The Economics of UberX in NYC - <AUTHOR> http://justin-singer.org/blog/2014/11/the-economics-of-uberx-part-ii/

<comment><USER2> While fascinating, this analysis seems to fall apart on two major fronts.

1\. It seems to completely discount surge pricing, which would likely change these numbers significantly.

2\. It assumes that taxi and Uber behavior is very similar, but this seems pretty dubious for 2 major reasons:

a. In dense areas it's far more convenient to use a taxi than an Uber (you can hail one in a minute or two), while in less populated areas it's far more convenient to get an Uber. This would definitely skew Uber significantly towards longer, speedier trips.

b. Uber likely sees a greater proportion of utilization from airport rides. For an expensive trip like that, people are more price conscious and most New Yorkers know it's usually much cheaper to take Uber. When juxtaposed against the prospect of waiting in line for a ~$60 + tip taxi ride, the immediacy of a $63 Uber looks _very_ appealing. Additionally, I imagine Uber is seeing disproportionate growth amongst tourists (who might already be using Uber elsewhere but are intimidated by hailing NYC taxis).

<comment><USER3> The author _does_ discuss surge pricing.

<comment><USER4> Nope, he does not. If he'd studied the blog post he's linked to, it is clear that surge rates can go a few multiples at busy periods, which would make an outsized contribution to total fares even at 10-15% occurrence.

If you look at the service area on the ubernyc page, it goes way beyond the city limits (even a fixed price to the hamptons). Again, even if the percentage of these rides are low, it isn't hard to see how average trip length or average fare would be moved up significantly.

I read the article - even though it's written well, it makes a lot of hypotheticals based on hazy assumptions that seem to lead well to a result that the author probably wanted to put forward. Not the best article if you want an objective analysis on the issue.

<comment><USER5> Did you look at the spreadsheet he linked to in the footnote where he calculates the cumulative effect of surge pricing? Where would you like to quibble with the math?

[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1N4NiwuPLo78w9PaoqXRa...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1N4NiwuPLo78w9PaoqXRa- eVwGxsexr1aFXdY_bvME-w/edit#gid=0)

<comment><USER4> Daily weighting is made up without any real insight into operations. Furthermore, whatsthefare says that it bases its own approximations on relatively sparse data from user's use of their systems, not realtime monitoring on a service that's probably prone to constant change.

I think I mostly find it incorrect to essentially take a pin-hole view at the data through 5-6 averages, and extrapolate it towards a somewhat biased result.

<comment><USER5> Even if you drastically change the daily weightings you don't move the overall output very much at all.

As for the other data they describe their collection methodologies, and the numbers they produce are in line with trends that Uber has indicated. You're certainly free to produce a dataset of your own but until you do that this one doesn't seem especially bad or anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _for the next three months at least, Uber is indemnifying full-time drivers against slow business. Good luck competing with that, companies-that- don't-have-a-$1.5-billion-war-chest._

This is what worries me. Uber are the freemarket dream child, but they're using their financial heft to actively distort the market. They've already driven Hailo out of the city, and I wonder who is next. I want Uber to become the de-facto choice by providing good service, not by bullying everyone else out of the city.

<comment><USER7> I agree that this is concerning, but I think the risk is mitigated by the relatively low tie in. I personally don't care which app I use. So, I end up using whichever service will give me more VC-paid free credit.

Uber has the most VC by far. But, if they use that to kill competitors and subsequently try to raise prices, I'd happily switch to the next upstart that undercuts them.

The only big downside is that it necessarily requires _a lot_ of VC to compete with them right now.

<comment><USER8> > Uber has the most VC by far. But, if they use that to kill competitors and > subsequently try to raise prices, I'd happily switch to the next upstart > that undercuts them.

That's the rub of dumping. You basically have to do it indefinitely or you eventually get competition. The lucrative "jack up prices" phase is really hard to safely transition to. Barriers to entry, specifically long lead times, will make dumping more feasible for certain goods or services. It's not trivial to spin up a car service, but I'm not sure the barriers to entry are high enough or not.

