Make sure you don't overpay with your privacy - <AUTHOR> https://privacycheck.com <comment><USER2> You need to have a native English speaker go over all your copy. Ideally, someone who is actually a copy writer.

<comment><AUTHOR> I will forward it - thank you! If you can point me on a specific English mistakes that you have noticed, I will really appreciate it.</comment></comment>


Bitcoin Crosses The $600 Mark As Its Rally Endures  - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/30/bitcoin-crosses-the-600-mark-as-its-rally-endures/ <comment><USER2> Bitcoin seems to be seeing steady growth in adoption by businesses that will accept it as payment, but I haven't seen any stats showing that it's getting similar growth on the payroll side. Who is getting paid in Bitcoins?

So, there are a lot more places to spend Bitcoins these days, but maybe not a matching increase in the quantity of Bitcoins available to be spent?

Companies that receive Bitcoins _could_ be using them to pay for services from other companies, from freelancers, or from employees, but that's currently not an option for many companies, because they use a payment processor that accepts Bitcoins and pays them in dollars.

<comment><USER3> Even if bitcoin payroll never happens, I don't think that's that much of a big deal. The open market will always be there as a way to acquire coins.

<comment><USER2> If you mean exchanges, then that works, but it's less efficient. To put it very simply: people will only buy bitcoin from exchanges if they believe the price will increase enough to cover the costs of doing so.</comment></comment></comment>


Iranian woman visiting family on tourist visa detained in Oregon jail - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/mar/29/iranian-woman-detained-oregon-jail <comment><USER2> A close family friend recently had plans to visit my sister who lives in the US. She's a Canadian citizen and moved to Canada from Iran when she was four years old. Anyway, she's been to the US numerous times, but was denied entry two weeks ago, with no reason given, despite the ban not being in force.

</comment><comment><USER3> The whole story is just the title. No reason divulged in 1000 words. I hope this gathers more attention to seek an explanation.

<comment><USER4> it did state there was a warrant. which means they had "probable cause" even if the standard for probable cause is getting lower and lower.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why is this on hacker news?

<comment><USER6> Because here are many non-USA citizens on HN who travel to USA for work, conferences, business meetings etc. and are concerned that one day it might happen to them too?

<comment><USER5> If that is the case... careful entering Iran:

[https://travel.state.gov/content/passports/en/alertswarnings...](https://travel.state.gov/content/passports/en/alertswarnings/iran- travel-warning.html)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_policy_of_Iran#Admission_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_policy_of_Iran#Admission_refused)

\- Admission is refused to holders of passports or travel documents containing a visa/stamp for Israel Israel or any data that passenger has been to Israel or indication of any connection with the State of Israel.

[http://www.bordersofadventure.com/travel-to-iran-things- to-k...](http://www.bordersofadventure.com/travel-to-iran-things-to-know)

\- All US passport holders are only allowed into Iran if part of a tour group (or with a guide). It apparently still stands that Americans must also be escorted from the airport to the hotel, and cannot make their own arrangements (it all has to be pre-organised – a simple addition via a tour company).

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national- security/anoth...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national- security/another-american-has-been-detained-in-iran-the-fourth-dual-national- in-five-months-to-be- arrested/2016/07/26/84ab02fa-52a7-11e6-88eb-7dda4e2f2aec_story.html)

[http://www.npr.org/2016/07/27/487665607/with-3-u-s- citizens-...](http://www.npr.org/2016/07/27/487665607/with-3-u-s-citizens-in- iranian-jail-a-look-at-whats-driving-the-arrests)

[http://www.lonelyplanet.com/iran/women- travellers](http://www.lonelyplanet.com/iran/women-travellers)

<comment><USER6> Sorry, I don't see how that's relevant. Iran doesn't position itself as a global tech center.

<comment><USER5> I fail to see how the parent story is relevant to tech at all.

A person with a federal warrant was arrested entering the USA. Why is this hacker news?

If you want to discuss "what might happen" when entering a country, and the entry laws of those countries, I'm game. But again, I don't see how it is tech related.

<comment><USER7> The part that you're missing is that HN is not just for tech news, and never has been.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Pastebin for TensorBoard - <AUTHOR> https://boards.aughie.org/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is an example board with data from the TensorBoard MNIST tutorial:

[https://boards.aughie.org/board/uh1-zU4pW7oWNpBFHkxyiNpu9T0/](https://boards.aughie.org/board/uh1-zU4pW7oWNpBFHkxyiNpu9T0/)</comment>


Former Valve VR ambassador about the involvement Facebook has with VR - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/chetfaliszek/status/980861065989783552 <comment><USER2> The real issue here is this guy using Twitter as a blog</comment>


The Case for Reparations - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/ <comment><USER2> Needs [June 2014] in the title.

This needs to be addressed TODAY. It needs to stop TODAY.

It's been 400 years and we are still punishing non-whites so we can benefit.</comment>


The Most Popular Programming Languages in GitHub Since 2012 - <AUTHOR> https://www.loggly.com/blog/the-most-popular-programming-languages-in-to-github-since-2012/

<comment><USER2> This infographic is pretty poorly designed. There are some icons that I don't recognize (like the 1993 circle+R and the 2005 flask). Google told me the (R) icon is actually the R language. Still don't know what the flask is.

<comment><USER3> The flask is Puppet.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puppet_Labs](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puppet_Labs)

<comment><USER4> Dang, I really thought [http://elixir-lang.org/](http://elixir-lang.org/) was that popular.

<comment><USER5> Someday :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Whoever made this, please take the criticism constructively. It was good information ( thank you for posting it ), but should have been presented better.

Using light blue, blue, grey blue and slightly lighter blue was not good design. I do understand it would be hard to use clearly defined colours with so many languages. My suggestion:

This would have been better presented if the user could select a language's icon and see its' data highlighted.

( I know you can't do that simply with an infographic - you'd need to create transparent overlays, or something. )

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm not sure why Puppet is on this list. It is not a generic language, it is meant for configuring and controlling large clusters of servers.

</comment><comment><USER8> It would be great if this were normalized by GitHub's overall traffic. It's tough to tell what has grown relative to what when everything appears to have grown.

</comment><comment><USER9> Thanks for some fun data! Two quick things, if you don't mind.

Something feels wrong with the data. For example. Q3/12 has abnormal amount of Pushes for all languages. Curious what causes the jump?

As someone who is color-blind, I really prefer people to combine symbols with color. Like you did with the active repos, except use the symbol in the key as well. That way if a color is close, I can check my guess against the symbol. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER10> > We looked at:

> The number of active repositories, a useful proxy for the projects that > people are working on right now.

This is better than looking at _all_ of them like many of these stats do because it eliminates has-been languages.

> The total number of pushes per language as well as the average number of > pushes per repository. These metrics are indicators of the rate of > innovation occurring with projects being written in a particular language.

This is skewed towards developers who push small changes often, and even includes code shufflers, and ignores projects where the developer commits large samples at a time.

> New forks and open issues per repository, which also show active use and > innovation.

Well written code has few issues raised.

> New watchers per repository, an indicator of developer interest.

This can be cheated by language promoters who run campaigns on twitter to double the Github watchers within a week. This stuff happens.

</comment><comment><USER11> 1995 was an interesting year for programming languages. I guess it makes sense since the web was just exploding.

</comment><comment><USER12> Needs a legend; I'm not sure what a few of the little icons represent.

<comment><USER13> In the infographic section entitled Active Repositories, from left to right:

        Javascript
        Java
        Ruby
        Cascading Style Sheets
        Python
        PHP
        C
        C++
        C#
        Shell Script (bash et al)
        Objective C
        Go language
        perl
        Puppet
        GNU R

<comment><USER13> I resolved the second to last one by this method: [https://www.google.com/search?tbs=sbi:AMhZZisSnBBfayiYq1eLbO...](https://www.google.com/search?tbs=sbi:AMhZZisSnBBfayiYq1eLbOjILBhXdX5f3_1LULjKXpuelrgU3y4W9mr --RAXWGarIa- Hi8w8i_1kX2tfyr_1-93rHFDRoWxDEyZz4itqKZdWEYC9W0_1DMiSCSGxv-s0gsMCgxPsjqBVTDXJmqQUU61VZMhTUPgWyGRjeOh08H0lWs5gxm_1_1hFFjQOHOy6u7qVXgxbMHVcn9KU31EpFrwr9BZkGhmgVXVqFiTCVrZMKBuyLa6nk2o9ZMP4W6An7Tq_1oThual5ocdxLhA-_1GjxzmY9NuAlroHvJTsnVlGsxYq2sgShkM7kXWERBsit59nxChLcjRABIzCAVobJ5XJdCuV4bNdb8AnpDE2qpQpoOrFgAvSJVsinCZY8HBmSZ6Cs33OWBOXrabR8gSs90aoofPe6rTlX2It4L2Odlv_1d8jHnbrfxe9qLmOiZrzNSS_1QqbxiMG_1b7QFxC0Eqcf2a869vh66v3AXeu9y1HcejToJv2QSZRBAG1GErr9ShiCNKYnCAUg76Cup1QOSDj- qx38UMHhAtDz8OPix-2qfnDzQJwFcxOsBRvFwPd1yRjPHaxXCNS65WJdz2n5wkUUf19z532x4-zFoYE2HGcSdn20XwD6jxRPwk3SbtUComTH839zYJWT3g7nckU_1B6xWwpn7wiLd6O6YZSpWueWSNIeVaJaAxHOEDPZKhw1EJmDL6nWWNwGrkYniztdZObLLCRKz1Q4rgzPd1xR4k8yPTHB63L2dX90YcZpmP_1Qv_1qxkzVBVaRaa5iVoOdn66Gr5gsXWVmoxkFkrtuAMzAFiXLau2NRvJu5im_1TkJPWGOeZBSPX036XDsvI43gGf1E41j9m2opTwifyusduHIsz3IeR_1qGzWzj8Kj0u6sJHdwjR9KovZJxqqi8DMaukUugkvNxmebS_1sgg9AerYqbSYtKgKPrTx2bLTy9Nih7naWdgriIqsQ1UhEDUquNXT4cPtu7_11kYDgt36ZVAyq769N4FRi1PI84xFgfkvaFibyfkc0BGfwW6PSx7i6p8gsIfD -- i9oF8kTjodiEF9u6m7V8JCONjA1fTizt1PeoYy3fghexYb-a6ow5D14cPqPpiBCT4TLAU_1YlBQsVeXPlZPk_1saF_19K_1CU3koWnhfvmatX3yKEjpEktAfPltCyp4knhr6qL3X46aLxvku2LCF-7K5mpBvGVvOHOj6nZXpMvAOYoTLeRXujQljFENTYoi6u2fHOPaSdd_1SHR7SCx4mTWlwDpQjcNjefeekpSBU8Z61dSEyp2WI6WdeGXKUxcBoMtb5-pHf- be_10UbaPSrT60WYa- oOhE1r-Uof0ytnW0Gp-b6pwUF3PZh9aAYYVT4s64xQ0Hg-4DGWtrixRwSRWdJD8aDxi8Zd1Fc9JCuCbhmnOfMS_1BXNAW5dAvXIcjgfKbPD_1wFjngHWMGhYJwd9c_12Q&btnG=Search%20by%20image)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Interesting that R looks late to the party with the highest growth rate over this period - I find it doubtful that R has grown so much in that time, but I guess instead that academic coders have started to use Github.

