Go Fucking Do It - <AUTHOR> https://levels.io/go-fucking-do-it/ <comment><USER2> I have seen this a number of times but the money goes to a charitable cause instead.

Oprah Winfrey also pioneered it via television.

Not totally sure why a random stranger would forward you money for procrastinating but that does not mean they won't.

In Europe anyone accepting transactions online is bound by Distance Selling Regulations which means they can demand their money back within 7 days, no questions.

I would factor that little admin nightmare into your business/legal plan.

<comment><USER3> The 'Distance Selling Regulations' does not apply for "contracts for services where you agreed to the service starting before the seven working days has expired"[1]

[1] [http://www.which.co.uk/consumer- rights/regulation/distance-s...](http://www.which.co.uk/consumer- rights/regulation/distance-selling-regulations)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's unclear whether, on gofuckingdoit.com, the penalty fine gets paid to the friend acting as a referee, or the owners of the site.

<comment><USER5> Agreed. I would sign up if the money went to my friend (with a reasonable cut to the owner), but not if the money goes to the owners.

<comment><USER6> I hope the developer lets us know how this goes.

I'm kinda dying to know if people actually sign up to send some random website money. As it is, I'm almost wondering if its satire.

<comment><AUTHOR> In the back of my head was letting the user pick a charity and/or indeed letting the user specify a third friend to send it to (and maybe take a cut from there).

I'll keep reading what everyone here thinks and implement that once there's some consensus.

<comment><USER4> Having it go to the first friend encourages an obvious bias, although that just depends on how much you trust that friend. Having it all go to you, the site owner, seems a bit unfair (a massive reward/effort ratio!) and nominating a charity would be an excellent way of mitigating that. I've heard of a similar incentive-based scheme in which you pay money to an entity you dislike (e.g. democrat donating to republican party) if you fail.

<comment><USER5> I think that would be brilliant. It would provide a strong incentive to Go Fucking Do It.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What I don't quite understand is: what kind of person would rather pay 25USD to some -- for all intents and purposes -- unknown organization over a good friend whom they know will hold them accountable. Plus it'll be a whole lot harder to lie to a friend; with this, it's as simple as clicking the other button.

<comment><USER8> If the money went to the friend, it would be easier to recruit them. Although in that case, they will have a perverse incentive to hinder your progress. Perhaps it's better to have the money go to a non-profit org of your choice.

<comment><USER7> Ha. In that case I guess it'd be up to the user to choose their friend wisely.

An option to choose where the money goes definitely seems in order.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Awesome! I just added some short-term 100-dollar TODOs.

(1) The product needs a basic F.A.Q. (What, exactly, happens to my card information? You don't put a hold on the funds, right? Do you know your shit with respect to securing your servers?)

(2) Take my email. Send me a confirmation. Remind me the day before. And then email me the conclusion.

</comment><comment><USER10> So a few buttons and a credit card field is all it takes to be a "startup"? I think I'll write myself a startup tomorrow.

Edit: Or today even, you know, in the true nature of the post.

<comment><USER2> What do you think a startup requires?

The idea scales, it is not spec work. According to YCom criteria it is a startup. _shrug_

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> 12 startups in 12 months? That's just strange.

<comment><USER12> That's actually utterly idiotic; as in "12 songs in 12 months" or "52 paintings in 52 weeks". One does not routinely come up with good ideas or get inspired.

<comment><USER2> This is so wrong I don't know where to begin. Your comment is also blatantly ignorant of the high output of artistic work that was produced "on spec" during the renaissance and other artistic periods.

52 paintings in a year was not uncommon for painters that are now revered as old masters.

Good ideas and inspiration are, despite your opinion, largely a product of routine.

The routine of capturing thoughts and directions followed by the routine of planning, implementation and possibly review.

The idea of a tortured artist throwing a smattering of paint at a canvas in frustration because his "spark" is gone is largely a figment of the modern imagination.

Art has been made to order on demand for most of history.

EDIT TO ADD: Downvoting without a response? Thanks for proving my point.

<comment><USER12> As you can prove to yourself by rereading the parent comment of mine, I have stated not that "good ideas and inspiration are not a product of routine", but that "good ideas and inspiration do not come up routinely". To further explain my thoughts, let me add that one need not be inspired or have a good idea to train themselves ( _training_ is what the kind of routine we're talking about ultimately is), but need be wishing to train and have _some_ idea, which need not be good.

It is a fine method of developing one's art/science/etc... skills to regularly practise, but not a fine method when it comes to startups and founding companies, think I; for such things happen to have _consumers_ , people who may be favouring the product and incorporating it to their daily lives, which will be disrupted when the founder loses their interest in that product and proceeds to the next month's startup.

They may have had a goal of building 12 web sites in 12 months, or 12 blog posts in 12 days, but this person chose to launch 12 startups each month, and launch those to press. Launching companies regularly is dissimilar to painting regularly. (TBH, I did not double check if this _serial founder_ is referring to some ordinary web application as _startup_ )

<comment><USER2> Good ideas do come up routinely.

Well, according to [http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html) you can literally go and find good ideas right now and every day thereafter.

It is also the basis of the Lean Startup Machine weekend (phenomenally popular).

You can train yourself to have ideas. _Good_ is just an evaluation system.

People may indeed be incorporating a new product into their lives and the Founder will need to manage customer expectations and fallout. A high likelihood of discontinuance does not disqualify his attempts from being a startup.

The truth is, from a validation perspective the OP may have stumbled onto a supremely successful model of idea validation. Build it, tweak it, pump it for 11 months. The next project has 10 months. The next 9. Etc. Compare the metrics after one year and choose the most successful.

However, the statement that good ideas do not come up routinely and is false. They may just not be routine for _you_

<comment><USER12> _come up_ : (Of an issue, situation, or problem) occur or present itself, especially unexpectedly [1]

 _inspiration_ : A sudden brilliant or timely idea [2]

If an entrepreneur trains via founding companies, then, should an architect train via filling the city up with half-arsed buildings? Nowhere in the pg article does occur something like "build random ideas into companies routinely". Also, in that write-up is writ:

> If you're not at the leading edge of some rapidly changing field, you can > get to one. For example, anyone reasonably smart can probably get to an edge > of programming (e.g. building mobile apps) in a year. Since a successful > startup will consume at least 3-5 years of your life, a year's preparation > would be a reasonable investment. Especially if you're also looking for a > cofounder.

[1] [http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/come- up...](http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/come-up?q=come+up)

[2] [http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/inspira...](http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/inspiration?q=inspiration)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Love it. The idea has been tried before, but I've never seen an incarnation this simple. I like that there's no requirement to create an account (for either me or my friend) and the UI feels perfectly sized for the complexity of the task.

Plus, it works. I'd been meaning to clean my desk for weeks, but after assigning $50 to getting it done today I finally did it.

<comment><USER14> You could hire someone to clean an entire apartment for $50.

<comment><USER13> > You could hire someone to clean an entire apartment for $50.

Obviously the point is to _not_ lose my $50.

<comment><USER14> I get the point. I'm saying that if you're willing to potentially lose $50 over 5 minutes worth of self-discipline you might as well spend it on a cleaning service and get a few hours worth of self-discipline instead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The big problem I see is how do you pick the accountability partner?

It needs to be someone who you would trust with an arbitrary amount of money because as soon as there's an ounce of distrust then the entire idea falls apart.

I'm not going to put up $250 if I think there's even a 0.0000001% chance the accountability partner will improperly log that I didn't do it.

<comment><USER16> The money doesn't go to the accountability partner. So if they place any value at all on your friendship, why would they do that? There's nothing to gain.

Also:

>I'm not going to put up $250 if I think there's even a 0.0000001% chance the accountability partner will improperly log that I didn't do it.

Really? An expected loss of $0.00000025 bothers you?

<comment><USER15> It doesn't matter where the money goes to in the end, the only thing that matters is the risk taker loses the money.

There's a very big difference between "internet friend I've known for 4 years and I would consider him a decently close friend" and "I'm willing to hold this guy accountable for $1,000".

I think you guys under estimate at how hard it will be to find an accountability partner who is actually worthy. Your family members will have a bias to not let you lose the money. Really close friends (the people you can trust) might too but the questionably close friends aren't quite trustworthy enough to let them decide on your $500, etc..

<comment><USER16> >It doesn't matter where the money goes to in the end, the only thing that matters is the risk taker loses the money.

Sure it does. It's the difference between expecting people to behave morally and expecting them to behave in their own rational self-interest. The latter isn't completely reliable, but it's a much, much safer bet than the former.

<comment><USER15> Safe isn't immune, also people are really strange around money.

What if I set a goal for 2 years from now. Suddenly I'm forced into maintaining a friendship with my accountability partner because if I don't then I run the risk of being blackmailed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Awesome app and beautiful interface! I think I'll sign up for it tomorrow...

</comment><comment><USER18> _yawn_

Enough with the "shock" titles. You're not impressing anyone. Grow up.

</comment><comment><USER19> If I had the points, I would downvote this. Titles like this are rude and meaningless. Will not bother reading.

<comment><USER20> The startup is just a simple webpage that takes your money if you don't make a deadline you set; And the author is a self-procclaimed "entrepretraveler".

<comment><USER2> Quotation marks for startup as if you are trying to express disdain? You might want to actually structure a coherent, credible response otherwise you are simply lowering the quality of posts of HN.