There are other ways you can behave anti-competitively without dumping too...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This guy's whole article falls apart based on one terrible assumption: that Uberx behaviors are similar to taxis. There are a whole host of reasons why this is not the case. Taxis are more likely to hang out in dense, Manhattan areas contributing to short and slow rides. Riders would much prefer to take an Uberx to the airport than a taxi. Surge pricing. Etc.

<comment><USER6> Why would people be more inclined to take an UberX to the airport than a taxi? The taxi has a flat fare. And from the map view I've seen using Uber, UberX's absolutely do hang around in dense Manhattan areas.

<comment><USER10> I live in Manhattan and I now prefer to take Uber/Lyft to the airport whenever there's no surge pricing. Taxis are _supposed_ to have flat pricing but I've never found that to be the case: given all the bridge/tunnel tolls, baggage fees, and airport taxes, I'm consistently charged anywhere from $80-$120 one- way from Midtown Manhattan to LGA (+tip). In comparison, Uber uses GPS tracking to automatically figure out which tolls to tack on, and it costs me $63.

<comment><USER5> NYC Taxis have a flat fare to JFK. This does not apply to LGA.

That being said I have no fucking clue how you're spending $80 or more on that fare. Even if you're coming from the far west wide and sitting in traffic forever you shouldn't be cracking $50.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Not taking surge pricing into account probably plays a large role in explaining this article's findings.

Another thing to note in his section with self driving cars: the pool of cars would be fixed in that case, but the amount of uber drivers fluctuates throughout the day. Now, uber doesn't _really_ care if drivers are 70% utilized or 50% utilized, as their revenue doesn't depend on that, but they do have an interest in keeping the drivers marginally satisfied

Also I don't have the numbers but at least in SF, taking an uber to the airport is much cheaper than taking a cab ($25 vs 50 from my office, last I checked), so I could imagine that something like that skews the distribution of ride lengths.

<comment><USER12> I think the distribution of ride lengths might partially have something to do with the nature of cab hails in NYC vs. other cities. I travel a lot, and in most cities, uber is my go-to cab service, because I don't know the local cab system, I might have to call multiple companies, I can't street hail in a lot of places, etc.

However, in NYC, it's often faster to street hail a yellow cab for short trips than it is to wait for an uber. So here, I mostly use uber for long trips (airports, midtown to the financial district, brooklyn, etc.) or for time- sensitive situations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> What's odd to me is trying to discuss Uber in NYC by comparing to yellow cabs. We have a thing in NY called "car services" which basically everyone uses, and which are much more comparable to Uber than taxis are. You call a car, they come to your house, they pick you up, and they take you where you want to go for a predetermined price.

In general, the car services I take are cheaper than Uber or metered taxis. But not always. And they can be a little more annoying to deal with than just using an app on your phone. Certainly Uber would be far less intimidating for tourists.

Plus Uber was able to pick me up in the rain on Halloween, because of surge pricing. And they only charged me triple!

But seriously: if you are talking about Uber in New York and not mentioning Arecibo car service, which has several hundred of cars all over the city at all times of the day and night, and is one of many such services in operation, you are missing a huge part of the equation.

</comment><comment><USER13> The most important giveaway of this post is this: "But at the end of the day, their business model boils down to taking a 20% rake of a large commodity services business while pushing assets, costs, and liabilities off the corporate financial statements and onto the shoulders of their not-quite- employee-partners."

<comment><USER14> And yet people still choose to drive for Uber. Are they all being taken advantage of?

<comment><USER15> And yet people work for walmart, are they all being taken advantage of?

There is a claim that some positions of power make people unqualified to make choices. Think student/teacher or adult/minor sexual relations or maybe some of the ideas around accredited investors -- non-accredited investors are not allowed to invest in certain types of assets to protect them from predatory practices.

I'm not commenting on morality here, but the state of current law.

