What happens when a host cancels with Airbnb? - <AUTHOR> http://www.paulsavage.eu/daily-life/airbnb-cancelation-experience/

<comment><USER2> Well, this is some way similar to the experience I had when renting through AirBNB in Rio de Janeiro during carnival. We were 4 people and booked a place with two bedrooms which said it accommodates 4 people. Sounds right.

When we showed up at the place, there were just 3 beds - a double bed in one room and a single bed in another.

Mind you, this being carnival season and stuff, we were paying a handsome amount for our rental. However, when we got in touch with the host (he lives in the US with his wife, a care taker opened the house for us..) he refused to acknowledge the issue. He said: "There's a couch in the living room, one of you can sleep there - that way the house accommodates 4 people".

So we got in touch with AirBNB support who said they would find us another place. Of course they couldn't - everything is sold out during carnival. So, they finally decided to refund the "AirBNB fee" to us (about USD 54) so that we could use it to buy an inflatable mattress to put on the floor.

I asked them why they couldn't give us a full refund considering this was absolutely unacceptable as they should take responsibility for incorrect listings that lead to situations like this. (for what it's worth, Expedia, etc. have a far higher standard of customer service when it comes to stuff like this) They replied saying that the host had already been paid out - as if that's our problem.. =/

Anyway, we had no choice but to stay so we did indeed buy an inflatable mattress... AirBNB's customer support however was pretty terrible and the host was a complete asshole to us.

<comment><USER3> If there is a double bed, single bed, and a couch, that accommodates 4 people.

Remember, Airbnb is a marketplace so it is your responsibility as the guest to clarify the exact sleeping arrangements. If you want a higher level of service, go to a hotel. You'll pay a lot more, but if you require great service then it's probably a better option.

<comment><USER2> Uhh no. AirBNB has a field on listings that clearly indicates "Bed Type". In this case "Bed Type" said Real Bed. Random example: [https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/1229577?checkin=02%2F21%2F2014&...](https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/1229577?checkin=02%2F21%2F2014&checkout=02%2F22%2F2014&s=EgSJ)

One isn't likely to clarify that with the host prior to arrival given that it's on the listing. AirBNB needs to take responsibility for this kind of thing given that you pay about 15% as AirBNB fees and 3% is also paid by the host. Refunding just the fees isn't what you pay the fees for. It is to take care of situations such as this.

<comment><USER4> No, that indicates that you're not renting just a couch in someone's apartment (a la couchsurfing). In the vacation rental world, that max accommodation figure almost always includes the couches (especially if it's a pullout couch).

<comment><USER5> Did you visit the link provided? There is clearly a "Room type" classification, which would be used to indicate that you're renting a room in a house, a whole house, a bed in a room, or a couch in a room, for example. And there is also a "Bed type" classification to specify the type of bed you will be sleeping in.

<comment><USER4> "Bed Type" doesn't mean it's uniformly that type, it's sort of the max of the class, so it's not terribly useful. It would be nice if it was broken down by number of beds (it is on some sites), but that's more of a nice to have than the norm.

<comment><USER5> That's beside the point - the point being that you asserted that the "Real Bed" qualifier was referring to not getting a couch in an apartment, like couch surfing. Judging from your post history, you will argue on any point possible, and won't cede a thing. Consider this my last reply.

<comment><USER4> Sorry if I wasn't clear with what I was saying.

That field is mostly useful for distinguishing between whether you're getting a couch or a bed in the case that you're just renting part of the apartment. It's not very useful in the event that you're renting a whole apartment. It means there's at least one real bed, it doesn't mean that everyone in the "Accommodates" number will get a real bed.

It's not perfect, it would be better if it were more explicit, but this is a pretty common on these sorts of listings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> hey everyone, I have looked into this and a few things are going on here.

(1) Turns out there was a bug in our system where a guest was actually allowed to double-book this host's listing, so this was our fault. The host did not cancel, we double-booked. We are fixing this bug now, and I haven't heard of any other guests being affected by this.

(2) I just want to note this is a statistically rare event (though by reading comments some of you have experienced this), which is why we probably haven't spent enough time trying to solve this, but we should.

(3) I agree with the author that our cancelation policy is not adequately balanced on both sides of the transaction. Our team has actually been developing a better system for some time, and we should have a more balance policy soon - unfortunate this happened though. Right now, when a host cancels a booking, there is an automated review left on their listing saying this happened, a penalization in their search rankings, and if they chronically cancel, they are removed from our platform; but I agree we could do more here. The changes we are making will hopefully lower the frequency of these instances occurring going forward. Open to feedback here, and if a host has canceled on you I would love to get your feedback on how we handled it.

(4) In the event that a host does cancel, I think we can do more to provide protection and peace of mind to the guest for their trip. We have a Guarantee for hosts, so we are looking at what an equivalent version would be for guests. If you have any ideas, please let me know.

<comment><USER7> On #3 it may be worth penalising those who do it during annual events like the Boston Marathon, Wimbledon, etc.

Accommodation is extremely hard to find and highly competitive at this time and the host should factor this in.

If it becomes an annual thing that hosts cancel and allow gazumping ( [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gazumping](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gazumping) ) then it will seriously damage the AirBNB relationship with renters as AirBNB will become an untrusted place for accommodation during such events.

It is so hard to find replacement accommodation during such events that the inconvenience is greatly multiplied.

(And annual things go for conferences too, SXSW for example)

I would go so far as to suggest that during events the relationship be inverted and the renter be given more weight than the host. Once the host has priced fairly, they should be penalised harshly for causing great inconvenience to a renter. The extra money during such events already more than compensates the host side.

<comment><USER6> This is a very good insight. Thanks for the suggestion. You are definitely right here. In the past during events (e.g. SXSW), we have actually booked Airbnb's ourselves, and some hotel rooms, just in case a guest got canceled on last minute and all Airbnb's and hotels were sold out, but we should definitely go further.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > _" I can't even leave feedback... as we never got to stay there."_

I think this is a bigger deal than the cancellation -- the fact that, on a site that's all about reputation, there's no reputation hit for a host canceling someone's rental. Airbnb should create a feedback system that allows feedback to be given for various steps of the process, not just the stay itself.

