My experiment with clear and direct communication - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@kentbeck_7670/clear-direct-communications-an-experiment-21b8a151aa7c <comment><USER2> I can't help but feel that even in this "clear and direct communication" the author is continuing to look for ways to manipulate situations and people. What seems to be lacking is empathy. The communication is based upon the value add, the reaction or positioning that the author gets at the end of the interaction, rather than on collaborating with another human and trying to get both parties to a better place.

A similar strategy to this "clear and direct communication" that can devolve into the same place is the concept of Radical Candor[0]. It can begin as a "helping" to awaken others to things they may have missed, and can end up being an avenue for tearing people down instead of growing them. The only difference is the intent of the speaker.

Assuming the best in people and striving to have positive outcomes tends to work better. This puts you at risk of other people much like the author was previously, who seek to undercut and deceive and manipulate, but those people show their true colors pretty quick and they end up on a different tier of communication that no longer gets the privilege everyone else is afforded.

A pivotal change within my own life and communication was reading about Adler's work [0]. Separation of Tasks as a concept is very applicable to interpersonal relationships at the office. I no longer struggle with trying to explain why people are rude and pushing agendas that don't make empirical sense. None of us are infallible and we all are seeking to shape our world in different ways and it's helpful to delineate what we really care about and not. Which hills to die on.

[0]: [https://www.radicalcandor.com/](https://www.radicalcandor.com/) [1]: [https://www.mentalhealthtoday.co.uk/blog/lessons-from- alfred...](https://www.mentalhealthtoday.co.uk/blog/lessons-from-alfred-adler- the-influential-figure-in-cognitive-behavioural-therapy-youve-never-heard-of)

<comment><USER3> Right. It's like all of these strategies are about how he communicates but not about how he listens.

Most people think they are good listeners, but I come at this from the world of training coaches. Coaching starts with being a professionally good listener which is much different than being an amateur good listener.

And when you try to reach this level of listening at a professional level you start to realize the millions of ways in which you block yourself from listening.

An obvious one that the author did touch on was that he recognized his prior communication as manipulative. Right! We all bring our own agenda and this is one of the ways in which we can filter what we are hearing. What has the person said that supports my agenda? What threatens it and how can I disprove that? Thinking that way doesn't allow you to realize that your judgement might be wrong.

The other big ones are anxiety and need for esteem. It's like when you can't help but give advice because you are deeply desperate for validation. You're not broken, that's a very human way to be.

Listening is hard and so a good starting place is to separate listening from judgement. The word I use most is curiosity. Just focus on being curious as a way to crowd out all these other feelings. Then later you can make a judgement.

If you are a clear communicator and a bad listener then the result is just that you go around being clearly wrong a lot of the time.

<comment><USER4> Former listening trainer here. I discovered though training a great many people that a key listening problem is that people's attention wanders away and then back, and as a consequence they miss a lot of what has been said but are not aware this has happened. I found this was common even among professional psychotherapists.

Also the easiest way to improve your listening skills is reflective listening. That is where you simply say back to the person the key ideas they expressed to you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is an interesting article to me because I feel that I have been approaching this from the exact opposite direction.

It took me many years to learn that speaking in honest, innocent truths is not all there is to communication. Even if what you say is topical and meaningful, the way it is _perceived_ by recipients has little correlation with how truthful your message is. This is what is meant when "factual information" is only one of four aspects of communication: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four- sides_model](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-sides_model) (see in particular the example at the bottom of the page).

Essentially, the best way to communicate something always depends on the receiver.

My approach has thus been to try and run everything I want to say through a "if I were the other party and heard this, what would my reaction be? Is that reaction what I'm trying to achieve?" filter. I understood the article as this being the "manipulative" element that the author wanted to eliminate. But for me personally it's been life-saving to have some way of making sure that I'm not _completely misunderstood_. And that will happen if you present the right information at the wrong time, in the wrong context, to the wrong people or with the wrong presentation. Yes, I deliberate a lot over how I word my emails...

This take on "communication is not just truths yelled into the void" is also reflected in several XKCDs: [https://xkcd.com/1028/](https://xkcd.com/1028/) [https://xkcd.com/1984/](https://xkcd.com/1984/) [https://xkcd.com/1860/](https://xkcd.com/1860/)

And this one in particular is very poignant: [https://xkcd.com/1576/](https://xkcd.com/1576/)

<comment><USER6> "Is that reaction what I'm trying to achieve", interesting perspective.

<comment><USER5> It seems apparent to me that this is something most people do more or less intuitively (and for those that are especially proficient at it, I can see how it would become manipulative very quickly). I'm getting better at it, but it's still largely a manual/conscious effort.

Tangentially, I also found the way Alan Turing was portrayed in The Imitation Game to hit extremely close to home in this regard. E.g. this key scene: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOjMfUCgyyw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOjMfUCgyyw). Regardless of how historically accurate it is, the movie contrasts these differences between interacting with computers/math and other humans (in that the former is solely about "factual content" alone) very well in my eyes.

<comment><USER6> Wow interesting video. Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What a loaded article.

Obviously "clear" and "direct" are both positive-spin words, indicating that the author thinks there's some value to this.

As somebody who used to be incredibly blunt, and still is much blunter than average, I'll tell you that social graces, white lies, and indirectness usually serve purposes. The only time you need to be more direct is when people don't understand what you're saying (which actually happens a fair amount in business).

Take for example the PIP (performance improvement plan). On the one hand, the name of it is so whitewashed you could worry the meaning might be lost. However, renaming it to the blunt title "were-probably-about-to-fire-you- documentation", though refreshingly direct, would probably be a tough pill to swallow for a lot of people.

Does changing the words around it lessen the pain (in the long term)? Unclear, maybe it just spreads it out, maybe it makes it more shameful, because it indicates it's too severe to be addressed directly.

<comment><USER8> I'm Dutch. I used to believe, like Dutch people tell themselves, that we are direct and honest. Then I met some foreigners, who said we are just blunt, which of course I could only take as evidence for the fact that not everywhere honesty is valued. Then I moved abroad, learned a lot, among which that indeed the Dutch are mostly just blunt. I try my best to me direct and also the most friendly self I can be, these are not at all at odds and when they seem that way you're probably just ones of those people who mixes up direct and bluntness. Being dirdctthe friednly way works better (positive attitude is infectious), feels better, is better.

Most people proud of their directness are simply blunt ogres and proud of that, in my experience. Took me a while to discover that I can do better.

<comment><USER4> Could you explain what is the difference between being direct and being blunt?

<comment><USER8> Blunt is somewhere between direct and bullish. When you're a bit too eager to be direct, a bit too happy to give someone your unsalted opinion, like to step on or over peoples comfort zones perhaps a bit too much, a bit too proud of yourself for not being sensitive at all.

It can be subtle, it can be clear as day, but the pattern is 'I'm telling it like it is' attitude without considering anything else. Turns our you very often _can_ consider something else while being direct.

<comment><USER4> Thank you for the reply.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There's an assumption here that I find fascinating. That it is _possible_ to speak clearly and directly.

The process of producing speech is the result of the direct or slightly indirect activity of billions of neurons. That activity, in turn, is the result of inputs that take into account the strength of trillions of dendritic connections which encode (in a lossy fashion) the history of a persons experience.

Speech is compressive and lossy. You do not communicate the full state of your system or even a small portion thereof when you use speech. You have a limited vocabulary whose meanings do not map one-to-one in the mind of any other person who hears you speak. So not only are there multiple limitations on the output side of the channel, there are limitations on the receiving side as well.

