How Do We Define Affordable  Housing? - <AUTHOR> https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/3/15/how-do-we-define-affordable-housing <comment><USER2> It seems fairly obvious that the solution is to allow denser construction in the city cores, as well as allowing smaller residences to be built (such as dormitories at the lower end).

<comment> chroem- There is also a very strong, but potentially unpalatable, correlation between driveable cities and highly affordable housing. Something having to do with supply and demand.

<comment><USER3> A personal automobile is _the_ single most expensive form of transportation (except for a private jet, of course) on a per mile basis. Reasons around palatability (it's also the most dangerous form of transportation) aside, it doesn't matter how "affordable" housing is in a driving-only neighborhood when you're talking about people who don't have enough money to afford a car in the first place.

<comment> chroem- Let's do some napkin math and put these assertions to the test.

Average rent for a 1 bedroom apartment in Seattle, WA is $1869 a month [1]. A PugetPass costs about $80 a month. Living in Seattle without a car costs $1949 a month, or $23.4k a year.

Average rent for a 1 bedroom apartment in St. Louis, MO is $817 a month [2]. A decent used car that will last at least four years before needing maintenance costs a total of $4000, or an average of $83 a month. The national average for car insurance is $815 a year [3] (Missouri's is even lower), coming out to $68 a month. Now let's assume your used car gets a modest 25MPG, gas costs $3.00 a gallon, and your work is 15 miles away, plus you drive 20 miles on weekends. That's $82 a month in gas. Living with a car in St. Louis costs $1050 a month, or $12.6k a year.

Living with a car in a driveable city is $900/month and $10.8k/year cheaper than living in a non-driveable city. By this metric, non-driveable cities have housing that is 85% more expensive.

[1] [https://www.rentcafe.com/average-rent-market- trends/us/wa/se...](https://www.rentcafe.com/average-rent-market- trends/us/wa/seattle/)

[2] [https://www.rentcafe.com/average-rent-market- trends/us/mo/sa...](https://www.rentcafe.com/average-rent-market- trends/us/mo/saint-louis/)

[3] [https://www.thesimpledollar.com/how-much-does-car- insurance-...](https://www.thesimpledollar.com/how-much-does-car-insurance- cost/)

<comment><USER4> This is going to depend a lot on which non-drivable city you choose. I thought Seattle was particularly expensive?

I lived in Montreal and paid C$675 / month for a 1 bedroom apartment 5 minutes from a metro station and another C$79 per month for monthly STM pass. Throw in a few trips outside the city with a rental car and we're still under C$10k.

<comment> chroem- Montreal seems to be an outlier according to

[https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/how-does- montr...](https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/how-does-montreal- maintain-its-enviably-low-rents/article31285810/)

There are also much cheaper driveable cities (e.g. Knoxville, TN) and much more expensive non-driveable cities (e.g. San Francisco, CA). Also, more realistically, you would probably be commuting to the city center if you were driving. Rent in the suburb of Florissant, MO is only $618 a month [1]. And the average gas price in St. Louis is only $2.28 a gallon [2], and insurance in Missouri costs an average of only $57 a month [3].

That brings the cost of housing down to $820 a month or $9.8k a year. I'm sure you could get a cheaper and more reliable car as well.

[1] [https://www.rentcafe.com/average-rent-market- trends/us/mo/fl...](https://www.rentcafe.com/average-rent-market- trends/us/mo/florissant-city/)

[2] [https://www.gasbuddy.com/USA/MO](https://www.gasbuddy.com/USA/MO)

[3] [https://www.thesimpledollar.com/how-much-does-car- insurance-...](https://www.thesimpledollar.com/how-much-does-car-insurance- cost/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> [https://www.iconbuild.com/new-story/](https://www.iconbuild.com/new-story/) is building houses within $4000 - $10000 with 3D printing

</comment><comment><USER6> The first figure, the bar chart based on the BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey shows almost the same expenditures in Atlanta, Georgia and Los Angeles, California, with somewhat higher overall expenditures in Atlanta and somewhat lower housing expenditures relative to transportation in Atlanta.

However, Zillow gives a median home value of about $220,000 in Atlanta: [https://www.zillow.com/atlanta-ga/home- values/](https://www.zillow.com/atlanta-ga/home-values/)

Median list price per square foot is $219

Median home list price is $310,000

Zillow gives a median home value of about $663,000 in Los Angeles: [https://www.zillow.com/los-angeles-ca/home- values/](https://www.zillow.com/los-angeles-ca/home-values/)

Median list price per square foot is $478/sq foot in Los Angeles

Median list price of homes is $750,000

That is a radical difference in housing prices that does not seem to show up in the figure in the article. Presumably salaries and budgets are proportionately lower in Atlanta than Los Angeles.

Is this really an accurate and adequate explanation? I know people who have moved from Atlanta where they could afford a house and had to downsize to a smaller apartment in the San Francisco Bay Area which is somewhat more expensive than Los Angeles, but in the same ballpark.

Is Los Angeles really more affordable than Atlanta?

[ADDED]

The US Census reports:

Fulton County, GA (Atlanta area)

Median Household Income (2012-16): $58,851

Per capita income for past 12 months (2012-16): $39,101

[https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/fultoncountygeo...](https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/fultoncountygeorgia/PST045216)

Los Angeles County, CA

Median Household Income (2012-16): $57,952

Per capita income for past 12 months (2012-16): $29,301

[https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/losangelescount...](https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/losangelescountycalifornia/PST045216)

Note that Fulton County, GA (Atlanta) has a _higher_ median household income than Los Angeles County, and much lower median home prices according to Zillow.

It is unclear what the consumer expenditure report is computing. It may be the percentage of total expenditures NOT INCLUDING SAVINGS AND TAXES, rather than gross income:

[https://www.bls.gov/opub/hom/cex/calculation.htm](https://www.bls.gov/opub/hom/cex/calculation.htm)

Hence people in Atlanta may be saving more but spending a similar percentage of TOTAL EXPENDITURES to people in Los Angeles.</comment>


The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-hack-how-china-used-a-tiny-chip-to-infiltrate-america-s-top-companies?srnd=businessweek-v2 <comment><USER2> This has been posted several times and there are tons of comments:

[1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18146438](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18146438) [2]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18138328](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18138328) [3]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18145645](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18145645) [4]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18138990](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18138990) [5]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18141328](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18141328)</comment>


Show HN: Encrypted and anonymous discussions with friends - <AUTHOR> http://friendsincognito.com

<comment><AUTHOR> We built Friends Incognito to offer a safe and open discussion environment. We'd love to hear your feedback.

<comment><USER2> How does the "anonymous" part mix with having G+ and FB logins?

<comment><AUTHOR> We don't store who submitted which comment in the db. A comment is owned by all discussion participants. So, even though someone can tell which discussions you are in, nobody can tell which comment belongs to you.</comment></comment></comment>


Scott Adams challenged over Elbonian/Estonian jokes - <AUTHOR> http://blog.grabcad.com/2013/12/scott-adams-challenge-estonia/

<comment><USER2> I have no idea what GrabCAD has to do with this, or what the GrabCAD challenge even is.

I don't see why Elbonia would necessarily represent Estonia. It's a fictional country, that represents all of the small, relatively poor, Soviet Bloc states that people in the US don't know much about; Estonia, or Latvia, or Albania, or Moldova, or Slovenia.

This just seems like some false outrage to garner hits for his site.

<comment><USER3> Slovenia was not a Soviet Bloc state.

<comment><USER2> You're right! Hence emphasizing my point about Americans (like me) not knowing much about them. After checking Wikipedia, technically Slovenia was briefly Eastern Bloc as part of Yugoslavia between 1945 and 1948, but after that split and was independent of the USSR. For some reason I had thought that it was an Eastern Bloc country for longer than that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Because, face it, the Elbonians dress _just like_ Estonians?

Really, why don't the Albanians get up in arms? The two-vowel substitution preserves more of the sound than then two consonants.

</comment><comment><USER5> Worse yet: years ago I noticed that Elbonians is an anagram for 'no lesbian'. Coincidence? Then why are there no female Elbonians present in the strip at all? Answer that, Scott Adams!

<comment><USER6> haha genius

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is it a joke, or do they actually believe Scott Adams made this comic to make fun of their company?

</comment><comment><USER6> What GrabCAD has to do with it?

<comment><USER5> They provide an innovative technology for harvesting water in dry locations?

<comment><USER8> Right, but why them specifically out of the hundreds of other water-delivery- to-poor-nation companies and contests?...

<comment><USER5> They are in Estonia</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to Make Your Stuff in China  - <AUTHOR> http://designtheatre.net/2010/04/01/go-it-alone-how-to-make-your-stuff-in-china-part-1/

<comment><USER2> I work as a product designer in the UK. Recently for our smaller clients we are finding the the most cost effective way to have plastic parts made (financial, time and environmental impact) is to have the injection moulding tools made and tested in china but then ship the tools to the UK and mould over here. That way we save on shipping costs for the final product and by working with a manufacturing partner who have a tool shop in the UK you can maintain tools and ensure quality moulding without having to fly out to china.

This works well if you are making a product in the thousands but would probably not be the right solution for tens or hundreds of thousands.