<comment><USER9> Indeed. Even if it's just an automated post saying that the reservation was cancelled by the host. More than one of those and I think that many people wouldn't want to take the risk.

<comment><USER10> See Brian's post: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7254986](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7254986)

Airbnb does leave an automated review about the cancellation and dings the host's listing in search results.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you think this is bad, wait until you see what regular hotels can do to you during busy season.

Most hotel chains have a "frequent guest" program. One little-known feature of those programs is that people with the highest status can "bump" other guests from the hotel when the hotel is full with about 24 hours advance notice. Now, usually they'll give you a free night or two in exchange for that happening to you, but it doesn't help you that night.

Regardless, this is a hazard of traveling anywhere and relying on someone else for a place to stay. It is by no means unique to Airbnb, and hotels do it all the time (and often with much less notice.)

<comment><USER12> I have top-level status with Marriott and have used the Guaranteed Room feature a few times; it's hard to say that using it results directly in displacing another guest since hotels don't really know how many people will show until the end of the day - what is does is guarantee you a room at rack- rate.

That said, as a top-level guest I would be THRILLED to get walked to another hotel due to no room being available since I'd get a free night at the other hotel, $200 USD, and 2 free nights anywhere in the world!

<comment><USER11> Well, generally hotels overbook their rooms regardless -- they know with 90% confidence that X% of people will no-show on a given day, so they can overbook (airlines do this too). Generally when using the guaranteed room feature, you ARE displacing someone. But you're right, you do have to pay the rack-rate (which is often $500 or more)

Airbnb hosts can't do any of this because they don't have enough rooms, so there are some definite advantages to the traditional hotel model. I like Airbnb and I have used it many times, but I do consider the rooms I get off Airbnb as less "guaranteed" than a hotel room.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Airbnb should have a public % number for hosts for both acceptance rate for "open" dates on their calendar and for cancellations.

I was traveling the world for the last 9 months and we fairly quickly stopped using AirBnB in favor of Booking.com and Agoda (which had hotels, guesthouses, and even hostels if you're so inclined).

Host behavior was the problem. We'd contact a place that supposedly had an opening. Nope. Contact another. Nope. Contact a third. Yes, but they work until 10pm so we need to go find them for a key. AirBnb was an amazing experience when it worked, but time-intensive and frustrating for most transactions.

<comment><USER14> I've been traveling for the past two years, and fortunately have only had positive experiences with Airbnb. I agree that some hosts can be less responsive others, so I've taken more time on my end to have a bit of back- and-forth with the right ones before booking.

Paul does make a good point regarding host cancellations, and your suggestion to publicly display acceptance or cancellation rates might be helpful to prospective guests.

<comment><USER13> Yeah, I've always loved it when it works, but the back-and-forth can be frustrating on near term bookings... Especially when you are traveling with semi-shakey internet connections.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> One thing that I cannot find on AirBNB is how to post a review and attach photos to it. Is it possible? On several occasions the apartments were not even remotely the same as in the photographs. (For example, on photos they look spacious and clean, in real life they are not.)

Amazon customers can upload their photos of the stuff they bought. This functionality is really something we need.

I think that AirBNB by doing things like this gives the hosts too much power (which in turn they abuse).

</comment><comment><USER16> Funny, this mirrors my first Airbnb experience from a year and a half ago: [https://bgentry.io/blog/2012/07/18/my-first-airbnb- experienc...](https://bgentry.io/blog/2012/07/18/my-first-airbnb-experience)

Sad to hear that the experience hasn't gotten any better when a host cancels on you, especially when it's at the last minute.

I wonder if the issues with hosts' calendars not being up-to-date are still as big of an issue. Airbnb hosts are incentivized to _not_ update their calendars because it gives them an avenue to direct you to their other properties.

</comment><comment><USER17> My attempt to book an apartment with AirBNB in Helsinki for Slush.org last year ended up in 3 cancelations (people got better offers) and us staying in a hotel. No word from AirBNB support.

I am sadly not going to use AirBNB agin to big events.

<comment><USER6> I am sorry you did not get better support from Airbnb. That is a bad experience. You can email me at firstname.lastname@example.com if you would like to elaborate further.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> In October I had a host cancel on me with in 7 days of arrival. The host did not want to cancel through the AirBnB system because of fees I presume, instead they western union'ed me a refund....but it took several days for us to work out the logistics on the transfer. It worked out because I was able to book another (better) apartment, albeit for a higher fee, and I received the refund before I left for the trip. Handling situations where the host does not cancel through the system did not seem intuitive and resulted in me searching for a phone number to contact AirBnb and make them aware of the situation in case the host was scamming.

I'll be traveling internationally for a couple of weeks in the fall and using AirBnb for much of that trip. Deep down I have a feeling that at least one of the rentals will have a choppy transaction. Until they tighten up on holding hosts accountable and make the transfer of the key more uniform and streamline there will always be a degree of uncertainty.

</comment><comment><USER19> Yes, I have had this same exact experience and worse. One host started insulting my girlfriend and kept suggesting I cancel if I didn't like the place. Total bull. I lost the whole payment and STILL couldn't leave review.

</comment><comment><USER20> The "voucher" seems paltry. How does it compare to the price difference of using a hotel?

</comment><comment><USER21> any party in almost any such setting, including hotels, could cancel two months in advance without fees. I really don't know what the big deal is.

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here. My points were 1) the host said there was a glitch in the airbnb system & doubled booked somehow, but I think they either wanted either a longer tenant or they got a better offer for Marathon Weekend in Boston 2) if I cancel I lose 50% , if they do it they lose 3%.

<comment><USER8> One of Airbnb's founders clarified elsewhere in this thread that there actually was a system glitch.

<comment><USER22> Agreed, my reply was about people canceling to get a "better offer". :) Other than the glitch he mentioned, I think that part of the system actually does work pretty well. Always room to improve though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Last time we used Airbnb was for an apartment in Copenhagen. We found out when we arrived that instead of the "Whole apartment" as it was listed, we would be in one room and sharing the rest of the place with the owner and her daughter. Airbnb didn't do anything to help us; we just stuck with it and vowed to be more careful next time.

