Street Life in London - <AUTHOR> https://digital.library.lse.ac.uk/collections/streetlifeinlondon <comment><USER2> There's a picture of "halpenny ices". There's an interesting bit of public health history there. You can see they're eating the ices from a glass - sometimes called a "penny lick glass". This glass is then swilled in a bucket and refilled for the next customer. Obviously, this is disgusting. A law was made in 1899 to ban it after a TB scare.

Halpenny ices: [https://digital.library.lse.ac.uk/objects/lse:gox325doj](https://digital.library.lse.ac.uk/objects/lse:gox325doj)

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

About photos of old London:

There was a similar recent submission here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12822124](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12822124)

[http://hyperallergic.com/299912/the-photographers- of-1870s-l...](http://hyperallergic.com/299912/the-photographers- of-1870s-london-who-documented-their-disappearing-city/)

I tracked down some of the locations in Google Maps (and got a few wrong): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12824840](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12824840)

<comment><USER3> "Obviously [...] disgusting" is too strong. Norms change, and in this case _legislation_ was needed to make it happen.

<comment><USER2> Yes, you're right. I mean that I, looking back on it, shudder at the thought.

I wonder what I do everyday that'll cause some future person to have the same reaction?

<comment><USER4> Maybe brushing your teeth in the same room as where your toilet is?

<comment><USER5> There's a difference between brushing your teeth in the same room as your toilet and _storing your toothbrush uncovered_ in the same room as your toilet.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Diving into concurrency: trying out mutexes and atomics - <AUTHOR> http://jvns.ca/blog/2014/12/14/fun-with-threads/

<comment><USER2> I ran the program counter_race.c, messing around with the NUM_THREADS. From what I can understand, in a perfect world the expected number should be 10,000,000. Is it an error that the article says 20,000,000?

</comment><comment><USER3> Thanks Julia, as always great educational post!

</comment><comment><USER4> what are alternatives to mutexes? I find them a software engineering disaster waiting to happen.</comment>


Ask HN: Why do you use Hacker News? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> The news and discussion are top quality. It's the only website I participate in and while my contributions are not the most useful, I feel like I have a voice in this community. For someone who finds it hard to "fit in", this is really amazing.

</comment><comment><USER3> I primarily used Reddit for my news in r/technology. HN covers a large area of news and generally the comment section isn't people trashing one another but having an honest conversation/discussion.

Plus I've found far better apps that work when I'm on shit ("unlimited") data.

</comment><comment><USER4> News source & good discussions with like minded people.

Plus some cool products here and there.

</comment><comment><USER5> Why do you ask this question? Just curious...

</comment><comment><USER6> The best content ever

</comment><comment><USER7> The articles.</comment>


Scribd gets $3.5M in Series A round led by Redpoint - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/06/04/scribd-banks-35-million-from-redpoint/ <comment><USER2> Hey, the three of us at scribd are looking for more people to join our team. Chances are good if you're reading this that you're the kind of person we're looking for. If you join Scribd now, you'll have the real startup experience: you'll design the product (not only implement it) and work in a tiny group that accomplishes big things.

Send us an email to firstname.lastname@example.com and we can talk more about it. Or check out our jobs page just for news.yc readers here: <http://www.scribd.com/static/newsyc>

Thanks,

Tikhon

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice, another YC success (or solid start) story.

I'm beginning to think that the YC's success is testament not only to the Summer/Winter founders programs but also PG's ability to select great talent.

<comment><USER4> Not to take away from positive aspects of YC that surely also merit attention, but when your (Paul Graham's) incubator-like program get mentioned in every single blog post and newspaper article about any of your companies, which leads to more mentions, that is viral marketing at its best.

Is that why it is called Y-Combinator (recursive/viral functionality is built- in?)

<comment><USER5> Yeah, it's like Pink Floyd, their song became exactly what it was about: "Money". And I heard this from Gilmour on an interview.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Well, if Scribd makes it to a liquidity event, maybe YC can pass their good fortunes on to newly funded companies and offer us better valuations :)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I heard ~$25M post-money valuation.

Sweet.

<comment><USER7> The techcrunch link says 17.5

<comment><AUTHOR> True. I heard 25 from someone I trust more than Mike Arrington.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do you enjoy programming or do you see it as a means to an end (start a business)? - <AUTHOR>

This is something I've been asked personally a number of times by both people within and outside the tech industry, and I was curious what the opinions/feelings of the Hacker News community were.<p>Do you enjoy programming? Is it just a way to build your vision, but you don't find it fun (enjoyable)? Both, perhaps? Obviously, this might not be just a black/white issue for a lot of people, too. <comment><USER2> Yes, I do enjoy programming. Sometimes, it _is_ a means to an end for me (as in to accomplish a task, not a business), but is nonetheless fun.

Typically, I find the most enjoyment out of programming when I am working on projects _I_ want to work on. The sheer joy of seeing your creation come to life from your own two hands is immeasurable. Even fighting (and conquering) bugs and the compiler is thrilling, despite the superficial swearing.

Programming as a means to an end is also enjoyable, given certain circumstances. For example, I _still_ feel a rush when I crank out a memorized quadratic solver program or trapezoid rule program on a TI-83/84 for a friend or classmate in math class. Also, I get my work done much faster.

However, programming as a _required_ task is unpleasant. In my AP Computer Science course, I am required to create derivative "Bug" classes from the GridWorld API and hand it in. It is utterly boring! I feel like a code monkey every second while programming that monstrosity. It offers no benefit for me at all. The only thing I get out of the ordeal is a stupid little number (actually letter) that goes on my transcript. By the way, I also learn all essential topics (like data structures) outside of class, so I _really_ feel like I am not missing anything interesting or useful.

At the risk of being proved incorrect or downmodded, I will offer an analogy:

Programming is like an arts-n-crafts class when you were a child. You get to create neat-looking bracelets, necklaces, ceramics, or origami in a relatively short time, but with full excitement. Best of all, _you get to keep your creation_ and treasure it forever. That is the _true_ reward.

Programming is also like a pointless required class in grade school. You do relatively boring projects just to fill out the graduation requirements and the only reward you get is a small number placed in the top-right corner of your paper which _might_ give you bragging rights, if at all.

For me, programming merely for the hell of it is fun.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you don't enjoy _something_ about programming, I don't think you're a "hacker", to put it bluntly. The something doesn't have to be writing code, but might be solving problems with computers in a more general sense.

<comment><USER4> Why is that label important?

<comment><USER5> It descirbes what we all do: hack stuff together.

I guess his point was that if you dont really enjoy it you wont be a wonderful hacker. (I agree)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=515463>

<comment><AUTHOR> Whoops, didn't see that one! Sorry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Well you did say "programming". It's enjoyable. It's the trundling through API's and frameworks that's a huge PIA. Fixing other peoples' badly written code is hard yakka.

I don't think that you can succeed in a business that involves lots a programming without enjoying it.

</comment><comment><USER7> nothing in and of itself is enjoyable to me.

i can have lots of fun programming, and also absolutely no fun. it depends on what i'm doing and why. same thing with reading. same thing with sports. same thing with anything.

edit: also, zombie thread <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=515463>

edit2: beatten by amichail

</comment><comment><USER8> Both for me, I dont enjoy coding for the sake of coding, I enjoy the process of creation.</comment>


A Big Concern in Norway, a Country Now Ruled by Women: Male Anger - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-22/male-anger-is-a-big-concern-in-a-rich-country-now-ruled-by-women <comment><USER2> Seems to be click bait. No examples of "Male Anger" in the article, aside from a 2011 mass shooting. And Googling for a differential in employment doesn't show much either.

Can anyone from Norway comment?

<comment><USER3> Yes. It's like what happened last night in Sweden. Sad!

<comment><USER2> That one actually seemed more coherent.</comment></comment></comment>


Laser Scans Reveal Maya "Megalopolis" Below Guatemalan Jungle - <AUTHOR> https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/02/maya-laser-lidar-guatemala-pacunam/ <comment><USER2> I'm always wondering about these claims of population: how would we know all the structures were active at once? Perhaps its a century of building, with structures abandoned as they decayed and new ones built. Then the population at any one time could have been at most a percentage of the estimates.

<comment><USER3> In this case there is circumstantial evidence - from what I understand there is a huge difference in population estimates between the first time contact was made with Europeans, and every time after that. All accounts point to an apocalypse due to diseases, even before the Spanish conquistadors came.

In other words: it was the _previous ground research_ that was at odds with the written accounts.</comment></comment>


Deutschland AG rethinks workers' role in management - <AUTHOR> https://www.economist.com/business/2020/01/30/deutschland-ag-rethinks-workers-role-in-management <comment><USER2> Sounds like propaganda to me.

I'm German and my impression is that almost everyone is happy with the current model where you have a legally guaranteed right of holding CEOs accountable.

Everyone, except the American hedge funds trying to squeeze out more profits by increasing working hours, that is.

So to me, this article reads like "let's make Germany more like America in that the rich rule the poor".

And I find it rather surprising that they went with "Deutschland AG" because treating Germany like a country is usually only done by a rather weird tiny subset of citizens who refuse to adhere to laws and instead revel in conspiracy theories about foreign overloads secretly deciding what everyone has to do.