This is why effective communication is so hard! As the sender you don't have full introspective access to the contents of your brain, so you can't even know what the full message is you're trying to send. As the receiver you're operating on a highly compressed message without a fully shared codec.

So whatever the feeling of "I'm being direct" or "I'm being clear" _is_ , it is almost certainly itself faulty. We're not built for that and language isn't either.

<comment><USER10> 7

3+4

2nd-smallest double Mersenne prime

Number of continents

<comment><USER11> What's the point you're trying to make?

<comment><USER12> The irony is delicious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is miserable. Communication needs to be informative and actionable first of all. For example, the opener "I am not impressed by that projection." Who cares? There is 1 bit of info on that statement (impressed OR not impressed). It achieves nothing.

Second to being informative and actionable, communication should be useful (to you, to them). If being blunt or overly straightforward renders it useless, for any reason (even just sensitivity of the listener), then _you_ need to take that into account and consider how it affects the outcome you want.

It reminds me of this Yudkowsky quote from [0]:

> "what you _say_ is another issue, especially when speaking to > nonrationalists, and then it is well to bear in mind that words don't have > fixed meanings; the meaning of the sounds that issue from your lips is > whatever occurs in the mind of the listener. If they're going to > misinterpret something then you shouldn't say it to them no matter what the > words mean inside your own head"

This article from Beck is little more than pretense to feel entitled to treat people rudely and act as if that is pragmatic. Very disappointing.

[0]: [https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Pm83rA8MTYYeR4Ci4/i-don-t- kn...](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Pm83rA8MTYYeR4Ci4/i-don-t-know)

</comment><comment><USER14> What's clear and direct about this guy is that he's using the excuse "clear and direct" to simply be able to say all the negative things he's previously been afraid of saying.

The problem with that is if you offer no solutions, positive encouragement, or proposals on what is better, people quickly tire of hearing the negative honesty part of your mind. And they start to learn that it's because your speech reflects a negative person underneath.

I think he has another couple of years "experiments" needed on his personality.

<comment><USER15> Three out of four examples were positive?

> I told an ex-girlfriend that I loved her and I was offering her a long-term > relationship. I told my daughter who is getting shot with rubber bullets > that I am terrified and that I am proud of her. I told a project at work > that I wasn't impressed by their goals.

> Last night I told someone I could be interested in a variety of > relationships with them. They told me they weren't interested in romance but > they were interested in friendship. We had a nice talk and teed up another > talk.

<comment><USER14> It wasn't clear to me from the writing which were his before/after phases, which mostly sounded like what I commented on. But I read between the lines that his "negative-only" traits have probably bled through to his experiment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The approach has a name, it's called "radical honesty". The idea is this: we are often surprised as to how things turn up, yet at the same time, we are not fully engaged with the world around us, we hold back. The inner world is not expressed fully out in the environment so the environment responds to the _projection_ of you, instead of the real you. No wonder why things don't turn up as you'd expect, they favor the projection. What if you'd be completely honest and direct with everyone and always act as you feel, holding nothing back. Then the world would respond to that instead, everything would have direct causality to your actions. You wouldn't look back to think how you should have acted, since there is only one way to act, truthfully and honestly, and any outcome would be the result of that and then you'd have complete responsibility for your actions and the character you have built. It is probably a spectrum, the far other extreme can be considered psychopathy. When all of your actions are pre-examined thoroughly, you're never trully out in the world. In any case, it's a good experiment for everyone to try, you'd be surprised. Congrats to the OP for figuring it out.

<comment><USER17> While I like the idea of representing the inner world as clear as possible I dont think this is possible in human communication.

Here is why I think this:

\- saying things in a way is different than understanding them

\- communication is happening on all channels: verbal, non-verbal including context, rhythm, tone, time, moods ... So only being honest verbal does not assure that the other will understand the same way the non-verbal or the context

\- I understand that maybe mathematics is a honest way of communication. But takes a lot of practice (building concepts one from another and all from a starting point) from everybody to understand from a book the same things. And this is not usually possible between two people. Maybe can be done between long term partners

\- I think focusing on the I without putting effort into making sure how the other understands be a trap of deluding ourselves that we are honest. We are honest when the others also understood what we said and only after that they can truly respond to who we are. At least this is my believe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is something that I struggle balancing back and forth. I used to be direct, and then less direct, and then direct again, then less direct again. Moving to different country, or to different communities, and my attempts were resets because people have no expectations and all things are blank state.

For every attempts to swing either way, there's pros and cons. I am now on my "direct" phase. I guess that's just the nature of communication, it is all contextual.

</comment><comment><USER4> I have a lot of experience training people in interpersonal communication skills. I have come to the conclusion that good communication is based on a set of attitudes. You start by assuming that the other person is reasonably intelligent and well-motivated, and that they will see the point of what you are trying to say if you just explain it to them in a clear manner.

But is it also possible that they have things on their own side that you need to hear and understand. And so on the basis of all that you come up with what you need to say, and also how to listen and ask questions.

All the specific rules, like reflective listening and Rosenberg's Nonviolent Communication, are just putting these attitudes into practice.

However, it is also the case that sometimes the person on the other side is not well-motivated, either because they are a bad person or they are in a situation where in order to get along in life they have to screw you over. In that case clear direct communication can fail or even be dangerous. So you have to make a judgement as to whether or not it is smart to go ahead and be direct.

<comment><USER18> >However, it is also the case that sometimes the person on the other side is not well-motivated

Correct! There are some people fortunately < 5% from what I can tell who are mal-adaptive and sometimes mal-adaptive and intelligent. That's a different ball game indeed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I recently got feedback that I speak at too low level and with too much emotion/passion.

Still digesting it. I think it is a variant of what I've heard before, which is that I leap from A to C assuming everyone understands that A and C both connect to B.

It's frustrating because that's the style I enjoy for receiving information. When someone makes a jump like that, it intrigues me especially when I don't see the connection. It triggers easy questions when needed.

Another one I run into is assumed consensus. I make a statement without saying that it is a team consensus, and people outside the team assume the opposite, that I'm going rogue or something.

Then there is dismissive agreement, something I both do and dislike when done to me. Basically "yeah but that's not what I want to focus on".

I'm intrigued by the Amazon style of memo writing and reading in advance of meetings, as I think a lot of communication issues can be solved by making clear why we are sitting in a room talking right now, and ensuring everyone has the same background information.

<comment><USER20> > I recently got feedback that I speak at too low level and with too much > emotion/passion.

How often do you get this feedback? Was it from just the one person? If so, have you asked others if they perceived you similarly? Of all the people you asked, how many agreed/disagreed?

Unless there is consensus, don't assume it is true. The _majority_ of times someone gives you feedback like this, it is about them. They usually have a need, are expecting you to provide it. Instead, focus on what that need is. Heck, even if there is consensus in the feedback you get, you should still try to figure out what their real problem is: Yes, you speak at a low level. OK - so what? What problem is that causing for them? The trick is to learn to ask these questions nonconfrontationally (definitely do not respond with "So what?")

General steps would be to indicate you've heard them, express some concern, and then ask. Something like:

"It would concern me if my voice level is creating problems for our communication/work. It would help me if you could give me an example so I understand better."

(This is not the best phrasing, but is probably adequate). You can take it from there based on the response. Ask how they would have preferred you said it. In the end, though, try to find out _why_ it was a problem. Are they intimidated by you when you speak passionately? Are they mishearing you because of the low volume?

The other issue is the use of "too" in their statement. How low is too low? How much is too much? Best to get examples so you get an idea.

BTW, it's not unusual to find out that it really wasn't a problem when you probe them. People use "too much" even when it isn't.

