'Cut-through' traffic caused by Waze app must stop, L.A. councilman says - <AUTHOR> http://mynewsla.com/government/2015/04/28/cut-through-traffic-caused-by-waze-app-must-stop-l-a-councilman-says/?google_editors_picks=true <comment><USER2> I've lived in Los Angeles for the last 5 years and I can tell you that Waze really uses neighborhood routes in the hills, which coincides with the most affluent residents in LA.

Unfortunatelly, Los Angeles is built with 3-4 choke points to get from the reasonably priced suburbs in San Fernando Valley to the companies that pay for $100k+ positions on the west side and mid-wilshire.

Waze helps alleviate that traffic and I not surprised that a politician here in LA is so out of touch that he would recommend shutting down a tool most people use to get to work so that the wealthy can have less traffic noise outside their house at 8am.

Streets are public domain, and until I'm relieved of my road tax liabilities I intend on using any one I choose.

<comment><USER3> Until they put up signs forbidding rush hour traffic for non-residents of the street. At least, that's what they do around here (DC area).

<comment><USER4> And how is it enforced? Do they ask "where are you going"? Can you answer "none of your business"? I never lived in the US but I refuse to abandon my mental image of the free country I always thought it was.

<comment><USER5> They pull you over, and if you don't live in the immediate vicinity, you get a ticket. It's happened to me several times in Oak Park, and I live there!

You could say "none of your business". You'll get the ticket, and, if its really unjustified, you can go fight it in traffic court.

<comment><USER6> "Sorry officer, I got lost and took a wrong turn. I'll make my way back to the main street."

<comment><USER7> Getting lost doesn't remove your ability to read signs that tell you not to enter a particular street.

<comment><USER4> But what do the signs say? I'm really curious. Can you visit a friend? Do the police escort you to your friends house?

<comment><USER7> "I'm going to a friend's house. He is located at $ADDRESS."

If you're proposing this as a way to avoid a justified ticket by lying to the police, all I'll say is, good luck with that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is an example of the NIMBYism that's unfortunately common here. The homes in the areas with the worst traffic (ie, Westside) are very expensive (>$1million) and are also usually in hilly areas with twisty, narrow streets. While I can't blame the residents for hating the extra traffic, OTOH at peak times of day the main thoroughfares are almost literally nonfunctional due to congestion. I drove for three hours yesterday morning and went a total of maybe 8-10 miles--and that was avoiding the freeways and using 'secret' backroad shortcuts.

We really need to get serious about stopping subsidies for freeways and other outdated modes of transporation, and instead fund efficient, modern mass transit. Roads designed for single passenger cars are the steam engines of the 21st century.

<comment><USER9> This may very well be reflective of my ignorance of that area, but would a bicycle not suffice for an 8 to 10 mile trip? If an average speed of a bicycle is say 10mph, then you've already cut your time by two hours!

Of course.. I believe most American cities and roadways are not well designed for commuter cyclists. Perhaps we need a serious look into the bike highways of Copenhagen.

<comment><USER10> In California? it'd work for half the year; the other half, you'd die of heatstroke.

<comment><USER9> Interesting point. I'm on the west coast, and our summers tend to be much hotter, and winters much colder. So I suppose, not only bike friendly roads are needed, but also a whole biking culture would need to be established to allow employees to change into work clothing from weather sensitive bike gear... hmmm, complexities...

<comment><USER10> I may have been engaging in some mild hyperbole there, but one big reason I got the hell out of Sacramento and now live up north in blissfully cool, shady, overcast Seattle was that I couldn't stand the 100F-plus summers. It's hard enough just enduring that kind of heat; getting out in the sun and sweating on your way to/from work is just... not something I would ever do. But maybe LA is not as bad as the Central Valley, I don't know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Just once it would be great to read a headline like:

"Traffic congestion spurs realization that enhanced public transit is sorely needed in high density population zones"

instead of:

"City council continues to make short sighted decisions that don't help anyone"

</comment><comment><USER12> "No thru traffic" signs have been a part of life for a long time, long before Waze came around, and that's the simplest answer to the issue for these residents. [1] Yes, as other posters have pointed out, this is an instance of technology butting up against entrenched interests and behaviors: the shortcuts formerly only known by a few, are now available to anybody with a smartphone; rich residents get mad at the increased traffic, and political action happens quicker when rich people are involved. [2,3]

Whether or not this is an example of the rich getting their way more quickly than the average person, I think that the point about residential areas seeing increased through traffic is an important one. No one, whether rich or poor, wants to live on a heavily trafficked street. (I believe that it is possible to create environments that contain both successful transportation infrastructure and livable streets for _all_ people.) The answer, however, isn't to shut these roads off to thru traffic (an exercise in futility), but rather to create better routes for people to get to work. Whether these routes are better mass transit options, better new roads, or improvements to existing roads, they will all, unfortunately, be uphill battles against NIMBYers. Hopefully LA, and the US in general, can eventually come around from the car- dominated perception of the urban environment.

[1] [http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=236446](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=236446)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_City_Council_Distr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_City_Council_District_2)

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Fernando_Valley#Property_v...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Fernando_Valley#Property_values)

<comment><USER13> As my Dad says, "'Thru' is not a word I recognize. Let's cut through here."

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Blaming Waze is blaming information, because that's all Waze can provide. I'm sure it plays well with his constituency, though.

<comment><USER15> Waze is more than information. It provides directions to drivers, with the promise of speeding a commute. It appeals directly to people in a hurry, and it directs them through residential neighborhoods not designed for through traffic.

A reasonable hypothesis would be that greater Waze use would correlate to higher numbers of accidents in residential neighborhoods.

<comment><USER16> > Waze is more than information.

Nope. In this respect (transportation routes), it is quite literally and merely information. It does not make promises.

<comment><USER15> Waze has synthesized voice instructions to "turn left at Oak Glen Circle." I call that "direction." You call it "information." Potayto, Potahto?

Also, "promise," meaning indicative of potential.

<comment><USER14> All are functions of the information. Take away the information, and all those things go with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is the same problem that technology always brings.

The "you could do it before but required alot of work and now the technology makes it so anyone can do it" problem.

Google made this famous by allowing anyone to learn more than people wanted other to know about themselves.

The information was all there before google but google made it easy for anyone to collect with little effort.

To the home owners point, I do find myself doing this alot with waze in Toronto. Instead of taking Gardener or Front Street, waze sends me through the CNE grounds on streets that i didn't even now existed. I could have probably done this before waze but the technology made it easy for anyone to do.

It seems like the solution is the do what they've always done, improve core infrastructure arteries and put up speed bumps, slower speed limits and more stop signs to help deter people from moving through residential neighbourhoods.

<comment><USER18> speed bumps sound ok until:

A some one looses a $3k exhaust system on a sports car to them B Someone dies because of slow ambulance response - Emergency vehicle crews hate speed bumps

<comment><USER6> The speed bumps around my old neighborhood have a dip in the median exactly so that ambulances can avoid the bump completely. I was told that it's also a safety concern, as sudden shocks when carrying, say, someone with a spinal injury could actually be life-threatening. (Un)fortunately, it's also perfectly possible for ordinary cars to use the dip, too, and thus not have to slow down really at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Part of me is with this councilmember: cities put effort into planning and zoning for the benefits of all citizens, not just those who are driving automobiles.

Another part of me says, traffic has gotten bad because transportation infrastructure is bad, and a big chunk of that is this councilmember's job. So if he's complaining about the traffic, he also ought to be working on some solutions. More convenient public transportation, better bikeways, etc.

I've had this same thought using Waze to avoid afternoon traffic in Silicon Valley when it took me through residential neighborhoods with kids playing in the streets and past schools.. Overall, if you're regularly diverting your commute from designated thoroughfares through residential neighborhoods, wealthy or not, I'm gonna call you a self-absorbed jerk.

<comment><USER7> What's a "designated thoroughfare"? I'm not sure I've seen such a beast.

In my opinion, what's self-absorbed is buying a house on a public road that can be used as part of a longer trip, and then getting upset when people actually use it. If you don't want outsiders driving through your neighborhood, move some place which is off the beaten path, or where you can put up gates or something. This will be less convenient for you, but that's the tradeoff that comes from making things less convenient for others.

<comment><USER15> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arterial_road](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arterial_road)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I can just open up a google map and do it manually. I do that now. Waze just makes it easier.

If you don't want traffic congestion you might consider not living in Los Angeles.

<comment><USER20> Or perhaps the city council should fix the actual underlying problem... That their road systems can't really cope with the amount of traffic they have currently.

<comment><USER21> Or that their cities can't really cope with the amount of people they currently have.

<comment><USER22> Or that cities need to get more dense and friendlier toward pedestrians and bikes.

<comment><USER23> It's simply a personal preference for dense cities vs being an absolute truth.

<comment><USER7> Denser cities are demonstrably better off and more efficient.

<comment><USER24> > Denser cities are demonstrably better off and more efficient.

"Better off" is a matter of subjective value, and the fact that lots of people prefer _not_ to live in denser cities demonstrates that the measures by which denser cities are "better off" do not represent universally-shared values.

<comment><USER7> There's a lot of subjectivity, but it can be measured in an approximate but decent manner by using money. People in denser cities have more money on average. Property values in denser cities are much higher, which indicates that people prefer to live there than elsewhere, on average.

<comment><USER24> > Property values in denser cities are much higher, which indicates that > people prefer to live there than elsewhere

No, it doesn't, because:

(1) property is not used exclusively for living space, and (2) even leaving aside #1, you'd expect higher residential property values in one kind of area than another if the supply of residential space in the first kind of area was lower compared to the number of people that prefer that space, no matter what the overall aggregate of preferences was between the two kinds of space, so "there is less space in dense cities compared to the number of people who prefer them than there is outside of dense cities compared to people who prefer living there" would be a better conclusion from that premise than "people generally prefer to live in dense cities", even before considering (3) you ignore the fact that dense cities tend to occur in places that are desirable for reasons that exist prior to the density, and that density is an _effect_ , not the _cause_ of the desirability.