Regardless of your opinion of the idea/execution it qualifies as a startup.

The same "startup" tags could be applied to Quora (I write content for free, you make people log in to view it to profit) or any other number of enterprises.

EDIT TO ADD: Poster has removed the tags around startup without adding in his edit history to show it.

<comment><USER21> How in the hell is this a start-up? It's a website.

<comment><USER2> It fits the criteria of being a startup. It scales and it is not spec work.

Why do you think it is _not_ a startup?

<comment><USER21> Does every project someone spits out on a domain name automatically constitute it as a start-up? Is he intentionally building a solid business around this and actively trying to scale it? Is there anything to this other than a preposterous personal goal and obtaining that sweet HN cred?

This is a personal project with no intended future other than the experience. Calling it a start-up is going overboard.

<comment><USER2> Do you think you are the person that gets to be the final arbiter on whether the OP is or is not forming a startup? Do you think HN front page is a good start to scaling...?

Why do you think you are qualified to pass judgement or even question whether his intention is to build a solid business? Can you even define a 'solid business'?

Are startups solid in any definition? Surely once a business idea has scaled/matured into something solid is no longer a startup?

Are personal projects and startups now mutually exclusive? That must be news to Martha Stewart, the boys at innocent Smoothies (sold to Coca Cola) and the entire forum of Mumsnet.

Not to mention these guys - [http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/224357](http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/224357)

You might not like his proposal but you don't get to label it a non-startup when it actually fits every technical definition of the criteria.

Oh, and by the looks of this thread his potential customer base might be polarised but the idea is pretty validated. People are putting down money and defending the brand.

Sounds like he has a business to me...

<comment><USER21> No I am not, nor did I assume that grand position. Good for scaling? Possibly. Good in general? It does not mean anything especially if you compare to the garbage that winds up within the top 20 links each day.

I defend my position as a sentient being that can offer sane judgement. He's doing 12 'start-ups' in 12 months. I should not have to say anything else to justify why this is such an absurd idea. His reasoning is that he can do this because someone else completed 180 projects in 180 days. The analogy alone should tell you that he is not taking this as seriously as he should for each to be considered a start-up (realistically). Practice is excellent but he's doing this for the number not for the raw value of any particular experience.

Start-ups are solid in the definition that they should have a reasonable business plan to expect anything of value (experience, cold hard cash, what have you). There are objective manners in which to approach whether something has merit as opposed to viewing business plans in a nebulous fashion believing that 'everything is possible!'

Personal projects and start-ups are not mutually exclusive, nor did I state this. I said that a project should not automatically become a start-up.

<comment><USER2> I see that you like to post and then once questioned you like to edit the post to address the concerns as if you had written that way all along.

This is HN, not Reddit. When you criticise something you are expected to give a credible reason for that criticism.

You failed in that respect and retrospective attempts are simply not going to cut it.

His business seems to be generating cold hard cash right now. In what world can you say that is not a startup?

<comment><USER21> When did I edit my post? Further justifying my belief you don't comprehend what's in front of your face.

I'm really starting to believe this is no different than Reddit.

<comment><USER2> What?

>> _Justifying your belief that I don 't comprehend what is in front of my face._

Seriously, what?

<comment><USER21> This is becoming farcical. Good bye.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Ampache – Web-based audio/video streaming and file manager - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ampache/ampache

<comment><USER2> Out of curiosity, how did you handle the mobile web with this project? With my pet project, Streeme, I had non-stop issues with the music streaming stopping on lock screens. The root cause was javascript not triggering the next track unless you unlock the device. I also found that formats/codecs could be problematic between mobile devices and different software stacks (mobile firefox, chrome, safari). Is there some alternative interface for this nowadays that doesn't need javascript? Have they settled on a common codec yet? I got pretty fed up with iOS fundamentally changing Safari's HTML5 Audio behaviors with every OS overhaul as it was my main listening device on the bus and at work. Even though it still works on the desktop, mobile clients really killed my passion for trying to make a web based media player.

</comment><comment><USER3> This has been around for some time. Is this a new version?

Edit: Looks like it's a fork from the original Ampache which is no longer maintained: [https://github.com/ampache/ampache/wiki/About](https://github.com/ampache/ampache/wiki/About)

Looks much nicer than last I used it. I'll check it out. I've been working on building something similar in Node.

</comment><comment><USER4> Great to see the author posting it here. I submitted it a few days ago but I guess my timing wasn't that great [0].

I'm pretty happy with Subsonic [1] at the moment but I'll definitely give it a shot later because Ampache isn't Java based, which is a huge win for me.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7735252](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7735252)

[1] [http://www.subsonic.org/](http://www.subsonic.org/)

<comment><USER5> I also use subsonic - it's great. I have a third party app on my phone that handles caching really well too, so it's a very easy way to listen to a very large music library without any manual configuring.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This looks neat.

The common hangup I have with these sorts of things though, is what's the most reasonable way to host the data? IANAL, but AFAICT I'm prohibited from running something like this from my residence because my ISP (Verizon) says I can't run servers or dedicated services from my home connection. So OK, I'll go ahead and run it on a DO or EC2 or Linode instance - well, provided I feel like massively overproisioning and thus paying inordinately for ample storage (what if I have terabytes of media?), or dealing with slow connections mounting/proxying to S3 (for example). On top of that, for anyone who has media they did not acquire legally, they are now breaking (more?) laws, hosting agreements, etc.

Just curious to see how anyone else manages it - because LAN XBMC/UMS/PS3 etc is always great, but if I want something more available, like this, or a private Roku channel, etc, it seems less of a real option the more that I consider it.

<comment><USER7> I'm a Comcast user, and while I know that I'm breaking the user agreement by hosting servers, I do it anyway and so far they haven't been bothered by it. My presumption is that clause is more of a CYA on their part that if you begin consuming terabytes of bandwidth hosting your own Youtube site or whatever, they don't need to invent much of a reason to turn you off. Frankly, I'm OK with ignoring it because it seems totally unreasonable in its current wording. What is a server? Sure, Apache is pretty cut and dry, but what about hosting a L4D2 game for three friends? What about that World of Warcraft patcher that acted as a Bittorrent client? How about those Javascript libraries that "crowd host" your website? As far as I'm concerned anything that sits on a port waiting for a connection is a "server" and its almost impossible to do much online these days without unknowingly running one.

If Verizon is more stringent on this, you do have a few options if you want to do it anyway. One of the easiest is by only running the server when you intend to use it. Set up a script that allows you to turn it on/off via email or tweet or something. Or setup a port knocker script that closes the port, only opening it for outside connections when you want to watch Archer or whatever. That will protect you from the usual port scans and such, and is likely all you need to evade Verizon's ire.

The increased bandwidth usage is a trickier problem that, depending on your location/ISP, paying for offiste hosting may be your only option if you intend to stream large amounts of media. This is likely only going to get worse as infrastructure continues to degrade and ISPs continue to sit on it, so I envision we'll all be looking for options here in the future.

<comment><USER6> Fair points. Now that you mention it, the CYA rationale makes a bit more sense. And yup - it's like you said, it's almost impossible to not be contributing to other Internet users in some regard most of the time, with peering really being the LCD of those situations. Hell, being the host in a Halo matchmaking game would be enough for them to nuke your service, by contract logic. Also, good idea on the tweet/etc - even a simpler option would be doing something like a text file on S3 that just flags it as on/off, and let the script poll that every so often. I think I'll do that.

Aside, but as an unreasonably paranoid person, I appreciate the candor WRT "screw it, I do it anyway" \- this (personal media hosting/availability) specifically has been a pain point for a while, and with a decent pipe to the house and plenty of storage, it'd be a shame to let it all go to waste. ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Have been running on the Raspberry Pi for the last year (on lighttpd), but that version was a little troublesome on the usability front. This looks like progress, however, with a HTML5 player being a great improvement.

EDIT: Just updated to the latest version (very simple - clone new 'site files' from Github and copy the previous config, installer does the rest) and can confirm the experience is much improved with the new web player.

</comment><comment><USER9> Hi guys, Thanks for your comments, really glad to see people are interested in the new version. We're working hard to release the 3.7 version so keep in touch!

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm not too familiar with PHP. Are there any tests I can run to make sure this actually works as expected on my machine?

</comment><comment><USER11> Ooh, a manag!

Eh. Can someone please fix that glaring error? Thanks.

</comment><comment><USER12> Great work man :D will try it out when i get home</comment>


65535 interfaces ought to be enough for anybody - <AUTHOR> http://aakinshin.net/en/blog/dotnet/mono-and-65535interfaces/ <comment><USER2> Android is worse — it limits number of _methods_ to 65535 (but has hacks to workaround it) [https://developer.android.com/studio/build/multidex.html](https://developer.android.com/studio/build/multidex.html)

<comment><USER3> A coworker mentioned that multidexing also take ages and uses huge amounts of memory.

<comment><USER4> Are there any legitimate use cases for that many methods?

<comment><USER5> Java's crippled generics, lack of tuple support, and lack of default parameters encourage interface bloat in utility libraries.

Given how bloody good Java IDEs are (By which I mean to say - how good IntelliJ is), the cognitive cost of this interface bloat is very low... Until you start developing for Android.

<comment><USER6> Wouldn't Java's crippled generics actually help reduce the method count since due to type erasure they're all the same method at the VM level anyway?