China is very cost effective for people time, like making a mould tool, but power and raw materials does not vary as much. A building full of machines making plastic parts has a similar cost wherever it is in the world. I think that as people become more concious of the environmental impact of the products they are buying companies will begin to move to a model where they manufacture the product much closer to the consumer and save on shipping it around the world.

<comment><USER3> But shipping long distances by container via sea or rail is not that bad for the enviroment, it is the last bit of travel by truck that really is the killer. I'm not sure there is a huge difference.

I personally think that make the mold is the most important part, so if anything that is the part I would not want to give up control on.

<comment><USER2> The Chinese are very good toolmakers and are significantly cheaper than the UK. By going oversees you same money and give yourself more in the budget for more complex tooling with side actions and collapsible cores.

We tent to work with local injection moulding firms that have all the facilities on-site to make modifications to the tools and would check the designs of the tools by the Chinese before they start cutting metal.

There obviously is a risk in going to china that you will have to go out there to solve a problem but we are much happier with that being during the six weeks that they are making the tool and not the 5 years that it is being used.

<comment><USER4> I agree with samwillis.

Here are some tool numbers that I have: US cost = $30k, 8-10 weeks. China cost = $5k, 6 weeks. That is for a tool I quoted last week.

I slightly differ on where to manufacture the parts. Because in my industry pennies matter due to several mark-ups in the chain, we manufacture in China. But as samwillis said, it may not be needed in your business.

samwillis is right when s(he) says that parts and power costs don't change much, but labor does. Labor in the US is $25 / hr burdened, and in China less than $4 / hr. If your parts are labor intensive, it makes sense to be there in China.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Part II: [http://designtheatre.net/2010/04/11/go-it-alone-how-to- make-...](http://designtheatre.net/2010/04/11/go-it-alone-how-to-make-your- stuff-in-china-part-2/)

Part III: [http://designtheatre.net/2010/05/01/going-it-alone-part- iii-...](http://designtheatre.net/2010/05/01/going-it-alone-part-iii-inside- the-factory-walls/)

The author was also on a panel at TC Dirupt NY called 'getting it built' - which you can find here:

<http://disrupt.techcrunch.com/2010-nyc/agenda/#built>

Liam Casey was also on that panel - he is a good guy and a great contact to have in Shenzen (if any HN'ers are looking to build hardware - email him)

</comment><comment><USER6> Any fellow hackers here that import goods from China? If so, care to share your experiences?

<comment><USER7> Yes, I import a component for a device I sell. It's still stealth mode so I cannot even lever a plug for it here, BUT I'll share my importing experience

1\. Sourcing: Alibaba.com is best, Global Sources is a near shadow copy but also good

2\. Money transfer: For small amounts I'd recommend Western Union.

3\. Chosing a supplier.

</comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>====

Ooh this step is tough.

I liked this article because Adam has pounded the pavement in Shenzhen. This is more than I've done, as the flight would blow out the costs before the market was proven (it is now).

One thing you'll notice is that almost all devices on Alibaba are duplicated by about 5 manufaturers. Some of these are re-stockers, not the actual manufacturers. I haven't worked out a foolproof method of checking who the leaf-node manufacturer really is, but do try.

.

4\. Interacting

Be professional. Normally there are contact details on the Alibaba page. Use this to initially get in contact. Whoever is listed will probably not be the person who responds, so scan your spam folder carefully for the next few weeks.

Remember that you may be small fry to them until you place a large order

.

5\. Shipping

Most things are FOB (Free on Board) which basically means you pay the shipping. Your Shenzhen company contact should be able to provide you with a quote for Fed-Exing a sample. They will arrange the shipment, you just have to pay.

Initial orders can often just be declared as a sample for customs purposes.

.

6\. Costs

Volume counts. It reduces the shipping and unit cost, often in big steps. Shipping too has discontinuities on volume with shipping becoming much cheaper if its worth placing on a ship.

For projecting future costs as the supplier how their price list varies with volume, and how the shipping varies too. They'll quote you.

Plug these all in a spreadsheet and work out the unit cost.

.

7\. Legal

Do not forget Import Duty and Sales Tax. These vary per country (I'm in UK, but I've also done this in Oz).

But you need to find out how your goods are classified on an Import Duty scale. This tends to be that goods manufactured in your own country have an import duty on similar goods. In my case I'm importing discreet LED displays, which the UK does not make, so I don't pay Import Duty. If I was importing Plasma TVs, it would have a duty.

Check your country's Import Duty website for your classification. Often there is a fine line between entries, where it could be one or could also be another. This is a judgement call which number you choose. The immigration department may disagree with you and you may have to wrangle with them.

This happened to me in Australia, but after some in-person dignified pleading (yes there is such a thing), the Import official accepted my classification. This miraculously had lower Duty than what he'd initially decreed.

.

</comment><comment></comment><comment>=====

.

I hope this helps, good luck!

<comment><USER8> FOB usually means Freight On Board which means they will load it onto a truck at the specified site

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOB_(shipping)>

Free on Board means the goods are counted as delivered when they pass the rail of the ship that is going to carry them

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> More discussion on the same article at <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1255215></comment>


Recommend Books for Python ML and DS - <AUTHOR> I'm a sophomore. I need recommendations for books on Machine Learning and Data Sciece and Free online courses too. <comment></comment>


Default HTTPS access for Gmail - <AUTHOR> http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/default-https-access-for-gmail.html

<comment><USER2> This whole incident seems to have put the fear of god in them.

<comment><USER3> I like this idea though, indeed I like the idea of the web being https by default.

Where I find it funny in relation to email is that email passes over the internet in plain text and without Google adding PGP or something to Gmail the benefits for this aren't great.

Considering the current incident with China, and the hacking in December. https for gmail will prevent snooping of gmail, but wouldn't prevent the email being intercepted if sent to or CC'd anyone on any other domain where the traffic crossed China (ot it could offer low-hanging fruit in other countries as relays may not be as secure).

It does help increase intra-Gmail security (as using the web to author would author it being visible before being sent) but it wouldn't wholly secure the entire transaction end to end which surely should be the goal.

I'd love to see Google take steps to offer a public key encryption system for Gmail that could secure the email even as it passed over other systems and to recipients in potential hot-zones.

<comment><USER4> Actually, not all email passes in plain text - a decent chunk (although doubtless a minority) uses SMTP over TLS.

Many servers have it configured, and if it's available on the destination almost all MTAs will use it to send mail to other servers, even if they don't support receipt of mail in this way.

<comment><USER5> Gmail uses TLS to encrypt SMTP if you're using a client app.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Google... hardening...

This is old news for people who know (or care) about https. But it is new news in terms of the Goog vs. China cyber war. The winners in all this will most certainly be Google customers outside of China because Google will continue hardening their defenses which will make computing with Google safer for the end user. Will it help users in China? Time will tell...

</comment><comment><USER7> Good that it's still possible to turn it off. In Iran 2-3days before and after each political event government restricts access to only :80. No IMAP no POP3, and no :443.

<comment><USER8> The login form always uses HTTPS.

<comment><USER7> And there's also remember me feature.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I guess they put this off mainly because of the performance hit. I found the following quote regarding HTTP vs HTTPS performance on SO:

 _One point that has been brought up by several others is that SSL handshaking is the major cost of HTTPS. That is correct, which is why "typical session length" and "caching behavior of clients" are important.

Many, very short sessions means that handshaking time will overwhelm any other performance factors. Longer sessions will mean the handshaking cost will be incurred at the start of the session, but subsequent requests will have relatively low overhead._

SO Ref: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/149274/http-vs-https- perf...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/149274/http-vs-https-performance)

I wonder which they view as more significant, gmail latency or increased server load?

<comment><USER10> I'd be surprised if the answer wasn't latency - this kind of server load would be easy to scale with their engineering resources and they're big on the competitive advantage of user-perceived performance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> If only Yahoo had HTTPS available at all after login... Kind of fond of that address.

</comment><comment><USER12> It's kind of amazing that it wasn't like this from the start. Unsecured coffe shop wifi + http = everyone in the room can grab your password.

<comment><USER13> No. GMail's login page is always HTTPS so no one in the coffee shop can grab your password.

However, all the mail is in the clear. So if some crappy website sends your password via email, then someone can can grab it.

<comment><USER14> Which can is just as bad.

<comment><USER15> Bad minus being able to directly sniff your password equals less bad, not just as bad.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Preserving Trees Becomes Big Business, Driven by Emissions Rules - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/preserving-trees-becomes-big-business-driven-by-emissions-rules-11598202541 <comment><AUTHOR> Also related article from 2018: [https://www.wsj.com/articles/one-mans-money- draining-bet-on-...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/one-mans-money-draining-bet- on-climate-change-11545912000)</comment>


Show HN: React Redux based blood donor demo application - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/smanne/reduxnor <comment><USER2> This is looking good Sandeep. Thanks for bringing this to the hackers news community.</comment>


Show HN: Timelinr – The most fun you've ever had planning - <AUTHOR> Would love feedback on our planning app. Supports both macro and micro planning. Much more to come in the near future (mobile, integrations, etc), but for now, a really fun way to roadmap products, projects, teams, or just your personal goals.<p>Cheers! <comment><USER2> Your OP links to itself

<comment><USER3> I found this by googling the name: [https://www.gotimelinr.com/](https://www.gotimelinr.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's us! Odd the proper link didn't go through. Oh well. =)</comment></comment></comment>


What Ever Happened to OS/2? - <AUTHOR> http://www.osnews.com/story/26780/What_Ever_Happened_to_OS_2_ <comment><USER2> There were other OS/2 based FOSS projects that died.