<comment><USER7> In dense cities, a lot of property is used for living space (that's what makes them dense) and supply is high (likewise, that's what makes them dense).

As for cause and effect, I'm not ignoring anything. Cause and effect simply doesn't matter here. Are cities dense because they're where people want to live, or do people want to live there because they're dense? It doesn't matter; in the end, people prefer to live there. If people want to live there because it's dense, then it's obvious that people like density. If it's dense because people want to live there, then that means more people get to live in a desirable place, and the fact that people try to go there means that it's worth the extra cost. Either way: density is better.

<comment><USER24> > Cause and effect simply doesn't matter here. Are cities dense because > they're where people want to live, or do people want to live there because > they're dense? It doesn't matter; in the end, people prefer to live there.

It matters quite a bit when the issue of desirability of dense cities was raised as support for the claim uphtread that "cities need to get more dense"; if desirability is a cause of density rather than its effect, the desirability of existing dense cities does not support the claim that not-currently-dense cities need to get more dense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> So the statement is to stop cut through traffic in stead of fixing the broken LA system.

How about we offer acceptable public transportation alternatives such as a proper metro and more frequent busses?

</comment><comment><USER26> Lol.. Welcome to Los Angeles. Traffic is and has always been bad and cut throughs always have happened. This is not new or news.

<comment><USER27> Contributing to a discussion about how to ameliorate the situation would be more welcome than "that's just how it is" dismissal.

<comment><USER28> Not really. All we have is a bunch of commenters, the most vocal from outside the area, hand-waving and saying officials should _just fix the problem_. Realities of settlement, infrastructure, and politics stand against just waving a magic wand, though.

Also, just saying "transit" is saying absolutely nothing without demonstrating that one knows the difference between the layouts of NYC and Greater LA.

<comment><USER25> You're right. I don't think the non Los Angeleans really understand the layout of LA. It's not a city like NY is a city.

Politics are stopping us from developing better public transportation options. Blaming people for trying to stay out of 2 hour traffic is not the right approach.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This would be less of a problem if companies didn't all feel they had to be located in Santa Monica and West LA. Maybe the head office absolutely has to be on the Westside because of the cool address, but what about satellite offices around the city, closer to where people live?

Or better yet, just evolve the corporate culture and embrace working remote.

<comment><USER28> Or maybe looking outside of LA and SF entirely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'll be the first to say here that if this effect is actually supported by data, and not just anecdotes, then the councilman has a good point. It's rude and dangerous to cut through residential neighborhoods to save one or two minutes off of your car trip, and mapping apps shouldn't be so quick to direct you to do so.

Pedestrians and cyclists have already lost access to major roads (see invention of jaywalking, etc), but it was OK since we could still take walks in our neighborhood. If every road is open to its full traffic capacity, the only safe place to be is in a car.

<comment><USER24> > Its rude and dangerous to cut through residential neighborhoods to save one > or two minutes off of your car trip, and mapping apps shouldn't be so quick > to direct you to do so.

No, its not rude to use public roads to get between points connected by those roads, nor is it dangerous provided you are driving in a safe manner (and, if you are driving in an unsafe manner, that's a problem no matter _why_ you are on those roads -- just as much if you are doing it to get to or from your home that is on the road as if you are using it to get between two points that the road happens to connect.)

<comment><USER30> >just as much if you are doing it to get to or from your home that is on the road as if you are using it to get between two points that the road happens to connect

This is exactly the point and where the problem lies.

If I live on the road, and am one minute from home, and know that my neighbor's kid likes to ride his bike there - then I'm going to be very careful while driving down it.

If I'm still 30 minutes from home, and using the road to get from one 50mph main road to a different 50mph main road, I'm going to be in a hurry and not respect the residential speed limit as much.

It's human nature, and we can fight it by [1] having police speed traps in every neighborhood (expensive), [2] having speed bumps everywhere (annoying), or [3] adjusting the dials on Waze's optimization function.

<comment><USER7> There are more options than your three, such as [4] fix the road system so that routes through residential neighborhoods stop being the fastest.

You seem to present [3] as being the obvious and easy choice, but it's the only one that involves suppressing information i.e. censorship. That's a moral problem as well as a practical one: Waze provides a useful service, and if you shut it down or neuter it, you'll just get a dozen imitators popping up to take its place. (Never mind that a ton of apps besides Waze already provide the same sort of info.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I hope that this problem encourages LA's more elite residents to strongly support a subway underneath the 405. Poorer residents in the flats have long suffered this effect adjacent to freeways.

But whatever the class of residents affected is, to mis-use streets intended for local neighborhood activity is terrible behavior.

Due to where things are headed technologically, it is only a matter of time before the city simply automatically charges drivers fines for driving inappropriate routes.

<comment><USER25> Why stop there? We have enough money in LA to build a metro on or around the 101 and 405. We don't need five lanes if we reduce the cars on the road.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Instead of trying to have Waze direct people into less efficient routes, shouldn't the L.A. city council use the data provided about how roads are being used to address the fact that the "major roads" that are intended to be the efficient routes between distant locations are, in fact, _not doing their jobs_.

</comment><comment><USER32> Why not just put up "No Through Traffic" or "Local Traffic Only" signs as many other cities do?

<comment><USER24> Or, adopt the more common (and also pre-GPS) solution of just designing residential neighborhoods (or refitting existing roads with strategically placed auto-traffic barriers) so that they aren't _usable_ for cut-through auto traffic, but still perfectly usable for ingress/egress and for through traffic by pedestrians/bicycles.

Complaining that people are using public roads that connect their origin with their destination to travel from that origin to that destination is, well, bizarre.

<comment><USER32> Probably the right answer, but that sounds like multiple orders of magnitude more difficult than putting up some signs and/or posting a cop to write some tickets. Also, I assume the people who live in those neighborhoods would want still want their houses easily reachable by car.</comment></comment></comment>


Why Reddit switched to Python (2005) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.reddit.com/2005/12/on-lisp.html <comment><USER2> When it comes to programming languages/framework debate, there are a few interesting tidbits:

1) Geeks _love_ to debate languages, especially one they _know better_

2) Geeks also love to trash languages that they don't know that well

3) There's always the claim of N-increase of productivity without any scientific backing (yet we always stress out that we should measure everything...seems like a paradox eh?)

4) This is how we do politics: debating languages, tools, frameworks.

Use whatever you like. That's the bottom line.

Joel used ASP.NET for FogBugz, ASP.NET MVC w/o ORM for SO.

LinkedIN, TripAdvisor, Jive, some Google properties are using Java.

Facebook, Flickr, WikiPedia use PHP.

You are far more productive using the tools you know.

If someone just picked up Node.JS (and a novice JavaScript developer) yesterday and claimed he/she got 10x productivity boost, ask him/her to show how they go about and code the solution a'la Notch (live-stream how you code or from pre-recorded coding session).

Building products require more than just a syntax. Libraries, Tools: build tools, packaging tools, deployment tools, documentation tools, etc are all as important as the programming language itself.

It's about time we ask for proofs, not just a blog post claim.

<comment><USER3> > some Google properties are using Java.

Google is mostly a Java shop, IIRC. They even write HTML and JavaScript in Java, a.k.a GWT.

<comment><USER4> They also have plenty of C++ and Python. Small projects will always be allowed to run whatever language they fancy, but the largest and most critical codebases at Google are definitely in java, c++ and python.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Things are a bit different now. SBCL works great nearly everywhere, Clozure CL does too, and there are more libraries that are easier to install than ever before.

<comment><USER6> Yes, but the Python eco-system didn't remain standing in one place either. Lots more libraries, more stable and feature-full releases, and great support for bindings for well known libraries/frameworks/APIs all across the board, as Python has clearly emerged as the favorite hacker language for general purpose programming.

<comment><USER4> I wish. As mainstream as it got, it's way less deployed than java (which is used for literally everything, including mobile development), PHP, C/C++, Perl and even Ruby. It's starting to be fairly ubiquitous, thanks to hacks like jython and ironpython, but it's nowhere near being considered the "clear favourite" for anything.

<comment><USER6> Each of PHP, Perl and Ruby has their niche(s), but excluding those Python is _far_ more popular. And the comparison with Java/C is irrelevant here since this is a different domain of languages (dynamic) we're talking about here.

<comment><USER4> You didn't say "the favorite hacker _dynamic_ language" though :)

I'm a huge Python fan, but I'm also a realist: the Python ecosystem (in terms of vendors, products, customers and professionals involved, as well as libraries and tools) is nowhere near the mainstream Java/C++/whatever- Microsoft-is-pushing-this-year. Python is not the language of choice on any mobile platform, for example; it barely registers in the humongous "enterprise" space; SDKs for most hardware devices (or anything else, really) will usually list Python as the third or fourth choice, if at all. It's doing reasonably well in scripting, automation, Linux administration, 3D and web, but that's a far cry from being a clear favorite for "general-purpose programming".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > After spending the entire summer working entirely in Lisp, it's nearly > impossible to work in another language and not say to myself, "If only this > were Lisp..." Lisp has many goodies that make programming in it a joy: the > REPL, macros and the lack of syntax are some. I won't go into the details, > but rest assured, it's cool. People become Lisp zealots for a reason.

I honestly don't understand this sentiment. For me it's nearly impossible to work in lisp and not think "If only this were some other language..." The _baseline functionality_ I'm used to from other languages, like even type checking, is absent. It's like writing in assembly just for the degree of control you have as compared to managed code. I mean yeah writing something in assembly can be fun in its own way, but the result will almost certainly be awful, and you'll solve problems that have built-in solutions in other languages.

