New York City considering legislation to ban cashless retailers - <AUTHOR> https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/03/cashless-cash-free-ban-bill-new-york-retail-discrimination/584203/ <comment><USER2> I was ready to be annoyed at government blocking popular progressive changes, but this changed my mind:

>In New York City, the majority of the nearly 12 percent of unbanked and 25 percent underbanked residents are people of color. Close to 17 percent of black New Yorkers and 14 percent of Latinx New Yorkers are unbanked, compared to just 3 percent of white New Yorkers.

I had no idea that many people didn't use banking services, which probably says more about me than anything.

Not to get too political, but this reminds me a lot of the coal vs renewables debate. I'm 100% on the side of transitioning away from coal, towards renewables, the same as I am in favor of ditching cash. But people who still depend on the coal industry, and using cash, can't just be forgotten about because "cashless is better".

Places should be forced to accept cash until everyone can go cashless (within reason obviously, there needs to be some sort of line drawn here, but those percentages show we're not there yet), and the government should support/retrain coal miners who lose their jobs due to energy transitions.

<comment><USER3> The question is, why are they un or under banked? What or who creates those conditions? One doesn't see much diversity in or competition in banking products or terms, so it's not likely that anything is going to change.

<comment><USER4> I think it's a combination of factors. Distrust of the system, lack of steady cash flow, lack of local offerings.

<comment><USER5> High cost (fees are proportionally much more expensive), shady practices[1], accounts frozen by creditors.

Poor people are making completely rational decisions when choosing not to trust banks, and it's patronizing to assume they simply don't know better.

[1] banks re-ordering transactions to maximise overdraft fees.

<comment><USER3> So there's an opportunity it sounds like. Why are no services stepping in to capture all those potential customers?

<comment><USER5> Oh there are, all those cheque cashing places for example, and they're under- regulated, so not too great either.

Still paying a larger fee to cash a cheque sure beats having all your assets frozen entirely.

<comment><USER3> Check cashing isn't banking though. I mean why aren't there banks that can be sustainable without overdraft fees? I get the idea of a fee if they cover a charge in which funds aren't available. But can't a debit card simply decline if no funds are available - hence the bank never covers an unfunded charge and thus never charges overdraft fees? Are there not other ways to monetize banking for low cash flow individuals?

<comment><USER6> Banks don't really exist to help people save money anymore. For the most part, they exist to extract fees from people who keep money there and from borrowers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Even if you take out the racial view (which is totally valid), it just doesn't seem right that you can walk in somewhere in the US with US Dollars in your pocket but be turned down, and I say that as someone who very rarely makes purchases with paper money. As much as I hate "slippery slope" arguments, I do also worry that this is the first step in the direction of businesses dictating how you buy things. Starting with no cash may not seem that bad, but I don't wont to end up in a world where different stores require me to check out using their own e-wallet or a specific brand of credit card they've partnered with.

The whole thing reminds me a little bit of that 30 Rock episode where Liz Lemon gets stuck with a 50 dollar bill and gets into a shouting match with a convenience store clerk when he wont accept it, saying something along the lines of "this is legal tender, you have to accept it!" Not the same situation as what is being discussed here, Liz's sentiment still applies.

<comment><USER8> Yep. The only equitable way forward is if we make a national debit card, that runs on a national payment network where everyone is allowed to have an account.

Say- take Discover (which is a bank and payment provider network) and recharter them as a government owned corporation or make them wholely owned by the Federal Reserve. Then, give the USPS the ability to act as a simple bank frontend for these accounts- giving you overnight a national footprint that everyone can access. Make the transaction fee on this network near Zero, and allow anyone to have an account with you. Get rid of the credit ability, and you get a true alternative to cash.

Anything less is Visa/Mastercard forming a chokehold on out financial lives. I would love to ditch my credit cards for cash, but right now I'm being bribed with the great benefits that Visa/Amex are forcing merchants to pay for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I hear/see why business do it, but I think this quote from the councilman sponsoring the bill is the right take: "In the end, I think the need for equity outweighs the efficiency gains of a cashless business model. Human rights takes precedence over efficiency gains."

<comment><USER10> But not having a bank account is a choice. It's not about "rights."

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Our young technocratic elite can be so clueless sometimes.

Aside from helping to build our future surveillance dystopia, they promote cashless retail as more 'futuristic', and make fun of cheques and cash.

I don't understand a culture that promotes volunteering your own surveillance data (social media, smartphones)[1] and surrendering your anonymity as trendy core values.

[1] [https://privacysos.org/blog/nsa-calls-the-iphone-using- publi...](https://privacysos.org/blog/nsa-calls-the-iphone-using-public- zombies-who-pay-for-their-own-surveillance/)

</comment><comment><USER11> Philadelphia just did this as well. With a higher percentage in poverty there. I see this as beneficial. There are a number of areas where people for various reasons can't get a checking/bank account.

I find it partially annoying that some of the cash only stores I go into. Gouge with a 5$ ATM fee, then I have to hold change. But again not everyone has access to a bank.

What I found interesting is the gloss over of the Septa Key (new transit card) system, during this discussion. While it was botched. It was initially positioned as a debit card for those who couldn't get a bank account. Available to load with cash at any kiosk and making it a master card debit card. It actually saved me when I had fraud on one of my cards. I switched to it as my primary payment method while awaiting a new card.

Amazon was trying something similar. Provide cash at I think CVS or somewhere else. Then it goes into your Amazon gift balance.

In the end. I think these cashless laws are good. Even if the above work perfectly. Some people don't want a strong history attached with their purchases.

<comment><USER12> Ah yes, the CTA transit cards can also act as (predatory) debit cards.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> As long as cash is legal tender, you shouldn't be able to ban its use, especially if it's being exchanged for legal goods.

<comment><USER14> Cash is already disallowed for pretty much every payment you can't make in person. And good luck sending Amazon a check either.

<comment><USER13> The article is talking about making purchases you make in person, not online purchases.

<comment><USER14> Yes. I can read. My point is that, for better, or worse you already can't use cash for a great many payments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't get how this is racial discrimination or even how they get to this conclusion.

Example: We have 3 groups: Group 1 Group 2 Group 3

There are 2 types of services: Service A Service B

3% of group 1 can't use Service A 14% of group 2 can't use Service A 13% of group 3 can't use Service A

Does Service A racially discriminate against any of these group? No, it does not. It just can't accepts business from people who use Service A. So people who can't or won't use Service A have to go to another business that does accept Service B.

But okay let's play pretend. Let's say it is discrimination then it's only potentally more effective against certain groups by 10%. I say potentially because how many in this group would go to a this specific chain? probably less then that 10%. I'd wager the actual percentage affected falls in the area of margin of error. AKA sucks to be you but it's a free country so cross the street to somewhere they do accept your cash.

<comment><USER16> I agree that -- all things being equal -- the market could probably sort these things out. But, the point is that things aren't equal.

I could definitely see a situation where a company uses a cash ban as a facade to reject a certain clientele (namely, poor people that can't afford the technology or don't have the means to get a credit card).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> NYC is playing follow-the-leader here: we just banned this here in Philadelphia.

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/philadelphia-is-first-u-s- city-...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/philadelphia-is-first-u-s-city-to-ban- cashless-stores-11551967201)

</comment><comment><USER18> I think this is good because it doesn't force customers to use cashless payment. Research has shown that when people don't see physical money being spent that people tend to spend more.

However, I live in a country and with lots of non-bank related cashless payment options. Commuter pass, branch chain store money card, point card, gift check or payment by smartphone service? Ok. Best part of all those options is that I have every single one but the last and never had to show personal identification to use them.

The real downside to cashless is that you can't just transfer some to a friend without it going through a company and paying some kind of "fee" or being "spied on". The only real upside to cashless for companies is that employees can't really steal hard cash anymore and they can take out cashiers from the payroll. Most of the cashless business in the country I live in have done away with cashiers and added personel to other parts of the company. I think it improves some companies while others need a human to handle transactions.

</comment><comment><USER19> I get salads at Sweetgreen (one of the referenced cashless retailers) periodically. On two separate occasions I've been behind some stranger in line who didn't realize the place was card only, so I paid for their salad with my card and they gave me the cash. It is a weird policy, but I understand why they don't want to deal in cash.

Interestingly the flip side of this is cash only places. New York is also a huge user of Venmo for those times when you only have a card, but the place is cash only. Often if you don't want to have to leave to find an ATM and pay an ATM fee someone else will pay your bill in cash if you Venmo them the money. The problem of a cash free, or cash only place is easily solved in both cases with a little cooperation with your fellow New Yorkers.

<comment><USER20> I love that New York still runs so heavily on cash. Cash is an absolute necessity for a free society. It represents every person's freedom to voluntarily exchange goods and services without (easily) being tracked, monitored or mediated. It's a bit shocking to me how so many tech types underestimate or fail to see this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I don't know about the US but around where I live, there's at least two establishments which don't take cash. I can see all the advantages from their POV.

Personally I'd think it laughable if the government attempted to force them to accept cash.

What next, make them accept cheques?!

<comment><USER4> There's no "what next". The government only has one official currency.

<comment><USER21> Not where I live :D

> In most countries of the world the issue of banknotes is handled exclusively > by a single central bank or government, but in the United Kingdom seven > retail banks have the right to print their own banknotes in addition to the > Bank of England; sterling banknote issue is thus not automatically tied in > with one national identity or the activity of the state.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banknotes_of_the_pound_sterlin...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banknotes_of_the_pound_sterling)

For instance if I were to go further south, any Scottish notes I have would not be accepted in a load of places. More generally using banknotes from Northern Ireland in Britain will get you funny looks and a near 100% refusal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> "Going cashless" is a form of class warfare.