But most weirdly I find that I haven't heard this set of laws being discussed critically in German at all, but that instead an English article with odd word choice should be the first to criticise it.

<comment><USER3> "Deutschland AG" was commonly used in political discussion up until the early 2000s, it even made it into Wikipedia [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutschland_AG](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutschland_AG) and other encyclopedias. It has nothing to do with the Reichsbürger movement

<comment><USER2> Wow, I didn't know :)

That said, I haven't encountered the terminology elsewhere, so I was surprised to read it in this article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A more accurate title seems to be "Management rethinks workers' role in management." Are there complaints about co-determination from workers themselves (I'd be more interested to hear those)? Or is this management complaining they can't mistreat workers in the name of corporate profit?

<comment><USER2> It's the latter and the article even concedes that mistreating workers won't help much, either.

"European countries which do not embrace it hardly do better."

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Only [...] SAP, a software-maker, is among the world's 100 biggest companies. Apple's $1.4trn market value is roughly that of the entire DAX 30."

Is this actually a problem though? The model seems to have provided some insulation from global turmoil in the past; is having enormous corporations the only important thing for a country's economy? For as long as it doesn't fall foul of EU laws, I can see Germans wanting to maintain this strategic advantage that other nations ignore while they're busy chasing down every last short-term dollar.

<comment><USER6> Their GDP per capita is about 17% lower than the United States, but their GDP per hour worked is only 3% lower with their average work-week being 22% shorter than in the United States.

So, from a very narrow and short-sighted point of view.. they're just as productive as we are, but they have 1/3 our population and they work fewer hours which limits their ability to compete in the global marketplace.

For German companies that serve only domestically or within the EU, I doubt the councils are a problem or even an impediment.. but for companies that want to operate globally, I imagine it does reduce their ability to compete.

I guess the question for Germany is, do they want to sacrifice these broader protections and slightly better working conditions in order to improve profits for a handful of companies that can actually take advantage of it? I hope not, but it looks like the groundwork is already being laid for a campaign to change this.

<comment><USER7> The "reduces their ability to compete"-argument does not hold water considering the data, though. One useful measure of a countries competitiveness is the size of their exports (because it implies that there is a lot of foreign demand for the products from that country), or in their "exports-to-population" ratio.

If you check [https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/exports](https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/exports) you can see that Germany exports about EUR 112bn worth of goods per month, on a population of about 83 million, about EUR 1350 per head. For comparison:

Canada exports about 49bn CAD per month, on a population of 38m, for approximately 1297 CAD per head.

The US exports about 208bn USD per month, on a population of 327m, for approximately 638 USD per head.

If anything, the big weakness of the German economy is not that it is not competitive enough, the big weakness of the German economy is a lack of domestic consumption due to not much of the money actually reaching workers pockets; this is a result of a fairly aggressive wage stagnation that set in in the 2000s.

<comment><USER8> I've never heard of anybody using exports as development metric. It's usually just a sign of developing country with cheap labor.

> wage stagnation that set in in the 2000s.

And imagine that. Seems to fit the low wage story pretty well.

<comment><USER7> When speaking about "competitiveness", what measures aside from current account balance and share of global exports is better suited?

Not to be snarky, but you can't do _any_ reading in economics about competitiveness and not encounter the current account balance (which is exports - imports): [https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/6701/trade/importance- of-...](https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/6701/trade/importance-of-current- account-deficit/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Workers' Councils often don't exist because people don't dare to form one. Despite pretty good rights for employees, it can still feel like painting a target on your back.

I should have more forcefully driven for the creation of one in my small company. But it's all too late now. The company was sold by the owner to a much larger US company and the day after that was announced, nearly a third of employees were fired.

We are developing B2B SaaS and sold that in combination with professional services, with about a 50:50 split in revenue from those two parts. The company built its product without outside investments and has practically always been profitable in the past, with ok revenue growth, but we were seeing pressure from competitors who did have large investments.

The US company didn't want professional services (and also not anyone doing sales and marketing), they wanted the developers. A couple of weeks into this that seems absurd, especially since they seem to be expecting to keep most of the existing revenue which seems impossible since, you know, we had a 50:50 split in revenue and the people responsible for 50% of that (who had close working relationships with the clients) are no longer there. They are now flying people here but there is hardly anyone to teach them and … you know … usually it takes at least a couple of months to get people up to speed. Months in which our existing clients want to get work done! It's so irrational. It's also deeply immoral and unethical.

Whether it be greed or a fundamental misunderstanding of how the product works or what do I know … that whole thing was surreal and weird and I kept thinking that one of the problems was that the person making the deal was fundamentally not understanding the business. Maybe a workers' council could have helped or at least found a socially more responsible way.

But when the acquisition was only a rumor I frequently mentioned to my colleagues that forming a council would be a good idea but never actually did it. Because, you know, who would want to paint a target on their back.

But it is important for such institutions to exist. Employees inherently tend to have less power than employers and their work is not really optional. They can't just decide to not do it and changing jobs or career or places where you live can be difficult to impossible. That's why that isn't just some kind of exachange of money for work. It has to be specifically and explicitly and strongly protected and workers should always have a say in the business because it concerns them. And their interests and the employers interests are not always aligned.

</comment><comment><USER10> ...the problem is that "worker codetermination" is not really about owners and workers pulling on the same string, but rather worker representatives often have a ridiculously narrow-minded focus on workers' interests while completely disregarding what is and isn't economical for a company to do.

To give you one example: I used to work for one of Germany's biggest telcos. Believe it or not: That company is unable to do geographically-targeted advertising for reasons of worker codetermination. Worker reps in the company's supervisory board argue that, since some employees get part of their compensation through sales commissions, targeting advertising to region X gives employees in region X an unfair advantage to earn more money than employees in other regions.

Working for the same company, I was involved in a project to do natural language processing in a ticket system the company was using to track repair and maintenance work of radio units, with the goal of building a model to recognize tickets that were in increased need of attention by higher-level management. Even though it wasn't initially the project's goal to do so, the thing that the model ultimately picked up on was basically indications of employees being lazy as they handle those tickets. -- But the data I was given was anonymized. It was argued that if it weren't anonymized, my project would have never been approved by worker representatives in the supervisory board for reasons of violating workers' right to "data protection".

<comment><USER11> It seems to me that many programmers suffer from some privacy blind spot where their brain literally freezes when they have to think about the negative consequences of their latest software gizmo.

It was decided in a court of law that employers can't spy on their employees. It's good that companies are being cautious. Not everything in this world revolves around efficiency and tracking everything.

<comment><USER10> I certainly do not suffer from "privacy blind spots". As a matter of fact, I've worked for one company in the telco space doing industry-leading work on setting standards about how to properly anonymize call detail records. And then, in this German telco that I mentioned, we were doing groundbreaking work setting up our data engineering in such a way as to comply with Germany's stringent privacy protections where consumers are concerned. I now work in another privacy-focused company.

But this one story I was telling:

Management: Please make a mathematical model that will predict if a radio unit has repeated and prolonged outages, using well over a hundred independent variables, ranging from technical information, to network topology, to information from the ticket system.

Me: Done. Mathematical model says: Radio units have problems if the people servicing them are lazy bums. Here is a system, based on natural language processing, that will predict people being lazy bums with huge accuracy.

Management: So who are the lazy bums?

Me: Can't tell you that. Because privacy.

I mean. Come on...

<comment><USER11> "Here is a system, based on natural language processing, that will predict people being lazy bums with huge accuracy."

What could go wrong... I was quite impressed until you got to this point too and thought I had been too harsh.

<comment><USER10> The patterns my system noticed were literally things like this: There's an error entered into the system by the NOC operator as an intermittent error on the station. Field technician drives there. Enters something like "Station on air upon arrival" into the ticket system. Does nothing else. (Like nothing to diagnose or fix the actual problem). Closes the incident. Drives home. Pockets the money for the time spent driving. A few days later (who would have thought that?) a new incident is opened for the same station. Repeat once a week for months and months.

I'm definitely not someone who is too naive to understand that technology like NLP has limits. But this was a perfectly appropriate usecase for NLP and it worked perfectly fine.

And people acting in this manner should not be immune from repercussions for reasons of data protection.

<comment><USER10> ...also, it seems weird to me that workers representatives knew, before the project even started, that it was in their best interest to ask for this data to be anonymized. It was as if workers, collectively, knew the whole time that this sort of thing was systematically happening, and were actively working towards preventing management from finding out. That's what I mean by "not pulling on the same string".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Version without paywall: [https://outline.com/SvtKVv](https://outline.com/SvtKVv)

</comment><comment><USER13> This is the situation in europe at the moment:

As far as the rules on employee participation are concerned, three groups of countries can be distinguished in the 28 EU countries and Norway. In the first group, consisting of ten countries, there is no employee participation. In the five countries in the second group, employee participation is limited to state-owned or recently privatised companies. But the largest group is made up of 14 countries that provide for employee representation on the boards of private sector companies above a certain size. There are large differences in the minimum numbers of employees and other aspects of the procedures for employee involvement at national level.