<comment><USER5> Common Lisp has type checking.

<comment><USER8> Come on, we all know what he meant.

<comment><USER5> I don't really know what he meant, with the references to managed code and assembly language in relation to Lisp, but what he actually wrote is wrong when it comes to Common Lisp.

<comment><USER9> Perhaps he's referring to the batteries included feel of other platforms. Every other platform (i.e. .NET/java/ruby/python) have gobs of built-in functionality in the standard library - everything from parsing, to different I/O models (NIO in java), to frameworks (WSGI, WS consumption and production, etc). Lisps diverge fundamentally (e.g., the threading model) if it isn't specified in CLtL or ANSI CL. CL seem hamstrung by those documents.

Concrete Example: 7 years ago I couldn't (using available libraries) reliably parse in lisp a DB dump in XML (~8GB), select some records based on a set of calculations, and convert it to CSV. Most libraries insisted on needing the whole document in memory, some libraries leaked like a sieve and caused heap exhaustion, others couldn't handle UTF8. In the end, I could do it python (couple hours to develop and took 45-60 minutes to run), I could do it in java (several hours to develop and ran in ~8min), but I couldn't do it in LISP without writing a custom XML parser or delving into FFI. Maybe it was an abnormal case, maybe not.

I miss macros and the expressiveness; I miss the community; I don't miss the insanity.

<comment><USER5> Well, it's not like that any more. There are portable ways to work with threads, there are multiple XML libraries, some of which do not read the whole document in memory, and all implementations support UTF-8.

These things happened because some people decided to improve CL (both implementations and libraries) instead of using something else.

<comment><USER9> It may be worth retrying as an experiment to see how lisp fairs now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is an example of the Lisp Curse.

<http://www.winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html>

This is the reason why the Clojure community is taking libraries very, very seriously.

</comment><comment><USER11> "Translated very easily" suggests they didn't create a domain-specific language for their problem, which to me seems to be missing the point of Lisp. The exotic features of Lisp and Python don't overlap much at all, so the intersection of the two isn't a particularly powerful language. They probably could have ported to any Blub just as readily.

<comment><USER12> Why, maybe there are problems that do not require a domain-specific language! Doing something like reddit.com probably require a simple and readable codebase that can be extended and optimized easily. It is not likely that the domain is so complex that it needs macros and all the "clever" stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I like how they refer to reddit as a "FreeBSD box." My guess is that it's something much, much larger now.

<comment><USER14> He also says "the reddit code itself is not incredibly complex," which I imagine is less true now.

<comment><USER15> There's no need to leave it to imagination: <https://github.com/reddit/reddit>

<comment><USER14> Right, but I don't know how complex it was at that time in the past.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If there are any Lispers who lament the Lisp Curse, or some idiosyncracies of your favorite dialect of Lisp, and you have an open mind to give something new a shot, consider checking out Clojure.

I don't want to become one of those diehard __-advocates, but I'm pretty impressed with Clojure. Speaking from experience, I think it solves quite a few of the pitfalls mentioned in the OP. I wrote up an extensive post on how to learn Clojure, and veteran Lispers can jump to the end and catch the links of Clojure for Lispers:

[http://www.elangocheran.com/blog/2012/03/the-newbies- guide-l...](http://www.elangocheran.com/blog/2012/03/the-newbies-guide- learning-clojure/)</comment>


LShift is terrified by asynchronous libraries performance - <AUTHOR> http://www.lshift.net/blog/2008/12/15/asynchronous-libraries-performance <comment><USER2> Couple things.

First, there isn't enough context in the LShift article to judge whether Marek has a valid point. He's conceded up front that both Libev and libevent show logN growth for adding new fd's to the loop, and seems to be arguing that it could be brought down to constant time. So? He hasn't presented evidence that the overhead he's talking about is significant in the real world. This is compute vs. I/O in an I/O-bound environment.

Next, he also seems to be taking his cues from the second set of benchmarks on the Libev page, in which every socket has a random timeout. This is a worst- case scenario for both Libev and libevent. Contrary to both the Libev page and Marek's analysis, setting timeouts on individual I/O events is not the only way to implement "idle timeouts" (which many protocols don't even have); it is in fact one of the poorer approaches.

Finally, he's taken two very specific benchmarks and generalized them to the whole design approach. Libevent is considered "high-performance" because async I/O is a high-performance design --- especially compared to demand-threading --- and libevent was the first stable, cross-platform implementation of it. It's also "high-performance" because it implements the high-performance kernel interfaces, like epoll. But the internals of libevent, while reasonable, are not (at least last time I checked) particularly optimized.

You can get around most of these problems by building on top of libevent; for instance, at Arbor Networks, we ditched libevent's (verbose, clumsy) timer interface for a better data structure, and simply kept libevent notified of the next closest timeout.

"Terrified" seems like a very silly word to use here, but I'm always eager to get schooled.

<comment><USER3> > Contrary to both the Libev page and Marek's analysis, setting timeouts on > individual I/O events is not the only way to implement "idle timeouts"

just a quick question: what would you consider, is a superior approach to idle-timeouts ? thanks for you insights !

<comment><USER2> Use another data structure to track connections by liveness, which you can measure by timestamping on each RX event. Relax the requirement that an connection idle timeout of 60 seconds must fire in exactly 60,000 milliseconds; 60, 61, 65, nobody cares.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _The problem is that currently asynchronous libraries often use binary heap as a representation of internal priority queue._

This is a grossly ignorant statement. I have written my share of event loops (including epoll and IOCP based) and choosing heap for timer management is an _obviously_ dumb thing to do if you care about the performance. Also removing objects from the event loop _before_ delivering a callback is even more dumb for exact reasons he listed in the post. Essentially what he's bitching about is a lame-ass un-optimized implementation of an event engine.

Also, interestingly enough he actually reinvented a simplified form of Linux timer management code - <http://lwn.net/Articles/156329>.</comment>


Amazon "Brushing" Scam - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbb.org/article/news-releases/20509-amazon-brushing-scam-indicates-a-serious-problem-for-victims <comment><USER2> Not sure this makes sense because how in the world can the "seller" post a fake review under my account?

<comment><USER3> They don't use your account. They use their own accounts; they just need some place to deliver the unwanted package and the easiest way to do this is to pick a random address that happens to be yours.</comment></comment>


Machines Teaching Each Other Could Be the Biggest Exponential Trend in AI - <AUTHOR> https://singularityhub.com/2018/01/21/machines-teaching-each-other-could-be-the-biggest-exponential-trend-in-ai/ <comment><USER2> Does any AI expert here know decent text profanity classifier that can catch first letter swapping in bigrams? For example, there is this Reddit username topsidedlesticles. It's easy for even low IQ people to classify this as profane, but incredibly hard for AI. It's frustrating when these corner cases cannot be solved with the latest AI. One begins to wonder if this batch of AI is just useful for FB and G to target us better.</comment>


Dev-Dash: Chrome Dash for developers - <AUTHOR> http://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dev-dash/ldkbpnbhocpbliadbhleccjenkndklma <comment><AUTHOR> Don't hesitate to leave some feedback. I'm looking for ways to improve the extension.

Thanks, N</comment>


Another Travel Ban: IRS Moves to Revoke Passports for Unpaid Taxes - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertwood/2017/02/02/another-travel-ban-irs-moves-to-revoke-passports-for-unpaid-taxes/#218402a240fb <comment><USER2> Nice little minimum security prison Uncle Sam is building here.

Right now it seems so innocuous: you can't leave the country for limited reasons. Expect the reasons to expand in time. Scope creep is routine in Federal law.

I am a tax lawyer, and I am disgusted. Land of the free, indeed. Peh.

<comment><USER3> Paying—or at least filing—your taxes is the law in the USA. Generally speaking, breaking laws results in you losing some freedoms. I'm sure there are other crimes for which you would lose the right to travel out of the country.

Anyways, the article states that this would only apply in cases where an individual has over $50,000 in unpaid taxes. Statistically speaking, I don't imagine that very many people find themselves in that situation.

<comment><USER4> I don't know how many people fall in to the category, but some of the millions of American citizens living abroad may. While it is rare to be prosecuted, legally the fines can quickly pile up if while you are living abroad, you forget to report every cent that you own or partially own abroad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Does this mean Trump will be prevented from leaving the country? I honestly don't understand how I'm expected to pay taxes when the highest in the land refuses to pay his.

<comment><USER6> I think you are confusing "not paying his taxes" with "legally declaring a loss as a tax deduction to offset future earnings".

Yes, it was a bigger deduction than most people, but it was technically and legally within the tax guidelines - guidelines that were left alone by past administrations. If you want to be made at someone that Trump didn't pay tax, blame the tax system and politicians that made it possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Remember, everyone: Tax evasion is Illegal. Tax _avoidance_ is merely discouraged.

Never refuse to pay taxes. Just pay the taxes you _owe_.</comment>


FTC hearings on tech companies included economists who take money from them - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/90253465/should-we-break-up-the-tech-giants-not-if-you-ask-the-economists-who-take-money-from-them <comment><USER2> Next week: Hacker News thread about investigated companies included commenters who take money from them ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18257185](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18257185))

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm tired of the big tech alarmism. Nobody needs to break up any of these companies. Having power does not make a company evil.

You can ask legitimate questions about Amazon's treatment of employees. Boycott them if you're so inclined. Are they being paid fairly? Are they being exploited and over-worked? I think it's a conversation worth having. At least be sensible and call for regulations that address this in particular, not trying to break up Amazon entirely.

