Outbox vs. USPS: How the Post Office Killed Digital Mail  - <AUTHOR> http://www.insidesources.com/outbox-vs-usps-how-the-post-office-killed-digital-mail/ <comment><USER3> Anti-Post Office hatchet job:

> So having worked on the Hill they knew of the USPS's well-documented > inefficiencies. As they describe it, they "knew that the USPS would not be > able to work out its own problems, so perhaps naively, we hoped to partner > with USPS to provide an alternative to the physical delivery of postal mail > to a subset of users, hoping this would spur further innovation and cost > savings."

The Post Office is insanely efficient. The only reason it has budget problems is because Congress causes the budget problems. [http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/09/28/330524/postal- no...](http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/09/28/330524/postal-non-crisis- post-office-save-itself/)

<comment><USER4> Are you sure about that? It seems like there is nothing 'insanely efficient' about physically sending paper across the country when the recipient has indicated that no, you actually don't need to do that.

It's like the USPS has an insanely optimized implementation but inefficient algorithm for delivering mail. Change the algorithm and you can throw all your micro optimizations out the window.

The important quote from the article is this one:

> 'You mentioned making the service better for our customers; but the American > citizens aren't our customers—about 400 junk mailers are our customers. Your > service hurts our ability to serve those customers.'

This sure makes it sound like the USPS isn't so much a 'public good' as it is a private, tax payer funded business whose primary business model is advertising.

<comment><USER5> I don't think you understand how junk mail works. There are a few hundred companies in the US who print junk mail. They are located in the cities that the junk mail will eventually be delivered in. They receive huge discounts to pre-sort the mail by zip code and palletize it in such a way as to cleanly slip into the USPS's system at the last possible logistic point. It might cost a regular human being $0.49 to send a letter. A presort mailer might pay $0.12 or $0.09 or $0.07 (or less) to send a letter. But that's because the USPS provides only the last mile rather than cross-country transport.

The reason this revenue stream is so important to the USPS is logistics, overhead vs marginal cost. As long as you're delivering a couple of pieces of mail to each house every day you can price those items marginally. Average Mail Per Address (AMPA) needs to be at least 3-5 for the USPS's pricing to work. If everyone opted out of junk mail AMPA would drop into a range more like 0.5-1.5 and then there's proportionally much less in the way of marginal cost and it's all the overhead of driving/walking from one address to the next. And then the USPS has to change all the pricing to go up by 200% or more and that'll never fly in Congress.

The other problem is that reducing the mail volume by 50%-90% would result in massive layoffs of workers (which won't look good for Congress) and it would reduce influence and power for those in charge of things. Few people ever willingly accept their diminishing importance.

I'm not in favor of the USPS continuing to assault my mailbox with junk mail. But I don't think there's any hope of things getting fixed until they have such an awful year that mail stops for a while and Congress reforms their mandate. I give it maybe 20% odds of happening in the next decade.

<comment><USER6> How long has the USPS been an ad-supported company?

<comment><USER7> Brilliant insights -- both you and GP.

The USPS is the original ad-supported service where _you_ are the customer. Mind blown.

<comment><USER8> You meant "you are the product".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "You mentioned making the service better for our customers; but the American citizens aren't our customers—about 400 junk mailers are our customers. Your service hurts our ability to serve those customers."

The article blows right past this like it's insignificant. Junk mailers sort their own mail, drop ship it to the local BMC, and pay the post office for the privilege. This subsidizes the regular mail. If you can get rid of junk mail with a mouse click, it's not worth it.

The post office getting upset about ways to prevent junk mail from being delivered is just like a website complaining about Adblock.

<comment><USER10> The interesting thing here to me is how people get captured by business models.

The post office started out as an important public service. "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds." The post office is mentioned in the US Constitution because at the time it was immensely important.

But after enough time in bed with the junk mailers, they've abandoned all but a pretense of that. And it shows. They shifted from serving American citizens as a duty to serving American citizens on a platter. It happened inch by inch, I'm sure, but now they're trapped.

Let that be a lesson to anybody who's starting a business: choose your business model wisely, because over time it will win out over everything else.

<comment><USER11> The USPS is still important. For example, no private carrier has a Constitutional mandate to serve all Americans. They are essential for rural communities: for example, if you need medication but there's no pharmacy nearby, the USPS will deliver it to your house even if UPS and FedEx won't.

Also, the USPS kicks everyone's ass in time and cost when it comes to delivering small packages. For a 12-oz package from NY to SF, USPS delivers in 3 days for about $2 while FedEx and UPS start at ~5 days and $10.

<comment><USER12> I've also never had USPS hold a package because it got to me too quickly, and I've _absolutely_ had commercial carriers do that to maintain artificial separation between service tiers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What's wrong with this story is that Outbox didn't want to do the one thing that would keep it in business: make its customers fill out a form that allows a third party to accept mail on their behalf. There are plenty of businesses digitizing mail right now -- travelingmailbox.com, earthclassmail.com, amongst others. Why Outbox.com refused to go this route and instead decided to go out of business was their decision. There was a workaround ([http://travelingmailbox.com/usps- form-1583-ca](http://travelingmailbox.com/usps-form-1583-ca)) -- they just opted not to take it. That's not the USPS's fault.

<comment><USER14> Since I came to US, I've been thinking about actually using one of those. These providers seem much cheaper than their equivalents in Europe. Does anyone here have experience with any of those providers?

<comment><USER15> I use Earthclassmail extensively. It can be expensive.

However, it provides some incredibly valuable services. Mail scanning is great, but check deposit is better. However, it's only worth it if you really need a US address, move a lot, or have enough mail or check volume to justify $80/month.

<comment><USER16> I assume you write that $80/month off as a business expense, correct?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I presumed this story was going to be about the USPS monopoly on first-class mail and would involve an armed raid to shut down competition, as has happened in the past.

"The monopoly is well enforced. The USPS can conduct searches and seizures if it suspects citizens of contravening its monopoly. For example, in 1993, armed postal inspectors entered the headquarters of Equifax Inc. in Atlanta. The postal inspectors demanded to know if all the mail sent by Equifax through Federal Express was indeed "extremely urgent," as mandated by the Postal Service's criteria for suspension of the Private Express Statutes. Equifax paid the Postal Service a fine of $30,000. The Postal Service reportedly collected $521,000 for similar fines from twenty-one mailers between 1991 and 1994."

[http://www.aei.org/papers/economics/opportunities-for- antico...](http://www.aei.org/papers/economics/opportunities-for- anticompetitive-behavior-in-postal-services/)

</comment><comment><USER18> I call BS on this article. We're not getting the full story. (Using a throwaway account since I'm travelling, and on a public computer; this article pissed me off so much that I had to respond right away)

Background: I used to work for a research lab which got a majority of its funding from USPS. Worked there for ~10 years. Interacted with the USPS engineering folks in Merrifield, VA very closely. I can assure you: the USPS has some very good engineers (in the true "engineer" sense of the word). None of them would call digital "a fad". Not one.

Now, to the article: "but the American citizens aren't our customers—about 400 junk mailers are our customers." .... wrong! No postal employee will call it "junk mail". They all call it "bulk mail". I know, because I was corrected myself. :-)

"Digital is a fad"... wrong again. At one time, the USPS was the largest user of Linux; all of their mail sorting machines were running OCR on Linux boxes (they also were a huge SGI shop, with racks and racks of Octanes and O2s). Today, when mail cannot be sorted automatically, its image is sent to a remote data-entry site, where operators enter the address by hand. See the fluorescent barcode at the back? That's used to tag the mail and barcode it later, all digitally.

And finally: we, in our research lab, actually had proposed this "Outbox" style electronic mail forwarding to them back in 1998 or 1999 (the Internet was new). I don't remember the details, but there were some legal issues surrounding it that prevented it from taking off. Remember: the USPS is governed by laws (passed by Congress) that were written around the time of Ben Franklin. Fun fact: the average speed of letter sorting by hand (800 pcs/hour) was established by Ben himself, and is still the target for manual sorting.

Plus: I doubt the PMG would become personally involved in such small nonsense.

I know everyone wants to make fun of USPS; but for the price, they do a phenomenal job. People want them to compete with "the market", but don't realize that the USPS' hands are tied: they can't raise rates without approval from the Postal Rate Commission; they can't close post offices that have no customers; etc. etc. After the Civil War, when Congress wanted to give the veterans jobs, where did it send them? To the Post Office! I've heard (rumor) that even today, the USPS cannot use your discharge status against you for a job.

<comment><USER19> They drop junk at my house every day without any easy way to opt out. Do they deserve scorn? Absolutely.

<comment><USER20> Apparently, they drop bulk at your door every day. Not junk.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I was reading with great interest until I came to the heading about "disruption" at DC. Defending "ask later" practices is neither disruptive in the proper sense, nor particularly ethical.

The reporting here attempts to paint a picture of a slow, outdated USPS (and they surely are, to some extent) by way of obviously false comments ("digital is a fad"? Really? I'm supposed to believe someone at the USPS actually said this, in context? Let's critique the USPS, but let's not fabricate silly positions.)

Too bad, really, it sounds like a great idea and excellent technology, but marred by a shameful ideology.

<comment><USER22>
      "digital is a fad"? Really? I'm supposed to believe
      someone at the USPS actually said this, in context?

I agree it's unbelievably that anyone would say digital is a fad, but digitisation of physical postal mail might be a fad; it'll last as a market only as long as recipients want their letters digitally, but senders insist on sending physical mail.

