Uber's experiment in behavioral science to subtly entice drivers - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/04/02/technology/uber-drivers-psychological-tricks.html <comment><USER2> > It has even concocted an algorithm similar to a Netflix feature that > automatically loads the next program, which many experts believe encourages > binge-watching. In Uber's case, this means sending drivers their next fare > opportunity before their current ride is even over.

I have to say that as a USER, I've noticed this change (I think it's been fairly recent) that they assign you a driver who hasn't yet finished a trip.

What ends up happening is Uber tells you an "estimate" of 3 minutes to arrival before you book. Then it assigns the driver and says "10 minutes" to arrival, but the driver hasn't even dropped off their last passenger yet. So, what's happened _multiple_ times is that the 10 minute estimate ends up staying at "10 minutes" for 5-10 minutes straight and 15-20 minutes after I booked, the driver shows up.

I would understand this if I ordered an Uber pool, but I ordered a black car and it still operated like that.

I'm not sure when they made this specific change, but I've noticed it a lot more in 2017 and overall I've been really disappointed with the _uber app_ this year as they seem to be trying to over-optimize everything to the hilt and it's starting to backfire

<comment><USER2> They also sweeten the deal so that if you cancel more than 5 minutes AFTER you accept the fare, they still charge you a cancellation fee.

So, they give you a pie-in-the-sky estimate, you wait ten minutes, realize it's still gonna be an extra 10 minutes and then cancel because you can grab a taxi _right there_ and they want to charge you a cancellation fee.

I understood that when they were at least _close_ on their estimate times, but now it just seems like they're intentionally being difficult.

<comment><USER3> I stopped using Uber after a couple of instances where a driver accepted my ride request and then drove steadily in the opposite direction for quite a while before canceling and triggering a charge to my account for not 'being where I was supposed to be'.

Each time this happened on a busy Manhattan avenue where I watched empty yellowcabs fly past for 15 minutes. Totally infuriating. Used to take a few per month but now haven't taken an Uber since September.

<comment><USER4> I live in NYC. That used to be a frequent problem, but I haven't had that happen to me recently. Whenever it did happen, I would cancel, contact support, and get my $5 back. It only takes a few minutes to contact support from within the app.

<comment><USER3> I was able contest the fee each time (with an extra step to get it actually refunded rather than a credit for future rides), but the reason I started using Uber to begin with was largely about accountability and convenience, both of which seemed to be on the decline when this was happening. Plus there's something especially insulting about being charged a fee for the privilege of being stood up.

Maybe things have improved recently but their corporate behavior hasn't given me much reason to start using the app again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> >"We've underinvested in the driver experience," a senior official said. "We are now re-examining everything we do in order to rebuild that love."

This just seems so crazy to me. A company who's very foundations are built on its number one assets: drivers has been neglecting them. It's like an airline neglecting its pilots or hospital neglecting its surgeons. Without drivers, Uber dies. I know they're investing in self-driving vehicles, but self-driving Uber's are a long way off after a spate of incidents and the pending Waymo lawsuit. It's going to take many more millions and countless lobbying to adopt laws for self-driving vehicles.

Seems to me that Uber see their drivers as temporary pawns in a long game of chess. Eventually, Uber hopes to replace their drivers with self-driving vehicles a dream they've been aggressively trying to make happen. What a horrible business.

<comment><USER6> Hospitals abuse residents who are the future lifeblood of the hospitals. Just because the personnel are essential doesn't preclude the abuse.

<comment><USER7> Hospitals have the luxury of choice. Where else are the doctors going to practice?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'll just point out that every two-sided marketplace in existence uses tons of data and behavioral techniques to get "suppliers" (e.g. drivers on Uber, hosts on AirBnB, sellers on eBay, manufacturers on Alibaba, etc. etc.) to offer the best buyer experience at the lowest cost.

</comment><comment><USER9> That's certainly one approach toward interactive journalism.

Works incredibly well on mobile devices too.

</comment><comment><USER10> Did anyone else find the treatment of "forward dispatch" here strange?

Obviously a lot of the things in this article are gross (why the hell does Uber give out badges?), but forward dispatch makes a lot of sense. It convinces drivers to work longer hours _by making them more money_. Driver downtime is uniformly terrible - it delays rides, diminishes Uber's revenue, and cuts drivers' wages. It's textbook market inefficiency (unmet supply and demand at once), and reducing it is a win for everyone.

Some of the things surrounding forward dispatch are messy, yes. It makes for inaccurate estimates, activating it every login is ugly, and deploying it without a pause button was malicious or idiotic (remember that drivers take hits for rejecting rides). But why is a central piece of this article a claim that a driver-requested, wage-increasing feature really just undermines self- control?

</comment><comment><USER11> A slightly off-topic question: when was the last time when Hacker News front page hasn't featured a negative post about Uber?

<comment><USER12> When was the last time anyone had anything positive to say about Uber?

<comment><USER13> > When was the last time anyone had anything positive to say about Uber?

This is the exact reason why I find it hard to take seriously anything anyone says about Uber on the internet. The completely one-sided 'discussion' is so divorced from reality - if there was really nothing positive to say about Uber, why do people still choose to use and drive for them?

<comment><USER14> "if there was really nothing positive to say about Uber, why do people still choose to use and drive for them?"

if there was really nothing positive to say about Comcast, why do people still choose to use them?

<comment><USER15> Because in many markets, Comcast is the only provider.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> On a somewhat unrelated note, I saw a Uber-labeled vehicle tday on I-280 near Woodside, equipped with an older model rotating Velodyne scanner on top. It didn't look like Uber's publicly known self-driving cars. It was doing a steady 45 in the middle lane, and I suspect it was mapping, not self-driving.

<comment><USER17> [https://www.uber.com/info/mapping/](https://www.uber.com/info/mapping/)

Uber have had mapping cars for quite some time - they also acquired Bing Maps from Microsoft in 2015.

<comment><USER18> What do you mean they acquired Bing Maps from Microsoft? Bing Maps is owned by Uber now? Sorry if this is common-knowledge to everyone; I don't remember reading about it.

<comment><USER19> News to me too, but apparently they bought a bunch of tech and 100 Bing Maps employees in 2015:

[http://mashable.com/2015/06/29/uber-bing- maps/#yo4ZMCPC1aqj](http://mashable.com/2015/06/29/uber-bing- maps/#yo4ZMCPC1aqj)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Not related. Can someone share what are those interactive "images" made of? Or what are the correct terms to call those "images"?

<comment><USER18> My initial assumption was they were made of d3.js (SVG) but looking at the inspector they seem to be canvas elements (<canvas>).

I didn't see any mention on d3.js in the js libraries being pulled in, so not sure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I had a really bad date about a month ago. In a part of Brooklyn I'm not familiar with. Things started well, and the woman asked me if I would help her move some stuff because she was having some remodeling done. I was all, "Okay. Sure."

I wasn't set up all that well to begin with. Long day at work, tired. My phone was close to dead. So euphemism for hooking up or not, I went home with her. And she's legit trying to move stuff. So I start helping out. She has a lot of art, and she's telling me really specifically about where to put stuff. I take one painting and put it where I thought she wanted it.

That was not where she wanted it. Because the way I placed it in the closet it was touching some of her clothes. This was not okay. And she flips the fuck out on me and starts screaming at me about how I don't care about her things.

Okay, okay. I'm sorry. We're cool now, right honey bunny? We're cool. She's cool. So then we're trying to move her biggest piece out of the living room. It's an 8'x15'-ish mural. Large. Heavy. We get it off the wall hooks holding it up, and she straight up drops her end of it, causing the corner of the thing I was holding over my head to crash down on my face. The corner landed straight on my left eye and cut me on the eyebrow before sinking into the eye itself.

And then she starts screaming again about how this is what I deserve for disrespecting her art.

At this point, I'm out. I just left. I left my man purse and everything. Did not care. Just wanted out. Because this woman is crazy.

I had about 5% on my phone at that point, and I tried to get an uber to take me home. Got a connection to a driver, and my phone died. About this time, I started feeling really sketchy. Like something was wrong. Not wrong in a "I've had too much to drink." but more like, "There are probably drugs involved here." And I don't do drugs.

Uber driver never showed up. I woke up in my apartment about 8 hours later. Have no idea how I got there. Judging from the way my legs felt, I suspect I walked the whole way home from Williamsburg to Ditmas Park. My entire face was caked in blood, and I had to get 6 stitches put in my left eyebrow and a badly blackened eye. Also ruined my favorite sweater and jeans. I mean, it was a date. I was dressed up nice.

Bonus points to Uber for charging me the cancellation fee. I get it, they are not an ambulance service or a medical team. But come on, you have to have a better solution to a user whose phone dies than, "fuck you. give me five bucks."