</comment><comment><USER24> I can't tell; did this guy lose 50% of his $1200 or not?

If he did and AirBnB is just keeping it, shame on them. That's gross incompetence and people should rightly boycott.

If he didn't, he should fix the article to show that in fact AirBnB isn't grossly incompetent.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I didn't lose anything. I said if I cancel I'd lose 50%, if they cancel they lose 3%

<comment><USER25> I understood what you wrote, but it is pretty confusing the way it's written. Maybe you want to add a clarification?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure. Will fix it now. Server getting batter at the moment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Its inconvenient but not THAT bad as you didn't loose the money.

I had a worse experience with Airbnb, they simply cancelled my reservation and closed my account a few days before my travel and refused to give a valid reason.

[http://nidalalhariri.com/post/55999109847/how-airbnb- closed-...](http://nidalalhariri.com/post/55999109847/how-airbnb-closed-my- account-and-refused-to-give-a)

</comment><comment><USER27> This was my experience about a year ago in Ft Lauderdale, FL. In my case, it meant doubling the expense to get a hotel since by the time they cancelled, most hotels were already booked.

I'd say AirBNB is to be avoided for anything remotely critical (conference, wedding, etc.) If it's just a leisure trip with friends, it might be OK.

</comment><comment><USER28> Looks like one other person was able to leave feedback about a host cancellation shouldn't feedback solve this problem?

</comment><comment><USER29> I understand the sentiment, there should be some way to flag the listing on AirBNB or penalize the renter, but lets be fair to the renter and leave their address out of the post. I'm sure everyone is breaking leases and condo regulations to give out a discount to us.

<comment><USER30> "I'm sure everyone is breaking leases and condo regulations to give out a discount to us."

I'm not so sure that's a good argument. Are you saying AirBnB is a business that helps people break their leases and condo regulations to make money, and that we should keep this covered up?

Plus in this case, there was no discount: the low-paying customer was ditched as soon as the renter found a higher-paying one. In times of scarcity (big event in city), a leveraging tool such as AirBnB will be used to charge more, not less (AirBnB allows the renter to find more customers than the low-paying ones, right up until the last minute).

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> In this rant, the author notices AirBnB is not a hotel.</comment>


Show HN: I built a cron job scheduler - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cronhub.io/cronhub-scheduler/ <comment><USER2> Slick landing page design, well done and congrats on your hard work.

As others have said the market is saturated and engineers would implement this themselves. Don't let that deter you, though, there's still room for innovation.

If you can get user feedback I'm sure you can find a niche or killer feature that makes your product worth paying for. For me, I have two things I'd like to see in a paid service:

1\. Allow scheduling support for seconds. Obviously you'd have to get creative on this one.

2\. Allow conditionals with rules-based triggers that are easily configured in a UI

Those would require you create something more akin to Laravel's Console setup instead of working directly with Cron directives, but that's something worth considering! In that setup, a Cron is pointed at the Laravel configuration and it runs every minute: [https://laravel.com/docs/7.x/scheduling](https://laravel.com/docs/7.x/scheduling) \- ultimately for #1 you'd want to take inspiration from [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9619362/running-a- cron-e...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9619362/running-a-cron- every-30-seconds)

Good luck, have fun :-)

<comment><USER3> Your approach on providing feedback is clean, to the point, and most importantly, encouraging. Well done, Zachary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You realized that there are already free alternatives like [https://cron- job.org/en/](https://cron-job.org/en/) on the market?!

I - personally - would never pay for a cron job service ...

<comment><USER5> In many cases, paying for a service you could do yourself is more about having a throat to choke in case something goes wrong. I'm sure I could figure out cron/crontab if I took the time to learn about it but that's not my core skillset so paying $5/month is actually rather cheap for me (especially when the cost is passed along to a client who is less skilled at these things than I am).

<comment><USER6> And what happens when this service you depend on gets shut down for whatever reason?

<comment><USER5> I get to bill the client for moving them to another service.

<comment><USER7> So best to choose one that's gonna shut down soon :-).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Unfortunately, it's still missing the main cron-killer feature: randomized intervals.

I have 200 servers that I need to run some task every 3 hours. But I don't want them to all run at the same time. I need options to either "start this task at some point randomly in the next 3 hours, then every 3 hours thereafter" or "run this task randomly in every 3 hour block", without resorting to manually tweaking hour/minute run times on every server.

<comment><USER9> As a workaround, sounds like you need a deterministic pseudo-random number generator.

Find a value that is unique to each server (e.g. the UUID of the / partition?) to seed your PRNG, and then generate the first pseudo-random number. If you do it right, it will always be the same number.

Modulo this number against the number of (seconds|minutes|hours) of random delay you want applied, and apply a sleep timer to the start of the job based on that result.

It's dirty, but it ensures

* each server gets its own random interval from the start time

* that random interval never changes

* the server runs the job on a regular schedule

There are probably better ways of doing this, but this is the first thing I could think of that doesn't require any crazy libraries and can be done using standard linux utils that are on all machines.

I'd love to hear any better ways that people have!

<comment><USER10> > _Find a value that is unique to each server (e.g. the UUID of the / > partition?) ..._

FWIW, that's pretty much what /etc/machine-id is for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The landing page looks good. The UI screenshots are a little small and hard to read on my screen, but overall, the design is great.

You might also want to consider explicitly stating the value proposition: how will I save money/time/etc by using your service?

One possible use case that you might be missing are recurrent tasks that I want to __ensure __are run. For example, for my service,[https://pagecheck.app](https://pagecheck.app), I run tests every 30 minutes or so and I want to make sure those tests succeed. I couldn't find a job scheduler that allows for recurrent tasks, so I ended up writing my own Javascript library for Postgres: [https://github.com/meyer9/postqueue](https://github.com/meyer9/postqueue)

I'd love an external service that ensured that my recurring tasks run reliably, but it would make 0 sense for me to use your service at that price level. I have hundreds or thousands of scheduled tasks, but I can't pay thousands of dollars to ensure that they are run.

<comment><USER12> Pretty much every CI/CD system supports scheduled builds. GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Travis, Circle CI, and even Jenkins do.

