Dealing with Duplicate Person Data (Levenshtein Distance, Nicknames & Multi-core/CPU)  - <AUTHOR> http://proudtouseperl.com/2009/04/dealing-with-duplicate-person-data.html

<comment><USER2> Please be careful to THOROUGHLY vet any logic like this prior to internationalizing. (Though, truth be known, I'd be hesitant to employ it in America these days for anything important.) You might think names are reasonably unique identifiers. You'd be pretty catastrophically wrong in much of Asia, for example.

Our Japanese university customers use the following to test identities for equality:

1) Same first name

2) Same last name

3) Same high school

4) Same birthday

5) Same high school major

6) Same high school GPA

7) Human review

Human review exists because if after all those checks we still merge two students and then someone fails the entrance examination as a result, someone at our company and someone at the university will pretty much have to resign in disgrace.

<comment><USER3> Amen. At Spock we had a cluster of women from Spain that got tagged as Catholic priests because they had names like "Maria Pilar Pastor". Identity resolution is one of the trickiest things they are solving.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This issue is usually known as record linkage. Academic research has produced some more sophisticated techniques. <http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/31/6/1246> <http://www.fcsm.gov/working-papers/foreword.pdf> <http://www.census.gov/srd/papers/pdf/rr99-04.pdf>

<comment><USER5> See also: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Record_linkage_problem> and <http://www.fcsm.gov/working-papers/RLT_1997.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've been tackling the same problem (in a similar architecture recently (though more real-time oriented)). Some other suggestions:

      1.  Hash the names (with something like Text::DoubleMetaphone) and select from this list rather than trolling the whole database.
      2.  Check out POE (great for distributed parallel processing)
      3.  Consider how you will handle null fields (a lack of information is not the same as badly matching information).
      4.  Consider the uniqueness of the data values themselves (Ebenezer Rumpelstilzchen is more unique than John Smith), but you have to watch out for foreign names (which seem unique but aren't).
      5.  Matching on multiple fields seems multiplicative, not additive.

<comment><USER6> Numbered lists are not code, so please don't format them that way. They break the page.

(HN really needs some CSS that restricts the width of code blocks.)

<comment><USER7> There is a GM script that does this (PRE-fix), but with javascript: <http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/25039>

I tried with CSS alone, but as I recall it was inconsistent in multiple browsers, so went with js.

<comment><USER6> OK. The CSS I have on my blog seems to handle long code snippets pretty well, but I can't explain how it works, since I just ported a Typo theme.

Regardless, it seems possible. Someone that actually has a clue about CSS and/or Javascript should submit a patch to fix HN :) (Unfortunately, I do not have said clue.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Recently, I had to solve that same problem in PostgreSQL. I use a multicolumn index with the soundex of first name, soundex of last name, and birthdate. This yields a set of preliminary candidates to match. On a second step, we prune according to a hand-crafted distance measure, which relies on levenshtein and a bunch of simple calculations on the whole record. Finally, we order the candidates by distance and take as match that record with minimal distance under a threshold.

</comment><comment><USER9> Fuzzy logic that usually requires "tricks of the trade". Good suggestions here.

Some other things we have used over the years to remove dups:

      SOUNDEX (last name, first name, street name)
      Zip Code (1st 2 digits, 1st 3 digits, all 5 digits)
      Street Name only (discard numerics)
      First letter of First name only (watch out, Joe and Jerry may be reduced to one record)
      For mailing lists, are 2 people with the same last name at the same address really 2 people? (Sometimes yes, sometimes no)</comment>


The best Mario Kart character according to data science - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/civis-analytics/the-best-mario-kart-character-according-to-data-science-7dfb65d4c18e <comment><USER2> I bet it's peach in Diddy Kong racing. Experiential anecdotally that's the sense I have.</comment>


GitHub Down - <AUTHOR>

GitHub is unreachable at the moment for both web and ssh (for me at least). <comment><USER2> I have only been using github for a brief period of time so I am not sure about their track record. Is this a common thing? Seems to be happening fairly frequently... I don't keep commercial products on Github but still a little annoying. If it is a DDos, I must ask why? Who would want to do that? A competitor is the only answer I can think of.

</comment><comment><USER3> <http://isup.me/github.com>

It's not just you! <http://github.com> looks down from here.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> They've updated their status to indicate they're under a DDoS attack impeding access to their systems:

<https://status.github.com>

<comment><USER3> Is every period of downtime due to a DDoS, or has it become the industry catch-all phrase?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> me too.</comment>


[prophecy] Google will down from Reader Close. - <AUTHOR>

I can sure turn off Google Reader, Google will certainly demise. Someone other arguments it? <comment><USER2> I don't think this will impact Google too much. Even in the case they get pushed off the top the way MSN, AOL or MySpace did, they are also in the hardware market, not to mention Google has become leading inventor, technology company and also have a massive amount of funds to get back into business somewhere else. They won't just disappear like that.</comment>


Looking For A Co-Founder For An Online Programming Interview Tutor - <AUTHOR>

http://blueberrytree.ws
I once blew a programming interview at Microsoft. I was disappointed in myself and I was sure I could have done better had I only studied the correct things (Date and time algorithms).
Instead of looking for another job, I decided to start living off my savings and build an online programming interview tutor smart enough to figure out what topics I needed more practice with. I started building BlueberryTree because I wanted to use it.
I've finished enough development for a potential MVP and I'm working on adding more programming interview exercises, tutorials and video lectures. I'd like a partner and I'm willing to split equity 50/50.
I'm a software developer and I love what I do. I read technical books on the toilet, I don't care what language or framework I use, I'm easy to get along with, and I drink my whiskey neat.
I'm looking for a new best friend and partner. You could be a developer, a designer or someone who loves to get sales.
If you'd like to know more contact me at "cozysystems at gmail.com" <comment><USER2> Some random questions for you:

What language/framework/tech is your programming tutor written in?

What skills/qualities are you looking for in a cofounder?

Where are you located (closest city I guess is enough)?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's written using Ruby On Rails 2.X. The exercises are written in C. I also have an exercise recommendation server I wrote in Clojure.

If a co-founder is a software developer, I'd like someone with experience writing a web app front to back. Maybe someone that specializes in something I'm not too familiar with. I noticed you're into systems programming, I'd love to work with someone with that kind of experience!

As far as qualities go, I'd like someone who can work remotely and get shit done. Someone that will communicate immediately how they feel about the project. For example, if they didn't want to be a part of it anymore, they would just come out and tell me and not just disappear.

I am currently living in Midland, TX. I'll be moving to El Paso, TX soon. Nearest tech city is Austin, TX. I drive there occasionally for meet ups. As soon as my wife finishes school, we're off to California.

<comment><USER2> I like your project, but I honestly can't say if I'm willing or able to commit to cofounding a startup around it right now (as it would obviously be a big commitment, I'd want to be sure its something I can and want to do first - plus I'd have personal projects/startup ideas to cancel or put on hold). I also don't know if I would be a good fit[1].

Still, I would be interested in chatting regardless (even if you already found somebody - one can never have enough good contacts), so feel free to drop me an email sometime. HN username at gmail.

[1] eg, I have no real business experience, nor have I ever used rails - willing to learn on both counts, of course, but I don't want to say I can do something when I don't know for sure. I'm also based in europe (Ireland) and I don't know if the distance would cause problems

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think this is a somewhat interesting idea. I got bored and quit before finishing one of the example problems though...

If you're looking for a co-founder, maybe you could try open sourcing your project on GitHub, and then re-submitting your request along with a link to the code. That's the first thing I would want to look at.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable link: <http://blueberrytree.ws>

</comment><comment><USER4> You might want to look up Gayle Laakmann, who wrote "Cracking the Coding Interview" amongst others other books and runs a site/startup called CareerCup.

<http://www.careercup.com/>

</comment><comment><USER5> Have you done the financial models to check how viable the business model is?</comment>


Ask HN: Why is Azure so expensive? - <AUTHOR> What is the benefit of using Azure comparing to AWS or Google Cloud? It is so expensive <comment><USER3> Because its aimed at enterprises that have Microsoft OS's and applications. Those buyers are used to paying a premium and know they don't have to retrain staff.

You need to consider that the bulk of developers are actually using the Microsoft platform. For the most part they aren't interested in the free software community. Linux VMs are not an option for a lot of corporate tasks.

That is of course changing and probably the main driver for Microsoft being more open.

<comment><USER4> Hm. 1000% sure it's a Sales tactic. Price it high and cut "deals" for clients. Oldest trick in the book.

<comment><USER5> They're a lot more cooperative around BigCorp compliance related stuff than AWS. It doesn't sound like that big a deal, but it really is.

<comment><USER4> Oh yeah, that's for sure huge, but BigCorp isn't paying market price per container. I'm talking about the sales tactics played out against the little guy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Azure just recently announced price reductions to be competitive with AWS. The blog post has some interesting links. [https://azure.microsoft.com/en- us/blog/helping-azure-custome...](https://azure.microsoft.com/en- us/blog/helping-azure-customers-achieve-more-at-the-best-prices/)

Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft.

</comment><comment><USER7> I can just say that Azure and AWS cost more than Google Cloud because Google Cloud has the worst customer support I ever saw.

<comment><USER8> Nice to hear that Google are consistent with their customer support across all their products!

<comment><USER9> I spent about 2 hours on the phone with Chromecast support yesterday for an intermittent problem I was having. On the bright side, they have a phone number you can call for support, on the bad side, it seems their strategy is to keep transferring you to different people, each who makes you go through the same trouble shooting steps until you just give up out of frustration, which I did.