<comment><USER22> You have good writing skills. Your story, though shocking, had me gripped :)

Did you ever find out why you felt sketchy and why you don't remember how you got home? Was that because of the injury?

As far as Uber charging cancellation fee, I don't think they have a way to know if your phone died. For them, it's equivalent to the driver being unable to contact you.

<comment><USER21> Thank you for the compliment. I try to write as well as I can.

I did talk to the woman later to get my man purse back. She straight up ruffied me. I have no idea for what purpose.

As for Uber seeing stuff, I have some posts below on the topic. I think this is not a difficult problem to solve.

Actually, what it really boils down to is CAP theorem. Uber is just making the wrong choices about CAP.

In this case we aren't talking about a networked system in the normal way we do with distributed database systems. We're talking about a network of people. How do you handle it when there's a partition event? Uber's default choice is fuck it. Write one part of the transaction to the database and charge the user a disconnect fee.

That's not in anyway the correct way to handle a network partition. That's like if you have an application that receives a message and logs it, but can't get a response to my callback, and it just says, "Okay. My work here is done." And then makes a new entry in a table that says the failed callback owes 5 bucks.

That's absolutely stupid and wrong. Network partitions are going to happen. All the damn time. And if your best mechanism for dealing with them is blame the callback . . . you have some serious thinking to do. Because that shit is broken.

<comment><USER23> Ignoring the rest of your story, which is interesting and weird, I think your analogy to CAP breaks down fast. The driver cannot roll back their time spent. You called them to a spot, presumably they went there and you weren't there. They are out their time, it's gone. Any number of bad things could have happened to you, but the user agreement is that if you don't show, you pay.

<comment><USER24> Based on the assumption that he wasn't actually where he was supposed to be. I've had several cancellations from drivers, when being worse for wear, for not being where I'm supposed to be even when I've not moved and seen the car drive past without a phonecall. Probably don't want the hassle of a half-cut passenger, but it's a nuisance from their end. Do they get a cut of the charge?

<comment><USER23> I think they do -- and agreed it's a problem when it's their fault. That's what the call button is for after all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Do Taxi services with employeed drivers simply not exist in the US anymore? So curious why people complain about how Uber treats their drivers when they could support Taxi companies that employ drivers. They may even have app's for generation Y to use for hailing as well.

<comment><USER12> Taxis cost a lot more, but to make up for it, they provide a much shittier service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'd like to say you have hit rock bottom when you treat your employes (or "independent contractors") like whales in a pay-for-play MMO, but Uber always finds a way to go lower.

</comment><comment><USER27> The article says that some companies have switched to an employee model to ensure workers are available during peak hours. But there are other ways to do that:

\- Pay workers more during rush hours, and less during other times. This could be surge pricing, or the platform choosing to not take a commission during rush hour, and take a higher commission than normal during off-peak hours.

\- Tell workers they should be available from 8 AM to 11 AM and 5 - 8, at least four days of every work week, but are free at other times to work or not work.

I don't think it's necessary to have employees to make them available at certain times.

</comment><comment><USER28> There seems to me to be an optimal, market-based solution to this: form a Rideshare Drivers Alliance, hire brilliant former Uber programmers and data scientists, and build an app intended to run in the background on drivers' phones that optimizes for their interests. If you build something awesome, you should be able to charge millions of drivers a small monthly fee to show them metrics and data aligned to their interests. The real difficulty to overcome is the information imbalance between drivers and rideshare services.

Edit: typo

</comment><comment><USER29> "While surges do mitigate shortages, they do so in part by repelling passengers..."

Supply and demand -- what will those crafty manipulators at Uber dream up next? The author makes it sound like some kind of voodoo magic.

<comment><USER12> The point is that Uber would rather mitigate shortages in ways less likely to impact revenue. An increase in drivers has less bottom-line impact than a reduction in passengers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> TL;DR: here's the list of psychological tricks mentioned in the article:

1\. When driver's are about to log off, it tells them that they are very close to reaching an earnings target, such as "You are $6 away from making $40 net earnings". The target is set by Uber, and is always just out of reach.

2\. Uber suggests to drivers that they should go to a certain area for better chance of finding riders. The article says this might be an example of where Uber benefits at the expense of drivers because Uber does not prefer surge pricing.

3\. Uber prompts drivers to accept the next fare opportunity before the current ride is over.

4\. Uber tells new drivers when they are 50% towards the goal of 25 first rides. At 25 rides Uber will pay a 'signing on' bonus.

5\. Some Uber employee's would pretend to be women when communicating with the (overwhelmingly male) drivers.

6\. Lyft did a split test of two different calls to action: (a) "You're losing $15 per hour by driving on Tuesday mornings instead of Friday evenings"; and (b) "You would make $15 per hour more by driving on Friday evenings instead of Tuesday mornings". They found that (a) was more effective, but eventually decided not to use this approach [for reasons not explained in the article]

7\. Uber provides non-cash rewards to drivers in the form of 'badges' like "Above and Beyond", "Excellent Service" and "Entertaining Drive". It also gives drivers stats like how many trips they have taken in the current week, how much money they have made, how much time they have spent logged on and what their overall rating from passengers is.

<comment><USER31> 1) Probably the most manipulative by far. Interesting to learn.

2) Also how driver get the most rides helping to maximize their earnings. In fact isn't this the whole point of surge in the first place? To push drivers to high surge areas? I would hardly call this a "psychological trick" and is very reasonable.

3) How is this a "psychological trick"? This clearly is in the drivers' benefit as it helps maximize the number of rides they take. All their time becomes productive if they get dispatched to another trip ahead of their current trip ending. Also, it's clear this makes Uber more efficient as a platform as they can treat occupied cars as active supply.

4) Is this not simply providing transparency of the bonuses/incentives Uber is offering?

5) Weird but even weirder that it works. Not the first time I've heard of this. Apparently works on emails too. A number of companies use this. A quick google show's it's well known.

6) Not shocking. Seems like relatively standard A/B testing of copy.

7) Some of this is gamification and some is transparency. All standard.

This article to me largely seems like an attempt to play on the recent many bad deeds of Uber for a click-bait article that deliberately perturbs some facts to fit the narrative. This article could very easily have been written about any other company in the world. But writing it about Uber now, generates clicks and upvotes.

<comment><USER32> I agree very much with you. I would categorize point 6) as manipulation though, because it is about choosing wording to change behavior. IMO this creates stress though, and connecting your service with stress can backfire in the long term.

<comment><USER33> The wording is an example of loss aversion, and has been studied many times in behavioral psychology. The company's intent is to change behavior (getting the driver to drive on a different day). Anyone would choose the better outcome. Is that manipulation? Or optimization? And the driver could benefit from having this information vs not at all (though of course the company benefits most of all).

<comment><USER32> I try to view manipulation neutrally. In the end, I think what makes us despise certain manipulations is a concurrent lack of empathy, or the intent to only further one's own goals (vs seeking win-win solutions through manipulation).

Parents manipulate their kids a lot, but with the kids' very best interests in mind (mostly :)).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> >"We've underinvested in the driver experience," a senior official said. "We are now re-examining everything we do in order to rebuild that love."

This is a pretty troubling way to phrase using behavioral science to manipulate your employees.

<comment><USER35> Not employees. Free agents, totally independent contractors.

<comment><USER36> Who have no control over their work schedule or fares among other things. They're technically contractors but the super court in California has ruled otherwise.

<comment><USER37> they probably control their work schedule, but not fare?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> That sounds like an extremely creepy evening. Sounds like you got away cheaper than the worst outcome that night, and that's saying something.

Were there any other signs that things were gonna turn out like they did with that lady, before the picture escapade?

<comment><USER21> I really got nothing. She wasn't any more flaggy than any other woman I've met on OKCupid who is born and raised in NYC.

I'm starting to think that born and raised in NYC is itself a flag.

<comment><USER39> You should have left the second she freaked out on you over her clothes. That was the red flag.

<comment><USER40> You should have left when you realised it wasn't an euphemism. It is not okay for her to use first dates as slave labour.

<comment><USER41> I would not have left. She could just be seeing whether he was a nice guy before them bangin'. The minute she started yelling, yes, probably. But before? Why? Because she needed help moving a painting around.

Anyway it all depends on the contents of the conversation, how he request was made etc.

<comment> nommm-nommm >She could just be seeing whether he was a nice guy before them bangin'.

^^^ I find it incredibly sexy when someone attractive does me a nice favor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I'm so sorry but this is hilarious.

<comment><USER43> It's super funny the way date rape is funny.

<comment><USER21> Oh tone it down a little bit. I'm an upper middle class white male. I'm pretty fucking privileged. I was trying to get laid. And I was being stupid. I own my mistakes here, okay?

It's okay to laugh about it in retrospect.

No one got raped. And I learned a lesson. Sort of. I kind of want to hang out with her again. That kind of crazy is a little hot.