<comment><USER23> You're getting downvoted but this seems completely true to me.

It bars the homeless and poor from the establishment!

Can anyone that disagrees explain the opposing take?

<comment><USER24> Here are some reasons a business might not take cash,

* Eliminates robbery: no cash to take

* Reduces expenses: no cash register or bill machine

* Saves time: no change or trips to the bank

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vSYg17HD94](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vSYg17HD94)

<comment><USER22> Yeah in a bubble. But most establishments that suffer form this aren't going to be able to afford to "go cashless". Doing as such as a concept thrown around by establishments that can afford to do it like Blue Bottle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Cash is a huge freedom we take for granted. I would back this totally.

</comment><comment><USER26> I find that interesting simply because NYC is home to the financial industry which is the largest beneficiary of cashless transactions.

On a personal note, I prefer cash and appreciate the places that give me a discount for using it.

</comment><comment><USER27> Philadelphia was discussed yesterday: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19328547](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19328547)

</comment><comment><USER28> I can see NYC's point on this one.

The problem with credit cards isn't the concept (which I like) it is that they're rent-seekers that seem to want an ever increasing slice of the pie. We currently pay 2.5% of most purchases to these companies, with plans to increase that further.

The problem is that their costs should be falling, since their volumes have increased massively but instead of passing on those cost reductions they're trying to leverage their duopoly harder.

Cash is the only leverage society has to keep credit card processing fees low. If it disappears and there remains an uncompetitive market, we'll all suffer as a result.

</comment><comment><USER29> I absolutely, passionately hate when the traders do not accept cash, but I firmly believe they must be in their full right to do so.

<comment><USER16> Why?

This means that the US Government, which issues the currency, basically has less power than Visa and Mastercard. It's the currency of the nation... They should be required to take it unless they have a legitimate reason not to.

<comment><USER30> > This means that the US Government, which issues the currency, basically has > less power than Visa and Mastercard.

How's that? Nobody is required to accept Visa or Mastercard either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Meanwhile, in the 21st century[1]...

[1] "Why Sweden is close to becoming a cashless economy", [https://www.bbc.com/news/business-41095004](https://www.bbc.com/news/business-41095004)

<comment><AUTHOR> Except, they're changing their minds:

 _Swedes turn against cashlessness_ [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/03/being-cash- fre...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/03/being-cash-free-puts-us- at-risk-of-attack-swedes-turn-against-cashlessness)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The next step will be only being able to pay via mobile app.

<comment><USER32> There are a number of restaurants I've been to where you can _only_ make a reservation via their stupid mobile app. Like, even if I'm at the front desk of the restaurant asking me to pencil them in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> This is excellent news. I hope other municipalities and states follow. Only accepting corporate or institutional payments is racism against non-corporate persons (humans). Racism in this retail context is already illegal.

Cash must be accepted. It is the only form of payment (besides cryptocurrencies) where the individual does the payment. Other forms are merely large corporations/institutions using their financial clout to signal that they will pay for something in the future. Those corporations always have perverse incentives to both sell your purchasing history to anyone that wants it as well and to enact financial embargoes against arbitrary people/companies whenever even slight political or social pressure is applied.

Additionally, work-arounds for the law of having to accept cash for all debts should be addressed. Many retail or food service companies will only take your business initially if you present a credit card.

<comment><USER34> What?

Cash is the bane of society. We would live better without it on every single aspect imaginable. (including but not limited to health, environment, crime)

<comment><USER35> "Cashless" does not mean "moneyless".

Cashless means that it doesn't accept physical money, paper bills and metal coins. It only accepts credit or debit cards. Or any other kind of electronic medium.

<comment><USER5> If I give 5$ to a homeless person and he then tries to go buy a coffee at a cashless coffee shop, what do you think will happen?

After all he has money, right?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> > racism

Wut.

<comment><USER37> Poor people, and especially poor non-whites, are much less likely to have a credit or debit card.

I think it's important to understand "racist" as an effect, not as an opinion. The decision to not accept cash probably wasn't made with racist intentions, but it can very well have racist outcomes.

<comment><USER38> >> I think it's important to understand "racist" as an effect, not as an opinion.

I'm pretty sure it's the other way around. If as a white person you punch a black person because you don't like the car the person is driving, that's not racism, that's just some weird aggression. It's not based on the concept of race. But if you punch them because they're black, that's obviously racism.

Same thing here. If you're taking an action that indirectly causes harm to mostly non-whites (more specifically to poor people, some of whom are white) without the intent of causing harm, that's not racist. It's only racist if you feel that the group that's being harmed is racially/ethnically inferior to your group and that that justifies your actions.

That isn't to say that knowingly causing harm to people, even without any racism involved, is OK. It's not. But it's the intent that defines racism.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Ahhhh, intersectionalists and libertarians make strange bed fellows. What's even stranger is most of these politicians fighting for the rights of the "unbanked" embrace the surveillance state win that comes from cashless.</comment>


Neutron Bomb - <AUTHOR> http://www.cringely.com/2009/08/neutron-bomb/ <comment><USER2> Here is the problem with this debate. On one hand, people say, "We need more H1B visas to handle the engineering workload in the U.S. There aren't enough skilled americans." They also say, "We must make engineering more attractive to Americans. Stop focusing on sports, et al and focus on creating brilliant minds."

Similarly, groups argue that outsourcing jobs is acceptable, another that it is not.

The problem is that we cannot have both. You cannot convince students in america to invest 6 figures into their education if they know those jobs will be filled with immigrants or shipped overseas. If there is no opportunity for jobs or an income that can absorb the investment in the education, then students will not enter that profession.

Technology employers in America argue that limiting H1B visas is stiffling creativity and the ability of companies in the U.S. to innovate. If this is the case, rather than paying individuals from other countries less to do the same job, pay locals more to do the same job. Give them more of an incentive to enter the work force. Value the work appropriately to the difficulty and investment level needed to complete the task. Being an engineer is difficult. Not everyone in the world, can, or wants to do it. There has to be an incentive to perform these difficult tasks.

The reason that we need to curb H1B visas and the outsourcing of jobs is precisely for the same reasons that the employers say we need to increase them. We need to curb them because we need america to remain more competitive.

There is a difference between America remaining more competitive and American corporations remaining more competitive. The former means american citizens and our nation remains strong. The later does not. If, for example, we continue to increase H1B's and off-shoring of technical work, then the logical conclusion is that there are no longer _any_ native born americans to fill these positions. If this is the case, then America -- the nation -- is vulnerable to those countries with citizens and patriots to foreign entities who do have those skills.

This will leave America at an extreme disadvantage in the long run.

If engineers, who, arguably produce much more value to society than athletes or even CEOs were to earn as much money, the professions would be more popular. Instead, we have individuals who could make lasting changes to the benefit of our infrastructure, our technology, and our culture are entering other fields because they are more lucrative and are more _appreciated_ by our society.

If we continue to outsource the jobs, it is a big sign that those who perform these tasks are not really appreciated. Engineers are not appreciated in America. They are appreciated in other countries. Compare our culture to Germany. Germany appreciates technology savants and the result is evident in their current account. Relatively speaking, they are the richest nation in the world.

And America is the poorest.

<comment><USER3> America doesn't need native-born Americans to be competitive. Our entire history has been contingent on the labor of immigrants. Surely _any_ American will do.

The failure of the H1B program is that we bring these engineers to America, shackle them to a single employer (relying on that employer's good nature alone to not take advantage of them) and --most egregiously-- after a few years we _send them home_.

The H1B program _should_ be a simple 'green cards for technical experts' program. Bring in as many technical people as you can reasonably employ: but ffs _keep them_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> IBM is shipping jobs overseas because

... wait for it ...

(1) the complete cost of employing an American, including taxes, regulations, compliance, etc., is much higher than employing an Indian national.

That's it.

That's the complete list.

Question: when we raise taxes by 40% [ [http://business.theatlantic.com/2009/08/ya_know_plus_or_minu...](http://business.theatlantic.com/2009/08/ya_know_plus_or_minus_2_trillion.php) ] to close the budget gap, and start taxing employers even more for universal health coverage, and do X and Y and Z over the next 10 years ... will this make American workers more or less affordable as compared with off-shore workers?

<comment><USER5> This is either misleading or just confused. India funds roughly 25% of health care costs through the government, and has lower employment costs, yet you imply that if we were to incrementally approach their health-care system, the difference in employment costs would widen.

Edit: incidentally I agree with your point that IBM's issue is as simple as lower employment costs, but I'd suggest it's lower because Indians have a lower overall cost of living and lower standard of living, and the best students generally want to move to a country where they aren't climbing over mountains of trash and starving people all the time. I think we ought to let more of them do so, but in the meantime, of course companies are going to move to where the cheaper resources are.

<comment><USER6> Surely you cannot fail to have noticed how much Americans currently spend on health care, and how moving from private industry to state industry consistently increases the amount spent (at least in the US!)? Now, a case could be made that health care is an exception, largely because it's so heavily regulated already as to be effectively a poorly-run state industry with private profits. However, taking any other country's efficient or well- run government program and trying to build one like it in the US is probably doomed to failure. The US government has very bad incentives for "efficient" and "well-run".

<comment><USER5> I don't think you get to just make assertions like that without any facts.