Does this suggest that R usage is greatly underestimated, generally, then?

Also why did all of Perl get pushed in Q3/12? And every language got a significant peak that quarter? Is that a data error?

</comment><comment><USER15> based on my experience with language detection on my own repos i'm very skeptical of this kind of statistics. for example, i know i don't know any perl6, yet github thinks (and claims) otherwise.

</comment><comment><USER16> The icons are totally not the ones that are official, very poor design.

</comment><comment><USER17> anyone have any insight into the perl anomaly in q3 of 2012? What was released then? Or, perhaps, what perl program really sucked at around that time?

</comment><comment><USER18> C++ comes up pretty well there...</comment>


YC School – Accepted and Rejected :( Anyone else? - <AUTHOR> https://imgur.com/a/fWEPn0p <comment><USER2> It happened to everyone. You can still join this facebook group to get community feedback by others not not in the Advisor track [https://www.facebook.com/groups/229021634448412/](https://www.facebook.com/groups/229021634448412/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17804371](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17804371)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks</comment></comment>


Do We Still Need the "Opinions Are My Own" Social Media Disclaimer? (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology-and-learning/do-we-still-need-opinions-are-my-own-social-media-disclaimer <comment><USER2> In today's world of Cancel Culture, I'd say yeah. The disclaimer is needed now more than ever.</comment>


Take 30 seconds to complete a fill-in-a-blank sentence to find your next job. - <AUTHOR> http://www.jobdreaming.com/?utm_source=HackerNews&utm_medium=link&utm_campaign=HN

<comment><USER2> If a user enters a large number of characters in the "Enter A Password To Save This Dream" input box the application throws an exception that is visible to the end user. Please disable detailed errors in IIS and catch this exception, and show a div populated with a friendly error message based on the length validation failing. Assuming that it is a length validation that is failing and not special characters in the password.</comment>


SlabText.js - <AUTHOR> http://www.frequency-decoder.com/demo/slabText/

<comment><USER2> Nice :)

Just some feedback, there's about a 1 second delay before the final text is rendered on initial load. This creates a slight jarring experience due to resizing, kinda analogous to the infamous @font-face FOUC/FOUT issue

Tested on latest versions of Chrome, Firefox and Safari.

<comment><USER3> It's actually exactly a 1 second delay:

$(window).load(function() { setTimeout(slabTextHeadlines, 1000); });

<comment><USER4> "Always call the script after all fontface fonts have downloaded. I've hacked this for the demo to enable you to see the headline transformation as the script kicks-in but you should always use google WebFont loaders active() and inactive() callbacks to launch the slabText treatment (or a similar "font loaded" callback feature from another font provider)."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is very useful in a scenario where one wants the text to scale up and occupy space like it had been done on physical paper.

I remember attempting something like this earlier ([http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8421533/how-to-obtain- ctr...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8421533/how-to-obtain-ctrl- behavior-on-a-browser-using-javascript)) but I am stoked by your approach.

Nice work. :-)

</comment><comment><USER6> This is a really impressive effect, but I'd hesitate to use it as part of a generic cms backed site since the auto-sizing could inadvertently editorialize the meaning of a headline at different page widths.

"Roddick SURVIVES, Staving Off Retirement" vs "Roddick Survives, Staving Off RETIREMENT"

<comment><USER7> This is what the preset word combinations mentioned in the post are for.

<comment><USER6> Ahh, right, i missed that. I was distracted from the sub-headings by the big bold responsive headings.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Great work, the effect is stunning !

Really nice that it's automatically disabled when displayed on a small screen than viewport defined.

</comment><comment><USER9> Now I'll have to decide whether to replace my existing brute-force text- fitting code with your more optimal solution. Argh!

</comment><comment><USER10> It's a horrible mess on Chrome for Android. Use with extreme caution (and testing).

</comment><comment><USER11> Nice approach, Fittext is nice, but this bring the game to another level.

</comment><comment><USER12> another useful text JavaScript plugin

<http://fittextjs.com/>

Full Disclosure: I have nothing to do with this product :)

<comment><USER13> Not that OP's isn't nice, but I like this one more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Beautiful. Does it work in IE? (i'm too lazy to fire it up)

<comment><USER15> works in IE10 - so good for the future.</comment></comment>


Finish The Projects You've Started - <AUTHOR> http://www.happiness-project.com/happiness_project/2010/02/finish-the-projects-youve-started-or-call-an-end-to-them.html <comment><USER2> I whole-heartedly disagree. Starting things is my litmus-test for deciding if I'm going to take them further.

Examples:

• My usual way to pick a next book to read is to start reading 5. Whichever one pulls me in the most wins.

• When sorting though startup ideas _many_ of them were for things I'd prototyped / researched in the past, including the one that became Directed Edge.

Unfinished projects leave _positive_ pressure for me to go back and do things at some point in my life. Starting in on something is the best way to learn its dimensions. There's this _pleasant_ queue of things that I'd like to finish up in life at some point before kicking the bucket, and I suspect it will only continue to get longer.

I'm not saying, "don't be a finisher" – but the important thing seems to finishing _many_ projects, not _all_ of them.

<comment><USER3> The message is not that you must finish all of your projects, but that you must decide whether you will finish them or not. If you decide to finish them, then just do it! If not, then store it away somewhere out of sight. If you want to go back to it, you can always pull it out again.

Unfinished projects create clutter, and for me (and a lot of people I know) clutter depresses me and makes me less productive. I'd rather have unfinished things filed away somewhere, than out in the open getting in the way of my active projects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think people should also stress out less about unfinished projects. Lots of failures and to-be-continued's (successes a plus too, obviously) is a sign that someone has lots of projects. More power to you if you can get closure on the projects that stagnated, but the merit is debatable if this effort takes time away from pursuing more promising ones.

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't see the advice in this article. Surely, for any project, you either finish it, or you don't. There is no other choice.

The only thing that seems possible is to decide for some projects to quit trying to finish them and erase them from the mind. But the article offers no help in deciding when to draw that line. Just because a project takes longer than expected? I don't think that would be very useful.

It seems to me the advice here just mounts more pressure on projects. Now it's not only "I should finish it", but also "I should decide if I finish it or not" - merely letting them stay in some corner won't do anymore.

<comment><USER6> > I don't see the advice in this article. Surely, for any project, you either > finish it, or you don't. There is no other choice.

Outsource? Delegation? Give away to community?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> People often ask me how to learn more about building web apps and I give similar advice (although I only talk about finishing projects, not culling them).

So many of us have a lot of ideas. We get excited about some and start building them. But not many get to the stage where they could go live. And of those we launch not many get maintained.

Without launching an app it is hard to get the breadth experience that having a working, live, active web app. You are forced to learn about marketing, design, taking payments, feedback, user interactions and so much more. So I encourage people to take a project they like and not only launch but maintain it. This obviously requires having a decent idea to begin with, but that is just part of the challenge.

</comment><comment><USER8> Test of time: Once I read an article on a game developers website. The article suggested to let an idea for a bigger project rest for some time (e.g. two months). If you are still enthusiastic about it, then it's more likely that you have the motivation to pull it off.

</comment><comment><USER9> I've started 4 projects in the last 4 months and am not more than 25% done on any of them. I wish I could concentrate better so I can spend more time on them, I really wanna see at least one make it.

</comment><comment><USER6> Programming has low ROI(Return Of Investment) very often. Try to improve your ROI, i.e. code small, reusable parts, then assemble big projects from these small parts.

For example:

      * you can write code generator instead of code;
      * you can write (small) library first, then use it in your programs;
      * you can prepare templates and wizard program, which automates creation of typical code;
      * (for Linux) you can prepare package, which is easy to install.

General rule: try to save your future time, even when you need to sacrifice some today time for that.

Just for example, every command line program needs option parsing. Write template for typical option parsing routine, keep it in separate directory, improve it over time, write generator, which will just substitute program name. Even if your project will fail, you will still have this small piece done, and it will save some of your time at every new project.

(Sorry for my English).

</comment><comment><USER10> This site is great</comment>


FCC to be led by Ajit Pai, staunch opponent of consumer protection rules - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/01/fcc-to-be-led-by-ajit-pai-staunch-opponent-of-consumer-protection-rules/ <comment><USER2> Is there a sympathetic view of Ajit Pai that anyone could offer?