I mean, sometimes you just need to put your dick in crazy. Even when you know it's bad idea.

(I'm trolling you, by the way. I can't not troll you. You're like my boss who hates it when I shoot him in the crotch with a nerf gun in client meetings. I just have to do it. 38-year-old me will never stop acting like a 12-year-old. But trolling is nicer than downvoting.)

<comment><USER44> Man I dunno call me crazy but I don't care what your demographic privilege is: getting roofied in a strange part of NYC sounds pretty terrifying and not like a "laugh it off" moment. It's great that you survived with just a few stitches and ruined clothes, but that could have ended far worse, no?

Given that there was no consequences for this woman's actions, what are the chances she did or will do this again to another person?

<comment><USER45> Man, i dunno call me crazy but policing other people's emotional responses to events seems insane.

maybe you should take a look at this [1]

/petpeeve

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laughter#Causes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laughter#Causes)

<comment><USER44> Dude gets roofied, hit in the face, and walks around bloodied in a city and it's not okay to say "That's fucked up"?

If common sense triggered my pet peeves that much I'd have to stay out of internet comments.

<comment><USER21> It was fucked up, and there's nothing wrong with saying that.

I don't know, as a pretty recent transplant from Texas to NYC, I find _a lot_ of things to be fucked up here. I have a choice about how to respond. I can get very deeply upset by how messed up everything is, or I can accept responsibility for my choices, realize when I've made a bad one, and find some humor in the situation while I make a mental note to not do _that_ again.

<comment><USER44> Sounds like a healthy outlook to have on life. As someone else mentioned, you're a great writer and compelled my response. My initial response was more "holy shit that person needs to be locked away" than "you need to be offended by that".

Did you ever file a police report or anything? Sure, it could be your fault for getting yourself in that situation, but this person sounds violent/dangerous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Please google Susan Fowler and stop using Uber altogether -- like it really shouldn't be a debate about how crappy their arrival estimates are at this point -- they are a company that has no soul.

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on- on...](https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-one-very- strange-year-at-uber)

For those that didn't google her. The first hit I got was a blog post about her sexual harassment at Uber.

After reporting the incident: "I was then told that I had to make a choice: (i) I could either go and find another team and then never have to interact with this man again, or (ii) I could stay on the team, but I would have to understand that he would most likely give me a poor performance review when review time came around, and there was nothing they could do about that. I remarked that this didn't seem like much of a choice, and that I wanted to stay on the team because I had significant expertise in the exact project that the team was struggling to complete (it was genuinely in the company's best interest to have me on that team), but they told me the same thing again and again. One HR rep even explicitly told me that it wouldn't be retaliation if I received a negative review later because I had been "given an option". I tried to escalate the situation but got nowhere with either HR or with my own management chain (who continued to insist that they had given him a stern- talking to and didn't want to ruin his career over his "first offense")."

<comment><USER47> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13682022](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13682022)

Corresponding Hacker News submission.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> > Some local managers who were men went so far as to adopt a female persona > for texting drivers, having found that the uptake was higher when they did. > [...] Uber acknowledged that it had experimented with female personas to > increase engagement with drivers.

Classic. Men are predictable, and Uber is predictably amoral.

<comment><USER49> Many, many years ago, when I was thinking of moving, I was looking for salary ranges for a particular American city. It was pre-Glassdoor so there wasn't a website that aggregated that information.

I decided to go the HackerNews of that particular industry, except instead of using my own account, I decided to make a fake one with an avatar of an attractive but non-famous female. Basically it looked like it was a genuine personal photograph rather than a professionally shot photo you would've found in a magazine. I basically posted one post, introducing myself and asked if anyone had an idea of salary ranges for that city given a specific job position.

Holy. Crap. The number of replies I got was unbelievable. I think on average threads on that news site had double digit responses but this one had over 100. I even had people private message me to say they wanted to interview me despite not including any links to a personal website or resume.

<comment><USER50> When I sign up for services where the goal is to get tech support (i.e. StackExchange, Discord, Slack) I use a female persona.

I've had to explain to a few people (including my wife) that it's not a gender confusion thing at all, it's purely for the perks.

It's ridiculous how far people will go to help a "woman" online.

<comment><USER51> Does this actually work on SO? You don't see the avatar until after you read both the title AND the problem (since it's at the bottom of the page instead of alongside it). Plus, the avatar is very tiny. I feel like most people would either have a solution by the time they finish reading or they won't, but a female picture wouldn't change that.

(Serious question by the way, this is an interesting idea)

<comment><USER52> They might have an answer to the question in their heads, but whether or not they choose to type it up and submit is a different question.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Thank you for TL;DR

Machiavellianism (willingness to manipulate and deceive others), Narcissism (egotism and self-obsession), Psychopathy (lack of remorse and empathy), Sadism (pleasure in suffering of others);

<comment><USER54> > Psychopathy (lack of remorse and empathy), Sadism (pleasure in suffering of > others)

Where did you get these from? Especially the second one.

<comment><USER55> Actually the second one is connected to the former. I'm too lazy to cite a reference but there is evidence that psychopaths feel relaxed when others are not. (There are a few popular documentaries about that one Youtube) Of course 'psychopath' is a spectrum, so this doesn't mean Uber management consists of complete psychopaths. Actually there are clinical psychopaths that end up being altruistic - obviously not in this case though.

<comment><USER54> > Actually the second one is connected to the former.

Sure, but I am asking where it even came from to begin with. Like sadism, what bullet point does it apply to on the top comment?

> .. but there is evidence that psychopaths feel relaxed when others are not.

Also, sure it might be true but why do you even bring this point into the discussion? Does the article or comment mention anything about "calmness" (or similar)? I didn't find it but I might be missing.

<comment><USER55> I guess when looking at the articles about Uber from this years that made it onto the front page here, we are seeing a pattern of unethical behaviour. Even Uber admitted that something like this exists by letting go one Executive and planning to transform the company into a more benevolent direction.

Why do people repeatedly do things that are bad for others and generally considered unethical, likely even being aware of that? In my opinion this needs no further explanation.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why Am I So Upset About Aaron Swartz's Suicide? - <AUTHOR> http://discountgeni.us/2013/01/13/why-am-i-so-upset-about-aaron-swartzs-suicide/ <comment><USER2> The Aaron Swartz issue really reaffirms a hypothesis ive held for a long time about empathy. This is the first time I've seen HN in uproar, up in arms about the injustice against a man at the hands of the state for a crime which they cannot agree with. Yet there have been far greater travesties of justice, countless suicides by innocent people in Guantanamo bay or prison and not a bleep on the HN radar.

Obviously Aaron Swartz impact on the internet, his relevance to this community and obvious closeness to many people explains it. But take away who he is and the circumstances are sadly far from rare. Aaron Swartz' ordeal is being relieved right as we speak in numerous places around America and the world.

It's just unfortunate that for many it took this long to empathise or understand their plight.

<comment><USER3> Guantanamo is different. There are a lot of people there (fewer now) who don't belong there, but others I'd have to try hard not to murder, myself.

The problem with Guantanamo is the lack of legal process, and the way some people were swept up who shouldn't have been (which mostly got resolved in 2005-2006), not that many of them aren't horrible criminals. I'd be fine with prosecuting them all in federal civilian court with fair trials.

<comment><USER4> The problem with Guantanamo is that it exists at all as an extra-judiciary area specifically designed to deny inmates certain rights.

<comment><USER5> The whole point of the tactics used against Aaron was to render his right to a trial by jury too risky and expensive to exercise. In both cases, the legal accountability of the Executive Branch is what's being undermined - by the Executive Branch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm going through the exact same thing. I've been upset since Aaron's suicide and I just cannot figure out why it's affecting me in such a way. I didn't know him, and like the author, I have a difficult time feeling emotions for distant (yet immense) tragedies, including war and natural disasters. But this just fucking hurts.

Maybe it hurts because seemingly reasonable, well educated people are behind this. This wasn't some looney that snapped and walked into a school with guns blazing. The people responsible are representatives (in one way or another) of the United States of America. Land of the free. Home of the brave. Supposedly good people. But they can do this (thanks to the wallets of hard working American people) and will probably get away with it? They have this kind of power? They can ruin a person's life for a victimless crime, even when the alleged 'victim' chooses not to pursue legal action? That's a devastatingly scary thought. And it's not just Carmen Ortiz and Steven Heymann. Our justice system is wrought with corruption, and that's scary, because it's probably the best justice system in the world (or at least touted as such).

<comment><USER7> > The people responsible are representatives (in one way or another) of the > United States of America. Land of the free. Home of the brave.

I don't get this at all... Harvard fellow uses MIT's network surreptitiously to violate the terms of service to download a nonprofit's entire database and then give it away for free, putting them out of business. Gets busted and charged with crimes. Where's the problem here?