<comment><USER14> > Think student/teacher or adult/minor sexual relations

You are literally comparing working for Walmart to being raped? That's a bit condescending not only to people working for Walmart but also to rape victims.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> As I move my startup forward I work as an Uber driver and have for the last 13 months. Very simply, fair prices have dropped substantially and it is much harder to make the same amount of money as before, although operating costs are the same or higher. Not to mention the constant risk of catastrophic damage / injury .

Uber can massage numbers all they want but a driver can only take - on average - the same number of fares per hour, so drivers work longer and harder. In that way it is exactly like any taxi job on earth - long, hard hours for low pay with zero equity value accruing. But that is ok, because that is the nature of such a job. Uberx is a tremendous (r)evolution for the consumer but for the driver... not so much. Driving for Uber is a blessing for me because it allows me to control how many low-paying, high-risk hours I need to fulfill to make my entrepreneurial nut per week - and it works for now. But for the the mainstream driver - hey, the new boss looks a lot like the old boss in all the ways that really count. Uber on!

</comment><comment><USER17> I've signed up (as a user, not driver) for Via, Gett and Lyft. I believe drivers can do the same. As long as they don't collude and are constantly competing, it could be good for everyone. That said, I still prefer yellow cabs and use them when possible.

</comment><comment><USER18> surge pricing not taken into account?</comment>


Introducing Braintree.js - <AUTHOR> https://www.braintreepayments.com/braintrust/braintree-js

<comment><USER2> I have built quite a few rails apps using TR. The braintree ruby gem makes the whole process very easy. I would hesitate in using this because you still end up explaining a lot to during PCI compliance. IIRC during the PCI compliance my customers had to do a whole lot of work even when we were using TR. Splitting your process into multiple steps and doing validation using JS is much much easier IMHO.

<comment><AUTHOR> The compliance process varies depending on how the business operates. There are more controls if you accept card numbers over the phone, for example. For most merchants, the process is straightforward. Our PCI Compliance page describes the process using Braintree.js.

<https://www.braintreepayments.com/tour/pci-compliance>

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> If anyone is using this, I'd love to hear about their experience. We default to recommending Stripe to our customers, but will probably need to offer Braintree support in the future as well (in case they already have a Braintree account and want to use that instead of creating a new Stripe account).

<comment><USER4> Perhaps Spreedly Core might be interesting if you need to support multiple payment gateway options. core.spreedly.com - I work at Spreedly. BTW we're making some signficant changes to the site/pricing in about 10 days so if it's interesting to you at all email justin @ spreedly to talk further.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Seems to use a different approach to Stripe, using encryption rather than API hooks/callbacks.</comment>


Massachusetts Police Test Out Robot Dogs. Is Dystopia on Its Way? - <AUTHOR> https://reason.com/2019/11/26/massachusetts-police-test-out-robot-dogs-is-dystopia-on-its-way/ <comment><AUTHOR> > The agreement doesn't say much about how the bomb squad is permitted to use > Spot, but it does forbid the bomb squad from taking and posting photos of > Spot in use;

I'm surprised that a police organization can agree to this term; surely any of the other bomb squad members nearby will capture the device on their body cameras (assuming they have them), which in turn are public property and subject to FIPA / FOIA.

Is a police department which agrees to secrecy in its uses of secret technology _per se_ a secret police department?</comment>


Ask HN: Anyone using Blekko instead of Google? - <AUTHOR>

With all the anti-Google sentiment welling up, there are usually a post or two about DDG popping up, but I hear almost nothing about blekko (http://blekko.com/) anymore after their launch and subsequent coverage on TC in 2010.
The few times I have tried raw Blekko (basic search no tweaks with slash tags) it seemed like very comprehensive search results, but they werent ordered to my preferences so I found myself digging to page 4 or 5 before finding what I wanted. I dont know if Google's personalization is just that good or their search is that good.
Is anyone using them? Is anyone giving Google search a run for its money? <comment><USER2> I tried Blekko for a bit this past fall and was not terribly impressed. I, frankly, don't understand what the /slash notation is doing. is it a filter? Is it a specific type of search?