I once took a communications workshop where the instructor drilled two messages:

1\. Everything anyone says or does is in service of his/her needs.

2\. Never believe what people say about you.

The first one is your example. They're giving you that feedback because of some need they have that's not being met. The second one is not a license to behave however you want, but is tied to the first. People can get frustrated by something, and are not good at expressing it, and often take it out on people.

I would get all kinds of negative feedback about me, and it was very confusing. When I probed others if they felt similarly, I would often get sharp divides - a lot of people felt there was nothing wrong about my behavior (or even advocated for it) - others hated it. Only when I got more into effective communications did I start realizing that most of the people who were complaining about me merely had different preferences, and it wasn't that I was loud/stubborn/impatient/dull - it was that they had unspoken expectations from me that I wasn't meeting. Often having a mere conversation about the issue would resolve the problems without my having to change my behavior.

All this is not easy to do, BTW. I'm still poor at it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This brings to mind my favorite affinity on of (small p) political speech. Political speech is about saying something based on the reaction you want rather than what is true. When I first heard things framed this way political, speech struck me as dishonest and manipulative. It certainly can be that, but with the distance of perspective I see that it can provide listeners with the truth in a way that they can react in positively. How's my new haircut? Honest, clear, direct: pretty bad, among the bottom 5% of haircuts you've had. Political (deceptive, manipulative):Great! Political (honest but motivating positive action): I don't think it is as good as your last one.

</comment><comment><USER22> The right to direct communication without punishment is a hallmark of privilege.

Women in tech -- and I know a lot of them -- talk about how the only "acceptable" way to call out a guy's Glaring Error without him getting mad at you is like this:

"Gosh, I don't know, I maybe don't really understand the requirements that well, but it seems like {huge mistake} isn't right, what do you think? Of course I could be wrong."

We don't _like_ doing this but we are told we're "not team players" if we dont do this.

</comment><comment><USER23> He's using the language of self help ("clear and direct communication!") but interpreting it in a manner reminiscent of the "truth telling sessions" enacted by Synanon: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synanon](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synanon)

> > Last night I told someone I could be interested in a variety of > relationships with them. They told me they weren't interested in romance but > they were interested in friendship. We had a nice talk and teed up another > talk.

He considers himself to be a "direct" communicator, when this is an example of _very indirect_ communication. The guy wants to date and/or be intimate with someone — telling them "I could be interested in a variety of relationships with you" is _so much more indirect_ than asking "wanna get dinner?" it's not even funny. His barometer of "clear and direct" is totally off in this case.

This guy's take on "clear and direct communication" is sophomoric and there's a reason adults don't communicate in the most direct manner at all times. Sometimes you need to give the other person plausible deniability: asking "wanna see my etchings?" is a cultural shorthand that is just a more respectful way of asking "wanna sleep together?", but this guys interpretation of clear and direct communication doesn't seem to have room for a question like that.

Sometimes speaking vaguely rather than directly is a way of respect to your conversational partner. This guy doesn't get it

<comment><USER20> > telling them "I could be interested in a variety of relationships with you" > is so much more indirect than asking "wanna get dinner?"

While you may be correct that his statement wasn't direct, I would say your alternative would be the very definition of "indirect".

Being direct in such situations may not be the best approach, and I suspect that is what you're trying to get at. However, "wanna get dinner?" when you want something more than just dinner is almost a textbook definition of indirect.

<comment><USER18> In human relations a kind of Kolmogorov complexity measure in which we communicate the most information in the least symbols or words --- well illustrated with your 'wanna get dinner' \--- I think is adjacent to directness and openness. That is, why was it a guy can't spit it out? I like you and wanna get dinner with you? Fear, feeling, and self-esteem issues more likely. Now, it's probably not street smart to have that out with the potential invitee, however, being open about those feelings with a good friend in a hear-to-heart so that it enables one to move forward more directly to me seems like a win.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I want to congratulate and thank the author for experimenting with how he communicates and sharing what he observed.

</comment><comment><USER25> It's a mistake to think that "speaking" is communication. And it's worse when one thinks 'but what I am speaking is true'.

</comment><comment><USER26> Thank you for sharing.</comment>


Why Japanese Web Design Is (Still) the Way It Is - <AUTHOR> https://info.moravia.com/blog/why-japanese-web-design-is-still-the-way-it-is <comment><USER2> Discussion from yesterday: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16254569](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16254569)

</comment><comment><USER3> I am a huge Honda fan, particularly of their vintage vehicles. I used to spend hours navigating their Japanese website. I don't know any Japanese, but somehow I could still find my way into new parts of the website and get around. The site complexity goes way beyond just the front page.

The entire thing is massive, it's full of tons of stuff that you wouldn't find American corps even bothering to put up there. There are tons of articles, facts, diagrams, fan sites, historical information, photos. At one point they had games with little virtual cities. So many cool, and fun things.

The US site is nothing but marketing. It's so boring, I never even bother going to it. There's no hidden stuff, nothing interesting, just a very sales- centric site. It's like anything that doesn't directly make money isn't bothered with... while the Japanese developers are having fun putting together cool things.

<comment><USER4> Could you post some links to some of the more fun things you've discovered?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Am I the only one who thinks that the Japanese versions of the Starbucks and Toyota sites look infinitely better?

<comment><USER6> You won't get any argument from me. The large images and lack of useful text make sites seem like they are made for children.

Another thing that you don't see as often anymore, that most Japanese sites have, is a site map.

<comment><USER7> Well more and more it feels like devs, not just web devs, but all devs, envision their users and drooling idiots...

<comment><USER8> I think, that's kinda been trend with western design in general. Also I agree with the article, that a lot websites are basically low information brochures. If I am going to your website it means I want detailed information. However, a lot products, the site is devoid, and just looks nice.

<comment><USER7> I wonder if this is an effect of print media getting involved with the web, thus trying to adopt various "guidelines" from printed documents to web sites.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Alzheimer's research in 'major step' towards blood test - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/health-28198510 <comment><USER2> The article reports:

"Dr Eric Karran, director of research at Alzheimer's Research UK, described the study as a 'technical tour de force'.

"However, he warned the current accuracy levels risked telling healthy people they were on course to develop Alzheimer's which may lead to anxiety and depression."

I just completed the Coursera online course in human behavior genetics. One of the ways that psychology research can contribute to the hoped-for future of genomic, personalized medicine is by figuring out how patients will react to various kinds of personal medical information about possible future outcomes. Today, there are some genetic tests for Mendelian (single-mutation) diseases that have a very high reliability, but many patients don't seek those tests, even if they have relatives who had the diseases, because there isn't much a patient can do about an incurable disease. People DON'T want to know that they are sure to die with a grave disease in the next twenty years. People would rather imagine that they just might live forever.

So if other studies replicate the result of the study reported here, and perhaps even further refine the accuracy of predicting Alzheimer disease risk from a simple blood test taken earlier in life, there will still be plenty of research to do on how to motivate patient behavior in

a) seeking the test,

b) acting on the results of the test in a rational way,

and

c) not piling up other health risks meanwhile.

And of course if this study finding eventually translates through further research into a deeper understanding of the cause of Alzheimer disease, leading to a prevention strategy or even a cure for that disease, that would be wonderful, but there are plenty of diseases that can be reliably diagnosed without being treatable or even preventable at all. This is a good step forward, but much work remains to be done to tackle Alzheimer disease and further prolong healthy lifespan for the patients at risk for that disease.