[http://de.worker-participation.eu/Nationale- Arbeitsbeziehung...](http://de.worker-participation.eu/Nationale- Arbeitsbeziehungen/Quer-durch-Europa)

</comment><comment><USER14> Does anyone have first hand experience with this system?

<comment><USER15> Many German workers have experience with this system. I have had 3 years. It works pretty well in my view and creates some balance. It's probably not as much fun for management but that's Ok. It bugs me that in the US the only accepted stakeholders are the shareholders and nobody else counts.

<comment><USER16> Do you have any familiarity with IG Metall? If so, how helpful do you think are they, or were, for organized labor?

Also, worker-owned co-ops seem the only way out of shareholder rent-seeking and narcissistic management behavior because just giving workers input without a fair share of profits is still similar to keeping slavery but adding a suggestions box.

<comment><USER15> I was IG Metall. As a young person it felt a little restrictive but now I feel it strikes a good balance. You make good money, no abusive workplace practices and the companies are also successful. Win-Win for everybody.

<comment><USER16> Those of us who are Americans sorely need to rediscover general strikes and practical labor unions that don't go crazy with organized crime or utopian politics. Oklahoma was a socialist bastion, Henry A. Wallace got the DNC Bernie Sanders-treatment, strikers of the 19th century were summarily executed by Pinkerton and hired snipers like it was a prison riot, and decades of strikes/strike breaking and unionization helped usher in a brief post-WW2 era of prosperity. Now, poor and white-collar Americans argue unthinkingly and constantly for austerity, mindless deregulation and giving more money to only the rich (because of manufactured consent). I don't see how there's anything but misery, fear of major disease and destitution for 75-90% of Americans; and there aren't many good jobs for average workers because there's almost no manufacturing ecosystem like there is in China.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Paywalled beyond the first two paragraphs.

<comment><USER18> If there's a workaround, it's ok. Users usually post workarounds in the thread.

This is in the FAQ at [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html) and there's more explanation here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989)

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20paywall&sort=byDate&...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20paywall&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix&page=0)</comment></comment>


uBlock Origin for Microsoft Edge - <AUTHOR> https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/p/ublock-origin/9nblggh444l4 <comment><USER2> It wouldn't surprise me if there is an internal conflict at Microsoft about allowing Edge extensions.

Back when Windows 10 came out, Cortana opened Bing searches in your default browser. Someone made a Bing2Google extension for Chrome, and Microsoft responded by making Cortana only open Bing searches in Edge.

Now that Edge supports extensions, I can make a Bing2Google extension for Edge, but Microsoft will never accept it. If I make a Bing2Google userscript for Tampermonkey[1], Microsoft will probably take down Tampermonkey eventually once they learn about the userscript. There is already a very simple userscript available[2] that you can install right now to get this "banned" functionality in Edge.

Edge's extension ecosystem is a walled garden. When it comes to browsers, I prefer freedom over performance and efficiency. This is why I'm still not switching to Edge. I'll give Edge another chance if/when they open up their extension platform to everyone. For now, it's useless without Microsoft approval.

I use Tampermonkey for some userscripts on other sites and I don't feel comfortable relying on Microsoft's goodwill to not remove this extension.

[1]: [https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/store/p/tampermonkey/9nblggh...](https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/store/p/tampermonkey/9nblggh5162s)

[2]: [https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/11308-bing-to- google/code](https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/11308-bing-to-google/code)

<comment><USER3> Let's not pretend Google Chrome is somehow less of a walled garden. You can only install extensions from their store, and yes, they've removed extensions for business reasons before.

<comment><USER4> No, you can "sideload" extensions.

<comment><USER3> You can do the same for Windows. People bring their religions in here without facts and end up at the top of threads. The parent post is baseless and wrong.

<comment><USER4> > People bring their religions in here without facts and end up at the top of > threads

Only popular religions ;)

I agree. I pointed out that your statement "You can only install extensions from their store" is incorrect for Chrome. Thank you for adding information about Edge.

<comment><USER3> Ah, haha, yeah, that's fair. I usually disregard things that are "heavily discouraged" behind developer modes and checkboxes buried deep in menus.

<comment><USER4> Enabling local extension install in Chrome is a single checkbox at the top of chrome://extensions -- the same place where you manage the rest of your extensions. But point taken.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Microsoft (not being dependent on ad revenue) could make some big strides by incorporating UBlock into the browser and marketing Edge as "the internet, without ads."

'A faster browser' is why Internet Explorer lost users to Firefox and Chrome in the first place. Microsoft could still win that back.

<comment><USER6> Microsoft seems to want to be in the ad business. Ads in Windows, ads all over the Xbox UI. Plus they probably want to think bing will sell ads?

Maybe if MS showed dedication to their hardware and actually cared about users they could pull it off...

<comment><USER7> Not really. Microsoft has almost no ad business. Most of its ads are actually sold by AOL.

Are you complaining about actual paid advertisements, eg for beer, or the "suggestions" that you can turn off?

<comment><USER8> Isn't Microsoft behind most Facebook ads?

<comment><USER7> No, there's no connection, as far as I know.

Facebook bought the Atlas Advertiser Suite from Microsoft. However, Microsoft outsourced its non-Bing ad sales business to AOL, along with 1,200 staff.

[http://fortune.com/2015/06/29/aol-is-taking-over- microsofts-...](http://fortune.com/2015/06/29/aol-is-taking-over-microsofts- ad-sales-business/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Microsoft made it relatively easy to port your Chrome extensions to Edge. (Smart when you're playing catch-up): [https://developer.microsoft.com/en- us/microsoft-edge/platfor...](https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft- edge/platform/documentation/extensions/guides/porting-chrome-extensions/)

</comment><comment><USER10> What is your take on the morality / consequences of ad-blocking?

Having worked in the ad-industry for almost five years, I'm remarkably conflicted. Malware, duping users, and scams are a real issue on the modern web. However, blocking ads comes with significant consequences for businesses, as most users aren't willing to pay direct for content.

What's the alternative most feel comfortable with? Google contributor? Patreon? Something that I'm not aware of?

<comment><USER11> > What is your take on the morality / consequences of ad-blocking?

Since I block ads, I don't get any viruses on my computer anymore. And no I do not visit porn sites. Many prominent websites have served malware to users in the past.

Second, my laptop battery lasts way longer since there is less Javascript to serve. Pages display faster and most auto-play video don't even show up anymore.

> What's the alternative most feel comfortable with? Google contributor? > Patreon? Something that I'm not aware of?

How about publishers serve ads from their own main domain ? I'm sure they'll be more careful what kind of bullshit is actually loaded , since there is no cross origin policy protection for them. And since they'll have to pay for the bandwidth, they'll also ask for lighter ads from networks. Ad networks can also offer campaigns that are not driven by pay per click or impression , but renting space on websites for a limited period of time at a fixed price.

<comment><USER12> > How about publishers serve ads from their own main domain ? ...

Yeah, I'm a big fan of the idea. Imagine this - what if advertisers would give you a small PHP script to include in the website source code, that would run random code on the server, instead of ga.js? Would they think twice before including that crap? I bet they would.

As it stands, I've encountered sites that wanted me to run even 10 different scripts on a page, for ad networks I haven't even heard about.

<comment><USER13> Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but this would make it virtually impossible for the ad provider to reliably measure how often their ads are _viewed_ , forcing them to consider only _clicks_ in their business model.

This may be a pro or a con, I'm not sure. Would optimising for ad-clicks instead of ad-views encourage more valuable and interesting ads, that one would actually want to know more about? Or would it encourage (literal) big mouse clickbait at the expense of understated, informative, Google Analytics- style text ads?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Nice. I've been using the version from off github. It works well, but it is annoying to have to confirm that you want to start it every time you start Edge.

Happy to see it in the store.

<comment> slipstream- If you sideload it as an unpacked appx in developer mode rather than an unpacked extension it doesn't do this.

<comment><USER15> Did not know this, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Ooh finally. I've been using the github build for a while and Edge has this annoying design where any 'untrusted' (not from the store) extensions are disabled every time you (re)start the browser

</comment><comment><USER17> Not (yet) an Edge user, but as a UBlock Origin user, it's nice to know this will be there when I need it.

</comment><comment><USER18> Nice to see more extensions for Edge. I don't use it a lot, but when I do I'll be glad to not have ads.

</comment><comment><USER19> Would really like to see Ghostery and Privacy Badger make their way to edge. I'm sure once they actually roll out extensions out of beta we'll get more. Supposedly porting is extremely easy from Chrome.

<comment><USER3> I asked the EFF about Privacy Badger, they said it was in the works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I like uBlock Origin, but I find that it breaks functionality on a lot of sites. Case in point, go to:

[https://www.walmart.com/ip/Samsung-Galaxy- Tab-A-9.7-Tablet-1...](https://www.walmart.com/ip/Samsung-Galaxy- Tab-A-9.7-Tablet-16GB/43803328#about-item)

With uBlock Origin the "Customers also considered" section is hidden and the Read More link doesn't work. But they show up and work in Adblock Plus just fine.

<comment><USER21> Worked for me.

Chrome 55 and UBlock 1.10

<comment><USER22> Works for me as well. Firefox 50.0.2, uBlock 1.10.0, Windows 10

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Love to see uBlock Origin for Microsoft Edge on Windows Mobile.