<comment><USER11> Tests in my case mean page checks I run for my customers. Not tests on my code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What are the differentiators from a service like [https://cloud.google.com/scheduler](https://cloud.google.com/scheduler) ?

<comment><AUTHOR> For now, the only difference is the ease of use and monitoring.

<comment><USER14> Disclaimer: I work in Google Cloud, my opinions are my own.

Great stuff!

I use Google Cloud Scheduler a lot (manage dozens of cron configs) so have some thoughts on how they compare:

For monitoring, I definitely like what CronHub supports. I wish Cloud Scheduler had a similar monitoring API. As such, I have to do all that myself. The logs for Cloud Scheduler attempts are not connected to the logs of the jobs that get kicked off.

On ease-of-use, I'd say CronHub and Cloud Scheduler look about equal. Both have a Web UI, an API, and a CLI. However, Cloud Scheduler is supported by Google's Terraform plugin, which allows me to manage dozens of scheduler configs as Infrastructure-as-Code across several environments with ease. Obviously Cloud Scheduler also supports additional things like granular permissions (Cloud IAM) for different config management operations and authentication for scheduler requests, which are key to managing lots of configs for several teams and running secure infrastructure.

Feedback (some of this may already be on your roadmap):

\- I'd recommend you create a Terraform plugin or at least provide some examples for the various IaC tools out there.

\- Another differentiator you could add would be a cron schedule visualizer (for the cron-expression-impaired like myself) that shows all of one's cron configs and how they line up. That would help with situations where you're trying to arrange your crons to not compete with each other, or when you want to make sure the crons kick off in a certain order with gaps in between.

\- Parts of cronhub.io drop into sub-domains, it'd be nice if there was a persistent navigation across them all so I don't have to just click the back button to figure out how to get out of e.g. crontab.cronhub.io when I want to get back over to the documentation.

\- You should add at least some simple security to both the cron webhooks and the ping API. My app would like to verify that the cron request is definitely coming from CronHub. And CronHub should definitely want to verify that incoming ping requests from my crons are coming from my app. Similar to [https://developer.github.com/webhooks/securing/](https://developer.github.com/webhooks/securing/).

\- Not sure about pricing structure. Who only has 1 or 5 cron jobs? Even as a solo dev with some side projects I'd have to get a custom plan. I'd say be generous with Schedulers and charge for your differentiators (for $49/month I can get ~500 crons with Cloud Scheduler, but no good/easy monitoring of those jobs).

\- Perhaps rename "Custom Plan" to something like "Enterprise Plan" or the "Scale up" plan or something. The larger businesses that will sustain you want to feel special when they look at your pricing plan.

\- You'll want to offer Log Export (Enterprise plan?).

\- It's not clear to me what the team collaboration aspect of your product is. Why wouldn't I just have a single user and manage/monitor everything through your API/CLI and Slack/Webhook integrations?

\- One other piece of feedback: The text-shadow on your homepage is too much for me (I'm on Chrome on a Macbook), it's hard to focus on the text, I even checked my glasses for fog/smears when I landed there.

That said, I find your product inspiring (especially the no-free tier)! You present it in a personal way that makes it feel legit and loved, quite different than the dime-a-dozen SaaS landing pages that fly through here. Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, thank you so much for the great feedback. I appreciate it.

Some of the things you mentioned is on my roadmap but some are new to me. I love the idea of cron visualization.

For pricing, I agree, my current setup is not ideal and I plan to iterate on it in the next couple of months.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > It's built for developers who don't like managing servers and working with > cron jobs.

I had a hard time understanding the target market. Are they referring to frontend developers who are forced to do backend work?

<comment><USER9> Programmers are not sysadmins are not network engineers are not tech support are not DBAs are not ...

Increasingly, people in one area are expected to take on the responsibilities of other areas. This invariably ends up in disaster the moment you've scaled past the point that inexperienced person can go. Not because that person doesn't have good intentions, or ability to read manuals, but because some things you only learn by doing the hard way.

DevOps tries to turn developers into sysadmins. Sysadmins make fantastic scripts to manage their servers. Developers make fantastic programs. The skills are similar but ultimately very different, the problem domains are very different, and the thought processes required are very different.

"Oh I can just copypasta this from stackoverflow" is a terrible way to develop or administer systems. The danger is squared when it's the area you care less about, as you have even less chance of detecting when you're doing it wrong.

Alas, business needs don't allow for the right thing to be done from the start, which is reasonable as the money needs to go on generating more money and fast.

Which is why every business has technical debt, always and forever, and overpaid consultants will always have jobs pointing out where the problems are for other people to fix.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I am still struggling to see how such a basic service is actually used? Is it just because it's (presumably?) a GUI to create the job(s), and a portion of people deploying services today are just not comfortable writing a cron entry, or a systemd timer unit?

In all the time I've seen this type of thing posted, I've seen one explanation that had the potential to make sense: an app that runs via "Functions As A Service" (if you call it 'server less', I will hit you, with the server it's running on).

But the explanation _given_ was "oh we need this function (which is just a container running somewhere really) to "remain hot" so it responds quicker...

So it's not that they needed to run some job every $n minutes, that was a kludge work around. What they needed was either a FAAS platform that allows for minimal worker scaling (you know, like forking/threaded web servers have done for decades); or, and hold onto your hats here, I know it's a crazy idea: they needed a server that's always on.

I know that the author probably put a heap of effort into this tool, just as all the other "cron as a service" authors did - but I'm sorry, I just don't get it. At this rate, I will not be surprised when an un-ironic "printf as a service" is posted to "Show HN".

</comment><comment><USER12> Congratulations on the launch. I like the landing page and the justification for the lack of a free tier. Cronjobs are often set-and-forget tasks that a free tier can attract a lot of free users that are hard to turn into paying customer. A well-defined pricing structure with well-defined features can bring customers who settle-in for the long term.

That said, I think you will be competing in an up-hill battle with competitors.

\- CI/CD systems: This is how I would personally setup my jobs. I can go as far as SSH-ing to a remote server, and execute a script there, assert a certain output in the stdout, and mark build as failed. CI/CD system can then alert whoever is responsible. I don't think extremely technical developers are your target audience. The right balance would be a UI that can make this easy.