<comment><USER7> On the one hand yes, on the other hand Java also generates Bridge methods when you implement a generic interface. A MyType implementing Comparable<MyType> will contain a compareTo( MyType ) method and a generated compareTo( Comparable ) bridge method.

It is more likely that generated classes, countless getters and setters and a tendency to small methods has a higher impact.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Also:

65535 tcp-ports ought to be enough for anybody [1]

65534 hardlinks ought to be enough for anybody [2]

[1] [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/113224/what-is-the- larges...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/113224/what-is-the-largest-tcp- ip-network-port-number-allowable-for-ipv4)

[2] [http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/5629/is-there-a- limi...](http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/5629/is-there-a-limit-of- hardlinks-for-one-file)

<comment><USER9> I find it extremely awkward that we actually use numbers for ports. Port 80 is typically used for HTTP, but there's nothing preventing another application from using port 80. Why not call the port "HTTP" instead. Better yet why not give it an integer range of ports to go along with the naming - Eg MyApp[1], MyApp[2].

If you want to hide a port from being probed then give it a GUID as a name. No more port scans.

<comment><USER10> Packet size is important. If your ports are strings, every packet gets that much bigger. Nobody wants slow internet for programming convenience.

<comment><USER11> It's not even convenient. Strings are one of the biggest scourges of any programming language out there. Giant mess in basically every language until Java got it somewhat right, and even then don't forget your equals...

C# (.NET) could be the forerunner if only they had not gone with UTF16, but then it's only with hindsight that we can point out UTF8.

<comment><USER12> Strings are only a problem because they are being treated as text. In this case, they would simply be treated as binary identifiers, so there is no problem. The raw bytes would do just as well for this kind of thing.

<comment><USER13> Only if they are fixed length. If you used variable length strings in packet headers things would get complicated.

But if you're fine with fixed-length strings, you could just as well use all those bits to represent a number instead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> [http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/Z/Zero-One-Infinity- Rule.htm...](http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/Z/Zero-One-Infinity-Rule.html)

</comment><comment><USER15> After yesterdays posting of the list of incorrect assumptions programmers make about the world I put it into my daily web routine to visit the page and read one list per day till done.

<comment><USER16> Do you have a link to this? I missed it and would like to read it.

 _EDIT_ : Think I found it? [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13640409](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13640409)

<comment><USER15> [https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome- falsehood](https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> File this under 'premature optimization bites after 12 years'.

<comment><USER18> Why makes you say it is "premature"? Isn't it possible that they hit that limit because the project is a monolithic monster? Or because it uses libraries that waste those resources?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Any time you have a 16-bit count, it won't be enough. It's a dangerous size...

<comment><USER20> The same is true of 32 bit numbers. 64 bits might finally be enough. _crosses fingers_

<comment><USER21> Well, for _counts_ 32 bits is enough, unless you count something really small, like every individual byte in something.

And for _counts_ 64 bits should be enough, since it's 20 billion billion.

<comment><USER22> For counts of things you have in memory, 32 bits is usually enough -- even if each thing is just 8 bytes, 2^32 of those objects would require 32 GB.

<comment><USER20> 32GB isn't an exceptional amount of memory these days.

<comment><USER22> Sure -- but it is an exceptional amount of memory to use for tiny objects like those. If you're working with four billion objects at a time, they're probably more substantial than eight bytes.

<comment><USER23> Or you spent a lot of effort to get them to 8 bytes or even smaller, to fit as many of them as possible in memory. See use-cases like time-series/analytics databases, point-clouds, simulations with many elements...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> 16 bits can represent 65536 different values, not 65535.

<comment><USER25> 0 Interfaces 1 Interface ... 65535 Interfaces

<comment><USER26> I can't tell if you're joking, but when you're counting a quantity, you don't start from 0.

<comment><USER27> Why not? Is having zero interfaces not distinct from having one interface?

<comment><USER26> It is. But when you have one interface, that interface can be given the number 0. So you have a total of 1 interface, even though you've only counted up to 0.

Edit: I misunderstood. I'll leave the comment up. But I originally interpreted the story as meaning that each interface needed to be assigned an unsigned 16-bit id, which allows for a total of 65536. That was just inference on my part though. It literally says that more than 65535 are not allowed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This sounds familiar. Mono worked for me until it didn't. And it would be some corner case like timing and sockes, or HTTP connection issues. By that time we already bought into it and so I was running around opening a huge black box trying to figure out the internals.

</comment><comment><USER29> Remember how we laughed about visual basic which supports just 65536 different variable names?

<comment><USER30> How many of these would fit into 640 kB of RAM, anyway?

<comment><USER31> you need 16 bits per name, so 2^20 bits. That fits nicely into about 20% of your 640kB of RAM.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> It's almost as if programming languages should support integers, rather than just machine words. Or, put differently: Fixed-Width "Integers" Usually Harmful.

</comment><comment><USER2> > A short fact about .NET: if you have an interface IFoo<T>, the runtime > generates a separate method table per each IFoo<int>, IFoo<double>, > IFoo<bool>, and so on.

In Java you have to do the same manually: [https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/util/stream/S...](https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/util/stream/Stream.html#mapToInt- java.util.function.ToIntFunction-) wow such polymorphism much ad-hoc</comment>


Scheduling Algorithms in Big Data: A Survey [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.ijecs.in/issue/v5-i8/53%20ijecs.pdf <comment><USER2> This paper might seem short, but it's a great introduction to various scheduler types available for Hadoop clusters. Fair Scheduler & Capacity Scheduler are the only ones I've witnessed in production use, but I see a huge potential for improvement in the longer term by using some of the adaptive types.

It's amazing how many enterprise customers encounter severe issues with their clusters simply because of poor scheduler configuration. Either they never changed the defaults, or they arbitrarily twisted knobs without understanding the how various configuration values are dependent on each other.

Finding a healthy balance between having humans describe what they think they want and letting the system adjust itself will be huge.

<comment><USER3> Hadoop scheduling is _hard_ , and the one thing I'd love to give someone some money to come in and fix.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's dated. Uses references to Hadoop 1.2 documentation. Hadoop is at 2.7 currently with 2.8 and 3.0 coming soon.

In particular it refers to slots. YARN no longer use slots.

No mention of Tez, Storm or Spark?

</comment><comment><USER5> Is anyone actually sitting on zettabyte-scale data sets, as the introduction claims?

There's a three year old xkcd "what-if" that guesstimates Google has about 15 exabytes of data, and that presumably includes lots of different types of data (e.g., you're not going to run any analysis across youtube videos, gmails, and self-driving car telemetry).

</comment><comment><USER6> The authors really need to clean this up, the English is awful...</comment>


Gender pay gap shrinks when companies disclose wages - <AUTHOR> http://news.cornell.edu/stories/2019/02/gender-pay-gap-shrinks-when-companies-disclose-wages <comment><USER2> >From 2003 to 2008, the gender pay gap at the reporting companies shrank 7 percent, from 18.9 percent down to 17.5 percent

Is this really a large enough effect size to justify such a headline?

>Our findings suggest that regulatory mandates on pay transparency, as a means to overcome biases against women in the workforce, may be effective in closing the gender pay gap.

No, they really do not. A potential reduction from 18.9% to 17.5% does not 'close the gender pay gap', and attempting to close such a gap in this manner to begin with just demonstrates a misunderstanding of what confounding variables cause it to begin with.

<comment><USER3> I once read an interesting thought experiment about this, adapted to this story it goes like this:

We assume:

\- Greedy capitalist bosses (wanting to pay less for more work)

\- Same productivity of men and women

Now if there's an 18.9% pay gap, then women are on average 18.9% cheaper to employ than men.

Greedy capitalist bosses should therefore only employ women, closing the gender pay gap by driving womens' wages higher (and those of men lower).

Yet this doesn't happen, so one of the assumptions is wrong or the gender pay gap difference (the 18.9%) is not correct.

<comment><USER4> Another assumption that could be wrong is that greedy bosses can accurately determine productivity. If bosses have biases that cause them to underevaluate women's productivity this would also explain the pay difference.

<comment><USER5> That would still give a huge benefit to the greedy boss who can "accurately determine productivity" and hires all women for cheaper, which means it would inevitably be copied in the end.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I found this to be really interesting:

"The researchers were especially surprised by the way in which the companies adapted to the regulation – by slowing the growth of men's wages, not increasing women's."

<comment><USER7> I experienced this first hand and as a result I departed for greener pastures. Isn't diversity a great thing when it suppresses wages, no wonder all the big boys are pushing for it.

<comment><USER8> This is happening at my place right now. Leadership has dictated that priority is now to even out gender imbalances rather than giving raises. Since the women in our company are heavily skewed towards lower-paying roles (QA, customer support), this means the company will avoid giving raises to the roles that actually are in demand and have strong salary growth elsewhere. Needless to say, those of us with options have started looking.

Of course, everyone who gets a competitive offer elsewhere will get a counteroffer, so this policy only applies where it's convenient.

<comment><USER9> I don't get this kind of destructive attitude. Surely the sensible thing to do when you want more equality and women are skewed towards lower paying jobs, is to hire more women in higher paying jobs?