Haven't all the senders caught up already? All my bills etc are electronic these days, and very few people send letters in the age of e-mail. Amazon purchases I don't want digitised. Maybe christmas and birthday cards?

<comment><USER23> This sounds much more likely, and would as you say, be a completely accurate statement.

Mail that can be digitized will eventually be digitized by its senders, whereas stuff that can't, well, that isn't changing.

I know in Australia the bulk of the mail I receive these days is ebay orders from overseas - my bills are digital, my statements are digital. The physical things that go in regular envelopes tend are stuff like new credit cards or registered mail like my passport of things.

So yeah, it does seem like an implicitly shrinking space.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> What's strange is, USPS actually seems to be aware of such services and perhaps endorses them. When I signed up for Virtual Post Mail, and proceeded to setup a mail forward on the USPS website, I got this message:

> Our records indicate that this address is a commercial mail receiving agency > (CMRA). If you are forwarding your mail to a CMRA, please enter your private > mailbox number (PMB) below.

So what did Outbox do to upset USPS?

Becuase what I fear is that my mail scanning service will suffer the same fate as Outbox, and suddenly leave me without a way to get mail. I don't live in the US anymore, but I'm still a citizen, I still pay taxes, and I still own property there. Without mail scanning there is no feasible way for someone in my position to receive my mail. How is the water company going to let me know that my bill is past due? How is the city going to let me know that my property taxes have changed? This isn't just a nuissance, this makes it impossible for me to do business in my own country.

<comment><USER25> You have a contract with a third party to receive your mail. I don't think they care about that.

Sounds like Outbox wanted to divert mail being delivered to one physical address to another for individuals.

<comment><USER26> I don't think that the point at which the mail is diverted is the issue here.

The article leads me to believe that the USPS took issue with mass- unsubscribing from junk-mail, not with having mail diverted before reaching the addressee.

<comment><USER25> The article was written from the POV of the guy who blew through alot of investor money on an idea that wasn't really thought through.

The USPS has a legal obligation to provide universal service to every physical address. They unsuccessfully tried to hack around it, while ignoring the multitude of solutions available to do so in a real (but perhaps inconvenient to them) way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I may be being too naive, but what's to stop a startup like outbox from opening up a digital version of Mailboxes Etc?

Instead of forwarding mail from current addresses or physically picking up mail from peoples' mailboxes, they'd get a new address managed by the digitization service.

<comment><USER28> I was thinking the same thing as I read the article, they MUST have had that idea, right? There must have been something preventing that model from working, why else would they try something as insane as "undelivering" mail.

<comment><USER29> It's just like a PO box. You can use it for most casual things but the hassles aren't worth it for services that require proof of physical address like driver's license, bank accounts, mortgages etc. Also using non-physical address for personal transactions raises your fraud score. E.g. your credit card goes to a PO and you ask vendors to ship to your physical address that may not even be in the same zip code or city.

The true benefit of a service like Outbox is that I don't miss important paperwork like auto registration and home insurance renewals. But the more important the service, the more stringent the requirements of proving you live at the physical address on file. I own a rental property and it is a pain to make sure all the bills and paperwork related to the property come to my primary residence. Yet I keep finding mail from different companies going to the rental address even though I have set the Billing / Contact address to my primary residence. Companies just do a "SELECT address, city, state, zip" when doing a mail merge, which usually brings up the physical address instead of the billing / contact address.

<comment><USER30> Earth Class Mail does this. They offer real street addresses as opposed to "PO boxes", so you don't run into a lot of the issues you are describing. The only thing that occasionally is a problem (but like, once in a blue moon, and usually related to buying a new iPhone) is the issue with "having a physical good sent to an address other than my billing address". However, while I've usually been able to just temporarily change my upstream AT&T address for just the day to make my order, ECM also solves this problem: you can have physical packages delivered to your ECM street address and then have the product forwarded or even go pick it up in person the same day (I live two hours away from ECM, so I'm unlikely to do this often, but I technically can in a pinch).

I have my ECM address on my drivers license (I didn't even ask the DMV to do this for me: I simply listed ECM as my mailing address, and that's the address that their policy puts on the card; I verified with them afterwards there was no mistake or misunderstanding), and have had no issues with moving my bank accounts and credit cards to my ECM service. The only people who know my physical address are utilities (though my bills actually do get sent correctly to ECM), health insurance (as the pricing is dependent on your location), and the US government (voting registration and DMV filing, though neither ever sends mail to anything but ECM).

That all said, your specific use case is somewhat different: you need the utilities to also send you bills, and they are some of the few people who actually care about having your physical address. But it isn't like Outbox could really solve this in a sane way for you either... that would involve them going through the mail of the people who are renting from you, only once every three days (so assuming your renters didn't reap the mail first), and pulling just the mail being delivered to "you" as opposed to them. If I were renting from you I'd frankly find that kind of sketch. For what misterbwong and forgottenpass are talking about, however: ECM is specifically the service they are looking for ;P.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> [http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/09/28/330524/postal- no...](http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/09/28/330524/postal-non-crisis- post-office-save-itself/)

There's a reason why the post office is going broke, and it's not necessarily bungling on their part. Blame Congress for this one.

I'm kind of shocked with how stark the PMG was though.

<comment><USER18> I really doubt that these chaps talk to the PMG. He has a lot bigger fish to fry than talk to 2 tech dweebs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> If someone wants a service like this, in my opinion Earth Class Mail is a better alternative. They are not in any way "hip" or "web 2.0" and they would never in a million years talk about "disrupting" some established legal regime: but frankly, I'm not just "ok" with that, that makes me ecstatic. I thereby see this "how the post office killed digital mail", a dream I've been successfully living now for years through one of their "less disruptive" competitors, and can do nothing but laugh.

Instead, Earth Class Mail is a service that has been in business since 2006 and they operate within the existing legal framework of mail: they are effectively the kind of service that is required to live in an RV, where a third-party receives your mail on your behalf. To make this work, you sign forms _from the post office_ that you send to Earth Class Mail, which are then kept on file to demonstrate they can legally open your mail. Maybe Outbox used the same process, maybe they didn't, but this article made it sound like Outbox is responsible for this legal framework: wrong, the ability to assign "open my mail" rights has existed for a long time.

Rather than having to have cars driving around attempting to "undeliver" your mail with some ludicrous three-day delay as Outbox did (at extreme cost to the service that calls into question whether their business model would even succeed, a fact mentioned in this article linked today, and limiting them to only even being able to think about operating in high-density regions of the country), you simply have your mail delivered to them. You can initially set this up with your local post office as you work on "moving" to ECM, and you can even do it temporarily if you just want to try it out (the post office will happily forward mail for as little as 15 days: again, this is a use case they actively support).

But frankly it is so amazingly relaxing once you "commit" and outsource your physical address. I have a lot of friends that move every couple years, and the idea that they have to change their address at the same time is silly: that is the most stressful moment to be trying to move mail delivery and you can't usually overlap the old and new addresses to buffer mistakes. In the most extreme situations, people who are traveling a lot (for whatever reason; maybe they have a job that requires them to be in random locations for weeks on end a lot, or maybe they are just kind of nomadic and stay with friends a lot as they travel the country) will tell you to send things to their current location. Outbox sort of helped with this, but the three-day delay sounded really irritating: ECM just solves this problem outright; you don't even need a real physical address at all.

Indeed, I seriously have now switched to using my Earth Class Mail address for everything: my drivers license even has that address on it (and yes, I verified with the people at the California DMV that there was no issue with this, and they technically do have my physical address on file; but their policy is to print the mailing address of the driver on the card), which makes it really easy for me to never get into an argument with anyone about what my address is: I effectively now live at Earth Class Mail in Los Angeles. The only people who know my real address are the US government (DMV and voting registration, though they happily send my voting materials to ECM), the power/cable/phone services to my apartment (again, bills go to ECM), and my health insurance company (they base pricing on where you physically reside).

They offer multiple locations around the country, so you can get an address vaguely near you or opt for one that "looks good" for your purpose (maybe you want your startup to look like it has an office in San Francisco, for example). With some of the addresses they are legitimate "street addresses" that can receive packages on your behalf, and you can either have the package forwarded to you or you can go pick it up from them if you need it _now_ and live near enough to the location. (Though, with packages, I normally just one- off deliver those to my apartment.) (I wonder if you can have them open the package and take a picture of the contents... I never asked ;P.)

<comment><USER32> Do you have any financial accounts (such as Fidelity in the US) set up using this address? How do you handle situations when their "compliance" department says "we have flagged your address as being a mailbox-type-service" and demand a physical address? Do you just give your physical address instead?

<comment><USER30> As this has not (yet?) happened to me, I cannot really tell you how I handle the situation: I presume I would give them a physical address instead and keep them as one of the few people who know where I live. As it stands, my health insurance provider knows where I live because they truly care (premiums are different in different locations). I believe I remember my bank actually putting my ECM address down as my physical residence because that was the address on my drivers license.

To be clear: I have no issue telling people my physical address; I'm not trying to hide from people ;P. I just don't want to have to think about updating addresses ever, and I really don't want to receive mail at my physical address. Most providers that do ask for physical addresses also ask for a mailing address, and almost no one mails to the wrong address. I don't mind having my physical address with my bank, as long as they aren't sending me critical mail here.