However, I have been using DuckDuckGo almost exclusively for the past 2 months and I'm not sure that I'll be going back anytime soon. DDG is touted as being for the privacy conscious, but I can't say that was my primary motivation in switching. I have been increasingly unhappy with Google's 'bubbling' and my searches there increasingly felt like I was running in circles through crappy mailing list archives and spam sites and all their new 'features.'

DDG brought back memories of what drew me to Google in the first place, over a decade ago. It is clean, straightforward, and relevant. Yeah, I know it's running on Yahoo Search APIs which are running on Bing, but it's still a drastically different search experience.

Finally, doing a bit of research into DDGs extras and the !bang notation pages kind of sealed the deal for me. Want to know your IP address? just search "ip" Want lorem ipsum text, just search for that. Want to search the python documentation? Just use !python. Want to re-run your last search in Google? Just add !g Those features alone are enough to make it a true power user's search engine.

<comment><USER3> Just to be devil's advocate here, everything you list seems to be easy to do using any web browser (since we're talking about power users here):

>Want to know your IP address? just search "ip"

<https://www.google.com/search?q=ip>

\--> Your public IP address is 123.456.789.>256? - Learn more

>Want lorem ipsum text, just search for that

Ok that's pretty cool.

>Want to search the python documentation

For me this is a language other than python, but I have queries in chrome/opera that search by keyword. C++ is c<space>stuff, java is j<space> stuff. As an added benefit, for any internal documentation I can have keywords going directly to internal stuff.

>Want to re-run your last search in Google

Ditto with bing b<space>, amazon a<space>, etc.

As a 'power user' my needs go way beyond what any search engine does. Web browser, scripts, etc pick up the slack.

Also, am I missing something here? Everyone keeps mentioning that DDG runs off of Bing. Do they do anything in the interim to your queries, or do you get the same results by going to bing.com? And if so, is everyone just arguing that bing's results are better than Google's now? (Could be, I dunno).

It is kinda cool that you get wolfram results, etc (wherever they pulled lorem ipsum from for example) all compiled for you instead of having to keyword everything I guess.

And that's enough rambling, sleep.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I hadn't heard of Blekko, so I Googled it, but I accidentally typed it "blekki". Google autocorrected it, and Blekko was still the top result.

That didn't happen on Blekko. I got a lot of results about Bill Lekki. Then a few minutes later the results changed and the Wikipedia page for Blekko was the top result. Weird.

<comment><AUTHOR> Looks like the Blekko team was watching this thread and probably the traffic in-bound from it and (maybe) tweaking on the fly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've been using Scroogle for a while, which just aggregates Google searches to its own IPs so that you remain anonymous to Google. There are four problems with Scroogle, not necessarily easy to solve:

(1) No Google Maps. Honestly I'll probably keep using Google Maps whatever else happens. I could give up Gmail and I'd still keep Google Maps. (2) No Google Calculator. This would be more important if Google hadn't changed their calculator app over the past couple of years, making it much more difficult/useless for unit conversions. Still, it would be nice if I could get Google Calculator results through Scroogle, and it shouldn't be _that_ hard. (3) No image searches. This is one big reason to use Blekko right now; it is not Google Images and it has a nice image search which can be activated from the search line. (4) Scroogle keeps going down. This is Google's fault; Google should have whitelisted Scroogle as not-a-bot and supported their endeavor. Over the past months the problem has been that Google thinks Scroogle is a bot; but every couple of months there's also a time-frame where Google changes the antiquated search pages which Scroogle queries to make its searches.

For all that, I still like Scroogle and will probably continue to use it for the next couple of months. But Blekko is where I go when I want to do an image search.

</comment><comment><USER6> The SEO links on Blekko are really useful but I could never go without my !bang syntax. DDG and chrome are my default with google just a !g away.

<comment><USER7> You can set this up at the browser level to work with any sort of search. Look up Firefox Quick Searches (a similar thing exists in Chrome).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> what's blekko?