<comment><USER10> Customer hung up? PROBLEM SOLVED!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Comparison (not exactly apples-to-apples):

~3-4Gb RAM: Azure (2cores, >100$/month), Google (1core, ~25$), AWS (37$, or compute optimized 75$)

high memory 13-14Gb: Azure (>246$), Google (~63$), AWS (16Gb, >172$)

...

UPD: Thanks to tyingq, Azure 3-4Gb RAM (2cores, starting from 70$)

<comment><USER11> Just to illustrate how hard it is to do a simple comparison, you show Azure's 3/4 GB ram offering as being 2 cores and > $100/month.

But, if I go to their pricing page ([https://azure.microsoft.com/en- us/pricing/details/virtual-ma...](https://azure.microsoft.com/en- us/pricing/details/virtual-machines/#Linux)), I see:

A2 - 2 Cores, 3.5GB, 40GB: $70

A2 - 2 Cores, 3.5GB, 135GB: $89

D1 - 1 Core, 3.5GB, 50GB: $104

D2 - 2 Cores, 7GB, 100GB: $115

D2V2 - 2 Cores, 7GB, 100GB: $127

Thus, I'm not sure which one you're referring to. You seem to be referring to one with 7GB RAM, which seems not to be a very direct comparison.

<comment><USER12> Had look and I get totaly different pricing (higher mostly), Central US/USD prices and couple examples:

INSTANCE CORES RAM DISK SIZES PRICE D1 1 3.5 GB 50 GB $0.14/hr (~$104/mo) D2 2 7 GB 100 GB $0.28/hr (~$208/mo)

So D1 same and yet D2 twice the price!

A2 is $134 for same setup.

Note they mention discounts for 12 months prepaid, though not exciting and talking 5% discount and you have to be spending $6000 to qualify for that over the 12 month period.

Certainly seems, use of proxies and your location effect what you are quoted and I'm located near London and used the Opera browser, so who knows.

Certainly indicates that shopping around, even if your hitting the same price page, is prudent.

<comment><USER11> You're looking at Windows instances. Click the linux tab.

<comment><USER12> You are absolutely right, thank you for clearing that up and indeed I get same prices as you now, accept upon D1 which is (~$57/mo)with D2 - same as you get ~$115/mo . The V2 flavours at $63 and £127 a month (D1 and D2 respectively).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is Azure more expensive? I can't tell, in any simple way.

Is there a place that offers some simple apples-to-apples comparison for typical use cases? All three require complex calculators that account for bandwidth use, ip addresses, etc.

Edit: I do see some tools after searching some, but they are all flawed a bit because the three providers don't all offer the same thing. Azure's 2 core machines start with significantly more RAM than Google or AWS, so it's not a great comparison. The tools don't make that sort of mismatch easy to see.

<comment><USER13> The inability to directly compare signals a deliberate attempt to make the offer opaque for consumers and thus bias the market towards inefficiency.

<comment><USER14> I believe the term you're looking for is 'product differentiation'.

<comment><USER13> Yes — it's a business technique whose purpose is the reduction of competitive pressure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I wont talk to the benefits of using Azure versus AWS versus Google Cloud, but Azure's sales model is a bit different.

If you're looking at Azure, and on HN, my guess is you're probably a startup, in which case you want to look into Microsoft Bizspark ([https://www.microsoft.com/bizspark](https://www.microsoft.com/bizspark)). This drastically changes Azure prices. If you're a larger company, Azure is all about enterprise sales, and bundling. If you buy multiple Azure services along with Windows, and O365, the Azure part is dirt cheap.

<comment><USER16> Embrace, extend and extinguish

<comment><USER17> This isn't reddit. You can't post out of context EEE FUD here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> For our use case (fairly standard windows setup, sql server, about 8 VM's in total) Azure was less expensive, more so after we setup and saw true costs. We run our dev and test environments there and were able to get faster hardware & more storage for less as well (about 10% less for about 20% more). But again, that's a pure windows setup, comparing other components gets tricky because of different pricing models.

</comment><comment><USER19> We recently explored putting about 25 of our VMs in Azure.

For our workloads, Azure is a worse deal. Broadly, we found that compared to EC2 instance types, you paid a slight premium of 20% or so to get 2x the RAM and 100s of gigs of ephemeral SSD storage (vs little or no SSD storage), while taking a perhaps 30% hit in CPU performance.

It's not terrible, and depending on your workload, might be better than EC2. I'm personally very partial to Amazon's spot instances and t2 family types, neither of which Azure offers.

Even so, compute only represents ~25% of our AWS bill. For enterprises who have significant Windows/AD investment, Azure might be a no brainer from an ops cost point of view.

<comment><USER16> Every time I go VM shopping, it's always going to cost around 30-50% more to run on Azure. Thats a pretty significant increase IMO, especially for companies where Cloud Servers account for around half of our expenses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Setting aside the cost which I thought similar for Linux.....

If you are running Linux , azure works really well. Give it a try if you can set aside your bias.

</comment><comment><USER20> This post should be flagged.

The OP needs to quantify the statement about azure being expensive or else it will just sound like anti-Microsoft fud.

</comment><comment><USER21> Firstly, the hyperscale providers size their VMs differently, so it is generally not an apples to apples comparison. The best way to compare cloud environment is to consider 3 year cost of ownership, and try to price in various components/elements you might use such as big data stores, VLANs, autoscaling, tiered storage etc.

It is my opinion that the variance in pricing over the long run is no more (or will be no more) than 5% for these hyperscale providers over the long run. So your decision should be based on the type of applications you are trying to build in the cloud. If you are a microsoft "house", then it might make more sense to consider AZURE since they make it easier to port diretory services and licenses to their cloud. Likewise if you are a google house.

Obviously AWS has a lead in the market with regards to tools and functinalities as they were early to the cloud game, but MS and google are catching up fast. My personal choice of IaaS is google cloud because their interface is very easy to understand, but frm a customer support perspective, AWS and AMAZON are far better. Also, AWS and google frequently provide free credits for a period of time so it would make sense to try those out to see what works best.

<comment><USER10> > Obviously AWS has a lead in the market with regards to tools and > functinalities as they were early to the cloud game

I really disagree with this statement. Having used both AWS and Azure, Azure is leaps and bounds ahead with the tools they provide. It's possible AWS made efforts to catch up, it's been several years since I ported everything from AWS to Azure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is a good question. I don't know of one.

There are some issues I've seen while trying to run systems there. Some of the network configuration there is very strange, and I've seen some crazy performance issues. Their API is very painful to use as well. Lastly, they run an agent on your node that can gain someone root access (worse than Linode's ability for someone to do that). Finally, their control panel has a basically unlimited session lifetime. I don't think I've had to log in once within the past 60 days.

I've found that systems running in Azure reliably perform worse than AWS. Systems in Azure with about the same CPU and RAM have worse performance by anywhere from 2x to 10x. I'm using this based on seeing things like GC run times in both Go and the JVM. The systems report 0.00% CPU steal, no idea where the bottleneck is.

Their network also leaves some to be desired. One of the biggest pain points is that they drop ICMP Echo / Echo Reply on the edge of the network. So doing network troubleshooting across the WAN is challenging. Another issue is that they seem to often either drop or de-prioritize UDP packets within their Fresno location. This causes some issues with software that uses UDP for communication. With that are the weird, and confusing, mix-match between NetworkSecurityGroups and Endpoints, with only one of them being configurable in the UI.

The last thing is their API and the SDK (at least Ruby). Their API is an XML behemoth with incorrect documentation (e.g., the example URL using a wrong path in the docs), and severe performance problems. There are times where the API takes over a minute to respond to a request, sometimes taking longer to respond with an HTTP 500. Their Ruby SDK, at least, isn't so much as an SDK as a library that's meant to be consumed via IRB.

Lastly, the nodes all run an agent called WALinuxAgent. This allows Azure to take action on your node without your approval. It can also do things like add new users to your node, and give then full sudo access. This is also done without a reboot, so you have no indicator that someone just took this action on your system. Scary!

I've also seen this agent get weird responses from the endpoints it talks to causing it to think it should reprovision your node. It proceeds to then rewrite your SSH host keys, vomit an exception, and then exit. It's brilliant.

Trying to get help from support is impossible. I've had issues with the quality of the responses given, but also issues with them just never responding to open issues. AWS's support team should be commended in comparison.

<comment><USER23> > One of the biggest pain points is that they drop ICMP on the edge of the > network. So doing network troubleshooting across the WAN is challenging.

Do they drop all ICMP, or just ICMP Echo Request/Response? Because if they drop all ICMP, including "Fragmentation needed but Don't Fragment set", it will cause problems.

<comment><USER22> Echo/Echo Reply only I believe; not done an exhaustive test to confirm all that are dropped. I've clarified in my post that I was referring to E/ER. Thanks for calling that out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> As far as I understand Microsoft licensing, in normal VPS + Windows solution you would have to pay Windows Server CALs for each user connecting to your web app on that server (even if you dont use windows authentication).

In Azure, MS frees you from that CAL charge.

I would be grateful if someone could confirm or reject this licensing issue - I heard it once from a MS employee but perhaps he misunderstood the thing about VPS somehow?

<comment><USER25> As of Windows 2012, you don't need CALs for a "web workload" (basically, Internet web pages and POP3 email) on the standard edition. Before that, there was a special edition for "web workloads" that was limited in other ways.

<comment><USER24> Well, I spoke to MS licensing person from Warsaw 3 months ago and she was sure about the need for an external connector license if you don't want to pay CALs (costs around 100 CALs if I remember correctly). What is your source of information if I may ask? Or maybe you can point me towards a publicly available document?

<comment><USER25> You do need an external connector license for the servers that aren't running "web workloads" (serving pages), e.g., a database or mid-tier application server.