Google is guilty of what, exactly? Do you dislike how they treat you, the user, as the product? Change your Google privacy settings or better yet switch to Google alternatives (Protonmail, DuckDuckGo, Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, the like, YouTube is too useful to abandon).

All I see is a big push to vilify tech companies so politicians can look like they're for the little guy.

Take the recent Google internal vulnerability case. All of the sudden politicians come out of the woodwork, when public disclosure of this sort of thing was never an issue before. In reality, people doesn't seem to understand that enforced disclosure of internally discovered vulnerabilities will make more proactive actors look _less_ secure than companies which aren't as rigorous (and have less to disclose).

If you very understandably don't trust Facebook with your data, simply get off it. Use Signal, SMS, email, Discord, Slack, anything else you want to talk to your friends and family.

I suppose telling people not to use Facebook, Instagram, or Google services doesn't have the same ring to it as tearing companies down though.

Edit: Changed nonsensical sentence about Google's vulnerability disclosure. Clarified.

Edit: Reclarified still nonsensical Google vulnerability disclosure paragraph.

Edit: Changed "more" to " _less_ " in the disclosure paragraph. Third time's the charm.

<comment><USER4> > _If you very understandably don 't trust Facebook with your data, simply get > off it_

Facebook compiles shadow profiles of people who _have_ gotten off Facebook [1]. Their lack of platform security affects users and non-users alike, particularly when those actions spread violence and political misinformation.

Facebook bought WhatsApp and promptly broke its promises to WhatsApp's founders and the EU. Facebook bought Instagram and used its heft to copy Snapchat's product. Using incumbency-resulting scale to copy and destroy competitors is inefficient. It's a market failure. It's why we have antitrust law.

When people say "break up Facebook," we mean "update antitrust law to see user data as capital."

[1] [https://www.cnet.com/news/shadow-profiles-facebook-has- infor...](https://www.cnet.com/news/shadow-profiles-facebook-has-information- you-didnt-hand-over/)

</comment></comment><comment> gjsman-1000 My fear is that if a breakup occurred, it would only allow Chinese tech companies to come marching in, destroying American competition. (This could backfire pretty bad...)

<comment><USER5> For a long time I have been told that small nimble companies will succeed so it seems healthy to me to break up these big, slow companies. I wonder if there is some level of Stockholm syndrome going on that makes people think we need these huge, dominant companies.

<comment><USER6> Or alternatively, maybe it's true that there are major economies of scale to most businesses, and big companies get big not through "lobbying" and "regulation" but because they're far more efficient than small companies?

<comment><USER7> Or at least, having one big company serving 100 people can be more efficient than 10 smaller companies delivering 10 people each a similar service.

<comment><USER5> Is this really more efficient for society and innovation in the long run? It just cements the status quo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So? Of course you should be able to pay experts to represent you in these hearings, or hire them for unrelated purposes. The issue is whether such payments are appropriately _disclosed_.

</comment><comment><USER9> Yes, as long as it is one step in the breakup of lots of other monopolies/conglomerates and not just politically motivated targeting.

<comment><USER5> I am starting to think that companies from a certain size on should be broken apart automatically. Or we should find other ways to disincentive growing a company beyond a certain size.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why would you want to break them? A guy builds a company and then for some reason somebody who never helped build it thinks it's ok to break it into little parts?

sounds communistic to me... let the free market decide and if needed, then regulate it more.

<comment><USER11> >let the free market decide and if needed, then regulate it more.

That is exactly what happened over a 100 years ago. That additional regulation was called the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890.

When the US DOJ broke up Standard Oil, who had control of 90% of the market just like a certain search engine does today, consumers and the market were better off...and even Rockefeller who lost his illegal monopoly, saw his fortune double as a result of the breakup making him the richest man in the world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> What a shit article. Yeah, if you go to the level of economists who work at elite universities and firms, and are the type to testify before government bodies, most of them are one degree of separation from the world's biggest corporations. So what? Either what they're saying is evidence-based and defensible, or it isn't. The article seems to want to smear these people on the basis of their links, no matter how tenuous, to big tech corporations.

It's amazing watching [a subset of] the American public clamor for the destruction of incredible things that could only be created in America, and should really be sources of pride, imho.

<comment><AUTHOR> "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." -Upton Sinclair

The issue is that nearly every single one of these people are paid to believe big tech is not a problem. This isn't even a scenario where there were competing viewpoints: The deck was entirely stacked with paid supporters.

And as far as the fact that these companies were created in the first place: Today's giants only exist because we properly employed antitrust regulations against the previous generation of giants. Google would not exist without the antitrust case against Microsoft. And an innovative future depends on us applying antitrust law again, to the likes of Google, Facebook, and Amazon.

We should be proud of what our country has accomplished, but we must break them up on occasion to allow for new growth. Movement and innovation is what keeps us on that leading edge, and resistance to apply regulation against these companies will allow other countries to surpass us.

<comment><USER12> You edited to include additional claims, and some counterfactuals. I see no reason to believe that the anti-trust rulings against Microsoft, which were actually rather weak when all was said and done, is what allowed Google to come into existence. I don't see how they had any effect on Google, or how Google was stymied by Microsoft's monopoly. Can you substantiate that claim?

Likewise, you have to prove that these companies are destroying the ability for other folks to innovate through abuse of monopoly power (the point of the hearings), not just say that they're big so we need to "break them up".

<comment><AUTHOR> A number of Microsoft employees have confirmed that the main reason Microsoft never did anything to stop Google's growth when it was small was fear of further antitrust punishments:

 _And most important, as Microsoft lived under government scrutiny, employees abandoned what had been nascent internal discussions about crushing a young, emerging competitor — Google. There had been informal conjectures about reprogramming Microsoft's web browser, the popular Internet Explorer, so that anytime people typed in "Google," they would be redirected to MSN Search, according to company insiders. Or, perhaps a warning message might pop up: "Did you know Google uses your data in ways you can't control?"_

 _Microsoft was so powerful, and Google so new, that the young search engine could have been killed off, some insiders at both companies believe. "But there was a new culture of compliance, and we didn't want to get in trouble again, so nothing happened," Burrus said. The myth that Google humbled Microsoft on its own is wrong. The government's antitrust lawsuit is one reason that Google was eventually able to break Microsoft's monopoly._

[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/20/magazine/the-case- against...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/20/magazine/the-case-against- google.html)

As an HN user, I assume you are probably familiar with dozens of projects for products or services that were superior to Google's entrenched ones. Be they alternative mobile OSes, search engines, email or calendar products, etc. But thanks to monopoly power, all of them have failed to gain traction from the incumbents due to their vertical integration with the rest of their product portfolio.

Gmail is not the best email client (it's not even a particularly good email client now that it takes two minutes to load), Android is far from the best mobile OS. But both are dominant because of the inescapable monopoly which owns them and every other product people use online. Google Search isn't winning because of the quality of the code or the results, but because Google has invested billions of dollars every year in ensuring the default search on nearly every electronic device is Google. No matter how superior someone's product is, if they don't have Google's scale or their billions, they can't compete.

<comment><USER12> Fair enough. Note, I'm not arguing that there is no appropriate use of FTC action to stop anti-competitive behavior. The informally discussed actions attributed to MSFT employees would probably qualify (certainly using browser monopoly to effectively block websites). However, it never happened and "informal conjectures" are pretty dubious. I don't think that rises to the standard of evidence that Google wouldn't exist had the FTC not intervened.

From the same article

 _What eventually humbled Bill Gates and ended Microsoft's monopoly wasn't antitrust prosecutions, observers say, but a more nimble start-up named Google, a search engine designed by two Stanford Ph.D. dropouts that outperformed Microsoft's own forays into search (first MSN Search and now Bing). Then those two dropouts introduced a series of applications, like Google Docs and Google Sheets, that eventually began to compete with almost every aspect of Microsoft's businesses. And Google did all that not by relying on government prosecutors but by being smarter. You don't need antitrust in the digital marketplace, critics argue. "When our products don't work or we make mistakes, it's easy for users to go elsewhere because our competition is only a click away," Google's co-founder, Larry Page, said in 2012. Translation: The government ought to stop worrying, because no online giant will ever survive any longer than it deserves to._

I am certainly familiar with alternative options to popular digital products. Some of them _do_ in fact gain adoption, which seems to counter your position that it's impossible to gain traction because of monopoly power. They often get bought by the incumbent (Facebook's properties being the most obvious example). Note that some independents (Snapchat, Twitter) have also managed to rise post-Facebook and IPO. It's not clear monopoly power is what makes these supposedly subpar products dominant. Certainly I use Google Calendar because I use GMail, and I use GMail because I don't care enough to look for another email provider. It's good enough for me. If a better one came out, worth switching to, I certainly would. Just like I switched my email from Yahoo! to GMail when GMail came out. I think there's a difference between a company being big and holding the lion's share of the market (Tide holds 50% market share in laundry detergent) and being a monopoly. Telecoms and utilities are monopolies, in many markets. There are no other options. I don't see why Google Search is (DuckDuckGo exists and has done pretty well with a focus on privacy, for example; and of course Bing). But I also disagree that it's _not_ because Google has the best search results. As far as I can tell, they do. Who's better?

<comment><AUTHOR> Bing and DuckDuckGo both have vastly better search products (for different reasons). DDG obviously has a strong privacy push, and allows you to grab results from different search engines in a private way, Bing pays for your searching there with rewards.

Results quality is incredibly similar, and in fact, several times I've read hyped up announcement articles about new Google Knowledge Graph features or tools like the metronome when you search "metronome", only to notice that Bing already had that functionality already. Google isn't really the innovator in search and hasn't been for a long time. But given that they pay billions to both Apple and Mozilla to be the default search on iOS and Firefox, and also control the largest mobile OS, Android, Google remains mostly uncontested for the 90% or higher market share it has in a lot of countries.