<comment><USER3> I think the most important use of a blood test wouldn't be for patients, but for researchers. If you can predict 90% of a cohort will develop Alzheimer's, you can do much smaller, more powerful trials on interventions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Isn't this still too late? On the other hand, there is some early evidence that a blood sugar meter may be able to be used as an early diagnostic, at a time when one can do something about it. Keeping blood sugars relatively low, and, probably more importantly, having relatively long periods of low (but normal) blood sugars through e.g. intermittent fasting or even reducing/removing snacks may be the best preventative measure one can take.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Really wish they broke "86% accuracy" into precision and recall.

<comment><USER5> Here's the paper: [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1552526014...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1552526014024546)

Re your comment: "accuracy 87%, sensitivity 85%, and specificity 88%"

<comment><USER6> What does that mean for false positive and true negative?

<comment><USER5> Sensitivity is the true positive rate, specificity is the true negative rate.

From the body of the paper, for their chosen test, their False Positive Rate appears to be 21.2% (100% - 68.8%) and their False Negative Rate appears to be 5.1% (100% - 94.9%). For this type of test, its the false negative rate that we'll really worry about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> There really is encouraging progress being made in this area (early prediction of AD) in several different fields. I know of several different groups who are using imaging instead of blood tests to predict conversion of MCI to AD as well. A lot of it is using the data being collected by ADNI:

[http://www.adni-info.org](http://www.adni-info.org)

</comment><comment><USER8> I guess the major benefit is for people who do not actually have alzheimers being falsely diagnosed, but early detection doesn't help in any way for people who do have it, right? I'm not sure I'd want to know until it was unavoidable.

<comment><USER9> I have a hard time understanding why people wouldn't want to know what's in store for the future. Even if it's unavoidable, there's still lots you can do in terms of making best use of the time remaining to you.

<comment><USER10> Protip- We are all going to die so make the best of it in any case.

<comment><USER9> Certainly can't argue with that</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Talent Myth - <AUTHOR> http://harjtaggar.com/the-talent-myth-0

<comment><USER2> Love it. What a great post with so much truth.</comment>


Show HN: xlogs - free alerting, logfiles and savings for Amazon EC2 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.maclawran.ca/happy-new-year-resolution-save-money-on-amazo

<comment><USER2> looks nice! I've been working on a similar app. What is it written in? Any chance you'd open source it?</comment>


Red is Beautiful: A Visualization of Redis Commands - <AUTHOR> http://redislabs.com/blog/red-is-beautiful-a-visualization-of-redis-commands/

<comment><USER2> Nice - can you do it for MongoDB? :)</comment>


Ask HN: What are your favorite fonts? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Open Sans, Source Sans, Proxima Nova, Lato, are all pretty classic. But for HTML I only use system fonts to save page load time.

</comment><comment><USER3> I adore the capital R in Bembo. Generally, Venetian Renaissance Antiquas are very nice, maybe looking a bit quirky to the modern eye.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I like Sharp Sans Display No. 1 and Galaxie Copernicus.

<comment><AUTHOR> also this review of Galaxie Copernicus is pretty cool.</comment></comment>


Why not ban all advertising? (1999) - <AUTHOR> https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/why-not-ban-all-advertising-1100734.html <comment><AUTHOR> I thought this was being sarcastic at first, but ends up being seemingly entirely genuine.</comment>


Reddit, Stumbleupon, Del.icio.us and Hacker News Algorithms Exposed - <AUTHOR> http://www.seomoz.org/blog/reddit-stumbleupon-delicious-and-hacker-news-algorithms-exposed

<comment><USER3> These are not the algorithms but an overview of the formulas.

For example the HN algorithm is outlined in several places e.g. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38704> and on the pg Arc site, and the reddit algorithms is

      def hot(ups, downs, date):
      s = score(ups, downs)
      order = log(max(abs(s), 1), 10)
      sign = 1 if s > 0 else -1 if s < 0 else 0
      seconds = epoch_seconds(date) - <USER2>
      return round(order + sign * seconds / 45000, 7)

</comment><comment><USER4> the delicious one is wrong.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for reading the post. What do you think is wrong with the del.icio.us formula?

<comment><USER6> You just demonstrated one of the coolest things about posting at news.yc. You never know who you're gonna run into. Even when they're replying directly to you.

edit: Hint, click his name...

<comment><USER4> :)

<comment><USER7> This is why I love Hacker News.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Use of true clock time in these formulas penalizes posts that are submitted at low-traffic times.

Using a virtual clock, such as a tick count based on traffic (number of other submissions, votes, pageviews, etc.), could adjust for this.

<comment><USER9> Good observation. I believe a similar concept is used in high frequency trading (in markets such as foreign exchange). So derivatives are not dt, but du where u is a surrogate for time in ticks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> For reddit, this is the public algo released with their code. I think we should not assume that's the algo they use on reddit.com. Think about it: they could easily release a basic algo and keep the good one for their own internal use.

At the very least, even reddit's blog post announcement of the code mentioned they're not open sourcing the spam detection code. Surely that's part of the ranking algo in that it determines if a submission gets ranked or not.

For the SU one, I think there is more to the story, but that's for another post...

<comment><USER11> I don't think they'd bother trying to fake people out by releasing a different ranking algorithm than they used on the site. There wouldn't be any point anyway. Knowing how to get onto the frontpage of a venetian-blind site like Digg might be useful to spammers, but knowing the ranking algorithm of a bubble-up site like Reddit or News.YC wouldn't help them much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Not to be an ass but how hard can they be anyway? Its not a formula like a^2 + b^2 = c^2

it is just some variables that they tweaked until they fit.

</comment><comment><USER13> I thought karma had an influence on how something appears. If not what is the point of karma?

<comment><USER14> To keep you in line unfortuneately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Yippee! Thats great. But how did u findout delicious's and stumbleupon's? By reverse engineering technique... like... Were these found out(or guess-worked) by constantly keeping track of the ranking of content?

Joshu, i think the del.icio.us formula is right, or they might just be using a different time constraint than 1 hour(maybe 2hrs or anything else). Because to findout what's popular they dont require any complex stuff. Simple math as specified in Danny's post is enough for their task.

Go Danny! Go!!!

<comment><USER8> I would trust user 'joshu' on matters related to del.icio.us.

<comment><USER15> God!

Gojomo, is that really Joshua, the founder of Delicious and Memepool? I just guessed it when u mentioned the username in single quotes. ;) I wouldn't talk a word abt the algo then. :D

<comment><USER16> click on 'joshu' 's user name.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It would be nice to have a less misleading title. I clicked to find out what Digg's algorithm is.

<comment><USER18> Wait - the title doesn't include Digg, so how exactly is it misleading? Maybe you're being sarcastic and my sarcasm detector just isn't well-tuned.

<comment><USER17> The title was edited, apparently. When I clicked, it said Digg, and the article still has a section on Digg.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> can't be to hard to finds .yc's - cause its open. i hope this doesn't send a flood of seo's ;)

</comment><comment><USER20> Mathematically speaking, would it make a difference to use p^2 / t instead of p / t^2?</comment>


A practical use case approach to Redis. - <AUTHOR> http://www.scribd.com/doc/34269414/Redis-Persistence-Power

<comment><USER2> looks like it was an awesome presentation</comment>


Evernote updates privacy policy to allow employees to access notes - <AUTHOR> https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/235660588-Notice-of-Privacy-Policy-Updates-January-2017- <comment><USER2> There are 3 stories about this:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13177522](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13177522) (this)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13177581](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13177581)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13177971](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13177971)

I've never been comfortable storing my notes on the cloud at all.</comment>


Agile Diagnosis (YC S11) Launches: Helping Doctors With Diagnosis - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/03/agile-diagnosis-beta-launch/

<comment><USER2> Every time I go to the doctor with anything that isn't obvious I'm always amazed that some basic ML tools aren't part of the standard practice. Especially since the standard reaction now is "here take a bunch of expensive tests, you won't be paying for most of them out of pocket so who cares!" We've had the tools for decades now to at least say "given these symptoms, it's very likely you X, Y or possibly Z". Additionally I'd be surprised if there weren't some unexpected correlations between various features that most doctors would miss.