"all the anti-google sentiment" is nonsense. it's not really anti-google. people get emotional about products and companies they care about. the people who whine about every little change google makes are the same ones who whine about every little change facebook makes: the biggest fans of those products.

<comment><USER9> No its rather apt in my opinion.

[http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB1000142405297020462420...](http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052970204624204577176964003660658-lMyQjAxMTAyMDIwNTEyNDUyWj.html)

"Google acknowledged in the settlement that it had improperly and knowingly assisted online pharmacy advertisers allegedly based in Canada to run advertisements for illicit pharmacy sales targeting U.S. customers."

Oh hello whats this? Google execs knowingly assisting illegal operations peddling illicit drugs from manufactures unknown? Since when does their 'lets not be evil overlords' policy include knowingly taking cash to help peddle drugs coming from illicit sources.

"By the end of the operation in mid-2009, agents were buying Google ads for sites purportedly selling such prescription-only narcotics as oxycodone and hydrocodone. Agents also got Google's sales office in China to approve a site selling Prozac and Valium to U.S. customers without a prescription.

"Google's employees were instrumental in bypassing policy regarding pharmacy verification," Mr. Whitaker told the Journal. "The websites were blatantly illegal."

At the agents' direction, Mr. Whitaker said he signaled his illegal intent to Google ad executives, including Google's top manager in Mexico. As a tape recorder ran, he walked Google executives through the illegal parts of the websites. He said he told ad executives that U.S. Customs had seized shipments, for example, and that one client wanted to be "the biggest steroid dealer in the United States.""

Seriously what the fuck? The anti-google sentiment is nonsense?

"The government's case also contained potentially embarrassing allegations that top Google executives, including co-founder Larry Page, were told about legal problems with the drug ads.

Mr. Page, now Google's chief executive, knew about the illicit conduct, said Mr. Neronha, the U.S. attorney for Rhode Island who led the multiagency federal task force that conducted the sting. "We simply know from the documents we reviewed and witnesses we interviewed that Larry Page knew what was going on," he said in an interview after the August settlement.

Mr. Neronha declined to detail the evidence, which was presented in secret to a federal grand jury. Other people familiar with the case said internal emails showed Sheryl Sandberg, a former top Google executive who left in 2008 for Facebook Inc., had raised concerns about the ads."

I'm sure it was just a rogue employee of one of their far off subsids, oh wait nevermind I guess it went to the top, lulz. Sorry for posting so much of the article but your simple ignorant line deserves all the filth contained in the url, I'd rather not depend on you clicking to read it.

The actions listed in that article even at their most innocent leaves me with such a foul feeling that it can be nothing else but Evil.

<comment><USER10> I agree with the sentiment, but "Google execs knowingly assisting illegal operations peddling illicit drugs from manufactures unknown?"

I think it's more like Google knowingly helping people bypass the pharmaceutical equivalent of DVD Region-coding.

The drugs people were buying were the same stuff you guys get down there in the states, they were just available for cheaper because Canadians pay less for drugs. It's also my understanding that Canada has stricter regulations on drug safety than the US, so your portrayal seems a bit FUD-y.

From wikipedia (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmacy#Internet_pharmacy>)

"Canada is home to dozens of licensed internet pharmacies, many of which sell their lower-cost prescription drugs to U.S. consumers, who pay one of the world's highest drug prices.[11] In recent years, many consumers in the US and in other countries with high drug costs, have turned to licensed internet pharmacies in India, Israel and the UK, which often have even lower prices than in Canada. In the United States, there has been a push to legalize importation of medications from Canada and other countries, in order to reduce consumer costs. While in most cases importation of prescription medications violates Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations and federal laws, enforcement is generally targeted at international drug suppliers, rather than consumers. There is no known case of any U.S. citizens buying Canadian drugs for personal use with a prescription, who has ever been charged by authorities."

<comment><USER9> When medication does not go through legit supply channels you cannot trust the product, accountability is gone. Trusting illicit pharma spammers to source legit medication is laughable.

Edit: Not laughable, horrific and sad.