See question 5 at [http://blogs.technet.com/b/volume- licensing/archive/2014/03/...](http://blogs.technet.com/b/volume- licensing/archive/2014/03/10/licensing-how-to-when-do-i-need-a-client-access- license-cal.aspx)

That blog post is also a great demonstration of the hilariously complicated MS licensing regime. Hilarious if you don't have to deal with it, that is.

<comment><USER24> Thanks a lot for the link!

It seems that if I have a web app and database on the same server then user<->web app does not require CAL even if database is involved in handling that web app work load! That's good news for my use case. It really shows how twisted MS licensing is if MS licensing staff does not understand MS licensing )

I am not sure however, whether this changes if authentication is involved - <USER2> it still a publicly available web solution or not?

I really hope ASP.NET will become rock solid soon on Linux so one can avoid MS licensing twists altogether,

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> What is more expensive? The pricing seems on par with Amazon.

</comment><comment><USER27> Is it even relevant? You need to work out how much your hosting costs as a percentage of your overall expenses. In my business it is less than 5% running on Azure. I could convert to AWS and save a bit and it might be 4%, hardly worth the effort. If you have hosting costing > 10% then you have bigger issue, not enough revenue, or terribly inefficient software.

<comment><USER28> It's not just that. If you did things yourself on dedicated hosting (which would save you 70-80% of your bill) you'd have more options. You'd have much more bandwidth, much more cpu, much more disk for the same price.

Of course it'd be more work. But if you think you can transform more bandwidth, faster calculations or more user storage into more customers, you definitely want to get off cloud.

<comment><USER10> And then when one of those customized servers dies...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Because it's not. Azure and AWS are largely comparable. The only reason to select your cloud provider between Azure and AWS is the feature set you care most about.

If you are a .NET shop, Azure absolutely dominates AWS for what it provides.

</comment><comment><USER29> This reminds me of this article: [http://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2015/12/ballme...](http://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2015/12/ballmer-microsofts-cloud-revenue-numbers-are-bullshit/)

</comment><comment><USER30> Microsoft partners get benefits like unlimited Azure support incidents at some partnership levels. They also get consulting hours.

</comment><comment><USER31> My guess is that they are selling to existing MS stack install bases hat are much more price agnostic.

</comment><comment><USER32> So expensive? Can you please provide some data / your usage to back you statement?

</comment><comment><USER33> Azure/Google is definitely more expensive but that is probably because they don't treat their employees like crap. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10065243](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10065243)

<comment><USER34> In any cost comparison I have done, Google comes out ahead of AWS, followed by Azure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> if you need windows VMs it's alright

<comment><USER36> Well duh.</comment></comment>


Free, Encrypted, and Open-Source Email Forwarding Service for Custom Domains - <AUTHOR> https://forwardemail.net/#/ <comment><AUTHOR> From the creator:

I created this service after realizing that the only email forwarding services that exist now that are "free" are also closed-source and proprietary. This means they probably read your forwarded emails. Before creating this, of course I adhere to the "don't repeat yourself" practice - so I endlessly searched on StackOverflow, GitHub, Gists, and elsewhere for alternative solutions.

Then there's Gmail, which costs money now for custom domains (it used to be free). They also don't allow you to easily set up email forwarding for custom domains anymore.

There's also Zoho mail, but again that requires you signing up for an account with Zoho, and then forwarding over the emails in a configuration setting.

Put simply, there was no current email-forwarding service that was free, simple, secure, tested, and open-source.

This service solves all of these problems.</comment>


The fastest Firefox ever with Photon UI and better tooling - <AUTHOR> https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/09/firefox-quantum-developer-edition-fastest-firefox-ever/ <comment><USER2> I've been using this on the nightly channel since 57 became available there and it has been an amazing improvement. Excellent work by the fine folks at Mozilla!

I starting using nightly expecting to have stability problems and then just drop it, but can't remember it crashing or having any issues at all.

The speed improvement has been nicer than expected, but it's particularly impressive that they've done it while also keeping things so stable and working all this into such a large complex piece of existing software.

This kind of work and their freedom focused goals will probably make a donor out of me.

<comment><USER3> Same here, using it for a month both in desktop and mobile, not a single crash. On the desktop the performance improvement is really noticeable

<comment><USER2> I recall reading about the mobile version of 57 not yet having the changes that made the desktop version so much faster. I think they're coming in mobile 58.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I love the built-in widgets for date/time. It would be great if every browser had built-in widgets like this for all form fields (including complex ones) and styling became options vs mandatory.

</comment><comment><USER5> I use it already since a few days and it's a huge improvement. It's just way faster than before. The new slimmer UI is also great IMO, because it goes out of the way better than before.

Be aware that some extensions might not work yet. E.g. refind is one of those which need to be updated.

</comment><comment><USER6> > The fastest Firefox ever

I dunno, 0.x and 1.x Firefoxes (Firefoxen?) were pretty fast.

<comment><USER7> At rendering the content available at the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's really fast, although for some reason it keeps consuming CPU steadily in the background. This makes my MBP temp go to 70ºC and the fan becomes audible.

</comment><comment><USER9> Still no live javascript editing, like Chrome scripts tab? This is a major setdown that prevents me from using Firefox. Chrome has that since so many years that I can't believe Firefox still hasn't got it. I think the latest Firefox releases are fast and good as browsers.. but as a developer, that's a showstopper.

</comment><comment><USER10> Looks awesome. This might convince me to switch back to FF as my default browser.

</comment><comment><USER11> Is this going to find its way into Firefox mobile as well?

<comment><USER2> Not for the mobile 57 release, but I think it is supposed to be mobile 58.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Nice. When will it come to Firefox beta?

<comment><USER13> Beta for 57 rolls out today I believe.

<comment><USER12> But will it include these updates, or they are limited to developer edition only?

<comment><USER14> Firefox 57 includes these updates so yes Quantum is included in the Beta branch right now.

<comment><USER12> Great, thanks!

UPDATE: Just updated my beta, and tabs UI looks rather ugly IMHO. Bigger elements than older design, more bulky. Sharp rectangular shapes of each tab UI element are also very standing out. It looks like a touchscreen UI to me.

It also completely disabled all common add-ons like Adblock Plus and Stylish. That's a BIG problem. Looks like Adblock Plus has a compatible beta version at least.

It does feel much snapper though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's faster and nicer looking but still, doesn't highlight the URL box when you click on it like in chrome.

So still a pass for me, might seem stupid but its a major thing for easy of use.

<comment><USER16> Use Ctrl+L or F6, you'll need to touch the keyboard anyway for typing the URL.

Otherwise, you might want to set "browser.urlbar.doubleClickSelectsAll" to "true", so you can at least get it with double-clicks.

<comment><USER17> Alt-D is another shortcut.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Good self-hosted calendar sync framework? - <AUTHOR> I'm recently trying to de-cloud myself. On the top of my list are email, calendar, and meetings since I feel like all this remote work is really tying me into these cloud-based solutions.
I've found some neat libraries regarding email and WebRTC meetings but I can't find anything on calendar sync for the life of me. I have a UI in mind for my own calendar app but I can't find a good open source framework or library that does calendar sync with both Google Calendar (personal), Office365 (work), and CalDAV (also work).
I've found a library that (kind of) does Google Calendar by itself and a slew of projects regarding Office365's API that don't really seem to have much in the way of reliability. Haven't found anything in the way of CalDAV.
Hoping someone can recommend a good calendar sync framework, preferably with JS or Rust bindings? <comment><USER2> Have you checked out [https://nextcloud.com](https://nextcloud.com) for solving everything?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah! So I set this up locally for email and a self hosted calendar, but I generally dislike modern calendar interfaces and am looking to experiment in building my own out (probably using Rust or JS).

NextCloud's engine doesn't seem to be very friendly/lightweight in this regard as it's been built specifically for their frontend :/ I was hoping there was some library that accomplished the same thing while being more lightweight/having friendly bindings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> While CalDAV sounds simple on paper, it is anything but. That explains the complexity of most projects related to it.

Things like DAVdroid provide a syncing ability for Cal/CardDAV to Android.

There is evolution-data-server and SyncEvolution for regular GNU/Linux.

Good luck in building something lighterweight, I'd be keen to move to it from NextCloud too :)</comment>


Helm – a free polyphonic synth with lots of modulation - <AUTHOR> https://tytel.org/helm/ <comment><USER2> Helm is awesome!! U-He makes a bunch of great quality instruments, another one that is really spectacular is Zebra.

It also runs on linux! Which is more or less a desert when it comes to interesting audio plugins.

</comment><comment><USER3> JUCE is a cross-platform C++ library used by lots of synth software and VSTS plugins. While JUCE itself is open-source, there's not a lot of high-quality sample projects (that I'm aware of). Helm looks awesome, and it's exciting to see a great example using JUCE.</comment>


How to Manage CSS Explosion - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/q/2253110/184 <comment><USER2> You can't.

You can try to reduce the horribleness of a CSS file, but the language simply doesn't provide the tools needed to do the one thing all programmers need to manage complexity: abstract away the common part of two specific processes into a reusable component.

I'll never forgive the designers of CSS for not at least providing immutable constants, if not variables.

<comment><USER3> The more I think about it, the more certain I become that immutable constants (a good idea, IMO) are the furthest CSS could safely go down the rabbit hole before the entire enterprise would consume itself in spaghetti-code madness.

Not that plenty about CSS doesn't beg for better abstractions, but turning it into a programming language is kind of a terrifying prospect. I've see too much of what enthusiastic amateurs can inflict with JavaScript.