Of course I guess I shouldn't be too surprised since medical records keeping is still 30 years out of date. The fact that it's still common practice to share medical records by filling out a consent form and having one office fax paper forms to other is ridiculous.

I really hope we start to see disruption in this industry, so much potential for not only cost savings but improved care.

<comment><USER3> I found this answer on Quora, by a medical student, to be quite illuminating on why machine diagnosis isn't going to be any good, any time soon. [http://www.quora.com/Why-is-machine-learning-not-more- widely...](http://www.quora.com/Why-is-machine-learning-not-more-widely-used- for-medical-diagnosis)

<comment><USER4> Jae is awesome, but picked a particularly difficult case.

There are certain kinds of diagnosis which are hard for humans and easy for computers, relatively, and some which are hard for computers and easy for people. (well, more likely hard for one and impossible for the other).

Truly novel things, where you aggregate data across multiple sites, are IMO the most amazing. Or, really rare but well defined conditions; doctors, especially busy ones, have a much smaller in-memory working set than computers.

I am very excited by machine diagnosis to augment humans. I don't think it will replace humans for a long time, but making humans even 1% better saves many lives and improves quality of life (and saves money).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This industry is not very open to change. But, Borna and Eric are very hard working (and equally smart) guys -- just the kind of guys who can bring disruption to the industry. I have very high hopes!

<comment><USER6> I think it's great that there's an increase in attention to the medical space from smart young folks. From my experience though, being smart and hard working have very little to do with success in the medical-tech space. It mostly has to do with 1) if you can show ROI with the least (can't emphasize this enough) change to anyone's daily workflow, and 2) having a very very hard working sales team

<comment><USER7> Another critical aspect is to target the tech-savvy younger generation of students and residents, which Agile is doing with their recent offer of free lifetime access for participating medical schools. Almost all of us are using tools like Uptodate on a daily basis on the floors. Agile's algorithmic presentation of the same information makes a compelling case to use their product. Early adoption by trainees can lead to future paradigm shifts in the whole industry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have chronic nerve pain in my entire upper body. I _used_ to be a patient of a world class university pain clinic. I left there for an individual pain doctor because... I saw 4 doctors in 4 visits, none of whom knew my diagnosis, read my file, etc.

If this flow chart was on the door of the patient room, my quality of care would have been MUCH better.

</comment><comment><USER9> I find it fascinating that AgileDiagnosis went through YC, and then six months later through RockHealth. Would any of the founders mind commenting on how/why they chose this path?

<comment><USER10> Both incubators have been crucial in their own ways. YC has an immense experience and expertise in start-ups of every kind to draw from that helps us tackle general start-up challenges decisively. Rock Health has a deep network of health and medical partners and mentors for opportunities and challenges unique to health-tech start-ups.

<comment><USER4> In retrospect, would you have done them in that order, or done Rock Health first and YC second, or does it not matter?

I don't think anyone can touch YC for the core value proposition, but domain- specific programs (for medical, enterprise, government, ...) might make some sense, and I could see the value in something like StartX as a pre-YC while- still-in-college thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I hunted down a long HN comment thread where I proposed something similar about 2 years ago: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1399953>

Pretty excited to see someone is executing on this

</comment><comment><USER12> A space that IBM is hoping to own with it's "Watson for Healthcare" initiative: <http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/36989.wss>

</comment><comment><USER13> Amazing work JonLee and crew! Congratulations on the launch!

</comment><comment><USER14> <conspiracytheory> <http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html> was written before YC S11. </conspiracytheory>

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm sure a lot of people here have read Atul Gawande (of the New Yorker) article about The Checklist, in which a simple list of steps before surgery, such as "wash your hands", vastly reduced infections at hospitals. Yet the checklist faced resistance, including from doctors who thought that having such an obvious list was beneath them...even though even the smartest doctors mess these steps up in the rush of an operation. [http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/10/071210fa_fact_...](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/10/071210fa_fact_gawande)

This is the mindset that any disruptive enterprise must face. It's not like in the coding community, where spending a substantial amount of time writing seemingly trivial and boring tests -- i.e. an automated checklist -- is considered to be a necessary step in writing software.</comment>


The Future of New York City Transportation: Goodbye Cars, Hello Rails - <AUTHOR> https://www.inverse.com/article/5839-the-future-of-new-york-city-transportation-goodbye-cars-hello-rails <comment><USER2> Adding street cars and limiting car traffic would be an excellent solution in Manhattan. Installing street cars are probably two orders of magnitude cheaper than digging the equivalent subway, and we have too many cars as it is. The second avenue subway is basically a joke; it only has three stops on second avenue, and construction will be shut down without doing any of the additional phases of construction that would take the subway further south.

They should also close 1/2 of the avenues and turn them into parks. It would greatly increase foot traffic to the businesses on the street, and would make Manhattan much more livable.

<comment><USER3> What will the businesses sell? Air dropped supplies?

<comment><USER4> This argument has the same line of reasoning that the businesses originally tried to use when the city did put in buffered bike lines - that removing unfettered automobile / truck access was the death knell to commerce

(Like these: [http://gothamist.com/2011/07/14/post_blames_bike_lanes_for_b...](http://gothamist.com/2011/07/14/post_blames_bike_lanes_for_bad_busi.php) [http://www.villagevoice.com/news/new-east-village-bike- lanes...](http://www.villagevoice.com/news/new-east-village-bike-lanes-good- for-bikers-bad-for-business-6694622)).

In the case of the bike lanes, this is the furthest from the truth (have a Google for lots of arguments about the merit of increased bike traffic).

I'm not sure what the solution is, but there certainly is one that would support a few car/truck free avenues.

<comment><USER5> I believe he meant that trucks need access to the business so the business can receive its stock

<comment><USER6> If this is the concern, then it's a misplaced one, especially for streetcars. It's totally common in European cities for the busiest streets (with shops etc) to be exclusively lanes of recessed rail. Trucks have no problem delivering supplies; in fact, it looked a lot more pleasant than trying to weave in and out of traffic and hope to god loading area parking isn't blocked a la busy streets in US cities...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Fun fact - almost 40% of US public transportation users are in the NYC metro area.

[https://twitter.com/bencasselman/status/631939479318626304](https://twitter.com/bencasselman/status/631939479318626304)

<comment><USER8> The US as a whole is an incredibly rural country. Compared to Europe and Asia, the US only has a small handful of cities where public transit is economically viable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Bikes! Bikes! and Trikes! Also, with electric bikes, which now make longer commutes possible, I say, bikes!

Let's look at one possible way in which bikes could be a path forward.

Replace 9 out of 10 miles of road currently utilized by motorized ground transit with lanes split half for pedestrians, half for bikes, with two directions of bike lanes being nested inside the two pedestrian walkways.

Ped Walkway </comment><comment></comment><comment>=

Bike Lane >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Bike Lane <<<<<<<<<<<<<<

Ped Walkway </comment><comment></comment><comment>=

Both walking and biking are orders of magnitude lighter and the infrastructure outlay and maintenance costs will be orders of magnitude lower. Additionally, as a city evolves, it doesn't require massive planning and public work projects to introduce new routes/lines or modify existing ones. You simply take a left instead of a right. Because, bikes are cooler than trains like that. You can choose which way you turn. The remaining 1 out of 10 miles could be utilized for hub style (think how airlines organize their routes) public transit (busses, trains, etc.) routes. This is just one proposal. I'm sure there are other ways to make bikes a bigger part of our commute infrastructure.