In fact, I think about physical mail so infrequently I seriously just don't check it at this point. It seriously just occurred to me that I haven't checked my physical mail in a very long time (well over a month). Let's go check it! ;P (I actually got a little concerned that I'd fail to find my mail key, but thankfully I found it without issue.) BTW: I'm pretty certain my local mail carrier hates bulk mail so much that he just refuses to deliver it to my address now.

        1 piece of mail for someone who doesn't live here
        3 cable service bills (autobilled, waste of paper)
        2 heath insurance bills (I pay these online already)
        1 power bill (keep forgetting to autobill... :()
        1 rental insurance bill (I guess, didn't open it)
        2 lawyer bills (they also e-mail these: *sigh*)
        1 notice from AT&T of their new privacy policy

So far, none of this is mail that I care about: in fact, most of it is mail I wish I could "paperless". I can check these a few times a year and it wouldn't cause me a problem, and it is difficult or impossible for me to not tell them when I move anyway (utilities, insurance, lawyer). No financial data goes to my apartment: as I had said before, I don't even think my bank has my physical address on file anymore, but even if they did I long-ago set them to paperless for my personal banking statements so it doesn't matter.

I also received:

Google Wallet card -- I asked them to send this to me a few days ago, gave them my apartment address as I wanted to get it sooner. I did guess it would arrive in an envelope like this, but it could also have arrived in a package. I also only ordered it "for fun" and so promptly forgot it would arrive here: receiving this in another few months would not be an issue.

Trademark Scams -- I have some things that are trademarked; occasionally, I get official-looking mail that tries to convince me to pay large quantities of money to random companies to "complete" or "secure" my trademark. In this case, I received two messages requesting EUR 970 to get listed in the database ipts-register.com. Fine print: "The registration on our database has not any connection with an official government organization."

So yeah: I don't use physical mail anymore :/.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Um, the existing industry doesnt use "disruption" negatively because they "don't speak the same language." Theyuse it negatively because you are talking quite literally about disrupting their business and probably putting them out of it.

Not talking about outbox and usps specifically so much as the fetishization of "disruption" the OP author buys into without question, as if the only reason to be scared of "disruptio " is a cultural misunderstanding, you're not with the program. Rather, quite obviously its bad for some existing business interests -- but also it's certainly possible to challenge the religious belief that disruptionof markets always leads to better outcomes for consumers or society as a whole.

<comment><USER23> No at this point it's used negatively because the silicon valley startup crowd have been using the word _constantly_ for the past 10 years now, in reference to every conceivable sector of industry, which, as this article perfectly highlights, they frequently don't understand in the slightest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> They didn't think about the corner cases that are part of mail. What do you do with Certified Mail? Registered Mail?

Different classes of mail have different security and other business requirements, and involving some random "disruptive" third party has many potential consequences.

I'm not sure that I understand why this was necessary for the company anyway. I subscribed to a service in 1999 that did this -- you had bills sent to a PO Box and they would scan/PDF everything for you (even ship copies on CD-ROM). They would also pay your bills for you if desired.

</comment><comment><USER34> "Maintaining a fleet of vehicles to go to every person's house every day was costing them a fortune"

Funny, that's just what the USPS is _constitutionally mandated_ to do (Article I, Section 8, Clause 7).

<comment><USER35> No, the USPS is not constitutionally mandated to deliver to your house.

The Post Office Department did not begin delivering mail to city addresses until 1863. Rural Free Delivery did not begin until 1893.

Before free delivery, you went to the Post Office yourself and asked for your mail. ("Caller service" or "General delivery", both of which still exist.)

Since the 1970s, the Postal Service has been delivering to clusterboxes. Grandfathered areas get to keep their individual mailboxes, but new greenfield development must be built with clusterboxes.

If mail volume keeps decreasing, we'll see greater contraction in free delivery. It all depends on how the politics go.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> You do wonder why post offices - everywhere - not just in the US - have not done something with electronic delivery.

If I was Postmaster General I would like to see a post office ISP that only accepted mail from government departments, local authorities, banks, hospitals, doctors, schools and other agencies. From there people could setup a forwarding address - if people wanted to just check their mail from one account, e.g. gmail, they could have the 'important stuff' rolled into it. Or they could setup POP/IMAP.

There could also be a webmail where you would be able to have highest accessibility standards. Clearly the cryptography would have to be in place so only the sender and the recipient could read the mail - a 'virtual envelope'. Naturally there would be tracking tags so they knew if someone had read that 'final demand'.

As a competitive service for banks etc. wanting to send out statements it could work very nicely. Good for trees, too.

<comment><USER37> The Swedish post does it. They already have a "companies electronically send us a PDF and we print, envelope and mail it to end customers" service, so the idea is that instead of printing it they can just forward it on to your electronic postbox. Not many agencies/companies have signed up to use it (only about 100-200 from the looks of it), so it's still pretty useless to me. [http://www.posten.se/sv/Privat/epostboxen/Sidor/home.aspx](http://www.posten.se/sv/Privat/epostboxen/Sidor/home.aspx)

There's a separate one run by the Swedish IRS, and I've gotten a few letters from them to it [http://minameddelanden.se](http://minameddelanden.se)

There's also a private service, but it also suffers from poor support - <USER2> think I've only gotten mail from a credit reporting agency there [https://www.kivra.com](https://www.kivra.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I've seen several people mention Earth Class mail as a working alternative here. I am not sure if even their lowest monthly charge would provide enough value to be worth it for my own use case, but I do have a few questions regarding it for their users..

Do you still have a mailbox at your home? If so, do you still check it regularly? If so, do you still receive bulk mail drops from postal carriers in that mailbox? I'm talking about the ones that typically are addressed to "Current Resident" and such.

Unless you are in a position that you can confidently forgo ever checking that mailbox again, it seems that you would still be receiving those and be forced to deal with them. That would take a lot of the potential out of the service for me.

</comment><comment><USER39> Can't Outbox just provide me with a c/o address, and I can update my address with anyone who intends to send me mail?

</comment><comment><USER40> These guys are doing the classic startup shuffle--pick off the profitable people and leave the some chump (aka the government) with the unprofitable ones.

Although, I'm a bit skeptical that they couldn't "undeliver" mail profitably in a city-density area like Austin. Focusing just on businesses and apartment complexes, $640/mo + mileage gets you a person twice a week, for 8 hours a day, at $10 an hour. At $5 per month per subscriber you need to collect about 150 subscribers per month to make your nut.

Really? They couldn't get 150 subscribers serviced by 1 person over 8 hours? Sounds like they didn't control their rollout density or price correctly.

This sounds more like "Waaaaaah, we're only going to be a $20 million company rather than a $2 billion company. I'm going to have to hang my head in shame at the next Skull-and-Bones barbeque. We should shut down."

</comment><comment><USER41> >the American citizens aren't our customers—about 400 junk mailers are our customer

Yup, I used to work for one of the country's largest mailers, doing direct mail strategy. Outbox, if it became widespread, would have killed this marketing channel.

</comment><comment><USER42> This makes no sense. They could have circumvented this by having customers give out their addresses as: Joe Schmo c/o Outbox PO Box whatever Closest Outbox Facility, CA 90210

Sounds like some details are missing here.

</comment><comment><USER43> I haven't received physical mail where I live in 15 years. I have all my paper bills sent to paytrust, who scans them, and then pays them per automated rules (or allows me to manually approve.) Physical Mail just goes to 650 Castro Street in Mountain View, where I get a re-mail once a month wherever I am in the world.

I lived in an apartment for about 18 months, but never asked for a key to my mailbox as there really was no reason for me to open it.

The only packages I ever need to receive at my place of residence are via FedEx/UPS.

</comment><comment><USER44> I hate to be that guy but if you popup a dialog as soon as I visit a site, I immediately click the back button.

</comment><comment><USER45> Fuck the USPS.

Seriously.

Its been obvious for at least a decade that the customers are direct mail advertisers and we're the product and we can't really opt out (I've signed up for a several opt-out services and I still get junk mail).

</comment><comment><USER46> Seinfeld covered this scenario over a decade ago, complete with visit from Postmaster General: [http://youtu.be/JpUqLjjKk4Y?t=3m20s](http://youtu.be/JpUqLjjKk4Y?t=3m20s)

</comment><comment><USER47> Can anyone vouch for any similar services in Europe (specifically in the UK)?

I change address fairly regularly, as a student, and it'd be great if I could cut out paper mail entirely.

</comment><comment><USER48> This is one of the most disingenuous articles I've read in a while. I expected something a bit more subtle from a Yale alumnus.