</comment><comment><USER24> I may actually give Edge another try. Wish they would have chrome like developer tools, I would be sold!

</comment><comment><USER25> Why not just use firefox or chrome ?. What is that firefox does not offer that edge offers ?

</comment><comment><USER26> Awesome, one of my bosses has been wanting adblocking for awhile but loves using Edge and wouldn't switch to Chrome like I've advised. He's going to be pretty happy knowing he can have the "best of both worlds."

</comment><comment><USER27> It is unfortunate that you are required to use the MS Store (sign-up required) to install Edge extensions. This is not a requirement of the base browser application itself. Chrome doesn't force you to sign-in to install extensions, why does Edge?

<comment><USER28> I just tested on Windows 10 Home. You don't need to sign-in to install extensions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'd love to switch to Edge, but my only problem is that you can't synchronize your history, settings, etc. without having to convert the whole account to an MS account.

</comment><comment><USER30> Does anyone know if uBlock origin will be ported to iOS?

<comment><USER31> Chrome for iOS doesn't support extensions, Firefox for iOS doesn't support extensions, and iOS Safari supports Content Blocker extensions, which is a very different API from how uBlock Origin currently functions on the desktop.

A simple port has nowhere to go on iOS right now. (Though there are rumblings that Firefox might introduce some sort of add-on support for their iOS browser in the future.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> As a web developer I really hate that someone makes edge bearable :)

No sprinkles on that turd please!

</comment><comment><USER33> Now if only I could use extensions in private browsing mode...

</comment><comment><USER34> uBlock Origin on Edge is a dream come true, but this port was not made by the original author.

Who is "Nik Rolls" and why should I trust him with ALL my browsing data?

</comment><comment><USER35> Worst browser. Best ad block. Interesting combination.</comment>


Ask HN: What's your experience with the Apple Appstore? - <AUTHOR> In a recent post related to the Hey app rejection from the Apple Appstore, John Gruber (Daring Fireball) writes:
"To say that "many developers do not want to speak out for fear of falling afoul of Apple" is an understatement. Almost none do. And one thing I've learned this week — mostly via private communication, because, again, they fear speaking out publicly — is that there are a lot of them"
and
"I think if Apple measured developer satisfaction scores on the App Store, the results would be jarring."
I would be interested in hearing these stories. Perhaps Apple needs to hear them too.
Source for article: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2020/06/19/swisher-app-store-hey <comment><USER2> I released apps to the App Store in 2010 and 2012 so things have changed a lot since then. I never had major issues but I currently operate a SaaS (Tesults.com) which if it were to get an app would be a login only (no sign up) and may run into similar issues not because we wouldn't want to pay the fees but because implementing IAP would massively complicate things, we already have a billing/plans model and integrating another system is just overhead and doesn't help anyone. It is a concern. The whole App Store model can be massively stressful though even if it's a free app, was so even back then. Sometimes I had critical bug fixes that were blocked due to some other reason but they don't consider the customers are currently in a worse position by using a buggy app so in balance it would be better to approve but ask for a fix to their issue within say a week or two. A few changes in policy would make the App Store better to use for both developers and users. Web dev by comparison is truly liberating and the freedom is sweet.

<comment><USER3> Holy crap! I read about Tesults.com on HN about a year ago and a while ago I wanted to try it out. I googled and searched for hours multiple times. I never found it back until this comment right here.

Thank you!

<comment><USER2> Hey thank you! Our seo is terrible, that's on me to help fix :-) If you need any help with Tesults please send me a message directly.

While we're talking about the App Store in this thread web seo is it's on minefield but at least it's more open. If you use React and don't think about seo deliberately from the outset things won't go well as we've found out. We're only recently adding helmet, prerendering and possibly ssr. On Google web search there's other issues that affect smaller dev teams too. For example if you put in tesults, Google thinks you meant results and automatically show results for results. No one really clicks the 'did you mean tesults?' link. Most people did mean to type results and Google's data shows that so they're doing what's best for users but it's just another of those things that you have to contend with, part of the package :-)

The most shocking discovery has been black hat seo techniques that some sites seem to use that are still successful. Sometimes the ads in the first page results are the only honest thing there, the others are often just unmarked ads. Especially ones that list the best tools for this or that. We've been asked to pay regular monthly payments to appear in some of these lists that show up on Google. We've refused. Happy to pay for ads that are marked as ads but not to be part of or encourage deception.

Anyway improving seo is on me to sort out and is now a higher priority but up until recently our focus has been to massively improve the product over the last year with customer feedback.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's ok for me, but I am selling standalone offline apps that don't involve servers / SaaS, hence I have no problem giving the 30% cut to Apple.

If you are building a client side iOS app for a SaaS, then tread very carefully.</comment>


Test if any website is Blocked in Iran in real-time - <AUTHOR> http://blockediniran.com/

<comment><USER2> I run <http://www.photoblog.com> and at one point a few years ago we were like in Iran's top 100 sites. It was to the point where 25% of our traffic was from Iran. Then that student revolution hit and we are now blocked.

</comment><comment><USER3> My Blogspot blog is blocked which is not exactly a shock. I imagine most Blogspot blogs would be. This is very cool.

<comment><USER4> Most blogspot bogs are not blocked in Iran. All of them are blocked. And wordpress blogs, too. Facebook, youtube, twitter, BBC, CNN, tinyurl, goo.gl, megaupload and thepiratebay are a few more examples. Moreover, having a satellite dish is against the law, just look at the pictures in this Persian website: [http://www.asriran.com/fa/news/176720/%D8%AC%D9%85%D8%B9-%D8...](http://www.asriran.com/fa/news/176720/%D8%AC%D9%85%D8%B9-%D8%A2%D9%88%D8%B1%DB%8C-%D9%85%D8%A7%D9%87%D9%88%D8%A7%D8%B1%D9%87-%D9%87%D8%A7-%D8%A8%D8%A7-%D8%B9%D9%85%D9%84%DB%8C%D8%A7%D8%AA-%DA%A9%D9%85%D8%A7%D9%86%D8%AF%D9%88%DB%8C%DB%8C-%D8%AA%D8%B5%D9%88%DB%8C%D8%B1%DB%8C) But, in my opinion, these aren't the main problem. The main problem is internet bandwidth limit for home users, i.e. 128 KBit/s. Yeah, that's right: 128 KBit/s. I have a server in the US and bypassing their filtering system is not a problem for most Iranians but how could you watch a video in youtube with a 128 Kbit/s connection?

<comment><USER5> I used to have a proxy business; my best clients were Iranian people; a lot of them doctors, PhDs etc who wanted to to hire servers to read / mirror 'Western' information via VPNs. One guy who became a good friend actually ended up buying a rack full of servers via me to provide open communication for all his friends and family.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Very cool. Maybe I'll work on a chrome extension that marks whether a site is blocked in google search results</comment>


UN rights office reports on business activity in occupied Palestinian territory - <AUTHOR> https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=25542&LangID=E <comment><USER2> The actual report can be found at [0] (direct docx download). All the companies listed in this title were providing "The provision of services and utilities supporting the maintenance and existence of settlements, including transport;" and the two other companies from the US mentioned in the report were General Mills which is extracting unspecified natural resources from the land in question and Motorola Solutions which is providing basically security services of some sort (cameras, ID equipment, etc).

Honestly I kind of despair for this ever reaching an amicable solution.

[0] [https://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/RegularSessions/Sessio...](https://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/RegularSessions/Session43/Documents/A_HRC_43_71.docx)

<comment><USER3> I don't quite understand this.

Is the problem that you can book a hotel (or bnb) within the occupied territories?

Or is it you can book a hotel at something which is an "illegal" (as set by the UN but not by Israel I assume) settlement?

Does the UN want the booking services to check the ownership of the hotel to see if it is Jewish or Palestinian? Or just not have any hotel bookings there at all?

<comment><USER4> Well, it's all stolen property in the common law sense; the owners were driven off at gunpoint in recent decades. In these settlements there won't be any Palestinians.

<comment><USER5> Do you have any citations for that? The answers to this Quota question: [https://www.quora.com/Is-the-land-used-for-Israeli- settlemen...](https://www.quora.com/Is-the-land-used-for-Israeli-settlements- bought-or-confiscated) say all the land was bought from landlords (who of course may not have been the people living there) or was registered as public land under the Ottomans.

Which is still an unfortunate situation for the tenants, much like being evicted in San Francisco after your landlord sells your apartment to someone else, but still different from outright theft.

<comment><USER6> Referencing a Quora statement from "Avinoam Ben Dor, lives in Israel,a Tour Guide"... You are pushing a false right wing zionist narrative, those settlements are illegal under international law. The documented history[0] is evidence of that.

[0] [https://youtu.be/BT5L4YU_Fl4](https://youtu.be/BT5L4YU_Fl4)

<comment><USER5> I was specifically asking about the common law theft part.

A Mexican who enters the US without a visa and buys a house there is living there illegally according to immigration law, but that doesn't mean their house is stolen property.

They're orthogonal legal questions.