Pollution; down. Car wrecks; down. Public health; up. Cost of living; improved. Community; improved.

If you've never been to "Bike Party" and your city has one, I implore you to go. The sense of community is astounding. Riding with a group of cars has never been so social, and never will, because you're enclosing yourself in this box and cutting off most contact with anything outside that box.

Also, as someone that lived and worked in Manhattan for 5 years and is now a daily bike commuter in Baltimore, it's my opinion that riding a bike is fun, elegant, exciting, but riding the subway, most of the time, is just not humane. It's just, not fun, most of the time stressful, sometime it's running on time but almost never on your schedule, and sometimes it's an absolute nightmare. But, riding a bike, most of the time, it's an absolute pleasure.

</comment><comment><USER10> It would need a huge injection of money to happen. Just last week there was a major report that the subway system is falling apart.

"Basically at the current pace, there isn't a foreseeable future in which all the subway stations are in a state of good repair,"

[http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2015/09/03/mta-subway-repair- rep...](http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2015/09/03/mta-subway-repair-report/)

<comment><USER11> You don't need a report to tell you that. I ride the subway every day, just go down there and take a look and you'll find that the phrase "it's falling apart" is very literal. Cracks in the walls, floor, and ceiling. Tiles falling off the walls. Railings falling down. Doors hanging by a single hinge. Lights that burnt out years ago and will never be replaced. And lets not get started on the dirt and grime. Or the piles of trash littering the tracks. New York's subway might be great in terms of keeping cars off the road but it's an absolute maintenance disaster.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> "The third big factor is that autonomous vehicles are coming. We probably will have them by 2030; they'll be fairly common. " I honestly think this is wishful thinking. At least not in the "autonomous" form that many people imagine. If anything, they will be like Tesla's autopilot mode - so the car will keep itself in lane, brake and accelerate, but not much more - you still have to pay attention all the time and be ready to take control at a moment notice. Fully autonomous vehicles where you can take a nap or turn around in your seat and read a book or watch a film will take half a century if not more, if not because of technological reasons then because of legal ones. I would say both are going to be huge.

</comment><comment><USER13> Not as applicable to NYC, but I still wonder if some of these urbanization and transportation trends will continue as well to do millennials start having kids in earnest. I'm on the bleeding edge of millennials myself and my commute/space/living preferences shifted strongly from a walkable downtown apartment to a suburban SFH (that's still slightly walkable) as soon as my first kid started to crawl.

I'm a bit of a curmudgeon, and I know the trends won't reverse entirely (there are many millennials already committed to the urban lifestyle) but i suspect we'll see some weak deurbanizing trends occurring again pin about 7-10 years as the center of the echo boom start families of their own.

</comment><comment><USER14> This:

 _We're beginning to see traffic volumes of people we haven't seen on our subways since the late 1940s. That's before the big surge in car traffic._

sounded very odd to me; it just went against my bias that "everything increases". Certainly the population of NYC _must_ have grown significantly in the past 65 years, and it sounds just weird that all newcomers became drivers.

I tried to find statistics, but the best I got was from Wikipedia which says:

 _Ridership continues to increase, and on September 23, 2014, more than 6.1 million people rode the subway system, establishing the highest single-day ridership since ridership was regularly monitored in 1985._.

Which seems to support my thinking but misses out on ~35 years. Am I missing something?

<comment><USER15> Many parts of NYC depopulated heavily during suburban flight, in particular Manhattan - the regional population has always trended up but many people left for the newly developed suburbs following the war.

Manhattan's population for example peaked at 2.2m between 1910-1920 and still has never been that high since. Current estimates are around 1.6m.

Population density in Manhattan has decreased dramatically, largely owing to suburban flight and an increased demand for quality of life - it was 21 people per 5,000 sq ft in 1910[1], it is 12 people now.

One funny thing about all of this is that the old brick buildings that are such prized real estate nowadays used to be low-rent tenements, considered blights on the city, and where a million dollar bachelor pad now sits multiple families used to fit in the same space.

The pattern extends to other parts of the city also - Brooklyn peaked at 2.7m between 1940-1950 and rapidly depopulated afterwards, even now the borough only has ~2.5m people.

The depopulation is a large part of NYC's reputation in the 60s, 70s, and 80s as a dangerous place - abandoned buildings and depopulated neighborhoods contributed to crime and general decay, though of course cheap rent also contributed to a dramatic surge of artistic achievement.

tl;dr: NYC depopulated heavily after 1950, and didn't really start recovering until the 1990s, and even then NYC's population didn't start growing rapidly until the early 2000s when the combination of shifting preference towards urban lifestyles and lowering crime made a large influx of population possible.

The resurgence of American cities is, in the grand scheme of things, an _extremely_ recent phenomenon.

[1] [http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/03/01/realestate/man...](http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/03/01/realestate/manhattans- population-density-past-and-present.html?_r=0)

<comment><USER16> Where are your numbers for Brooklyn coming from? The population _was_ greater in the 1940s and 1950s, but it is still well over 2 million, and still the most populous borough in NYC. (As it seems to have been since 1930s.)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooklyn#Demographics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooklyn#Demographics)

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

<comment><USER15> Whoops, we're using the same source but I looked at the wrong column for current numbers. Fixed. Nice catch, thanks :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> You do not need rails to have street cars, in fact it simply is cheaper and better, let alone more flexible, to rely on automated buses going forward. While initially you now need a drive going forward automation can play a bigger role.

When you go rail you immediately restrict yourself to that route. There is little to not flexibility. Let alone rails on the roads in snowy climates just cause additional issues. As for simulating with buses, you can embed in the roadway or even on light poles or similar along the route where you want the bus to go when automated. Hence its "on rails" without physical rails.

<comment><USER18> As a modality, rails have two upsides: energy cost and passenger density relative to space use(you can run a much longer train than a bus) and a signalling of intent that changes expectations for the area's other investments. Because a rail stop isn't cheap to move and comes with the expectation of a certain level of service and traffic prioritization, the neighborhood grows around the rail line, not the opposite. A BRT line is more easily neglected.

There's a positive feedback loop involved in any transit investment and how it affects the neighborhood, but especially so with rail - unquestionably so as you think at bigger scales. One of the touted benefits of California High Speed Rail, for example, is that it would bring the Central Valley cities into the commuting sphere of the other urban centers.

(The worst thing you could do with a rail stop, from a land-use perspective, is put a big surface parking lot around it. That turns it into a transfer point for a car commute, not a prestigious destination that other transit will naturally run toward. One of the problems with the CHSR plan, the last time I looked, is that the Central Valley alignments are a pretty dodgy package.)

That said, providing better transit at lower cost is always an upside, since the first-order question for trip planning by transit is always the overall level of service - frequency and coverage, as well as speed. I would expect robobuses to usher in a new era for system planners.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> How about actually using some new technology, like SkyTran that's currently being built in Tel Aviv. [http://www.skytran.us/](http://www.skytran.us/)

</comment><comment><USER20> self driving cars and uberbuses

</comment><comment><USER21> How about a maglev?

[http://giphy.com/gifs/speed- maglev-a8HzaGEoLYvLi](http://giphy.com/gifs/speed-maglev-a8HzaGEoLYvLi)

A fast smooth ride. Probably only need a low-speed maglev like what's being built in Beijing:

[http://english.cri.cn/12394/2015/04/21/3381s875320.htm](http://english.cri.cn/12394/2015/04/21/3381s875320.htm)

At 60-80 mph you could be whisked to Giants Stadium or one of the local airports is 10 minutes, for example.