I'm all for paying people in lower-end jobs better, mind you, but using this as an excuse to hurt salary growth seems like it's intended to discredit the whole idea of gender equality. Well, unless the people involved are provably overpaid, like CEOs tend to be. But somehow I suspect the CEO is still getting his excessive raises.

<comment><USER10> > When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure

Very simply, the measure of women being paid less is useful on wide scale in demonstrating women's position in society, but it doesn't go into the complexities of the issue, so aiming to get your company more equal on that measure can mean so many things as to make it a useless target unless you understand the situation.

<comment><USER9> Excellent point. Reminds me of the Bechdel Test, a simple test to show how poorly women are treated in movies. To pass the test, the movie has to have at least two named women talking to each other about something other than a man. It should be trivial to pass, yet a surprising number of movies don't.

But that test doesn't mean that movies that pass the test are better or more feminist than movies that don't. Terribly sexist/misogynist movies can still easy pass it, whereas _Gravity_ , a movie starring only Sandra Bullock for most of its duration, doesn't pass it because there's nobody else in the movie to talk to.

Similarly, the point of calling attention to the gender wage gap should be to pay women better and give them better access to higher paying jobs, not to deny men raises.

Equality should lift people up, not push them down.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Here's the study: [https://wpcarey.asu.edu/sites/default/files/daniel_wolfenzon...](https://wpcarey.asu.edu/sites/default/files/daniel_wolfenzon_seminar_november_9_2018.pdf)

To describe a 7% change as "shrinks" is a bit of a stretch.

And to attribute it to solely to the requirement to disclose may be incorrect as there was only a 1.4% difference vs companies that were not required to disclose anything (the 7% figure is vs pre-regulation).

So wages rose for women post-regulation, regardless of whether the company they worked at disclosed wages or not. Meaning other provisions in the law also likely played a role in the decrease of the gender gap.

The study also references another study that finds:

> _that firms with higher pay inequality exhibit larger equity returns > suggesting that differences in pay inequality across firms are a reflection > of differences in managerial talent._

All just food for thought. Regulation and transparency can produce interesting outcomes and side-effects without making us any wiser as to the dynamics driving the differences in outcomes.

</comment><comment><USER12> Not just gender I think. I witness over and over how employees one day realize they were underpaid and get paid immediately. Including myself. Sometimes the company asks the employee to keep it silent so the other ones won't do the same. This is ofcourse unhealthy situation, and too common. You got to win your rights manually.

</comment><comment><USER13> The problem of gender pay gap is a really hard one to tackle. You have to be a fool to pretend there is no issue, but the number of causes is incredible at the gender, education, industry, company and individual levels.

Every time there is a public debate around that topic you end up with two major groups, one saying that women work less or are less productive because of XYZ, the other saying something close to "it's the patriarchy".

Striving for equality of outcome is a good first step, but it's attacking the symptoms and not the causes.

Just like for politics or employees quotas, you can bend the end of the process to make it look fair and balanced but if the 10 steps before are biased against women (and other groups) you end up with an illusion of parity while the only thing that changed is you now make "positive" discrimination.

Making the wages public is a good thing no matter the reason, after all the first step of making a decision is to have access to data. If it helps with pay gaps all the better.

<comment><USER14> How about option 3: men choose to work on jobs that pay more but are more stressful while women chose to work on more social jobs that pay less and value other things more than just pay.

<comment><USER13> You'll have to be a bit more precise because right now it's hard to tell if you're trolling or trying to make a point. In any case, the pay gap isn't a thing that can be addressed with a single sentence such as yours.

It's a really simplistic point of view to say social jobs are valued other than with a salary. And I'm fairly certain that social workers, teachers and nurses get their share of stress.

If anything the "men do manly jobs and women do social jobs" is another symptom of the underlying causes. Sure you can say "that's the way it is" and move on, but if you want to take part in the debate you have to show a minimum of intellectual honesty.

Plus it doesn't work for people having the same position in the same company.

<comment><USER14> I agree stress was a bad metric, I'm sure there are other metrics some sociologists would be able to enumerate, I can just speculate based on my experience: In my country when I started studying computer science -- which was a niche area, I had 90% male colleagues; after 15 years with all the media coverage of high salary in the industry, the proportion shifted to 60-40, because the profession has become main-stream.

So another factor could be risk -- women are more risk averse than men; hence they choose more established professions where the pay is less.

Then, there's the drive and single-mindedness some high paying jobs require -- men are built that way, women are less likely to have obsessions on obscure- technical hobbies; heck, most men aren't built that way, it just happens that for those people that have such drive and single-mindedness, most of them are men.

And that's the way it is -- unless there's some moat protecting your job, due to the laws of supply and demand the higher paying jobs are the ones nobody wants to do because of risk, discomfort and so on, and those that most people cannot do because of the dedication and single-mindedness they require, and for both categories men are the likely candidates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I couldn't find an _N_ of the study.

It seems important to me in order to ascertain the statistical significance of this. Were there 10 companies in one group? 100? 1000? Did anyone else see this in the study?

<comment><USER16> Based on table 1, it was probably about 4000 companies and 66000 employees total.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> These articles tend to attract comments with dire predictions for US society if people knew each others salaries, so just a reminder Norway always does nationwide salary transparency

[https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-40669239](https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-40669239)

<comment><USER18> > These articles tend to attract comments with dire predictions for US society > if people knew each others salaries, so just a reminder Norway always does > nationwide salary transparency

True. But I think it is worth pointing out that the US is not Norway. There is a significant culture difference for one. Secondly the policy may simply not scale. The US population, workforce, economy is orders of magnitude greater than that of Norway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Been working on a tool called [http://levels.fyi](http://levels.fyi) to help increase career ladder and salary transparency in the workplace (mainly for tech right now). Would love suggestions on things to add to make it more powerful!

</comment><comment><USER20> Shouldn't remuneration depend on the amount of work done? Gender issue shouldn't come into it.

<comment><USER21> Should the price of something depend on the amount of work done? On how much the buyer values it? Or on the amount the buyer has to offer to outbid others?

Does an employer just pay for work done, or possibly also for availability, potential, loyalty, goodwill?

Edit: That said, I absolutely agree that gender isn't something that should figure in those considerations. At best it's a poor proxy for much more specific differences between individuals.

<comment><USER20> I agree its not easy to quantify wage rates. It is highly context dependent. The valuation depends on many things. Still gender should not be the parameter since valuation depends on an individuals performance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Conclusions that the companies hired more women because of it are a bit weird to draw since every company that would be a comparison in the country also has to follow the same rules?

And ofc it's solved by lowering the growth of male wages :D Business

<comment><USER15> No, they were comparing companies that didn't need to follow the regulation (companies with 24-34 employees) with companies that did (35+ employees).

Of course, the problem with this is twofold:

1\. Companies with <35 employees is a tiny slice of the population and should generally not be expected to follow normal population distributions.

2\. Companies with <35 employees are already behaving differently than larger companies with >35 employees. I do not think that variable was accounted for in any way by the study and that is problematic.

<comment><USER23> Over 80% of all companies in the USA have fewer than 35 employees

[https://www.naics.com/business-lists/counts-by-company- size/](https://www.naics.com/business-lists/counts-by-company-size/)

i agree with your point #2

the differences between large and small companies are significant enough to outweigh the causal relationship that the OP implies

<comment><USER24> I think he was referring to the relative number of workers at companies with more/less than 35 employees. Clearly the average worker, by a large margin, works at companies with 50 or more employees. Even more so when you don't include whatever proportion of businesses counted that are essentially self- employment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> "The researchers compared those companies to firms with 25 to 34 employees that didn't have to release their data"

So they are comparing two different types of firms (with > 35 employees and between 25 and 34 employees): Doesn't that invalidate their study right there?

<comment><USER26> They did not directly compare the two types of companies, they compared evolution of each type.

Of course that's not perfect, but it's good enough

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Very logical. Well, it gets to 0 if the pay is fixed.

You don't have much companies using that in the West</comment>


Some Amazon employees bought NYC condos before news of HQ2 location emerged - <AUTHOR> https://thehill.com/policy/technology/417633-amazon-employees-bought-new-york-city-condos-before-company-announced-hq2 <comment><USER2> To understand whether this is even anomalous, you need to know:

\- How many Amazon employees already live in NYC or are already planned for relocation there for non-HQ2 things.

\- The frequency at which a typical person around there buys new condos

Without knowing those, it's hard to have priors, or to begin to decide whether this is a departure from those priors.

<comment><USER3> They speak to this right in the article.

> but the Journal reports that one brokerage firm sold nearly 150 units just > last week, 15 times its normal volume.

<comment><USER4> That's the number in the week _after_ the announcement, by my reading.

> Amazon _announced last week_ that it would be splitting its second > headquarters between Long Island City in Queens and Arlington County, Va., > ending months of jockeying between cities and speculation of where the tech > giant would land.

> There are no exact numbers on how many units have gone into contract in the > Long Island City area since the announcement, but the Journal reports that > one brokerage firm sold nearly 150 units just last week, 15 times its normal > volume.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "While employees of companies are barred from buying or selling stocks based on information that has not yet been made public, lawyers told the Journal that they were unaware of any such ban affecting real estate transactions."

This is exactly what I was wondering, I know there are rules against insider trading, but I wasn't sure if there were rules against people buying property based on a potential location for a new HQ.