Ok the prosecutor may have been overzealous, but we do have an adversarial system and it was Swartz's bad decisions that brought the hammer down. They didn't plant drugs on him. He wasn't doing it to feed his family. Sorry to all the people here that knew him personally, and to whom this is a personal tragedy, but this is not the kind of travesty of justice that you are making it out to be.

<comment><USER8> 35+ years in prison for "checking out too many books at once" is not a travesty?

<comment><USER9> According to the Wall Street Journal[1], the government would probably have asked for 7 years, and a plea bargain offer was made to reduce to 6-8 months in prison. The 35+ years was the potential maximum, would have required conviction on all charges, and ultimately would have required an independent trial judge to "throw the book at him."

[1] [http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB1000142412788732458150...](http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424127887324581504578238692048200404-lMyQjAxMTAzMDEwMzExNDMyWj.html?mod=wsj_valetbottom_email)

And "checking out too many books at once" = allegedly hacking into a third party network to download 4 million articles from 1,000 academic journals without paying the required fees.

<comment><USER10> 7 years, for downloading articles that should probably be in the public domain? Well, that's not prosecutorial overreach _at all_.

<comment><USER11> 6-8 months is what the prosecutors asked for, remember?

According to Lessig that wasn't even the sticking point for Aaron: Aaron didn't want to plead guilty to a felony, he wanted lesser charges.

<comment><USER10> Allow me to rephrase that then: 6-8 months, for downloading articles that should probably be in the public domain? Well, that's not prosecutorial overreach _at all_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> We're upset because Aaron was an activist while many of us capable of doing what he did, just sit on our couches or comfy chairs.

We're upset because the full legal power of the government was used as a weapon against him almost as if he was mass murderer instead of his "crime" being just setting information that was technically free in the first place, actually free.

We're upset because instead of waiting pensively for what his sentence would be and protesting what would undoubtedly be unjust, all we can do is remember who he was and triumph his cause in the hope that this won't happen again.

He didn't deserve to feel this was his only way out and he had so much more to contribute based on his past accomplishments.

I guess the problem with us identifying with Bradley Manning in comparison is he didn't do things like contribute to RSS and Markdown. But the information he set free is just as important.

<comment><USER13> "I guess the problem with us identifying with Bradley Manning in comparison is he didn't do things like contribute to RSS and Markdown."

No, my problem identifying with Manning was that he exposed private communications involving the State Department, which could have consequences for our foreign relations and national security. Swartz was downloading scientific journals, which is an entirely different ballgame.

Very few people believe that State Department communications should be public. So, even if you convince everyone that some injustice was done to Manning because of specific situations that called for whistle-blowing, it does not reveal any general problem in the federal justice system.

With Swartz, I think just telling his story will cause many people to realize how broken the federal justice system is.

<comment><USER12> There are nearly 5 million people with access to US "top secret" level information.

So I would disagree about how public you think it is just because it's not on the nightly news.

<comment><USER13> Are there 5 million people with access to that specific top secret information?

My understanding is that you only get access to some top secret information, not the keys to the castle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "Aaron Swartz is what I wish I was."

I am too a cold, rational bastard and yet I've found myself fighting tears over and over these last two days. And I barely knew who Aaron was until two days ago.

But I think the OP nailed it, for me and I'm sure for many more. I can still recall when I was an idealist as a child and a young teen. But I preferred to become cynical rather than suffer from injustices in the world. Much easier to be above, untouched, than fight for change and inevitably suffer, a lot.

But we still viscerally admire somebody like Aaron, somebody who took the hard route, somebody we could have been but hadn't the courage to.

That's why we suffer so much today, the best part of us has died.

<comment><USER15> I think you nailed it for me with having to confront out best selves and their absence. It's why I keep thinking of this George Orwell verse where he cursed his own cynicism upon meeting an idealistic young soldier in Barcelona (hat tip to Hitchens):

 _For the fly-blown words that make me spew_

 _Still in his ears were holy,_

 _And he was born knowing what I had learned_

 _Out of books and slowly._

Later on he ends:

 _But the thing I saw in your face_

 _No power can disinherit:_

 _No bomb that ever burst_

 _Shatters the crystal spirit._

<comment><USER16> And a hat tip to you for sharing this poetry, which so perfectly expresses the feelings some of us have reading about Aaron's life, and seeing his smile in photos.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Whether or not the actions of the US government via the DOJ was the direct cause of Aaron's suicide will be debated at length.

However, as both a cause and a "martyr" of sorts, Aaron's death has become a rather large stick to hit both government and the copyright lobby with.

I hazard a guess that Aaron would have been happy for us all to use that stick with a vengeance.

We should keep hitting these powerful lobbies with that stick until they break or the stick breaks.

</comment><comment><USER18> Reposting my comment from a forgotten thread, because I think the sense of loss many of us are feeling should be channeled into actions that may conceivably do some good:

\---

1\. What concrete steps can people take to prevent cases like Aaron's from happening again? What enduring commitments can be made, and to what causes or organizations?

2\. Who should we be listening to and supporting who is of like mind with Aaron, and has been neglected so far? Who is doing good work out of the public eye, like Aaron was?

I join you in commiseration. I'm going to look for a local organization to join in support of online freedom. Perhaps find a club to mentor promising youth in tech. I hope the Americans here will take every feasible step in correcting overzealous prosecutors (and nonetheless calling for justice where it hasn't been meted out). Aaron's passing must not be in vain.

\---

</comment><comment><USER19> I know absolutely why I feel so upset. He was part of my tribe. Though I never met him, or even directly engaged with him, I was very aware of him and took direct inspiration from his actions. I have dealt with the death of close peers in the past who were part of my tribe. I was younger and more prone to succumbing to anger and spite - now I know the best thing I can do is to honor their memory by maintaining the impetus we once shared.

</comment><comment><USER20> While I sympathize with the tragedy of Aaron's death, I have to agree that he is receiving a disproportionate amount of attention. Take away his association with the HN community and the Internet, and his case is not nearly as tragic as many others. Take the Guantanamo inmates who committed suicide. They were innocent and were imprisoned without any control over the situation. Aaron chose to break into the MIT network closet and JSTOR (though I agree that the punishment is way too harsh, there should be no punishment at all). But everything Aaron did was by his own choice. The people in Guantanamo didn't do anything at all. Their situation is much more infuriating, much more tragic, and deserves much more attention.

</comment><comment><USER21> Maybe it's similar for you to how many people were surprised by their level of grief, when Princess Diana died. Girls growing up in the 80s grew up on the fantasy of being like her, chosen and given wealth and fame and becoming a queen. And then she didn't buckle up and the entire childhood fantasy died right there with her in the tunnels of Paris. This trauma has changed England's emotional landscape for good - no more stiff upper lip.

So you saying 'Aaron is what I wish I was' is the correct analysis - Aaron had everything that we here strive for - he was recognized for his potential when he was a teenager, he had been accepted by YC, was part of a successful exit, was a highly respected and idealistic Internet activist and intellectual... These are the goals people strive for when they tell themselves 'if I only could achieve XYZ, then I will be happy - I will put all my energy into XYZ, because it will eventually be worth it'. The reality is more complex. Even with all these achievements, the highest potential that we can strive for can be destroyed. In his case by the beast of depression when driven by senseless persecution through the political apparatus.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'll tell you why you're upset. You're upset because you are precocious. And decided. And certain. And dare I say sometimes morally certain!

Aaron was an absurd hero who chose not to revolt. He just didn't imagine himself happy, so he agonised about the futility of living with every breath he took. He remained a stranger in his own life even with each new career summit he topped. Ultimately he chose to check out thinking that was the only way from the inevitable. Tragic. It needn't have been.

Like most of the high achievers of Aaron's age, your generation has achieved so much so quickly that you've missed the barely audible slow burning whisper of your own existential questions. The din of success, of the ceaseless twittering of Twitter, of the vacuous flapping on Facebook and the daily showboating wankery of blogging has made you forget that it's the SILENCE that matters. It's the silence of your thoughts to yourself that will answer your questions. Slowly and with meditated patience.

I'm upset too. I'm upset that his parents have to deal with this tragic loss, that his surviving loved ones are looking for answers to this tragedy. I'm upset that traditional methods of calming, of seeking, of surviving are lost to this generation - a generation addicted to instantaneous Google-fed answers and one that is now gyrating to hokey lyrics like "partying & bullshit", "we're gonna die young"* ... :-(

This generation that obviously knows a great deal about internet startups and computer science, and Batman and world peace knows very little about how to answer their own questions about a meaningless existence. Their parents did it. Same shitty world, shame shitty life - they made it! How??

Finally, I now know what a pointless Sisyphean desk job has to offer to a young person: how to suffer patiently without self-destructing. How to fold, without going all in on the flop.