\- Random polling: As other commenters mentioned, a loose scheduler can help those who want just want to casually spot-check stuff.

\- Granular schedules: One might need to run an indexer every 10 minutes Mon- Fri 08:00-17:00, and hourly in weekends. Instead of using two schedulers, it might be both financially and cognitively easier to have just one scheduler.

\- Add features to expect a certain output to mark the job as passed. This can be an HTTP status code, a certain regular expression, a time-out threshold, etc.

Good luck on your ventures!

</comment><comment><USER17> Nice landing page man! :)

I have one question: What tool did you use to create the docs? => [https://docs.cronhub.io/how-to-ping.html#ping- api](https://docs.cronhub.io/how-to-ping.html#ping-api)

<comment><USER18> Looks like VuePress: [https://vuepress.vuejs.org/](https://vuepress.vuejs.org/)

<comment><USER17> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Congrats on the launch and moving away from the free tiers for monitoring!

That can be a scary step but if you want to get paid so that you can afford to keep working on cronhub then it makes sense!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the support! Yeah, this was a hard decision but hopping the right one for future sustainability.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Nice, I also think that backend engineering needs more innovation!

</comment><comment><USER21> Very cool. I wish it existed earlier when I was looking for solutions.

Shameless plug: Ended up creating an open source CLI for AWS cloudwatch[0] that works pretty well for us, but it's less slick obviously.

[0] [https://github.com/cronyo/cronyo](https://github.com/cronyo/cronyo)

</comment><comment><USER22> Congrats, this looks awesome!

How do you deal with getting money (I can see stripe), tax implications and potential liability? Did you consult tax or any other attorneys? Who drafted your terms of service?

Did you establish an LLC? Did you consult an attorney?

</comment><comment><USER23> Cool landing page! Interestingly, I don't see any type of navigation menu (such as a hamburger menu) in the mobile page. Any particular design reason why you opted for that?

</comment><comment><USER24> Looks great!

We use Visual Cron for ETLs, that would tell me that there's a market..?

</comment><comment><USER25> I am sorry, but I can't stop thinking how useless this service is.

<comment><USER26> Sorry, but I can't stop thinking about how useless your comment is.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Confused by a friend in discussion of variables (repost) - <AUTHOR> I asked this a little while ago, but I didn't get much of a response.  I'll only ask it this once more in case people didn't see it - having lurked here a while I know there's a large dollop of chance in whether a post gets seen.
Anyhoo ...
A friend of mine is not a programmer, but does program.  My friend has a degree in mathematics, works in the supply of a specific type of computer hardware, uses Perl to accomplish various scripting tasks, and is very capable in doing so.
While discussing programming languages recently I casually said that we can think of "variables" as boxes to put things in with the name of the variable on the outside, and the thing we put in these boxes are "values". "Values" can be complicated, and may actually be references to other things.
My friend went thoughtful, and then said:
Suppose I have a hash:

    $next{"thingy"}="whatname";
    $next{"whatname"}="wotsit";
    $next{"wotsit"}="doohickey";
 Then I would have said (my friend said) that:

    $next{$next{$next{"thingy"}}}
 is another name for "doohickey" and hence is a variable.
Is this a common point of view?
I'd appreciate any thoughts or feedback - perhaps my viewpoint is too narrow, or simply wrong. <comment><USER2> The hash table is not a good example, because a hash is not a variable, it is a function.

F(x) = "doohickey" when x = "wotsit"

I think you guys are confusing variables and data types (or data structures) too, they are different things.

<comment><AUTHOR> Would you not say that "next" is a variable, and the value, the thing, that "next" contains is a hash? "Next" is, of itself, not a function, surely.

<comment><USER2> It it isn't "next", it's next{x}. It's a function, not a variable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's a little weird, but not without precedent - for instance, take a look at "setf" found in most Lisps.</comment>


Amazon Transcribe - Automatic speech recognition - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/transcribe/ <comment><USER2> I've been looking for, and testing, various automated transcription APIs over the years and _never_ found one that was high-quality for videos of interviews (background noise, people don't talk in full sentences, people use filler sounds). I'd love to find something usable -- and plan to try this one as well. Human transcription is laborious, slow, and expensive. I've toyed with the idea of a human clean-up pass after the automated transcription, but that's still labor intensive.

<comment><USER3> Perhaps the task you're trying to complete is just inherently laborious, slow and expensive, then?

Given that humans _frequently_ have trouble understanding one another, it's very unlikely you'll ever encounter an API that can do 100%, or even 90% accurate transcription across environments.

\---

Isn't transcription inherently an opinionated activity, as well? In terms of how to transcribe utterances, words spoken in other languages when the main language is another, etc?

<comment><USER4> Even inexpensive human transcription works pretty well though assuming good audio and recordings that aren't difficult for other reasons (strong accents, etc.) I usually get my podcasts transcribed by a service that is basically a quality control front-end for Mechanical Turk and I need to do minimal cleanup.

I'll be interested to see how this works in comparison when it's more broadly available. I'm guessing it will be sufficiently worse that it won't be worth using for this purpose. If it's cheap enough though I could see using it for other recordings that I don't normally get transcribed today.

<comment><USER2> Would you mind sharing which MT-based service you're using for podcast transcription?

<comment><USER4> CastingWords. I've been very happy with them for my purposes. They tend to even get various CamelCase product spellings and the like correct even if I forget to put them in the transcriber notes. I usually get the 6-day $1.50/min service partly because I need the turnaround and partly because, anecdotally, the quality also goes up a bit when you pay for the premium rates. I do maybe a couple dozen 20 minute podcasts a year so the costs are negligible.

<comment><USER2> Thanks. I'm dealing with hours of interviews per day.

<comment><USER5> Can you share about your use-case? I have a very similar transcription need-- feel free to contact me at my email in profile

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wow! Circa $1.50 hour. Whereas human transcription services are more like $45 per hour.

This kind of price will open up entirely new applications. E.g., for ~$10/day, you could transcribe every conversation you have at work. Combine that with good search and your phone becomes a supplemental, artificial memory. "I know I talked about that with somebody but I can't remember who" becomes a thing of the past.