<comment><USER22> Maglev helps when crossing large distances. I don't see how it would help local travel within NYC.

<comment><USER21> Hmmm... I wonder if that's why I got down voted. No one gets it.

Anyway, a low-speed maglev doesn't travel that fast; only around 60-70mph. It'll also be quiet and smooth, as I already mentioned. The length of Manhattan is only about 14 miles so at that speed it's a 15 minute trip. Commuting from far into Brooklyn or Queens can take over an hour to get into Manhattan.

You could also build the bus station 10 miles outside of the city, near the stadium, for example, and quickly get everyone into Manhattan. 230,000 people take a bus into Manhattan daily.

[http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2015/03/could_the_new_port_...](http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2015/03/could_the_new_port_authority_bus_terminal_be_built_in_nj.html)

Btw, Beijing's low-speed maglev is only 11 miles: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_S1,_BCR](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_S1,_BCR)

<comment><USER15> The NYC subway isn't a commuter rail system, it's a metro, which means stops are spaced closely together - the standard interval is every 0.5 mi.

A maglev train is of pretty marginal benefit here - it'd be a smoother ride, but there is simply no way with the station spacing you can get up to the kinds of speeds where maglev shines. Not to mention having to account for standing passengers means stricter bounds on permissible acceleration, which further knocks down your speed gains.

So sure, hypothetically a maglev train line from Inwood to the Financial District would get you there in 15 minutes... without stopping, but I don't think it's a stretch to say that's not a particularly useful mass transit system ;)

> _" You could also build the bus station 10 miles outside of the city, near > the stadium, for example, and quickly get everyone into Manhattan."_

Right, and this is also why maglev, while being an interesting thought exercise, ignores practically all other constraints.

The bottleneck getting people from NJ into Manhattan isn't the speed of the trains, it's the fact that all rail traffic must pass through Amtrak's aging tunnels that suffer from poor signaling and deteriorating conditions - both of which cause frequent delays. The fact that you're squeezing all this traffic into two tubes itself puts a pretty hard cap on the amount of capacity you have.

NJ-Manhattan rail links are constrained not by speed but by overall capacity. Faster moving trains present an extremely marginal gain on overall capacity, especially when they have to share space/schedules/speeds with non-maglev (is that even possible?) traffic.

There have frequently been thoughts of moving the PABT out to Secaucus where commuters can catch a frequent, fast train to transfer to Penn (or in the future, GCT), but the reality is that the Amtrak tunnels are already operating at capacity so adding a frequent shuttle service is really just a pipe dream at this point.

If NYC/NJ suddenly got a big truckload of cash to invest in infrastructure, "maglev trains" are very, very, very far down the list. Much higher on the list (if not the very top item) would be "build the damn Gateway tunnel", which will double rail capacity under the Hudson and into NJ, and make adding new NJ-Manhattan train service even a possibility.

<comment><USER21> People that take a bus don't use the Amtrak tunnels.

If you are going to build a maglev then you'd probably have express trains. That does without saying, right?

The A train covers 31 miles. That's a long ride.

[http://web.mta.info/nyct/facts/ffsubway.htm#stations](http://web.mta.info/nyct/facts/ffsubway.htm#stations)

I'm sure there are plenty of places where we'd benefit by greatly reducing commute times.

As for the Gateway tunnel, yeah, that should have been done.

<comment><USER15> Right but you're talking about improving the system by taking current PABT bus commuters and putting them in NJ, and connecting them to Manhattan via some kind of rail link.

It's a common idea, but it won't work for the same reasons stated already - there isn't any capacity left in the tunnels.

> _" If you are going to build a maglev then you'd probably have express > trains. That does without saying, right?"_

You'd need very wide station spacing for the speed gains to really matter, which makes the tech more appropriate for suburban commuter rail, not metros. So think LIRR/Metro North/NJT instead of the subway.

The main problem there is that all commuter rail routes converge onto a single set of tracks coming into Manhattan - via the Hudson tunnels on the NJ side, or along Park Ave on the Metro North side, or via the East River tunnels on the LIRR side, and all the commuter routes are rather long, so there's no convenient 11-mile stretch to try this out like the Beijing S1.

Sharing track is also going to be an impossibility I think - you're not going to be able to have standard gauge heavy rail sharing the exact same track as a maglev, so you can't, say, replace one branch of the LIRR with maglev. It's an all or nothing affair.

I mean yeah, in a hypothetical world where we had infinite resources, maglev would be pretty f'ing cool, but in the actual world it's so far down the list of priorities for our money that it might as well not be on the list.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I don't know. I think we've found that packet-like networks (cars) are more robust than the alternative (trains). Robustness gets built into rail systems by adding more tracks that sit unused most of the time so you can bypass problem sections. Otherwise, a train breaks down/derails/rails go out of alignment, etc. and not just that line fails, but the entire systems is impacted. In other words, whatever solution they start with, will be overcome by the event of a fleet of self-driving taxibots.

Still, I think it's fair to view the dismantlement of NYC's above-ground rail system as having been a mistake in many ways. It was replaced by fleets of yellow cabs, and while living conditions in buildings are better, and more light gets to the streets, the road system has become more difficult to deal with.

Perhaps the better solution is to force all non-taxibot traffic (except for delivery trucks) to park in peripheral garages in New Jersey or somewhere and force everybody to taxibot where they want to go?

hmm...on second thought, I guess this is a hard problem without a single solution?

<comment><USER24> The packets in this case have an enormous overhead. A four-car train takes up about as much space as 4 or 5 cars, but can carry 720 people compared to a best case of about 20 for the cars.

<comment><USER23> Yeah sure, there's all kinds of ways to pack lots of people into a little space and get them marginally close to where they started from and where they need to get to. But there's still the first and last legs of that journey. Even in Paris, where no spot in the city is further than 500m from a station, means you may still have to walk a km in the worst case.

It's fine when holding nothing, now do it with a couple armfuls of groceries or whatever.

A car free city eliminates cars, which carry around big empty storage boxes in the back all day, and can go from right where you are to right where you need to go. Bikes are an "ok" solution for some segment of the population, but not for every.

A quick example, my 80+ year old father, who walks with difficulty with a cane, would not be able to live in a car free, train only city at all, and bikes are not an option for him for the same reasons. But he still insists on working every day because retirement bored him. There's lots of people like my father, old, handicapped, both, how do you design a mass transit system that can accommodate people like him?

That's why transit systems designed by healthy 20-40 something internet forum people are usually bad ideas, they optimize for these kind of best-case scenarios, but there's so many edge cases in humans that these solutions work poorly in general. Cars work well in general, but a terribly many of them in places like NYC are personal vehicles used for just a few minutes a day, adding to congestion.

There's only ~13k Taxis in NYC and ~40k other for-hire vehicles. What if we doubled those numbers, and killed off all other personal non-business vehicles entirely (the majority of vehicles in the city)? Sounds like that solves pretty much all of the problems.

Okay it doesn't solve all of the problems, you still have to deal with Taxi drivers.

<comment><USER25> Bikes can actually be better for people with mobility issues than cars. Biking is pretty low impact and uses less energy than walking, so for some people for whom walking is a challenge, biking might be possible. With safe bike infrastructure, these people can still get around without cars. As a bonus, the exercise will keep them mobile longer.

> There's lots of people like my father, old, handicapped, both, how do you > design a mass transit system that can accommodate people like him?