Medicare, which is already a government-run health insurance plan, and one whose customers are so satisfied they are militantly protective of it, has lower administrative costs than private insurance companies:

[http://wallstreetpit.com/7500-does-medicare-actually-have- hi...](http://wallstreetpit.com/7500-does-medicare-actually-have-higher- administrative-costs-than-private-insurers)

<comment><USER6> I don't have specific data on Medicare, but you aren't exactly arguing against what I said, I notice. One would _expect_ the beneficiaries of a government program to be militantly protective of it, and the less efficient, the more so -- no one hires lobbyists to reduce money or services they're getting.

<comment><USER5> I am if you read the link, which is actually a good survey of what turns out to be a somewhat complicated question, due to the differing populations served. I don't think it's fully settled, but I think the assertion "Medicare has lower administrative costs that private insurance" has a much better shot at surviving than the negative of that assertion.

The government is unbeatably efficient at writing checks. I don't know where you get this notion that somehow the government would be an inefficient purveyor of health insurance. It simply isn't true.

<comment><USER7> > I don't think it's fully settled, but I think the assertion "Medicare has > lower administrative costs that private insurance" has a much better shot at > surviving than the negative of that assertion.

It doesn't matter whether that assertion is true. It's almost a dumb a question as wondering about whose check writing costs are lower. (I've never seen someone wonder about that wrt defense spending.) The closest relevant question is whether govt healthcare is more effective. The folks currently covered by US govt paid healthcare aren't being covered for less and aren't having better outcomes than the folks covered by the private system. (I'm ignoring horrorshows like the Indian Health Service. They'd almost be better off if we gave them blankets infected with diseases and cases of whiskey.)

Then there's the "fairness" question. I know several folks who pay a lot of taxes who are "heavy" and/or old. On what basis are you planning to deny them govt funded healthcare?

On the other end of the scale, your choice to subsidize an activity does not obligate the recipients of that subsidy to minimize your costs.

<comment><USER5> You're drifting far, far away from the issue that was raised at the beginning of this thread. tjic asserted, I believe as an article of ideological faith, not based on any facts or evidence, that the proposed medical insurance bills in Congress would raise overall employment costs in the U.S. That assertion is what I took issue with, because I hate to see people blindly voting up stuff they agree with without thinking about it. Nothing else.

In any case, I don't think your "closest relevant question" is well-formed. For one thing, no one is proposing "govt [sic] healthcare". For another, though what you write is frustratingly vague, it looks like you're proposing to compare outcomes between those 65 and over who are covered by Medicare with those who are young and healthy and covered through their employers -- obviously the populations are going to have very different outcomes.

<comment><USER7> > the proposed medical insurance bills in Congress would raise overall > employment costs in the U.S. That assertion is what I took issue with

Your response was to claim that the govt could write checks cheaply. It's fair to point out that that response isn't relevant to the question.

> For one thing, no one is proposing "govt [sic] healthcare".

Sure they are - that's what the "govt option" is.

We have experience with lots of experience with "govt healthcare" in the US outside of Medicare and the VA. We have the Indian Health Service. We have the various state programs. and so on.

Besides, proponents of ObamaCare can't honestly ignore Medicare. They're fond of saying "we can save 30%". Since the elderly get 70% of today's spending, getting close to 30% savings means that Obamacare must reduce the cost of Medicare or it has to cut all other healthcare spending to near 0.

I'm actually all for letting Obama experiment on folks who get healthcare from govt funding (both actual govt programs and govt employees who get private healthcare). If you include federal, state, and local, that's about as many people as are currently in the private system

I think that he should have free rein to do whatever he thinks will work with those folks and the amount of money that we're spending on them today. However, in 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2014, the per-person budget should be cut by 5%. Since that's less than 20% and he's promising 30%, that's a slam dunk, and he can even use the savings to bring more people into the program.

If he's right, folks on this govt plan will be healthier and so on and the savings will be too big to ignore. If he's wrong, govt employees and the like will revolt.

Deal?

<comment><USER5> You're obviously not serious. I'm done wasting my time on this.

<comment><USER7> I'm completely serious. I think that Obamacare should be given a large scale trial, to see if it can deliver what he promises.

Why don't you want to give him a chance?

Or, are you still trying to argue that check writing efficiency determines health care cost and quality?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > _Companies like IBM that take this position [i.e. buying the most affordable > engineering talent they can, even if it's off shore ] are hurting America._

B.S.

If you can purchase one apple for $1 or an identical apple for $10, failing to buy the $10 apple is (a) smart; (b) maximizes societal utility.

It's spending money uselessly that destroys valu.

<comment><USER8> I think Cringely is talking about a kind of vicious cycle where since you buy your apples for 1/10th the price, you fire 90% of your workforce. If everyone does this, and if there aren't new jobs to take in that redundant workforce, you could end up in a death spiral where you find that even though your apples are dirt cheap, there's no one left to buy your expensive apple tarts. So you drive yourself out of business by reducing your costs.

Obviously this can only happen if the assumption holds, that there are no new jobs to absorb the redundancies, and that this is happening across the economy.

That said, a case could be made that these assumptions are correct - what's your argument against them?

<comment><USER9> _That said, a case could be made that these assumptions are correct - what's your argument against them?_

There are tons of new jobs, and a whole new middle class - in India and China. Corporations do not share your nationalistic interests - IBM doesn't _owe_ America anything. If Germany were to have won WW2, IBM would now be a great German company. As America's broken system of government slowly bleeds this nation to death, IBM will have no remorse over becoming a company focused on India/China.

<comment><USER10> That is certainly not an argument that IBM's actions are not "hurting America"

<comment><USER11> But if IBM doesn't "hurt America", it will "hurt the world".

<comment><USER12> I would suspect that many Americans would be willing to make such a sacrifice.

<comment><USER13> There's a big difference between "hurting America" and "hurting Americans".

Maximizing societal value may mean moving industry to places where the government is less of an impediment to efficient value creation. In the long (and usually, short) run, that's good for people. But it may mean that American jobs move to India, and American workers can a) follow their jobs, b) create new jobs by starting a new company in America (and deal with whatever caused their old job to leave), or c) whine and moan until someone gives them a handout.

Move, build, or cry about it. Doesn't sound like anyone's really being hurt. It's not like IBM is stabbing their workers, they're just telling them that they can work somewhere else, or get another job. Seems fair enough to me.

<comment><USER14> > "Maximizing societal value may mean moving industry to places where the > government is less of an impediment to efficient value creation."

Sure. Because after all, China is a paragon of good government.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is a fascinating view into how Bob thinks. This article, right up until the conclusion is excellent.

It lays out in great detail how the ever rising health care costs are hurting companies. It also in detail explains how the car companies were only focused on the short term and that ended up bankrupting them. But IBM takes the long view and that's why they are still in business.

And Bob concludes that the problem is short tern thinking? That took me by surprise since it's almost the exact opposite of the case he just made.

Bob thinks this is all because of focus on short term profits and we somehow need to stop that. But how?

Isn't it obvious that instead we should make the US worker more competitive?

For labor intensive industries that may only go so far when people in the developing world work for A LOT less. But not all industries are labor intensive. And the standard of living in China is rising fairly fast. A bit slower but still rising in India.

Isn't reducing the costs of health care and pensions the most obvious answer to how to make US workers more competitive?

Exactly how to do it for health care is a political topic, so lets not discuss that on HN. But even Bob mentioned severing the pension from the company.

<comment><USER16> He's saying that what's good for IBM -- a long-term plan to outsource work and replace Americans with foreign workers -- is bad for the US and bad for US workers. So the problem for companies is short-term thinking, and the problem for US workers is that intelligent long-term corporate planning leads to some combination of outsourcing and importing foreign workers.

<comment><USER15> OK that makes more sense then what I thought he meant. But it doesn't make that much sense when you consider that the ultimate end is economic collapse.

If corporations just put up with what ever conditions we force on them, in the short therm great, but in the long term we're screwed.

<comment><USER17> The ultimate end is more likely a new equilibrium, in which the difference between the cost of living in the BRIC is closer to the industrialized Western world than it is now. Also, don't forget productivity gains are fueled by new technologies, and the US are still way ahead of the competition in research.

<comment><USER18> I don't understand your point.

There's not a huge barrier to new discoveries in the US being utilized in other countries, and our only advantage in conducting research is infrastructure for distributing money. Over the next ten years, that could be closed by a cash-rich nation that wanted to (China).

<comment><USER15> But as they close the gap over the next 10 years, their standard of living and their wages are also going to keep rising. And at some point the gap is small enough that the extra cost of shipping it from China to the US isn't worth it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Senet: board game from predynastic and ancient Egypt - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senet <comment><USER2> Here's a more informative account, hosted on Board Game Geek:

[https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/166814/senet-review- version...](https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/166814/senet-review-versions- updated)

Excerpt:

> _Everyone seems to agree that play moved back and forth down the 30 spaces > rather like a game of Snakes & Ladders. Most believe play started in the > upper left corner and moved to the lower right. All also seem to agree that > it's in the backgammon family of games, and indeed, it may be the original > founding game of the type. Each player had an equal number of identical > pieces (either 5 or 7) and the "dice" were four throwing sticks that were > flat on one side and rounded on the other.

The board comprised 30 spaces in three rows of 10 each. 24 of the spaces were plain or decorated with art that had no game effect. If we start the numbering system at the upper left, the first special space is No. 15. This seems to be a "starting" space of some kind, according to most authorities, although probably not the game start. Instead it seems to be a restarting space for pieces that are sent back from the "water trap" in space 27, which I'll discuss later on.