<comment><USER4> Have you looked into Sass and Less CSS? I haven't used them in production. They seem to achieve reuse in a CSS-like way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _"I am using a large number of div tags within the website (previously it was completely tables based)."_ That's one part of the problem. Why not use tables if you are using .title, .body and .footer for DIVs when tables have this as default? I see a lot of people using DIVs on places they shouldn't. They use things like <div class="title" ... Why not use H1 - H6 instead?

HTML tags provide structure. Structure means less complexity. Using only DIVs will get you into CSS trouble.

Edit: A good tip: your website will look more consistent and clean when you try to build your pages by only declaring HTML tags in your CSS at first. Only when there is no other solution declare classes and IDs. And even then remember you can use multiple classes in your class attribute. Things like: class="width50perc floatLeft textAlignRight textColor1" are very handy.

<comment><USER6> > Things like: class="width50perc floatLeft textAlignRight textColor1" are > very handy.

At that point, how is this any different from just using inline styles? The whole point of CSS is to separate presentation from content, you've done gone and thrown a bunch of presentation back into it.

<comment><USER5> True, but I think the fun thing is when you use CSS to seperate presentation from content you will end up in CSS hell. I know websites like csszengarden are telling you this is the power of CSS. And it is, but ask yourself: how many times did you change the layout of a website with CSS only? Probably not a single time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Surprised no one mentioned Sass or LessCSS.

<comment><USER8> The current version of Less is really impressive. It's written in JavaScript, which lets you do crazy things like:

      <link rel="stylesheet/less" type="text/css" href="styles.less">
      <script src="less.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

Since it's a superset of plain CSS, both the migration and the learning curve are really pleasant.

<comment><USER9> Why would you want to do this on the client and slow the whole site down? I can understand (though don't personally want to use) a server-side preprocessor, but doing it in realtime on the client seems counterproductive.

And what? I've just checked out the minified version of less.js and it clocks in at 32kB. Seriously?

<comment><USER10> Why do you say that doing this on the client would slow the site down? That's counter-intuitive to me. I'm trying to push everything I can off to the client (client machines seem pretty good) in order to keep things on the server speedy- but it's my first web app, so I'm new in this space. Thanks.

<comment><USER11> It's the opposite, I recommend you check out the work of Steve Souders, his blog and his books (<http://stevesouders.com/>). The general idea is that the server is going to be speedier (through a combination of hardware than caching) than the user's machine. And there are a lot of old machines out there.

Souders estimates that around 80-90% of a site's slowness has to do with the time it takes for the browser renders the page, js slows that down.

<comment><USER10> Thanks for the link. Browsing "Even Faster Web Sites" he cited 14 rules from the first book ("High Performance Web Sites") in the preface. Rule 1: Make Fewer HTTP Requests. I guess this is what I had in mind. I have a request get the data, but how I allow user to render it different ways. So the local rendering is done in JS.

I'm still building, but it look like I better give this a second look.

I'm also in the education space, so where there are crappy machines there are also likely crappy networks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> bill-nordwall There are better ways to manage CSS bloat.

See Nicole Sullivan's Object-Oriented CSS approach: <https://github.com/stubbornella/oocss/wiki>

</comment><comment><USER12> I love CSS. It's so easy to get the results you want. Redundancy, messiness, and other complaints are a small price to pay for that.

</comment><comment><USER13> I wish my designer would read this ... but he's just a designer, what does he care about the quality of his CSS.

Any good stackoverflow answers for that? Making people who think "code" is a side-product take pride in that part of their work too?

</comment><comment><USER14> My personal guidelines:

* Partition into sections for fonts, colors+images, positions+spacing, text, and specials.

* Refactor for minimal property duplication, instead of selectors. For example text-weight:bold; will be mentioned only once, but the "#content a" selector multiple times.

* Use a CSS reset.

* Make an extra file per browser+version for hacks. Do not use hacks, which make sure they get triggered in IE7, but not 6 or 8, for example, but use ie6.css, ie7.css, and ie8.css. Duplicate code for this if necessary.

Example: <http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/style.css>

</comment><comment><USER15> My approach: <http://jonasgalvez.com.br/Software/HCSS.html></comment>


The Traffic Stats for Digg & The Other Top Bookmarking Sites Revealed! - <AUTHOR> http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/top10_largest_social_bookmarking_sites.html <comment><USER2> You can't count Netscape; most of their traffic comes from people clicking on the wrong thing by mistake.

</comment><comment><USER3> I talked with the reddit founders, and they indicated that they're doing around 160,000 unique daily visits these days.

That would make Quantcast's number (100,308 uniques) seem low... I have a hard time even believing compete's 433,070 unique monthly visitors.

This also contradicts with Alexa's data, which ranks reddit at 888 world wide, & 239 in the US...

</comment><comment><USER4> revealed or just compiled from existing sources?

</comment><comment><USER5> Give it a rest, Casey Kasem. Just list them in numerical order.</comment>


Uber backtracks after jacking up prices during Sydney hostage crisis - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/12/15/uber-backtracks-after-jacking-up-prices-during-syndey-hostage-crisis/ <comment><USER3> Whether or not the surge kicked in automatically and the tweet was made merely as an announcement, or the surge was instigated manually...It's surprising that Uber doesn't take advantage of these situations for PR purposes. Would it kill their bottom-line to overpay their drivers for several hours in extreme situations?

I guess the problem is that anytime an "extreme" situation happens (which could be any kind of accident or dangerous weather), Uber would then be expected to absorb the costs.

That said, maybe Uber shouldn't say _anything_ during emergencies? I mean, what's the usecase here? People in the area are panicking for their lives...their first thought is to check Twitter, then check @Uber_Sydney to see if Uber has anything interesting to say about the terrorist hostage situation? Uber should've made no statement on this, and everyone would've more or less accepted the auto-surge situation. Instead, they not only inserted themselves into a citywide emergency for PR purposes, but then they did something that will never, ever be popular. Would really love to hear the PR strategy that inspired that original tweet by @Uber_Sydney

<comment><USER4> Instead of taking a loss to compensate drivers, perhaps they should just waive their 20% cut during emergencies, so 100% of the fare went to drivers. They could sell the surge pricing as hazard pay for drivers without opening themselves to the criticism of profiteering off an emergency.

Another reason to like surge pricing is that, in addition to increasing the supply of drivers, it reduces demand by incentivizing riders to conserve: people are more likely to split a ride with strangers when surge pricing is in effect. That's a desirable property when there's an emergency and your goal is to get people out of an area as efficiently as possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> One man's price gouging is another man's hazard pay.

<comment><USER6> There was no danger in driving someone out of the Sydney CBD.

<comment><USER5> Demand to leave was abnormally high because of a perceived threat to public safety. Keyword: perceived.

Regression to the mean applies to panic as well. With a large enough sample size, all humans, wether they be passengers or drivers are susceptible to fear in the same ways.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If increasing prices will put more drivers on the streets, this means that more people will be able to "escape". It may look bad, but surge pricing may actually help in these situations.

<comment><USER8> That's the Uber argument. It makes logical sense but their customers don't get it.

Uber has a reputation problem and failed to generate public goodwill. They're the poster child of arrogant valley companies that everyone loves to hate. As logical as surge pricing is, it will be a hard sell until they win the people over.

As a result there was no optimal way for them to respond in this situation. \- Disable automated surge pricing, less cars on the street, less people home quickly \- Remain silent about automatic surge pricing, guaranteed backlash, more cars on the street

Instead they tried to get ahead of the backlash. Maintains their strategy, gets more people home, paints a huge target on their backs for everyone who hates them.

<comment><USER9> Jacking up prices in response to a humanitarian problem is called 'profiteering'. It is economically sound, but it's not ethical.

If they want to show it worked, they should release numbers - <USER2> how many uber drivers were 'enticed' back onto the roads? Show people that it actually works, rather than wave hands around saying 'mutter mutter logic mutter mutter save lives'.

<comment><USER7> > It is economically sound, but it's not ethical.

In this case on the one hand you have people desperately trying to leave a place, and on the other hand you have drivers sitting at home not wanting to risk their lives for $x/mile.

When Uber jacks up prices, you are creating incentives for those drivers to get out of their homes and start allowing people to desperately leave the places where they don't want to be in.

Highers prices>More drivers>More people leaving the dangerous places

There is nothing ethically wrong with it. I could even argue that the unethical thing would be not to jack up prices, since this would put less cars on the streets and consequently less people would be "rescued".

<comment><USER9> s/uber/food and s/sydney cbd/famine area

"I could argue that jacking up the prices for food in a starving area is ethical, since it would encourage diversion of food from other areas, bringing in merchants who would otherwise not visit"

Or maybe ethics is a little broader than just economic invisible-hand logic?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Uber is all of us on HN. And we need to speak up that greed is bad. We need to not associate with greed. We need to recognize that this new economy-thing- that's-so-new-we-don't-have-a-name-for-it-yet changes life; And we need to not be on any side that funds, creates, supports, programs, designs and Elephant- in-the-room ignores greed.

If the end result of rich people funding new companies makes greed, then I vote to stay poor. There is so much potential with "airborne extensive genetics" to do good. But Uber is greed; greed is bad and toxic.

</comment><comment><USER11> It's an interesting case, which raises a few issues.

On the surge itself, I think it's a bit instructive to imagine two worlds, call them World 1 and World 2. In World 1, every person has the same ability to pay and attachment to money - their willingness to pay changes only by virtue of how much they need the ride. In World 2, every person needs the ride precisely as much, their willingness to pay is solely due to differences in their financial circumstance.

In World 1, the ideal response in every sense would seem to be surge pricing. Those willing to pay a higher price would have their greater need met, at a price they agreed to. Refunding them is fine but arguably unnecessary.