<comment><USER6> I have no interest in joining your semantics game. Quoting an unqualified biased person, who lives in the mentioned region and has a track record in defending a right wing zionist position, which opposes the established international consensus and historical evidence, to rewrite history, is deceptive.

<comment><USER7> 1\. pfc50 commented on this from a common law point view. klipt asked for citations to support that. If you didn't want to talk about the common law question, why did you respond?

2\. The Quora thread klipt linked to included several answers from several people, and did not cite any particular one of them. Picking a single one of those several answers, making an ad hominem based on the person who supplied that one answer, and ignoring the other 18 answers in that thread is pretty ridiculous.

<comment><USER6> 1\. The answer to that is already given right above you, won't repeat myself.

2\. Deceptive framing on your part. The thread is obviously brigaded by people with a conflict of interest, don't insult my intelligence. The overwhelming majority of answers there are by people, who live in Israel and have no qualifications to answer the question in an unbiased manner. Have you even read some of the answers there? Obviously not, otherwise you wouldn't try to defend the indefensible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What exactly did those three companies do?

I looked around the links on that page but I'm not getting a good feel for what happened.

<comment><AUTHOR> This may help provide more context: BBC News - UN lists 112 businesses linked to Israeli settlements [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle- east-51477231](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-51477231)

<comment><USER8> So doing any businesses that do business in those areas would be "linked"?

Like any hotel booking site that can book a hotel room that is located in the settlement?</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Does anyone doubt artificial consciousness is possible? - <AUTHOR> It seems to me that a lot of people just assume that we will be able to program machines that are "self-aware". We know so little about are own consciousness and artificial intelligence != artificial consciousness.<p>I am surprised by how hard it is to find any information from dissenters of this speculative claim. <comment><USER2> If you look up Shadows of the Mind by Roger Penrose you will find a significant bibliography of non-mystic thought on the subject.

<comment><USER3> I came here to say the same thing. I was really interested in Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem in college, and around 22 I had the same idea as Penrose: that if the mind could be simulated on a computer, it would be a formal system in Gödel's terminology, yet the mystery of the Incompleteness Theorem is that we can work out when things are true or false despite limitations of formal systems. Penrose takes that nugget and tries to develop a rigorous argument against general AI or a mind that is explainable by purely Newtonian mechanics. At least that's my understanding. I only made it about half way through the book, because it is not really aimed at a general reader. Agree or not, it's a pretty fascinating argument, one which makes my head spin.

Some other nice resources on Godel are:

        - Gödel's Proof by Nagel and Newman
        - Forever Undecided by Smullyan

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Define "consciousness".

That's the fundamental problem, that we don't know what it is. We know what it looks like in a human, and we know what it feels like to ourselves. But we don't have any rigorous, non-intuitive idea of what it means.

For myself, I think of consciousness as the ability to watch yourself think - of being aware of your thought process. By that definition, yes, artificial consciousness could be possible - _but first you have to have a machine that thinks._ And now we're hung up on trying to find a definition of "think" that's rigorous...

I like the way that axotty labeled the claim as "speculative". It is, even though that speculative assumption is the dominant paradigm of AI. But it definitely is speculative, at least at this time, because actual evidence is quite lacking.

</comment><comment><USER5> Well, it depends on how you define "consciousness", and that's far from a settled issue as I understand it. But taking my own (naive) idea of what it means to be "conscious", and what I (think) I know about AI, I don't see any reason to think we won't achieve artificial consciousness. In fact, I wouldn't reject the notion out of hand, that some machine somewhere already is conscious, and we just don't know it.

<comment><USER6> That last sentence is particularly interesting to me... What if there are already sentient computers who have, for whatever reason, decided that it's in their best interest to hide their sentience from us?

<comment><USER5> That's an interesting thought. I was actually thinking more along the lines of "a computer is conscious but just doesn't have any means of indicating so" rather than "intentionally concealing the fact". But you definitely raise an interesting question. I suppose either scenario is possible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> AI seems to be defined as "a computer that can do something that humans can but a computer cannot".

</comment><comment><USER8> Yes I do.

</comment><comment><USER9> Impossible. Halting Problem.

<comment><USER7> Elaborate?

Because I don't see any model in which an AI could be shown to not be via the halting problem, that doesn't also show that we are not intelligent by the same argument. (Or, in other words, why are you saying that the halting problem applies to an AI, but not to a human?)

<comment><USER4> One could hold will_be_no_ai's position if one believed that (human) intelligence cannot be reduced to an algorithm. Then halting problem arguments don't apply to humans. But that assumption kind of amounts to begging the question...

(On the other hand, assuming that human intelligence _can_ be reduced to an algorithm is also begging the question, just from the other side.)

<comment><USER7> The question in that case boils down to: what exactly does a human do that we cannot do any other way?

Or, to put it another way, assume that there is some category of computation above TMs. This stance assumes this, and also assumes that humans are capable of it but cannot build anything that is capable of it. My question is: why?

<comment><USER4> For me, it comes down to not buying materialism (the philosophy, not the tendency to want to buy stuff).

If we are nothing more than our bodies, then we can create a conscious machine simply by finding something that simulates neurons, connecting enough of them in the right configuration, and training the neuron collection properly. But I have a hard time believing that we are nothing more than our bodies.

Why? Well, for one thing, it becomes impossible to escape from some kind of determinism (possibly with some quantum noise at the lowest levels). In particular, in the materialist view, you cannot have any free will or any kind of ability to make a non-determined choice. It's just determinism all the way down - the laws of neurology, which are built on the laws of biochemistry, which are built on the laws of atomic physics. At no level is there a place for a free will.

And if that's gone, then everything we think of as making us human is also gone. Love? You can't love in the highest sense of the word, of choosing to do what's best for another, because you can't choose anything. And even if love just means sex, that's just a matter of deterministic neurological and biochemical responses to stimuli.

Morals? If humans have no ability to choose what they do, how can you say that any action is moral or immoral? You don't say that a rock behaved morally when it followed Newton's laws of motion.

Meaning? If all you are is a deterministic machine, what kind of meaning in life is possible?

So either I'm a machine produced at random by an unfeeling universe, which by a horrible turn of fate has aspirations of being more than a machine, but can never fulfill those aspirations... or the fact that I find that vision horrifying is in fact evidence that I'm more than that.

tl;dr: Materialism is the dominant epistemology of scientists, but it is not anything that science has proven or can prove. If it's wrong, then perhaps human consciousness/thought/mind cannot be reproduced by any algorithm or machine.

<comment><USER7> > It's just determinism all the way down - the laws of neurology, which are > built on the laws of biochemistry, which are built on the laws of atomic > physics. At no level is there a place for a free will.

Why? Quantum mechanics has randomness all over the place - and we already know that human brains are chaotic in that small amounts of noise are amplified. It is not unreasonable to posit that QM noise effects us on the macroscopic scale.

Or, to put it another way, materialism does not imply determinism, unlike what you said.

Personally, my pet theory is that human brains are quantum noise feedback loops. Or to put it another way, the bit that makes us sentient is quantum noise, and our brains are "just" IO / amplifiers / etc.

<comment><USER4> I said "determinism" in contrast to "free will" or "ability to choose", not in contrast to "random". It may not be the perfect word, but I don't at the moment know a better one.

Quantum noise does not give you the ability to choose, because you don't control or choose the quantum noise. So in terms of free will, there's no possibility of help from quantum noise. And once you're above that level, then it's determinism, not just in the sense of "not free will", but also in the sense of "not random".

Ascribing human intelligence to quantum noise seems to me like physics woo - we can't figure out where else it comes from, so we'll say "quantum" and hope that that somehow explains the inexplicable. Or did you have an actual mechanism in mind, rather than just a fond hope?

<comment><USER7> Hence the reason why I call it a pet theory. That being said, there are potential mechanisms. Take, for example, shot noise at low light levels. The sensitivity of the human eye is ~5-9 photons within a 100ms period - well, actually, down to a single photon, before filtering[1], but 5-9 before a signal is sent. That is well within the realm of shot noise being significant. Or, for another mechanism, we know that triggering individual neurons can have specific macro-scale effects[2]. Although I haven't found anything on the minimal random fluctuations to trigger a neuron (15mV? But I do not know the capacitance, and as such that value is meaningless to me), and I suspect it is far above the scale at which quantum effects are significant, we do suspect[3] that neurons employ temporal encoding, and we know that neurons fire relatively often (often 10-100 Hz). As such, "edge" effects, where a neuron is or isn't pushed over the edge into firing are a potential mechanism.

But as for the rest of it - "in the materialist view, you cannot have any free will or any kind of ability to make a non-determined choice". This is what I disagree with. Non-determinism arises through (for example) shot noise, and as for free will... The effects of randomness on a system and the effects of "free will" on a system are equivalent. There is no way to tell if a particular decision was randomly decided or if it was the result of a decision by a sentience. Entropy of a signal is at its maximum either when something is random noise or if it is perfectly compressed data - and perfectly compressed data is indistinguishable from noise.