The next space of note is No. 26, which apparently usually had a symbol implying it was a "good" space. Space No. 27 is the "water trap" which is a "bad" space. Most authorities believe that pieces that landed there were sent back to Space 15. Finally, spaces 28, 29 and 30 are marked III, II and I, respectively. Most believe these were "bearing off" spaces, although some versions treat them as entering spaces, RC Bell, for example.

Apparently these markings were remarkably stable for the several thousand years that the game was played._

</comment><comment><USER3> For those in the Bay Area, there's a full sized version of Senet at the Egyptian museum in San Jose. Not sure where they got there rules from. Also saw Senet on Steam recently. Seems like the game is on a comeback.

</comment><comment><USER4> Someone should make up rules and ship it. The world needs more board games.

</comment><comment><USER5> tl;dr--- the rules are unknown

<comment><USER6> Senet dates from the time games were played not just as entertainment, but as a way to divine the will of the gods. As such , the absence of rules robs us of a little understanding of Egyptian religion, culture, and civilization. This is touched upon briefly in the following article about game rules that appeared in Escapist Magazine:

[http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/video- games/is...](http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/video- games/issues/issue_41/247-Game-Rules-as-Art)</comment></comment>


Forgot your password?  Try "123456". - <AUTHOR> http://www.crn.com/security/222400105

<comment><USER2> I wonder how many of those 123456 might be throw-away accounts of people who just wanted to take a look. Probably not many but I think that aspect is often overlooked.

</comment><comment><USER3> My uni started forcing discrete passwords on mail services and they also added a variating password for the wifi. This was an attempt to get students in the habit of creating not-so-obvious passwords in their careers. I think it has been quite effective too. Students realize how easy it is to remember something like ut5r#94!, ask anyone on the campus... they know this by heart.

<comment><USER4> Agreed! My first password provided to me by OIT at Georgia Tech was just like that - long with lots of entropy and not pronounceable. And sure enough a few weeks of using it daily to logon to the campus wifi I knew it by heart. And every 90 days (or maybe it was 180.. been a while) when Georgia Tech would make us change our password, I picked something just as complex. And know thats how all my passwords are.

Unfortunately I now use 1Password to manage a lot of that and I no longer know all of my passwords by heart. :/

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is yet another rehash of Imperva's press release.

[http://www.imperva.com/news/press/2010/01_21_Imperva_Release...](http://www.imperva.com/news/press/2010/01_21_Imperva_Releases_Detailed_Analysis_of_32_Million_Passwords.html)

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1067323>

<comment><AUTHOR> Whoops! Sorry for posting a duplicate story.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> That's amazing. I've got the same combination on my luggage.</comment>


We need a data API for the web - <AUTHOR> http://newcome.wordpress.com/2010/02/08/we-need-a-data-api-for-the-web/

<comment><USER2> This is basically the "semantic web" dream in one form or another, isn't it? Not that that makes it a bad idea, but it's been slow going.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I touched on RDF in my post. I have some experience with it, but it is pretty complex for just data. I think it is powerful, but the thing that makes the web work is simplicity.</comment></comment>


Nasa's full Artemis plan revealed: 37 launches and a lunar outpost - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/05/nasas-full-artemis-plan-revealed-37-launches-and-a-lunar-outpost/ <comment><USER2> It's strange that there is so little enthusiasm for this, measured by votes or comments.

It also seems like a very important mission.

I wonder why there is no effort to team up with China. It's a massive task, and the alternative to cooperation is competing for territory which is an inherently insecure paradigm.</comment>


Show HN: I made an extension to watch Netflix films with screenplays in sync - <AUTHOR> https://screenplaysubs.com/ <comment><USER2> Very interesting!

Fun tidbit: for TV actors, regularly reading pilot scripts and then watching the produced pilot for comparison is a _huge_ common educational technique. You get to imagine what kind of acting and directorial choices you'd make, and then see what was actually done. Often times you'll realize you had totally misinterpreted what a scene was even about.

It's also fun to see how every script is filled with lines that are "unactable" \-- there's just no way any real person would ever say anything like that. Then nine times out of ten, those lines are cut from the final product, because even the best actors couldn't make them work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fascinating! It can also be the other way around, where an actor miraculously interpreted an unactable script well. E.g. Joaquin Phoenix delivered "It vexes me. I am vexed." in Gladiator quite well.

<comment><USER3> I watched a video recently that touched on this subject when talking about the TV show House. If you read the script for a regular House episode, there's no conclusion to be had besides House being an insufferable, racist prick. Instead, Hugh Laurie delivers the obviously racist lines so sarcastically that it makes them work very well (which is obviously what the writers were going on).

<comment><USER4> I've recently watched House and I found this more uncomfy than I did the first time.

House (the character) is often being plainly racist and sexist. The fact that he presents it as sarcasm is a vehicle for him, used to make his racism more difficult to challenge.

<comment> matt-attack But can't shows be about racist people? I mean there's shows about murderers all day. Do people critique shows (think Dexter) as "uncomfy"? You can laugh at, and even find endearing, racists characters. It's part of being a grown up I believe.

<comment><USER4> If there are more shows with racist people as the endearing title character than there are with black people as the endearing title character, is that not a problem?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is great!

Also check out LanguageLearningWithNetflix [0] which lets you watch videos with two subs in different languages, displays the subs as HTML so select/copy/define will work (and it has a built-in dictionary too). It also allows you to quickly jump to the beginning of each sentence so you can hear it multiple times, which helps improve your listening skills. For me, it has been a fun way to improve my German.

On a side-note, please notice how none of these great features are available to mobile users. iOS for example, is technically perfectly capable of supporting this kind of extensibility, but the App Store model limits it to a few narrow and specific use-cases.

[0] [https://languagelearningwithnetflix.com](https://languagelearningwithnetflix.com)

<comment><USER6> LLN is good but seems to favor anti-features like disabling text selection on subtitles (except in the side pane) in order to push their in-house paid-for features.

Regarding your comment about extensibility, this applies to mostly every software platform other than the web, unfortunately. And even there, it feels like a happy accident. There's much work to be done in this area.

<comment><USER7> Text selection is a fiddly CSS issue that Ognjen didn't get around to fixing yet. There's only two paid features (saving words and machine translation.) About 3500 paying users at $3.50/mo after taxes and fees (from 800k total users), but before paying for servers/APIs, if you are curious. Free users are welcome.

[ Dear Netflix, let's be friends. There's a lot of work to do still, and we can go further, faster, with some small helps. Can we get a test account? Regards, David. firstname.lastname@example.com ]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Oh, someone has to manually time the movie. They only support about six movies. I expected that it would use closed captioning data, do the sync automatically, and support far more titles.

<comment><AUTHOR> The syncing is done automatically, at least mostly.

TL;DR: ScreenplaySubs fetches the subtitles from Netflix, parses the PDF- formatted screenplays into JSON, and syncs by calculating the sentence similarities between subtitle and screenplay dialogue.

In particular, we use the Universal Sentence Encoder for deciding whether a subtitle matches with a screenplay dialogue. If a screenplay dialogue is similar enough with the subtitles, the former will be tagged with the timestamp provided by the latter.

A lot of the underlying problems presented with each step sounds deceptively simple at first, but turns out to be quite challenging and fun to research. E.g. Parsing PDFs in general are not straightforward ([https://filingdb.com/b/pdf-text-extraction](https://filingdb.com/b/pdf-text- extraction)), and there's only a handful of resources on parsing PDF screenplays beside a handful of research papers ([https://github.com/drwiner/ScreenPy/blob/master/INT17_screen...](https://github.com/drwiner/ScreenPy/blob/master/INT17_screenplays.pdf)), which lead us to create our own open source repo for this ([https://github.com/SMASH-CUT/screenplay-pdf-to- json](https://github.com/SMASH-CUT/screenplay-pdf-to-json)).

Our screenplay-pdf-to-JSON converter is able to contain all dialogues, transitions, actions within a particular screenplay scene. With this, we're treating scenes as atomic, being able to detect changes in scene ordering based on the tagged scene timestamps. This also means if dialogues are swapped within a scene in the movie, there will be some syncing inconsistencies.

Some scenes do have little to no dialogues, which would pretty much cause the extension to work on a best-effort basis. E.g. The opening scene of There Will Be Blood has very minimal if not no dialogue at all. This is the case where I need to jump in and sync up the screenplay manually. OTOH, the opening scene of Inglourious Basterds will work very well, since there are tons of dialogues in it. This is the reason why I can't just add movies and instantly upload it to the site.

Would you be interested for me to get into more details? I was thinking of writing a series of technical blog posts if there are enough interests!

<comment><USER9> Please blog about the details! Are you following the W3C work on synchronized multimedia?

[https://github.com/w3c/sync-media-pub](https://github.com/w3c/sync-media-pub)

[https://www.w3.org/community/sync-media- pub/](https://www.w3.org/community/sync-media-pub/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Will do! I am not aware of that, tell me more!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Very cool. I have been fascinated by this whole area of what I call "media stapling" since I spent about two years obsessively watching the Big Lebowski as a stress reliever. This film has no commentary track so people have recorded their own and you have to sort of just manually sync up the mp3. I also do a lot of interview transcription where text is stapled to audio.

Anyway I see you have a comment here where you say you use the closed captions to figure out where to staple in the script. Would be cool to be able to staple in arbitrary other media - text audio video whatever.