I can understand how he would be opposed to the pro-consumer agenda of Wheeler's FCC. To be sure, there might be a better way of solving these problems using a free market mechanism, instead of top-down regulation which is antithetical to the libertarian/conservative ethos.

For example, previous HN discussions have surfaced how some european countries have a deregulated last mile, giving the consumer a nearly zero-friction way to switch between ISPs.

I just can't imagine Pai doing anything like this. I can only anticipate him enhancing the monopolistic powers of the big ISPs.

<comment><USER3> I'm quite opposed to the guy's ideas from what I've read so far, but here's one perspective:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/opinion/21Benkler.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/opinion/21Benkler.html)

Some of the ways to look at it is that if providers can sell a fastlane to Netflix they can reduce prices for the consumer. Other arguments that have been advanced include having a fast lane for medical devices or emergency services.

I could see an argument in favor if the rest of the marketplace was highly competitive and you could just switch to a different provider if the provider you had was behaving abusively. That's not the case in most of the US where you have a duopoly at best for fast internet.

Personally, I find this guy's proposals to be bad policy for individual consumers, but they're pretty great for ISPs. They would argue that in the end that's great for consumers too, but as far as I am concerned, that remains to be seen.

<comment><USER4> > if providers can sell a fastlane to Netflix they can reduce prices for the > consumer.

Historically, this is not shown to be how companies act. The implicit assumption here is that a supplier has some sort of benevolent desire. But the reality is that if a company can increase revenue, they will do so without redistributing it to the benefit of their customers or even employees.

> They would argue that in the end that's great for consumers too, but as far > as I am concerned, that remains to be seen.

We have seen it, and it's not great for consumers. Trickle-down economics is a fallacy. It's also been debunked by Economists very thoroughly.

<comment><USER3> I'm with you, I think it's not going to work, but these are the kinds of arguments people make. In some ways it's a question of whose freedom are you defending? The person who put the cable in ground or the person that cable goes to. Both want complete freedom to use that cable as they see fit, but those freedoms can be in tension. How do you choose?

This is one of the issues with "freedom" based arguments, in anything but a trivial system freedoms collide and somebody has to make a call. Ajit Pai seems to lean toward the cable-layer. I lean toward the cable-user. I think he's wrong, but I'm not willing to question his motives. I think he also wants the best for all, and disagrees that putting the consumer first works out better in the long run.

<comment><USER4> I thought about how the best respond to your comment. I think your intentions are pure, but you conflate a lot of different issues together that it's kind of difficult to respond.

So let's start with the economics.

At the heart of Capitalism is the idea of Perfect Competition[1]. There is no ethical considerations in an Economic model, only a core set of assumptions one of which is that each individual acts in their own self-interest. But just because everyone acts selfishly doesn't mean that there can't be a benefit to both parties. In fact trade rests on the idea that two parties can engage in a mutually beneficial transaction[2] (and it is trivial to come up with an example).

In a Perfectly Competitive market, a seller can't charge a high price because another seller will undercut their price. Likewise, a buyer can't demand a lower price, because no one will sell to them at a lower price. There is an implicit "equilibrium" where the seller maximizes their profit and the buyer maximizes their utility.

So in a way, you could say that the buyer and seller "freedoms collide", but that precise collision should result in an mutually beneficial transaction of sorts.

At this point you might be thinking that if competition means market equilibrium, then why does HN want regulation at all?

Well the trouble with Perfect Competition is that it is an impossible ideal:

> there is no actual perfectly competitive market in the real world [1]

This is because of all the conditions required for Perfect Competition. Some of my favorites are:

* A large number of buyers and sellers

* Perfect information

* Homogenous products

* No externalities

Some examples of real-world American failures pertaining to these examples:

* A large number of buyers and sellers -- Internet providers. There are few providers outside of Time Warner and Comcast.

* Perfect information -- Health care. When was the last time you saw hospitals post surgery prices online so you could pick most affordable option? Oh wait, an Oklahoma Surgery Center did that [3] and you know what happened? Californians flew out to have surgery because even with travel it was far cheaper than their local alternatives.

* Homogenous products -- Coke vs. Pepsi. You could argue they are homogenous (both soda pop), but most people would disagree. Moreover with recipe protections, it may very well be impossible/illegal for Pepsi to make an exact clone of Coke or vice-versa.

* No externalities -- Pollution (e.g. Global Warming). Pollution is often a cost to society as a whole and not on a corporation. If dumping your factory run-off directly into the river is cheaper than properly disposing of it, most companies would choose to do just that (e.g. the Mississippi pollution levels [4]).

Well so if Perfect Competition is impossible, then what should we do?

This is where Government regulation comes in and where there is often a debate. But from an Economic standpoint, I think it is pretty safe to say that we should do everything we can to _maximize competition_.

That's why most of HN is fond of Tom Wheeler. By and large his policies protected net neutrality and ensured that ISPs couldn't artificially favor one service over another thereby reducing competition. How could a Hulu compete with a Netflix if Netflix just shelled out massive amounts of capital to buy "fast lanes" with contractual non-competes with all the major ISPs in America?

But that was my point. The argument that ISPs will "reinvest" this new revenue into improving service for their customers is a fallacy. ISPs will only invest in things that increase revenue...not because they _want_ their customers to have $10 cheaper internet service.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition)

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

[3] [http://kfor.com/2013/07/08/okc-hospital-posting-surgery- pric...](http://kfor.com/2013/07/08/okc-hospital-posting-surgery-prices- online/)

[4] [http://www.stltoday.com/lifestyles/health-med- fit/health/mis...](http://www.stltoday.com/lifestyles/health-med- fit/health/mississippi-river-is-second-most-polluted-u-s- waterway/article_bce8579e-7449-11e1-9b27-001a4bcf6878.html)

<comment><USER3> Ha! I'm not sure who you're trying to convince, I keep saying I agree with you!

I'm merely phrasing things a little differently. A fully free market with no regulation or intervention, as you point out, is frequently impossible. Especially with in infrastructure where natural monopolies abound. Free markets have a tendency to become monopolies or abusive without efforts to maintain competition, and as you point out we have to encourage competition. But this requires making tradeoffs.

The person who put the cable in the ground feels they are free in this (theoretical, but non-existent) free market, to charge whoever they want whatever they want to use the cable. The person using the cable has no choice but to accept those terms because there isn't effective competition. Wheeler chooses the freedom of the consumer to choose versus the freedom of the provider in order to favor competition among providers.

I agree with this balance, Wheeler was good, I don't like this new guy at all so far.

My original objective was to try to explore the other guy's point of view, to give some of the arguments they would give in favor. I find them unconvincing, but those are the arguments those opposed to net neutrality give.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Pai consistently opposed consumer protection regulations during the 3-year chairmanship of Democrat Tom Wheeler, who left the FCC today. Pai opposed net neutrality rules and, after Trump's victory, said those rules' "days are numbered." He also opposed lower rate caps for inmate calling, rules designed to give TV consumers cheaper alternatives to rented set-top boxes, rules that protect the privacy of ISP customers, an update to the 31-year-old Lifeline phone subsidy program to help poor people buy Internet service, a speed increase in the FCC's broadband standard, an investigation of AT&T and Verizon charging competitors for data cap exemptions, and preemption of state laws that restrict expansion of municipal broadband."

Sounds like a real winner.

<comment><USER6> It should be an interesting comparison with Pai, an obviously experienced and qualified individual for the FCC post with perspectives that many find offensive, and DeVoss, who is obviously an inexperienced and unqualified individual for the Secretary of Education post, to see which actually gets more done.

<comment><USER7> In this case I think many would prefer the least effective one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I dont want to sound like a broken record but if you want to help protect Net Neutrality you should support groups like ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Free Press who are fighting to keep Net Neutrality.

[https://www.aclu.org/](https://www.aclu.org/)

[https://www.eff.org/](https://www.eff.org/)

[https://www.freepress.net/](https://www.freepress.net/)

also you can set them as your charity on [https://smile.amazon.com/](https://smile.amazon.com/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Nearly everything Trump will do, every appointment he will make, every order he will sign will be very bad for the vast majority of Americans and the country as a whole. He is not an honest, earnest, free-market loving Republican with good intentions and a desire to see the country succeed.

I don't know why there's this sense that in the tech community we are immune. We have a beautiful free and open technical world, where everyone has equal access to information and commerce, where large companies cannot use their power to obliterate startups so startups can thrive, where competition is healthy and the consumer wins. Don't fool yourself into thinking it doesn't depend on a favorable government to exist. Don't fool yourself into thinking Trump won't do his best to get rid of it.

<comment><USER10> I think so, he is big in old money. Oil, coal, bringing factories back, etc., sparking innovation was not one of the things he campaigned. He is going to make immigration more difficult, and people will not have confidence in coming here. Other countries are already investing on it, so they will take advantage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> He worked for Jeff Sessions...no no surprise there..

</comment><comment><USER12> This is bad for consumers. Everything I have read of what this guy has said, it's like he purposely opposes anything pro consumer.

<comment><USER13> He supports his paying constituents: big telecom.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I wonder if Netflix will survive this as Comcast will be able to just cut them off and offer customers their own service.

<comment><USER15> Comcast is already extorting as much money as they want from Netflix; it's not clear that Comcast would benefit from cutting them off.

<comment><USER14> Without netflix it would stop a lot of cordcuting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> gm-conspiracy Can somebody explain to me what the reclassification of internet from "information services" to "common carrier" accomplished (besides cellphone companies buying consumer satellite tv companies)?