Voyager was one, to rewrite OS/2 using the known OS/2 API calls.

OS2INE was another to try to run OS/2 binaries under Linux like WINE does for Windows binaries.

They seem to have vanished from the Internet.

OSFree stalled because they could not raise enough money to host their web site and continue development. They had the DOS part working as it was based on FreeDOS, and I think it would run some command line based OS/2 apps as well. I had a few ISOs of OSFree but they don't distribute them anymore. It looks like all they have is the source code.

Some of these FOSS operating system recreations just don't go anywhere or stay in the alpha stage. ReactOS, Haiku, AROS, etc are such recreations of Windows XP, BeOS, and AmigaOS. I think AROS is the one that is more polished than the others and more ready for prime time.</comment>


Show HN: Inspector Gifget - Speed up, slow down, play backwards your .gif(s) - <AUTHOR> http://inspectorgifget.com/

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN,

This is one of those weekend projects that took a couple days longer. Would appreciate any feedback you have. It's built in Flask/Python with the source available on Github (<https://github.com/xta/GIF-Explode>).

Thanks</comment>


Ethan Herdrick (Biographicon):  Running a startup on Scheme. - <AUTHOR> http://abstractstuff.livejournal.com/37979.html

<comment><USER2> A question about using scheme ( or any other flavor of lisp)...

To me (management type, with some tech knowledge) it seems as if there are some serious downsides to using not-so-mainstream languages, such as scheme. In my position I would be worried about the following:

\- hiring - will I be able to find talented people to work on the codebase? Especially if I am not located in a startup hub.

\- Scaling - I haven't seen many sites using scheme or other flavors of Lisp that are able to scale. As a management type I would want to see more than just 3 or 4 sites that have scaled well.

\- available libraries - the more traction a language has, the more libraries will be available for it. Can a (supposedly) better language make up for this?

And yes - I have read Paul Graham's essays on the subject and find them insightful, but since I am sure that almost all hackers have and I see no large sites written in anything but mainstream languages I am not convinced.

Disclaimer: I am in management, and I am merely curious - not bashing scheme or any other flavor of lisp. Just thinking that this is probably the right place to post this question.

<comment><USER3> I don't think you're going to get a satisfactory answer to a question that involves convincing a management type of the benefits of using Lisp. The point (or at least the way I understand PG's point) is that you _can't_ convince non-technical management types to use Lisp. This becomes a competitive advantage for a startup where management types don't make decisions. It's part of why small startups can beat larger, better funded competitors where managers force everyone to use Java. They get worse developers, less productivity, and take longer to build a worse product. In short, they lose, and the hackers win. You don't have buy into this view to agree that it is, at least, a terrific thesis, and I think YC was started in part to test this thesis.

I should add at this point that I don't know how to code in Lisp. If you ask most programmers what languages they "know how to code in" (never mind if they're experts), Lisp will show up in only a tiny fraction of the answers. Interestingly, you can take this to support or detract from Lisp.

You could say "if nobody's using it by now, it must not be any good." But that reminds me of the joke about the economist who tells his kid not to pick up the $20 bill on the sidewalk, because "if it were real, someone would have already picked it up." Mabye Lisp is the $20 that nobody (or at least very few) believes is real.

Some day, I swear I'll get started. In college (as a math major) I remember talking to a buddy who was majoring in cog sci trying to convince me that Lisp was a great language, and that I really should take a look at it. I was dismissive. If it were so great, why were we using C++ in all my math classes...

\-- oh, another thing to add _hiring - will I be able to find talented people to work on the codebase?_ A management type probably won't be able to. This option is only available to founders who 1) can do the work themselves, and/or 2) know people who can do the work.

 _Especially if I am not located in a startup hub._ Again, fairly unlikely. The idea is that the founders are already part of a community of good programmers, so they most likely live in a place where you can find more good programmers

<comment><USER2> I know the argument about noone but techies being able to see the advantages of using lisp, but I think it puts hackers on a piedestal where they don't belong.

Basically the argument implies that management types won't use lisp because they don't understand it. Well they don't understand java either. Or C++. What they do understand though is finding the fastest and cheapest way to a product - that is what they do for a living. If lisp was so great then surely some smart manager would have noticed that "hey look over there, they have 3 guys working on something that we have 30 guys working on - and they are doing better" And management is all about getting the most value for the least resources.

If you think of managers as the Dilbertesque pointy haired boss, then sure. But I think you (and PG) grossly underestimate the intelligence of management, and what it is that they do.

<comment><USER4> I think an open minded boss (assuming his hands aren't tied by someone above him) would entertain Lisp for a pilot or internal project if:

1) you could show good examples of successful projects done by comparable teams

2) you could demonstrate the ability to hire/train people to develop/maintain it

Am I being too optimistic? I put in lots of qualifiers to make it more realistic.

<comment><USER3> Eh, maybe. If the Lisp programmers are truly talented, and this is truly a contrarian play, then you might have to let go of the comparable project/team requirement.

As for hiring people to develop and maintain... well, this is probably why it doesn't work for the usual boss/employee relationship. The employee may quit a job. But if the employee is a founder or has tons and tons of equity, he'd be quitting on himself. He will go to the mat to save the company. He will bust a vessel in his eye before he'll let it fail.

Yes, he may end up sprawled out on the mat with a broken eye vessel, but that's the price of freedom, right? ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Thanks for hosting this Justin.tv :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hope to see you here tomorrow Fred. Maybe you'll give us a talk some time?

<comment><USER5> Count me in :)</comment></comment></comment>


Oxytocin Spray Increases Empathy - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1269781/Scientists-develop-spray-make-men-affectionate-using-cuddle-hormone-oxytocin.html

<comment><USER2> The article is atrociously written, but this is an interesting development.

One scenario that immediately comes to mind is misuse and detection of such, I'd imagine someone somewhere will try dosing a counterparty with this to get an edge in negotiations.</comment>


AMD EPYC 7601 Dual Socket Early Power Consumption Observations - <AUTHOR> https://www.servethehome.com/amd-epyc-7601-dual-socket-early-power-consumption-observations/ <comment><USER2> Main discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14598081](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14598081)

<comment><USER3> Unlike anandtech servethehome has measured the power consumption of Epyc themselves.</comment></comment>


Check: an platform to help journalists fact-check claims and debunk misinformation - <AUTHOR> http://www.zachalexander.com/work/check/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi folks – this is a case study I just published of my experience helping design & build Check ([https://checkmedia.org](https://checkmedia.org)), an open-source platform for social media verification.

It's basically a React/Relay app with a GraphQL/Rails backend. You can see the source here:

[https://github.com/meedan/check](https://github.com/meedan/check) (Docker compose app)

[https://github.com/meedan/check-web](https://github.com/meedan/check-web) (client)

[https://github.com/meedan/check-api](https://github.com/meedan/check-api) (server)

I have no official connection to the project anymore, but I helped build a lot of the frontend over the past year and will answer any questions as best I can.

The writeup has a number of (responsive) images and two gifs FYI, but no images/PDFs.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> *a platform, sorry for the typo :)</comment>


Show HN: Platform to Solve Some of "First Impression Influence" Problem - <AUTHOR> https://vaadit.com <comment><AUTHOR> What is "first impression influence" problem?

When a user search for query having multiple subjective answers, he googles it, lands on some question-answer forum (say, Quora), he's going to see most- visited/most-liked/most-commented/most-active answer. And general world population is innocent enough to get influenced by first-impression it sees.This situation worsens for country like India and Pakistan, where technology-penetration is super-fast than eduction-penetration. So a 14 year old boy in remote village now has smartphone and access to Google, but he's never gone to school. He's very much likely to get influenced by first answer he sees for any query (which is very much likely to be a majoritarian viewpoint).

Solution:

Don't show users just one perspective on first-impression. Show him more than one perspective so that his mind is bound to read that and maybe thus reason better.

Some e.g.: Questions might be extreme like "Are muslims good for this world anymore?" and simple like "Which car should I buy in 2019?"

So for these questions, no answer is correct, more than one answer are important enough. So more than one answer should be put at parallel level.</comment>


Ask HN:  Are Wi-Fi network names being used for advertising? - <AUTHOR>

You could even have a company that sells advertising on their Wi-Fi networks throughout a city.  The network name would change frequently throughout the day as it goes from advertiser to advertiser. <comment><USER2> I've never seen it other than seeing the company's name that was trying to sell me wifi access (i.e. "T-Mobile" while in Starbucks a few years ago).

I would think that you couldn't switch the network name _ever_ if you wanted traction though. (1) If you switch the network name on most routers, it kicks everyone off and forces them to connect to the new server. (2) If you want someone to be able to find you again, how do they know that _you_ are really "Bobby's Place" (the name of the advertister) or "Booby's Place" (the name of Bobby's house)? I don't know if the last example translated well but the idea is that without the same name, there is no name/brand recognition...</comment>


Ask HN: Dynamic DNS Hosting - <AUTHOR>

I'm setting up a web server at home and looking for a reliable dynamic DNS host.  Any recommendations for free or affordable ones? <comment><USER2> <http://www.dyndns.com/>

My Linksys router is configured to automatically update my dyndns info.</comment>


Does America Need to Make Things? - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/14/does-america-need-to-make-things/

<comment><USER2> This is an interesting article and something that I've been musing about for a few weeks. Is manufacturing completely leaving the United States? I know its easy for non-engineers to point to engineers and say "hey, make something" but there is a little truth to Lacy's statements.