Defaults win, we've seen time and time again. Google didn't explode in popularity because people set it as their search engine. Sure, nerds like us did back then, but what happened was Adobe Flash Player and similar apps started installing the Google Toolbar, which changed your default search engine to Google. And this is why the EU has finally taken a move to prevent Google from making Android manufacturers default to Google Search, though it's likely most will still be paid to provide that default going forward.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


U.S. to Act on China Software Beyond TikTok, Pompeo Says - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-02/u-s-to-act-against-array-of-china-software-risks-pompeo-says <comment><USER2> [https://web.archive.org/web/20200802212446/https://www.bloom...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200802212446/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-08-02/u-s- to-act-against-array-of-china-software-risks-pompeo-says)

</comment><comment><USER3> Doesn't this legitimize what China does? I personally don't want the government telling me what I can and can't view or use, that sounds like China.

</comment><comment><USER4> I read this just now. Just last week in the tiktok thread I was saying wechat would be next. People said since only Chinese use wechat to communicate with China it isn't the same thing.

Maybe zoom after? I have some far out of the money puts there.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm going to predict Pompeo will be running for president soon. You might not agree with his methods, but the man certainly has the capability to show results.

<comment><USER6> He is more likely to spend 12-18 months in prison than to occupy the white house. He was supposed to run for the open seat in Kansas as a stepping stone to a later presidential bid but the scandals were piling up too fast, so he opted to stay where he was to do some damage control and get a few IG slapped back for investigating he and his wife. His tenure in the role has been one clusterfuck after another, so I am not exactly sure what results we should be impressed with.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Extramarket job hunting - <AUTHOR>

I'm a web engineer who has spent some time (5 years total) working in DC and NYC, but is currently in KY because of multiple family health issues that have now played out.
I've noticed, spanning several years, that when I'm in a major market and put my resume out, I get lots of very serious attention (and some offers). When I'm out of such markets, I get some attention... but it always seems to peter out. It's as if my "score" as a candidate, however you want to define it, is weighted with a hefty discount.
But the reality is that aside from my family, I have zero attachment to this city. I am not married, don't have kids, have no significant friendships here, and my rent is negligible. Getting to NYC, or SF or ATL or wherever is literally a matter of packing a suitcase and getting on a plane.
How can I convince potential employers that I'm not a "relocation risk" or whatever it is they're thinking? What is my best course of action, aside from just picking up and moving to a larger market? <comment><USER2> Many companies which aren't remote-friendly tend to resist hiring folks without a clear tie to their primary market for obvious reasons. If you're in Anytown, USA and applying to jobs in Metropolis, you look more like a country mouse dreaming about big city livin' than an unattached city mouse whose happenstance brought you back to your humble hometown.

Even if you've historically lived and held down key roles in a major market, the fact that you're not there now may lead an employer to believe that you're not prepared to stick out long-term assignments if the wind blows another direction. Or, worse, you're not actually as good as your résumé purports, and your last employer(s) figured that out and fired you, which led you to crawl back to the nest.

I'd suggest either moving to a major market and shooting from close range, or looking for remote-friendly roles (which would allow you to keep your negligible rent, quite a rare find in any of the top engineering job markets).

</comment><comment><USER3> You don't need to convince. By convincing you only draw attention to the fact you have relocated in the past.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you find good freelance designers? - <AUTHOR>

I've worked with several freelance designers over the past year, and have mostly found them through connections, or, in one case, through a previous design project on 99designs.
I'm in need of some short-term design help right now, and for one reason or another all of the designers I know are either unavailable or not a good fit for the project.
I've been looking around on some outsourcing sites, the HN Contractors spreadsheet, and a few other places, but I'm not having any luck finding people.
Is there anywhere I'm not thinking of?  I basically need about 10-15hrs of help. Nothing fancy, just some clean solid design work. <comment><USER2> I've done an 'Ask HN' saying concretely: designer wanted, rush job. I got 5 answers by morning. All were competent guys, the first one (Hey Abi!) got the job and did it good enough to be launched, which given the time constraints (less than 12 hours start to finish) was pretty neat.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I had thought about that, but wasn't sure if it was OK.

I guess if no one responds to this in the next couple of hours I will do that.</comment></comment>


Google Inbox, now for other browsers than Chrome - <AUTHOR> http://inbox.google.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Of course I'm being sarcastic. It's just very shoddy craftsmanship to launch a website for Chrome-only and leave it like that for several months.</comment>


Ask YC (and PG): What books do you have on your bookshelf?  - <AUTHOR> I'm trying to come up with a "reading list" for the Summer and I would like to hear what the YC community recommends. Suggestions can range from the highly technical (in the style of SICP or ACP) to the more popish ones (such as "The Long Tail" or "Blink!").
What books would you say have helped you the most in your startup or hackering in general?
Which ones gave you the best ideas or insight?
Which ones do you think every Hacker should read?
Any books you have read recently, that you wish you had read earlier in your career? (I'm thinking business books, for instance) <comment><USER2> The 33 Strategies of War. - Robert Greene

I am too nice a guy. I am also the leader of my company. The two don't mix. You have to become somewhat detached, and somewhat of an asshole in order to effectively lead. I found out the hard way that sometimes you have to say to your people "because I freekin said so" instead of trying to be nice to them and let them make the mistake you know they are going to make (silly me, I forgot this was a business, not a community college).

The hardest thing for me, by far, has been to fire someone. I did it two months too late, and everyone in my company suffered for it. My lesson? Be an asshole at the right time.

I love the book I mention because the lessons apply everywhere in business: You need to motivate, you need to earn the respect of your people, you need to be decisive, you need to see the bigger goal, and you need to delegate correctly and put together the right structure in your company's leadership.

I've learned a lot from this book. Guess what? Our productivity is about 2-3 times higher now (no joke, 200% to 300% more work gets done every day). We're running fine, everyone is pulling their weight, and everyone is happy to be making professional progress. My own lesson from this book was that I had to get some balls, crack the whip, and turn from a fellow programmer to a leader and mentor. Your lesson from the book might be different, but I bet that almost everyone has something to learn from this book.

</comment><comment><USER3> The best thing I've been reading lately is E. W. Bovill's _English Country Life 1780-1830_. Boring title, but a great book. His _Golden Trade of the Moors_ is fabulous.

<comment><USER4> "Highly technical," says the Times.

"Popish!" raves the Globe.

Sorry, couldn't resist. Seriously though, I bet he's at the library checking it out right now. :)

But while we're recommending books he doesn't want, I would like to suggest W.P. Montague's, The Ways of Knowing.

Particularly, it's explanation of authoritarianism, when it's appropriate and when it's not, has been indispensable.

To whet your appetite, I'll say this much:

Montague asserts that if you want to fill your head with true beliefs (this stuff called knowledge) about reality, then you should be aware of five distinct types of evidence that a human can collect and five distinct logical theories with which to process (Rationalism, Empiricism, Authoritarianism, Pragmatism, Mysticism). The more mastery, the more knowledge.

The book is slow going but not for the usual reasons. Each page made me want to pause and sit and think until I had totally reprocessed all my life's experiences and questioned all my now seemingly ill-formed conclusions in the new light of my increased powers of reasoning.

If I found a genie in a lamp and he granted me one wish, I would wish that everyone in the world would read the first chapter of that book... or for a puppy.

You can get a nice ~1930's copy for like $6 at an antique book store.

<comment><USER5> Searching online I eventually found one on Amazon for $12 - about the cheapest I saw (lots on Amazon uk, starting at about 15 pounds) - from Powell's.

If you found pg's cities essays interesting or clueless, read Jane Jacobs's trilogy on cities:

The Death and Life of Great American Cities The Economy of Cities Cities and the Wealth of Nations

The quality of the writing, and the thought, more than fully justify the hubris of the last title.

<comment><USER3> ABE is the place for used books:

[http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=bovill&...](http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=bovill&tn=english)

<comment><USER4> Ineed. Mayson, I hope there are a few copies of the _Ways of Knowing_ left on AbeBooks because that's where I scored about six copies a few months back.

I realize now that in littering my friend's apartments with these books, I've been trying to transform my town into Cambridge (or into what PG says Cambridge is). But I seem to be a size too small for that job. Or as Montague might say, I don't command the prepotency needed to elicit that kind of change... yet.

So I'm taking a break from all that to compare Cities and Ambition with my own experience. My train leaves for Cambridge in a few weeks.

Giddiup.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This summer I've read/am reading/am planning to read:

* The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Robert Caro)

* Options Volatility & Pricing: Advanced Trading Strategies and Techniques (Sheldon Natenberg)

* Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (Edwin Burrows & Mike Wallace)

* Egil's Saga (anonymous)

* Invisible Cities (Italo Calvino)

If you have any interest in the history of New York City at all, or if you're interested in seeing an incredibly well done character study, read "The Power Broker." Probably the best biography I've ever read... Ron Chernow's biographies of J. P. Morgan, Rockefeller, and Hamilton are all great, but Caro's on Robert Moses blew me away.

<comment><USER7> The Power Broker is awesome. One of the finest books for understanding the 20th century. It's also fascinating to note that today we blame car culture on oil companies and selfish consumers. Turns out that the one of the people most responsible for creating America's car dependent culture was a progressive named Robert Moses ( with a lot of help from the NY Times).

BTW, another great book on urban themes is City: Urbanism and its End, by Doug Rae.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I thought about posting this here after a relative success asking the question on Reddit:

<http://www.reddit.com/info/6mikl/comments/>

but it looks like you've beaten me to it!