<comment><USER6> The crime of "insider trading" is a type of securities fraud. A plain reading of the law would not seem to apply to purchasing a home. But historically securities fraud has been used to prosecute a wide array of behavior

<comment> munk-a I would be surprised if purchasing a mine for some particular mineral immediately after learning that your tech company will suddenly need an enormous amount of that mineral in a closed door meeting, didn't constitute some sort of insider trading.

Similarly, if advanced real estate purposes were made with the intent of resale I'd imagine you'd also get hit with insider trading. I think it'd be pretty reasonable to prosecute them anyways since they are using insider knowledge of market movements to gain an edge in the real estate market.

<comment><USER7> That's a very broad and speculative reading. Insider trading is about regulating the securities market, not about keeping all transactions by the insider information-balanced.

<comment><USER8> Or as Matt Levine says - it is about theft (ie trading on stolen information) not about fairness

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The locations really weren't generally known internally. A few days before the announcement, there was a company-wide all-hands meeting with Jeff where we presumed we'd find out. Nada. Nothin'. No details. We were all left in the dark as much as anyone else.

So the real question here is "which employees, and what did they know?". Or even better, will they be living in these condos for a few years, or selling them in 3 months?

<comment> saiya-jin Isn't in US some heavy taxation on capital gains from quick property sales to prevent this type of speculation? Ie in France it's progressively lowering after 5-6 years, it gets down to reasonable levels in I think 22 years.

The result is much less volatility on the market.

<comment><USER10> There is a long-term capital gains tax break for holding a certain number of years. However with real estate you can sell one property and use the money to buy another within a certain amount of time and not have a taxable event. (See [https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self- employe...](https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self- employed/like-kind-exchanges-real-estate-tax-tips) )

<comment><USER11> So it's worse than having a policy that is neutral on flipping: our tax system actually encourages it.

We shoud tax short term capital gains on property at 100 percent. Nobody should be able to profit by driving up the cost of housing.

<comment><USER12> flipping houses isn't driving up the cost of housing. The costs go up for other reasons. Flipping is simply trading, aka providing liquidity in exchange for taking volatility risk.

<comment><USER13> > flipping houses isn't driving up the cost of housing.

Yes it is.

> Flipping is simply trading,

Usually, not: flipping is typically short-timeline buy-improve-sell cycles (that is, it's exploiting market irrationality where certain improvements add more to market clearing price than they cost to add.)

This does bring up prices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It says 2 employees bought a condo....in a neighborhood with probably the most amount of construction in NYC. How is this scandalous? People do buy real estate on their own...

<comment><USER14> I looked it up and it appears Amazon's current office in NYC is in Midtown -- meaning 2 employees of several thousand -- bought a condo in a neighborhood just a couple of subway stops away. Probably because they couldn't afford to live in Manhattan!

ARREST THEM! People shouldn't' be spending their paychecks on a home with a decent commute to work.

<comment><USER15> This is scandalous! I am certain we can find a few people in every major company that would attest that this should be illegal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Matt Levine talks about what is considered insider trading and what isn't. (scroll through each to the relevant headline)

[https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-10-22/front-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-10-22/front- running-amazon-with-buildings)

[https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-11-20/u-s- sa...](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-11-20/u-s-sanctions- hit-european-banks)

[https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-11-21/now- yo...](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-11-21/now-you-can- foreclose-on-your-neighbor)

<comment><USER17> Most important tidbit in there is actually nothing to do with Amazon HQ2 but rather his recapitulation of a subtlety of insider trading which most people do not realize or necessarily share his perspective on:

>Insider trading, I often say, is not about fairness; it's about theft. There is no general prohibition on the use of material nonpublic information in stock trading, and in fact investors are supposed to find out new facts, and trade on them, so that prices can be more informative. Insider trading law is really about the misappropriation of nonpublic information that belongs to someone else — a corporate CEO using information that belongs to shareholders, or a therapist using information that belongs to her client — rather than the "level playing field" that prosecutors love to talk about.

<comment><USER18> I think Matt Levine is rather excellent, a model for the sort of dialectic reasoning that's sorely missing.

Yet I just don't get this argument of his. As far as I can tell, insider trading prohibitions are intended to protect the integrity of the market. That's why they are administered by the SEC. If you steal office supply, the SEC doesn't get involved. If you steal trade secrets to build an exact replica of <widget>, the SEC also has nothing to do with it.

"Integrity of the market" in this case means that every investor can at least somewhat accurately estimate where they stand in the competition with other investors. That doesn't mean it's a completely level playing field; Large funds with the resources to send employees to every walmart and count the cars in the parking lot will always have an advantage. And that's not a bug but a feature, since it's the mechanism by which investors are rewarded for uncovering information.

But those are what one might call "known unknowns". What could easily destroy the market are "unknown unknowns, the Deus Ex Machina taking all your money, with not even the theoretical chance to compete without leveraging insider information yourself.

As an analogy, it's like a usual casino, where you know your expected value is slightly negative. And one where, with no predictability, the staff sometimes just takes all your chips and kicks you out.

All that appears to me rather close to the concept of "fairness". Not for any moral considerations, but simply to avoid the inevitable death of an "unfair" market.

(There's a fair (stolen?) chance that Matt Levine is right and I'm wrong. If you are looking for investment or legal advice, he is far more capable than me.)

(I also think this very case somewhat supports the view above: Surely buying real estate ahead of the market is an opportunity that Amazon itself could have used profitably. Thus, it would appear to fit the definition of "theft of information that belongs to the company")

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> What I'm curious about is whether LIC condo prices are really going to increase dramatically compared to similar projects in other parts of NYC? LIC is a major subway stop and well connected to the rest of NYC as is...you can live in Manhattan and get to LIC in 1-9 stops in < 30m. You could even live in Jersey City and get to LIC in 50m. It takes longer for some people living in outer neighborhoods of SF to get downtown than that!

<comment><USER20> I actually feel like what'll get much more expensive is Nassau county. LIC is right off the LIRR, and commuting from LI -> LIC is very doable.

LIC is already basically full of luxury high-rises, so it's unclear to me that it'll get significantly more expensive.

Of course, what the hell do I know about real estate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Stuff like this seems like standard practice in the real estate industry (I am not an expert)

For instance, I know one strategy called "land entitlement"[1]:

Step 1) Find an area that has demand for a type of building or business that it is not zoned for.

Step 2) Buy an option on a plot of land in that area.

Step 3) Lobby the government to rezone that area / approve your project

Step 4) Execute option and acquire land and a fraction of its new valuation

This isn't directly analogous to the what happened in this instance, but essentially this is just a way for people with influence in local government to make money. Imagine if someone with connections to the FDA bought an option on a biotech stock and then convinced his friend, the commissioner, to help get their drug through the approval process. I'm pretty sure that would be illegal (or at least a gray area) -- but it's fair game in real estate.

[1] [https://cashflowconnections.com/land-entitlement-with- chris-...](https://cashflowconnections.com/land-entitlement-with-chris- tourtellotte/)

<comment><USER22> i would not know where to begin with land options - is there a primer. it sounds like a thing designed for people with corrupt control over local councils

<comment><USER23> The way I've heard this working is: you approach the landowner with a really good bid for his land ($5m for his property worth $4m). He agrees to sell, but you have trouble coming up with the money, and ask him if he can keep the offer open for a year or so. He isn't thrilled with this, but you offer him $250k up front, to be forfeited if you don't come up with the rest of the money. This makes the $250k look more like a token of good faith and less like an undervalued option, but it comes to the same thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Generally curious: Is there such a thing as "insider trading" for real estate purchases?

For example, what if Bezos were to buy a ton of real estate in the DC area anticipating the value would go up after he announces Amazon will locate there, and he could effectively position himself as a "slumlord" of sorts for the surrounding real estate market?

<comment><USER25> Matt Levine [1] is a lawyer and he wrote [2] once that he doesn't think it's a violation of insider trading laws to transact in real estate with insider knowledge:

 _The insider trading laws apply only to securities markets — even insider trading in commodities markets is mostly okay 2 — and that probably is because of some background expectation of a level playing field in those markets. Nobody expects real estate to be fair; it is not exchange-traded and liquid and fungible; it is just obviously a market where some people know things that others don't. Insider trading in operation is about theft, not about fairness, but the reason that the law concerns itself with the theft of one particular kind of information — or, rather, with one particular misuse of other people's information — probably is about fairness._

[1] [https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthe...](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthew- s-levine)

[2] [https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-10-22/front-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-10-22/front- running-amazon-with-buildings)

Edit: I stand corrected, Matt Levine _is_ a lawyer.

<comment><USER26> Matt Levine is actually a lawyer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I don't see anything about the timeline of these purchases, which seems like a critical detail to me. Most NYC purchases are 1 month+ affairs, and it's not unusual for it to stretch to 3 months or even longer. I'd like to know the date they initiated a property search, went on-contract, and closed the sale.

If you wanted to be sure of closing before the official announcement, you'd have to start your search more like 6 months ahead of time. I doubt even Amazon itself was sure of the location that far in advance. Maybe they had already decided to move there with no knowledge of the HQ2 location at all?

Or have they even closed on these properties? It's more plausible that they could learn the information, start a search, and get a purchase contract signed in a week or two if they were in a rush and not too picky. Then they would be fairly well guaranteed to be able to complete the purchase at a pre- announcement price. Assuming that the announcement does infact affect the price - this isn't that huge of a corporate move for the NYC market. But that also means that the purchases could fall through if there are legal questions about it.