<comment><USER16> When VOIP and other communication services started to sprout in the 1990s the FCC let them coast without taxation for about a decade. They then reclassified all such services as common carriers so that they could be taxed as such. Common carriers must pay into various tax funds such as LNP (which funds citizens' rights to port their phone numbers between carriers), NANPA (which maintains the North American Numbering scheme), and USF (which subsidizes telephony buildout or services to areas that the private market would otherwise ignore). Most consumers see these as various charges as a roughly 20% up-charge on their bill.

<comment><USER17> You're referring to only one aspect of common carrier status. There's a whole host of regulations that apply - or not - if you're a common carrier.

And I'm sorry are you honestly claiming that those cost 20% of an internet bill? Because of so you're gonna have to cite a source for that one. Between your selective choice for what you claim is CC status, combined with a claim that a $50 monthly bill is $10 attributable to CC, makes me think you're pushing an agenda rather than sharing facts.

<comment><USER16> I should have been more clear: those taxes relate to communication services (VOIP) that interconnect with the public telecommunications network, e.g let you call phone numbers. They are not taxes for Internet access. And yes, there are a large number of other more restrictive regulations. Sources here: [https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-335228A1.p...](https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-335228A1.pdf) (warning - PDF)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Any large corporation in favor of net neutrality like Amazon and Netflix, should join Google and make fiber happen nationwide.</comment>


Matt Cutts: Calling for link spam reports - <AUTHOR> http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/calling-for-link-spam-reports/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+mattcutts%2FuJBW+%28Matt+Cutts%3A+Gadgets%2C+Google%2C+and+SEO%29&utm_content=Google+Reader <comment><USER2> The only proof that a link was 'paid' is the invoice, reports, anonymous or not are going to be very hard to verify.

</comment><comment><USER3> Who's going to report Mahalo? :)</comment>


Not Paid? – A WordPress Plugin - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/SurfEdge/not-paid-wp <comment><USER2> Be aware: likely illegal in many countries, and can get you into serious trouble.

<comment><USER3> How so? The end user is the thief of services. Anyways the user could always just end up removing the plugin on their own.

<comment><USER2> We have a legal system in place to got after clients that don't pay their bills, vigilante justice isn't one of them.

"Hey, that guy is late on his car payments, lets cut his brake lines."

<comment><USER3> > "Hey, that guy is late on his car payments, let's hire a repo man before > they deface my property.

<comment><USER2> That's built into the contract, and both sides are well aware of it. I've never seen or even heard of a contract to create a website for somebody that entails "if you're late on payment, we make your site not work". If you can get than in there (and the client still signs etc), that's a different story.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Covering parking lots with solar panels - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/01/28/the-best-idea-in-a-long-time-covering-parking-lots-with-solar-panels/?foo=bar <comment><USER2> Ever since I first saw one of these -- several years ago, near the Googleplex [1] -- I have had this idea for a real-estate venture. You're welcome to take it on, because I'll never get around to it. Step 1, go into AZ, somewhere not too far from Phoenix or Tucson, buy some cheap desert land near a freeway exit. Step 2, grade the land and gravel it, never mind asphalt, no need. Step 3, good high security fence around. Step 4, Put up solar panels like these, but raised good and high, 20ft clearance under. Step 5, advertise "Shaded RV Storage". Charge people a good rate for storing their RVs where they will not be so horribly sun-damaged, as many RVs are damaged by long-term sun exposure. Meanwhile selling power to the utility. And, bonus, put gutters along the lower edge of the tilted panels, leading to a buried cistern, collect rainwater water for pretty landscaping and for washing RVs (for a fee, your RV will be all sparkly clean when you come pick it up).

Yer welcome.

[1] Street view [https://goo.gl/maps/2T8mZ](https://goo.gl/maps/2T8mZ)

<comment><USER3> Feasible? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOZBrHqTJk4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOZBrHqTJk4)

<comment><USER4> In the gp's post, he's talking about above ground mounting, similar to rooftop, and more like the parking lot coverage in tfa... in this case it's actually about a break even for the solar in 8-12 years usually... (feel good qualities not withstanding)... that covers the electrical usage for the lot's residents, at the very least. Assuming you are charging for the electricity... you are still making the lot rent, and on top of that, you can charge more for being a "green" lot (if the organic food market is any indication), which means you can charge over 20-30% more than standard lots... so your break even on investment is about 8-12 years, but you'll be making 20-30% more on the lot rent, which means you'll probably break even much sooner, and see a close to pure profit for 8-10 years after the investment paid for itself.

It's not a bad system... this also doesn't account for states like Arizona and California that offer tax breaks and incentives for solar initiatives like this one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here in Japan, virtually ALL parking in lots is hourly metered. You get a ticket & if you spend money in the stores, they will credit you the price of the parking (making it cheap or free for actual paying customers) on the ticket. This is actually done for reasons of space - cities are crowded & and space for parking is at a premium. The result is that it is just considered normal.

In the US, they have these massive lots that are spread out over an area often larger than the store itself. The obvious thing to do would charge for parking with the Japanese system, and use the proceeds to help offset the initial costs, just like with a toll highway or bridge.

However, the "God-given Right to Free Parking" mentality would never allow it to work, and the local governments are too weak to try to impose it. Every city has a ring of malls outside of it not just for cheaper land, but to escape any form of regulations from the city itself. This is a "risky thing", and businesses don't like risk.

It would take a very careful marketing campaign to be able to kickstart something like this. I doubt many places have the leadership required.

<comment><USER6> The lots are privately owned by the malls, shopping centers, or stores. The "city" is in no position to impose paid parking on private property. Where parking is scarce, private parking is generally not free. Where parking is provided on public property (e.g. city streets) it is often metered, though certainly not always.

<comment><USER5> While they can't directly tell a mall "you have to charge", they can encourage it indirectly through zoning laws:

For example, they can cap the footprint of parking lot space, leading to stores building parking garages or taking their own steps to minimize freeloaders through metering. That's just an off the top of my head example.

Never say the govt "can't do something". The have power of eminent domain, as an example of how far they are able to go when the actual will is there to have something they want. Check out the history of the new Fenway Park for things they can do.

<comment><USER7> Rather than a cap, many suburbs have a minimum parking space requirement for stores. Suburbs have been using zoning laws to encourage a car based economy. In the Chicago suburb which I used to live, you could not walk the one mile to Target even if you wanted to for lack of sidewalks, crosswalks, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm not too aware of payback timeframes and maintenance costs of solar power. So I thought I would look into the Rutgers solar canopy. This led me to the news article at Rutgers discussing the project:

[http://news.rutgers.edu/news-releases/2011/04/rutgers- board-...](http://news.rutgers.edu/news-releases/2011/04/rutgers-board-of- gov-20110405#.VMv_7VWJOuY)

The description largely matches this article in the Washington Post. It also mentions that it was a "40.8 million dollar project." I'm uncertain if this includes various tax breaks and incentives, but let's take it at face value.

It also mentions that it will generate 1.2 million dollars per year in electricity. If we assume that electricity costs will stay perfectly constant and that maintenance costs are factored into the 40.8 million, this means the facility would pay for itself in 34 years.

I do not actually expect maintenance to be included. I ask myself, how long does a solar panel actually last? It seems many tariffs and incentives are based on a 25 year life of a solar panel. The UK Centre for Alternative Technology has the following article: [http://info.cat.org.uk/questions/pv/life-expectancy-solar- PV...](http://info.cat.org.uk/questions/pv/life-expectancy-solar-PV-panels)

In it, they explain that a solar panel's output will go down by about 1% per year. The materials surrounding the electricity production will wear, yellow, or otherwise decay, but the power production seems largely unaffected for 30 or more years (aside from the 1% decrease each year, that is).

On the flipside, energy costs are rising at much more than 1% a year. So in terms of raw energy pricing, and assuming that maintenance isn't too much of an issue, it seems like the Rutgers facility might "pay for itself" in 35 years. Of course, it isn't exactly a good fiscal decision to freeze $40 million dollars for 40 years.

I have no idea how to quantify the benefits of shade for the cars. But overall I now have a basic understanding of why someone might build the Rutgers facility.

It also seems likely that as energy costs rise, solar panels become less expensive and more efficient, then these canopies will make much more financial sense. It seems like it would take a lot for it to be a "good money investment" though.

<comment><USER9> "On the flipside, energy costs are rising at much more than 1% a year."

[http://www.nasdaq.com/markets/natural- gas.aspx?timeframe=10y](http://www.nasdaq.com/markets/natural- gas.aspx?timeframe=10y)

huh?

<comment><USER10> Perhaps electric rates would be more relevant than natural gas...

[http://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/#/topic/7?geo=g&...](http://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/#/topic/7?geo=g&agg=0,1&endsec=vg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I was in Qatar this summer and noticed them. Anyone know how long this has been installed there?

[http://www.qf.org.qa/content/the- foundation/issue-68/qatars-...](http://www.qf.org.qa/content/the- foundation/issue-68/qatars-new-energy-horizons)

QF's solar project has also brought parking lot shades covered in solar panels to Education City – the first in Qatar – and achieved the first agreement to be signed by Qatar General Electricity and Water Corporation (KAHRAMAA) that accepts a private commercial energy project's connection to Qatar's central power grid.

looks like the following company has been providing this type of construction since, at least, 2012 when this article was published (the company looks like it's been around since 2006).

[http://envisionsolar.com/press-releases/envision-solar- annou...](http://envisionsolar.com/press-releases/envision-solar-announces- business-development-initiatives-in-united-arab-emirates-qatar-and-spain/)

</comment><comment><USER12> Our local government has leased the rights to build solar panels over their parking lots to a private sector company. They've covered most lots at this time.

The panels have all of the advantages outlined in the article.

The only downside not mentioned was snow and ice falling from the overhead panels. At least one person has been hurt.