<comment><USER11> Sounds like Rifftrax, the successor to Mystery science Theater 3000

<comment><USER10> Wow, thanks for the pointer, had no idea about this. They have an app that looks like it could be so cool if they opened it to other people to use as a platform. Although for now just using it for their own commentaries (which I'm sure are great). Sort of a Hollywood approach as opposed to a Silicon Valley approach (even if they aren't literally in Hollywood).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've seen plugins like this from time to time and I always wonder to what extent using them with a secured service (like Netflix etc) means that you've opened yourself up to them doing all sorts of things with your account. You need to login and once that's done the plugin code effectively acts as you doesn't it? I'm guessing there are Chrome/FF protections on the password field, but if the plugin can do anything on a site, might it not draw their own fake password box on top of the real one?

I'm certainly not suggesting this is done by this author and I applaud the creation of the tool, but I'd be interested to hear opinions as to whether my interpretation above is correct or if I'm overly cautious/overlooking something.

<comment><USER13> I mean, unsurprisingly, it looks like it requests permissions to execute arbitrary code on your behalf on netflix.com. So yeah, it can do... a lot. It could, for example, click the logout button on your behalf, wait for you to log back in again and keylog your password when you do (there aren't any special protections there -- you can access it like any other field from privileged JS, and other extensions like password managers depend on this being the case), then use that to, in the background, change your password and recovery email, and then log you back out again. Any use of Chrome extensions that can execute scripts requires some degree of trust, for better or for worse.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> ScreenplaySubs is a browser extension for Netflix that syncs up movies with screenplays, displaying them side by side. It's like having a subtitle that provides more insights to your films.

Demo: [https://vimeo.com/447986440](https://vimeo.com/447986440)

<comment><USER14> I really like the Amazon Prime Video "X ray" feature that shows the actors, bios, etc, in the current scene. It's odd to me that other services like Netflix don't have something similar.

<comment><USER15> Most likely other services don't do this because of patents.

<comment><USER16> and they don't own IMDB where much of this information is already organized into a usable state.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> As I checked the demo video and read the screenplay, I could actually imagine the shots, camera angle - the images basically appeared in my head with Tom Holland in them (without actually playing the video or remembering the movie). This is very interesting.

</comment><comment><USER18> It would be interesting to have a TTS synth output the screenplay on another card, one which could be used by a blind person to plug some headphones in (not covering all the sound, in order to hear the environment and speeches). Maybe even optionally disable the spoken words, and only output the scene description, and emit a beep on a cut.

The demo on the page looks great, and this is stuff which should be automatable at some point by AI.

</comment><comment><USER19> Where do you get the screenplays, out of curiosity?

<comment><USER20> I wondered this, too. Also--which draft, if there's more than one? Is it like, "latest available", or "easiest to parse", or do you have a policy like _only shooting scripts_?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Nicely implemented, you just need to recruit people to add more movies!

</comment><comment><USER22> It's not for me but it's a great extension!

<comment><AUTHOR> much appreciated!

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I don't use netflix and prefer subtitles, but it looks nice!

Maybe you could implement smooth scroll and some sort of an overlay mode.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, and that's a great idea I've considered for future releases. More specifically, the layout presented in this video looks ideal: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HybzbDBF7HQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HybzbDBF7HQ). Where the screenplay can replace the letterbox at the bottom.

One of the reasons we decided not to implement that for now is to provide a bigger room for error since our algorithm is still not perfect. Sometimes the extension choose to focus on 1 or 2 sentences next to the accurate dialogue. Having an entire viewport height to show the screenplay means even if some inconsistencies occur, the user may still be able to see the accurate dialogue.

<comment><USER23> makes sense :)

yea I like this example better, but thought of an actual overlay.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is Chrome extension that is asking to read browser history. Why?

</comment><comment><USER25> Really cool! It seems like the data synchronization is done manually?

<comment><AUTHOR> There's some automation going on. Check out my reply to one of the skeptical comments!

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This cool. I did this exact thing in 2013 with DistanceFlix.com

</comment><comment><USER27> Nice!

Nerd out with your word out.

</comment><comment><USER28> Site is flagged from work PC

</comment><comment><USER29> Data source for GPT-4?</comment>


Show HN: This Website Was Deployed by Email - <AUTHOR> https://hackerspring.com/p/wbgxm2/5ec9b2cf/this-website-was-deployed-by-e-mail/ <comment><USER2> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23208339](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23208339)

</comment><comment><USER2> This reminds me of Posterous (YC S08 IIRC), which allowed posting to your blog via email. Unfortunately it was shut down after the company was acquired by Twitter.</comment>


Endohumans- App that revolutionizes fitness gaming – Indiegogo - <AUTHOR> https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/endohumans-app-that-revolutionizes-fitness-gaming/x/10101885 <comment><AUTHOR> Guys check this out, if you can please support us!

A seemingly common app that tracks your runs soon turns out to be the beginning of a great adventure

The IDEA Smartphones and fitness bands and fitness trackers are all over the place as technology companies have quickly realised that there is a large interest and market for such products. The release of countless fitness bands and smartwatches as well as the upcoming Apple Watch have increased the hype and momentum.</comment>


Scala Considered Harmful For Large Projects? - <AUTHOR> http://kirkwylie.blogspot.com/2011/01/scala-considered-harmful-for-large.html

<comment><USER3> I really disagree with the author in terms of metaprogramming. One thing in particular jumps out at me:

> Ultimately, a programming language that's useful for large-scale programming > projects needs to have clear, unambiguous grammar and syntax so that any > developer familiar with the project and the language can instantly figure > out what's going on.

Wow. There are just so many things wrong with this statement. Let me enumerate them:

1\. Scala _does_ have a clear, unambiguous grammar. If it didn't there wouldn't be a Scala compiler. I think what the author means to say is that languages need to have _less flexible_ grammars (like Java does).

2\. Just because you _can_ use all kinds of wild things to obscure your code doesn't mean you should. If you prefer the "boring" way of doing something, then go for it. You just have to understand that just like anything else in programming, it's about tradeoffs. Does the benefit gained from using a DSL or operator overloading outweigh the costs? Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't.

3\. The idea that a programmer (even one who's familiar with a project) can look at any given piece of code and instantly understand what's going on is a myth. Even if that snippet of code makes perfect sense, you also need to understand the state the program is in before that piece of code executes. Again, it's about tradeoffs. You need to choose the method that allows programmers to understand code more quickly. Sometimes using metaprogramming is the way to do that.

I will grant the author that there are valid reasons not to choose Scala, but I don't think he's hit them.

<comment><USER4> Regarding 1, there are languages that do not have a clear, unambiguous (to my reading, _formalized_ ) grammar yet possess compilers. Examples include classical FORTRAN, Forth and (if I'm feeling particularly trollish today) C++.

<comment><USER3> Fair enough. But in that case, the entire argument is moot. After all neither Java nor Scala (as far as I know) are formalized. :-)

<comment><USER5> The Scala language report does include an Extended-BNF syntax for the language, weighing in at 7 pages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6>
        The problem is that if you have a language
        designed to make it easy to do this, you
        encourage people to do it.

As the author of the BASIC DSL[1] in question, I must say that it was decidedly _not_ easy to do. It would appear that Baysick is the number one reason that Scala hasn't swept the enterprise.

[1]: <http://github.com/fogus/baysick>

</comment><comment><USER7> In the comments the author says, "(I am) just saying that on balance for a large project you shouldn't willy-nilly start adding in Scala."

I think I can do better than that.

"I am just saying for a large project you shouldn't willy-nilly do X". You fill in the X.

The "willy nilly" weasel word takes care of all possibilities and prevents counter argument. What a dumb blog post (and argument).

</comment><comment><USER8> By his argument, Ruby is _really_ bad for large-scale projects, due to its "language flexibility". (Lisp is just as bad, and Python not much better.)

All I can say is that this hasn't been my experience. It's not just that Rails makes good use of Ruby to define and use several internal DSLs (for validations, associations, etc.), or that many plugins do the same for other purposes (HAML for markup). The large rails app I use at work also has a few special-purpose internal DSLs of its own (for instance, to express permissioning restrictions), and they've made some things a whole lot easier to deal with.

These are features that can make a real mess, if abused, but bad programmers can make a mess in any language. The only real cure for that is to have programmers who have good enough judgment to avoid mistakes most of the time, and code review processes solid enough to catch the mistakes they make on their inevitable off days.

(Besides which, even raw Java isn't entirely free of "undesirable" flexibility these days. There are lots of setups these days in which annotations are used to augment or alter core language semantics, with the aid of runtime bytecode generation. I happen to think that's a good thing for their users. But I suppose one could disagree.)

<comment><USER9> _bad programmers can make a mess in any language_

My experience is that inexpressive or hobbling languages encourage good programmers to make a mess as well! To give an absurd example, I remember working with a dialect of BASIC that did not support recursion (this would have been the 1970s). To write a "Towers of Hanoi" solver, I had to greenspun my own procedure argument stack. While this is a useful learning exercise, greenspunning your own language features in an inexpressive language inevitably leads to half-baked implementations.

And that is what I see with modern Java: lots and lots of things greenspun on top of the language in half-baked ways. There is just as much functionality code in a complex Java application as there is in a complex Scala application, but in the Java application the domain-specific code sits on top of a rickety tower of awkward implementations and work-arounds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> _"Ultimately, a programming language that's useful for large-scale programming projects needs to have clear, unambiguous grammar and syntax so that any developer familiar with the project and the language can instantly figure out what's going on."_

I have a hard time swallowing the necessity to rely on restricting the expressive power of the language to prevent people from creating code that is hard to understand. My current project is in the order of 100 KLOC in Python (the horror, you can even redefine methods of _single objects_ at runtime!) and so far none of the problems we've got can be tracked to language abuse.