 _They believed that their technology could actually save the Post Office money. If consumers started to opt-in to Outbox, or other services like Outbox, then the Post Office could receive the full benefits of the stamped envelope but never have to deliver those packages, which is one of the biggest costs for the Post Office. In fact, if properly implemented, when a customer sends a letter from Austin, TX to Alaska, if the Post Office knew that they weren't going to receive the letter anyway, then the Post Office could forward the letter from Austin directly to Outbox, and never have to ship the letter across the continent._

This, for example, is just laughably wrong. Marginal cost isn't the bugbear of the USPS; universal service obligations are. As long as there's one person in Alaska who doesn't want to sign up for digital mail (possibly because they can't reliably connect to it in Alaska), then the USPS has to fly planes or sail boats up there to deliver the mail _anyway_. And as Outbox themselves discovered, moving mail around for individual customers is hideously expensive. It can be made efficient in cities where there is sufficient population density, but something like 1/3 of US addresses are on rural routes and of course delivery to those is more expensive. Even if half the customers on rural routes sign up for a service like Outbox, there's no promise that they'll be the ones farthest away from sorting offices, so mail carriers will need to travel more or less the same routes even if they are serving a lower number of customers, plus all customers will want packages delivered because packages have physical rather than purely informational content. Unfortunately, the profit margin on Package elivery is only about 1/3 that of first class mail delivery, which continues to decline in volume at about the same rate that demand for package delivery increases, leaving the USPS in a now-in situation which requires it to balance the books through cuts rather than investment and growth for the foreseeable future: [http://about.usps.com/strategic-planning/five-year- business-...](http://about.usps.com/strategic-planning/five-year-business- plan-2012-2017.pdf)

I loathe junk mail with a passion and it really irritates me that I have no way to opt out from it, that the USPS is required to inefficiently front-load all its fiscal obligations as if they were payable tomorrow, and a whole bunch of other things. But by ignoring the legal operating constraints imposed by Congress on the USPS and the resulting necessity of dealing with bulk mailers, the author is doing his readers a huge disservice by offering trite solutions to knotty problems, essentially arguing that the USPS should pick up the costs of mail forwarding on behalf of a service which reduces the utility (and thus revenue) of the USPS's largest income stream (bulk delivery).

 _In 2014 Derek was selected for Forbes ' top 30 under 30 list for law and policy and as a 2014 Global Leader of Tomorrow, for thought leadership and activism on NSA surveillance and innovation policy._

I'm pretty sure that if the USPS had been offering to open, scan, digitally archive, and destroy your physical mail for the last decade as Derek says they should have been, he'd be writing a similarly indignant rant about big government overreach and the crowding out of private competitors, regardless of assurances about strict siloing or privacy controls.

</comment><comment><USER49> What a WASTE.

<comment><USER50> Don't Ever Antagonize The Horn

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Did these guys really think a government monopoly that has operated the same way for over 200 years was going to change their procedures to accommodate their startup idea?

<comment><USER12> I was able to get a package sent across the country in three days, delivered to someone's door, and watch its progress online for $5.60 in 1814?

<comment><USER51> Well, it would take 3 months and your would get your progress by telegraph, but otherwise, yes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> This is such bull. How could any postal service in good conscience (or legally for that matter) co-operate with a service which consists of opening other people's mail?

Any postal service should deliver mail to the addressee, unopened and unchanged. Any deals that put that mail in the hands of third parties should be a no-go to start with.

And they also shouldn't be offering this themselves. Closed envelopes stay closed. If that means postal services are not profitable, so be it. That was never the reason they existed in the first place.</comment>


Ask HN: I registered a domain that has a Twitter account assigned to it - <AUTHOR>

I just registered a nice domain name for a new project. Let's call it xyz.com. The domain was free, but has been in use before.
I noticed the twitter handle @xyz is registered, has a text and a logo of the project that previously was on the domain. It has not twittered anything though. It has a link to xyz.com in its description and it is assigned to email@example.com
What would you guys do? Just reset the twitter password and use it? Try to contact Twitter? Try to contact the previous owner? So far, I was not able to find any contact info. <comment><USER2> Just take it: the account is unused, and you did an honest try to reach the former owner.</comment>


Ask HN: Remedy for sagging inspiration? - <AUTHOR>

When you're working on something and just start to feel, what's the point? Is this going anywhere? Will anyone care? Should I just give up?
What do you do to stay inspired?
Do you read something?
Do you have some kind of ritual to get you back on track?
Any inspiration secrets?
I'm having a pretty low day today and could use some hopeful advice. <comment><USER2> Everyone has low days. When I do, I just power down and do something else.

I can't imagine letting a low day discourage me. My work is way too important for that.

If you ever think "What's the point," "Is this going anywhere?" "Will anyone care?" or "Should I just give up?", that tells me that you're not sure about how important your project is. Get sure. Is it too important to let a few speed bumps discourage you? Decide. If it's that important, then get back to work. If not, do something else. There's no in between.

</comment><comment><USER3> Tune out for awhile. I find shutting out everything I normally do (like watching TV, playing games, and especially anything work related) for a day or two, and reading a book helps a lot.

If you need to, step away from your normal environment too. In general I find that breaking away from what I'd do "normally" really works best to reset my brain. Your mileage may vary, but give it a try. Go to a park, bring a book and lunch and just disconnect.

</comment><comment><USER4> Are you just burnt out? When you're low on inspiration, taking a day to do everything but work can do wonders. Get out the house, see some friends.</comment>


The Twitter Streaming API and why you should use it - <AUTHOR> http://fenn.posterous.com/why-and-how-to-use-the-twitter-streaming-api

<comment><USER2> Fenn are you using this with adioso?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not actively in production yet, though that was the original purpose for writing it - I realised it was useful so thought I'd decouple it and release it as a standalone opensource library.

<comment><USER2> _"... I realised it was useful so thought I'd decouple it and release it as a standalone opensource library. ..."_

Beaut.</comment></comment></comment>


Students launch camera to edge of space, snap pics of Earth - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/09/21/space.camera.icarus.ireport/index.html <comment><USER2> See also: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=520751>

Quite a lot of discussion there - worth reading to avoid saying the same things over and over.

See also: <http://space.1337arts.com/>

Pictures and videos.</comment>


Medical Equipment Crashes During Heart Procedure Because of Antivirus Scan - <AUTHOR> http://news.softpedia.com/news/medical-equipment-crashes-during-heart-procedure-because-of-antivirus-scan-503642.shtml <comment><USER2> This seems appropriate: [http://xkcd.com/463/](http://xkcd.com/463/)</comment>


Show HN: Plasmyd, a platform for scientists to discuss papers - <AUTHOR>

We're trying to create a space for scientific discussion about papers online, we'd love some feedback.<p>http://plasmyd.com/ <comment><USER2> Love the name!

I'm curious, how do you differentiate yourself from Academia.edu ?

<comment><USER2> aakil: Not sure why, but your comment is [dead]. Here's your response for anyone who has showdead off:

 _aakil said: Thanks! Academia is more a social network for scientists, whereas we're aiming to be a discussion platform. So, our site has a search engine that lets you search papers like you would in pubmed and on top of that, you can start discussions._

Thanks for the explanation =)</comment></comment>


They're Tracking When You Turn Off the Lights - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/articles/theyre-tracking-when-you-turn-off-the-lights-1413854422

<comment><USER2> Mr. Koonin would appear to be an excellent candidate for an analyst position with the intelligence community:

"It's like when Galileo first turned the telescope on the heavens," said Mr. Koonin. "It's just a whole new way of looking at moons."</comment>


Outschooling in the Bay Area - <AUTHOR> http://amir.io/outschooling-in-the-bay-area <comment><USER3> I have homeschooled my kids for four years now, and I think this article does a great job at dispelling common myths. The "socialization" myth is the biggest, but if you look at homeschool teenagers, they are much more well socialized in interacting with adults in the real world. One point I would have liked to have seen: the number of homeschool parents who are former teachers. More than half of our homeschool friends are former teachers. This means these parents worked in the public school system, and when it came time to send there kids decided "nope, I'm not sending my kids through that system".

As for startup ideas: I want MOOC aimed at younger kids. Right now the closest thing we have is Khan Academy, and it's pretty good, but a MOOC on a specific subject, with a series of videos, and questions, and interactive activities would be a big help.

<comment><USER4> School is so different from any other environment you'll encounter as an adult that I can't really see how learning "socialization" there is beneficial? Maybe if you plan on doing time in prison? (I'm only half joking) The only time I really experienced a similar environment as an adult was my first job during college at a retail store.

As to your point about former teachers. My mom, who's a former teacher, decided to home school's my much younger sister last year. She's been much happier and more productive since then. She still spends time with other kids her age during archery practice, reading club etc...

However, she actually has time to read books that she likes after school instead of spending 2 hours a night on homework. She was literally spending almost 2 hours a night on homework in _elementary_ school. The amount of stress her teachers put on her to perform on standardized tests was obscene.

<comment><USER5> Obligatory....

[http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html)

"And that, I think, is the root of the problem. Nerds serve two masters. They want to be popular, certainly, but they want even more to be smart. And popularity is not something you can do in your spare time, not in the fiercely competitive environment of an American secondary school.

Alberti, arguably the archetype of the Renaissance Man, writes that "no art, however minor, demands less than total dedication if you want to excel in it." I wonder if anyone in the world works harder at anything than American school kids work at popularity. Navy SEALs and neurosurgery residents seem slackers by comparison. They occasionally take vacations; some even have hobbies. An American teenager may work at being popular every waking hour, 365 days a year."

And...

"Public school teachers are in much the same position as prison wardens. Wardens' main concern is to keep the prisoners on the premises. They also need to keep them fed, and as far as possible prevent them from killing one another. Beyond that, they want to have as little to do with the prisoners as possible, so they leave them to create whatever social organization they want. From what I've read, the society that the prisoners create is warped, savage, and pervasive, and it is no fun to be at the bottom of it.

In outline, it was the same at the schools I went to. The most important thing was to stay on the premises. While there, the authorities fed you, prevented overt violence, and made some effort to teach you something. But beyond that they didn't want to have too much to do with the kids. Like prison wardens, the teachers mostly left us to ourselves. And, like prisoners, the culture we created was barbaric."