I can't speak as to whether the US is falling behind in innovation, but solutions to keeping manufacturing in the US are not simple. To properly address this problem you have to start with education and the incentives with enticing more American's to go to graduate school. Then there's globalization and monetary policy and immigrant visas. I'm sure there are a whole host of issues in between.</comment>


Show HN: Enterprise group text messaging for communities - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VREaVIyy20Y

<comment><AUTHOR> The video is a demo of a working prototype I have for enterprise text messaging.

The goal is to get an organization have their own phone number, so members of the organization can communicate through it.

So far the features are \+ 1 to many text messaging

\+ Text messages appointment scheduling

\+ Scheduled messages

Right now the domain I am developing this for is churches, and was wondering if any other orgs out there would be interested in this product?</comment>


Scientists have created a living organism whose DNA is human-made - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/15/science/synthetic-genome-bacteria.html <comment><USER3> No.

They really didn't.

In this case the claim that it's a fully synthetic genome is fairly suspect, basically it boils down to this:

A codon is 3 base pairs. Giving 64 possible codons.

Each codon codes for an amino acid except for 3 (I think?) stop codons.

This results in more unique codons than there are amino acids.

As a result some amino acids are represented by different codons.

In this paper all they did (not saying it's nothing, but it's definitely not what the headline says) was remove that redundancy. Effectively they ran sed over the genome of E. Coli (I think, I read it this morning which was hours ago), and replaced every occurrence of an alternative codon with a single "standard" one. Then they plonked it into an existing cell and it reproduced.

The biggest challenge was probably ensuring the correct construction over the 3 million odd base pairs in their root strain. Note that of 3 million base pairs, they only made 18000 changes, far from a synthetic genome.

It should not be surprising that given a correct assembly the bacteria reproduced - by design the experiment only replaced codons with a different equivalent codon.

<comment><USER4> > _It should not be surprising that given a correct assembly the bacteria > reproduced - by design the experiment only replaced codons with a different > equivalent codon._

I am surprised. I was under the impression that while two codons may code for an equivalent protein, bacteria do play shenanigans with DNA, like re-reading the same genome multiple times with shifted read frame. I don't think codon equivalence is preserved when you shift the read frame by 1 or 2. Moreover, a DNA molecule with changed codons is slightly different chemically at that place - which means a protein that might have previously attached there for some reason now might not.

<comment><USER5> You are right. If you read the paper, they de-duplicated all out-of-phase (shift 1 or 2) overlapped genes. Simple search and replace wouldn't have been viable due to these overlapped genes.

<comment><USER4> Thanks. Should've read the paper before commenting.

<comment><USER6> Actually, your question and followup answer is valuable addition to the discussion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> No, it is not artificial life, they synthesized life from that which already gave rise to life. This is an important distinction because what they did involves growing and manipulating existing systems. It's no more artificial than a an animal which has been bred, this is just on the level of molecular genetics. If we ever transcend, creating human/"machine" interfaces will require such technology. No you won't jack in like Neo, no we won't download our souls and thoughts to a computer, synthetics will replace organics slowly. The computers and people will meet in the middle.

</comment><comment><USER8> I will keep moving goalposts until a genome and cell are synthesized atom by atom.

<comment><USER9> You just revealed where your goalposts will end up when they stop moving, so that's effectively where the goalposts are.

<comment><USER10> Maybe he means atom in the original sense of "indivisible particle", in which case it appears we can count on the physicists to keep moving the goalposts further ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> No. Scientists didn't create the full biochemical environment in which a genome's meaning is evoked.

<comment><USER11> This is so often overlooked. DNA is nothing without the machine to 'run' it. Which is incredibly complex in itself, more so than the DNA?

<comment><USER12> there are some DNA enzymes. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deoxyribozyme](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deoxyribozyme)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This sounds like the Genesis of the movie Splice.

</comment><comment><USER14> No it's not. It could be DRM for the biotech industry though.

</comment><comment><USER15> Does it reproduce in a non-deterministic way? If so ...

<comment><USER16> Data scientists have a hard time predicting the states and decision paths of a Neural Network! I doubt we'd even make a serious attempt at predicting reproduction for life in this millenium (or maybe ever!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> "Life" means splitting hairs finer and finer. Are bacteria alive? Viruses? Prions? The distinction is ultimately meaningless.

<comment><USER3> Bacteria are alive by all standard definitions of life.

Generally viruses and prions are not considered alive as they are not (theoretically) capable of self replication.

Viruses don't have any of the mechanisms required for self replication - <USER2> only reproduce if a different organism is coerced into duplicating the virus's genetic material. Specifically the virus genetic material gains precedence over the cell's own material once the cell dissolves the protein shell.

Prions are literally misfolded proteins - saying they're alive is not different from saying any arbitrary polymer is alive - plenty of polymerization processes essentially have the same construction behaviour: rely on the bond affinities to morph neighboring identical molecules into identical construction.

<comment><USER12> Prions definitely self-replicate. the criterion for life is metabolism addition to self reproduction

<comment><USER18> No, they don't. When they come in contact with another, already synthesized, protein of identical composition, they alter it to match their own shape. That is a far cry from replication or reproduction. The other protein has an equal role, in its readiness to conform.

Other molecules alter the shape of proteins not like themselves, in otherwise similar ways. We don't call them alive, either. Prions are interesting in that their action produces more identical action, in an exponentially growing fashion, unlike other, otherwise similar, processes.

If you like, you could say the prion's shape, itself, reproduces, given a substrate of conformable prionic proteins. That makes it more like a meme.

<comment><USER12> I got my phd in biophysics from UCSF, where the prion work was originally done, and all my professors used the term "replication". That was a colloquial term for "catalyze a structural transfer in an exponential way". I think that really does qualify for replication in a limited way.

However, arguing over this terminology is irrelevant.

<comment><USER18> Agreed. The exponential character makes it eerily similar to life processes.

I wonder whether anyone has measured temperature reduction in a runaway prion replication process.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why Browser Sniffing Stinks - <AUTHOR> http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/05/31/why-browser-sniffing-stinks/#

<comment><USER2> I found a lot wrong with this article. But the two that bothered me the most were these.

"Reduced scalability and increased maintenance"

The author claims code "can never be future proofed" because of different browsers. I don't see why that's so. I personally use a renderhtmlforbrowser() function that uses a switch statement. So all I have to do when a new browser comes out is add another string to the switch statement and another function for the renderhtmlforbrowser function to call.

"It's Rarely Required"

The author says "Web standards have made browser sniffing far less necessary on the server" but I disagree with that. Standards have made things easier in that you can create HTML that won't be completely mangled by one browser while working fine in the other. But anyone whose tried knows that a site's appearance can be completely different in two separate browsers even though they are both standards compliant (even with CSS). So anyone who cares how their site looks still needs to pay attention to all browsers

<comment><USER3> <http://dowebsitesneedtolookexactlythesameineverybrowser.com/>

<comment><USER4> Agreed. If you really need pixel-perfect layout of your content, then use images like Wolfram Alpha does. Your time is probably better spent on content and usability though.

Or for another aspect -- all displays will render colors differently, but it would be nonsense to try to compensate with different color schemes in your website.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Most the non-IE browsers work pretty well and get updated quickly to fix problems. IE needs the workarounds and for that you can use conditional comments (<http://www.quirksmode.org/css/condcom.html>).

</comment><comment><USER6> x100.

Mixi, the Japanese social networking service, has a mobile site. I was trying to surf to it via my DSi; but they refuse mobile connections from anything but a mobile browser that is recognized in their DB. They might have complicated that further by some awful IP address restrictions (thank you so much, jphone ruby package /sarcasm).

Result? I need to load the full website on a game system that simply cannot handle it. It cannot compare in the slightest to experience to the experience loading mobile Facebook. (Although to be fair, Mixi cannot compare favorably to anything done after Friendster anyway).

Please people, unless you really have to - don't browser-sniff.

</comment><comment><USER7> IE is like an 800lbs weight belt locked around the waist of the web.</comment>


Google, Facebook Urge Supreme Court to Take Up Samsung-Apple Patent Dispute - <AUTHOR> http://recode.net/2016/01/18/google-facebook-urge-supreme-court-to-take-up-samsung-apple-patent-dispute/ <comment><USER2> [http://www.cnet.com/news/apple-says-purple-iphone-concept- pr...](http://www.cnet.com/news/apple-says-purple-iphone-concept-predates- sonys-art/)

Samsung argued that Apple used the Sony designs for the Walkman and a prototype phone as a basis for the iPhone. Apple claims their Purple project predates the Sony prototype.