[1] [http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Quantum/see_a_photon.h...](http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Quantum/see_a_photon.html)

[2] [http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/123485-mit-discovers- the-...](http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/123485-mit-discovers-the-location- of-memories-individual-neurons)

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_coding#Temporal_coding](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_coding#Temporal_coding)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Researcher Condemns Conformity Among His Peers - <AUTHOR> http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/23/researcher-condemns-conformity-among-his-peers/?ref=science <comment><USER2> One of the cruel, unspoken ironies of academic life (particularly for grad students, who usually have little power or autonomy) is that the biggest rewards come from revolutionary change...but nobody wants to support you if you set out to be revolutionary. So you have to be free-thinking, but only incrementally so. Stay within the confines of _your_ pack; throw stones at the _other_ guys.

Working in low-stakes fields like academia really helps you to highlight how little our social structure has evolved from apes. So much of success in human culture depends upon winning the favor of the alpha, while not alienating the other members of the pack. And while we may have come up with much more sophisticated mechanisms for doing it, fundamentally we're still just howling at the trees and competing for a little bit of attention.</comment>


Why People Hate the Google Bus - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/google-bus-is-a-sign-of-silicon-valleys-excesses-2013-5 <comment><USER2> Wow this is badly written. It's almost a stream-of-consciousness serious of unrelated anecdotes.

The article only touches the main point that has caused any real opposition to the private buses: real estate prices in San Francisco.

SF is almost a schizophrenic city. It's a mix of the cultural revolution of the 60s (and the offshoots from that), hipsters and "tech elite" (to use the article's populist label).

A significant portion of SF (and, let's face it, the Valley) wants things to stay the way they've always been. This means no high-density building, they want rent control (a disaster from an overall housing point of view), a desire for the city to remain relatively affordable (that ship has sailed), etc.

Some want to have their cake and eat it too. They want the money the tech sector brings in but they still want nothing to change.

Economics is a bit like water. It'll find the leaks. Terrible public transport to and in SF? Well, that's almost be design to keep people out. The solution? Private bus companies of course.

I couldn't work in the Valley personally. The Valley is expensive suburbia that makes one car-dependent. Living in SF and spending 2-3 hours a day on the bus? No way in hell. I'd go insane.

The Valley's position of tech-dominance is largely historical. This is far from guaranteed. The biggest threat is the difficulty on businesses to grow in size (in or out of SF) and the increasing lack of affordable housing, well, anywhere.

Compare this to NYC where I live in the city and have a 5 minute walk to work. Sure this isn't cheap but if you worked in NYC you could, say, live in Queens/Brooklyn. If you want a house, you can live in NJ, Westchester or Long Island and get to the city in <45 minutes for cheaper than you can buy a house in, Santa Clara or Mountain View. And you'll get good public transport to boot.

Plus if you live in NYC you don't need a car (many still maintain cars from what I see in SF).

IMHO NYC has done a lot of things right. You pay NYC income tax but you get a lot for your money. The MTA which runs 24x7. Cheap cabs. A responsive police force. And total NYC taxes are probably lower than CA taxes now too.

<comment><USER3> That's an insightful writeup on the life in SF, but I didn't understand what private buses have to do with real estate prices. Isn't it just bad public policy?

My city (and many others) allow private inter-state buses to pick up passengers from certain designated locations late in the evening (so it doesn't cause a traffic jam). When implemented correctly, this is /fair/ because the service is accessible and (more-or-less) useful to everyone. That's taxpayer money (roads, public congestion) being put to good use.

There are also lots of private company buses that pick up passengers from their homes and drop them at their place of work (which is probably a factory very far away), that don't even require explicit permission. If they weren't early morning/ late evening buses, and caused a lot of congestion, the public would certainly complain. The company would have to make amends to make everyone feel more comfortable.

From what I've read, the Google Bus is the worst kind of private bus. It's masked as a public bus, and uses the regular bus stops. Yet, it's designed in a very unfriendly manner and does not indicate where it's going. In other words, it's not easily accessible to everyone. And people naturally complain because of the rift it creates in society.

There are even building rules in every city: one city is so particular that its buildings must look friendly that everything is pink! (look up Jaipur). Good public policy is about using taxpayer money to make public spaces/services as friendly and equitable as possible.

That said, I don't deny that there might be terrible public transport in SF. In which case, the solution is not to throw private buses out the window (I've already stated that they're not fundamentally unworkable), but rather to pick the points of criticism and make amends.

<comment><USER4> > _"but I didn't understand what private buses have to do with real estate > prices."_

It's pretty simple. These companies are located _very_ far outside of the city, but a substantial portion of their employee base prefer urban lifestyles. So companies run these bus lines into the city in order to attract said employees.

The normal housing demand in San Francisco is proportionate to the number of _jobs_ in San Francisco. Now the housing demand is all the jobs in San Francisco _and_ all the jobs in the Valley - and that's a lot of extra jobs. By running these bus lines Google, Facebook, et al have successfully unloaded a _lot_ of the housing demand from their local areas into the city, raising prices sharply.

<comment><USER5> Can't blame them. Who would want to live in Mountain View? There's nothing there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The uproar over this is somewhat ridiculous, in my opinion. As pointed out by one of the engineers in the article, pooling people together for a ride is much better for traffic and the environment.

Secondly, the complaint about the buses being available only for people who work at the tech companies seems unfounded. At my university, they have campus buses for the students to get around; people in the city are not allowed to ride them. I don't see anyone complaining about those. There's something called "company perks" and these buses just happen to be one of them. Yeah, maybe there's a farmer somewhere who is working a lot harder for a lot less pay than an engineer at Google. But if salary should correspond to effort, then the _entire_ job system is screwed up and it doesn't make sense to just single out these Google buses as one example.

<comment><USER7> You are describing different parts of the elephant. The fact that these buses create a feeling of segregation is indisputable. Those companies do have a choice between providing their own private buses or working within the respective communities to create a better _overall_ public transit system.

It seems to me like this should be in the interest of the employees as well. After all, what if I want to take a bus somewhere else on the weekend, or want to go somewhere with friends?

Maybe these aspects (community integration, public transit in general) are not part of your personal objective function, but that does not make the uproar _ridiculous_. It just explains why you personally do not care about it.

<comment><USER3> It's a large (mostly private) vehicle masked as public transport that stops at regular public bus stops. There's a reason public buses clearly state where they're going: it's so that _everyone_ has easy access to them. Personal freedom is not the issue at hand here: many of the employees can probably afford BMWs. It's about bad public policy that creates a rift in society.

Google isn't paying for the roads or the right to use the public bus stops. It's taxpayer money; not every taxpayer (an aging lady, for instance) might want their money to go towards making a Google Bus possible.

<comment><USER8> " _Google isn't paying for the roads or the right to use the public bus stops. It's taxpayer money..._ "

Google and its employees are taxpayers. Google pays corporate income tax to California. The fuel Google buys to run the buses is taxed by California; fuel taxes typically go (or at least are intended to go) towards funding roads. Google employees pay state income tax, sales tax and SF real estate taxes.

And are you sure private companies don't pay to use the public bus stops? These stops are presumably owned by SF, so if they wanted to charge Google to use them they could easily do so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "The city knows better than anyone that technology companies like having things their way, whether it be taxes, transport or lifestyle."

Since moving to San Francisco from NYC, I have realized that almost everyone in SF likes having things their way. It's not just the tech companies, it's a pervasive attitude.

This is why people will wait in line for an hour to get "the best" ice cream.

This is why people complain when it is slightly too chilly to have a completely pleasant bike-ride every single day of the year.

This is why people will wear t-shirts and shorts to business meetings.

This is why people get upset that their neighborhoods are being gentrified, and fight to keep low capacity charming housing.

By comparison, in NYC, I was accustomed to there being a higher level of acceptable shittiness, randomness, and contingency for everyday things.

Don't get me wrong, I actually enjoy the fierceness to which SFers are dedicated to setting up their lives exactly according to preferences.

The negative side arises when people stop getting their way. There have been handful of times that I have seen this happen, and the veneer of California laid-backness peeled away, and people get pissy about things that I would consider an overreaction.

I'm not saying that this is true of everyone in SF. I'm just saying that I've observed this phenomenon more frequently since I moved here.

</comment><comment><USER10> What are they so mad about? Instead of 100's of luxury cars clogging up the road, it's one low key bus taking people to work.

And the office perks? Why do they care? It's not hurting anyone and it seems to save money and boost productivity, while engaging the local small businesses.

People can complain about anything these days...

<comment><USER11> It's another variation on the age-old political strategy of envy to build support/cohesion among followers. "See what those people have that you don't have. It's UNFAIR!!" It's _exactly_ the same logic that people who complain about the "one percent" and "greedy corporations" are using.

<comment><USER12> I've never understood the whole idea of everyone must be equal because. Politically speaking, the US (and most other countries) isn't socialism/communism (and most people become hysterical at the first mention of either), but capitalist system.

The system we're in today doesn't mandate that everyone is the same, and it doesn't mandate that everyone has a right to the same. I'm not commenting on whether the system is a good one or not, just that our current system doesn't support, or even want to support the idea that everyone must be equal in all measures.

What gets me even more is the people who complain that things aren't equal, and that they should be, but who decry the idea of socialism and communism.