A lot of parents get their kids involved in activities which aren't necessarily for the good of the child except to minimise e chances of falling to the bottom of the popularity ladder. A ton of effort and money is spent trying to fit in at school - and as most of us recall - it all simply vanished the minute you walk out the high school gates, in the same way a prisoners society is irrelevant the moment they are released back into the real world.

It really is madness.

<comment><USER6> I'm sorry but I gotta call bullshit on this. I see this opinion so much, on here and throughout pop culture, but I don't think it's true.

From my high school experience, popularity boils down to social awareness, and inversely, social ineptitude. It really has nothing to do with book smarts. It's not a zero sum game. You can be smart and popular. In fact most popular people are smart from my experience.

Most of the popular kids from my high school, 4 years later, are still popular, have really hot girlfriends/boyfriends, and are doing great things with their lives. The vast majority of the unpopular kids from my high school are still pretty weird and aren't doing so hot (although not nearly as weird as they were in high school).

I know it's not a popular thing to say but some people just get dealt a better hand than others.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure how much I agree with the essay, but you really need to give it more than 4 years. By 10 years out, most people from my high school had leveled out to a degree--the weird kids were mostly married and starting to have kids, the popular kids were married and starting to have kids. Things like hot girlfriends/boyfriends didn't really matter--they'd all pretty much matured. One other thing I'll point out, the most attractive girl from my graduating class definitely wasn't the most attractive girl when we graduated.

That being said, we had 2 distinct cliques of popular/smart kids, both of these groups were in honors/AP classes. Group A was more popular. Group B less popular (but still more popular than the other various groups), but smarter. These groups started in 8th grade when the school separated the gifted program into 2 groups (I was in Group B btw).

Group A (with very few exceptions) partied through college and then married young. They ended up doing about as well as all the non-popular kids from high school.

Group B partied less, studied harder, married later, and is making much more money than Group A.

I think popularity predicts success to a point, i.e., popularity has diminishing returns. Group A cared too much about the rewards that came with being popular in high school, so they spent too much time maintaining their status. The kids in group B were popular enough to get by, but they worked harder on other things.

<comment><USER6> Yea I definitely agree with you there.

I think it's two camps, the socially aware people, and the socially inept people.

The socially inept people basically have some behavioral flaw that they themselves cannot see or understand. Usually it takes until way after high school to figure it out, like being in a dysfunctional household, or autism, or cerebral palsy, or something.

Then there's the normal kids. AKA group A and B in your comment.

_________________________

Anyway my conspiracy-theory-of-the-day, and why I posted that comment in the first place, is that homeschooling usually puts them into the socially inept camp.

Reason being, these kids are basically being 100% controlled by their parents. They only have exposure to two sets of ideals and beliefs (their parent's) for their entire upbringing. It'd only work if the parents were perfect and somehow treated their child as a true equal (or if they have like 10+ siblings or something). School mitigates that risk by having another "ground base", out of control of their parents, to turn to.

I think the whole "everything changes" thing happens because you move out of your parents house, not because HS ended.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> That's a very interesting perspective that resonates with my own experience growing up. Although for a completely different reason (collapse of the Soviet system and with it the funding for good schools), parents in my neighborhood banded together to create a sort of private alternative to the state run monster that was imploding.

While we still had traditional classrooms and a centralized place of learning, the groups were much smaller (10-15 kids) and the programs studied were very different from the state run schools. We covered all the basics in ~25% of the time and the rest was advanced or very creative. My favorite was a visiting professor from MGU (Moscow State University) teaching 5th graders how to translate Babylonian Cuneiform, including how to infer meaning of writing that no spoken reference exists for. Not really useful right now, but is the very definition of cool when you are a kid!

I've been pondering how to replicate some of these experiences for my future kids and this is definitely interesting.

<comment><USER8> >My favorite was a visiting professor from MGU (Moscow State University) teaching 5th graders how to translate Babylonian Cuneiform, including how to infer meaning of writing that no spoken reference exists for. Not really useful right now, but is the very definition of cool when you are a kid!

Not just when you're a kid. I'm 34 and that sounds awesome.

<comment><USER9> As an adult, I find it cool too, but I can't think of a single kid I know that would be remotely interested in it. Half of them would probably be rolling their eyes before the second word.

<comment><USER7> That's the talent of true educators, present things kids would normally ignore in a fascinating way.

<comment><USER10> This effect is hopelessly swamped by what kids are interested in. It exists, but it's just not strong enough to be helpful at any kind of scale.

<comment><USER11> You don't necessarily have to compete with what they are interested in. You have to compete with the boredom of sitting still at their desk for hours on end while doing trivial homework/reading assignments. _Everything_ is exciting at that point and may foster a lifelong addiction... hobby.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I run an education startup that has unexpectedly attracted a lot of homeschooled students/parents.

The author asserts, "this is the community where experimentation ... to educational approaches is happening the fastest", and I am finding that to be true. The parents are more open-minded and the students are more self-driven.

In fact, it feels likely to me that any dramatic change to the education system as a whole will start with the homeschool community, if it ever comes at all. So, my advice to other education entrepreneurs is that this is a good market to start with.

The author's big conclusion - an impending unbundling of education - is really interesting to me. It aligns with my own prediction (and the basis for my startup), which is that students/parents will have a stronger say in who the right teacher is for them, for any given subject. And, with tools enabled by tech/internet, the best teachers will be able to scale up what they do and reach many thousands of students.

<comment><USER13> What is the startup you run? Would like to know..

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> _I first became interested in homeschooling several years ago after a friend with six kids began homeschooling in San Francisco out of necessity - <USER2> public school system wanted to send each of her kids to a different school. Instead of hiring six Ubers each morning she decided to start homeschooling her kids herself._

Can someone explain how something like this even happens? I'm used to a system which assigns you a school based on your address/space. If space constraints change, the child is generally not kicked out. Exceptions are usually made to space constraints so that younger siblings may attend the same school as their older siblings. I can understand an elementary, a middle and a high school but that is only three different schools.

<comment><USER15> That line interested me as well but for a different reason. Do schools in San Francisco not have an obligation to transport the children that are assigned to them?

Actually, I just looked it up the SFUSD page and it appears they do, and they offer school buses as I suspected. So the rationale for homeschooling by this person seems, well, irrational. Why would she need to hire six cars when buses would come get the kids?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Having been homeschooled myself, I can attest to most of the advantages he describes. Personalized education is a very powerful thing, especially for what he calls "asynchronous learners".

</comment><comment><USER17> Kudos to Amir in explaining the outshooling movement so well. I always had a negative view of home-schooling, but his explanations of why more parents are doing it today made sense. In many cases, kids can learn a lot more and remain creative. The big drawback still is that one parent would need to stay home, but Amir did mention that this could be changing.

</comment><comment><USER18>
      For various reasons, the mainstream regard homeschooling as
      a niche approach suitable only for the weird or the wealthy.
      That's a prejudice that doesn't reflect the reality of the
      growing movement I've observed in the Bay Area.

I'd like to see the author back this claim up, rather than ask us to trust him. Homeschooling is a feasible choice for families where one parent does not have to work full time, which rules out many poorer families.

This is a roundabout way of saying that the idea that homeschooling (or "outschooling") is the future is, frankly, a pipe dream. It is and always will be a niche option.

<comment><USER19> > I'd like to see the author back this claim up, rather than ask us to trust > him. Homeschooling is a feasible choice for families where one parent does > not have to work full time, which rules out many poorer families.

In the Bay Area, this would likely rule out families with incomes below $90k and one or more kids, assuming they want at least a 2BR apartment.

<comment><USER18> My impression is that Amir only had people like himself in mind when he wrote this article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> barry-cotter I'd say the thesis of the article is that homeschooling will become more popular and have a large impact on the development of instructional methods in public schools in the future. The first may be true, the second is not.

The main factors militating against homeschooling are conformity, money and logistics. As homeschooling becomes ever more mainstream the weirdness hit people take for it will lessen. Money and logistics are the big things. For homeschooling, even unschooling, you need at least one responsible adult nearby and available, usually a SAHM. That means homeschooling is restricted to the upper middle class, people in rural areas with cheap housing or people who are really, really willing to sacrifice for it. If everyone around you is on two incomes and you're on one that better be an excellent income or you will need to sacrifice a lot.

Homeschooling will have no effect on school instruction, none. The things mentioned in the article could almost all have been written any time since the 60's. The only exception is MOOCs, which are mostly equivalent to community college for high school students.

Alfie Kohn and John Taylor Gatto have been beating the drum on how awful the overwhelming majority of schools are for decades to no effect. The Sudbury/Summer hill/democratic schools movement grew and then receded in the middle of last century.

And what's the latest big thing in education? Ability tracking instead of age tracking, the smallest, least disruptive, obviously good change to the current system? No, it's No Child Left Behind.

Just give up hope already. There will be no reform.

<comment><USER20> > That means homeschooling is restricted to the upper middle class, people in > rural areas with cheap housing or people who are really, really willing to > sacrifice for it. If everyone around you is on two incomes and you're on one > that better be an excellent income or you will need to sacrifice a lot.

Elizabeth Warren has written an excellent book describing the pitfalls of two- income families that send their children to public schools. It's called "The Two Income Trap".