I did create a listing of the most popular books mentioned on the comment thread, if you're interested. The following were mentioned by 4 or more people:

14 The C Programming Language

11 Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

8 Introduction to Algorithms

7 Compilers: Principles, Techniques and Tools

6 Programming Erlang

5 The Mythical Man-Month

5 The Pragmatic Programmer

5 Applied Cryptography

4 Beautiful Code

4 The Little Schemer

4 Programming Perl

more here: <http://www.reddit.com/info/6mikl/comments/c04abpy>

</comment><comment><USER9> Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion - by Robert Cialdini. This book will pretty much change your life when it comes to figuring out marketing and why people do things, and what not to do when you're trying to get people to buy into your ideas.

<comment><USER5> I have to strongly second this: one of the best psychology books around.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=135185>

<comment><USER11> Books I wish I had on my bookshelf:

Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us (Seth Godin, Oct. 21st)

Outliers: Why Some People Succeed and Some Don't (Malcolm Gladwell, Nov. 18th)

Reality Check: The Irreverent Guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging, and Outmarketing Your Competition (Guy Kawasaki, Oct. 30th)

If you're the kind of person who lines up at bookstores to get the newest non- fiction books the day they come out then it's going to be an awesome fall.

<comment><USER12> I just like books with post-colonic explanatory subtitles, but it looks like I'll be taken care of as well.

Yes, I made that word up.

<comment><USER3> You could call them prolapsed titles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The Triumph of Conservatism by Gabriel Kolko - the book for understanding the rise of corporate serfdom

The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig - will make you nostalgic for the days of monarchy

World on Fire by Amy Chua - the single best book for understanding globalization that I have read. The antidote to Tom Friedman.

America's Great Depression by Murray Rothbard - very different from the story you get in school. Is he right?

Two favorite tech books are Inside Intuit and The Manager Pool

</comment><comment><USER13> V.S. Ramachandran's Phantoms in the Brain changed my life.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat by Oliver Sacks solidified my interest in neuroscience

And The Three Pound Enigma solidified my fascination with medicine in general.

If you only read one, read Phantoms in the Brain. It's like the bible of science, providing the crumbs for future research into the deeply interesting and previously philosophical realms of the human brain and who we are.

</comment><comment><USER14> * The Pragmatic Programmer

* Becoming a Technical Leader

* In Search of Stupidity

* Hackers & Painters

* Blockbusters

* Joel on Software: And on Diverse and Occasionally Related Matters That Will Prove of Interest to Software Developers, Designers, and Managers, and to Those Who, Whether by Good Fortune or Ill Luck, Work with Them in Some Capacity

* The Best Software Writing I

* Behind Closed Doors

* Managing Humans

* The Mythical Man-Month

* Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

* The Non-Designers Design Book

* Founders at Work

* Good to Great

* Dreaming in Code

* The Art of the Start

* Maverick

* The Design of Everyday Things

* The Art of Project Management

* The Art of Innovation

</comment><comment><USER15> The World is Flat The Post American World

Losing My Virginity - Richard Branson's Autobiography

Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie

The Second Coming of Steve Jobs Inside Steve's Brain

The Seven Day Weekend- Book by Ricardo Semler of Semco on company organization and management, Semco essentially operates as a socialist enterprise with election of bosses, profit sharing, open information, flex-time, etc, but with the twist that Ricardo is the majority stock owner. Fascinating book and well- written to boot.

Founders at Work should go without saying :)

</comment><comment><USER16> On my desk: Getting Real (37Signals), Hardball (Chris Mathews), Prioritizing Web Usability (Jakob Nielsen)

Nearby shelf: The Design of Everyday Things, Maverick, Founders at work, A Brief History of Time, A Pattern Language, Peopleware, Made to stick, Web Standards Solutions, Designing Interactions, The Pragmatic Programmer, The Mythical Man-Month, Oh, the Places You'll Go!

Other good reads: Blink, Tipping Point, Long Tail, Freakonomics

</comment><comment><USER17> I recently read _Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart_ by Gerd Gigerenzer, Peter M. Todd, and the ABC Research Group and _The Nothing That Is: A Natural History Of Zero_ by Robert Kaplan.

Both were great reads and left me energized. Neither had much to do with technology or startups. But I felt more prepared and motivated to solve problems after I read them.

</comment><comment><USER18> I've been coding for quite a few years, but it was Godel's Proof that got me into the theoretical parts of computer science (even though it's a logic book). Strongly recommended. Godel, Escher, and Bach is the usual book to read after Godel's Proof.

Universal Principles of Design - great when you need some UI inspiration.

</comment><comment><USER17> Wow. I forgot to mention _Code Complete_ by Steve McConnell. Don't miss it.

</comment><comment><USER19> -Black Swan & Fooled by Randomness

-The C Programming Language

-The Non-Designers Design Book

-How to Read a Book

-Never Eat Alone

-Art of War

-Bill Bryson's a History of Everything(~)

<comment><USER20> The Non-Designer's design book has helped me 1 of every 5 days in the past month. I also recommend it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Here is a list for your referece: [http://www.bookhuddle.com/list/491/Recommended-Technical- and...](http://www.bookhuddle.com/list/491/Recommended-Technical-and- Entrepreneurship-Reading)

</comment><comment><USER22> I've added another powerful book to my library since the last time we had this discussion:

Made to stick: Why some ideas survive and others die... - Chip and Dan Heath.

Essential startup reading.

</comment><comment><USER23> AMOP was a good read.

</comment><comment><USER24> First person to say "The Long Tail" gets expelled.

<comment><USER16> It's trendy to bash Long Tail, but doesn't your comment imply that it's prevalent enough that a entrepreneur should read, disagree or agree with it?

<comment><USER24> It's a flawed conclusion based on flawed data. You read about it, and it sounds compelling, and then you find out that reality just doesn't work that way.

I'd say it's not worth the time spent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> SQL for Smarties SQL programming style

both are by Joe Celko

</comment><comment><USER26> * Selling the Wheel * Growing a business</comment>


Genode OS: A tool kit for highly secure special-purpose operating systems - <AUTHOR> https://genode.org/about/index <comment><USER2> I've been following the Genode project for quite some time, and first got the chance to meet the Genode team when they presented their work at FOSDEM in 2012. I've since been amazed, both at the pace of development they've kept up while keeping to their principles of a small trusted code base that is kept clean by refactoring when common concepts are outlined.

My friend Daniel and I were invited to join their Hack n' Hike event a few years back, and it was just the loveliest! We hiked together during the days, sharing a barbecue around the camp fire in the evenings and hacking together at night. The people on the Genode team are among the friendliest I've come across in the open source community.

I wish you all the best of futures, both with the Genode project and in life in general.

Cheerful regards, Robin

 __Edit: __the slides from FOSDEM 2012 introducing Genode (in the state of the project back then):[https://genode-labs.com/publications/nfeske-genode- fosdem-20...](https://genode-labs.com/publications/nfeske-genode- fosdem-2012-02.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> The fine people on the Genode project did yeoman's work for constructing something sufficiently complex atop seL4. Without their exploring, mailing- list cajoling, implementation, and write-ups our seL4 work would be significantly more painful, and it's already unpleasantly painful as-is.

<comment><USER4> sel4.systems appears to be down currently

<comment><AUTHOR> Now it's up again: [http://sel4.systems/](http://sel4.systems/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's worth to note they now have a downloadable USB image, which is notably dogfed (dogfooded? dogfeeded?) by the Genode developers:

[https://genode.org/download/sculpt](https://genode.org/download/sculpt)

And some eye candy:

[https://genode.org/about/screenshots](https://genode.org/about/screenshots)

<comment><USER6> > It's worth to note they now have a downloadable USB image, which is notably > dogfed (dogfooded? dogfeeded?) by the Genode developers: > [https://genode.org/download/sculpt](https://genode.org/download/sculpt)

I fetched their `sculpt-vc.img` and create qcow out of it to directly boot in qemu.

$ qemu-img convert -f raw -O qcow2 sculpt-vc.img /var/lib/libvirt/images/sculpt-vc.qcow2

The resulting image is not bootable. It fails on boot showing _Genode_ logo and goes into a reboot cycle.

$ file sc*

sculpt-vc.img: DOS/MBR boot sector, extended partition table (last)

sculpt-vc.qcow2: QEMU QCOW2 Image (v3), 24375296 bytes

<comment><USER7> Genode uses PCI MMCONFIG, so you have to use 'qemu -machine q35' not 'pc'.

<comment><USER6> Nice. This got me going

$ qemu-system-x86_64 -name guest=humbug,debug-threads=on -drive file=/var/lib/libvirt/images/sculpt-vc.qcow2 -machine q35 ....

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> They implement a Nizza-like architecture to let you choose how much risk you want for each part of your stack:

[https://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/papers_ps/nizza.pdf](https://os.inf.tu- dresden.de/papers_ps/nizza.pdf)

It's also designed to allow separation kernels to be used in foundation. There's been quite a few of them:

[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1701.01535](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1701.01535)

<comment><USER9> Do you think it is feasible, for a poweruser who can setup and debug linux installations, to setup and use GenodeOS or sel4 as of today as a main workstation with X applications on the level of Xfce, Firefox? (days, or months, or not at all?)

<comment><USER8> I haven't used the recent version. Try it out. Tell us how well it works or doesnt. Preferably on hardware you know is supported.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> An obligatory mention when we talk about secure operating systems is the seL4 microkernel ([https://github.com/seL4/seL4](https://github.com/seL4/seL4)) where they have formally verified every line of code using the proof assistant Isabelle/HOL.

<comment><USER11> Always made me curious why Google didn't decide to use seL4 as a base for Fuchsia and instead went with Zircon...

<comment><USER12> There might be license issues between AGPLv3 of GenodeOS and the Apache 2.0 or GPLv2 that Android components use.