<comment> tomh- Well, take a look at this sample (<http://dispatch.databinder.net/Common_Tasks>) and see if you can figure out what all those operators do just by looking at them :)

Thats the kind of abuse possible with languages such as Scala, Haskell or c++ templates.

<comment><USER6> Take a look at this sample ([http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/2.5.x/api/org/spr...](http://static.springsource.org/spring/docs/2.5.x/api/org/springframework/aop/package- summary.html)) and see if you can figure out how to use these classes just by looking at them.

That's the kind of abuse possible with languages such as Java.

\---

Seriously. Every new API that you intend to use has a learning curve, some more significant than others. Every new API is a new "language".

<comment><USER11> It's not really a fair objection. AOP isn't part of Java, it is an ugly hack that someone bolted onto the outsides of it.

Seriously. You write your Java code, you compile it, and then in the night the evil AOP pixies sneak in and slip chunks of bytecode into your compiled classes.

<comment><USER12> The library tomh linked to is not a part of the Scala language or the standard library.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> tl;dr:

 _The author has a set of views about the benefits of hobbling programmers on large projects, which he takes as axiomatic. He espouses Java as a language suitable for performing said hobbling. He convincingly argues that permitting programmers to add Scala code to large Java projects undoes the hobbling provided by the Java language._

I can't argue with his conclusions, but I'll fight his premises to the death.

<comment><USER13> You put it much better then I could.

I feel the entire article was just linkbait. Scala and Java could be replaced with .Net 3.5 and .Net 4.0. Or C++ and F#. Or any other language pair. And it would still be sorta right, maybe, if you assume your programmers are just average, not-overly talented developers, who don't know how to compartmentalize code.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm learning Scala now and am impressed by its difficulty. Not since I learned C++ in college have I needed to spend the same amount of time and effort learning a language, and the arguments given here against Scala are exactly the arguments you hear against C++.

That's heartening to me. C++ is a great language for people who 1) know the language, and 2) use it sensibly (which often means humbly.) There's all kinds of stuff you can do with C++, including metaprogramming magic that gives you DSL-like capabilities a la Boost Spirit.

I can't imagine using Boost Spirit in production code myself. Maybe there's a good use for it somewhere -- probably so -- but I really don't care if Boost Spirit is every a good idea anywhere. Maybe it's just an abomination; I don't care! All I care about is that I can make a good judgment about allowing it into my codebase.

I'm going to approach Scala with the same attitude.

<comment><USER12> I used Boost Spirit in my dissertation project for the parsing: [https://github.com/scotts/cellgen/blob/master/src/cellgen_gr...](https://github.com/scotts/cellgen/blob/master/src/cellgen_grammar.cpp#L289)

I would not choose it again. With what I wanted to do, the performance was poor. Spirit just had to deep-copy the parse tree it was generating way too much. I liked having all of my source in C++, which meant not having to embed C++ in ANTLR or yacc. But I'm not sure that was worth it. Perhaps the newer version fixes that problem, but I doubt I'll ever test it out for sure.

Luckily for me, the performance of the compiler itself was not really a priority. And it was a research project, so it didn't really matter.

Anyway, I know your point was broader than Spirit specifically, but I thought you may be interested in my experiences.

<comment><USER15> Is there a reason you didn't just handcode a recursive descent parser?

<comment><USER12> Yes. It's a waste of time. Why should I hand-code a parser for C when it's a solved problem? Note that the source code I linked to calls into an already existing Spirit grammar for C (which I made some modifications to, mainly so I could get more information back from the parse tree).

Hand coding a parser is generally not a good use of your time. There are many tools available to generate a parser based on a BNF grammar. I used my project as an opportunity to learn one of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I have a very tough time figuring out how having a DSL is much different then having a huge project specific class library. You are going to have to learn project specific stuff, and DSLs flow better for me than APIs.

</comment><comment><USER17> The title is misleading. The point that the author is actually trying to make is that _adding_ Scala to an existing project can be harmful. He does not say that Scala is inherently harmful for large enterprise projects, in fact, he explicitly states the exact opposite:

 _Neither Geir nor I consider Scala inherently harmful to a large-scale programming project._

I would argue here that adding _any_ language to an existing project would have at least some of the drawbacks that the author mentioned (developers not familiar with the language, added complexity...).

</comment><comment><USER18> The author is correct that, as a language "in the small", Scala offers many more ways for a programmer to create hard-to-understand complexity. Though many things have been conceptually simplified (the distinction between primitives and objects has been abstracted away so that most developers don't have to worry about, for example) there is a whole lot more stuff that make it easy to hang yourself with. (See implicit conversions and parameters, destructuring and pattern matching, and the power of the type system). Most of these things can be used to make code more readable, concise, and flexible, but can also be used to great ill effect.

When it comes to programming "in the large", like the author seems to be describing, I couldn't disagree more. Here it's Java--the culture and ecosystem--that tends towards over-abstraction, huge frameworks that obscure rather than illuminate intent, ridiculous class names that include "FactoryFactory", and so on.

I would argue that the second phenomenon--the hugely complex frameworks that have arisen in the Java world--is a direct consequence of the lack of power offered by Java, the language. Complex frameworks that do dependency injection through bytecode generation and XML configuration files really aren't necessary in the Scala world, where 90% of what you're actually trying to do can be done using compile-time mixins. The factory pattern can be replaced with anonymous first-class functions, with a net increase in clarity and conciseness. Most things that makes Scala more complicated in the small can be also be used to replace even more complicated, ad-hoc patterns and frameworks that make big Java projects such a pain to work on.

That said, it could be true that introducing Scala into existing codebases that already have thousands of lines of Spring XML config might simply introduce additional complexity, without offering a realistic path to removing all of the nonsense that supports the legacy Java code.

</comment><comment><USER19> The author's argument is specious. You need design guidelines in place for any language feature. You can say the same thing about interfaces in Java - <USER2> see a call x.doFoo() and you have _no idea_ what code gets called! Well yes, that's why you formalize your module interfaces and don't let people just randomly create interfaces between modules, etc, etc.

Even in assembly you can define a function _do_foo that actually does "bar."

You need to know how to architect code with meta-programming in mind, no doubt. But this isn't any harder than architecting code with any other language feature in mind. Just as you need to clearly specify the semantics of your interfaces, you need to clearly specify the semantics of DSLs.

Managed properly, DSL's can have a tremendous positive impact on the code- base.

I've been mucking around in compilers lately, and one thing that never ceases to amaze me is SBCL. The compiler is about 55K LOC + 15K LOC for each native back-end. That's about the same size as the C1 compiler in Hotspot, but does a whole lot more (ie: includes the front-end of the compiler, while C1 gets low- level bytecode as input, has to deal with type inferencing and lambda lifting and all sorts of other things to bring a high-level dynamic language down to machine code, etc, etc). And it does that with algorithms about 15 years older (it doesn't have the benefit of SSA form which would massively simplify many of the optimizations SBCL performs).

Macros are a huge part of how SBCL does it. There are 123 macro definitions in the compiler, and they do a tremendous job in cutting code by making DSLs for things like specifying code generators, etc. As for readability - because it's well designed and well-commented, it's surprisingly maintainable and readable for a code-base that's 25 years old and has been maintained by so many different people over the years.

</comment><comment><USER20> This is really, _Scala (and any of those extra JVM languages) considered a harmful addition for large java projects_ which makes a lot a sense. It surprises me a bit that it needs to be said, and said in such fashion.

<comment><USER21> The obvious comeback being large Java projects considered harmful.

<comment><USER22> Obvious but not worthwhile, as the issue isn't Java, it's multiple languages on a project.

<comment><USER11> But I think this argument with respect to Java is flawed anyway, or was for a long time. EJB 3 and JPA is enormously much better, but back in the bad old days of J2EE you had these 'no go areas' anyway. You kind of slapped a couple of interfaces down, and then hoped that the magic code generator of the App Server would do the right thing (if configured properly).

How is that any different from having a "if you don't know what you're doing, don't mess with these bits" area for the Scala stuff to sit in?

J2EE isn't the only example of this. Plenty of frameworks had their 'here be dragons' sections, the fiddling with which was considered a dark art.

<comment><USER22> I'm no fan of the language myself, but you're going overboard to try to dig a reason to trash Java out of this.

<comment><USER11> ??? I'm not trashing Java. Did you read the article? I was making an analogy between the risk of having a language like Scala, which would mean there was stuff the Java-only people would not understand (which is what the article claims), with the black box auto-generated code produced by early J2EE (which is similarly a no-fly zone).

Believe me, you'll know when I'm trashing Java, because I'll use the g word.

<comment><USER22> _"...with the black box auto-generated code produced by early J2EE"_

If this comparison _were_ analogous, your point would make no sense, since it would boil down to _in the bad old days, we got stuck with code we couldn't understand and lived with it, so_ now, _code we can't understand isn't a problem_.

And it's not analogous. We're not talking about black-box generated code nobody on the project understands, but instead people on the project making code that other people on the project don't understand. To harp on the one detail of incomprehensible code ignores _huge_ differences in those situations. So, it's gratuitous to evoke that.

<comment><USER11> Not to pick on you, but I've worked on plenty of Java projects where there were sections of the code that some of the programmers either didn't understand or didn't want to touch with a bargepole because they were 'too scary'.