[http://www.amazon.com/Two-Income-Trap-Middle-Class- Parents-G...](http://www.amazon.com/Two-Income-Trap-Middle-Class-Parents- Going/dp/0465090907/)

In it, she demonstrates that having two incomes isn't the advantage that you might intuitively think it is. Actually, having a single income and homeschooling (or outschooling) can make a family more resilient and flexible, for two main reasons:

1\. A second income earner can be brought in if something happens to the employed spouse. Two-income families are already tapped out.

2\. Location. If the family doesn't enroll their kids in a public school, they are free to live wherever they want, so long as the breadwinner can still commute. This cuts expenses way down. No longer do they have to compete with two-income earners for homes in a particular school district.

So, while having a parent remain at home is certainly a different lifestyle, it isn't clearly something that can only work for the wealthy. I know many homeschooling families who would not be described as wealthy.

<comment><USER21> > 1\. A second income earner can be brought in if something happens to the > employed spouse. Two-income families are already tapped out.

That's a _very_ specious statement. The second income earner would have to begin a job search at a point when their secondary social network is weakest for that task.

In addition, the primary income rarely goes down due to accident. It is more likely that the primary income goes down due to a area effect: big employer goes under, depression in the general economy, etc. These will make it even harder for the second income to come online.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Like many important things in America, children are neglected. Everybody gets divorced even if they have kids. And everybody works even if they have a spouse that works, even if they have kids. And we send our kids to public schools where they learn nothing besides how to be thick skinned. And we are surprised when the next generation is filled with even more stupid ass holes.

</comment><comment><USER23> This is a staggering and damning indictment:

"It only takes 2-3 hours of study per day to keep up with the regular school curriculum"

The sheer waste of life that implies about children in 'regular school', let alone the staff that provide services for them, is staggering.

<comment><USER24> A big component of school is just glorified daycare. Lots of lower income families send their kids to school mainly for that purpose.

<comment><USER25> Daycare or not, why is income relevant here? Rich or poor alike, daycare or learning alike, kids go to school for a multitude of reasons including socialization, applied skills (shoe-tying, sharing, etc.), and exposure to things besides television and iPads, none of which hinge on income.

<comment><USER24> Sorry, I should have clarified. Lower income people could not afford the cost of sending the children to daycare if schools actually sent students home after 3 hours each day.

Where I grew up, school became the social safety net for children from low income backgrounds. If the temperature dropped to -10F, they would still not cancel school because the low income kids received better heat and better meals from the school.

My point is that in many cases, school isn't nearly as much about learning as it is to have a safe and stable place for children from unstable households.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Somebody do this: Uber/TaskRabbit for homeschool teachers. I'd love to get together with ~10 sets of parents, have everyone kick in $15-20k/year each year, and maybe a place to host classes, and hire a bright, motivated teacher. The company would provide the core logistics/materials for passing the Common Core tests, and the teachers and parents would have the flexibility to design around that. It'd be cheaper than private school and less child abuse than subjecting your kids to the public school system.

<comment><USER18>
      > Have everyone kick in $15-20k/year each year
      > It'd be cheaper than private school

That's comparable to the most expensive private schools

<comment><USER27> Yeah. Off the top of my head I know a private high school that cost 26k/yr, but you're correct when we look at all the data: [http://www.privateschoolreview.com/tuition-stats/private- sch...](http://www.privateschoolreview.com/tuition-stats/private-school-cost- by-state)

        > The private elementary school average is $7,355 per year and the private high school average is $13,248 per year.

<comment><USER28> Wow that's 2x more expensive than my college was. I think some public schools are great as long as you tell the student that they are there to learn.

This way it's completely free for the parent and the student learns to be self-motivated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have no prejudices against home schooling but it takes quite a leap of faith to take a kid out of regular schools and start with it. Particularly if the school is 'good enough' such that the kid is doing well, even though it's plainly obvious how inefficient the schooling is.

The big issue for me is the vast difference between learning rates and attitude between kids, but the insistence on keeping them together on an arbitrary set of calendar dates of birth, rather than aptitude or interests.

Some (most?) parents plainly don't care and are just happy to get the kids out of the house and in someone else's care. These kids are generally disruptive and are destined to have a low level of education. I see the need to keep trying with them despite the low achievement rate, yet at the same time I see the need to let motivated learners race ahead at their own speed.

Throw in the murky issues of government funding, political interference in curriculum and entrenched power structures like teachers unions and school boards and it's not clear to me how a better model emerges from it all.

</comment><comment><USER29> This is not directly relevant to the article, but I see people look at public/private school v. homeschool as if it's a zero-sum game. Many families are unable to have a parent stay home the entire day(whether due to money or due to the parent liking their career-who wants an unhappy, bored teacher all day?), but ideally "schooling" should be going on in the home as well as in school. In public school I learned little of value past socialization (I did have interaction with peers, something my family would not have been able to give me on a regular basis if I was homeschooled) but I learned a lot on my own time and was encouraged by my parents to do this. Most children who are too ahead of the public school curve to benefit from it are smart enough to teach themselves (with some help from parents in the evenings if needed.)

</comment><comment><USER30> Is flexi-schooling heard of in USA? It is using a mixture of school based and non-school learning. In essence it is using a local school as a service rather than adopting its regime wholesale.

Out-of-schooling or outschooling is called "education otherwise" (EO) in the UK following legislation referring to a parent's responsibility to ensure their child either attends school or gets a sufficient education otherwise than in school.

I'm glad they've made the distinction with home-schooling, which EO people in the UK usually use to refer to mimicking school at home, having a "classroom" and a parent acting as a teacher. Most non-school based learning is referred to as "home-schooling" or "home education" by outsiders it seems and very little of it is actually home-schooling; this leads to a quite wrong view of kids who're getting educated outside of school as being shut-ins locked away from other kids and feeds in to the "not attending school means they lack socialisation" fallacy.

We started flexi-schooling to some success but in the UK it's up to the individual headteacher (how's that for a centrally planned education system) to allow it or not and our's deferred to the governors who basically thought, and expressed, that the only way to learn anything is in a school. My wife and I are both graduates with science degrees working in our own creative business, she has a teaching qualification and we've both been leaders with kids organisations for many years; we work in a semi-teaching role and I've done IT education with individual adults. Apparently either of us could educate a class of 30 kids, we do on occassion (sometimes out of school), but educating our own child(ren) like that or a small group of EO kids is apparently impossible.

Anyway, we did flexi-schooling for a year (1 day in 10 out of school, we wanted 1 in 5) without authorisation with the eldest child [ie in opposition to the school's expressed desire] - tests showed he was excelling despite the schools anticipation of abject educational demise.

Then the government brought in fines for non-authorised absence from school. This has weighed heavy, if we had the funds we'd just continue - it's worth it - but we don't have funds and so we've been unable to continue with what we consider (and the evidence suggests) is the best paedagogical approach for this particular child. The legislation is intended to stop people from taking their children on holiday in school time and their is scope in the system to accommodate flexi-schooling - and legislative support in the Education Act (and to a lesser extent the ECHR).

Were our child physically disabled, or indeed mentally challenged rather than excelling (just bright, not 'gifted' incidentally) it seems the school would have given greater concessions. Catering for those with exceptional needs is an area in which flexi-schooling is often accepted and used to great effect.

</comment><comment><USER31> I have one point:

* The reason why we have schools is that parents can go to work. Sad but true.

</comment><comment><USER32> "Normal schools can't personalize the curriculum and so deal poorly with asynchronous learners."

Couldn't agree more! Universities tend to be much worse in this aspect.

</comment><comment><USER33> The problem with homeschooling is that in much of the country "homeschooling" = "Jesus rode a dinosaur and owned Exxon stock, and so should you" level of misinformation (I'm exaggerating, but only a little).

I guess it's less of a factor in this neck of the woods.

<comment><USER34> I'm not sure what you're encountering, but I have yet to meet anyone that teaches that Jesus rode a dinosaur and owned Exxon stock, or anything remotely resembling it.

One family comes to mind, where I have to question both their ability and motivation behind homeschooling, but that's out 100+ homeschool families we know. Even so, they're the parents, so it's their call.

That said, the success is largely based on the parents' motivation. If they're out to provide a better customized, faith-based, talent-specific, or special- needs accommodating learning environment, that's radically different than doing it to brag about what a great parent a person is, due to the extra hardship.

Beyond that, not everyone is qualified to do it, as it takes a certain skillset, education level, preparedness, and patience level that isn't ubiquitious. Some of that can be accomdated through homeschool enrichment classes, co-ops, and the aforementioned online learning.

<comment><USER35> > I'm not sure what you're encountering, but I have yet to meet anyone that > teaches that Jesus rode a dinosaur and owned Exxon stock, or anything > remotely resembling it.

I had the same reaction as the previous poster; I'm from rural Idaho, where in my experience with it, "homeschooling" is a transparent veil for "too fundamentalist for government-run schools" (which in Idaho, is terror at a very special level). I'm sure it's not that way everywhere, and I'm sure that not all rural homeschooling parents are doing so for religious reasons. But there are places like my hometown, where that is primarily the case.

<comment><USER36> ^ This. I have family that homeschools and it's for this reason, unfortunately. I also come from a fundamentalist background and almost all the families I know who homeschool do so to keep their kids away from the "ways of the world."