Much love,

AK

\-----

* I like the songs, btw :-)

<comment><USER23> Seriously, if you think this generation has a monopoly on glamourising the "live fast, die young" ethos, you haven't been around for very long.

But excellent attempt at using someone's suicide to vent a lot of your anger at today's kids.

<comment><USER22> <Quote> Seriously, if you think this generation has a monopoly on glamourising the "live fast, die young" ethos, you haven't been around for very long. </Quote>

I didn't say that really, did I?

I've lived long enough to hear more than one case of rapid success claiming a suicide victim in the field of arts. We all know them. Many of these cases are often dismissed as some sort of underlying pathology and the rest as inevitable result of the individual's pathetic circumstance. All of course inadequate in truly explaining the "storm inside".

But guess who the high-achieving rock star child prodigies of today are, if not the erstwhile artists? The new kids have given up their piano keyboards for computer keyboards ... and there are plenty more of them in every second suburban basement than there are talented musicians, actors and artists today. And they are winning! And good for them! But some of the winners are even dreaming, no - decided, about ideals like social justice, equality, freedom. No amount of black and white binary talent will help answer the grey of these concepts that have plagued humanity since the beginning of human conscience.

Wisdom is a slow cooking dish ... that's never going to be ready. I guess you'll just have to grow up, kid.

(I'm sorry to sound patronising but there's no point in blaming the morons at MIT, the tits at JSTOR, the vindictive FEDS or the rotten capitalistic system. All really irrelevant.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> "I am upset that we have a justice system that would persecute me the way it did Aaron."

But it wouldn't, because we allow our fears to convince us to keep our thoughts to ourselves. And I am upset the very persons who are courageous enough to fight for our interest are eliminated, leaving us.

</comment><comment><USER25> _Aaron Swartz is what I wish I was._

Please don't compare yourself to anyone else. It's pointless, disempowering, and generally a waste of time. Your "best you" is what I wish you wished you were.

 _I am a bright technologist..._

You are not alone. There are many of us here, like you and like Aaron.

 _...but I've never built anything of note._

The things you build do not have to be famous to be "anything of note". Do people use the software you have written? Do they benefit from it? If yes, then it is most certainly "of note".

 _I have strong opinions about how to improve this world, but I've never acted to bring them to pass._

That doesn't mean there's anything wrong with you. That means you're normal. 99% of us are in exactly the same boat. We go about our daily business, taking care of ourselves and those close to us, making the world a better place in a thousand little ways.

Think of it this way. We're all just one great big football team. The Aaron Swartzs and Steve Jobs of the world are the quarterbacks and ball carriers whose names are in the press all the time. But they would accomplish little if it wasn't for those of us around them who block and tackle all day long. Don't be upset that, up to this point, you've been a blocker or tackler. Be proud. And realize that your turn to carry the ball has yet to come.

 _I have thoughts every day that I would share with the world, but I allow my fears to convince me to keep them to myself._

Congratulations. You have just taken the first step toward addressing that issue with that statement here on Hacker News. Now please take Step 2. Start a blog. If it's anything like this post, then I want to read it. And others, I'm sure, will want to also.

 _If I were able to stop being afraid of what the world would think of me, I could see myself making every decision that Aaron made that ultimately led to his untimely death._

You don't know what really led to Aaron's untimely death. No one does. The decisions you make are just one input to a complex process we still don't understand. So go easy on yourself and don't jump to unnecessary conclusions.

 _I am upset that we have a justice system that would persecute me the way it did Aaron._

Many of us are upset about this and a lot of other things too. But we won't allow any of them to stop us from living our lives fully. You can be upset about things in background and still have a wonderful happy life in foreground. Give it a try.

 _I am upset that I have spent 27 years of my life having made no discernible difference to the world around me._

I bet if I asked those close to you if the felt they same way, I'd get a resounding "No!" Maybe you should, too.

 _Most of all I am upset that Aaron's work here is done when there is so much more he could have accomplished._

Agreed. I guess that means that each of us now has a few more things to add to our own To Do Lists.

Thanks, John, for the great post. Best wishes for feeling better and getting on with it. Ultimately, that's what we hackers always do.

<comment><USER26> While the untimely death Aaron is tragic, the constant fawning over celebrities on Hacker News is frequently depressing. Both in the sense that we, as a community, are not able to rise above it and, rather more selfishly, that I am not one of them.

While, to a large extent, I already knew everything that you'd written, I'd like to thank you for reiterating it.

<comment><USER27> I don't know if I'd call the posthumous interest in Aaron as fawning. He did a lot of great work and had admirable ideals. He no longer has the capacity to be an agent of change. And while you can say his spirit "will live on", part of that passing on the torch comes from a thorough examination and celebration of his life. It doesn't just happen sometime down the road.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Everyone blames the system but we should really blame ourselves first. We did not protest Aaron's prosecution enough, we did not make him feel our support. We ourselves allowed this to happen.

<comment><USER8> I partially agree. I remember reading about his arrest thinking "uh-oh, this time he messed up" and kinda forgot about it, but I never realised he was facing the threat of 35+ years to life.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Today I had a strange thought: did Aaron kill himself because he thought it was the only solution to end the madness of the system?

<comment><USER30> I think not.

If he'd been planning to use his own death to bring about radical change, you'd think he'd at least have arranged for a suicide note to appear on his website after he was gone, or something.

I haven't seen anything like that, and if it existed and was accessible to the public, I'm sure it would've appeared on HN's front page by now.

Then again, if he _was_ planning this, we could account for our observations by saying maybe he mailed instructions, passwords, documents and public statements to someone he trusted to make the greatest impact with it, and that person's sitting on the information, watching the momentum build, waiting for the most effective time to release it. The noise about this has been deafeningly loud for us in the tech community for quite some time, but only in the last day or so have I noticed this story being picked up by mainstream news outlets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> The state has for as long as I can remember disgusted me, amongst many other things, exactly due to behaviour like this. Murdering thuggish religious zealots are a lot less sympathetic than anti authoritarian information crusaders, but the hysteria pitch here is eye opening to me at least from the perspective of people being so incensed by the fact that their government could be involved in such a thing.

Look around; the state is not your friend and it never has been, look at the statistics for democide in the previous century if you need any more proof. It's mindboggling to me that with all that goes on, when the blowback of business as usual in a modern western nation state hits closer to home people are actually shocked and amazed.

Look at the representatives of the law here on HN bleating about the nature of the offense in question as within the strictures of the law and thus beyond reproach and simply a symptom of a system that needs further tuning; This is how the state operates, this is what it runs on. Changing this fact doesn't require a simple tuning of a few dials here and there, it requires a fundamental re-examining of the central role of the westphalian nation state and the gears and levers upon which it operates in the modern world.

To be fair and admit my biases, yes, I believe castrating the beast is necessary, and this is just one more on a practically endless list of bullet points that demonstrate this.

As important as what happened here is and as much as it is nice to see people actually appearing to finally notice what is being done in their names and with their tacit consent, I simply can't see that actually happening. In a few weeks people will become resigned to the fact that they have no actual power and cannot make any actual change.

The depressing fact of the violent and compulsory nature of state authority coupled with it's extreme innate resistence to any kind of actual, real change are simply too entrenched for just this event to actually make any more difference than the millions of others just like it that ended up hitting some other tribe instead of ours.

Pity.

<comment><USER32> The state is not a person, and ergo cannot be your friend. However, the state is a collection of persons, both elected, appointed, and hired, and many of those persons can be your friend. Indeed, I count a number of such persons among my friends.

In a democracy, the state is what you make of it--it is your family, friends, and neigbhors. It is not some monolithic evil construct.

<comment><USER31> That the state is an organisational structure and thus that it is "composed of people" is no more an innate hedge against corruption than any other organisational structure. That plenty of the people which make the machine are otherwise good is precisely the problem; evil people will do evil things, but evil people are rare.

A much larger problem is when otherwise good people can be convinced that evil is good, and are wholesale conscripted into the commissioning thereof. Look at the statist lawyer pack currently continuously stating that this is just business as usual in this case. They're absolutely right, but that they can accept that state of affairs purely because it is done under color of law should be telling.

Any organisational structure given unlimited power and no direct oversight by market forces will historically trend toward this kind of behaviour, that is why I believe as I do that it is an innate characteristic of a state. The ability to write your own rules and modify them at will and without effective limit to power, coupled with the ability to levy compulsory fees on your "customers" is put simply a recipe for disaster. Democracy is a laughable hedge on that of power, the subversion of which on a daily basis ought to be evidence enough that this is true.

I am aware of the traditional refrain that the solution is better educated voters and less money in politics and a whole raft of other prescriptions, but I am similarly aware that they never come to pass and all attempts are made to keep the violent, psychopathic machine chugging along as it was before with nary a sideways glance for other possibilities.