</comment><comment><USER28> My personal observation why Amazon was always going to move to LIC (New York City) and it has been decided if not years then months earlier: I live in NYC. I have a very good friend who moved to LIC in March this year. You have to understand that there is already abundance of construction going on in LIC for past few years, but not at an aggressive rate. But within a radius of three block where she lives (near FoodCellar market and Hayden something condos) construction peaked. I can count there are 7-8 aggressive construction going on this area alone. My understanding is clearly city leaked/shared this information with builders months in advance so that they can get a head start on these new condos. This area I am referring to is near One Court Sq (one of the buildings shortlisted for potential Amazon HQ).

[https://commercialobserver.com/2018/11/amazon-finalizes- plan...](https://commercialobserver.com/2018/11/amazon-finalizes-plans- for-1m-square-feet-at-one-court-square-in-long-island-city/)

[https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-73.9...](https://email@example.com,-73.9443305,15z/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x0:0xbc1def18984f1fc9?ved=2ahUKEwi949j5wObeAhUGIDQIHf2MC78Q_BIwCnoECAIQCA)

</comment><comment><USER29> Who cares? There's no shortage of condos for sale! In case anyone is deeply concerned about the moral implications (because there are 0 legal implications), there's actually a luxury condo glut in NYC right now. [https://therealdeal.com/2018/08/19/condo-glut-is-to-blame- fo...](https://therealdeal.com/2018/08/19/condo-glut-is-to-blame-for-nycs- weakened-luxury-market/)

</comment><comment><USER30> > _The employees decided to buy units in a new 11-story condo building in the > Long Island City neighborhood of Queens just before the first reports of > Amazon's HQ2 location were released this month..._

On the surface, these condo purchases seem suspicious. OTOH, there are thousands and thousands of Amazon employees, so, one might ask: how many condos in NYC do Amazon employees _typically_ purchase per month? Is that number zero?

<comment><USER31> > On the surface, these condo purchases seem suspicious.

Buying real estate ahead of such an announcement doesn't break any laws (edit: it _might_ have violated employee agreements if Amazon has anything in there about acting on insider info, not an Amazon employee so I cannot comment on that). It's not as if this was a short dated deep out of the money call options play based on insider information (most definitely against the law; don't do this!).

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe not legally, but morally it's certainly equivalent to insider trading.

<comment><USER32> Who is the victim here?

<comment><AUTHOR> The previous owner of the condo?

<comment><USER14> How does that make them a victim? They weren't forced to sell at any price. That's real estate and the article says they are net new construction.

Also, Amazon has thousands of employees in NYC already. LIC is close to Midtown Manhattan, a few subway stops away and is a neighborhood full of new construction.

It makes sense for any employees to buy there regardless of any situation...doesn't?

Since when is "Buying a nice apartment in a desirable neighborhood near work" a suspicious or criminal thing? Geez.

<comment><AUTHOR> "How is the buyer of a stock shorted based on insider information a victim? They weren't forced to buy at any price."

<comment><USER33> By this logic, would it not be immoral to engage in any trades when there exist information asymmetry? There will always be "victims" who do not make a profit because they made a bad investment.

A person losing money due to insider trading has almost certainly invested in a company that was not worth what they thought it was. If they're a victim, then whose victim are they really? I have a hard time blaming the insider trader.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Just the notion that there could even be a ban about buying real estate based on insider information is insanity. Not every advantage needs to be legislated away. Same logic as CEOs hiding who they are when buying real estate sometimes; there's no moral obligation to inform the seller so they can drive up the price to make more money when they'd sell for their current one.

</comment><comment><USER35> Maybe irrelevant but still interesting:

more than 100 condos and over 100 mistresses, and literally tons of cash at home, a Chinese state company chief.

[https://www.caixinglobal.com/2018-10-17/fallen-chief-of- bad-...](https://www.caixinglobal.com/2018-10-17/fallen-chief-of-bad-asset- manager-had-tons-of-cash-literally-101335639.html)

</comment><comment><USER36> The President of the United States has specifically stated that he favors doing trade deals with the leaders of nations who buy his real estate properties.

If I had to measure, using myself for scale, how little of a shit I give about two nerds at an internet company buying condos where they may be working next, it would be at about bacterium-level.

<comment><USER37> What's the relevance with the President here? Is it in contrast with how little this is important to the president or you think the president profiting of his public office normalizes this type of behavior, which I don't see the link to very clearly?

<comment><USER36> We should be seeing news articles about political cronyism, corruption and favoritism, more than we see articles about two people at Amazon buying condos. Maybe if they were buying the condos from a politician in exchange for favoritism would it be news-worthy

<comment><USER38> Are you suggesting there isn't already a bunch of articles about the very example you gave?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I'm not sure that this is unfair at the individual level. If I'm an employee moving there I probably want to buy at the current price (which is still pretty hot) before speculators come in and bid it up and I can no longer accord to live there. Now if it was to buy and flip, I'd feel that this wouldn't be right.

</comment><comment><USER40> Wasn't the main scandal here the idea that local government was effectively paying money to one of the richest companies in the world? I wonder how many people lobbied their representatives to say that they didn't want their money spent on enticing a rich business into the area even if it might bring jobs.

</comment><comment><USER41> Sooo 2 employees, out of the tens of thousands that Amazon employs, bought a condo? Why is this news?

</comment><comment><USER42> What's scandalous about this is that there a journalists out there who would make a story out of this. Amazon has so many employees that "Some Amazon employees bought condos is location X in week Y" is probably a true statement for all X and all Y.

</comment><comment><USER43> I think this only matters to Amazon internally -- if some employees had advance notice of the move and bought property before the rest of the company was informed, that's not fair to other employees.

<comment><USER44> How? Maybe they are the employees that have to move to oversee construction or whatever other reason Amazon needs them there so they had advanced information. In any case Amazon is under no obligation to inform everyone about something like this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> The profit from before this hit and after for a single condo could increase in value at least 100K easily. I still don't think that's an SEC worthy thing.

<comment><USER46> Because it's "only" 100K or because private real estate transactions are not in the SEC's jurisdiction? The SEC definitely gets involved for less than 100K.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Amazon already has offices in NYC. Is it really that perfidious that employees would buy in a new condo building close to the existing office?

</comment><comment><USER44> So? It's not illegal so what is the story here ?

</comment><comment><USER48> even if this was based on insider info, there are no laws preventing this..

</comment><comment><USER49> Insider property buying</comment>


Steve Jobs was initially opposed to apps - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2011/10/21/steve-jobs-was-initially-opposed-to-apps-new-biography-reveals/

<comment><USER2>
      "Jobs at first quashed the discussion," Isaacson writes,
      "partly because he felt his team did not have the bandwidth
      to figure out all the complexities that would be involved
      in policing third-party app developers.

Looking at all the policy difficulties the iPhone App Store initially had, I think we can safely say he was right about that.

<comment><USER3> They still have serious policy issues.

Case in point: a friend of mine needed to transfer ownership of an app from a third party to himself. Apple dragged this on for _months_ , and it has been a constant stream of emails and 3-way phone calls. In the end, their Final Solution was this: he had to create a second LLC, add the third party as a "member" of this new company, get state documents certifying the existence of this LLC and the membership status of this third party, and a notarized letter from the third party authorizing the transfer.

The most recent issue was that Apple kept deleting the transfer request form because the name of his second LLC was too similar to the name of his first (seriously, Apple?).

Absolutely none of this is a technical problem; the whole reason he decided to go through this fiasco was to avoid breaking the upgrade path and losing all his reviews and stats (not to mention forcing his customers to lose data). Obviously, there is some switch that an Apple employee can tick that transfers apps from one developer account to another.

Contrast this to the Android Market's transfer process, which boils down to both developers sending an email to Google to authorize a transfer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Umm.. I am pretty certain he actually went on public record about this back in the 1st gen iPhone days. I recall that the only thing that was in doubt was if his justification was honest or was he just trying to appease AT&T.

<comment><USER5> When he said to just write Web apps instead of native apps, I thought that was just spin to delay criticism until the native SDK was available.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The headline and much of the Engadget article seem to complete ly mischaracterize the quote from the book. The quote (and history) indicates that he _postponed_ opening up for third-party developers, not that was "opposed" to the idea.

</comment><comment><USER7> By the time the book comes out all the content will be all over the internet. Shouldn't these posts have some kind of spoiler alert?? Some of us want to read the actual book.

</comment><comment><USER8> No shit. It's very unlike Steve Jobs to suggest using other products with his own. That's like admitting their products are insufficient.

<comment><USER9> They must admit their products are insufficient pretty often (just from recent OS releases):

* Twitter integration

* Yelp and Wolfram Alpha to provide responses for Siri

* Gmail/Yahoo Mail/Exchange email & calendar integration in iOS and Mac OS X

* Google/Bing/Yahoo as integrated search engines in Safari

Fact is that Apple prefers to do things in-house where possible, but if they see it in their interests to integrate something else, they will. Pride (or hubris) has nothing to do with it.</comment></comment>


EPA Finalizes Its Plan to Replace Obama-Era Climate Rules - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/19/climate/epa-coal-emissions.html <comment><USER2> >The new rule, which is expected to come into effect within 30 days, assumes that the forces of the market will guide the country to a future of cleaner energy by naturally phasing out coal over time. It imposes only modest requirements on coal plants.