A lot of these kids (anecdotally) ended up seeming pretty weird to me. I've always wondered though if it was the homeschooling or religious schooling that was the reason, though I'm inclined to believe the latter.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Streem – a new programming language from Matz - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/matz/streem <comment><USER2> I am glad that someone is working on a new stream processing language, it is a very interesting paradigm. However I hope that they provide some very robust tools for controlling input splitting. As I have spent too much time fighting with awk and wishing it was more flexible(it is frustrating always having exactly two levels of splitting with only matchers on the first and only inverse splitting on the second).

As is you would have to put in filters to resplit input into lines and that is very messy for something that you will need/want to do very often.

For example if you wanted to parse by character it would be wonderful to be able to do the following:

      STDIN | /./{|c|
        # stuff
      }

Even better would be if you took it a step further and offered something like regex pattern matching for the block input. e.g.

      STDIN | /\w+/{|word|
        /house/ {
          # when word is house
        }
        /car/ {
          # when word is car
        }
        {
          # default case
        }
      }

<comment><USER3> I'd like to recommend a python command line utility called pyp. It allows you to do python string manipulation on text streams using the standard pipe operator.

[https://code.google.com/p/pyp/](https://code.google.com/p/pyp/)

<comment><USER4> Yes, pyp is interesting. So are some other roughly similar Python tools for doing pipe-like stuff. I had blogged about some of them here, a while ago, including pyp, osh, and pipe (not the Unix pipe system call, but a Python module):

Some ways of doing UNIX-style pipes in Python:

[http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2011/09/some-ways-of-doing-unix- st...](http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2011/09/some-ways-of-doing-unix-style-pipes- in.html)

And that later inspired me to create an experimental tool called pipe_controller:

Swapping pipe components at runtime with pipe_controller:

[http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2012/10/swapping-pipe- components-a...](http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2012/10/swapping-pipe-components- at-runtime.html)

The above post links (recursively) to a few others, also by me, describing a couple of other ways of using pipe_controller, including this one:

Using PipeController to run a pipe incrementally:

[http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2012/09/using-pipecontroller-to- ru...](http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2012/09/using-pipecontroller-to-run- pipe.html)

and also includes the link for it on my Bitbucket account.

There's also plumbum, another such Python module.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you ever meet Matz, talk to him about programming languages. While he gets some flak for all the problems of his original hobby project (Ruby), he obviously loves programming languages and gives things more thought then people give him credit for. I had the chance to talk to him while I was still a student and full of ideas how the language could be made "better" and he shot them all down. For good reasons, as I know nowadays. So I always love seeing him building languages.

I shared a small story about him and languages quite a while ago, I guess it fits here as well: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6562979](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6562979)

<comment><USER6> Does he really get a "lot of flak" for Ruby? While I know not everyone loves Ruby, it seems crazy to me that people would denigrate Matz on a personal level...to me (admittedly, a novice in designing languages), Ruby always seemed well-thought out...that is, the trade-offs do not seem out of line given the philosophical benefits, and not everyone can make claim to turning a personal project into a worldwide language.

Also, he seems like a nice guy, not the type to be drawn into the kind of flareups in which he would draw flak.

<comment><USER7> I don't think so many people have a problem with Ruby the language so much as the culture around Rails.

<comment><USER8> What would be the point of blaming Matz for that?

<comment><USER7> Well, quite.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> *Yukihiro Matsumoto, creator of Ruby

I'm not sure everyone is familiar enough with Ruby to know who Matz is.

<comment><USER10> If they don't know who Matz is, are they likely to know who Yukihiro Matsumoto is?

EDIT: Interesting fact: I believe this is now my most downvoted comment in five years on HN, at effectively -7. Never would have guessed. I'm not exactly sure what it says, but I thought it was an interesting data point.

<comment><USER11> I, for one, remember the full name but not "Matz"

<comment><USER12> That's where I am, I didn't realize it until I got down to the copyright.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Why do most implementations of FizzBuzz special case % 15? I haven't ever really understood this. Maybe it's just my math-y background, but it always seemed to me you should just check mod 3 and mod 5 without an else between them, concatenating Fizz and Buzz.

Can anyone else comment on this? Most canonical FizzBuzz programs special case 15, and I don't get it.

<comment><USER14> just because 15 HAPPENS to be a concatenation of the output of 3 and the output of 5 today doesn't mean it will be tomorrow. If I said "say Fizz for multiples of 3, Buzz for multiples of 5, and 'this is a silly coding problem' for multiples of 3 and 5 then you'd have to rewrite your code.

Some of us know that clients ALWAYS change their minds, specs are rarely equivalent to the end result, and code against future changes that are trivial to account for in advance.

<comment><USER15> For any implementation you can manufacture an example which will require a person to re-structure their code.

Additionally, using %15 is not DRY. If the spec changes from saying "Fizz" on multiples of 3 to saying "Fizz" on multiples of 4, then you will have to also update 15->20\. If you forget to do this, you have a bug.

The correct implementation is dependent on the problem's context, and such context is not available with the FizzBuzz problem.

<comment><USER14> Part of my point (which i obviosuly didn't communicate well) is that Fizz concatenated with Buzz is a premature optimization. It's the developer taking advantage of a linguistic coincience. The instructions are to output 3 different strings based on %3, %5, or %3 and %5. I have never seen a set of fizzbuzz instructions that actually specified that the last option should be a concatenation of the 1st two. It's always specified as a 3rd string that people independently notice is a concatenation of the two.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm not really a programming language expert, but it seems to me that having an implementation being the spec wouldn't be a good idea. If the Streem implementation has a bug, then the bug becomes the authoritative behavior. Any platform specific quirks would also make it difficult to have defined behavior.

<comment><USER17> Yep, welcome to Ruby!

To be fair, a spec with tests was reversed out of the ruby implementation[1], so things have improved a bit.

1\. [http://rubyspec.org/](http://rubyspec.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> At the very least, it's going to be amazing to watch a master language designer build a new language from the ground up.

That said, I'm incredibly optimistic about a new Matz language. If I was going to guess, the syntax will be much lighter and the semantics will make VM optimization much easier than in Ruby.

<comment><USER19> dude, the man publishes 3 files, claims he's going to make a new programming language, and it hits the front page of hackernews -- Matz has some power there.

<comment><USER20> It's not power, it's credibility. If someone who has never done anything says they are going to accomplish something large people are skeptical. If someone who already created a successful and highly adopted programming language says they are making a new one people are rightly intrigued.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Would be cool if it would incorporate some thinking and concepts from Flow- based programming [1], as that is AFAIK the most comprehensive architecture covering all the aspects of asyncronous concurrent processing that one might run into (multiple in/out-ports, channels with bounded buffers, sub-stream support, etc etc).

[1] [http://www.jpaulmorrison.com/fbp/](http://www.jpaulmorrison.com/fbp/)

[2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow- based_programming](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow-based_programming)

</comment><comment><USER22> Reminds me a lot of Elixir's |> operator, which does the exact same thing. Nice! Curious how it'll turn out to compare with Elixir on other areas.

<comment><USER23> I've never heard of Elixir, but I always assumed that the |> originated in F#. Ocaml has it pretty much standard, too, although you can define it in one line in Ocaml:

let (|>) x f = f x

<comment><USER24> Also in Haskell [0]:

        (|>) :: Seq a -> a -> Seq a
        O(1). Add an element to the right end of a sequence. Mnemonic: a triangle with the single element at the pointy end.

It seems to be in the containers package since 2005: [1]

[0]: [http://hackage.haskell.org/package/containers-0.5.5.1/docs/D...](http://hackage.haskell.org/package/containers-0.5.5.1/docs/Data- Sequence.html#v:-124--62-)

[1]: [https://github.com/haskell/containers/commit/1e61853dbd4b9fc...](https://github.com/haskell/containers/commit/1e61853dbd4b9fc6ecc58ad655990ea5e971fa13#diff-a4090fc3521182bd8d1ac467d170c6aaR40)

<comment><USER25> Which has a totally different meaning from the F# usage.

'|>' from F# is the same as 'flip $' in haskell, or (&) imported from the lens library

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I love Ruby and I love Matz. With that being said there are some things that Ruby struggles with. I know that there have been some conversations among the core on bringing in more functional concepts to Ruby....at least since April. To me this says that Matz is coming to the conclusion that we may need a new language to get functional right.

While I am sad to see that Ruby may be superseded by a new language I'm really happy to see Matz leading the way with one of the solutions. In the Ruby community we have a expression "Matz is nice and therefore we are nice". That has set the tone for the community in ways that have never been the same in some of the others.

As someone who has had the opportunity to talk with Matz on multiple occasions and work with the Ruby community it would be great to see this as a natural evolution of Ruby and the people who love it... As I have started to move on to working with more functional languages etc. I have started to move away from doing Ruby, but if the community can continue on and evolve with a new language that would be awesome!

<comment><USER27> > "Matz is nice and therefore we are nice"

This non sequitur annoys me. Deconstructing it:

* A: "Matz is nice": Let's say we all agree this is true.

* B: "we are nice": i.e., the ruby community is nice.

* P(A -> B): (A therefore B) is a slogan, so I assume the proposition P is believed to be true. Is it?

In order for P to be true, the only option is for B to be true as long as Matz keeps being nice. Assuming Matz is still good-natured, is not hard to find counterexamples for B (every big community have some less-than-nice people). So the facts tell us that P is false.

Alternatively, if you assume that Matz is _not_ nice, then, without mattering if "we" are nice or not, the slogan holds true (modus ponens [1]).

Anyway, my point is that the slogan is as silly as this rant :p.