<comment><USER10> I don't want to conflate the whole Canadian pharmacy thing with criminal activities related to buying drugs online. The fact is there are Canadian pharmacies that are licensed by the gov., and only sell legit products, and they do it online. As a Canadian, if I buy them it's basically the same as popping down to the Pharmaprix and shopping there.

If an American buys from one of them they are making a safe purchase IMO, but breaking drug importation laws put in place more to protect the bottom lines of drug companies then to protect the consumer.

Now if a canadian or an american buys drugs online without reasonable assurances they're dealing with a reputable company... well that is stupid/sad/dangerous as you said.

<comment><USER9> That is where Google crossed the line into being evil, bypassing their own internal checks and regulations accepting cash for ads to sites that never were associated with any real pharmacy or any product at all. Judging by Glavmed's success and shadier sites with shop fronts calling themselves "Canadian" this is totally not isolated to one paid snitch.

These rogue pharmas source from India for generics, wherever they can to buy branded narcotics, and lord knows where for counterfeit opiates/benzos. Real Canadian pharmacies used to be more directly involved selling to the US, including narcotics, but that was years ago. The dirty bit is not at the pharmacy selling to people with prescriptions but those knowingly diverting to unscripted use, or the mules who use doctors to fill out scripts that then get sold. Then at the pharma affiliate networks paying spammers for traffic. Spammers paying google for adverts pointing to shop fronts. GOOGLE ACCEPTING CASH AND BYPASSING THEIR CHECKS THAT SEE IF ALL THE ACTORS MENTIONED PREVIOUSLY ARE LEGIT who then post the adverts to the shop fronts who may or may not be listed as Canadian who may or may not be sourcing via legal means from what may or may not be a Canadian pharmacy.

Krebsonsecurity.com has multiple write-ups on these types of operations which use advertisers like Google for traffic. In this case though Google employees at multiple levels went beyond just being a provider of traffic to being an co-partner in the conspiracy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Funny you asked. I signed up couple of days ago, deciding that slash tags should be the best way to get rid of all the crap in google's search results. I was a little confused though. Does Blekko expect me to choose which slash tag I want to use for my query? If that is the case, I think it will be hard for them to go mainstream. I can do it, no problem. But an average user will not be able to. I was expecting some sort of an intelligent algorithm which would decide which slash tags to use with my query. I think it all should be seamless to the user. They should curate the slash tags themselves and apply them to the search queries when relevant.

They've been around for a while. So I think it is fair to expect more powerful features from them. Color me worried. It would be a shame if they don't get more momentum. I think their idea of slash tags is a killer one. I just think they have not implemented enough or going to the wrong direction.

To sum up: 1) slash tags are just brilliant. 2) slash tags should be seamless to the user and be applied by Blekko automatically to each search query. 3) They should build their own slash tags, not relying on crows sourced ones. They should go crazy about this. Doesn't seem like they are. 4) More power to them. I love them

<comment><USER12> Have you tried blekko? We suggest slashtags as you type, we suggest more slashtags after you've searched, and we often automatically add slashtags to your search if you didn't specify one. Most of the /blekko slashtags (the most visible) ones are build by a combination of our in-house content team, and subject-matter experts -- the /health slashtag has an outside editor who's a medical librarian at a major teaching hospital.

Great suggestions! :-)

<comment><USER11> Yes I did. And I will continue using it. I guess my point is that a user should not even be aware of the fact that you use slash tags. I mean who cares what technology you use to give better results? Let that be a power user thing.

I also don't get the Facebook integration. Especially in your case. Your focus is on great content. Facebook is junk as far as content is concerned. Before Facebook I used to receive stupid emails with links to funny videos, cartoons and jokes that I'd immediately delete. I have not been receiving them for a few years because all of that stupidity went to Facebook, thank God. What valuable result do you expect to retrieve from there?

Given Blekko's focus on content quality and relevancy, I'd expect integration with Twitter if you really feel like you must do something on that front. Or integration with anything that people subscribe to for great content. RSS feeds come to mind. I don't know if this is possible but an integration with Google Reader would be beneficial for me. You may also try to add social features to your site such as an RSS reader that you can use to integrate to your search results. Again, I don't think this is such a big deal but if you are spending resources on integrating to Facebook, you might be better off spending them on integration with Twitter and the like.