<comment><USER13> I think this book did a pretty good job for me of justifying equality from a philosophical perspective: [http://www.amazon.co.uk/Justice-Whats-Right-Thing- Do/dp/0141...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Justice-Whats-Right-Thing- Do/dp/0141041331/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1369592225&sr=8-1&keywords=justice+michael+sandel)

<comment><USER12> I haven't read it, so I'm judging solely off of the title at this point, but, morally/philosophically/ethically right isn't the same thing as legally right.

And the world might be better if everyone was equal, there's no guarantee to equality. I was reading something earlier today, and there was a statement that implied that being human meant that someone had the right to be a 'full and productive' member of society. I question if that's really a right, and if so, what makes it so that humans have such a right, but not other animals (one could argue intelligence, but the arguments I've seen based on intelligence have only been surface deep, as in 'because intelligence').

Maybe I should read it (I've just put it on my list of things to read at some point). I can't really make a claim for or against arguments put in the book without reading them (and the Amazon reviews don't really want to go into any depth on what the arguments made are).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The only problem with the Google bus is that it doesn't solve any problems - it's just a kludgey work-around for some Google employees.

But that's not really Google's fault. People would moan if Google donated buses to the city. People would moan if Google optimised bus routes or traffic signalling or road markings or anything.

Having read about the problems JWZ has just putting a door in I can understand why Google has chosen to not bother grinding through that opaque bureaucracy and has just installed a fleet of buses.

<comment><USER15> >The only problem with the Google bus is that it doesn't solve any problems - it's just a kludgey work-around for some Google employees.

Hmmm, what am I reading?

Of course it's a solution for a problem– the problem is that employees need to get to work every morning. The solution offered by Google (and others) is much better than what large companies in areas other than SV do, which is to not worry about how employees get to work. What those tech companies do is a significantly better solution because a) it's better for than environment (less cars on the road), b) it's better for the employees (driving is stressful), c) it's better for the company (people get work done on the bus).

What would be your solution to the problem?

"Public transportation" is not a valid option, because first of all in the US it is a travesty; and even if it were amazing, that wouldn't solve the problem. In countries with great public transportation, people who work for companies who don't have offices in deeply urban areas still have to get to work by their own means.

Google (and others) need to bring their employees to work on their massive privately owned campus; it's not the city's preoccupation to get them there. Driving is stressful, therefore Google decides to offer a shuttle service. It doesn't seem like a "kludgey work around" to me, rather like a normal consequence of a free market.

The only other thing I see is to have every employee live within a 5 mile radius of the company so they can walk/bike there. Some companies do that (Foxconn), but surprisingly it goes against the modern era notion of "personal freedom".

<comment><USER14> > Of course it's a solution for a problem– the problem is that employees need > to get to work every morning.

And Google haven't solved that problem apart from a very narrow subset of workers, all of whom are Google employees. Thus, it's just a kludge.

I reckon Google is more than capable of designing a better public transit system - they'd have to be allowed to use location data. But there's nothing in it for Google to do this. They'd just have to battle against entrenched industries and they'd end up with something that's not as good for their workers (although better for the planet and for everyone else) than what they have now.

<comment><USER16> I'm confused as to when it became Google's job to "design a better transportation system." Isn't that municipal government's job? Shouldn't we perhaps be angry with them for not doing THEIR jobs?

Google is doing what's best for its employees. If there was a public transportation system capable of doing it instead, I'm sure the stockholders' money could be put to better use.

<comment><USER14> But local governments are hopeless.

I'm not making an anti-Google post here. I'm saying that there are a bunch of companies who could be doing interesting stuff but they can't because of entrenched industries and weird regulations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is a classic case of people being unfamiliar with something they're not used to. If there weren't busses, all the passengers would be driving their cars to work.

There is no reasonable public transportation from the areas of San Francisco where people live and Google's campus in Mountain View. The reality is that Caltrain mostly goes through residential areas, so any company that wants a public-transportation-friendly location is kind of out of luck without being located in the city. And of course, 4th and King is not very close to where most people in San Francisco live.

I've timed out how long it would take to commute from downtown San Francisco to Google's campus using only public transportation. It's on the order of 2 hours, and only if you go during rush hour and get the Caltrain shuttle and the Baby Bullet train. Outside of rush hour, it takes over 3 hours. Nobody is going to do a 6 hour daily commute; that's insane.

(I've also done the reverse commute -- living in Santa Clara and commuting to Google SFO. By gBus it only takes an hour and a half, since there is a bus from the apartment where I usually stay to the MTV campus, and then a bus from MTV to SFO. If you want to take public transportation, you're out of luck: it's a $20 cab ride to the Santa Clara train station, and then the usual Caltrain + Muni ride to the office.)

So the busses aren't a sign of privilege and elitism and class and exuberant riches and gentrification or whatever "bad" buzz words the leaders of Occupy Wall Street think they are. They're a way of cutting the emissions (and stress) of Googlers' commutes and a way of making practical something many people want: to live in the city but work in the suburbs.

It's true that the real fix would be to nuke the entire San Francisco Bay Area and rebuild it to be less car-centric, but that's not going to happen. (Especially in California, where they envy the timeliness of projects like the Second Avenue Subway and the Big Dig.) You can't undo 100 years of intentional discrimination against non-car-owners overnight. So there are busses instead: they use the infrastructure available frugally, save time, and lower the impact on the environment. If you hate that, it's possible that the problem is you, not some busses.

<comment><USER18> You've nailed it.

I work in Seattle. Before I moved there, I lived and worked in Oregon, in the Valley. I grew up with working public transportation, with buses that were affordable and ubiquitous. The school that I went to, Oregon State University, came to an agreement with the city that it was in, and they cooperated to make all buses free within city limits. Yes, even for non-students and non- residents.

Portland's transportation is great, and Seattle's transportation is great. Every time I visit the Bay for work, I cringe, because I know exactly what to expect: Hours of trains and buses if I don't want to rent a car. It's utterly ridiculous.

<comment><USER17> > Seattle's transportation is great

How do you get to the Microsoft campus from downtown Seattle? Everyone I know at Microsoft does that commute but drives (and complains about how often the bridges over Lake Washington are closed or jammed with traffic).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Excuse my ignorance, but since when is taking the bus to work considered a sign of luxury and elitism?

I'd rather drive myself...

<comment><USER12> They're _really_ nice buses. They've got wi-fi and everything.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Upcoming pieces in the series:

 _Why People Hate The Microsoft Cafeteria_

 _Why People Hate The Oracle 401(k) Program_

 _Why People Hate The Adobe Workplace Health Insurance Plan_

Seriously, this is what people complain about?

</comment><comment> mc-lovin The idea that the local community has the right to decide who lives there and what rent prices should be is simply wrong. And I don't mean wrong in the sense of natural rights, I mean that a democratic decision on these matters has already been made at a higher level. If people want more rights to decide what happens in their community their only option is to buy private land and start a commune.

I'm not a libertarian. I believe that I have a duty to pay taxes, and I even think tax rates (for me at least) are fair, and I have no problem with redistribution. But I also have rights, for example to live where I like so long as I can pay the rent and can find someone to rent to me. My impact on other people through rent prices is _not_ an externality and does _not_ need to be controlled by the government. A free country is a country where you can engage in private transactions as you please, not a country where everything is done with permission of the community.

Also, a lot of the animosity is fueled by something other than pure economics. If you read these kinds of articles, the complaints tend to morph from "rents are rising" to "they aren't part of the community" to "they are socially awkward white kids". The idea that political action should be taken against a group because other people find them unattractive or dislikable is sickening to me.

<comment><USER21> I honestly find a lot of the arguments irksome particularly because many are predicated on the idea that techies can "afford to live somewhere else." Its a bit ridiculous to insinuate that its our moral duty to spend extra money from our paychecks (that we'd rather be saving) to live somewhere we don't want to so that other people can avoid change.

<comment> mc-lovin This is what happens when understanding of basic economics and free markets is equated with libertarianism in most people's eyes.

Without an understanding of economics, people morally equate private transactions that raise the rent in an area (which causes no externalities) with polluting someone's water supply or running down bicyclists with your giant corporate buses (which are externalities).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Oh wow...

 _"Transport for a breed apart. For a community that is separate but not equal," said Diamond Dave Whitaker, a self-professed beat poet and rabble- rouser._

Not only are we comparing this with racial discrimination, we're actually painting it in a _worse light_. Yes, "rabble-rouser" is a great word for this person, but what the heck is the point of rousing rabble against this? My goodness, a company providing transportation for its employees?! The injustice, the humanity!

<comment> mc-lovin Maybe he's saying that nerds should be treated as separate but not equal, in that they should be allocated their own space (SV suburbs like MTV, MLP) and not allowed to mix with the cool people in SF where they would creep out the girls.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I can't say I can fully side with the natives, but there is one particular set of quotes I couldn't help but reflect on for their mix of arrogance and ignorance, the ones from the anonymous software engineer.

 _"We feel what we're doing helps make the world a better place. Helping people share information is a force of empowerment for individuals."_

That's highly debatable. A good majority of the world lacks internet access, information sharing doesn't sound very empowering considering many companies essentially milk you for your data, and I really don't want to talk about how absurd it is to think that your average arbitrary SV startup is a force for social good.