If you want to argue for small government, fine, I can't really argue against that, just own that as your position. However framing the policy this way is just dishonest. We know for a fact that free markets do not provide an answer for externalities like pollution and climate change and the only reason to say this is to buy political cover for the real motivation.

>While it instructs states to reduce emissions, the new measure sets no targets. Instead, it gives states broad latitude to decide how much carbon reduction they consider reasonable and suggests ways to improve efficiency at individual power plants.

That is always a great way to get things done, just leave everything up to what others think is "reasonable".

<comment><USER3> >We know for a fact that free markets do not provide an answer for externalities like pollution and climate change and the only reason to say this is to buy political cover for the real motivation.

Would it be fair to say that free markets answer externalities, but only when they become so severe that the market producing the externatlities itself becomes degraded? Not really an exception to your statement, more of a ludicrous technicality.

<comment><USER4> No. The idea of the market is that local, free transactions will produce a globally optimal outcome. But even within idealized models, free transactions only lead to optimal outcomes where the cost of externalities is charged to the activities that produce them. Otherwise, the economy will produce more of the activity than the efficient level.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This isn't going to get around the simple economics of coal being more expensive. Natural gas is what is killing coal, but the cost of wind and solar continues to decrease.

The Tennessee Valley Authority is closing 2 coal plants:

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-coal-tva/tva-votes- to...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-coal-tva/tva-votes-to-close-two- coal-power-plants-in-blow-to-trump-idUSKCN1Q32CD)

And is looking to go solar:

[https://www.timesfreepress.com/news/business/aroundregion/st...](https://www.timesfreepress.com/news/business/aroundregion/story/2019/mar/20/tva- solar-coal-plan/490997/)

Also an interesting read:

[https://energyinnovation.org/publication/the-coal-cost- cross...](https://energyinnovation.org/publication/the-coal-cost-crossover/)

""" Constructing new wind and solar projects would be less expensive than continuing to run 74 percent of existing U.S. coal plants, according to a new study. That number jumps to 86 percent of coal plants by 2025. """

<comment><USER6> Those two coal plants are only being run sporadically now, which probably means that they're being run as "peaking" plants, which is a very expensive mode of operation. A year or so ago TVA closed our local coal plant after replacing it with a natural gas one, and while they were at it they also built a one megawatt solar plant nearby. Which is all well and good, but that solar plant, even under ideal conditions, can only produce 1/1000th of the power that the natural gas plant can!

And just a couple of months ago TVA opened a 53-megawatt solar plant in my area, and they are promising that it will produce enough power to run thousands of homes plus some industrial-scale stuff. I haven't yet been able to find output stats for the two newest installations which I've already mentioned, but I have been monitoring a third local solar installation of basically identical design. And even under "ideal" conditions it's only producing 60% of its promised one megawatt output, and on average only a small fraction of it. (I don't know if it's always been that way or if the situation has deteriorated in the five years it's been in operation.) If TVA keeps building out solar plants which on average only produce a small fraction of their promised output, then before long they're going to be in trouble.

This is a general problem with wind and solar; they only produce a fraction (on average) of their "nameplate" (full capacity under ideal conditions) output, yet "nameplate" is what gets quoted in press releases and such. But actual average capacity may be only 25% of that (to use a ballpark number), meaning that you have to divide the quoted capacity by four to get a far more realistic capacity. Meaning that the 1/1000th number that I quoted above is probably actually more like 1/4000th!

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the comment, I think it massively depends on the specific panels and their makeup. You also add a lot of excellent context to the stories I found. There is a ton of cutting edge research going into solar panels and there are many different ways to achieve higher efficiency and/or longer lifespans.

My comment wasn't intended to say solar/wind is killing Coal because it isn't. Natural Gas is what is killing coal. I'm from Kentucky originally and the economy is feeling the squeeze from coal just not being really economically viable for some use cases compared to natgas. As the tech improves and mass production makes it cheaper, solar / wind will continue to make more economic sense. The currently "top of the line" most efficient solar panels as of 2019 come from SunPower and only are a paltry 22.2% efficient so there is a lot of room for improvement. Regarding renewables being a fraction of their "nameplate" capacity it really just depends on too many factors to generalize.

<comment><USER6> Well, "nameplate" capacity is always the maximum theoretical output under ideal conditions, and how often does that happen? And with solar you have to deal with nighttime, so there goes fully half of it right off the bat!

As to that local installation, I drove by it the other day and saw no obvious tracking issues or anything like that. When I took a tour of it about a year after it opened, they said that it had already become obvious that the inverter system was going to be finicky and that it was going to an ongoing challenge to keep that in tip-top shape, given the expense involved. So after five years I could easily envision a situation where the panels and tracking system are still going strong, but the inverter system has degraded to the point where it can only spit out 60% max.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > The move largely gives states the authority to decide how far to scale back > emissions, or not to do it all, and significantly reduces the federal > government's role in setting standards.

> immediately drew a flurry of challenges, with attorneys general in > California, Oregon, Washington State, Iowa, Colorado and New York saying > they intended to sue to block the measure.

I'm a bit confused here by these 2 statements. Why would states sue, or even have the authority to, when the Federal government is delegating control to the states?

<comment><USER8> There are multiple grounds.

A popular approach so far has been to argue the proper process for rule changes hasn't been followed. I'm not sure that applies here, but in many cases there are legal steps to changing regulation. You can't just wake up Tuesday and say "I think stop signs are going to be green."

Separately and more applicable in this case, states can argue they're being harmed by this particular set of federal rules. This can further be tied to already-existing law, essentially arguing that a new regulation is incompatible with a law passed by Congress. As an example, the EPA can't simply approve dumping industrial waste chemicals into waterways, because the Clean Water Act says otherwise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Another battle in Trump's War on America.

</comment><comment><USER10> Seems like the main points are that they are not going to propose again the same rules which were ruled unconstitutional, and adjust how aggressive the targets are.

> _"It could foreclose a new administration from doing something more > ambitious," she said._

I think I get what they're trying to say here, but there's nothing the Supreme Court can do during a moderate administration to "foreclose" more aggressive targets in the future. They can only answer specific questions. Just because the last 1A case was on a relatively uncontroversial form of speech or petition, doesn't mean that 1A is restricted in scope, it just means that it's not particularly harshly tested by the present case.

The argument they're making is frankly ridiculous. The Supreme Court _not finding a moderate policy to be unconstitutional does not preclude you from trying more aggressive policy in the future in any way_.

<comment><USER11> > _Seems like the main points are that they are not going to propose again the > same rules which were ruled unconstitutional_

It wasn't ruled unconstitutional, it was stayed by the Supreme Court while a lower court decided if the rule was within the EPA's regulatory power under the Clean Air Act. Then the Trump administration came into power and asked the court to put the case on hold while they rewrote the regulations.

Maybe that's causing the confusion within the rest of your post, because it isn't a question of constitutionality.

If the Supreme Court rules that the EPA "only has authority over environmental infractions at individual plants, like chemical spills and improper handling of hazardous materials", a rule from the EPA like this might not be possible again.

<comment><USER10> > _It wasn 't ruled unconstitutional, it was stayed by the Supreme Court..._

My misunderstanding from all the words going around.

> _If the Supreme Court rules that the EPA "only has authority over > environmental infractions at individual plants, like chemical spills and > improper handling of hazardous materials", a rule from the EPA like this > might not be possible again._

AFAIK the Supreme Court does not tend to rule on whether you "only" have the authority to do something, they're more likely to rule that a given thing is something that you _don 't_ have the authority to do. Maybe it's different when it comes to federal agencies, on that I'm ignorant. It seems more likely that the Supreme Court simply takes no issue with the new policy, rather than making a broad pronouncement about what future policy could be.</comment></comment></comment>


Slide To See Before And After Sandy - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/blogs/pictureshow/2012/11/02/164194937/interactive-slide-to-see-before-and-after-sandy <comment><USER2> very smart implementation. what are the different ways one can achieve that?</comment>


Debugging engineering velocity and leading high performing teams - <AUTHOR> https://leaddev.com/debugging-engineering-velocity-and-leading-high-performing-teams <comment><USER2> This article dives much deeper than I expected. It sounds like a fantastic resource for a manager, especially in a startup, but a lot of it also relevant for tech leads.</comment>


How to prevent XSS attacks - <AUTHOR> http://amix.dk/blog/viewEntry/19432

<comment><USER2> Has anyone tried tying a session to the client's IP address? Seems like this might make the session cookie harder to use externally (could still use XSS to perform all the attacks from the browser though).

<comment><USER3> phpbb used to do this, but I don't think it does anymore. The problem is that some users have ISPs that transparently route their web access through rotating HTTP proxies, all with different IP addresses. So, each click has the potential for sending the user through a different IP, and invalidating their session. AOL was infamous for this practice. You can imagine this might also happen closer to the client, say within a corporate network.

<comment><USER4> You can still tie the session to other properties that won't change, such as the user-agent string. I'm not sure how widespread this practise is, but I don't see any pitfalls in it (Except of course that it isn't guaranteed to catch the hijacking).

<comment><USER5> If they're able to sniff/steal your cookie they can easily capture any other request headers. This wouldn't be the case for brute forcing cookie values, but hopefully your cookie is secure enough to make that a non-issue.