<comment><USER7> I thought you were going to say that the human translator would use the service , add his own surcharge of $30 and still be cheaper than the competition :)

seriously this will sell like crazy to public offices and services that keep transcripts of conversations, courts of law etc.

<comment><USER6> I'm sure that will happen. Automating a first pass and saving the humans for the second, smarter pass will be a great combination. Higher quality, lower cost.

But that's only if you care about human-readable quality. I'm especially interested in the applications where we don't.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've been looking into podcast transcription services, but I haven't really found a service build using similar APIs like this. Can anyone shed some light on the transcription business, is the transcription quality not yet good enough or why don't we see many of these services?

<comment><USER9> Shameless plug follows...!

I'd love it if you'd take a look at [https://trint.com](https://trint.com) \- we're designed exactly for what you're looking for. We use machine learning to deliver a highly accurate initial transcript that you can polish to perfect with our in-browser editor.

<comment><USER10> HN might be DDOSing you at the moment. Perhaps consider putting Cloudflare or similar in front of your landing page?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Same price as google ($0.006 per 15 second increment) but more expensive that microsft ($0.004 per 15 second increment). However, this does charge by the second after 15 seconds which is nice.

I just wish they would lower the minimum threshold of 15 second intervals.

<comment><USER12> Is the quality so much better than CMU Sphinx that it's worth paying for it?

<comment><USER11> According to others, yes: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11820837](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11820837)

<comment><USER13> From personal experience we can get pretty good results on our workflow from sphinx - but the amount of time it took to get those results was massive, and spread over years. It's probably worth it for most organizations to skip that and go for a vendor.

Results from Amazon are an unknown right now, but the other vendors vary a good bit and are focused on particular kinds of audio (kinds vary by: the number of speakers, the duration of the audio, the vocabulary, language).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Given Alexa's performance, this is the last thing I'd want to use.</comment>


Windows 10 IoT Core Insider Preview for Raspberry Pi 2 - tomh- http://ms-iot.github.io/content/GetStarted.htm

<comment><AUTHOR> I wonder what the story will be for devices that Microsoft hasn't "blessed". Will there be some way to create our own images with drivers needed for different SoCs? There's a whole bunch of awesome ARM dev boards out there and it would be a shame to limit it to the popular ones.

<comment><USER2> For starters you have no source for the OS, kernel or mayor drivers.

</comment></comment><comment> slipstream- Fun fact: after downloading it and looking around, this is definitely based on Windows Phone.

</comment><comment><USER3> The demo they show is how to write a LED blinker program. I don't need an operating system (especially Windows) to do that. I could do that with a 555 timer and save $40.

I thought this partnership was going to enable running Windows software on a Pi.

<comment><USER4> Erm, isn't LED Blinking like the Hello World of talking to digital outputs on any type of hardware? By your logic you can get rid of _a lot_ of the rPi/ARM dev board/basically aything with GPIO/... samples all together, and no-one except people with experience would be able to get LEDs blinking. Which especialy in case of the rPi defeats it's purpose as a learning tool.

<comment><USER3> You've misinterpreted my point.

Blinking LEDs is the Hello World of embedded systems. But if I have to develop all of the software myself that I want to run on the Pi, I'd rather just use Linux.

The only benefit I see about having Windows running on the Pi, is so actual Windows applications can be downloaded and run on it.

If that functionality exists, there should be a demo where you boot up the Pi, access the Windows store, and download/run a real application.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is this going to be another repeat of the Windows XP ATM mess?

</comment><comment><USER2> Its totally not like Windows CE or 95!

>Wait for a few minutes and the board will automatically restart

oh, 2015 and M$ still wants me to reboot. At least its only once after install and thats it, right?

> If Visual Studio cannot connect to your Windows IoT Core device, try > rebooting the device.

oh. Not restart the debugger, just reboot, you know, turn it off and on again like Apu told you over the phone. After all you are just some random idiot, not a person trying to develop on this platform.

>familiar tools, including sfpcopy.exe

when I think of copying I think sfp! wait what? Why would I be familiar with a copy utility which name doesnt start with word "copy", and is not even shipped standard on Windows platforms (at least not on Win7/Win8/8.1)?

Can I at least SSH to the box? or telnet? anything standard and open?

>Enter-PsSession

no?, oh :(, and apparently to be an admin on your Pee you need to start powershell in admin mode on your client computer too, why? At least its painless and reliable

>Note: there is a known issue with PS that can cause a StackOverflowException on the PS client machine. To work around this type the following line

client as in my laptop where I just started powershell as an admin? splendid!

>Commonly used utilities

grep? cat? no :(

>notice how we leverage the new WinRT classes in the Windows.Devices.Gpio namespace

wasnt WinRT send to the farm with the rest of stupid ideas M$ had recently?

btw headless led blinking sample has logo and a splash screen :)))) but its still less painful to look at than the Erlang one from few days ago :)

All in all Im impressed. It looks slick and well put together, and Im sure it looks straightforward and simple for the winapi folks. I can imagine some very enthusiastic young people working on it at Redmont (people that never touched Linux/unix and are slowly reimplementing it? :P). Its not bad, +1 from me.

<comment><USER6> > wasnt WinRT send to the farm with the rest of stupid ideas M$ had recently?

WinRT and Windows RT are two separate things. WinRT is the runtime that Windows Store apps run on. Of course, you'd know that if you spent 15 seconds googling the answer instead of grasping for more things to complain about.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Some examples of parallel but not concurrent processing - <AUTHOR> Lately I've been studying the different async workflows and the most confusing bit (so far) is the difference between concurrent execution and parallel execution.
I have examples for concurrent-not-parallel, like single threaded processes or a multi-threaded program on a single thread processor.
What I cannot find are examples of scenarios where the execution is parallel, but not concurrent. TBH, it seems impossible (so far).
Wikipedia did give me one - Bit-level parallelism[1]. But that topic is a bit out of reach for me (again, so far).
Can anyone give me a more simple parallel-not-concurrent execution scenario?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit-level_parallelism <comment><USER2> Vector addition in floating point registers is parallel but not concurrent.

Parallel means division of a task into separate parts which execute at the same instant in time.

Concurrent means separate task with overlapping lifetimes.