In World 2, we're clearly discriminating by class (what you think about that depends on your moral framework; I don't love it) by initially _presenting_ the higher price, whether or not it's refunded. It's interesting to note that refunding in this case is particularly weird - you're giving money back to those who need it least - except when you consider that Uber probably has greater ability to pay than anyone in Sydney...

The real world, of course, doesn't resemble either of these.

In all cases offering more to drivers is desirable, other things being equal.

One thing that I haven't seen discussed is that there could be a distinction between moving people to some minimum safe distance, and moving people beyond that.

</comment><comment><USER12> Is Uber really this bad at PR? Don't the investors pay attention to the news cycle? Or is there a witch hunt going on behind the scenes?

<comment><USER13> It's possible - and IMO likely - for both to be true.

Media outlets are scrutinizing Uber's every move because scandal is popular and everyone wants to break the next Uber story.

They are doing this because public opinion for Uber is at a low, mostly due to Uber's own doing and shocking lapses in basic business ethics.

Uber got themselves into this mess by behaving deplorably, but one must acknowledge that there's a dogpiling/witchhunt going on as a result.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Seems as though Uber is a great candidate for a real life example of Homo Economicus.

</comment><comment><USER15> This is the city of #illridewithyou. There are probably volunteer uber drivers who are willing to help people escape safely during the crisis free of charge. That would have been an awesome PR moment for Uber.

</comment><comment><USER16> This story really highlights just how far the media witch hunt against Uber has gone. The story basically calls out Uber for its surge pricing strategy which kicked in during a siege in a Sydney, Australia cafe. People in the area were clearing out and catching Uber's. Because of the increased demand, Uber's automatic surge pricing kicked in.

This story makes it sound like Uber deliberately turned on surge pricing to capitalise on what was going on, which is not the case. Those who have used Uber before know this is an automatic mechanism, simple supply and demand, which in most cases makes sense. It is just unfortunate that this happened when this hostage crisis was taking place.

Surge pricing is and always has been an automatic thing. It isn't something that someone in an Uber office switches on when they notice an increase in demand or a crisis going on they can take advantage of. Uber are a pretty questionable company who have done some rather questionable things, in this situation, Uber did everything right (for the most part).

While I understand the fear is real from some of the people fleeing, the people actually being held captive in cafe were the ones we should be focusing on, not the people fleeing who were safe surrounded by. Calling an Uber in a crisis is the last thing I would honestly be doing, I would be calling an actual taxi because I know there are more taxis than Uber's in Sydney.

As unfortunate as it might be, the system works for the most part. Obviously there were a lack of vehicles in the vicinity of the siege, the system realised this and compensated by increasing the cost. The alternative in this situation if there was no surge pricing, there would be no additional vehicles to meet the demand which means people have no transport. It is also worth noting the drivers get paid more when surge pricing is in effect, the incentive of more money brings drivers from further away into the area.

And you know what, once Uber found out what was happening, they made all rides in the Sydney area free which they didn't have to do. Does this sound the like an action of a company trying to capitalise on a crisis? I don't think so. If Uber didn't reverse surge pricing in the area, then yes, I would be calling them out like everyone else, but as soon as they noticed, they made all rides free and offered refunds to anyone charged surge prices. Anything for a story, right?

I think Uber could have handled the PR around this so much better, especially keeping the public in the loop around complexities (if any) of turning off surge pricing or making rides free. I think this also highlights Uber need to consider pricing caps on surge pricing, a 4x increase is just ridiculous crisis or no crisis. I have heard of some parts of the US which have hit a 6x increase before and then Uber intervenes and caps it.

A fine piece of shoddy journalism. Shame on you Washington Post and every other media outlet making this into a far bigger issue than it actually is.

<comment><USER17> This wasn't an "automatic price increase" unless software got really good at explaining why they were increasing prices.

[http://cl.ly/image/2U3l242l350p/Image%202014-12-15%20at%2012...](http://cl.ly/image/2U3l242l350p/Image%202014-12-15%20at%2012.41.06%20PM.png)

"We are all concerned with events in CBD. Fares have increased to encourage more drivers to come online & pick up passengers in the area."

Somebody wrote that sentence, and it's a gross one. The same doesn't belong on the Post, it belongs on the person who wrote that and upon the culture that allows for sentences like that to be written.

<comment><USER18> That doesn't discount the fact that the surge pricing algorithm is still automatic. They don't have people sitting at their evil corporate HQ clicking buttons trying to maximize screwing people over.

<comment><USER19> No, but they knew what they were doing and can't claim they didn't _choose_ to continue.

<comment><USER11> Although it's _possible_ (no idea whether it's the case) they didn't have a mechanism to shut it down, on the time frame they would have needed to.

<comment><USER19> We can't philosophically disprove it. But Occam's razor applied to the behavioural evidence suggests Uber thinks surge pricing is fantastic, and keeping it in place during crises is corporate policy unless and until there's a media backlash large enough for it to actually get through their thick skulls that people are pissed off.

<comment><USER11> Presuming Uber thinks surge pricing is fantastic, wouldn't it be all the more likely they wouldn't build in a mechanism to disable it at the drop of a hat?

<comment><USER19> Possibly. But it's a red herring considering the issue is moral culpability and whether their behaviour is socially acceptable.

<comment><USER11> Their behavior, at this point, was "pay drivers out of their own pocket to help get people away from the emergency". It's hard to call that "socially unacceptable". It arguably took longer than it should have, but it takes time to make decisions in any large company. Hopefully they will learn from the experience, get better plans in place, and clarify policies for the future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is there a way to filter out posts trying to hate on Uber? I think I've gotten the point already.

</comment><comment><USER21> How about Uber can charge what they want, and if you don't want to use them then don't. Stop whining. Uber doesn't owe people fucking rides.

<comment><USER22> They can charge what they want, but let's remember that the free market only works if there is complete information. "Whining" in this case is helping to provide full information, so the rest of us can choose which service we pick in the future.</comment></comment>


How do I change the background color of the HTML page? Install a library - <AUTHOR> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42464888/how-do-i-change-the-background-color-of-the-body <comment><AUTHOR> This is what happens when you learn React first, without a basic understanding of web fundamentals (HTML, CSS and JS)

<comment><USER2> I'm trying really, really hard to understand how this is even possible and coming up empty. Obviously, there is a ton of evidence in the responses on that page that indicates that this is happening, but I don't understand it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nobody is recommending that this user installs a library. This user has already installed and is using React, and the top answer shows how to change the background color using style, which is not a React-specific concept, both with vanilla Javascript and with React.

I don't see a problem here.

<comment><USER4> > React Helmet ([https://github.com/nfl/react- > helmet](https://github.com/nfl/react-helmet))

> I really found this library very helpfull. Really clean solution i would > say.

> Sample Usage:

      import Helmet from 'react-helmet';
      <Helmet bodyAttributes={{style: 'background-color : #fff'}}/>

> answered Aug 9 '17 at 10:37

> Rahul

<comment><USER3> Oh. My bad. Thanks for pointing that out.</comment></comment></comment>


DIY Lazy Eye Fix - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1dh6np/diy_lazy_eye_fix/

<comment><AUTHOR> The solution networking two SNES emulators on the same machine with different layers turned on is especially cool.

</comment><comment><USER2> tl;dr: just play this modified tetris game: [http://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1dh6np/diy_lazy_eye...](http://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1dh6np/diy_lazy_eye_fix/c9qcdoo)</comment>


RSS feed is broken, and submission form is sometimes broken - <AUTHOR>

I could not find a link to support, so submitting it here. There are 2 problems with the site:
1. Links in RSS feed are broken; they look like http://news.ycombinator.comitem/?id=101517 instead of the correct http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=101517
2. Submission form is missing the text field if you get to access it through news.ycombinator.com/x instead of news.ycombinator.com/submit (this happens when you are redirected to submission form after login)
Cheers <comment><USER2> Here's a Feedburner feed that was set up almost a year ago. The links to comments are broken in this feed as well, but at least the MIME type is application/rss+xml instead of text/html.

<http://feeds.feedburner.com/YCombinatorStartupNews>

</comment><comment><USER3> Also the "more" link to the next page doesn't work if you have been on the current page for some time.

Look like it breaks when the fnid variable is updated to reflect changes in the next page as stories are moving up and down the page.

Should be easy to fix.

</comment><comment><USER4> #1 was already fixed once here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=100946>

I guess the changes didn't stick after the server was restarted?

<comment><USER5> #1 still seems broke to me, using NetNewsWire on OS X.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> There's a wrapper for the news feed which works with the features of google reader:

<http://harumi.ath.cx/newsyc>

</comment><comment><USER7> This is Arc alpha, I believe. Stuff happens...

</comment><comment><USER8> RSS still broken.

<comment><USER2> It's fixed now.</comment></comment>


Building a low cost wifi camera - <AUTHOR> http://johan.kanflo.com/building-a-low-cost-wifi-camera/ <comment><USER2> $24 Euro for a camera module at 2MP is not cheap. The esp8266 wifi-module is cheap, but many ip camera are using usb-wifi(cost less than $2 dollars). You may want to check IP cameras based on hisilicon 3518E that is the cheapest running linux you can find</comment>


Sam Altman: How to Build the Future (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYMqVwsewSg <comment><AUTHOR> Jack Altman interviews Sam Altman in September 2016.

Here's a summary of the interview. (I am thinking about building a service that does this for interesting comment; your ideas/suggestions on that are most welcome)

==

1) Jack: What to work on?

Sam: It's worth looking for the intersection of what you're good at, what you enjoy, where you can create value for the world; otherwise it's hard to have an impact.

==

2) J: How to select who to work with?

S: Hard, I don't have a great answer. Willing to move, be near people that work on similar things. When I help people, later it benefits you a lot.

==

3) J: How to accomplish big things?