You build an ADA compliant system. Compare the NYC subway, built long before the ADA, and the DC Metro. Except when elevators are broken (a big problem given WMATA's incompetent stewardship of the system), you can use pretty much the entire DC metro system in a wheelchair. Escalators are in every station. In Japan IIRC there were markings in the walkways of train stations, airports, and sidewalks to help the blind navigate, and we could incorporate that in the States.

<comment><USER23> > You build an ADA compliant system.

Right, the system can be very easy to get around in, but it's the system to destination legs that can be impossible. This is _almost_ always bridged with some kind of handicapped-accessible bus system in addition to the normal bus system. But then we're back to surface vehicles. Trains can _never_ provide door-to-door service, it's a classic "last mile" problem.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Etacts (YC W10) launches Gmail Contextual Gadget - <AUTHOR> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/07/app-tuesday-10-new-apps-in-google-apps.html

<comment><USER2> It would be nice if on the front page they addressed my privacy concerns in some way. I live in my Google account (gmail/docs/analytics, etc) and I'd like to know what information the app is going to have access to.

Something like Android's pre-install screen would be nice.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is good feedback and we should make that more clear. To answer your question, the domain admin (when he installs the gadget for the domain) gives us access to each email header as you open the email. To install Etacts, the user clicks through an openid+oauth login screen that details which services we use (gmail and google contacts).

<comment><USER3> Are you somehow only limited to the headers or simply only using the headers?

3rd party access (beyond the email provider) to someone's entire mailbox seems like a hard sell. The product sounds compelling, but I'd be much more inclined if it were something like a local browser plugin.

<comment><USER4> I imagine a browser plugin would have access to the entire content of any email you opened.

<comment><USER5> It's not a browser plugin. It is a web component that Gmail hosts in an IFrame (or caja wrapper?). Your domain administrator must grant API access to the plugin provider's API key.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> brown9-2 Can this gadget be used outside of Google Apps for domains?

In other words, can I use it on my gmail.com account?

<comment><USER6> Yes: <https://etacts.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> So it's like Rapportive but with the recent conversations and at the -bottom- of the email?

<comment><USER8> Rapportive has raplets. (<http://raplets.com>)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Do they store any of your information?

They have access to:

Mail - Sender Address Mail - Subject Line Mail - To Recipient Addresses

</comment><comment><USER10> I'll admit to not being super familiar with administering my Google Apps for Domain settings, but after adding it via the Google Apps Marketplace, and having it now added to my dashboard; it doesn't seem to be working. I realize this isn't Etacts support site, but I'm wondering if anyone else who uses Google Apps for Domain has it working?

</comment><comment><USER11> Is there a reason why etacts.com doesn't show any screenshots?

<comment><USER8> this. feels like a terrible landing page (but if it works, it works)

etacts - might wanna do a "review my startup" post and get some feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I just tried etacts for the first time and it seems to think I've received emails from some people before I ever had my gmail account. :/

</comment><comment><USER13> Congrats on the launch guys! Do you have anything planned for Android? The reason I'm not mentioning iPhone here is because Android's default/primary contact list is in GMail, so it would probably make sense to integrate into Android contacts app and their alerts?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback, we do have an Android app planned.</comment></comment>


Apache CloudStack now a Top Level Project - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/the_apache_software_foundation_announces40

<comment><USER2> w00t CloudStack!

Some quick facts:

\- CloudStack is the most active Apache project now by no. of commits/day and code/development activity: <https://www.ohloh.net/orgs/apache>

\- Stable, mature code, used in production. Works for Xen, KVM and VMWare.

\- Real world deployments, largest known deployment consists of some 20k hosts (source Collaboration12, I don't know exactly which talk/video, someone can comment with a link)

(Note, I'm a CloudStack developer and committer and I'm loving it :)

</comment><comment><USER3> Fantastic. One of the most widely deployed open source cloud stacks!

</comment><comment><USER4> Awesome project by amazing community!

Thumbs up!

</comment><comment><USER5> How does this currently compare with open stack?

<comment><USER2> No formal benchmarking I know of but OpenStack has better traction, is written in Python (I love Python) but has no real world production deployments I know of which is most likely to change. We don't have to have only one winner, but winners, so all stacks can have their share of market and everyone can win as everyone bring their pluses and minuses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Ah! Never a day like graduation day.

</comment><comment><USER7> Awesome progress in under a year.

</comment><comment><USER8> Go Cloudstack! :-)

</comment><comment><USER9> Great news !</comment>


Zz: A smart and efficient directory changer (2017) - <AUTHOR> http://leahneukirchen.org/blog/archive/2017/01/zz-a-smart-and-efficient-directory-changer.html <comment><USER2> Shameless plug: a shell I develop has builtin directory history: [https://elv.sh/learn/cookbook.html](https://elv.sh/learn/cookbook.html) (search for "directories")

<comment><USER3> You can make this for bash. I have "nd" and "pd", step to next or previous directory in the directory history (and "cd" adds an entry to the history). I like this a bit better then z, but it would be better to have both.

Code is here if anyone interested, look for the funccd, funcnextdir, funcprevdir and associated aliases.

[https://github.com/jhallen/joes- sandbox/blob/master/setup/ba...](https://github.com/jhallen/joes- sandbox/blob/master/setup/bashrc)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I use fzf's [https://github.com/junegunn/fzf](https://github.com/junegunn/fzf) ctrl+r for this. This is like ctrl-p in sublime text, but for recent commands. The nice thing is this works for every kind of command, not just cd. If you configure your shell with a long history, it really saves a lot of typing.

</comment><comment><USER5> I like it. Kinda reminds me of jump[1] which at a period I was using a lot but forgot about it when I got a newer laptop and did the "oh crap, I miss that, I'll install it tomorrow" for 3 weeks and eventually forgot about it.

[1] [https://github.com/gsamokovarov/jump](https://github.com/gsamokovarov/jump)

</comment><comment><USER6> I used this for a bit, but ultimately found the non-determinism to be a problem for me. I ended up specifically aliasing a few common directories, going from there to sub-dirs was really easy.

</comment><comment><USER7> Anything like this exist for Powershell?</comment>


How Much YouTube Paid Me for My 1M Viewed Video - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=do1VLjNg6AE <comment><USER2> Here's the highlights:

\- Between $2,000USD and $4,000 is average for this YouTuber for 1MM views on a video

\- Age and geographic location of viewers affects how much is made

\- Short videos make less, because less ads

\- Content/topic of video affects how much is made because ads

\- Sometimes there is outliers. This YouTuber has a video with 370k views at $4,000 USD. (hint: it's because more ads)

\- In short, its views + age of viewers + % watch time + geographic location of viewers + a bunch of other metrics.

This YouTuber claims you can 3x your revenue by making videos over 10 minutes long (so you get more ads).

<comment><USER3> > This YouTuber claims you can 3x your revenue by making videos over 10 > minutes long (so you get more ads).

This sounds like it should be true. It irks me whenever I see some commentary video about a minor thing dragged over the 10minute mark on purpose just to get the ad revenue.

Youtuber named Tim Pool is notorious for this: [https://www.youtube.com/user/Timcasts/videos](https://www.youtube.com/user/Timcasts/videos)

<comment><USER2> It definitely is true you can increase revenue. The 3x part is pretty subjective, depending on what you were doing prior.

Once you hit 10 minutes, you are allowed to put (as far as I know) as many ads as your viewers will put up with - but it has to hit the 10 minute mark.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have wondered about the economics of certain you youtubers, especially MKBHD.

He has a huge studio, with tons of gear, a lot of it not sponsored and staff.

The videos feature YouTube ads, but aren't in-video sponsored and he is selling a bit of merchandise.</comment>