Taking the example of J2EE, on a sufficiently large J2EE project (where 'sufficiently large' is 3 or more people) it would be trivially easy for a Java programmer who didn't know J2EE to work on it - since there's usually a lot more to it than just the back end persistence bit. (Front end, middle layer services, business illogic etc)

Or say they are using both an obscure database and hibernate and I spend a significant amount of time trying to get them to agree on how date formats will be read and written (don't laugh, nobody else could figure it out). When I do get it working, does everybody else on the project magically absorb this newfound expertise via osmosis or something? Don't be ridiculous! Only I have the understanding of it, and if the others know what is good for them they will not fiddle with it.†

Naturally I'll liberally sprinkle it with comments like:

// if you want to retain your SAN points, don't mess with this

In fact, this thing of someone working on something that is really tricky and then when they do get it working warning off the other programmers from messing with it is extremely common in larger projects. One of the benefits of OO code is that you _can_ segment the 'nasty stuff' off from the rest of the code so that it can be safely ignored. And this doesn't just apply to senior programmers doing stuff too scary for the junior programmers, it can work the other way too - as a senior member of the team I'm quite happy to let someone junior with lots of 'fire in their belly' tackle the ugly ugly task of getting the config files set up, and if they've done it right I never even have to look at them (don't be outraged, it's called delegation).

If you have to twiddle your ant script every time you want to compile your code, you ain't doing it right.

\---

† the corollary of this is: that there is _always_ a fiddler.

But when they break it you're allowed to laugh at them and then tell them to put it back the way it was when they found it

<comment><USER22> _"I've worked on plenty of Java projects where there were sections of the code that some of the programmers either didn't understand or didn't want to touch with a bargepole because they were 'too scary'."_

And this is _undesirable_ , is it not? Encapsulation aside, sometimes people get shuffled around in projects.

It's one thing to say, "OK, junior developers, don't mess with the tricky stuff in this project." It's another to say, "OK, I've decided to start writing this part of the project in a language the rest of you _don't actually know_."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I know everyone loves their high powered languages, but I'm afraid the author is right. The more developers, the more conformity you need. I'm doing a personal project in OCaml, and I absolutely love it. I like to think it keeps my medium size code base from ever turning into a large code base.

But Ocaml has so many features that two programmers can write in such different styles that it might as well be a different language. A team of maybe 5 people with a good attitude could probably work on the same code base. The same is true for lots of new languages like scala and clojure and even ruby.

Knowing what I know now, if there's a project that's going to have more than 10 people working on it, I'd hesitate to use anything except Java or C#.

<comment><USER24> _The more developers, the more conformity you need._

If you need a language to enforce coding standards, you have some big problems in your group!

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> No matter what the language is, I think it is important to understand that readability of the code should be part of the design. Scala does make it easy to write hard to read code.

<comment><USER11> Presumably it gets easier with practice. But I think you have to write it, and there are some idioms and shortcuts that people use, and if you're unfamiliar with the shortcut then it can be hard to figure out.

I had a similar problem with Objective-C. Everyone was saying how easy it would be for someone who knew Java to pick up, but for the first couple of years I found the message passing syntax to be incredibly jarring. Note that I'm not stupid, of course I understand what messages are etc. It wasn't that I didn't understand the concepts, it was that the syntax of the language kept tripping my "that looks wrong" buttons.

I think that with programming languages there can be an 'uncanny valley' effect. Something that looks too close to something else but isn't quite the same. Java and JavaFX were an example of that for me. I thought they made the JavaFX too close to Java. Someone who knew Java would keep getting tripped up on the subtle (and not so subtle differences) - but because it was too close to Java you couldn't easily tell where the Java ended and the JavaFX started. You might have a class where halfway down your page of code the rules of syntax and grammar shift slightly, and then a little bit further on they shift back...

When I'm mixing two languages I find it easier if they are distinctly different, it makes the cognitive burden easier. Nobody complains about having to mix Java and SQL on the back end with HTML and Javascript on the front end for instance. There's four languages right there, and the wuss that wrote the original article thinks two is too scary for most programmers? I know most programmers are like insects to the giant intellects of those of us at HN, but even so I think he doesn't give them enough credit.</comment></comment>


Show HN: OfficeHours – A Card Deck for Startups - <AUTHOR> I've been working on my first physical product recently and wanted to get some feedback at this early stage.
It's a card deck of questions that you can use as a way of practicing for an elevator pitch, accelerator interview or even as an ice breaker at a meetup.
I created it based on my experiences in an accelerator program a few years ago. I found the most valuable part of Office Hours was the back and forth discussion with a mentor, having to vocalise my ideas and fielding all kinds of questions.
Really this deck is meant to be a pocket version of that interaction.
Going forward custom decks are also a possibility too. They could be good promotional tool for trainers, businesses and event organisers.
Would love to hear any other suggestions or improvements for the site or the deck.
Thanks. <comment><USER2> > the most valuable part of Office Hours was the back and forth discussion > with a mentor

I completely agree and echo your sentiment from past experience.

I think your card deck concept is an excellent way to break away from product / engineering / screenshots and focus on the practical aspects of business execution as part of an interview scenario.

Many founders get caught up in product (low level details) and miss key concepts of business. It's easy to do, especially as a engineer (been there myself).

Your card product reminds me of this YC interview app: [http://ipaulgraham.herokuapp.com/](http://ipaulgraham.herokuapp.com/)

Related: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8334957](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8334957)

In hindsight, I wish I had your card deck when I applied to YC and was subsequently interviewed by PG. This would have forced me to shed my engineering mindset and put on my business cap.

</comment><comment><USER3> I like the minimal design. And I like that these could help prepare for an elevator pitch (which in turn would be peep for the overall idea and execution). Looks good!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable > [http://officehourscards.com/](http://officehourscards.com/)</comment>


Hetzner Cloud Volumes in beta - <AUTHOR> https://www.hetzner.com/news/10-18-cloud-volumes/ <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18241894](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18241894)

</comment><comment><USER3> Thanks @cedricziel for posting our good news. Here's some more information.

Hetzner Online will soon be offering a new cloud product, Hetzner Cloud Volumes, to the public. Hetzner Cloud Volumes offer highly available and reliable storage space for Hetzner Cloud servers.

Today, Hetzner announced that users can participate in the month-long beta test and use Volumes to scale up the storage on their Hetzner Cloud servers. For the beta test, participants can use up to 10 Volumes, each with a maximum of 100 GB.

Since each Hetzner Cloud server allows users to mount as many as five Volumes, this tool will allow participants to quickly grow your storage by creating new Volumes within seconds.

When the beta test is over, users will continue to have access to their Volumes. A Volume will cost only €0.04/GB per month. So 100 GB will cost users a €4.00 a month. The minimum size will be 10 GB and the maximum is 10 TB. And since the tool allows users to adjust Volume sizes in 1 GB increments, customers will only buy the exact amount of storage that they'll need.

"This is really a great opportunity for customers to make themselves heard," said Christian Fitz, Head of Marketing. "Participants in the beta test will get the first crack at using this product, and in turn, we at Hetzner Online hope to gain feedback and make it even better."

There's more information about the beta test on Hetzner Online's website [https://www.hetzner.com/news/10-18-cloud- volumes/](https://www.hetzner.com/news/10-18-cloud-volumes/) and on their customer wiki [https://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/CloudServer/en#Volumes](https://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/CloudServer/en#Volumes)

New customers will need to make an account and have it authenticated first.

For more information on Hetzner Cloud, see: [https://www.hetzner.com/cloud](https://www.hetzner.com/cloud) [https://accounts.hetzner.com/login](https://accounts.hetzner.com/login) [https://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/CloudServer/en](https://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/CloudServer/en) [https://docs.hetzner.cloud/](https://docs.hetzner.cloud/) [https://github.com/hetznercloud](https://github.com/hetznercloud)

\--Katie, Marketing, Hetzner Online</comment>


How to encrypt files on OS X by the command line - <AUTHOR> http://formalfriday.club/2014/10/28/encrypt-files-osx.html?utm_source=hackernews&utm_medium=brad&utm_campaign=post

<comment><AUTHOR> Turns out it's not too difficult to encrypt an individual file using OS X. OpenSSL is already on every mac out there.</comment>


Show HN: MightyName.com – Search over 8M available English .com domain - <AUTHOR> http://hn.mightyname.com <comment><AUTHOR> So I decided to reopen mightyname.com again to the public after a long time of strictly private service.

This is my private tool that can be used to search over 8 million available combinations of real english word .com domains and it's really handy. This is the primary tool I use to find domains for my side projects.

Enjoy!</comment>


Tracking the LA/OC Fire on Google Maps - <AUTHOR> http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?hl=en&gl=us&ie=UTF8&oe=UTF8&msa=0&msid=106212521568035882004.00045bb7819236c3696ea&t=h&ll=33.966142,-117.788544&spn=0.1754,0.256462&z=12

<comment><USER2> Cool. I wrote this similar simple web app a couple years ago (unofficially) for my university, USC: <http://usccrime.org/>

</comment><comment><USER3> Stepmoms' parents live just a few blocks from that blue evacuation zone on Brea Canyon drive. Crazyness.</comment>


The iPhone 5S fingerprint'Touch ID' scanner &Teenagers - <AUTHOR> http://guru8.net/2013/09/the-iphone-5s-fingerprint-touch-id-scanner-teenagers

<comment><USER2> I actually think it will make more difference for enterprise users that must put passwords on their devices. The Touch ID will help people that don't want to put a permanent password on their device, and will increase the BYOD movement, IMHO.

<comment><AUTHOR> i agree with you @liranz, passwords can be a pain</comment></comment>


Linux Fu: The Great Power of Make - <AUTHOR> https://hackaday.com/2018/06/22/linux-fu-the-great-power-of-make/ <comment><USER2> Makefiles really surprised me when I took some time to really learn how to write them. It's a very elegant language that feels more like a spreadsheet than normal coding. Don't judge me, but I think that the Makefile language is one of those that will make you a better programmer overall after learning it. Give it a try!