Apple once sued eMachines over the eOne that looked like the G3 iMac, citing a trade dress issue. It was an all in one design where the monitor had the computer in the case and it had round edges.</comment>


A History of CLU – Barbara Liskov (1992) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download;jsessionid=F5D7C821199F22C5D30A51F155DB9D23?doi=10.1.1.46.9499&rep=rep1&type=pdf <comment><USER2> Slightly tangential, but you might also be interested in Barbara Liskov's 2008 Turing Award lecture: [http://amturing.acm.org/vp/liskov_1108679.cfm](http://amturing.acm.org/vp/liskov_1108679.cfm) [video]

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a really fascinating read. I'm only really familiar with the Smalltalk side of ADTs/Modules/Objects that started gaining steam in the 1970s, due to Alan Kays prolific speeches. But this was all happening completely concurrently!

It's cool to see how people in the 70s were wrestling with concepts we take for granted today. Maybe some of their abandoned ideas are even worth pilfering - we're still a young field, which has its strengths.

<comment><USER4> Which is why everyone that has the opportunity to delve into history of programming languages all the way back to Fortran, can learn that C wasn't neither the first systems programming, nor the best at it, when one delves into what research institutes besides Bell Labs were doing.

<comment><USER3> I'm very much into the whole "non mainstream" computing thing. Alan Kay, Bret Victor, Lisp weenies, that schizophrenic dude who makes religious OSes with assembler, Chuck Moore, Ken Iverson - anything that's not nuget configuration file or a git error messages or sundry other things that makes me wish I was an electrician or an accountant.

There was less orthodoxy back in the day it seems, so it's always a breath of fresh air reading these older papers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Thanks for posting this. My history with reading papers has been very poor in the past and I've now made a resolution for at least the next few months to fight my Hacker News addiction by preferencing papers or books over 'news'.

</comment><comment><USER6> Did anyone else immediately think "Codified Likeness Utility" when they read the headline?

<comment><USER7> Barbara Liskov is one of the most influential computer scientists who even one a Turing award. So, I'd immediately think it was some historical or current work of Barbara Liskov if all I did was study CompSci. I'd already seen CLU as one of C++'s influences, though. The key contributions section should hint at its significance:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLU_(programming_language)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLU_\(programming_language\))

Her Wikipedia page also has a nice summary:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Liskov](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Liskov)</comment></comment>


Kent Beck talks about accelerating software delivery (video) - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIkUWG5ACFY&feature=youtu.be

<comment><AUTHOR> A link to the slides:

<http://www.slideshare.net/KentBeck/software-g-forces></comment>


MS Office 365 made "mandatory" across all technical institutions in India - <AUTHOR> http://www.aicte-india.org/downloads/AICTE_notice%20_3_.pdf

<comment><USER2> From what I understand, Office 365 is provided free of charge. The website is down. Would be nice if people can provide more information.

</comment><comment><USER3> MS is dominating Indian market from the start, infact most people don't know other OS existence.</comment>


Ask HN: please review my project - baseloop.com - <AUTHOR> http://baseloop.com

<comment><USER2> If there are no features and no GUI to explore without having contacts added, how are you going to introduce and retain new users? This idea appears similar to something I have been working on. Does the service compile data and statistics for local events, activities, and locations? Perhaps new users could explore this aggregate data before adding contacts. The services you mention such as Twitter and Facebook both allow users to explore the application without adding contacts.

</comment><comment><USER3> I like the startpage. The pictures explain the service very nicely.

</comment><comment><USER4> not really sure how successful you're going to be with people giving you their email password.. isn't there a way to do that via the google api?

<comment><AUTHOR> yes, we had the api implemented, but decided to go with this interface - it is almost exactly the same UI as both facebook and twitter.

<comment><USER4> is it possible to start using without adding anyone?

<comment><AUTHOR> No. We observed that the abandonment rate was 100% when a user had no contacts, so we made this a requirement up front, since we were losing everyone who skipped this step anyway.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Nikola Tesla Pitching Silicon Valley VCs [video] - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/u/0/+avinash/posts/UgWmghiGvRM <comment><USER2> The funny thing - this video is not too far off in describing Tesla's actual interactions with financiers of his time.

If you are going to make financial players a dependency in your business plan you'll have to jump through similar kind of hoops.

On the other hand Thomas Edison figured out how to bootstrap his enterprises, maintain control and avoid dealing with this kind of nonsense.

<comment><USER3> The moral of this story is "Do not try to be like Nikola Tesla, because it will not help you in any way."

<comment><USER4> I think many people such as myself (biotech scientist) fail to see how far we have to move away from the "cutting edge" in order to attract interest. A basic researcher thinks nothing of investing 3 years of labor into something that _might_ work, because if you look at it _this_ way and also _that_ way, then it means the other, etc, etc.

The time horizon for VCs is much shorter than that. If your idea is not working _now_ , then you have very little chance of getting investment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There exist great myths around Tesla:

 _"Hardly anything written about Nikola Tesla fails to exaggerate his inventions and deify the man. Factually wrong descriptions of his accomplishments are found all over the place. His name is broadly smeared by association with virtually every crank conspiracy theory on the planet. They want magically easy answers to complicated problems, and when they hear that Tesla invented such answers and that the government and industry suppressed them, they trumpet his name to the world. This group has become little more than a cult, an insult to the man and his accomplishments."_

 _"Tesla is not known to have ever mentioned ball lightning in any of his writing or speaking, and no record from his time is known to exist stating that he created, demonstrated, or knew about anything that could reasonably be called ball lightning — despite intense rumormongering to the contrary"_

 _"Tesla posed for a famous publicity photograph, that you've seen many times, of himself sitting in a chair inside his lab taking notes while the air all around him is filled with such streamers from his giant coil."_

 _"During the final decade of his life, Tesla was essentially penniless and living in a New York hotel, consumed by what we think today was probably obsessive compulsive disorder. It was during this period — and not earlier during his productive laboratory years — that he openly spoke of having built and tested a Death Ray."_

Source: 'The Cult of Nikola Tesla', <http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4345>

<comment><USER5> Oh, and about the wireless power, which the video clip is about:

 _"Did Tesla plan to transmit power world-wide through the sky?

It was his ultimate plan, but the farthest he ever got was the partial construction of his famous tower at Wardenclyffe which was intended for wireless communication across the Atlantic. His worldwide wireless power system was theoretical only, employing the Schumann-Tesla resonance to charge the Earth's ionosphere such that a simple handheld coil could receive electrical power for free anywhere, and everywhere, in the world. Tesla's idea was innovative, but innovative idea it remained, as debts mounted and the tower was dismantled before it ever got to be used. Now that the nature of the ionosphere is much better understood, physicists now consider Tesla's concept unworkable, and no attempts to test it have ever worked.

All sorts of conspiracy theories exist, for example that the HAARP research facility in Alaska is secretly a test of Tesla's worldwide power grid, or some sort of superweapon based on it. The profound differences between these systems become clear upon doing even the most basic of research."_

<comment><USER6> hmm... i believe that for long distances, tesla planned to use the conductivity of the earth itself, because of it's low impedance, to send AC current to any point on the plannet's surface (<http://www.google.com/patents/US1119732?printsec=abstract>).

for short distances, air transmission was possible, but there is strong drop- off in efficiency because of air being an insulator (<https://www.google.com/patents/US645576?printsec=abstract>).

also, people do consider his work "workable:" <http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/wireless-power-0409> the rumor is that tesla intentionally left out key details in his patents to keep from dangerous tech being in the wrong hands, while maintaining the rights to the tech. so, we aren't even able to reproduce tesla's levels of efficiency or distance without re-discovering certain aspects... but to say that physicists consider his concepts unworkable is false.

edit: typo

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hysterical. I especially liked the way one or more of the VCs said "uh-huh", "right", or "yeah" every two seconds when Tesla was talking. Reminded me of Harry Shearer in Wayne's World 2.

I didn't quite understand the ending though. "You haven't really seen any of the inventions yet. Would you like to?", "Sure", _Tesla points finger_ -> I don't get what just happened.

</comment><comment><USER8> Here is the kickstarter project related to this video: [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dorrian/a-statue-of- niko...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dorrian/a-statue-of-nikola-tesla- in-the-silicon-valley)

</comment><comment><USER9> Created to support this [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dorrian/a-statue- of-niko...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dorrian/a-statue-of-nikola- tesla-in-the-silicon-valley)</comment>


Make it free or fail - <AUTHOR> http://kanebennett.wordpress.com/2011/01/02/make-it-free-or-fail/

<comment><USER2> The "entire free software movement" has nothing at all to do with Evernote or Skype, and everything to do with gcc, perl, Python, Ruby, sendmail, database engines, emacs, the Gimp, and a whole raft of other tools the world would grind to a stop without. I'll stand aside and let anybody bash the freemium model if they feel like it, but confusing that with the free software movement is a serious error.

<comment><USER3> Surprisingly enough, this paper was the first (that I read) to ever do it; I do spend most of my time categorizing different types of business models (and Freemium is too broad to be useful) and I usually read about the "FLOSS" environment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I mean no offense to the author (who I do think is right) but I find it terrifying that the startup world has come to the point where "Have a business plan that doesn't rely on you having millions of users to be profitable" is considered an insight and not just plain common sense.

<comment><USER5> "come to the point"? Wasn't it just 10 years ago people were saying "Go big or go home"? It's not like this misconception is _anything_ new.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I open source software when I feel it will benefit the greater community. But I've never felt pressure from the community to make any of my production code _free_. As a matter of fact, I think any pressure on developers to push their software free is silly - it should be a sincere offerring. Only sincere open source projects survive - otherwise you get the likes of half-assed licenses and crappy (but open, which isn't better IMHO) software.