AOL, and a few others, unfortunately still break the "IP for session security" thing:(

<comment><USER4> You're right - I weren't thinking that through really.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Useful XSS cheatsheet:

[http://www.owasp.org/index.php/XSS_(Cross_Site_Scripting)_Pr...](http://www.owasp.org/index.php/XSS_\(Cross_Site_Scripting\)_Prevention_Cheat_Sheet)

</comment><comment><USER7> The hole in twitter was really big, surprised it took that long to exploit.

</comment><comment><USER8> Does anyone know if using a xss_clean function such as the one in PHP would be a problem for user passwords?

Many people like to use special char for password not sure that will conflict with xss_clean. Thanks!

<comment><USER4> You would never have to filter a password. In general, you shouldn't rely on filtering, but rather on escaping. Escaping always work, whereas filtering can have subtle edge cases. The only place where you should resort to filtering, is when you (for some reason) need to display input _as code_. But it's important to stress that filtering is _less_ safe than escaping - it's not the other way around. That's counter-intuitive, so a lot of people get it wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> more interesting links can be about XSS found here <http://www.abcphp.com/search.php?search=xss></comment>


Ask HN: Why isn't there a language that uses AI to squash errors? - <AUTHOR> We just launched a full rewrite millions of lines of code from converting a ecommerce app from Codeigniter to Laravel, and I just fixed an issue where the column name was wrong.<p>Do you think there will ever be a day where if the column is wrong the language has ML built in and actually looks in the db for the best candidate, tries a different query w/ that and if it succeeds uses that instead BUT notifies an admin that the error took place? Or at least submits it to the error log, or error reporting tool like sentry? <comment><USER2> You don't need "AI" for that. You need structured data.

You need to bridge the gap between boundaries.

If you have a powerful declarative system it could on the spot alert you to most of these errors.

For example if your programming language is aware of your database the compiler or IDE could tell you "On line 15 you are attempting to insert rows in a table that doesn't exist.".

Right now you will get that in runtime.

You need to empower the compiler to "know" about more stuff before executing them.

</comment><comment><USER3> You don't need to use ML to find that kind of error.</comment>


Secrets, lies and Snowden's email: why I was forced to shut down Lavabit - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/20/why-did-lavabit-shut-down-snowden-email <comment><USER2> I'm surprised this isn't getting more traction on Hacker News. It's blowing up on r/technology. Pretty surprising to see the mum reaction here. I was hoping to get some more insight into the legal aspects of what happened here. Also, the U.S. is devolving into a tyranny. Sadly, Plato surmised that all democracies eventually devolve into tyrannies. Seems to be coming true.

<comment><USER3> Sadly, I think hacker news is dominated by the profit motive over the motive of a common good. Even the libertarians here seem to be focused on the liberty to become wealthy free of regulation. I expect this comment to get down voted, even though it is a legit criticism, just as my questioning the morality of ad-supported websites[1].

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7733713](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7733713)

<comment><USER4> This article seems to be leaving out a lot of details which have been discussed many times previously on this site. Mainly with not complying with the specific narrow warrants for individual users, dumbing down the encryption and allowing user emails to be decrypted by admins in the first place, faxing over encryption keys vs. supplying them digitally, and other antagonizing things which required the government to broaden their request(s) for access.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Surely there should be something you can do to challenge an unconstitutional court order, or when you think an unusual court order is interpreted in an unconstitutional way. But how do you challenge that? Can you challenge a court order at all?

<comment><USER6> The Electronic Frontier Foundation appears to have done exactly that in this case:

[https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-has-lavabits-back- con...](https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-has-lavabits-back-contempt- court-appeal)</comment></comment>


Analyzing the SciHub data - <AUTHOR> http://ruleofthirds.de/analyzing-scihub-data/ <comment><USER2> Scihub is not exactly mainstream so nobody should expect that "laymen" would be downloading science papers. It grew out of need. I think the usage statistics have more to do with how early in time a country's scientists learned and spread the word about it.

<comment><USER3> That's interesting that you say it's not mainstream. Most of the people I know currently studying for a Masters or PhD have told me it's what they plan on using once they no-longer have access to the University publication systems after they graduate.

<comment><USER4> Most people currently studying for a Masters or PhD aren't "laymen".</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: review my Twitter app game, Twabble - <AUTHOR>

http://www.playtwabble.com . It's a point system game based on the vocabulary you use in your status updates. Points are awarded like Scrabble.<p>I built it to learn Python and Django and also as a resume builder (I am looking for a software dev job...). I didn't build it to showcase my web design skills.
 It uses Oauth to do sign in with Twitter, and because I know HN is weary my app requests write access but will only send a message to your stream if you explicitly tell it to. <comment><USER2> I don't get it.

The description on the home page doesn't make the game clear to me, and isn't compelling enough to make me want to hand over my twitter credentials.

After poking around a bit I found the "Most Active Games" box, but the pages those links take me to don't really have any more information, just a tag cloud of evidently broken links.

I spent maybe 3 or 5 minutes there, and I still have no idea what Twabble is or what it does.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yea, I need to change the verbiage. And I tried to augment it in the FAQ. But I agree it still is unclear. Admittedly there isn't much more to it besides tag clouds. If anyone actually uses it I'll probably add in some charts from the google api.

The broken links is because I was using an IntegerField to store the message ids, which are way bigger than integers. Don't know how I didn't catch that but it will be fixed soon. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Cool idea. What are you using to access twitter? I've been using tweepy, it's been good to me so far.

P.S. There's an unnecessary horizontal scrollbar in firefox. Just sayin.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am using oauth-python-twitter. I didn't hear about tweepy until about a week ago, I would definitely have gone with it if I had known. It's nice and clean.

I am in firefox 3.0, and no horizontal scroll bar. I don't know what would cause that...

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> clickable link: <http://www.playtwabble.com></comment>


Thieves are targeting beehives with growing sophistication - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/feb/18/bees-hives-theft-stealing-organized-crime-threat <comment><USER3> There's some good work being done in small niches on bees [0] [1] and others. Are any HN folks working on bee-focused projects that would give their work a shoutout? I'd love throw in on research, data collection or product development work using my own hives if teams are looking for help.

[0] [https://apic.ai](https://apic.ai)

[1] [https://pollenity.com](https://pollenity.com)

edit - <USER2>

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the links, those projects look cool. I'm not a beekeeper, but one day I would like to become one. For now I'm just reading on the subject And of course I stmbled up on the mite problem.

Do you by any chance know of anyone doing something similar to this article [1] It's noted as WIP, but I didn't manage to find any follow up papers, or some open source projects doing something similar. apic.ai looks similar but I don't think it's using lasers to remove mites from them.

[1] [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/313808393_Basic_alg...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/313808393_Basic_algorithms_for_bee_hive_monitoring_and_laser- based_mite_control)

<comment><USER3> I don't know about removing mites.

From what I've seen the best practices are around ideas that seem like "the best defense is a good offense" \-- or providing the bees the best possible chances and situation and letting them take care of themselves, which they do white well when fed a range of foods and not squeezed too tightly for profits and trucked across country.

Rev. Langstroth's work on this is dated ( 1850s and 1860s ) but still incredibly relevant. He's given a lot of credit for his work on moveable-frame hives, but 'd say he did a lot to advocate for the practice of bee keeping as a practice that could be engaged, as gardening, by anyone with interest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Heard the same story from a beekeeper in Poland. Some assholes are actually stealing other beekeepers' hives.

Are there any affordable tracking devices with long battery life (a few months) available that could be used to track down the thieves?

<comment><USER6> No, but it's possible to do. They need to be working only for some period after disturbing. Because beehive is stationary, it can use mechanical tilt switch, which enables device only when hive is moved. My beekeeping friend uses cheap rfid tags inlayed inside hive walls to easily identify that beehive is his, in case of needing to quickly check it. If he thinks someone stole the hive, it's quick to bring phone near known location on hive and confirm it. Gps trackers for each hive are still too expensive.

<comment><USER7> If you read the article, it's clear that wouldn't help much as the thieves are quickly breaking down the hives and reboxing the bees. The original beehives are discarded.

<comment><USER8> A system that would make a phone call based in an acelerometer inside the beehive would deserve a look at least.

<comment><USER6> If you can be notified as soon as thieves are breaking/moving hives, that would help immensely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > It's frustrating because it's getting harder and harder to keep bees alive.

this seems to be the real problem

<comment><USER10> Can one breed bees? I wonder if we could selectively breed pesticide resistance.

<comment><USER11> The honeybee is a domesticated species, and there are breeding programs set on making honeybees more resistant to the mite and virus that are often the cause of colony collapse. It's a tricky process though.

My guess is that genetic engineering of the bees or their microbiome will end up being the solution.

Or we can just let them all become africanized...

<comment><USER9> genuinely curious: how will africanization help?

<comment><USER12> Africanized bees are more hearty to mites and disease.

<comment><USER13> Are they also domesticated though?

<comment><USER11> No, and they can be pretty dangerous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Bee theft has a long history, with even Plato talking about it. (Laws 8.843d-e)

>And if any, yielding to his taste of bees, secures for himself another man's swarm by attracting them with the rattling of pans, he shall pay for the damage.

</comment><comment><USER15> I predict an FBI sting operation soon

</comment><comment><USER16> need to lojack the hives</comment>