<comment><USER3> I often miss "make". I suspect if there were no such thing as MS WIndows, we would all (still) be using make, rather than each language having a handful of competing build tools.

Code generation used to be trivial, as well, rather than having to write "plugins" in XML build tool N.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Semi-related, I love this article by Mike Bostock about using Make to capture some design/data workflows: [https://bost.ocks.org/mike/make/](https://bost.ocks.org/mike/make/)

I fiddled with this idea and made a Makefile that downloads a book from the Internet Archive, extracts all the illustrations and tweaks them with ImageMagick: [https://github.com/beardicus/bk-fig- phillips/blob/master/Mak...](https://github.com/beardicus/bk-fig- phillips/blob/master/Makefile)

This isn't the smartest Makefile... I've learned a bit since. Regardless, I find it really fun to smoosh a process into a dependency graph frame-of-mind.

Does anybody else have any examples of "non-traditional" uses of Make? Anything beyond compiling code or using it as a straightforward task runner?

</comment><comment><USER5> A former college introduced me to make as alternative for custom build scripting (bash) I wrote for some Python projects. I always assumed it could only be used for C style projects where you had compile steps and such, but it's so much more and I haven't looked back since. Make is almost as ubiquitous as shell script on any working environment and the mix of its own declarative syntax and 'regular' imperative script allows almost any task to be modelled.

</comment><comment><USER6> If only Maven were replaced with Make (in the Java world).

</comment><comment><USER6> Hacker News paydirt!</comment>


Freerisk.org - Freeing financial data and modeling - <AUTHOR> http://freerisk.org/

<comment><USER2> Secwatch.com is a competitor. I like freerisk's description of the filings better though secwatch has way more data.

<comment><USER3> Hmm, I think the primary thing that freerisk is looking to provide is a platform to allow people to easily build models and analysis on top of the financial data, and in turn, do interesting things to snuff out value through things like leaderboards, etc. Secwatch, on the other hand, just provides financial data, really.

That said, I think the world kinda needs more stuff like this: I think a big reason that people (on average) don't reason well about investments and the markets and all that is that, at large, its just out of reach.

But making it easy to people to plug in and build models, and in turn ranking the models in a useful way to help people see which ones are actually useful is a great start to really turning the web into a bit of a "distributed investment analyst" in the cloud, or something.

Needless to say, it wont be THAT useful without a richer set of data (ie: ticker prices, blah blah blah), but its something, at least.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> for more information on the project, watch the talk from ETech -> <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmhAIPGjCps>

</comment><comment><USER4> There's autocompletion for Berkshire Hathaway; but when I select (say, the A-class shares), the results text yields and error when I select Go!

</comment><comment><USER5> Any reason why the data is only 2 or 3 years?

</comment><comment><USER6> Nice project. If only OpenTick were still around as well. The combination would be nice.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> i guess both, the lack of data and small bugs are due to the fact that it's a fairly young project. but i really like the ideas behind it, and when they get the API done, i'm curios what people will start to build on it.

</comment><comment><USER7> Doesn't seem to work atm? (No results for "Microsoft")

<comment><AUTHOR> Querying "MSFT" works: <http://freerisk.org/viewtables?ticker=MSFT>

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> If you type the name of a company really fast (not the ticker) and hit enter before the autocomplete pops up, it will not find any information. Example of the url you get when you type "Microsoft" really fast <http://freerisk.org/viewtables?ticker=Microsoft> which doesn't work.</comment>


Sherlog.js – JavaScript error and event tracker application - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/burakson/sherlogjs

<comment><USER2> I wish Sherlog.js had pluggable backends, so that one could send metrics to Hekad server, for example. That way one storage can accumulate stats from across the whole stack (server-side and client-side events, infrastructure metrics, etc.) and visualize them in useful ways. I like how Etsy does this, though I'm not sure how they deal with client-side metrics, with StatsD protocol working over UDP.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, this was exactly the initial idea which turned out to be a 'in-the- future' release. Before spending more significant time on backend adapters, I would like to be 100% sure that the framework part is working smoothly. Things you said are definitely way to go, cheers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Very Interesting!

A minor thing: I'd rather split the two parts of the app into the tracking code & the app for collecting & displaying the data. If you then document the parameters, people might be more likely to use at least a part of it (or write other backends for it). Also this way it would be possible to not run another webserver in order to serve the tracking code.

</comment><comment><USER4> I use JavaScript daily and it is not immediately apparent to me what the advantage of this framework is over console logging and the Chrome Inspector tools. Perhaps showing the benefits of using the framework in your README file would really help elucidate the reasons why your tool is awesome. Good luck!

<comment><USER5> This is different. This is for tracking errors instead of debugging errors, similar to how Rollbar/New Relic would work for tracking compared to using Chrome Inspector for actually figuring out _why_ the code broke.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> MongoDB as a requirement sounds heavyhanded - is there a good reason to tie the database so heavily here?

</comment><comment><USER7> Can you add a screenshot to the README?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, just added.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Looks promising!</comment>


Minitel: The Online World France Built Before the Web - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/cyberspace/minitel-the-online-world-france-built-before-the-web <comment><USER2> Prior discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14681561](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14681561)

</comment><comment><USER3> It looks like most European countries had nationwide X.25 networks of some kind at the time. Why did federating these networks never really take off? There were some initiatives it seems (IPSS), but I can't find much information on international services provided over X.25. Was it because of commercial reasons, or were there technical reasons that limited the scalability of these networks?

<comment><USER4> Calling a foreign address worked fine, there was a prefix code for each network.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Reply All did a great episode all about Minitel, for those interested: [https://gimletmedia.com/episode/french- connection/](https://gimletmedia.com/episode/french-connection/)

</comment><comment><USER6> I graduated from a Telecommunications technical school in Budapest in 1992. We took the exam from relay-based switching centres (also 7A2 and ARF102) and had to repair an old style rotary dial phone to pass and get a diploma. Our teacher told us about Minitel in France but emphasised that the real thing will be ISDN (64kbps). In a couple of years in college I had high speed Internet access, Silicon Graphics workstations with those beautiful, huge blue monitors. It is hard to imagine nowadays what a change that was, though switching from my Motorola flip phone to iPhone 4 was also quite something.

</comment><comment><USER7> South Africa also had Beltel around that time, a very similar service I'm sure. I remember being wowed by the real-time cross-country chat and the better-than-ANSI block shapes for drawing :)

</comment><comment><USER8> Interesting that at the same time I was using a C64 with 300 and 1200 baud modems to get on the local BBSs in Canada. Which was way more of a hassle.

<comment><USER9> Any favourites you can remember?

<comment><USER8> The pub won one. A few of my friends ran their own small ones that mainly just us.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Not sure what other systems ran, but, AFAIK, the one in São Paulo, called Videotexto, was served out of a DPS-8M mainframe running MULTICS.

</comment><comment><USER10> Proud "Videotel" owner from Italy (worked on ITAPAC x25). Same as minitel, and with some tricks you'd have QSD as well ;-)

</comment><comment><USER11> Apart from PRESTEL which preceded Minitel I am sure Samuel Fedida would take a dim view of the IEEE not mentioining him.

<comment><USER12> The article notes PRESTEL, and points out the key technical difference between the PRESTEL and Minitel architectures:

"Although [Minitel] wasn't the only network to use X.25 or videotex technology during the 1980s, Minitel was unique in allowing the many service providers to operate their own machines. France Telecom oversaw only the network, whereas in most other countries, a single organization had centralized control of both the network and servers for the videotex system.

In the United Kingdom, for example, all content on the Prestel videotex system was hosted on an IBM mainframe housed at the General Post Office."

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Covered many times here: [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=minitel&sort=byPopularity&pref...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=minitel&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

Don't forget about Infovía in Spain!

<comment><USER14> And Viatel in Australia

[https://www.reddit.com/r/australia/comments/2wu5va/viatel_au...](https://www.reddit.com/r/australia/comments/2wu5va/viatel_australias_internet_before_the_internet/)</comment></comment>


Swiftype Adds Live Analytics And Other Features For Marketers - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/05/swiftype-live-analytics/

<comment><USER2> I think the page on their site is probably more relevant:

[https://swiftype.com/search-analytics](https://swiftype.com/search-analytics)

The visualizations look really clean!

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad to hear it. As Luke noted, we've been using d3 more and more, particularly for this release. We've all been really please with its flexibility.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It would be awesome if you could "close the loop" between analytics and SERPs!

For instance, say that you return a SERP with 2 results. Using your analytics and some conversion pixels, Swiftype would know that for that search, the first result has an estimated value of $10 and the second result has an estimated value of $20. From using Swiftype on a Wordpress site, I know that you give admins the power to change the order of results on a SERP page _manually_. Could you also do that _automatically_?

So for an e-commerce client, you could automatically re-sort the SERP so the $20 link shows up first (and hence gets more clicks). You could even calculate and display the benefit to the customer of doing this, e.g. "You have generated $1,234 in extra revenue this month by using Search Auto-Rejigger".

<comment><AUTHOR> If I understand what you're suggesting correctly, we already do this. Any analytics we expose in the dashboard are also being leveraged internally as signals for search relevance. Effectively, any search interaction can be used to improve the relevance of subsequent searches.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm excited by the availability of "what people looked for but didn't find" data in the post-Demand Media era.

</comment><comment><USER5> This was really fun to work on. The live analytics page is the most extensive use of D3 I've done thus far.</comment>