Keep what you want to yourself, as a developer, there isn't anything wrong with that and open what you feel like opening up - that's your right as a creative individual and professional.

</comment><comment><USER7> Free is a fad.

(We should differentiate free in this sense from actual "Free Software" which is a completely different ballgame than what we're discussing here.)

Having your customers pay you directly for a service is the natural state of most business arrangements for very good reasons - the big one being the lack of any conflicts of interest which erode product quality.

The software industry is still a baby and the online services industry is a newborn.

As the industry matures quality will matter more and this will lead to customers paying directly for software entirely to get access to a higher quality product.

It has already begun with Apple, both hardware and software.

Free is the dominate fad right now but it won't last forever.

</comment><comment><USER8> I think you're mixed up about what Freemium is. Freemium means having a free option which allows people to become familiar with a product, and then paid plans which add functionality. Examples are Yola which is free unless you wat your own domain, Highrise which has a free "solo" package, Acunote which is free for a certain number of users etc.

This is very different from "build it, they will come, figure out the money later" which is what Facebook, Google, Twitter, Tumblr and the like do (monetising these services inevitably leads to an advertising based revenue model).

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure those can be separated as easily as you point out: SMEs who buy some ads on Facebook, but spend far more by making their page active, headhunters who have a paying account on LinkedIn, can be both considered as models where basic usage is free while more expert features are paying or where network externalities are decisive, and agents pay to benefit from their centrality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think there's a sampling bias here. There are plenty of more profitable products out there, and there always has been - but we're not aware of them because they don't have millions of people using them.

<comment><USER10> Precisely. It's all about value per user. If you have a low value per user app then you need a much larger user base to turn a profit, so free/freemium/advertising based revenue is best because it's the easiest way to grow. On the other hand, if you have a very valuable app then you don't need many users and you can afford to charge for it. More so, you can afford to avoid giving away your app to people who don't pay you. Consequently, you may be making a tidy profit but far less people will have used your app or even know about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I feel that the author has a point, but only to a certain extent. There are also plenty of companies that focus on a great user experience and top not support. To provide some counter examples to the companies listed in the article, companies like 37signals or GitHub and many blossoming mobile game developers are executing on this very well, in my opinion.

<comment><USER12> Don't know if you can put 37 signals in there now, while they have free offerings they seem to do there best to make them only visible to those actively looking.

<comment><USER11> Fair enough, they do seem to hide any free offerings. They seem to fit well into the "building a fantastic product, charging for it, and offering great support" group.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The problem with "saturation" is not because things are free. It's only a problem when your product doesn't solve any problem. If your product does solve a real problem, and solves really well, you'll get the users.

If you just make something cool that doesn't really do anything people need, well then, don't blame it on market saturation.

There are types of apps that you can only reap the fruit of when there are lots of users. These apps can't succeed if they require you to pay before using it. Facebook is useless if you don't have friends on it. A blog is useless if people had to pay before reading it. Stackoverflow is useless without its huge community. Youtube is useless if uploading and watching videos wasn't free. Google would've been pretty useless if you had to pay before seeing the results.

<comment><USER7> >Google would've been pretty useless if you had to pay before seeing the results.

Debatable. If Google really did provide superior search results people would probably be willing to pay for it.

At this point, I would consider paying for good search results. Google right now is more of a search for people who pay for a lot of SEO rather than a more objective form of search.

Google Premium, for a small fee, could remove the ads and go further to eliminate SEO content.

IMO this is going to be the future for many software companies. There will be the mass market version which relies on ad support and there will be the premium product which is paid for directly and provides a superior result.

It has already begun in many sectors. Free stuff catches on quickly but in the long run, quality costs money, and there WILL be a place for quality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> There might not be a tangible exchange (e.g. cash changing hands); this doesn't mean that a transaction isn't taking place.

It's never a case of 'free' - it would be more realistic to refer the phenomenon as 'zero-purchase-cost'. e.g. Facebook isn't free - users pay with their attention.

</comment><comment><USER15> Free content drives out unfree content.

</comment><comment><USER16> "The entire free software movement, in my opinion, stems from just a few successful companies who utilized the freemium model"

Now I need only to find a way to attach RMS, not yet even in his grave, to a suitable turbine..

</comment><comment><USER17> _startups will be forced to pay for marketing to gain the upper hand_

This is only the case if you can't otherwise differentiate your product.

<comment><USER12> Depends on your market, for a user focused web app that is novel enough to go viral yes. A B2B web app though might be the best solution to a problem but struggle because the businesses which would benefit the most have never heard of it.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'd love to hear any thoughts or opinions on this post, and on my blog in general!

(edited post due to name confusion)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Loving your comments guys, thanks!

</comment><comment><USER18> Free software has been around far longer than any of the apps/websites mentioned here.</comment>


Comparing Clustering Algorithms - <AUTHOR> http://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/lmcinnes/hdbscan/blob/master/notebooks/Comparing%20Clustering%20Algorithms.ipynb <comment><USER2> I wrote an article about mean-shift a while back if anyone is interested in more details about it - [https://spin.atomicobject.com/2015/05/26/mean-shift- clusteri...](https://spin.atomicobject.com/2015/05/26/mean-shift-clustering/)

Some comments on K-Means - one large limitation of K-Means is that it assumes spherical shaped clusters. It will fail terribly for any other cluster shape.

It's interesting that the author compared results on the same data set for the different algorithms. Each clustering approach is going to work best on a specific type of data set. It would be interesting to compare them across several different data sets to get a better feel for strengths/weaknesses, etc.

<comment><USER3> I agree that on some level more data sets would be nice, but I felt that it cluttered and obscured the exposition. Instead I used the one synthetic dataset, but crafted in to have various properties (noise, cluster shape, variable density, non-standard distributions) that will confound many different clustering approaches ... it is meant to be the "hard" case that with all the difficulties and confounding factors rolled into one dataset.

<comment><USER2> Cool, I think you did a great job. Do you have run time data for each algorithm on that data set?

<comment><USER3> It's included in the upper left corner of the plots. To be fair, these are for the sklearn implementations, some of which are excellent, but I can't speak for the performance of all of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is very specific to 2D data. I bet the story is a lot different for high- dimensional data. The challenges you encounter with this sort of clumping in 2D is unlikely to occur in high-dimensional data due to the "curse" of dimensionality. Clustering in high dimensions has its own quirks and gotchas too, but they're quite distinct from the gotchas of low-dimensionality.

Here's more from an actual expert: [http://research.microsoft.com/en- US/people/kannan/book-chapt...](http://research.microsoft.com/en- US/people/kannan/book-chapter-2.pdf)

<comment><USER3> The examples are all in 2D because it allows someone to visualise what's going on. In higher dimensions things get messier and you have to rely on cluster quality measures ... which are often bad (or, more often, defined to be the objective function that a particular clustering algorithm optimizes, and hence give a false sense of how "well" the clustering has done). I've worked with HDBSCAN quite successfully on mid-range dimensionality data (50 to 100 dimensions). I agree that it doesn't work as well on truly high dimensional data, but then little can once the curse of dimensionality truly kicks in. Your best bet, at that point, is the assume that your data actually lies on some lower dimensional manifold (i.e. the intrinsic dimensionality is much lower) and apply suitable dimension reduction techniques (t-SNE, Robust PCA, etc.) and then cluster.

<comment><USER5> Or to apply neural nets to compute some kind of vector representation that contains semantic information.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> One of the better comparisons of Clustering Algorithms online. It's also worth checking out how HDBScan works: [http://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/lmcinnes/hdbscan/blob/mas...](http://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/lmcinnes/hdbscan/blob/master/notebooks/How%20HDBSCAN%20Works.ipynb)

</comment><comment><USER6> These all look like clustering based on a 2d space, but does anyone know methods to tackle clustering on a network?

Is it just a matter of tweaking the definition of density / distance to the number of hops, or is it a different problem entirely? I can see how with 0 or 1 hops the data would be a very smushed distribution, versus 2d distance is much more rich and spread out.

<comment><USER7> Clustering algorithms generally only need a distance metric. Here 2d space is used for illustration just because it is easy to visualize.

For n-dimensional space, geometric distance is often (but not always) used, but you can just use # of hops instead of that.

<comment><USER6> Brilliant, that's what I figured, thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I would say there are two aspects of clustering that are important: accuracy of the model, and accuracy of the model fitting process.

A model is a guess about the underlying process that "generates" the data. If you're trying to use hyperplanes to divide data that lies on a manifold, then you are going to have poor results no matter how good your fitting algorithm is.

On the other hand, even if you know the true model, high levels of noise can prevent you from recovering the correct parameters. For instance, Max-Cut is NP-hard, and the best we can do is a semidefinite programming approximation. Beyond a certain noise threshold, the gap between the SDP solution and the true solution becomes very large very quickly.

<comment><USER9> soft margin SVM would be useful here. And there are manifold aware topographical clustering algorithms, like Persistent Homology techniques, Gunnar Carlson is the man on this new clustering offshoot.

<comment><USER3> Oddly enough HDBSCAN can be recast as a persistent homology computation; the trick is in simplicial complex construction; you need something slightly more density aware than traditional Rips complexes. I am currently working on designing a version of Carlsson and Memoli's Multiparameter Hierarchical Clustering based on the persistent homology interpretation of HDBSCAN.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is a great resource. As someone who knows little about clustering, this was clear and very informative. It covers potential pitfalls much better than other similar documents I've seen, which is a useful approach.