S: Charlie Rose quote: things are done through focus and personal connection, and I'd add also self-belief.

==

4) J: You are known to work hard. Suggestion for people in their 20s?

S: Work hard at the beginning of your career, there's a compound effect.

Say yes to many things, meet people.

Work harder than most people think you should.

==

5) J: How to decide when it's time to quit?

S: Challenging. Most people give up too early.

Satirical version of this: 23 year old people that have starte 14 startups.

Most successful founders spent a very long time on their idea.

Framework: it should be an internal decision, not just based on external feedback.

==

6) J: How to find motivation to work on something for a long time?

S: You need motivation, otherwise you can't handle the hardship.

Enjoyment in what you do, people you do it with.

Also, sometimes people find a deeper mission.

==

7) J: Noticed changes in you over the last few years?

S: I focus on things that are really important. It's not much about money at this point.

Also, on burn-out: it comes mostly from lack of momentum. I find energy to work on things that are working.

==

8) J: How do you take risks in your career?

S: People have terrible risk calculus in general.

Answer is almost always: you're wrong about your perception, and you don't take enough risk early in your career.

Risk: not doing something you will regret not doing for the rest of your life.

The wrong kind of risk to take is when people don't commit because they fear failure.

In your career, strive to be a doer, not a talker.

People usually don't do stuff because it's hard and risky.

==

9) J: People fear being told "no" a lot.

S: Ask for what you want. People are not "aggressive" enough.

Also, each crisis gets less scary that the one before.

==

10) J: Money and long-term view of it, especially when you're young.

S: Story: our grandmother gave each of us some company stock, Apple and Applebees. I think we never sold it.

One of the few arbitrage opportunities in the market is time.

I think you can beat the market with long term commitments.

Go against the quarterly results.

For a startup, a long term commitment is important.

You get paid to create value for other people and the world, usually over long periods of time.

==

11) J: How much people should have strong opinions?

S: Strong opinion high level, flexible on details.

Refinement vs pivoting, e.g. Facebook has a strong idea and changed a lot in the details.

Strong opinions about the future are really important.

E.g. diversify in investing, or having a balanced portfolio: I don't agree at all, for example I would rather own stock vs bonds.

Ok not to be diversified in portfolio or career.

==

12) J: Advice for young people who want to have a big impact.

S: I don't want to give a specific field. Instead: think hard how you're going to make the biggest contribution, go learn about that field, have the courage of your convictions.

If you fail, go try the next thing. It's important to take risks.</comment>


Show HN: Jison Debugger – A visual editor for JavaScript parsers and lexers - <AUTHOR> http://nolanlawson.github.io/jison-debugger/

<comment><USER2> Question , is there a plugin for any text editor like ACE to generate autocomplete based on jison rules?

<comment><AUTHOR> That would be my #1 desired feature to add to this app - syntax highlighting for the Jison grammar.

Since CoffeeScript and Handlebars are written in Jison, you'd think someone would have done this already, but I couldn't wrap my head around the Ace highlighter implementation for those languages. It didn't seem to be as simple as "plug in this Jison grammar and get a highlighter." If that were the case, it would be easy, because Jison itself is written in Jison. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is great and necessary, because Jison is a big undocumented mess. That's why I stopped using it and started using PEG: [http://pegjs.org/](http://pegjs.org/)</comment>


Talking Automation with Mitchell Hashimoto of Hashicorp - <AUTHOR> http://opsrevolution.com/talking-automation-with-mitchell-hashimoto-of-hashicorp/

<comment><USER2> +1 for Hashicorp. Looking forward to using Atlas.</comment>


Instagram has a massive harassment problem - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/10/instagram-has-massive-harassment-problem/572890/ <comment><USER2> I have a question: what is the most effective way for a social platform to prevent harassment? Every relevant social platform has a harassment problem. People are mean; relative anonymity & tribalism make it worse.

This article offers no new solutions. Ramp up reporting and moderation? Instagram services a billion people. Even if Facebook multiplied their moderation team by a 100, they still would be drowning in information.

Considering the scale of this issue, I can see why these engineers are deferring to their idée fixe - machine learning. I guess I'm just skeptical. What are they going to do? Have a team (arbitrarily?) identify harassment by eye and use it as training data? That sounds like a draconian recipe for disaster. At the very least, its insufficient. Identifying harassment is not the same as identifying a street sign; it often requires the context of complex, offline interactions or shared info between two people. A friend asking "When can I see you again?" is fine. A stalker asking the same thing? Not so much.

I really want harassment to be solved. I hate that the internet is like this. But this problem would exist even without platform negligence.</comment>


[Concept] Mother of Startups - part 1 - <AUTHOR> http://whateverfy.posterous.com/49129283

<comment><USER2> I'm consused. How do I join one of the R-T-L startups and what do I get in return?

<comment><AUTHOR> On part 2 I will be discussing the actual mechanics of the "R-T-L platform". But basically if you know a "trade" (ie: you're a designer, programmer, marketing guru) you can apply to join the startup and in return for your services you will own a percentage of the startup. In other words, you're one of the owners. You will work for your own benefit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Who wrote that?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's the first blog post I've ever written, I have been mostly quiet just working over the years building these startups.

I will be releasing one by one assembling the team that will execute each one.</comment></comment>


Dhun - Minimalist Music Player for OS X - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/deepakjois/dhun

<comment><USER2> Anyone who likes this should also check out mpd:

<http://mpd.wikia.com/wiki/Music_Player_Daemon_Wiki>

More work to configure, but also works on Linux. There's a wonderful ncurses interface called ncmpc as well. mpd + ncmpc has been my iTunes in a terminal window for years.

<comment><AUTHOR> It was actually a few annoyances with MPD that led me to create Dhun. This was a while ago so things might a have changed. But my main grievances were:

* Installation on OS X wasnt very straightforward. I think the MacPorts version was broken and I had to do some stuff manually to get it to install

* Some of my ID3 tags and MP3 files were not recognised properly, even though they worked fine on iTunes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've been looking for something like this, here are some suggestions:

\- system-wide keyboard shortcuts (I believe there is a Carbon API for this that you could use). It'd be great if you could hook the default Pause/Play buttons on the Macbook keyboard, not sure if this is possible

\- possibly some kind of current track menu item (I wrote one for iTunes here: <http://silentmac.com/?p=470> ), requires Cocoa. Just to display the current song (some of my music has long, quiet intros, and I'm not sure what song is playing in the beginning), this might go against your idea of minimalist though

\- shuffle functionality

But it looks great so far!

<comment><USER4> _system-wide keyboard shortcuts (I believe there is a Carbon API for this that you could use). It'd be great if you could hook the default Pause/Play buttons on the Macbook keyboard, not sure if this is possible_

This worked fine on Leopard, but on Snow Leopard the play button on the MacBook keyboard just launches iTunes. I usually chmod -x /Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/MacOS/iTunes to suppress this annoying behavior (my default music player is Songbird).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> $ gem install dhun Bulk updating Gem source index for: <http://gems.rubyforge.org> Bulk updating Gem source index for: <http://gemcutter.org> ERROR: could not find dhun locally or in a repository

hm ...

<comment><USER6> You you should update to the latest version of Rubygems.

        gem update --system

<comment><USER5> Thats my first gem ;) Thanks for the help!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In response to TomasSedovic (I don't see "reply" links for some reason): "dhun" is the Hindi word for "tune". So I believe some thought _did_ go into the name :)

Edit: "dhun" has U as in 'put', not as in 'gut'.

</comment><comment><USER8> Why would anyone want to use this over mpg123? It is already "minimalist" running from the command line and can donwhatever you need it to do. I use mpg123 all the time, it's great

<comment><USER2> Don't you have to give mpg123 an explicit path to an mp3 file? dhun lets you play mp3 files by searching for them, through the Spotlight database.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Wish you put more thought into the name, it being commandline and all. Hard to type on qwerty AND dvorak...

Other than that, looks interesting.

</comment><comment><USER10> Hm, seems that using `mdfind` is rather slow. Probably using Spotlight's API via RubyCocoa/MacRuby will be faster?

<comment><AUTHOR> I am not using the Spotlight API via mdfind. I wrote a C extension. Care to elaborate on the issue (file a bug maybe)?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> A commandline interface for playing music in Mac OS X</comment>


Mortgage rates have been rising at a pace not seen in almost 50 years - <AUTHOR> https://www.lmtonline.com/business/article/Mortgage-rates-have-been-rising-at-a-pace-not-12940865.php <comment><USER4> Good. Home prices have been out of control.

Cheap money along with mortgage lenders have done nothing but push home prices to absurd levels. Local governments are complicit in this exploitation as property taxes rise/reset, giving them a skin in the game. The only suckers are the home owners, new and existing alike. They are being exploited by usury and repayment of an unreasonable debt on a home ,which without lender money would cost significantly less. Some long term residents are being priced out due to rising taxes. Remember, the home value gains aren't realized until you sell whereas the interest payment and property taxes are each and every year. This dynamic is turbulent and bad for health and continuity of communities.

Car and student loans are similar. It's not suprising that tuitions are out of control. Like with housing, the school administrators are complicit. Student loans are perhaps worse. One can't default on a student loan but the rates are 6-7%+ nevertheless.

Securitization of debt in dwelling, education and transportation are just three examples of exploitation of the individual. The irony that some of this liquidity is your very own retirement funds is not lost on me. A self-feeding loop. One must work their entire life, often in misery to repay these absurd prices. For me this is enslavement. Ideals aside, this is reality. Such is the system and life. It's survival. Having this perspective helps me refrain from being trapped and make sensible decisions.

What's the justification for this premium on this debt? "Umm, we provide liquidity to the very asset bubbles we create. We assume the risk of default on the loan which in reality Uncle Sam insures is against. Oh and also, we can use that money in one of the other markets that exist for us to exploit."