The reaction from the subjects when this is pointed out to them is disappointing, but telling. I apologise if I sound overly shrill on the topic, it's not my intent, I am simply tired of seeing this pattern repeated over and over again only to have people utterly unwilling to examine the real root of the problem.

<comment><USER33>
      Any organisational structure given unlimited power and no
      direct oversight by market forces will historically trend
      toward this kind of behaviour,

Exactly. Absolutely right. The bureaucracy is like middle management gone berserk. The founders were onto something, they built something with incredible revenue potential, and were both the executives AND the workers. Then some middle management layers had to arise for coordination. Over time the separation between the executives and the workers grew to become a yawning gulf, and the middle managers captured the asylum.

Lacking any inherent ability to create value (like actual producers) nor any ability to be bold and take risks (like good executives), the legal bureaucracy/middle management just consumes more and more resources.

It can go on for quite sometime when you have a company producing as much revenue as USG. But in this case it won't go on forever, as China is now rising beyond USG.

      Look at the statist lawyer pack currently continuously
      stating that this is just business as usual in this case.

Yeah, this seemed weird to me too. The best way to understand it is that they were taught in law school that extralegal methods (whether Lincoln suspending habeas corpus or 60s sit-ins) are allowed if and _only if_ they are in service of fighting racism, sexism, homophobia, or something similarly Nazi/KKK-ish. And for those who are not straight white males, which is the majority of today's new lawyers, they also believe (and are repeatedly told) that they owe their current positions/status to the federal government's past extralegal activities.

So they combine hatred for pre-1960s America with reverence for the 60s revolution and absolute fealty to the modern US federal government. Insofar as they ever critique it, it is almost always to strengthen it (more taxes, more laws, more regulations, more government). They used to push to weaken criminal penalties for actual criminals (Miranda) and to defund defense, but here too there's been kind of a recent change; the new breed of Sotomayor/Holder/Bloomberg/Obama types (along with the lawyers here) are actually pretty hardcore on both of those points. They are all about mandatory maximums and drone strikes.

The result is something similar to the first class of students raised after the 1917 revolution. Extralegal methods for the Great October Revolution were completely justified. But after that point complete obedience to the state was required; the only exception were extralegal methods that tended to _increase_ the power of the state and be directed against various libertarians, reactionaries, dissidents, or running dogs. When they felt they were still fighting against Russian culture, they pushed to reduce penalties against criminals; but once they felt they were fully in command the harshness of everything ramped way up beyond where it was pre-Revolution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Thank you for this post.

I've also been wondering about the depth of my emotion on this event. I have looked up to Aaron Swartz mildly in the past, but the turn of events and subsequent reactions have occupied my attention greatly since.

I too wish to be more like Aaron Swartz in many ways, and I too am strangely moved by his story and his passing. Reading my thoughts in someone else's blog is appreciated.

</comment><comment><USER35> Aaron Swart is an example of people whose technical ability (IQ) exceeds their other ability (EQ). His technical ability allowed him to accomplish great technical achievements; it also let him get into troubles at work or with the law, which together with his fragile mental health eventually got him.

<comment><USER36> With all due respect, is EQ really that important? We keep getting told that it is, but EQ never won a war; EQ never sent anyone to the moon; EQ didn't cure polio. Maybe cases like Aaron Swartz are a wakeup call to us a society, not that we need to be more "emotionally" intelligent, but that a society with severe hangups chews up and spits out its best and brightest, to its own detriment.

Say what you will about his activities not being in the accepted norm, or his mistakes, but the way we treat mental illness in this country is something we should be ashamed of, and I'm not just talking about the medical establishment.

<comment><USER35> EQ is that important. Simply because you don't live in a vacuum. You live and communicate with other people. You can be as technically capable as you can, but if you keep pissing people off, you won't go anywhere. Now in addition to this, if you are mentally fragile, sooner or later you will be shocked by what society has for you.

It is not the right time to analyze Aaron Swartz, but if you look at what is publicly written about his tenure at Stanford, Reddit, etc., you will see what I am talking about. Is it that important? You bet.</comment></comment></comment>


Apple made more profit last quarter that any other company in history - <AUTHOR> http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20150127006408/en/Apple-Reports-Record-Quarter-Results#.VMgG6kL3D8v

<comment><AUTHOR> Just to substantiate this claim - here's a wikipedia table with the numbers [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_corporate_profi...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_corporate_profits_and_losses#Largest_Corporate_Quarterly_Earnings_of_All_Time)

<comment><USER2> Has there really been 0% inflation since 2011? That part of the chart seems pretty iffy.

<comment><USER3> Cumulative inflation over that time has been 5.2%.

<comment><AUTHOR> Given that inflation number the difference is still vast, with almost a billion dollars more for Apple.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Node.js Compiler – Compiling your Node.js application into a single executable - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/pmq20/node-compiler <comment><USER2> 52 MB and 32 MB for macOS and Windows, respectively, for anyone looking for the important numbers.

<comment><USER3> how does that compare to the numbers for pkg, that Zeit just released and was on HN a few days ago? [https://github.com/zeit/pkg](https://github.com/zeit/pkg)

<comment><USER4> About the same 30MB for a hello world application.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Just wanted to mention a similar project, which was recently announced by Zeit, called "pkg": [https://github.com/zeit/pkg](https://github.com/zeit/pkg)

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm really happy with the effort of "compiling" NodeJS to native binary.

What I'm looking forward to is lightweight electron that will allow us to use the native browser-engine for each platform.

QT/GTK for Linux, WebkitView for macOS, Edge for Windows.

Hope the effort of node-compiler, zeit/pkg will be beneficial for the future of desktop apps.

<comment><USER7> One major advantage of Electron is not having to deal with browser compatibility issues - you write your code against exactly one runtime (sure, you may need platform specific flags for things - but no risk of the runtime changing/breaking after you deploy)

Leveraging existing OS engine will reduce file size but at the cost of not having a stable and known platform that your code will run on.

<comment><USER6> These days fixing those issues should not be a big deal.

Having all those polyfills / babel / webpack tools you can be quite safe about your app.

Nevertheless having a nice test suite also makes a benefit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The comparison table fails to mention one _huge_ advantage zeit/pkg has: it is able to generate executables for all three platforms from any _one_ of them, no need to setup three dev or build environments.

</comment><comment><USER9> Cool tidbit found via this: there's a FUSE driver for SquashFS!

[https://github.com/pmq20/squashfuse/](https://github.com/pmq20/squashfuse/)

</comment><comment><USER10> 50 MB executable?

<comment><USER11> Is that honestly a problem? Most Java applications I encounter is much larger than that.

50MB is nothing and if it enables you do have a single standalone binary that you're easily able to deploy I'd say it's worth the extra disk use.

<comment><USER12> I thought that was a totally reasonable file size too, until I looked up Docker image sizes for node:

[https://hub.docker.com/r/library/node/tags/](https://hub.docker.com/r/library/node/tags/)

Regular images are ~260MB and "slim" images are 85MB, but Alpine-based images are a paltry 18MB.

So it seems _something_ in the Node.js compiler is ballooning up the size of the code, by a factor of about three. I wonder what.

<comment><USER13> It really depends on version of node, and the modules used. I'm more inclined to want to see what can be done as a minimal electron... or seeing electron go the adobe air route, and have a shared (continuous updating) base, but that could prove problematic as binary modules (namely sqlite) are common.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I am wondering if using some of the front-end techniques for back-end would be beneficial. Tree-shaking, minimization and gzip would probably help with the binary file size. But as we go there, maybe some more advanced things like the closure[1] compiler or prepack[2] would make it faster.

[1] [http://www.syntaxsuccess.com/viewarticle/closure-compiler- vs...](http://www.syntaxsuccess.com/viewarticle/closure-compiler-vs-uglifyjs)

[2] [https://prepack.io/](https://prepack.io/)

<comment><USER15> > But as we go there, maybe some more advanced things like the closure[1] > compiler or prepack[2] would make it faster.

And then one could probably go even deeper in search of performance and instead of compiling JS to JS, compile it to C or even straight to native CPU assembly.

<comment><USER16> AOT compilation of js is probably not worthwhile.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> How is this different than zeit's recently released pkg?

[https://github.com/zeit/pkg](https://github.com/zeit/pkg)

<comment><USER18> The readme says this:

> Pkg hacked fs.* API's dynamically in order to access in-package files, > whereas Node.js Compiler leaves them alone and instead works on a deeper > level via libsquash. Pkg uses JSON to store in-package files while Node.js > Compiler uses the more sophisticated and widely used SquashFS as its data > structure.

<comment><USER19> More sophisticated is not a great way to suggest something ks better. That said, I could image this probably does give better performance if you have a lot of I/O with files in the package.

<comment><USER20> Maybe they weren't saying that is necessarily better?