1: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modus_ponens#Justification_via_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modus_ponens#Justification_via_truth_table)

<comment><USER28> I don't understand the original quote to be a proposition. I think what it's trying to say is "Matz is nice so we too aspire to be nice". It's not descriptive, it's perscriptive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> "Copyright (c) 2015 Yukihiro Matsumoto" \- bit early, ey? ;)

<comment><USER30> Why? I think it's pretty normal to drop this in as boilerplate on new projects.

<comment><USER31> Note the year ;)

<comment><USER30> Ha! You got me there :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> And... here's an implementation: [https://github.com/mattn/streeem](https://github.com/mattn/streeem)

Well, that was quick.

<comment><USER33> Heh, got to love the repo message "Sorry, Sorry"

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> We did a similar thing to the awk source. Made awk scripts first class, you could pipe them to each other.

</comment><comment><USER35> Can someone help explain what's going on here: \"([^\\\\\"]|\\\\.) _\ " [seen here in context]([https://github.com/matz/streem/blob/master/src/lex.l#L49](https://github.com/matz/streem/blob/master/src/lex.l#L49)).

Now it seems to be finding literal strings (so "strings" e.t.c.). That would explain the literal double quotes on either side. so without that we get: ([^\\\\\"]|\\\\.)_ so zero or more repeating versions of [^\\\\\"]|\\\\.

What I don't understand is why there is the explicit or \\\\. construct there, as this seems unnecessary. Am I missing something? also, why does it seem that strings cannot have either literal \ or literal " in them?

<comment><USER36> Because if there's a \ you want to skip over the next character, even if it's a ", but if it's not escaped then you want " to be the end of the string.

<comment><USER35> You're completely right, I think I had read it as \\. rather than \\\\. and thus didn't understand it. Thanks for helping me get it straight in my head.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I like the idea of dataflow or stream processing ideas. I would love if you could make the connector pieces smarter so that you were enforcing a contract between the piping mechanisms. I believe you could build some very interesting systems with that approach.

</comment><comment><USER38> Awesome I hacked something like this together a couple years ago using ruby and gnu parallel

[https://github.com/charlesmartin14/gnu_parallel](https://github.com/charlesmartin14/gnu_parallel)

it is badly needed

</comment><comment><USER39> This is an excellent example of using a parser as a language. Whether it has any legs depends on whether it beats existing tools on some front (sed, perl, ruby, etc). The concurrent angle is interesting, but I have found a multi- process approach to stream data to be more efficient than most concurrent single-process implementations. For example, with DAP ([https://github.com/rapid7/dap](https://github.com/rapid7/dap)), we found that GNU Parallel + Ruby MRI was more effective than a concurrent language such as Go.

</comment><comment><USER40> Tab ([https://bitbucket.org/tkatchev/tab](https://bitbucket.org/tkatchev/tab)) is another interesting recent text processing language.

</comment><comment><USER41> Take a look at dss from AT&T AST tools:

[http://www2.research.att.com/~astopen/dss/dss.html](http://www2.research.att.com/~astopen/dss/dss.html)

[http://www2.research.att.com/~astopen/publications/dss-2004....](http://www2.research.att.com/~astopen/publications/dss-2004.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER42> It's definitely a good idea. Pipes are both very powerful and very simple to use and debug, yet they are not very common in general purpose programming languages (examples?). I'm not surprised that someone is trying to build a language around them. I'll follow that, but for now it's a bit too early to judge.

<comment><USER43> See node.js streams.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Great idea, but I'm a bit disappointed in the syntax. Composed chains in Ruby are much nicer to look at.

</comment><comment><USER45> For people interested, you can do something like this in Ruby right now that has nearly the same syntax:

[http://pragdave.me/blog/2007/12/30/pipelines-using-fibers- in...](http://pragdave.me/blog/2007/12/30/pipelines-using-fibers-in-ruby-19/)

</comment><comment><USER46> I hope it will support really big integers as in Haskell and better floating point number calculation, although I cannot foresee the power right now. Because it is concurrent, it may be very useful in scientific computing, whether in small or large scale.

</comment><comment><USER47>
        true{TRAIL}	return keyword_false;

Well, this will be fun to debug

<comment><USER48> This is indeed one of the nicest typos I've seen, but note that there's already a pull request. I suppose bugs can become shallow when your 3 file repo reaches the first page of hn. [https://github.com/matz/streem/pull/4/files](https://github.com/matz/streem/pull/4/files)

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> -> in clojure or hy deals with that nicely:

(-> (read) (eval) (print) (loop))

using python-sh in hy this is possible:

(-> (cat "/usr/share/dict/words") (grep "-E" "^hy") (wc "-l"))

</comment><comment><USER50> Matz, now get started on implementing transducers! [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mTbuzafcII](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mTbuzafcII)

</comment><comment><USER51> Stream processing languages typically derive from SQL (streamSQL) or prolog (Rapide) ... This one doesn't seem anywhere near as powerful but who knows.

</comment><comment><USER52> Interesting that he chose a C-like syntax after going the complete opposite direction with Ruby.

<comment><USER53> Huh? Ruby also has a C-like (algol derived) syntax.

The replacement of "}" with "end" etc, is a trivial replacement, not a different type of syntax.

Lisp, Prolog, etc, would be a non-C syntax.

<comment><USER54> Obviously you can flatten this inheritance tree any way you like, but while all C-likes are obviously algol-likes I do think it's useful to consider C-like a distinct branch within that.

That said I think you probably want more than just curly braces to define C-like even then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Now it might be time to have a look into YACC, LEX and maybe BISON and follow Matz' repo :)

</comment><comment><USER56> Looking to hire a Streem professional, must have at least 5 years experience with Streem.

<comment><USER57> Great. I have been streem-ing for more than 15 years now. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> I see this as a very good alternative to traditional shell scripting languages.

<comment><USER59> Anything that beats Bash's ugliness I'm all for.

<comment><USER58> it would also be nice if it had a static type system, but given that it's Matz, it's unlikely...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> What kind of areas could Streem be used in?

</comment><comment><USER61> Why is Stream spelled incorrectly?

<comment><USER62> Easier to search for, at least.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Sorry, but if you know nothing about Ruby this is pure hype.

</comment><comment><USER64> Not a fan of the closing braces.

<comment><USER65> Didn't Matz mention that he wasn't either, when explaining Rubys syntax?

I'm a fan of indentation based blocks, so this seems like a step back for me :\

<comment><USER61> What does it matter?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> "Then said Jesus unto him, Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword" (Matthew 26:52, King James Version)

Sony played hard many times, e.g. closing Linux on Playstation 3 devices. I do not condone the attack, although I have no sympathy at all for such kind of companies.

</comment><comment><USER67> Whatever, [https://github.com/ekmett/machines](https://github.com/ekmett/machines) [https://github.com/scalaz/scalaz-stream](https://github.com/scalaz/scalaz- stream)

<comment><USER68> This is newsworthy because Matz is developing a new language, not because such a thing doesn't already exist.</comment></comment>


Launchpad service and some components it loads; Rterm.exe, BxlServer.exe, etc. - <AUTHOR> http://www.nielsberglund.com/2017/07/22/microsoft-sql-server-r-services---internals-viii/ <comment><AUTHOR> We look at some of the components the launchpad service loads; Rterm.exe, BxlServer.exe, etc.</comment>


GitHub: Commit together with co-authors - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/blog/2496-commit-together-with-co-authors <comment><USER2> GitHub is attempting to standardize a commit message formatting convention for this. Kind of has a certain odor to it.

Can we get cryptographically signed commit integrity into the mainstream instead?

<comment><USER3> There is already a convention for signed-off by. I don't understand either why GitHub is pushing for this, though I have seen this feature before on some repositories before the post.

Edit: Now that I think about it, can see why. I have seen merges where is was good enough to merge, but needed som slight adjustments. Rebase/merge with minor changes would be a good use for this, and would allow for better crediting of both authors.

<comment><USER4> It's not clear to me what the semantics of Signed-off-by is supposed to be, but at least for some projects (e.g. the Linux kernel), it doesn't imply that you are a co-author.

<comment><USER5> That's what I've seen. Some projects, including the Linux kernel, use Signed- off-by for Developer Certificate of Origin legal processes.

[https://elinux.org/Developer_Certificate_Of_Origin](https://elinux.org/Developer_Certificate_Of_Origin)

It makes sense that GitHub would use something new to avoid stepping on toes, and GitHub's mirrors Signed-off-by in implementation as a git commit message trailer.

<comment><AUTHOR> The Co-authored-by trailer isn't actually new. In fact it was already being used by over ~1M commits on GitHub before we launched the feature! :)

The git-core commit message conventions docs mention it ([https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/CommitMessageConventio...](https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/CommitMessageConventions)) as do the OpenStack commit message convention docs ([https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/GitCommitMessages#Including_...](https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/GitCommitMessages#Including_external_references)).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I love this! As somebody who quite frequently performs pair programming, this is a great feature. I've always found it unfair when only one of the two people got to "keep their streak up", I mean, it's a group effort after all!

<comment><USER7> We use "Name & Name <firstname.lastname@example.com>" during pairs/mobs so we don't worry about who gets the credit and waste time rotating authors. It doesn't look great on GitHub but we usually use an IDE to go through commit history anyway.

It doesn't work great for our open source projects though where visibility on GitHub tends to be more important.</comment></comment>