Tell me again, what risk are these institutions really taking?

END RANT

<comment><USER5> The system is set up to keep rich people being rich and in control, just like always. It's not at all random who is in control. Someone makes those decisions and it's not the public through elections :)

We never left the age of kings and peasants. We just have different names. The difference in income has only increased, and the gladiator arenas used to entertain the masses was replaced with sports and computer games.

We are more comfortable now though but so are the rich people.

<comment><USER6> There is some data for you:

[https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Pre- In...](https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Pre-Industrial- Inequality.png)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient#/media/File:2...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient#/media/File:2014_Gini_Index_World_Map,_income_inequality_distribution_by_country_per_World_Bank.svg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> FYI, housing prices can rise as well as _fall_ for periods of 40-50 years and this has been shown in the historical record.

The Journal of Real Estate Economics has a fascinating article from 2011 which goes into this in detail, by looking at the price of land / various housing structures in Manhattan and Chicago from 1920 to 1960.

By 1932, housing prices had dropped nearly 70% from their 1929 peak. If you had bought a 1-story house in Manhattan in 1929, it would not be until the mid-1960's that you got to just break-even, let alone made any money.

[http://www.people.hbs.edu/tnicholas/anna_tom.pdf](http://www.people.hbs.edu/tnicholas/anna_tom.pdf)

Also for those curious, I suggest you search "home prices" on [https://images.google.com](https://images.google.com). The very first image is so laughable, and such a suggestion of the times we are in. This will not end well.

<comment><USER8> It'll arguably end even worse if they keep going up though.

<comment><USER9> I'll take that argument :-). If we enter a deflationary spiral in housing it traps people with mortgages who find themselves owing more in their house than it is worth (we saw that after the Mortgage meltdown). Where as if the prices continue to rise, we see people who would prefer to own houses kept out of the market, but their mobility is not impacted.

Of the two scenarios, I consider the deflationary one "worse" in terms of its impact on more people.

<comment><USER8> I can't follow this logic at all. When home prices go up, rents also go up. How is your mobility not affected when you can't afford rent and have to move out of the city? Or for the people whose rent goes above what they can afford and they end up homeless?

If you're underwater on a mortgage, it's still the same payment month over month that you were expecting when you took out the mortgage. It'll recover eventually if you hold on. When you're paying rent month to month, that number changes on you as prices rise and you can't just hold on.

<comment><USER9> > When home prices go up, rents also go up.

Not if the supply of rental units is increasing. One apartment building can put 100 - 500 units on the market versus perhaps 10 single family houses in that same space.

A good example of this in action right now is Sunnyvale, which has had rising home prices over the last three years but flat rents because the number of rental units coming online has greatly exceeded the available housing inventory.

It would be accurate to say that _house_ rents go up with rising housing prices, but it is not true that _all_ rents go up with rising housing prices. What it does is re-factor the ratio of renters to owners in favor of renters.

<comment><USER10> @ChuckMcM - I always enjoy your comments, thank you for the perspective you bring to HN.

I've seen the argument you present used frequently, and I can understand where it is accurate in many markets.

In Seattle, a very similar argument is being made as a cure for the lack of affordable housing -- greater density of construction will lower costs through greater housing supply.

What I see happening in actuality though is that one house that would have fetched ~$900,000 today (and maybe $400,000 just a few years ago, post- recession) is torn down, and four condos put up in the same footprint. Ok - <USER2> supply increased, right? Not exactly, because if each unit is priced at ~$700,000, it's still above affordability for most people. So then those units get swallowed up by speculators and investors, the same as what's happened NY, Paris, London, and Vancouver.

I also recall in Seattle there is some building regulation where new apartment buildings get a tax rebate or some similar incentive that lasts 5 years - <USER3> then after that the units get converted to condos (or maybe its the other way around). In any event - my point is that there can be a lot of shenanigans that get in the way of the market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Rising rates are going to cause havoc here in the Bay Area, and other metro areas with extreme cost of living expenses and NIMBYism due to the following:

\- Interest rates were amazingly low in 2016. Many got their 30 year mortgages locked in at 3.5%, or we're able to refinance their existing one into that.

\- Rising rates may slow housing price increases, but due to NIMBYism, I don't foresee them coming down substantially, if at all. The Bay Area recovered from the housing crash swiftly. In a normal market high interest rates should cause prices to come down since people can only afford a certain monthly payment, but an artificially constrained market is not normal.

\- Those locked into an amazing interest rate are inscentivized to hold on to their homes, further reducing liquidity in the housing market. Combine that with other incentives like Prop 13, ridiculously low SALT deduction and lowered interest write offs for new mortgages in new tax bill, and you have a recipe for disaster.

\- Further stratification between those who can afford to buy in these markets vs those who can't.

I suppose interest rates could fall again, they were also at record lows in 2013, rose, and fell again in 2016.

Tl;dr rising interest rates are going to freeze an already illiquid housing market in SFBA, NIMBY metros.

Edit: I would love to read why someone disagrees with this analysis instead of just a downvote

<comment><USER12> Aren't "locked-in" rates typically renegotiated every 5 years or so? So if rates keep increasing the entire time some folks might be in for a rude awakening in 2021...

<comment><USER13> That's an adjustable-rate mortgage. A traditional US 30-year mortgage has a fixed rate for the entire term. You can refinance, if you want to, but you're just getting a new 30-year (or 15-year) loan which pays off the old one, and then you have a new fixed rate for that entire term.

<comment><USER14> If my rate is locked in at say 3.5%, would refinancing ever work out in my favor at interest rates >3.5%?

<comment><USER13> It depends on your situation. I did it last year, and I ended up with roughly $700 more space in my monthly budget even though my mortgage interest rate went up by 0.25%. I have enough equity now that I no longer have to pay for mortgage insurance, which saves a lot, and I also took the opportunity to roll up all my other debt into the mortgage. I'll pay more for the house over the long run, but I have more flexibility in the meantime, and that's been completely worth it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Missing from this article is that mean 30-year rates have dropped more-or-less steadily from 9.25% in 1991, to 3.65% in 2016.[0] Also, even "rising at a pace not seen in almost 50 years" seems iffy. Mean 30-year rates increased from 8.85% in 1977, to 16.64% in 1981. Rates increased at 2%-3% per year during 1977-1981, vs an 0.8% increase from May-17 to May-18.

0) [https://www.valuepenguin.com/mortgages/historical- mortgage-r...](https://www.valuepenguin.com/mortgages/historical-mortgage- rates)

Edit: Maybe they're adjusting for inflation. But they don't say so, if they are.

<comment><USER16> The late 70's/early 80's were a time of massive inflation. Take any interest rates in this time period with a grain of salt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's May 25th, 2018, and 9 hours and 14 minutes ago GDPR came into effect. I tried opening this link, which I imagine links to some news or media outlet. This is what I see:

451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons Sorry, this content is not available in your region.

<comment><USER18> Best of all, if you check the traffic, you still see it sending your info off to Google Analytics.

<comment> Z-Widwil Try uMatrix: [https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix](https://github.com/gorhill/uMatrix)

Super simple web connection switchboard by Gorhill (person behind uBlock Origin).

It allows you to assign certain addresses and elements to block calls from/to. For example 'www.google-analytics.com'. I use it as a catch-all when loading a web page, then release elements that I want to load.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Reading comments here it seems that US house owners consider 3.5% low, is this correct? Article is locked for EU readers.

This just makes me even more scared about Swedens new normal that is 1.50% (1.00% after tax deduction). Today I even get offered 0.99% (0.70% after tax deduct).

What is currently "normal" rates in different regions in the world?

<comment><USER20> 3.5% in the US is probably adjustable rate. 30-year fixed rate is around 4.66% ([http://www.freddiemac.com/pmms/](http://www.freddiemac.com/pmms/)). Note that, AFAIK, the US is the only country in the world to offer fixed 30-year mortgage rates.

Here in Australia five year fixed rates are around 4.79%.

Swedish rates are crazy low. Lots of people are going to go bankrupt when they're forced to renew at higher rates.

<comment><USER21> US is definitely not the only 30y fixed country in the world... how many countries are you familiar with? For example, the Netherlands has done 30y since forever. Current rates are between 2.5% (best case) and 3% (worst case with 0 down) for 30y fixed. 5y fixed is 1.2% to 1.6%, it's absolutely ridiculous.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > Sorry, this content is not available in your region.

lame.

<comment><USER23> Is this GDPR in action?

<comment><USER24> I confirm! Has nothing to do with Russia. Any VPN i tried located in EU cuts me off. Meanwhile non EU IPs do work!

<comment><USER15> Yeah, I've switched to a US exit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Stupid GDPR, the site isn't available

<comment><USER26> It's not the GDPR that's stupid, it's whoever runs this site. Compliance isn't hard.

<comment><USER27> They complied. It wasn't hard.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> 451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons

Sorry, this content is not available in your region.

Seriously???

<comment><USER29> Most of the web is funded by targeted advertising. Are you seriously surprised that a lot of those websites are blocking EU users since they cannot make a profit off of them now due to GDPR?

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Can someone with a background in econ / real estate weigh in on this a bit? Curious to hear some opinions on the housing market within the context of rising rates.

<comment><USER9> Disclaimer: I'm just an enthusiast.

Generally, in most discussions of the cost of housing, people discuss this expense in terms of a fraction of your income. In the US, a number of advisory articles and books consider between 25 and 30% of your gross take home pay as a "reasonable" amount of your income to pay for housing. So if you make $120,000 a year, that is about $3,000/month as 1/3 of your gross take home salary.