<comment><USER18> Yeah I didn't read it that way either, just a matter of factly "here are the differences" – that section probably could be expanded and clarified.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> it would be awesome if someone creates a compiler for javaScript.

<comment><USER21> I mean an actual compiler rather which is much more optimized than node environment rather than just making things into executables

<comment><USER22> V8 includes JIT compiler. Could it really be "much more" optimized?

<comment><USER23> If you look at Hiphop vs. HHVM there is certainly a significant performance upside in taking advantage of clangs or gccs ability to produce efficient code.

I'm not sure why Facebook decided to stop maintaining hiphop. Perhaps manageability wasn't great.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Is there any reason to compile your JavaScript except obfuscating the code !? It will most likely run slower, because of no runtime optimizations.

<comment><USER8> There is no real compilation going on here, V8 is bundled in the executable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> squashfs ? maybe docker is a better alternative - especially with the new 1.13 experimental feature "\--squash"

[https://blog.docker.com/2017/01/whats-new-in- docker-1-13/](https://blog.docker.com/2017/01/whats-new-in-docker-1-13/)

</comment><comment><USER26>
      First install the prerequisites:

      SquashFS Tools 4.3
      Python 2.6 or 2.7
      Visual Studio 2015 Update 3, all editions including the
      Community edition (remember to select "Common Tools for
      Visual C++ 2015" feature during installation).

Why not just Node.js and Git for Windows as requirements? Python 2 and a specific VS version, really? Is using npm command to get further packages too uncool?

<comment><USER27> This is risky to say but... NPM is a bad package manager. I could blab about why forever but tons of other people already have. I've never used a popular language with a package manager as bad as npm.

<comment><USER28> It's not risky to say. It's risky to do a shallow critique with no solid analysis. I would personally enjoy hearing a critique of why npm is bad in comparison to other package managers.

As someone who has spent a lot of time with npm (not even as a webdev), it appears to solve all of my common use cases while also dealing impressively well with various versions of specific dependencies. (Like, A depends on firstname.lastname@example.com, C depends on email@example.com, etc.)

<comment><USER27> There's a ton of annoying little stuff (like doing nothing to prevent path names too long for your filesystem) that could be forgiven for being young, but the big problems are in its architecture.

Node module syntax is non standard and can't be tree shaken, with a little more forethought it could have been designed to support static analysis and they wouldn't have needed to reinvent the module syntax for ES6. You can't reliably tell if a piece of code is using a given package until you run it.

The dependency resolution sucks. It's better now that they finally made it so nested dependencies aren't duplicated, but why the hell do I have to run a manual dedupe command to do so? What that tells me is that npm doesn't actually track dependencies, its hardly more than a fancy file downloading tool.

The repository curation sucks. I'm not sure if you've used Python's package manager, or Java's, or C#'s, or Perls, but npm has zero package curation and is filled to the brim with garbage compared to the others. I have published packages for C# and Java and the semantics are well defined and reasonable, you even cryptographcally sign your code and the system checks to make sure you upload documentation etc... In the case of java, which has the best system I've seen, they even use something similar to DNS validation to make sure you control package namespace.

The above point is the absolute worst thing about npm and drawfs the other problems. Let me give an example by pasting the package publishing guidelines for Maven(Java) vs npm:

Publishing an npm package: >Use npm publish to publish the package. >Note that everything in the directory will be included unless it is ignored by a local .gitignore or .npmignore file as described in npm-developers. >Also _make sure there isn 't already a package with the same name, owned by somebody else._ >Test: Go to [https://npmjs.com/package/<package>](https://npmjs.com/package/<package>). You should see the information for your new package.

I had to condense the Java guidelines but it's roughly this: create JIRA account apply for access review requirements verify namespace ownership generate crypto keys package coordinates/versioning project description URL and license info developer info SCM info package deployment generate binaries revolve package dependencies crypto sign package generate documentation online verification

Sounds like a lot of work right? It takes a few hours to setup and verify your domain/keys the first time but after that all of these steps are automated. The signing/building/doc generation/ deployment is totally automated. Npm is a toy in comparison.

from their docs: Why Do We Have Requirements? In order to ensure a minimum level of quality of the components available in the Central Repository, we have established a number of requirements your deployment components have to meet. This allows your users to find all the relevant details about the components from the metadata provided in the Central Repository. The following sections will detail these requirements.

Left-pad is a perfect example of why npm sucks. Nuget, Maven, Phython, and CPAN would have never let something that stupid happen.

<comment><USER29> > Left-pad is a perfect example of why npm sucks. Nuget, Maven, Phython, and > CPAN would have never let something that stupid happen.

O RLY?

* [https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/coldnew/left-pad/1.0.0](https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/coldnew/left-pad/1.0.0)

* [https://www.nuget.org/packages/left-pad/](https://www.nuget.org/packages/left-pad/)

* [https://pypi.python.org/pypi/left-pad/](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/left-pad/)

* [http://search.cpan.org/~dagolden/LeftPad-0.003/lib/LeftPad.p...](http://search.cpan.org/~dagolden/LeftPad-0.003/lib/LeftPad.pm) (LeftPad - Why should Node.js have all the fun? - comments on the package)

\-- UPDATE

About package removal...

* [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20403387/how-to-remove-a-...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20403387/how-to-remove-a-package-from-pypi)

<comment><USER27> All of those left-pad libraries are a jest, it's trivial to do padding in those languages. I was wrong about Python and removing packages but on Nuget and Maven you can't, its not allowed.

I think it's worth noting that with Java at least, besides not allowing package removal, the namespace is tied to a unique identifier with ownership verification, so the cause of the left-pad fiasco (kik wanting his namespace) is extremely unlikely to happen in the first place.

<comment><USER30> If the curation process allows joke packages to pass through, it is completely useless. Looks like the only difference from npm is extra bureaucracy then.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Live Chat Support Software - <AUTHOR>

I'm looking for a 1 on 1 web chat application that can be running in the background of a secretary's computer and when someone creates a chat, it alerts the secretary with a pop up of some sort. Would campfire support this? <comment><USER2> If you're talking about live chat support via your website, where your secretary could be running a chat program in the background, a YC company that has a good product is <http://www.olark.com/>

<comment><USER3> I also concur on the olark recommendation. We have been using it for about 9 months now and routinely close deals via live chat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Olark is a YC company and SnapABug is a Techstars company. Both are in that space and have great software.

A cool feature of SnapABug is that you can proactively chat with someone online. Not sure if that is available on Olark

<comment><USER5> I saw SnapABug demoed at Google I/O and I was pretty impressed. It does way more than just "chat" (like guiding users through your site and taking screenshots).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> <http://www.olark.com/portal/tour.html> gives you a pretty good idea of what you can do with Olark. I think the biggest difference between Olark and the similar competition is that you get to see the visitors to your website in your buddy list of your IM program. (And yea, you can proactively chat with these visitors using Olark)

<comment><USER7> I use Olark and love it. Its integration with my contact list is great--don't even have to switch away from Adium to chat with clients.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I use Plupper and they have a very decent free version.

</comment><comment><USER9> i NEED A HACKER NOW CALL 001-506-8952-0581 WITH JOSE GOOD PAY!

</comment><comment><USER10> +1 for SnapABug</comment>


Why Pacific Hurricanes Hit the Americas So Rarely - <AUTHOR> http://www.livescience.com/7866-pacific-hurricanes-hit-americas-rarely.html <comment><USER2> Simple. In the northern hemisphere, wind moves clockwise. So the West Coast gets cold winds from Alaska, while the East Coast gets warm winds from the Caribbean. That's why the West Coast is so cold until Southern California, but the East Coast is hot and humid all the way up to New York. That's also why Asia gets so many typhoons, but Europe gets none.

I recently moved to DC and the area is downright tropical.</comment>


ZoomRead follow-up - <AUTHOR> http://zoomread.com

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a follow-up to a post I did about 3 weeks ago for my site <http://www.ZoomRead.com>. HN gave a lot of really good feedback and I appreciate it:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1726256>

The main message was that the various ways of moving around and 'zooming' (of course) needed to be smoother. For that I've taken a look at the Silverlight 'DeepZoom' (seadragon) API - and so far it's worked quite well.

I'm currently working on 'falling back' to the AJAX client if Silverlight isn't chosen to be used, and will see if I can make it a little faster too.

Thanks again for the feedback from before, and do let me know how this version works out for you. It's been fun working on it.

<comment><USER2> Cool.

Starting the page zoomed in to an instruction page is helpful, but consider beginning the app zoomed out and set the double-click to zoom. You could provide instructions as a pop-up div.

A new user to the page could then see all of the categories and, if the user has never encountered DeepZoom, a cool surprise.

Again, nice app!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Yes, it would be easy to do that. There are 'hover' buttons on the bottom right with a 'home' icon, but I need to bring them out a bit more, i.e. a bit dull in those noisy screen previews.