Parallel is contrasted with single threads of execution. And concurrent should be contrasted with serialization of task lifetimes.</comment>


What do you think is the best free online tool for entrepreneurs? - <AUTHOR>

I just got back from participating in my first Startup Weekend event (honored to be asked to join as a coach) and was wondering what this seasoned entrepreneur community would recommend in terms of project management tools, landing pages, bug tracking, etc. <comment><USER2> Here are a few that are either all out free, or free up to a certain usage.

1\. Onetab (Quick save all tabs, nice chronological grouping)

2\. Google Docs (Powerful enough for most businesses)

3\. Freshbooks (Free up to 3 clients - worth the upgrade after)

4\. Mailchimp (Free up to 12,000 emails and 2,000 subscribers, and worth paying for after also)

5\. Insightly (CRM free up to 3 users, 2,500 contacts. Which is a great start)

6\. Inspectlet (Like Crazyegg, except they have a free option)

7\. Asana (Great PM/Task with a generous free product)

8\. Evernote/Skitch (MUST HAVE!. Every entrepreneur needs a way to compile their thoughts and research. I find this so important to even finding more about myself as I look back at the things I saved)

9\. Trello (PM for creatives.)

Then you have of course, Skype and Google Analytics which require no explanation.

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome, thanks for the rundown richsin!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> i like asana alot</comment>


Suicide, and 13 Other Ways to Deal With Failure - <AUTHOR> http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2011/06/suicide-and-13-other-ways-to-deal-with-failure/

<comment><USER2> Very helpful stuff in there for entrepreneurs. What I love about James' writing is that it's all from hard-earned wisdom over a period of years.

I've personally printed out a few of his posts and keep them on my desk at home to review occasionally.</comment>


The In-State Tuition Break, Slowly Disappearing - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/19/upshot/the-in-state-tuition-break-slowly-disappearing.html?em_pos=small&emc=edit_up_20150519&nl=upshot&nlid=71956317&ref=headline&abt=0002&abg=0

<comment><USER2> To cite my own experience, I pay around $30,000 a year for my instate J.D. program. My school-appointed mentor, who graduated in 2004, paid $4,000 a year.

I see this as unfair, not only in the sense that my generation has to take out extraordinary loans to access education, but also in the sense that I am forced to pay $100,000 just to participate in our justice system. And I am one of the lucky ones benefiting from a lowered in-state tuition.

But I am not worried about me. I am worried about my friends who have accrued crippling debt in their quest to be a high school teacher, or some other valid, yet low paying, profession. I am afraid these people will never pay their debt off.

<comment><USER3> Well I am not sure if the USA needs anymore lawyers.

If I were in charge I would make the tuition $500,000 pa and use the money to pay court appointed defence attorneys a decent wage and give them a reasonable workload. Fewer lawyers and more justice.

<comment><USER4> You have missed mhays' point. Focusing on what you perceive to be a problem of an abundance of lawyers detracts from the essence of the issue. Namely,

"... in the sense that my generation has to take out extraordinary loans to access education..."

Unless you think every field has an over supply, what is the point of your comment?

<comment><USER3> Of course I don't think every field has an oversupply of graduates (most recent graduates do though), but I do think tuition fees can be used by society to encourage people into areas we need rather than in areas we don't need more people. Discouraging more people from becoming lawyers and encouraging those that do to work in areas we need good lawyers is a double positive from my perspective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> An _extremely_ poor article. The only examples of this reported problem cited are a university that simply increased its size to accommodate more out-of- state students, and UCB, the very best state university in the nation, one that's the equal of many of the best private ones in many fields.

If that's the best the NYT can do, perhaps we don't have so much of a problem after all....

<comment><USER6> What amazes me is that out of state students would have to pay out of state while someone in the state without a visa could get in state tuition.

I'm not against in state tuition for visa offenders, but at the same time there seems to be an unfairness with regard to out of state students who would have to pay the "full price".

<comment><USER7> It's not a kid's fault that they live somewhere without a visa. People who move to California as young children – who grow up going to California schools, have parents working in California and paying taxes like every other resident, have all their friends in California and are just as likely to stick around and make their life/career in California as any other resident – should absolutely get to count for in-state tuition rates. Anything less would be cruelly punishing a group who did nothing wrong and get all kinds of other shit for it from society.

<comment><USER8> What if their parents were among the lower 47%, and so did not pay taxes into the system?

<comment><USER7> They absolutely do pay taxes: especially payroll taxes, but also income taxes are withheld from their salaries just like everyone else (often under fake SSN).

Or if they're being paid in cash under the table, as sometimes happens for both undocumented immigrants and for immigrants with visas or permanent residents, that's 100% the responsibility of the employer.

Indeed, undocumented workers often end up paying more tax than they would if they had authentic papers, because they're less likely to file for tax rebates at the end of the year.

They also pay sales tax, if they're paying rent are ultimately contributing to property taxes paid by the landlord, etc. etc.

If you want to see some data about this w/r/t state and local taxes, here's a recent summary: [http://www.itep.org/immigration/](http://www.itep.org/immigration/)

<comment><USER8> I didn't mean undocumented immigrants, but you make a great point that they're overpaying taxes, but are receiving only minimal services. And people look down on them as though they're a burden.

Documented workers who earn below a certain level have the entirety of their income tax deductions returned to them by the IRS. This happened during my first few years of working.

Workers who earn an exceptionally low amount, and have additional dependents or are paying college tuition, can earn additional tax credits, such as EIC or Hope.

In this way, many working households benefit from welfare and have someone working and/or going to school.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's almost impossible for out of state students to "get residency" and pay in state tuition rates. This is due to most states setting the age of majority for tuition classification only, to 25. Age of majority for voting and dying in wars is 18. Age of majority for drinking alcohol is 21. But tuition? Nah, you don't get that until you're 25, even if you're a resident of that state. So in effect, you only get the in state tuition for the state either of your parents live in.

<comment><USER10> This screwed me over. I couldn't get any financial help because my parents wouldn't fill the FAFSA, it wasn't until the year I turned 25 that I could get any aid or loans.

Now I'm a computer science professional pulling down a decent salary, the government lost out on about 7 years of taxes because of their policies.