</comment><comment><USER13> Putting solar panels in the road/parking-lot = bad idea. But putting them over seems like a good idea from my limited knowledge.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, the problem with the hype for solar roadways is that this alternative exists. Even if it were a good idea (which it isn't), this would beat it every time in terms of maintenance, energy efficiency and cost. And frankly additional benefits, shade is better than LEDs.

So even if the economics works, and it doesn't, it wouldn't make sense to start with solar roadways until the carparks are all done like this, and that's a long long way away.

<comment><USER15> You are not factoring in the added savings on asphalt. Asphalt roads are expensive. For example, the new I-4 expansion in Orlando will cost $2.3 billion for 21 miles of 4 added lanes. The reason solar roadways make economical sense is because it replaces the road itself and thus adsorbs the cost of the asphalt that would otherwise have to be used. Solar canopies only make sense for parking lots and only in hot regions.

<comment><USER16> But aren't solar panels _vastly_ more expensive than mere asphalt, per unit of area?

<comment><USER17> Why yes they are. You need more than just solar panels though. You'll need thick tempered glass, power inverters, monitoring and management systems, transformers and high voltage power lines. Once installed, your glass blocks will provide the ride comfort, noise, safety, of brick or cobblestone roads but less durable and more slippery.

<comment><USER16> I seem to remember that cobblestone roads were almost as slippery as ice whenever it rained. I grew up in a town that actually had cobblestone streets (long story, Europe).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This seems to be a much better option than setting up large solar farms in the middle of the CA desert. Parking lots are eyesores anyway so cover them up with solar panels. Why ruin pristine nature with solar panels.

<comment><USER19> The difference is the deserts get serious insolation. Or put another way, the places with major sunshine do not also contain major cities. Another problem with cities is the structures shade the panels.

<comment><USER4> Depends on the cities... here in the Phoenix area most of the buildings are only 1-2 stories.. and most of the larger parking lots don't get any shade from the buildings... There are several of these covered lots here in Phoenix, and more going up. A lot of places have covered parking anyway, so throwing solar panels on them isn't that much more cost in labor, and payoff in 8-12 years usually, with some profites for 5-15 after (at least from the costs of the past decade as a forcast).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> A major Midwest software company near me has these over their visitor lot (their employee lot being underground), and has a huge farm of solar panels behind the building. I think it's a great idea.

On the graph at the bottom, does anyone know why the estimation goes down after 2016, then only slightly rises in 2018? There has to be some reason why solar installs would take a major hit like that, but I didn't see it explained in the article.

<comment><USER21> The source of the chart data is linked just above it.

 _GTM Research forecasts that the market will continue to grow year-over-year until the drop-off in the federal ITC, peaking at 318 megawatts in 2016_

The federal ITC is a tax credit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> > Asphalt and concrete absorb the sun's energy, retaining heat — and > contributing to the "urban heat island effect," in which cities are hotter > than the surrounding areas.

If the solar cells were coated with some layer that reflects all the photons that can't be harvested for electricity that might mitigate that problem even further

Or maybe they already are?

<comment><USER23> most are black because that's what absorbs photons. asphalt happens to be black, but it converts 100% of captured energy into heat, whereas PV systems decrease that value to 95-50% (source: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell_efficiency#mediaview...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell_efficiency#mediaviewer/File:PVeff\(rev141208\).jpg))

<comment><USER22> They're black in visible light. But as far as I know they cannot harvest IR photons. So it would probably be useful if they reflected IR.

Although I don't know if it's better for them to be reflective or black in the IR window where where atmosphere is transparent. Black makes for good emitters too and that way they could shed heat into space.

If we could arbitrarily designed reflectivity vs. transparency it would probably be transparent in visible, reflective in IR, black in the IR window

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Despite all the positives - not everybody is a fan of these. This is a battle being waged in Connecticut over solar carports:

[http://www.fairfieldcitizenonline.com/news/article/Neighbors...](http://www.fairfieldcitizenonline.com/news/article/Neighbors- lawsuit-aims-to-pull-the-plug-on-6029470.php)

<comment><USER25> That sounds more like someone is sour over their own zoning permit being denied than any actual opposition to the panels themselves.

<comment><USER21> I think the panels might block the road visibility of his business (which I don't have a lot of sympathy for, but it's at least a less petty motivation).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I sure hope such investments have enough time to make their money back. I expect robotic cars to do away with the need to own personal cars. Shared by many people, a robotic cab will spend a lot less time sitting around and many parking lots will disappear.

</comment><comment><USER27> This strikes me as the perfect political investment. It passes the "new one on me" test, and it passes the "green is hip" test, and it would be a constant reminder of the politicians involved (ala Boris Bikes for Londoners).

It also promises to kick start a maintenance industry and lower costs as stnadrds are formed.

Overall I would expect this one to be subsidised and persued more hungrily than any offshore projects or windfarms

<comment><USER28> In Europe and Asia, I'd expect so. In the States, fossil fuel interests have already mobilized their media campaign, pushing for new taxes to penalize local solar energy generation. They've had some victories and some losses, but as another poster mentioned, they don't have to win every battle - just enough to sow uncertainty on whether it'll be a good investment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Our local high school (bay area) has solar panels over the parking lot. Seems to be working out.

</comment><comment><USER30> This is nice but this is also 99.99% of solar related energy "solutions".

If we put <some solar tech> in <some place> we could generate enough energy to power <many things>; however it is still not cost-effective to do so.

<comment><USER30> Yeah right... this is not true at all.</comment></comment>


Would Calexit be a good thing? - <AUTHOR> http://waitbutwhy.com/table/calexit <comment><USER2> This is one of the stupidest things ever published on WaitButWhy.

The Civil War killed more Americans (~750k) than WWI and WWII combined. Think of it as SouthExit. There are powerful forces binding this union together, and they will not allow a gentle transition to an independent California. So any one who wants Calexit, wants war, and war is really, really stupid. I'm baffled by the irresponsibility of this discussion. This isn't like moving out of your parents' basement because they told you to stop smoking weed.

Let's just remember, when we compare Calexit to Brexit, that Britain was and is a sovereign nation, and at no point in its history did it cease to be so. Stupid as Brexit was, the UK's right to leave the EU was enshrined in the articles of the EU. California is not Great Britain. The analogy does not hold.

Calexit is sponsored by Russia. "Yes California" is run by a guy based in Yekaterinburg.[0] What should this tell us? The enemies of the US want California to secede. Separatists are playing into their hands. Russia sabotaged the US presidential election, and now it is trying to break up the continental 48. That would lead to a weakened and divided country, much more so than it is today.

Secession would also lead to a more fragmented North America, indecisive as Europe.

There is no such thing as a clean slate. Calexit does nto present us with that opportunity. History is a nightmare from which we cannot escape, as Joyce said.

The WBW author is basically saying he wants California to exit to speed the advance of technology so he can become immortal. Why should we care about his immortality? And why should we believe that Calexit would accelerate technological development? He gave zero substantive argument that Calexit would have an affect on tech.

Just remember, every state in the US benefits from its close relationship with all the other states. There are huge positive externalities to union and the free movement of goods, people and capital. All of that ends with Calexit. Anyone who see a carefree paradise in separatism is living in a fantasy world.

[0] [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/21/us/yes-california- calexit...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/21/us/yes-california-calexit- marinelli-russia.html?_r=0)

<comment><USER3> Brexit is a mess. It's the first time that I'm seeing British people leaving their own country and come to Switzerland where they don't know the language at all. My friends who moved to London from Eastern Europe want to leave, because the worth of their salary dropped by 20% on the global scale, and all they can hear about is Brexit and the negativity around it. Britain is not fun anymore for anybody living there. Also older people who voted for the Brexit are just starting to realize how much they depend on foreigners.

<comment><USER4> I'm British and would prefer to remain in the EU. Yet I am quite satisfied to remain here in Edinburgh, both for employment and the quality of life. Believe it or not, there are a great many who share my opinion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> No. People in the current bubble forget that California is usually broke/in legislative crises, which might be about to happen again. Texas is probably the only state capable of thriving if it secedes, CA doesn't even have it's own electric grid.

* [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008%E2%80%9312_California_b...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008%E2%80%9312_California_budget_crisis)

* [http://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/California-s-400...](http://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/California-s-400-billion-debt-worries-analysts-6812264.php)

<comment><USER6> You act as though power exports from Arizona, New Mexico, Oregon, Nevada and Utah would somehow cease overnight if California were to become its own country. This is of course false.

<comment><USER7> It wouldn't continue uninterrupted forever.

Those power exports are paid for in currency denominated by the US dollar.

California is no longer part of the US, remember?

Each of those states would have to negotiate with the new Republic to receive something in equal worth to the power they were delivering.

And if they don't get it, they're not going to give away power for free. Their governments won't let them, their constituents won't let them, their budgets won't let them, and lastly, the FERC won't let them.

<comment><USER8> I don't see why paying for the power would suddenly become an issue. If California can afford it now, they'll be able to afford it later, even if it's paid in a different currency--it's still the same amount of wealth.

<comment><USER9> There still has to be two parties to a purchase. You can have all the currency with which to pay but if the seller does not want to sell, it doesn't really matter how much you have. The very big problem is that, regionally speaking, California may wind up a willing buyer with no willing sellers and no way to compel anyone to sell to it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's hard for me to see a scenario where a Calexit doesn't mark the end of American hegemony and quite likely the United States itself. A successful Calexit would without doubt lead to a New York exit. Now there's no way Texas is sticking around. And the Carolinas and Florida want to make a go of it too, etc. Once the pillars have fallen, the house collapses. Isn't that basically how all great empires slowly crumble?

So the stakes do seem quite a bit higher than outlined in this article and others I've read like it.