I was wondering about using a temp cookie and doing a bit of an automated tour, i.e. start at the top, and then wait for a second, then down to instructions. Not sure how good/annoying that would be though...</comment></comment></comment>


An AI-Driven Hedge Fund - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-21/hedge-fund-robot-outsmarts-human-master-as-ai-passes-brexit-test <comment><USER2> How was it predicting the brexit vote? It was a relatively close vote. I think as the article points out there was a lot of luck involved in this specific case.

<comment><USER3> It's not hard to see why in that moment the risk-reward would look good to a computer. It's not optimizing for individual trades but very much in the aggregate. So Brexit would look to any decent algo like a solid bet: the polls were close but the market didnt accurately reflect that, promising serious potential upside for the contrarian position.</comment></comment>


Ask YC: Health Insurance? - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
I've been using a personal health insurance plan that is left over from the last startup I worked for in the summer of 2007, and recently learned that my rates would be going up by 23% as of January 1. I'd much rather be on a group plan, but there are a number to choose from, and my company is only one person right now. I expect that part of the reason for the overwhelming number of options is that different people have different health issues, and so there's no one-size-fits-all solution, but it is probably also true that some insurance carriers are simply easier to work with than others.
So, who do people use for insurance? (And is there anyone in or around Palo Alto who needs a LAMP developer job that offers health coverage? Because if there is, I'm hiring...) <comment><USER2> If you are healthy, the cheapest thing to do is an HSA + high-deductible health plan. I've been on an individual plan I found at <http://www.ehealthinsurance.com> for a few years. Remember to price shop your plan every couple of years as you can usually save 25% or so by switching to a different plan (even with the same company).

At least in the US, the way "health insurance" works nowadays, it's not really "insurance" in the true sense of the word. From Wikipedia:

"Insurance is defined as the equitable transfer of the risk of a loss, from one entity to another, in exchange for a premium, and can be thought of as a guaranteed small loss to prevent a large, possibly devastating loss."

Problem is, most people think health insurance should pay ALL of their medical bills. This is why health costs rise so much in the US. People think health care is "free" because insurance pays for it. So individuals consume health services without regard for the true costs and that punishes everyone. It's a classic tragedy of the commons.

An HSA plan + high-deductible health insurance gets back to how things should be; you have health _insurance_ to protect you from a loss you can't absorb individually. But you still pay for routine & predictable care yourself, with your own money. It's cheaper for you, and better for everybody.

Plus, with an HSA, all of your "routine" expenses are TAX FREE!

<comment><USER3> To someone making ten dollars an hour, a 2000 dollar medical expense _is_ devastating.

The problem I have is that I have seen people with this same health insurance end up 50k or more in debt and worse because the provider fights you at every turn. At that point, is it health insurance?

Finally, going for preventative care saves more money than it costs for a provider. Having someone see a high cholesterol number and adjust diet and such is much cheaper than a heart attack a few years down the road. For the provider, it makes sense for them to cover basic health expenditures because it stops much bigger ones down the road.

<comment><USER2> First of all, I would argue that $2000 is not _irreversibly devastating_. One could pay it back over a couple of years. Secondly, as another poster said, one should be contributing to an HSA, _saving in anticipation_ of such an expense. Thus in all but the rarest of cases most of the money should be already available in such a situation.

I do agree that fighting insurance companies is a problem. Perhaps the government should require insurance companies to electronically code their policies so that you can get instant pre-approval for medical care on site, with steep fines to insurance companies for reneging on payment for pre- approved procedures.

As a society, we need to do everything we can to reduce the transaction costs of accessing health care. I'll bet that 15-20% or more of health costs are administrative, which is ridiculous.

Finally, many HSA plans realize that preventive care is important and provide "first dollar" coverage for preventive care, meaning the plan pays for it, not you (via your HSA account). See: <http://www.ahip.org/content/pressrelease.aspx?docid=21554>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> First a disclaimer; I work tangentially in health insurance right now, so take this with a grain of salt.

That being said, health insurance can vary greatly from state to state. There are different carriers offering different plans. Sometimes the same carrier will offer different things based on the _zip code_ you live in.

My recommendation to anyone looking for health insurance is to find a broker. It doesn't cost you anything extra, and they can look specifically at what your situation is and make recommendations based on that.

If you went to someone for your business insurance, then the chances are high that the same people can either talk to you about health insurance options or can point you the direction of someone who can.

Insurance offerings can be very complicated things; a broker who makes their money from dealing with insurance tends to have a pretty good awareness of what works and what doesn't.

Before people pipe in saying that broker will only offer you things that make them the most money; the difference between what a broker makes on the worst carrier (for them) and the best is _maybe_ 2%. It's worth far more to them to keep you as a happy customer for as long as possible, because as long as you pay your insurance bill, that broker will continue to make commissions on it. (Even so, the carriers will give you the same rate directly as they would through a broker).

</comment><comment><USER5> One thing that many people who have not had hospitalization may not realize it that hospitals really nail it to people without insurance. I had surgery a few years ago and the bill was $80,000. The insurance company disclaimed $60,000. I ended up paying only $2,000. Also make sure that all the doctors in a procedure participate in the insurance plan. Beware of anesthesiologists.

If you are a small company, check out HR outsourcing like Administaff. They can save money because they can pool all the employees of their clients. I have not used them, just an example.

</comment><comment><USER6> <http://tonik.com> works for me. I pay $140/month for their best plan. Aside from the annoying over-friendly wannabe 20 something text on the website, it's been worth it for peace of mind.

<comment><USER7> If you're a woman or (obviously) if you have a family, this isn't going to work for you --- there's no maternity coverage. (I'm not trying to snipe at it).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'd like to know more about this as well. I just graduated from college last week and made a point to get a year-long insurance plan that will cover me until august while I do my startup thing. It was from Pearce & Pearce, but that's because it is affiliated with Georgia Tech.

<comment><USER7> Term health insurance can be a bad bet: if you get sick on day 360, you're basically screwed, because your current insurer will drop you and your new insurance won't cover it. If you're young, the earlier suggestion of High- Deductable + HSA might be a better plan.

<comment><USER8> this was just me getting student insurance (dirt cheap) while I was still eligible. before it runs out i will get another plan and have an overlapping period where i have primary and secondary insurance, just like I had when I was covered as a dependent on my parents' plan while I also had this plan.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> i'm on MA's state health insurance. i hear it would be pretty killer if i actually had a hospital visit...which to me defeats the whole purpose of health insurance. i don't care about the small beans for doctor visits. i just don't want to get saddled with a 10k hospital visit bill for broken bones or something.

i see health insurance as one of the biggest obstacles against going the startup route. i live cooperatively, so my monthly fees, when i had a 'real job' and was on BCBS, were more than rent + food.

sure, most startupers are young folk, but we also live pretty risky lifestyles. i bike and roller blade along city streets all the time.

<comment><USER7> It's also murder for recruiting people --- anyone with a family is going to require health insurance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I work at a hospital in your neck of the woods.

Kaiser does a pretty good job with basic stuff, and their rates are pretty reasonable from what people tell me. A lot of other companies in the area use Blue Cross/Blue Shield. They can probably get you decent rates on an HMO plan for your business.

Another way to go about is is to find out what doctors groups in the area people really like. Then ask the offices in that group what insurance companies they are associated with. Insurance is one thing, but having to go to a crappy doctors group because that's who your HMO allows you to go and see really stinks.

</comment><comment><USER11> Find an insurance agent. They are experts, and contrary to some beliefs, it's not cheaper to go directly to the insuring company. They will work to find out what's best for _you_.

</comment><comment><USER12> We have United Healthcare, we worked with an agent through Paychex (our payroll provider) to get this set up. I talked to a couple of people in the medical field about the best plan for us (of the options provided by the agent) to help chose between our options.

</comment><comment><USER13> If you join <http://nase.org> (National Association of Self-Employed) you can get a pretty good rate on health insurance through them.

</comment><comment><USER14> Many useful threads, I'll need to read one day:

<http://searchyc.com/health+insurance>

</comment><comment><USER15> I keep my fingers crossed.</comment>


Facebook Dumps Bing, Will Introduce Its Own Search Tool - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/12/13/facebook-dumps-bing-will-introduce-its-own-search-tool/

<comment><USER2> _Search is an incredibly difficult space to delve into, and Facebook's search products will face their own unique challenges in that the closed network, with over 1 billion active users, is home to more than a trillion posts. Zuck said on an analyst conference call in July that his search engineers often remind him that Facebook represents the biggest web search corpus out there._

Assuming Google indexes 150B urls, 1K content/url avg on very low end, it's 150T corpus. Assuming even nominal 200 byes per post FB has 200T corpus. It's truly amazing to me that FB content now rivals rest of the entire Internet!</comment>