<comment><USER13> ? I know that this is a GenodeOS topic, but the GP wondered about _seL4_ which has some parts in GPLv2 and other BSD (2-clause).

IMHO the reason that few use seL4 is that it isn't ready: AFAIK seL4 isn't able to use efficiently multiple core with power savings, which is mandatory for usage in phones (and phones can use complex CPU with big and little cores).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I was wondering what the fit with Qubes OS was. Found this entry on Genode challenges page:

"Genode as virtualization layer for Qubes OS - ...This exploration project pursues the goal of replacing Xen by Genode as virtualization layer for Qubes."

<comment><USER15> _> I was wondering what the fit with Qubes OS was._

Rootkovska has been (imvho rightfully) criticized in the past for selling isolation but dismissing the attack surface in Xen. I think Genode can help here:

[https://twitter.com/rootkovska/status/949297922998489088](https://twitter.com/rootkovska/status/949297922998489088)

Though I believe thegrugq / ioerror have a point when they say that hardware compartmentalization is superior than layers of SW virtualization:

[https://twitter.com/thegrugq/status/515085244198703105](https://twitter.com/thegrugq/status/515085244198703105)

The threat model is relevant though: In that aspect QubesOS has some problem finding an audience. I personally like it (I'm an active user) ... but mostly because I have a fetish for privacy+security and I like to play with new stuff. However if you push a journalist or activist or anyone facing real risk to learn QubesOS (the learning curve is huge for the general user), it makes more sense to just invest in HW based compartmentalization instead. HW compartmentalization can easier be trained and there is less likely a chance of shooting yourself in the foot. It's not a tech that anybody whose life is under threat should be using. First rule here not to use tech in the first place, and for cases where the risk is marginal use HW based isolation ... then there is nothing for a long time followed by things like QubesOS, Signal etc. These things are just good enough to hide an affair but it's reckless selling them as serious solution to tech-illiterate folk who have something to loose.

<comment><USER16> I think the linked Rootkovska tweet (or more specifically, her own thread/replies to it) actually gracefully acknowledges that Xen is not magically free of attack surfaces.

She's also written some fairly long-form articles about Xen security and the (sometimes significant) room for improvement, including, for example, this Black Hat talk (from 2008!) about breaking Xen: [https://invisiblethingslab.com/resources/bh08/part3.pdf](https://invisiblethingslab.com/resources/bh08/part3.pdf)

I don't disagree with the rest of your comment :) I just have the impression that any discussion about Qubes+Xen is less "dismissal" and more that supporting a variety of hypervisors is "a small matter of programming" (where "small" is used to mean "absolutely not small").

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I want to run this on qemu/kvm Linux. How?</comment>


Call Me Maybe in Java - <AUTHOR> http://ghosono.com/callmemaybe

<comment><USER2> I wouldn't put your real number Greg. Some jerk like me is going to call you at 12:30am and have you not pick up.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for pointing that out! Totally overlooked that!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm not sure this content belongs here.</comment>


Any online apps to learn history/ geography/ economics (serious stuff)? - <AUTHOR> At some point i ran into this game: http://bramus.github.io/mercator-puzzle-redux/ ...and now I'm freaked out by the fact that i know where 95% of the countries in the world are, and what their shape is.<p>Does anyone know such games for learning history, economics... or whatever other adult topics like that? :) <comment><USER2> [Khan Academy]([https://khanacademy.org](https://khanacademy.org)) has forever free, study at your own pace, courses in many topics.

</comment><comment><USER3> For learning historical narratives, Youtube is honestly pretty great. Crash Course[1] is good for a broad overview. It presents a fairly coherent narrative and the advantage of this is that you can then relate any other historical narrative to this skeleton. Extra History[2] is a good example of a channel that presents narratives of specific incidents. If you are looking for a channel focusing on one particular period from lots of different angles, The Great War is not bad[3].

But none of this is actually going to teach you the skill of inquiry and skeptically reading different competing historical narratives. You kinda do need a class for that. A friend of mine is building a startup to make running one easier: [https://www.beaglelearning.com/](https://www.beaglelearning.com/)

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yocja_N5s1I&list=PLBDA2E52FB...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yocja_N5s1I&list=PLBDA2E52FB1EF80C9&index=1) , [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8dPuuaLjXtMwmepBjTSG...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8dPuuaLjXtMwmepBjTSG593eG7ObzO7s) , and [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8dPuuaLjXtPNZwz5_o_5...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8dPuuaLjXtPNZwz5_o_5uirJ8gQXnhEO) [2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbBHk_zLTmY&index=1&list=PLh...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbBHk_zLTmY&index=1&list=PLhyKYa0YJ_5Aq7g4bil7bnGi0A8gTsawu) [3] [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB2vhKMBjSxMK8YelHj6V...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB2vhKMBjSxMK8YelHj6VS6w3KxuKsMvT)

</comment><comment><USER4> Sadly, looks like all comments misunderstood your question :(

I was searching for something like that too, but I didn't found anything interesting. Only usual repeat-until-you-remember style games, like famous now duolingo. No real games using what you're trying to learn as main mechanic to encourage learning :(

</comment><comment><USER5> Just launched Duolingo flash cards. haven't tried yet. Not just for language other subjects too. [https://tinycards.duolingo.com](https://tinycards.duolingo.com)

</comment><comment><USER6> Freeciv-web at [https://play.freeciv.org](https://play.freeciv.org) is a game which could teach some history and geography.</comment>


Request for a new header: State-Of-The-Art - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@homakov/request-for-a-new-header-state-of-the-art-9a1935bbad72#.6507jfigt <comment><USER3> So you add this header. And then something new comes up. What then?

If the same header automatically adds that meaning as well, your site can break essentially randomly, unless you keep tabs on the new stuff and adapt the site to handle them - in which case, you don't really need this header, you can just add the new stuff as it comes up.

If the header is fixed in meaning ("best practices as of 03/2017"), then what value was really gained over simply copy-pasting a list of the recommended headers as of that date?

It just seems like it's either mostly useless, or too dangerous to use.

<comment><USER4> I read it as a versioned standard. You'd have a SOTA:1, SOTA:2 etc.

<comment><USER3> Then it falls under my second point: why add more complexity to browsers, when you can just copy-paste this year's recommended header list? Unless the idea is to do away with the other headers, but that seems overly restrictive - <USER2> our case, we can't implement HSTS, for example.

<comment><USER5> My modern frontend experience is pretty limited, but AFAICT there is no "this year's recommended header list." Rather, these issues are presented to developers as a bunch of independent problems, each one of which you have to individually hear about, research and understand in depth before you can figure out what you actually need to do to make your application secure.

If the website works from a user perspective, and it's not being actively attacked in a way that leaves obvious signs in normal operations monitoring, then a lot of IT orgs simply won't have the mandate or the budget to go Googling to find out the very latest recommended HTTP headers.

<comment><USER3> But to create this header, someone would have to compile that list, so that browsers could know how they should interpret it. So you can just publish it and allow developers to receive updates.

By the way, there are already such lists and tools:

[https://www.owasp.org/index.php/OWASP_Secure_Headers_Project](https://www.owasp.org/index.php/OWASP_Secure_Headers_Project) (OWASP in general, though I hear the crypto stuff is weak)

[https://securityheaders.io/](https://securityheaders.io/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I can't tell if this is serious or satire.

<comment><USER7> It is both. Like that drawing of a duck that's also a rabbit. ;-)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit%E2%80%93duck_illusion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit%E2%80%93duck_illusion)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Relevant XKCD, Standards: [https://xkcd.com/927/](https://xkcd.com/927/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Response header size notwithstanding, isn't this really a problem of app servers having really shitty default headers?

You make people turn off safety features manually and the rest of us are fine.

</comment><comment><USER10> > Allows CORS from any domain with any headers without OPTIONS preflights.

That'd be a great way to make CSRF attacks from any domain a default setting.

</comment><comment><USER11> And then we will have compatibility tests for browsers that implement how they read SOTA differently. Yuck</comment>


A tiger in a New York zoo has been found to have Covid-19 - <AUTHOR> https://www.aphis.usda.gov/aphis/newsroom/news/sa_by_date/sa-2020/ny-zoo-covid-19 <comment><USER2> covid-19 if you have animals [https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/daily- life-coping/...](https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/daily-life- coping/animals.html)</comment>


Official: File-sharing is a religion... in Sweden - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/01/05/file_sharing_sweden_kopimism_religion/

<comment><USER2> No, it has not. See this comment from x3c in the previous discussion for details: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3428635></comment>


Effortless Networking in the groups or platforms you belong - <AUTHOR> We all belong to different groups/platforms from our college alumni group, to Facebook secret groups, whether they are online or offline for the major purpose of networking with likeminds.
However most of us don't benefits from these network either because they are too large or we don't just know where to start from.
Introzap helps people within a group who have mutual interest and offerings to network effortlessly by sending one email introduction per day to each of them.
To get started, we have created a producthunt Introzap account - https://producthunt.introzap.com/
How it Works;
1. Signup with your LinkedIn account
2. Select what services you need, and what service your offering in return (Maximum of 3 each). Complete your profile
3. Receive your first email introduction, and reply that email to begin a conversation. <comment><AUTHOR> To create your own group visit [https://introzap.com](https://introzap.com)</comment>


Ask HN: What Will You Do to Save Civilization? - <AUTHOR> If the incompetent, selfish, and very disordered response from politicians to the virus continues, we will see modern civilization dissolve around us. This is the greatest threat I have seen in my lifetime to all of us.
Read this article recommended by Bill Gates, who over the last twenty years turned himself from one of the world's best programmers and best businessman, into one of the world's lead foremost authority on disease. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/03/how-will-coronavirus-end/608719/?linkId=85439737.
If we can use our prowess to get out the message that the globe must unite or tens of millions of people could die, we have the potential to save many lives. Governments need to get billions of tests made and distributed, million of ventilators built worldwide, tens of billions of masks built, comprehensive tracing and tracking of those who have been infected, and most importantly a massive logistics effort to bring help to whichever areas are seeing the worst outbreaks. People worldwide need to work to understand the virus and what they personally can do to fight it.
This is the most important time of our lives, and we need to bring our very best efforts.
If you have good ideas to get the message out, please share here… And don't stop there, tell everyone you know. <comment><USER2> If you don't have the ability/skills to work on epidemics and are not a health care worker of some kind, stay home.