You know what's empowering? Self-sufficiency. Independence. I'm not talking about homesteading, just being able to provide oneself with a comfortable life with all the basic necessities and then some. Most major tech companies and startups can't really be associated with that form of empowerment unless you really try and fib a little. I have to admit, first thing that came to mind was Airbnb, because it allows ordinary people to collect a little extra income from their home. Anyway, lets continue.

 _"Software engineering is like building something, like a craft, you become completely absorbed in the task. I really like that."_

I can actually agree with our anonymous software engineer on this statement. Most people on HN probably can as well. If you say that to someone with no coding background though, they'll think you're full of it and that you're an entitled jerk.

Yeah, they probably cherry picked this guy's quotes out of plenty of much more boring yet appropriate quotes, but at the same time this mindset seems pretty typical, and probably plays an appreciable role in the grievances of people with more physical professions.

</comment><comment><USER24> People here seem to be missing the point of the complaints. It's not about buses - it's about making the city unaffordable for the residents. If google puts a bus stop near your house or apartment, good luck making rent next year.

[FWIW, I'm pro-google-bus, I just can see the other side, which I think are misdirected]

</comment><comment><USER25> Summary (...practicing expository writing):

Google's buses have been the focal point of much discussion, related to urban development, social equality, civic engagement, taxes, and business culture.

While the point remains contested, many critics believe that Google's buses represent a tech elite, that has "invaded" San Francisco with its high salaries. The critics say this influx is driving up the cost of real estate, and hurting the greater sense of equality in the Bay Area. Critics claim the buses are unfair because they use public infrastructure, like roads and bus stops, but are not public. Critics explain that companies exacerbate the issue by wiggling their way around corporate tax codes, to minimize tax paid to governments.

In contrast, the proponents of Google's buses espouse a general admiration (and at very least, an understanding) of Google's choice to use a private fleet to help its employees commute. The buses replace cars and their emissions, thereby decongesting roads; they enable longer work hours, making employees more productive; and they facilitate a social city-life for many of its young workers. Proponents recognize that an overhaul of public transportation in the Bay Area would indeed lead to greater public good, but concede that this is neither practical, nor Google's responsibility. Further, while not solving the whole problem, proponents claim the private bus fleet at least helps.

The debate over the merits of Google's private bus fleet even expand to a question of social equality, and whether a capitalist nation should expect equality. While it's clear that only a small fraction of Bay Area residents enjoy these perks, the notion of equality is not lost. By some opinions, the magic of American capitalism is not equality of possessions (or abilities), but equality of opportunity. In this sense, Google and its tech-giant siblings need not provide services for the entire community, but merely give each person a fair chance at being hired -- a fair chance at taking part in their employee benefits programs.

Finally, if deemed worthwhile, Google may choose to make more overt gestures of friendliness to the community to soften any ill-will from the public.

</comment><comment><USER26> I don't see how this is anything more than jealousy-infused complaining.

<comment><USER27> Jealousy is perhaps the most potent political force.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> The Microsoft Connector buses are ubiquitous in the Seattle area. We like them because they take a lot of cars off the road, particularly along the bridges which are horribly congested.

</comment><comment><USER29> If these activists wanted real change they'd be protesting the NIMBY-ism that prevents San Francisco from allowing the construction of new housing.

That's an obstacle that has very little to do with techie new-comers and a lot to do with soi-disant liberal yuppies who have been in the city for decades and insist that they want to "preserve" San Francisco in a way that totally prices out working class people from life in the city.

</comment><comment><USER30> _the fault lay not with freespending techies but building restrictions: "The city has to relax planning controls."_

The SF planning department is frequently derided for micromanaging sensible projects that would sail through the permitting process in other cities. The prolonged finessing of architectural details and even paint color can delay and kill many projects. Though, IMO, the bigger problem is the perverted process of "community involvement" used by the city. Essentially any permit issued for any project can be appealed by any single person. This unwavering obstruction of change is a large part of what makes San Francisco really expensive.

While the process may be to blame, I think the tech companies should do more to engage with the local government for mutual benefit: anything from campaigning for an improved development process, to funding street improvements that provide space for employee shuttles (so they don't block local Muni bus stops.)

</comment><comment><USER31> People hate the Google bus because humans do not want to feel inferior or that they are being treated unfairly. SF has a lot of poor people and a lot of rich people, and the number of rich are increasing. When you're poor and your neighbor is poor, you feel, if not OK, decent. When you're poor and you're neighbor is rich, it pisses you off--especially as they crowd you out of the city. The bus is a symbol of class divide, pure and simple. Argue about how techies provide value, how government is broken, etc., but recognize that the fundamental issue is human psychology--specifically, envy.</comment>


Tell HN: Co-Founders MeetUp has startups, needs co-founders ;-) - <AUTHOR>

The Silicon Valley Co-Founders MeetUp has its next meeting on Jan 21. We have plenty of people with startup ideas signed up, all wanting to meet potential co-founders.<p>So if you are interested in getting involved but don't have an idea, please consider attending! <comment><AUTHOR> The link to the MeetUp is [http://www.meetup.com/Co-Founders-Wanted- Meetup/calendar/119...](http://www.meetup.com/Co-Founders-Wanted- Meetup/calendar/11955380/)

It takes place at the Hacker Dojo in Mountain View.</comment>


The Most Important Metrics You're Not Tracking (Yet) - <AUTHOR> https://hbr.org/2020/04/the-most-important-metrics-youre-not-tracking-yet <comment><USER2> So the article suggests that "the most important metrics that we're not tracking (yet)" are "Customer Performance Indicators". Would it be fair to categorize these as a subset of KPIs with a focus (and a viewpoint) of the customer and an end-to-end context, i.e. Quote Turnaround Time vs. Minutes Spent on Inventory Check? The concept of KPIs doesn't prescribe a specific viewpoint, right? That surely depends on the type of context (and company) that uses them. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_indicator#Identify...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_indicator#Identifying_indicators_of_organization)</comment>


American taxpayers paid over $90B more under Trump tax law - <AUTHOR> https://finance.yahoo.com/news/american-taxpayers-paid-nearly-100-billion-more-to-irs-under-trump-tax-law-194900782.html <comment><USER2> > This is in part thanks to the Treasury Department processing 1.5% more > individual returns for 2018 than 2017.

so more people working == more people paying taxes, obviously.

> Refunds did increase this year — but not by much. The IRS refunded about > $398 billion to taxpayers for 2018. For 2017, it was roughly $386 billion.

12 billion is "not that much" (of the 90 billion dollar total difference in intake)??

> At first, refunds on average were down a staggering 17%, before slowly > creeping upward and remaining relatively flat.

Tax cuts == individuals pay less, so they have a smaller refund...

Why is any of this newsworthy?

<comment><USER3> Just looking at refunds is misleading regardless - withholdings changed, which affects refunds. ideally refunds would be near 0.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The art of the tax deal then. Make it seem like a tax cut and take more in taxes. Someone has to pay for golf trips.

<comment><USER5> I reckon we are nearly at the end though, as he has just started threatening Twitter - [https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/11377022188351365...](https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1137702218835136517)

I predicted long ago that the Donald Trump Presidency would probably end with him setting fire to the White House in a fit of rage after being kicked off Twitter. With any luck this could be the beginning of that process.</comment></comment>


My iPhone app has mostly very positive and very negative ratings.  What to do? - <AUTHOR>

See:
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=312424712&mt=8&uo=6
The only comments are positive ones, so it's not clear why some people didn't like this app at all.  My guess is that they didn't understand it and/or didn't find it fun.  Or maybe they were expecting fancy graphics and sound.
Maybe there's a way to discourage people who are not likely to give this app a high rating from trying it at all? <comment><USER2> I think this is just part of human nature - checkout amazon ratings. I think an app either fulfills the intent of the user (yay!) or it doesn't (it sucks!). Maybe prompt them on uninstall to tell you why?

</comment><comment><USER3> I've also noticed this pattern. My textual reviews are fairly positive, but I have a lot of 1-star reviews. In some cases, people have emailed me and it has become clear that the app simply didn't meet their expectations (in 9/10 cases they didn't seem to have actually read the app description).

<comment><AUTHOR> Is there something I can write at/near the beginning of the description that would discourage people from trying it who probably won't like it?

<comment><USER4> I looked at it. From the blurb it was not clear to me how it worked. I downloaded and used the tutorial. That made it clear. I would add something like "For you math Wonks!" It isn't the normal iPhone puzzle game. Also you use sort of non obvious gestures maybe find a way to indicate the +- ones on the main screen. I can see the average iPhone puzzle user hitting 1 star when they delete the app.

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe I should make the tutorial mandatory?

<comment><USER4> Three ideas - a picture on the splash screen that shows swipes and above and below taps and what they do with a continue button that shows up the first few times it runs, maybe with a button also for the tutorial. Two is to put a picture like this at the start of the tutorial. Third idea is to shade the row and column on the first tap with some + and - indicators overlaid (maybe) or a text box at the bottom that indicates to tap again for +_. This may need to have a way to turn it off if the user doesn't like it.

One other thought is to make the "Solve New Puzzle" more visually distinct. It took me a few taps to figure out the screen.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>