<comment><USER11> Would it really be so bad? Cultures/beliefs/values vary tremendously from region to region, and smaller country subsets would be able to iterate faster to support their own value/belief systems.. Texas and related states that join it's new union could be as red as they want, California and those who join w/ can be as blue, and have things like Single-payer healthcare, no public prisons, no anti-immigration laws and open borders. -- U.S. as a super power has been waning for awhile now, and will continue to do so. Rome conquered the entire world, yet somehow a group of germanic tribes brought it to the ground. -- Every empire in history has fallen, America is no different.

<comment><USER12> Putting everyone into echo chambers is the stupidest idea. You'll get such radical agendas pushed. Balance and variety is good.

<comment><USER13> Too bad that's what we've done... If you look at America's history, political parties have been divided by a few issues and that's it. For the most part, the political parties until the 1900s followed Washington's wish of not being divided. Sadly, these modern political parties have decided that issues must be divided by party. This has lead to pretty much every issue we face today to be voted against by one party simply because the other party thinks they can't support it because it's somehow a partisan idea. The media has also made this worse by not documenting things objectively. Citizens think one party is pure evil and the other one is magically full of saints. Unless you ask a libertarian about which party is better, you'll probably get a terribly slanted view. I don't understand this. Both parties have some rotten people, but why is it expected of the American public (it is expected) to vilify one party? Issues about whether the government should be small and whether agrarian life is best have left to be about whether the government should tax its citizens into submission and whether it should be a police state. The much more rigid divide in beliefs is good for no one. I can't vote for anyone without them contradicting some of my beliefs because I don't follow the awkward divide in political ideals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Interesting that there is no mention of demographics. Hispanics account for almost 40% of the population, close to 80% of which are Mexican. Following secession and taking history into account, there is reason to speculate that California could become the subject of Mexican annexation, or at the very least, subject to turmoil that could arise from stoking such sentiments among a very sizable chunk of the population, most of which is not associated with tech. Furthermore, secession, if it is to be meaningful, would make a geopolitical impact that would arguably be good for neither California nor the rest of the US (nor the world for that matter; with a weakened US, worse things can fill the vacuum). What I could see is something more in line with right-leaning thought i.e. greater autonomy of the states and greater decentralization of power.

(On a somewhat humorous note: if Putin is spurring Calexit movements, then it sounds to me like a perversion of Pilsudski's Prometheism[0], except that Pilsudski was motivated by a desire to neutralize the threat that Russia posed.)

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheism)

</comment><comment><USER15> There is a plethora of issues that have to be addressed, to name a few:

* The U.S. Government would have to be ok w/losing a ~1/6th of it's economy.

* California has no military; funding such would be expensive.

* All existing multilateral agreements the U.S has entered into would NOT apply to an independent California. An independent California would have less bargaining power in renegotiating said agreements.

<comment><USER16> I don't disagree but the California National Guard is under state control normally, when it isn't federalized by special order. Some 23,000 individuals. They'd have to act quickly to seize control before the federal government but it could be done.

<comment><USER11> I think the wiser plan would be for technology companies who are pro-secession join forces and create a militia of tech -- i.e. invest in robotic/drone tech for military purposes, that way they can unleash a war if need be--but one of robots/drones instead of people. I think the next world war will be more about technology than it will people fighting people. Controlling drone/robotic weapons tech could be huge for a country wanting to secede.

<comment><USER17> Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong. (username v. relevant)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I love that this writer puts on no airs.

>As far as defense goes—would you want to fuck with a country with the world's best drones, robots, tech weapons, missile defense systems, and cyberattack abilities? No one would dare attack California.

Most people try to sound more important and qualified when discussing something so radical.

</comment><comment><USER19> Whether it's good or not Cal would instantly get a civil war with the Jefferson people unless the exit agreement included allowing a State of Jefferson to replace Cal.

</comment><comment><USER20> Also missing from things is the fact that more rural parts of the west coast are much more conservative than areas close to the ocean.

Look up continued interest in the State of Jefferson.

</comment><comment><USER21> Proposition 8 added "Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California" to the state constitution. The Supreme Court ruled that violated the federal Constitution. If California left the US, would that resurrect Proposition 8? How about Proposition 187, which didn't modify the state constitution, but set up a system of state laws that a federal court ruled violated the federal Constitution?

<comment><USER22> Those are legitimate questions that would have to be answered as part of the national government California would set up. Going back over all of the historical differences between US federal and CA state law. I suspect however, that nothing would _revert_. If those were important issues to CA citizens after secession, I think it's more likely that such propositions would be reintroduced.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The United States is a maritime superpower, able to project power across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Losing the Pacific coast would end that. I can't imagine it being let go easily.

<comment><USER24> The bulk of U.S. naval forces in California are in the San Diego region. It's possible the U.S. could negotiate a border that leaves the naval bases as well as the Marine Corps base at Camp Pendleton as part of the United States. (The entire swath of Southern California below Los Angeles.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> He who controls the nukes, controls California's destiny.

<comment><USER5> And for non-American readers, those are located in the big, flat central states that California would be seceeding from.

<comment><USER26> If command authority to launch ICBMs devolves to the states where the missiles are stationed, that will be an indicator that civilization is over. The political fate of California would be a footnote.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This post might be worth a damn if Tim thought a little bit harder about why Russia thinks Calexit would be good for them.

It's not obvious or true that anything good for Russia is bad for the US, but when you see the country who recently interfered in an election (propaganda, releasing dnc emails) is also interested in weakening the union of your states further.... maybe consider why before jumping on board.

</comment><comment><USER28> California is almost certainly going to break off from the larger United States in our lifetime. The interests of the United States are already too heterogeneous to be effectively served by a single government, and the problem is only going to get worse.

I don't believe California will be successful if it attempts to secede solo though. I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that if it is going to work, it will need to secede as part of a coordinated action with Washington and Oregon. The end result will probably be a commonwealth of nations relationship similar to the one shared by Canada and Great Britain. I've even got a catchy name for this new nation: the pacific coalition of states, or Pac Coast for short.

I'm also going to go out on a limb and predict that a combination of pushback on federal enforcement of marijuana laws and immigration policy is going to be the match that starts the fire burning. I believe popular pressure on both of these issues is going to force the coastal states to take a stand rather than roll over, and things are going to escalate from there.

<comment><USER29> On what planet do you expect that the US at large is going to accept 1/7th of their economy seceding without a fight?

<comment><USER7> Not just the economy.

You'd also need high level US military leaders to go insubordinate, voluntarily ignore their chain of command, and "donate" the assets of the US armed services to the Republic of California.

Texas is the only state that could probably put up a fight, but it'd be very ugly and very bloody.

Secession almost always equals war.

I think the folks advocating for secession trivialize the fact that the end result is armed conflict and not knowing which side your neighbor is on.

And Brexit is not precedent whatsoever -- Britain can exit from the EU because there was no large amount of shared military/defense assets based within the UK, and the EU is primarily an economic cooperation effort.

<comment><USER30> At least the southern states in 1861 had the advantage of providing a large percentage of the prewar officer corps and West Point graduates, as well as graduates of the other military academies like VMI and the Citadel. The demographics of the current US military are not favorable for liberal coastal regions thinking of secession.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> No.

<comment><USER32> Correct. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines) :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> The very idea is insane. I think we need to do a better job of fighting the divisive forces attempting to destroy this country, led by a domestic terrorist like George Soros.

The site itself seems to be run by children[1]. This is where HN news is coming from now?

[http://waitbutwhy.com/wait-but-who](http://waitbutwhy.com/wait-but-who)

<comment><USER34> The right thinks Soros funds everything. The left thinks the Koch brothers fund everything.

Me, I'm waiting around for a shadowy billionaire to fund my histrionic internet posting. $30/per trolling comment seems fair.

<comment><USER35>
      I'm waiting around for a shadowy billionaire to fund my histrionic internet posting.

Me, too. I keep looking for such an offer in the "Who is hiring?" postings, but no dice.</comment></comment></comment>


TwilioQuest, a new way to learn Twilio - <AUTHOR> https://www.twilio.com/blog/2017/10/twilioquest-fastest-way-to-learn-twilio.html <comment><USER2> I attended Twilio's Signal conference and they had Twilio Quest running at their hackathon.

As the head of my little startup I was supposed to schmooze and attend all the biz type talks - what did I do instead for the entire morning? I spent it on the Twilio Quest hackathon coding away.

Haven't had that much fun coding since college. Could not believe Twilio put so much effort into what I assumed would be a small side show at their conference.

This kind of commitment is incredibly impressive and really endears developers and technical users who see this side of Twilio. I even think it has applications outside of Twilio as a teaching tool if it could be frameworked up and open sourced.

Incredibly impressed by Quest and so tempted to see if I can improve my score!

<comment><USER3> Now you made me want to spend time playing it :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It seems so strange to have such a polished initiative on a niche project like Twilio. I can understand this for AWS, JavaScript Libraries, or SalesForce, but nobody's job title is exclusively "Twilio Engineer".

Then again, the team was always notably helpful during hackathons, and their documentation is usually on point. Maybe they recognize this as a company strength, and they are harnessing it as a way to compete with the likes of AWS/Google Cloud.

<comment><USER5> I'm basically a twilio engineer now. I do a lot of telephony, but no one wants to run and scale their own stack, so everyone ends up building against REST apis. Twilio has some of the best features around reliably placing calls, sending texts, and the most enjoyable developer experience of any api I've ever used, including outside of telephony. I've built a 100% serverless contact center, among other things. Twilio Sync RT infra is also fantastic. Their WebRTC service was total shit through 2014 but is better now.

<comment><USER6> Would you use their WebRTC offering, or is there a better alternative?

<comment><USER5> Sure, I'd use it, but under the following conditions:

\- wired ethernet

\- lots of guard code that reconnects failed calls

\- customer is aware they will not get 5 9's or even 3 9's.