A church in Florida held a service and 10's of people are infected now, which knowing the exponential spread will be 100's in a few days and 1000's a few days after that. The message is out there, people are not hearing it and/or choosing to endanger the lives of others by going out.

A simple (but may appear drastic) solution in the US would be closer to complete lockdown for 6-8 weeks where the National Guard assists local law enforcement to make sure people stay home.

Politicians have failed us in preparing for and battling this pandemic. The biggest thing people can do in the US is vote this November to get them out.

<comment><USER3> I think that's the end of our democracy if the national guard locks down the entire country. I'm surprised you'd advocate that so casually.

<comment><USER2> I didn't state I was advocating for it, just that it is a solution. Others in the media have said if we could freeze everyone in place for 14 days this virus would not have as much impact, if any.

People are blatantly ignoring instructions to stay home because "it doesn't impact me" and some counties are enforcing things via $5000 fines for public gatherings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was born in Soviet Union, I grew as it was collapsing, when I left Russia, it already was through two devastating crises.

US had no serious calamity since Civil War. All wars since then were not on the main territory, 9/11 is actually relatively minor. As such nation is not prepared to deal with any serious problem. On top of that economy and business are hyper-optimized, and thus extremely fragile.

For many other countries this pandemic is not a huge deal, not because it's not terrible, but because they recently have seen worse. They will take their losses and move on. US eventually will do the same, but will learn the lesson the hard way.

<comment><USER5> Which part of the world are you now, if you don't mind me asking?

<comment><USER4> Seattle

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > If you have good ideas to get the message out, please share here… And don't > stop there, tell everyone you know.

I disagree.

I say keep the noise to a minimum and let the professionals have the metaphorical floor.

That said it's important to be well informed AND help to quash misinformation. And misinformation at these volumes we as a species have never had to deal with before. So flag misinformation, report the posts and users to mods, send people friendly messages, unfriend/unfollow dangerous a-holes, call the cops on people being idiots in public, be a good citizen, etc...

</comment><comment><USER7> Listen to the professionals. Stay Home. And tell your loved ones to stay home too!

If your financial situation allows you to, be generous. Donate to organizations that are supporting the ones who need it the most. Shameless plug :

1\. [https://www.citymeals.org](https://www.citymeals.org) \- Delivers meals to elderly in NYC

2\. [https://getusppe.org](https://getusppe.org) \- PPE for ones on the frontline

3\. [http://khanacademy.org](http://khanacademy.org) \- Democratizing education for all

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22780457](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22780457) here is my follow up on this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > What Will You Do to Save Civilization?

Keep providing for my family and raising my kids to be decent people.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'll do what I can: stay home most of the time and wear masks when shopping. And try to convince others to do the same.

I doubt this is the worst we see in our life.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm not that worried about Covid-19. Pandemics come and go but human civilization has not collapsed. I'm much more worried about climate change which has the potential to cause orders of magnitudes more damage to human civilization and mass extinction.

Can human civilization survive a pandemic? Yes.

Can human civilization survive a 3C increase in global temperatures? Maybe.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'd rather just grab some popcorn and watch it burn.

</comment><comment><USER12> The rest of the world seems to be handling this crisis more or less competently. It seems to be only the US with its aggressively dysfunctional government that can't even manage the basics.

Modern civilization will be fine, but Americans are going to have to learn the hard way that their actions have consequences.

<comment><USER13> > The rest of the world seems to be handling this crisis more or less > competently. It seems to be only the US with its aggressively dysfunctional > government that can't even manage the basics.

The US is doing better than several prominent nations in Europe, including France, Britain, Italy, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands. Given how poorly the US has done, that's really saying something.

The UK wasn't even testing people regularly until the last week (that's over two months late), which is why their case numbers finally began soaring. That's held up as an example of the US failing, while it's ignored when it's done by the UK. It's also why the British PM got infected (another example of competence?).

The US mortality rate vs cases is under 2%.

Mortality rates vs cases: Italy: 11.4%, Spain: 8.6%, The Netherlands 7.3%, France: 6.7%, UK: 6.2%, Belgium: 5.5%

The US needs to increase its per capita mortality rate 21 times to match Italy and Spain. Five times to match France. 2.5 times to match the UK. Seven times to match Belgium. Six times to match the Netherlands.

I entirely disagree with your notion of competence.

Italy and Spain have 20,000 deaths and still climbing rapidly. The US requires 64,000 deaths and ~800,000 cases to match Spain's present figures; approximately 65,000 deaths to match Italy's present figures.

Germany's 67,000 positive cases is competence? That's obviously not true. Their mortality rate is showing competence so far, however. The US per capita mortality rate is only slightly behind Germany's outcome so far.

For the US to match Switzerland's cases per capita, it needs 650,000 positive cases, and the final tally isn't in yet. That's an example of extreme incompetence. If the US gets to 650,000 cases, nobody is going to say that is a great success, it will be considered an immense failure. And it's an immense failure for Switzerland as well.

To match Belgium's rate, the US needs about 400,000 cases. Nobody will define that as success or competence if the US hits that many cases. And it's not competence for Belgium either, to say nothing of their extreme mortality rate. The US will require ~23,000 deaths from Covid to match the per capita rate in Belgium. I assure you that will not be declared as competence if it happens.

The EU has shown tragic incompetence widely. It's ripping the EU apart, as they've entirely abanoned Italy and Spain, leaving them alone to fend for themselves. The first thing Germany and other EU nations did is lock down their own medical supplies and refuse to help their fellow EU members that were in the most need. Then the borders began to shut down, further isolating their friends in such desperate need. So far China has helped Italy with more supplies than the other EU members have. That's a demonstration of competence? Obviously it's the opposite, the EU has failed across the board. They're making the US look really organized by comparison.

Some figures for comparison, per 100,000 people.

Notice the US just above Germany at the bottom. The US still has to climb a long ways to reach the level of ... competence displayed by the supposedly elite healthcare systems in Western Europe. And if it does, it will then be declared to be on par with Europe's finest healthcare systems?

Italy: deaths 19.6, cases 156

Spain: deaths 17.4, cases 200

Belgium: deaths 6.2, cases 112

Netherlands: deaths 5, cases 69

France: deaths 4.5, cases 67

Switzerland: deaths 4.34, cases 185

Luxembourg: deaths 3.7, cases 331

UK: deaths 2.1, cases 34

Denmark: deaths 1.6, cases 53

Austria: deaths 1.5, cases 112

Sweden: deaths 1.4, cases 40

Portugal: deaths 1.4, cases 63

Ireland: deaths 1.1, cases 60

US: deaths 0.9, cases 47

Iceland: deaths 0.6, cases 302

Germany: deaths 0.79, cases 81

Norway: deaths 0.65, cases 83

Finland: deaths 0.23, cases 26

* Note: Sweden, Finland and Norway have almost no recovery cases, which is why their mortality rates are still low. Several other European nations have extremely low recovery cases, so their mortality rates will jump even higher yet (eg the Netherlands). Germany by contrast has a lot of recovered cases already, so its mortality rate would be expected to remain quite low.

<comment><USER8> Seems pretty pre-mature to start comparing countries. We'll know better in a few months/a year, who handled things competently and who didn't.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Review my startup - <AUTHOR>

Hey guys. A friend and I are building a small web app and we would love to get some feedback. Are we providing enough value for the users? Is there enough information on the homepage for people to sign up? Here's the page, would enjoy your feedback! http://gratifyapp.me<p>Regards from Gilman <comment><USER2> Initial reaction: the homepage has too much abstract marketing verbiage, e.g. "Do Less. Achieve more" and "Boost your productivity."

What you failed to answer with your homepage is exactly what the product is and what exactly you're trying to solve. Unless I am genuinely interested or came to your site via a referral, I'm most likely not going to stick around to read the copy beyond what's in the hero, let alone view the screenshots further down the page (which BTW loads unbelievably slow).

Be direct and to the point. Clearly show what your product is without pouring the marketing gravvy all over it.

Other than that, the product itself looks great, though the design reminds me very much of outlook.com. Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your valuable feedback hsuster! Totally agree with your points.

Gratify is actually more like a combination of to-do list and done list as you will be given an option to add your completed tasks/ project into your achievement dashboard. I guess I would definitely spill out more on product features instead the marketing terms. Thanks again and let you guys know after I change it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I can't read the black text where it overlaps the blurred purple square.

I'm not sure if I have a plugin that's causing it, but when I'm scrolling and hover over "Laser Focus" it stops my scrolling.

I'm having a really hard time figuring out exactly what the app is. I think some bold blue subtext next to gratify that says "A process management tool to gratify everyone" or something like that. A short blurb that gives a clue what you're dealing with.

</comment><comment><USER4> look nice but not really different from other (or the difference is not clear after a quick review). I am using todoist and I don't think I would ever pay for a TODO app without having a long free subscription first. I hope that helps

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! I would definitely try some other copy to see it works better.</comment></comment>


Does experience slow you down? - <AUTHOR> http://deplinenoise.wordpress.com/2014/07/30/does-experience-slow-you-down/

<comment><USER2> botton line: Thinking in premature optimization stagnate your desing.</comment>