According to the FED income growth has been fairly static over the last decade so that 1/3 number has been fairly static as well. [1]

Given those two observations, you can derive the impact of rising interest rates on home sales, which is to say that as the rates rise, the monthly payment will rise, and that will put homes out of the 25 - 30% window for people. Historically that means a slower sales cycle and downward pressure on house prices (which keeps the payments at the lower level).

If there is a commensurate rise in real wage growth it won't slow down the housing market and the banks will make more money. If wages stay stagnant the housing market will cool off and if it does so for long enough prices will come down as people who have to move will feel pressure to lower the price in order to have the sale go through.

[0] [https://www.google.com/search?q=what+percentage+of+my+salary...](https://www.google.com/search?q=what+percentage+of+my+salary+should+I+spend+on+housing)

[1] [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> As someone not living in the US, having a loan rate fixed for 30 years seems insane. So if interest rates go up in the US more than Freddie Mac expects, they are going to lose money on all their loans for 30 years? Seems like an unsustainable risk to me.

In Australia we have 4 year fixed home loan rate, and most loans are variable rate.

<comment><USER32> Are you aware of the amortization schedule? Interest portion of the payoff is front loaded. It is a very good deal to write a mortgage no matter what the rate is, assuming default risk is low.

<comment><USER31> Is that visible to the customer, or only in the bank's accounting?

<comment><USER32> Extremely visible. You can create one yourself via many free web tools. Just Google it.

<comment><USER33> They included a full amortization schedule in my mortgage signing documents. I imagine they always do but don't know for certain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> [https://outline.com/XxNrUc](https://outline.com/XxNrUc)

</comment><comment><USER35> I'm not an expert at all in this - but it seems like now is a great time to be a real estate investor?

Given that interest rates will rise, there will be more demand in the rental market. I don't think REITs will be a good option because of the potential for higher interest rates but investing in a property, locking in that interest rate, and generating positive cash flow from rent would be a sound decision?

<comment> ramen-san 5 years ago was a great time to invest in real estate. Today is probably okay, though prices have risen dramatically across the board (even the cities that got crushed in the recession have risen past pre recession levels), and rates are rising. Returns are getting compressed. Still good deals out there, but the risk/reward profile is shifting in the wrong direction.

For more on real estate investing, I write a lot on the topic here: [https://ramenretirement.com/](https://ramenretirement.com/)

<comment><USER35> I guess I should rephrase - now is a good time compared to the foreseeable future? As in, next couple of years it will be a worse time.

I actually bought a house 5 years ago, and I really feel I totally lucked out. Back then though, the fear of rising interest rates scared me into buying. Like you, I don't expect those type of returns with any investment I make now... but I was thinking about diversifying my finances, and moving money away from stocks into property real estate.

I know that I'll have to be much more diligent about finding the right market/deal. I'm using Bigger Pockets at the moment which is quite an amazing resource. Thanks for pointing me to your site too.

<comment> ramen-san Yes - if rates continue rising, along with prices, then returns will get compressed. Check out my analysis of that dynamic here:

[https://ramenretirement.com/2018/05/16/interest-rate- impact/](https://ramenretirement.com/2018/05/16/interest-rate-impact/)

Doesn't mean you shouldn't invest - just figure out what sort of returns you're willing to accept (along with the corresponding risk / cushion you need), and hold that line when you run your diligence. FWIW, I think you can still find single family investments in the midwest that will generate 8%+ cash on cash returns (after fully accounting for all direct, and reserved expenses). That's still a pretty good return, but getting harder to find.

It's hard to say when the market will soften or correct, so a dollar-cost- averaging approach to buying RE is probably a good idea (i.e. buy a rental property every quarter, or every half year.).

Given that pretty much everything is going right in the economy right now, my investment stance is more conservative. It's not a bad time to buy, but it's definitely not a fire sale. Bigger Pockets is a great resource. Drop me a line if you ever want to chat in more detail. I've gone pretty deep in the whole space, and have a background in investing and finance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> What drives the interest rates in the us?

In europe my loan is tied to the euribor 3month rate, which has been negative for ages and hasn't shown any signs of rising.

I remember having an argument on some webforum with some non european guy that could not believe my current interest rate is close to zero (mostly just fees collected by the bank).

<comment><USER37> Most of the other answers you got were wrong.

Mortgage rates are, mostly, driven by the market. The Federal Reserve influences the Federal Funds Rate (they don't "set it"; they set a target and then manipulate the market by buying & selling to try to reach that target). The FFR is just for overnight lending between massive institutions.

If your intuition says "hey, the difference between overnight lending between banks and 30-year lending to people is massive!" Well...that's right.

In 2015 the Fed raised rates by 0.25% but mortgage rates went down by 0.50%. The complete opposite of what most of your replies claim should happen.

This is not exactly a mysterious surprise. The Federal Reserve themselves have mountains of research, policy notes, and blog posts showing that there is an often large disconnect between the very short-term rates that the Federal Reserve can manipulate and longer term rates.

Here's on recent one (from 2017) titled, appropriately enough, "The Fed Funds Rate's Impact on Other Interest Rates"[1].

(Most US mortgages are fixed interest for the life of the mortgage. Very few other countries have that luxury. If you get a variable rate in the US, then it would be like yours -- tied to something else but with a markup.)

[1]: [https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the- economy/2017/october/incre...](https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the- economy/2017/october/increases-fed-funds-rate-impact-other-interest-rates)

<comment><USER38> Most mortgages in the US are sold to Fannie and Freddy (government-sponsored enterprises) [1]. These GSEs in fact _commit_ themselves to buy mortgages at a predetermined rate [2], and I suspect this rate is the main driver for the rates banks charge, at least for "qualifying mortages" (i.e. not jumbo loans and so on). In turn, I suspect the rates the GSEs offer depends on the rates at which the GSEs can finance themselves.

Now, who lends to these agencies (i.e. who purchases "agency MBS")? I couldn't find recent numbers, but this [3] FRBNY article from 2015 states that the Fed owns most of it, followed by banks (which buy agency mbs partly because it counts as a safe asset (a "high quality liquid asset"), and allows them to satisfy their liquidity coverage ratio requirements.

This leads me to your first point:

> Mortgage rates are, mostly, driven by the market.

Pre-2008, I would say probably yes, but nowadays I'm not entirely sure, as the govt. is the biggest buyer and plays a large role in the second-biggest buyer.

[1] [http://www.freddiemac.com/singlefamily/factsheets/sell/frm.h...](http://www.freddiemac.com/singlefamily/factsheets/sell/frm.htm)

[2] [https://www.bankrate.com/rates/interest-rates/fannie- mae-30-...](https://www.bankrate.com/rates/interest-rates/fannie-mae-30-year- mtg-com-del-60-days.aspx)

[3] [https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/banking/intern...](https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/banking/international/09.30.2015-mbs-10.30am.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> TLDR: rates are still very low, but have increased a skosh with some consistency over the past several months, the meaningfulness of which statistic is here unsupported.</comment>


The new Jira begins now - <AUTHOR> https://www.atlassian.com/blog/jira-software/the-new-jira-begins-now <comment><USER2> My biggest question wasn't answered: is it faster?

Using JIRA is a pain, and I really hope they address it in the redesign.

<comment><USER3> In my mind it's clear, when I see those animations, that it will be slower. Maybe it will even have a splash screen with a progress bar.

<comment><USER4> Give it a try. [https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/try](https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/try)

Miss those robots on the spin up screen that you might remember from that past?

It's getting a lot faster. We're going to keep going.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, don't bother. We just started using it at work a few days ago. _Not a single page_ loads in less than 7 seconds (with a primed cache, a completely fresh load takes 30+). Every page also pulls in 50+ subrequests, many of which have caching disabled. It's a new org, new project, and a single digit number of issues, so this can't be a scale issue (though I dread to imagine how awful _that_ would be).

That would be understandable (though hardly acceptable) for an SPA, but this is Enterprise, where every navigation still requires a full reload, and the page you're actually looking for (the issue page) is never less than 3 links away from the useless dashboard that some designer put in because that's what all the cool kids do.

How did this shit get past QA? Did the QA people give up on trying to file any issues because the UI was so slow? Do all developers at Atlassian have a Stockholm Syndrome that would put Microsoft to shame? That this actually made it through development (nevermind that it somehow has _paying_ users) is absolutely mind-boggling.

<comment><USER6> At least they have a rule not to regress performance! Best to institute such a rule when it's already slow as molasses, like they did, that way you can hit your KPIs while still shipping garbage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Are they going to abandon their on premise solution? For us a hosted version is a no go and will force us to move to something else.

<comment><USER4> No intention to do anything of the sort. Rest easy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I hope the new Jira provides less flexibility, because too many people straight up don't know how to use boards well. It's incredible. There's so many ways in the old system to do shit and people readily abuse it at every turn.

I've been enjoying the new Jira boards for their simplicity. Keep it up Atlassian.</comment>


How Do We End the Never-Ending Wars? - <AUTHOR> http://bostonreview.net/war-security/elad-uzan-how-do-we-end-never-ending-wars <comment><USER2> On Wikipedia there is a page with the "list of the largest employers" in the world.

At the top, is the US Department of Defense, at 2.86 million employees. It has an annual budget of over 700 billion dollars. On top of that, add the industries that work with the military and you get the military–industrial complex that shapes public policy and makes it pro-war.

How do we end wars? By taking away the incentives to wage wars.</comment>


Meditation under the microscope - <AUTHOR> https://aeon.co/essays/can-meditation-really-make-the-world-a-better-place? <comment><USER2> But what if, spending eight weeks thinking about compassion does makes the world a more compassionate place?

Yes, the business of picking the right control must indeed be a tricky one.</comment>