<comment><USER11> One could argue because of this policy the govt didn't have to pay out for a lot of students who parents did pay up as they should have.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A very nice business model these universities have. 18 year old clueless kids borrow as much money as they need, and hand it over by the truck-load. It's for the children!

</comment><comment><USER13> Americans should consider studying abroad. In most european countries, you will not (as an american) qualify for free university, but the costs are in the order of 20% or so of the US ones.

E.g., according to [0], tuition in Sweden will cost you some $10,000/year. And, it's an adventure that you're less likely to have the opportunity for later in life.

[0] [https://studyinsweden.se/study-information/fees-and- costs/](https://studyinsweden.se/study-information/fees-and-costs/)

</comment><comment><USER14> What the Article missed...

It lists one Land Grant college..ie Purdue..

Is everyone ware that Land Grant Colleges are quasi-federal chartered entities via the Morrill Act and that

they have still maintain an education mission defined in the act?

<comment><USER15> According to Wikipedia, Auburn and Michigan State are land-grant institutions.</comment></comment>


Show HN: DIY DDNS with Bash and Cloudflare APIs - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ctrlaltdev/DIYDDNS <comment><AUTHOR> Ohai o/

I needed a Dynamic DNS service for a couple of devices I had in my DMZ, but most free services requires you to confirm the hostname manually regularly, or include some kind of restriction.

I use Cloudflare for some domains, and I dug in their APIs to make my own DDNS.

It should be easily to adapt it to fit other DNS APIs, feel free to contribute!</comment>


Google now supports link rel="canonical" in HTTP headers - <AUTHOR> http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/06/supporting-relcanonical-http-headers.html

<comment><USER2> The first comment has it spot-on for the first example: the html version is an alternate version -- it's not the same content. The example of content distribution networks (and other mirrors) is much better.

</comment><comment><USER3> The syntax is very strange.

rel-canonical: <http://www.example.com/white-paper.html>

would have been a better one.

<comment><USER4> The Link: header has been a part of the HTTP spec since forever. The following example from the HTTP/1.1 spec [1] should look familiar:

        Link: <http://www.cern.ch/TheBook/chapter2>; rel="Previous"

We should be applauding Google for supporting standard headers instead of making up new ones. The Link: header is even mentioned in the HTTP 1.0 spec [2] and, as mentioned in the OP, there's even an RFC acting as a registry for the various Link relation types [3].

Though I don't always agree with standards, I hope you'd agree that it really does make sense in this case...

[1] <http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2068#section-18.104.22.168>

[2] <http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1945#appendix-D.2.6>

[3] <http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5988#section-5>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> What's the difference with the <link rel="canonical"> tag ? For those documents that are not HTML ? Seem not very useful to me.

<comment><USER6> It works for both HTML documents and non-HTML files. For non-HTML files, you cannot use the HTML link rel="canonical" tag, so this new support for the header is the only option.</comment></comment>


CouchDB on Wheels - <AUTHOR> http://www.jasondavies.com/blog/2009/05/08/couchdb-on-wheels/ <comment><USER2> I guess the purpose of this tutorial is to show how simple couchDB is to use, but since I knew nothing about couchDB other than hearing raves about it from my local alpha geek, all this did was open my eyes to how astonishingly inconvenient it appears to be. Maybe it's just the shock of unfamiliar syntax?

<comment><USER3> This tutorial shows how to use CouchApps, a very specialized use-case. While CouchDB itself is fairly straightforward, CouchApps need a bit of ironing out still.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Like Chris Rock once astutely observed,

 _You could drive a car with your feet, that don't make it a good idea._

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgWv5-I8Qy0#t=1m28s>

</comment><comment><USER5> I appreciate the hack value, but this website could be done so much easier using plain HTML and PHP for the Contact Us form...

<comment><USER6> This site is a test of the technology, but not really in the sweet-spot. The real use case for pure CouchDB applications is the p2p web, where your application code can be replicated from one database to another, along with the data. This means it's possible to build applications like Flickr or Twitter, without relying on any servers or intellectual property other than your own and your friends'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sadly the first thing I thought when I saw the title was, "aww no pr0n?". Gives you an idea how that presentation affected my thoughts on couchdb unfortunately.

On the other hand I might just have an overwhelming desire to look at pr0n that rears its ugly head no matter where I'm looking.</comment>


The Errors of Edward Snowden and His Global Hypocrisy Tour - <AUTHOR> http://www.vanityfair.com/online/eichenwald/2013/06/errors-edward-snowden-global-hypocrisy-tour

<comment><USER2> >To hunt for needles, the N.S.A. needs a global haystack that can be used for data mining. That is what the data collection is all about; no one has any interest in listening in on innocuous calls or reading pointless e-mails. This is all about using computers—massive, massive computers—and using complex models and algorithms to find the needles, rather than hoping to guess how to keep Americans safe, just in case the Ed Snowdens of the world might get upset with more intelligent approaches.

>Which brings us back to Snowden's global hypocrisy tour. I think nothing has more thoroughly damaged Snowden's "whistle-blower" persona than his bizarre—and, I would say, cowardly—decision to rely on some of the countries with the greatest history of oppression to help keep him out of the Americans' hands.

It's staggering how inept this article is.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Ecuador blah blah blah". Somehow, I feel that wherever Snowden ends up, said country will quickly become the second coming of the Third Reich in US state media. Note to the Vanity Fair hack: Snowden never cleared customs in Russia.

<comment><USER4> I could read a few paragraphs and just got sick of this article.

You called the author right, he's a hack at best.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It doesn't cease to amaze me how many people are willing to defend the police state and surveillance for a marginal? increase in security...

Throughout history regimes have proven far more dangerous to their own citizens than to other countries (Hitler rounding up Jews, Stalin and Mao starving their own, Pol Pot, various genocides in Africa, etc...). The average American needs to wake up.

<comment><USER4> The average American = the proverbial frog in the pot.

It'll take some seriously hot water to wake people up.</comment></comment>


Priority Inversion in Organizational Decision Making and How to Avoid It - <AUTHOR> http://benbobsworld.blogspot.com/2016/11/priority-inversion-in-organizational.html <comment><USER2> Would this be _bikeshedding_?

[https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/bikeshedding](https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/bikeshedding)</comment>