Typically using WebRTC means a significant cost savings, so it may or may not be worthwhile to build out the additional stuff needed to make it work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I remember this from Twilio-con in 2014 or so. TwilioQuest was easily the best session I've ever had at a conference. It looks like they took that and went even further. What a fun project to work on! I wish every conference session was as well polished. To me this one is the gold standard, or maybe on HN the bitcoin standard, of conference sessions. Approachable, engaging, educational, and entertaining.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm amazed at how big Twilio has become. I just thought of them as operating a useful gateway between the Internet and the SS7 network. I've used it for inbound SMS, for which it works fine. The API is simple enough. I used to do SMS via Google Voice and a Python program, which was awful. (It did take three years of nagging to get inbound multipart SMS support on Twilio, but they finally implemented that.)

Now they're moving into customer relationship management. They may end up competing with Salesforce.

</comment><comment><USER9> When your service is a commodity, consumers choose by price and ease of integration. This is a great way to make the choice easy

</comment><comment><USER10> Does anyone know any other apps that have done similar things? Gamification really pays off for me - but I have no interest in Twilio hehe. I'm familiar with habitica, not what I'm looking for

<comment><USER11> Ruby Warrior?

[https://www.bloc.io/ruby-warrior#/](https://www.bloc.io/ruby-warrior#/)

<comment><USER12> Maxed out auto-play audio on homepage warning

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This reminds me of Braintree and their hidden games in the source code. They used to have it some time ago: there were some links and instructions in the source code that you could use to access some URLs with classic videogames, Braintree themed.

This "little" details make developers take the company more seriously, somehow: "If they make the effort to develop this just to make developers smile, they must be extra committed to their code and their API quality". Not sure if true, but it's an effective strategy. Kudos to them.

</comment><comment><USER14> One of our startups is in a tough, low tech. market [in the USA]. On a tight budget we had to deliver robust SMS based features fast to meet customer expectations. It would have sucked the ocean to build Twilio's stack from scratch then use it hoping we got it right the first time. As someone else said: "the most enjoyable developer experience of any api I've ever used" is why we signed up and haven't looked back.

</comment><comment><USER15> This was clearly a labor of love. You've taken gamification to a whole-nuva- level.

</comment><comment><USER16> Obviously we don't know the full context, maybe this was a super quick side project that the developer(s) had a blast doing. But I would've preferred they spent time improving documentation, writing first-class client libraries for more languages ( _cough_ Golang), or you know the API itself - which last time I checked had the string "2010-04-01" hardcoded into it.

Naysaying aside i'll give it a shot if I'm ever using Twilio again. Haven't seen API providers really push the barrier in learning materials - could work.

<comment><USER17> I'm curious about the comment on API versioning. If it instead had the string "/v1/" embedded in the URL, would this be preferable to you? Which APIs do you feel are in need of updating?

Disclaimer: former Twilio PM.

<comment><USER16> So pointing out the API versioning scheme was disingenuous. It's as good as any other scheme and is probably necessary for backwards compatibility... it just seems old. I'll divide my short feedback into three categories:

API Features that I feel should be there but aren't:

\- CRUD operations for Copilot

\- Bulk operations for SMS/MMS - seriously one request per?

\- CRUD operations and better access for logging and billing in general. The UI does not suffice.

User Interface:

\- You did a huge redesign ~2 years ago that was frankly underwhelming. It added some SPA like functionality splattered through out the site, and many of the operations, like adding numbers to a Twilio Copilot service, became slow and buggy.

\- Good artists copy and great artists steal. SaaS products at GCP, AWS, Stripe, aren't necessarily perfect but can all be drawn from to create a better product. I honestly feel like most of the innovation at Twilio clocked out ~4 years ago and now its just maintenance work and annual reboots. Though this project shows innovation its far away from the core concerns of customers. We know how to use the platform already...

Generic:

\- Better documentation

\- More transparency for how carriers handle SMS once Twilio passes it off

\- More transparent pricing. I.e. if I send a 1600 character text I'm getting billed ~10 times or whatever - not great.

EDIT: Finally because Twilio is a billion dollar business I hold it to a much higher standard then I did ~5 years ago. I don't mean to discourage hardworking employees who mean well, just as a former employee of a not insignificant customer I have some residual entitlement and frustrations.

<comment><USER18> >\- You did a huge redesign ~2 years ago that was frankly underwhelming. It added some SPA like functionality splattered through out the site, and many of the operations, like adding numbers to a Twilio Copilot service, became slow and buggy.

Not only to the developer portal/backend, but to the documentation as well.

It went from something that was really straightforward and easy to use, to something that feels like you have to fight it to find what you want. I'm really curious what happened, or why this design decision was made.

It's honestly bad enough that imho there is space for somebody with a better UI/documentation to move in and compete on that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Chiming in late to say that I love TwilioQuest and I plan to max out my EXP because I just learned more about Twilio since this went live than I understood in the year I have been toying with it.

</comment><comment><USER20> This is pretty funny :) Not the easiest way to learn how to use their product, but fun :)

</comment><comment><USER21> Please work on your Programmable Fax API. It's a mess right now with 40% of inbound faxes having a status of "failed" with no additional information. Yes, I get that it's a beta (for many months now) but not showing a descriptive error message? C'mon!</comment>


In living color: Ars reviews the hacker-approved Philips Hue LEDs - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/11/in-living-color-ars-reviews-the-hacker-approved-philips-hue-leds/ <comment><USER2> So I got a set of these, they are pretty easy to hack as indicated in the article. Which is nice, I've got a Zigbee development board from Atmel that I'm planning on using to see if I can talk to the bulbs directly.

So interestingly they are 8.5W and about 600 lumens. I pulled out a compact florescent which was 23W and 1200 lumens, So in theory I could use a '2:1' bulb socket and get my 1200 Lumens with less power, or make up a 3:1 fixture and get 1800 lumens for the same amount of power. The point I'm trying to make here is that you don't necessarily give up light brightness if you can accommodate additional bulbs.

It is pretty awesome to be able to 'set the mood' although mostly I'm using them in 'reading' mode (warm white). Something the app didn't provide was 'set color based on tungsten temp' feature, that would be nice. You can sort of simulate it by using the 'set by camera' feature and put the kind of light you want shining on a neutral grey test card then select that 'color' but it isn't precise.</comment>


Ask HN: What good use can I put my ~1500 sqft irregular basement to? - <AUTHOR> I have a decent sized based basement, just about 1500 sqft in all. It's irregular as in it is not one big hall. It is fully finished however & has many rooms, but some have concrete columns in them. It has a kitchen space (no appliances), bathroom (with running water, shower, toilet) & other rooms. The obvious solution would be to rent it out as a house to a bachelor or small family. But I want to explore if I can do something better. Also all my utilities like gas, water heater, water mains etc are housed in the basement, like bang in the middle. So renting seems inconvenient. The basement however has its own separate entrance. I can also enter from within the house. It's been lying vacant for the last 2+ years & I rarely ever use it or even go downstairs. I want to be able to make some use of it & hopefully earn a little side income. What are some options? I'm willing to invest a bit if necessary, but I have no idea where to start. <comment><USER2> Is it possible a family member will need care within the next 5 years? If not could you benefit from a bulky but inexpensive energy storage - thermal mass with the charge coming from an antifreeze-filled solar water panel to the mass, then another circuit coupling the radiant floor heating ? Or electric where you're charging cheap but heavy lead acid cells (with thorough ventilation + at least one backup ventilation system) during the lowest usage times + PV and reselling back to the utility during peak usage?

From a more fun side, how about a large hot tub or "endless" swimming pool? Could even try out the swimming pool and if you don't use it convert it to a battery.

<comment><AUTHOR> No one hopefully will need care in the next 5 years. I have little kids.

Energy storage sounds intriguing, but solar means, I'll need to have them mounted on my rooftop, right? So I'm thinking that should be around $10k - $20k investment or more. But I'll get free energy & probably can sell it back to the grid. Sure something to think about.

<comment><USER2> Depends on your surroundings. Panels on the roof are very roof-unfriendly and you may need to add bracing and plan for shingle damage during the install and extra wear during maintenance. One guy near my house has PV panels in his south-facing front yard, much friendlier to the house, but a lot more susceptible to theft.

And then there's this thing [https://sparkonit.com/2019/05/24/build-thorium- reactor-home/](https://sparkonit.com/2019/05/24/build-thorium-reactor-home/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. I'll certainly check these out. But I already have plans underway for solar panels on my roof. Fighting with my HOA to get the permits etc.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Data Visualization Books - <AUTHOR> https://www.datapine.com/blog/best-data-visualization-books/ <comment><USER2> Visualization Analysis and Design by Munzner is also good.</comment>


Optimal streaming histograms - <AUTHOR> http://blog.amplitude.com/2014/08/06/optimal-streaming-histograms/ <comment><USER2> Online (i.e. single pass) estimation of quantiles is a well-studied subject – doing some literature research would have gone a long way here. Back in 2004, this was the best paper I found:

[http://ftp10.us.freebsd.org/users/azhang/disc/SIGMOD/pdf- fil...](http://ftp10.us.freebsd.org/users/azhang/disc/SIGMOD/pdf- files/058/303-space.pdf)

The technique is efficient, straightforward and has provable error bounds. It was published in 2001, so it would also be worth looking at subsequent papers that have cited it for further improvements:

[http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=6184540005789557130&...](http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=6184540005789557130&as_sdt=5,33&sciodt=0,33&hl=en)

<comment><USER3> I've found that people in industry are often unaware of recent discoveries in academia (even if they themselves were once academics). Unfortunately most of the top journals of interest to datascientists are locked behind a paywall, but sometimes Google Scholar is able to find a free copy scraped from some academic's personal site (the "All N versions" link is usually helpful unless the paper was published in an ACM or IEEE journal - those guys seem to hunt down carelessly posted papers on people's private sites).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Log-binning can be useful. However it has some disadvantages.