</comment><comment><USER11> how about t-SNE for clustering? [https://lvdmaaten.github.io/tsne/](https://lvdmaaten.github.io/tsne/)

<comment><USER12> The t-SNE algorithm isn't a clustering algorithm, but a nonlinear embedding. Clustering algorithms assigns a label (or no label) to each point in the data set. Instead, the t-SNE finds low dimensional coordinates for each point such that nearby points in the original data are nearby in the lower dimensional representation.

That being said, I've seen the t-SNE used as a preprocessing step prior to clustering, as in ACCENSE[1].

[1]: [http://www.cellaccense.com/](http://www.cellaccense.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> As someone intrested in the subject but with 0 insight or knowledge, would these algorithms be a good match for short text clustering? For example identifying identical products in a price comparison app based on their similar but not identical title/name and possibly other attributes.

<comment><USER14> The answer is maybe. You need to reduce that text to a set of features that you can pipe into a clustering algorithm, and what'll really make or break your approach is how you convert the text.

There are two types of features and related clustering algorithms: categorical and numerical. Numerical features are the most commonly supported by out of the box clustering tools (meaning most of the algorithms made easily available to you will expect numerical features). Categorical features can be reduced to binary numerical features, however, though whether that'll make sense for your data depends: For example, if products have a set of categories they can be sorted into you may want to just use that data along with K-Modes clustering or some other approach that considers categorical features. (Though to me those don't really seem to produce useful results.)

For short text clustering I'd try an ngram frequency approach, wherein you reduce the text to a set of features describing the frequency of ngrams from, say, unigram up to trigram. You're attempting to balance the number of features you end up needing to process with the amount of locality information you need to get a useful result. If you end up with far too many features, you could attempt to cull them with an approach such as PCA, but it may not even be necessary.

Do note that I'm only a little above 0 in terms of insight or knowledge, so take my advice with a good heap of salt. Clustering of this data would group together products that are described "similarly", but "similarly" in this case doesn't imply the products are in fact similar, but only that they're described in a similar manner.

You may also want to explore graph clustering over vector clustering, which—while there may be no out of the box solutions readily available—is likely a much better fit for text in general.

<comment><USER13> Oh wow, I still find the level of effort the HN crowd puts into being helpfull, amazing. You sir rock!

</comment></comment></comment><comment> Wei-1 Why not use Density Cluster based on this 2014 Science Paper? [http://science.sciencemag.org/content/344/6191/1492](http://science.sciencemag.org/content/344/6191/1492)

<comment><USER3> Desnity Peak clustering is an interesting idea, but is still centroid based and will have many of the same issues as K-Means (but may pick better centroids for this case). It also involves a little bit of parameter tuning (particularly with regard to bandwidth), and can be relatively slow if not suitably accelerated with space indexing structures such as kd-trees or cover- trees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It would be interesting to see what Agglomerative Clustering the author is using here. I suspect for this two dimensional, density based cluster dataset, single-link agglomerative would perform much better than what is shown (likely average link).

<comment><USER3> It was actually Ward. I agree that single linkage would have performed better, however the noise would have greatly confused the issue. Robust Single Linkage (Chaudhuri and Dasgupta, 2010) would be the better choice in the presence of noise as with the test dataset (which was designed to be as difficult as possible for clustering algorithms, while being obvious to a human viewer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Interesting, but the subtitle "Why you should use HDBSCAN" makes little sense on a dataset of N=1.

<comment><USER3> That's fair, but the subtitle was intended to be a little controversial. I could have included more datasets, but ultimately that just clutters the exposition -- instead I chose a dataset that can illustrate several different ways clustering algorithms can break. Ultimately it is meant to be a teaser as to why you should use HDBSCAN; the real answer is to grab the code and run it on your data, or your favorite test datasets, and see how it performs for you (because there is no substitute for that). I'm actually pretty confident you'll find the results impressive enough to make HDBSCAN a go-to choice for clustering.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Cool. I have not looked into the *DBSCAN methods, yet. This post makes me think I should.

<comment><AUTHOR> Then you should also have a look at OPTICS, which was one of the first density based clustering algo's [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPTICS_algorithm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPTICS_algorithm) and [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5515675/python- implementa...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5515675/python- implementation-of-optics-clustering-algorithm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Great article! Does anyone know of an implementation of HDBSCAN for R?

<comment><USER3> I don't know of any implementations yet. On the other hand it isn't that hard to get the basics working (see [http://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/lmcinnes/hdbscan/blob/mas...](http://nbviewer.jupyter.org/github/lmcinnes/hdbscan/blob/master/notebooks/How%20HDBSCAN%20Works.ipynb) for an explanation of the algorithm). The trickier part is getting good performance, but for small datasets that doesn't really matter. Hopefully someone will put together an implementation for R soon.

<comment><USER17> Thank you for the response and also all of your hard work in the Python package!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Can find such comparisons by

Glenn W. Milligan

Ohio State

back to at least 1980.</comment>


Armstrong to Nasa: You're embarrassing - <AUTHOR> http://news.discovery.com/space/armstrong-congress-nasa-embarrassing-110922.html <comment><USER2> I know this has to be incredibly difficult for anyone who grew up during the space race, but there comes a point at which you must force yourself to let go of the old in the act of grasping at the future. Compared to the advance of technology within government organizations like NASA, the progress seen in private programs chasing the X PRIZE has been astounding. So long as the government keeps their 70s era technology in service, the role remains filled, and the young upstarts have less motivation to shoot for the stars.

<comment><USER3> Bingo. Armstrong and many of the other old Apollo-era astronauts are emotionally invested in manned space-flight. I think he romanticizes it to the point of being immune to arguments of cost-effectiveness.

<comment><USER4> It's not just about emotions. It's the next frontier. Don't you want us to get there first? It's also a great investment, it creates jobs and develops technological breakthroughs that benefit everyone.

<comment><USER5> > it creates jobs and develops technological breakthroughs that benefit > everyone.

That's a testable statement. Though the more interesting statement would be: It creates more jobs than other things we could do with the many, and develops more beneficial technology.

(My guess is that those stronger version aren't true.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The title is completely misleading. Armstrong did not tell NASA "you're embarrassing". He told the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology that the demise of NASA is embarrassing. And it is. Regardless of the other crap our government spends money on, NASA is a fantastic investment, and has always provided a positive return to our economy.

<comment><USER7> I'm sorry, but you have no way of knowing this. What would happen if you took a bunch of would-be rocket scientists and _hadn't_ given them jobs at NASA?

<comment><USER8> That's an interesting perspective, assuming you're alluding to private vs. government funding.

However, can anyone provide evidence that private funding can accomplish anything near the scale of what NASA accomplished? I'm asking that as an honest question.

I don't love government spending or bureaucracy, by any means. Who would, except perhaps government workers? However, I fail to see any major advancements that have happened without the scale of funding that only governments can provide.

I really want to believe that the private sector can do it. I just don't see a lot of historical evidence that it can.

<comment><USER9> It's hard to make an apple-to-apples comparison here as private companies in the past decades have been forbidden to do what NASA has done. Not to mention, NASA's most memorable achievements were fueled largely through patriotic furor.

I suspect that it's possible. Much of NASA's flouted benefit are the technological discoveries it has made while solving the problems of Space exploration. Assuming that those discoveries have benefited our society economically more than NASA has cost it (an argument I've read before) then it seems like their would have been at least one sufficient financial incentive for private industry to pursue space if given the chance. Not to mention R&D that can only be performed in a zero gravity environment. A patent system _could_ make all this profitable.

But there are still so many other concerns, such as national defense that crop up in talk of private space exploration that it's really hard to make any real comparison.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The shuttle was never flown the thousands of times it needed to have all the bugs worked out, NASA is an agency lost in middle-management hell, and you can't trust exploration to the politicians.

That being said, Armstrong has a point: none of what I've just said is new or is satisfactory as an excuse. The failure to manage these facts and manage our access to space -- perhaps by a privatization push a decade earlier -- is an embarrassment.

<comment><USER11> I strongly disagree with the notion that NASA is lost in middle management hell. Do you know how many successful missions they have running right now, that are to the benefit of all? Dawn, Chanda, Hubble, Messenger, Cassini, GRAIL, 2 current mars missions, one halfway to pluto, another on its way to jupiter. Not to mention all of the valuable earth research. Manned missions are important for inspiring and our long term survival. But we can afford to take a break. The private sector in the US is doing really well. Nasa is getting ready to send people on a long term mission. Cut them some slack.

<comment><USER12> I don't want this to turn into a huge thread listing all current NASA missions, but I just want to put in a word for Kepler, which to me could be easily the most important NASA mission going on at the moment.

In 1994 we knew of _zero_ planets outside the solar system. Ten years ago we had a handful. Now, thanks to the Kepler mission, we're on the verge of _really_ understanding how common planetary systems are, how they form, the typical distribution of planet sizes and orbits, and how common Earth-like planets are likely to be throughout the universe. That's a big freaking deal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> >>[...] Russia's Soyuz capsules are the only taxis for the world's astronauts heading to low-Earth orbit, and each ticket to the ISS costs global space agencies between 50 and 60 million dollars each.<<

I thought, the last shuttle starts we're costing over 1 billion. So with 7 crew members, thats more than twice the price paid to the Russians. Sure, they could raise that price in theory. But the Russians can't afford to run the ISS on their own.