I think that in your case your data (server response time?) looks good because you probably have a log-logistic or log-normal distribution.

Suppose you were working with values that are exponentially distributed which is also a reasonable hypothesis for your data. In that case the log-binned histogram would like a plateau with the exception of the beginning and ending bins. In this scenario a linear-binning approach would probably be better.

Unfortunately, I think that there is no approach for bucketing that is good for all situations. Usually the best approach will depend on your data and also on what you are trying to analyze.

</comment><comment><USER5> Hmmmm... my gut reaction is to consider reframing the question.

Do you really need to know the shape of the distribution, or is it sufficient to know, say, various percentiles (e.g. 50%, 75%, 99%, 99.9%). If you're looking at metrics like response time usually 99% is all you care about. If this is the case there are efficient algorithms to estimate these values from streaming data using O(1) space with high probability bounds on error.

If you just need counts indexed by some key, then the count-min sketch might be sufficient (e.g. [http://www.auai.org/uai2012/papers/231.pdf](http://www.auai.org/uai2012/papers/231.pdf))

Finally, if you really do need to know the shape of the distribution should you be considering kernel density estimation (KDE) instead of histograms (see [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel_density_estimation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel_density_estimation))? Most people would argue you should. Looks like there are streaming KDE algorithms, though I don't know how practical they are.

</comment><comment><USER6> You might want to consider using kernel density plots rather than histograms, as histograms exhibit aliasing artifacts.

In general, binning/bucketing can be seen as filtering the empirical density function of your dataset with a box filter and then sampling. The frequency response of a box filter is the sinc function, which has a lot of energy above the Nyquist of this sampling rate. Kernel density plots with a gaussian kernel, on the other hand, can be seen as filtering the empirical density function with a gaussian filter and are thus approximately bandlimited.

</comment><comment><USER7> Crap. I wish i didn't read the HN comments page now. I read the first sentence of the article and immediately thought "you could bin on a log scale".

To be clear this isn't an area i'd consider myself all that knowledgeable. Coming up with a useful idea was an achievement.

So as i read through, comparing each proposed solution to mine, i decided i quite liked mine. Then i see that last proposal is my first idea. Great!

So over i wander to the HN comments and see that this is a common approach, i didn't just come up with a nice neat solution, i probably learned it, forgot it, and regurgitated it from my subconscious.

That sure doesn't feel as nice as the sparkly feeling i had just 3 minutes ago...

<comment><AUTHOR> That's still impressive! It took you two seconds while it took us 3 code iterations to get it right. It seems so obvious in retrospect but in the moment it can be hard to use the full range of your intuition about math. That knowledge could probably have saved us a day or two of coding.

OTOH it's extra difficult because when we did a first implementation we didn't we didn't have a full understanding of the shape of the problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The optimal number of bins has a rich statistics literature. The Freedman- Diaconis Rule is a good place to start: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedman%E2%80%93Diaconis_rule](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedman%E2%80%93Diaconis_rule)

That said, the challenge with online (streaming) data is that you have to constantly estimate the distribution you are sampling from. Someone here might know better =)

<comment><USER9> I worked in R&D for an extremely large ag company. We found that .5 or 1 STD bucket sizes seemed to work pretty well

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> [http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2011/02/08/llquantize/](http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2011/02/08/llquantize/) describes a very similar log binning technique added to dtrace a few years back. In practice, it's been one of the most useful things in the toolkit.

</comment><comment><USER11> Technique #4 would be extremely interesting if a user could click into a bucket and drop to the appropriate resolution level. Using their example, the user could click on the big yellow bar at 290 and see the .1-increment buckets for a 10-sized distribution.

</comment><comment><USER12> Strikingly similar to the problem of generating a close enough dendrogram over large data sets very quickly. Back in ~2008 I did some undergrad research on the topic to speed DNA analysis. Basically it solves your grouping problem gracefully by attempting to be within a error level at N levels. Since you are attempting N buckets this would solves your problem well. There was a very good review paper on the subject but is not in first page of google and my memory fails me completely on author (also I'm at work).

Might not meet your memory or computation constraints, but grouping is such an wide topic.

</comment><comment><USER13> Could you not keep statistics on the values that went into each bucket, and use those to redistribute the contents of the bucket when the buckets needed to be resized?

Sure, it's an estimate so you'd have some error term but you could pass that on to the new buckets. If the total error is small enough in practice it wouldn't be a problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> One of the problems we had to solve is compressing the data set so you don't need to keep too many bins around. To get one more significant figure, you need to keep 10x the number of bins. Once you have those individual bins you can always merge them in the visualization, the problem is defining them in a way that covers the distribution and doesn't take up too much space.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Hive seems to use something similar to the 2nd algorithm (merging close bins together):

[https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/hive/trunk/ql/src/java/org/...](https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/hive/trunk/ql/src/java/org/apache/hadoop/hive/ql/udf/generic/NumericHistogram.java)

</comment><comment><USER15> There are some nice, very efficient implementations of their solution #4at [http://hdrhistogram.github.io/HdrHistogram/](http://hdrhistogram.github.io/HdrHistogram/)

</comment><comment><USER16> A cute one I have been meaning to try: using a Haar wavelet as the histogram, with online updates. theory.stanford.edu/~matias/papers/wavelets-vldb00.pdf

</comment><comment><USER17> I wonder if a power of two would be better?</comment>


Ask HN: What software has improved your life the most? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER3> Okcupid - although recent dating apps are apparently more challenging, at least for a time dating sites helped nerdy people find each other, and have those awkward 'do you want to date me' conversations in a safe way.

</comment><comment><USER4> Probably some software in a medical device that helped with some simple preventive medical procedure

<comment><USER5> Yeah whatever software they use to help discover, develop and trial vaccinations too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Word processing software. I remember my first job as a lowly admin assistant in the Civil Service where my job was to manage with the team's post, file lots of pieces of paper, and deal with the Divisional Typing Pool ruled by the fearsome and never-to-be-forgotten Mrs Kagan. Word processors not only changed the office organisation structure forever, it saved me from having to approach Mrs Kagan to ask for a letter to be retyped because my boss wanted to add a couple of words "just here, and here - today if possible ... please?".

</comment><comment><USER7> well I guess we have to exclude the staples, right? operating systems, infrastructure, messengers, browsers, navi apps.

I love:

org-mode

autohotkey (windows)

firefox add-ons and userscripts

an alternative keyboard layout (and QMK for a hardware implementation)

kodi

calibre

sumatra pdf

well and including historically: I learned programming through macromedia flash

</comment><comment><USER8> Anki. Spaced repetition + testing effect made learning (math, in my case) much better and more efficient.

<comment><USER9> How did you use Anki(what kind of flashcards?) for math?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> H.264 compression, or whatever makes video on the internet work.

<comment><USER5> Fast cheap bandwidth and storage too then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Xiami, Douban, Spotify, Youtube, Bandcamp, SoundCloud, Wikipedia, RateYourMusic, Soulseek, ... no music no life!

</comment><comment><USER12> Stand ([https://getstandapp.com](https://getstandapp.com))

It reminds me to stand up once an hour.

</comment><comment><USER13> git, vs code

I do most of my homework on vs code, and use git to track and archive all my coding-related stuff to private repo. Seriously, it gives me peace of mind and euphoric joy when I finish my homework and push to the repo.

</comment><comment><USER14> Google Maps

</comment><comment><USER15> mIRC and its "powerful" mIRC scripting. Writing bots in 1999 was more interesting than nowadays.

</comment><comment><USER16> Vim, Intellij Idea, Java, Python, Bash

</comment><comment><USER17> Solitaire - <USER2>

Internet browsers - almost any one.

GUI compilers / dev environment

GIT

Excel

Word

</comment><comment><USER18> Emacs

Linux

Lisp

Python

I owe them pretty much everything.</comment>


US seizes 'largest ever' Bitcoin haul from man linked to Silk Road website - <AUTHOR> http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-10-26/us-seizes-bitcoins-from-man-linked-to-silk-road/5047832

<comment><USER2> According to some older news from when Ulbricht was arrested he was living a humble student's life, sharing his flat with two others iirc. All the while having Bitcoins worth $29 millions on his PC.

I wonder if this will speak in his favor, implying that Silk Road was just intended as a proof of concept and he never intended to make money with a drug marketplace. But probably the sheer amount of money will be held against him and he'll be treated like some kingpin.

Either way, I pity this guy. The technology was pretty soundproof and a small slipup he made years ago now ruined his life. Why didn't he leave the country after it became obvious that SR started rolling?

</comment><comment><USER3> what will this do to the BTC market when the feds liquidate their haul? Is it big enough to swallow a $29 million sell order?</comment>


Sexism pays: Men who hold traditional views of women earn more than men who don't - <AUTHOR> http://esciencenews.com/articles/2008/09/22/sexism.pays.study.finds.men.who.hold.traditional.views.women.earn.more.men.who.dont

<comment><USER2> I wonder how many "young" people they surveyed...Young people tend to be more progresive and make less money. One is not necessarily a direct result of the other...</comment>


Why Nexus One changes nothing, but Android changes everything | VentureBeat - <AUTHOR> http://mobile.venturebeat.com/2010/01/06/why-nexus-one-changes-next-to-nothing-but-android-changes-everything/ <comment><AUTHOR> I had a very similar reaction and thought process when I read about AT&T's comment about attempting to curb usage on their networks: [http://www.webdesigncompany.net/when-the-world-gives-you- lem...](http://www.webdesigncompany.net/when-the-world-gives-you-lemons-sell- lemonade/)

Since then, even AT&T have come to admit that voice lines as a concept is obsolete now and that data pipes are the business they are going to be for the foreseeable future.</comment>