<comment><USER14> The ISS is great and all, but the real value of the shuttle was that we could park next to Hubble or one of our spy satellites and do maintenance in place, so milking a lot of value out of orbiting platforms that would otherwise have to be shut down. I don't see what we have that replaces that right now.

<comment><USER15> Satellites are not designed for that - the Hubble sure wasn't. It is not a capability that needs to be replaced.

<comment><USER16> KRSchultz is basically correct, please don't downvote him. The last Hubble repair mission went way beyond the Hubble's expected service capabilities, which was an amazing accomplishment.

However, it's _vastly_ more economically sound and safer to bring an aging device down in controlled descent and send up a brand new one with all the latest bells and whistles than it is to send up the Shuttle with a crew and do space walks for a repair and upgrade mission.

The shuttle weights 4.5 million pounds not including cargo. The Hubble telescope weighs 24,500 pounds. Most of the cost is getting things into orbit, and when building devices the cost of a second spare is insignificant compared to the cost of the first one. Obviously sending a 4.5 million pound shuttle as payload with crew into orbit costs considerably more and also destroys more of the ozone layer than sending a 24,500 lb payload.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It is terribly embarrassing. But the solution is not to keep the Shuttle program creaking along, but to work on a new program. At some point, legacy must be removed and a new platform created.

<comment><USER18> Like I've said repeatedly, what is embarrassing is our dependence on forign nations to get to a space station largely funded and built by us. Russia is not our friend. Russia is a business partner with whom we're not at war.

We should have gotten our asses up and had something new by now, so we could retire the shuttle.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Isn't SpaceX scheduled to make a resupply flight to the ISS this November? I'm not sure how we get from that to "We will have no American access to, and return from, low Earth orbit and the International Space Station for an unpredictable length of time in the future".

Is it just because the SpaceX flights are only cargo and not personnel? I can't tell from the SpaceX launch manifest(<http://www.spacex.com/launch_manifest.php>) what the launch is going to be carrying, but the Dragon is at least capable of carrying crew.

<comment><USER20> It's not looking good:

[http://www.universetoday.com/89006/spacex-may-not-be- allowed...](http://www.universetoday.com/89006/spacex-may-not-be-allowed-to- dock-to-iss-on-next-flight/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Asking how we can shut down the shuttle program "in the middle of its prime" reminds me of the line from Star Wars about the bad guys surrendering "Now? In our moment of triumph?"

</comment><comment><USER4> America has stopped dreaming. Remember all those futuristic visions of tomorrow and the optimism America had? That all stopped once we stopped going to the moon. We just need to make this a priority over say, two wars and a military presence in hundreds of countries.

</comment><comment><USER16> I agree with Armstrong. It is indeed very embarrassing the US has no human launch capability left at all, especially given our enormous lead. Hopefully that will be rectified with the work SpaceX is doing.

</comment><comment><USER22> canned primates are not the future of space. I wish every dollar spent on it was spent on brain research. i want to explore space in an appropriate body, not this laughably fragile meat one.

</comment><comment><USER23> Great, now try to tell people they should pay more taxes to support a bigger space program - be it carried out by NASA or private companies.

<comment><USER24> The people don't need to pay more taxes. An adjustment of current budget allocation is all that's needed. For example, you could double NASA's budget by shrinking the war budget from ~$698,000,000,000 to $678,000,000,000 / year. Seems pretty reasonable to me.

<comment><USER25> And you should not underestimate the propaganda value. Generations were inspired by the Apollo program. The shuttle is a beautiful machine, but it really doesn't go anywhere interesting.

<comment><USER12> Is the Moon _that_ interesting?

<comment><USER25> It's a real place. The ISS is not a "place" - it's something we put up there. It's the difference between going to the woods and camping on your mother's lawn.

Besides that, if we can manufacture spacecraft parts on the Moon, launching them is much easier than launching from Earth. You can even use a maglev rail to launch stuff from there - no reaction mass involved.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This situations represents a failure to understand economics. From the moon race to the period of the XPrize, and even after, NASA and the FCC has stymied private access to space. It is hard to test a launch vehicle if you can't get a launch or even testing (e.g.: static firing) permits. It is hard to start a space tourism business if the person developing your vehicles is barred from showing the CEO of the company the designs (as happened to Virgin Galactic for a couple years because Richard Branson is not a US citizen!)

This should resonate really well with anyone building a startup. A startup is a money engine. You find something that is profitable, and you invest in it and grow it.

You can go out and spend a lot of money doing things the manual way, but if everything pretty much stops when you stop spending money, you're not really investing in a sustainable business.

This is the case with NASA and a lot of government programs. We were spending a lot of money, but we were not building a space industry... in fact, because government bureaucrats saw space as a competitive advantage (NASA, for instance, long enjoyed easy funding from Congress) they worked to stymie private interests that might show them up.

It is great that things are changing now. We have SpaceX building launch vehicles. Virgin Galactic will start their business any day now (hopefully, though remember how congress wanted to shut it down because it might not be "safe"?) Jeff Bezos is doing something off in the desert of west texas, and even John Carmack has a small space business.

But we cannot ignore the legacy of hundreds of billion sunk into NASA on unsustainable programs, and quirky launch vehicles designed to meet bureaucratic needs, such as to at least have one component of it built in each of the 50 states.

So, the news that NASA is in an "embarrassing" state to me, is good news. I say this, because I would very much like to see Humans have ready access to space.

<comment><USER15> "It is hard to start a space tourism business if the person developing your vehicles is barred from showing the CEO of the company the designs (as happened to Virgin Galactic for a couple years because Richard Branson is not a US citizen"

For the military, that is a feature not a bug.[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Launch#Concerns_and_investi...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Launch#Concerns_and_investigations)

Realize anyone with the ability to get to orbit has the ability to drop things on the USA.

Contrary to popular belief, the people in government who make laws and control regulation are not bumbling idiots. Sure, it's easy to make jokes about the DMV or the post office, but the reality is that the person at the counter you interact with doesn't make laws. The guys making laws are generally really sharp and well educated, and in fact a lot of them actually have economics degrees because it is a great background for that position. So they probably understand better than you or I roughly how many jobs are going to be killed by these tight regulations.

That is weighed against the military's desire to keep space less open for security reasons. For a long time the military was winning the argument. It has slowly started changing, but the delay certainly has nothing to do with a mis-understanding of economics.

<comment><USER27> "Contrary to popular belief, the people in government who make laws and control regulation are not bumbling idiots."

Actually, in the case of the export restriction laws in question, they were bumbling idiots. These laws were passed in haste after there was an accidental disclosure of technology from the U.S. to the Chinese during an investigation of a launch failure. The law is terribly vague, with industry leaders unable to tell even what is covered by it or isn't. Additionally, enforcement responsibility moved from the Commerce Department to the Defense Department, with a concomitant increase in red tape that really only a large prime defense contractor could have the resources to cope with.

It would not be too much of a stretch to say that this law would be like outlawing airline travel completely on the basis of security concerns arising out of 9/11.

Finally, the arguments that will bring about a much needed change to these regulations will not be economic in nature, they will be arguments about national security. Already there is an international market for technologies untainted by U.S. control. Unfortunately for the U.S., the need for that market is going away as U.S. companies have been isolated for so long, and other nations have been so free to cooperate for so long, that non-U.S. space technology is, for the most part, superior to U.S. technology on cost, reliability, and performance bases. We, the U.S., are losing the larger security war by winning every local security battle with senseless and callous efficiency.

<comment><USER15> As someone who has been trained in the law (admittedly by a large prime defense contractor) it's not that hard to understand.

<comment><USER28> Perhaps not for you and your colleagues, but for the folks at the state department charged with enforcement, it often seems to depend on their personal interpretation on a given day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I have massive respect for Armstrong and Cernan but disagree with their positions. I think they're both wrong on this issue, they're distorting the actual state of things, and at a deeper level they're romanticizing the shuttle so much and looking so much through the lens and context of the 60's US-Soviet space race that their prescription is nearly the opposite of what we should be doing. I and a lot of techies I know are way more happy with the state of US space affairs now than say 20 years ago precisely because there's so much private enterprise innovation now, while, at the same time, NASA is still doing new missions and research. NASA ain't perfect, govt ain't perfect, market ain't perfect, but there are lots of things going right at the moment. And I think they're overlooking it.

</comment><comment><USER30> Space? You can't get there from here.</comment>


AMD Slumps in Premarket Trading on Barclays Downgrade - <AUTHOR> https://www.thestreet.com/story/14232143/1/amd-slumps-in-premarket-trading-on-barclays-downgrade.html <comment><USER2> Lol, Barclays is just looking for a quick buck. AMD is growing and i'm Holding.

But i understand the sentiment, it has gone up. But it's the first time in more than 13 years they can compete with Intell and their shares are still way below what is coming :)</comment>


Lime says it handled 6M rides on electric scooters and bikes - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/23/17585814/lime-electric-scooter-bike-6-million-rides <comment><USER2> I've been seeing a lot of Lime bikes around here lately. Sometimes I even see someone riding one.</comment>