Just my two cents. Like I said, I love you guys and I think categorizing and curating content on the Internet is the way to go.

<comment><USER12> You can turn any search result into an rss feed with /rss, and put that into Google Reader or your favorite rss reader (I use NewsBlur.) This works best with date-sorted searches.

If you survey your friends about Facebook, you'll find that many of them like the idea of seeing their friends' likes and comments in searches. Personally, I don't like it, so I clicked "No Facebook" in the prefs.

<comment><USER11> Turning search results into RSS feeds pretty cool but it is something entirely different. What I meant was, to include the pages in my RSS feeds I am subscribed to, to the search you are doing just like you include Facebook to your search.

Regarding Facebook integration. Can you give me a use case where this integration is helpful and improves the search results? I don't think the survey argument is a valid one because our friends are usually not qualified enough to make an informed decision on this.

<comment><USER12> Ah, we've run some experiments with that kind of RSS or history search, but haven't shipped anything.

The use case for Facebook is people who want to search for stuff their friends like. As I said, that's not me, and you said it wasn't you, but you probably know some friends for whom that sort of thing matters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I was surprised to finally see my own blog showing up in the results when I googl-, err, searched for my own name. But then I searched for "name /blog" and my blog disappeared. It did however show an irrelevant GitHub page with a pull request I once submitted. So it seems to work for rough searches but refining needs some... Refining. I won't be making the switch today.

<comment><USER12> Assuming you mean elbertf.com, I filed a bug. We did recognize it as a WordPress blog, but for some reason the front page is getting a poor rank with /blog and is OK without it. BTW, you can send bug reports like this to firstname.lastname@example.com.

<comment><USER13> Thanks, that's the one!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Alexa data would suggest that their popularity is increasing: <http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/blekko.com#>

I really like some of their services like "Grep the Web" however I'm too used to Google to change (plus I don't see any other search engine drive anywhere near the volume they do).

<comment><USER15> alexa is HIGHLY unreliable. you might as well ask duckduckgo about blekko's performance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I tried to use it months ago while I found Google was slow here. But Blekko's Chinese search results are quite bad.

<comment><USER12> We're concentrating on the US and English for now. A startup can only do so much, so fast.

<comment><USER17> Using it from Japan I had some issues as well. Even in English it's not quite global yet. I guess Blekko might be good to see what's going on in the US market...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I tried to use blekko, but I found their search results not very relevant. However I using them from time to time just to show my support and to check if there is any improvement in search relevance.

<comment><USER12> Our last big step up in relevance was launched on December 15, have you tried us since?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I find it a little ironic that I had to Google "Blekko". Aside from this, Blekko's results are not as good as Google. For me at least.

<comment><USER12> We'd love to hear your feedback at firstname.lastname@example.com, thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> What are Blekko's thoughts on 'do no evil'? If they get popular, would they fall into the same trap that Google has, or would they stay pure?

<comment><AUTHOR> This is an impossible-to-answer question. I do NOT speak for the Blekko company, but while they are small and making $100,000s or millions it is easy to say "We are free, no spying!" (same for DDG).

As soon as you take Blekko public and they are making _BILLIONS_ and beholden to stock holders, they won't have a choice but to slowly roll that back just like we are seeing with Google.

The market won't let Google stay ambivalent; not with all that potential for profit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Yes, I use Blekko regularly. I'm often (but not always) pleasantly surprised with it's search results.

The slashes take some getting used to, but Blekko is worth an honest go.</comment>


Keep it simple, startup - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/28/keep-it-simple-stupid/

<comment><USER2> In other words, read _Getting Real_

<comment><USER3> To be fair, this article is a lot shorter than _Getting Real_. So it's more _Real_ than _Getting Real_ , in a way, I guess.

<comment><USER4> The Getting Real summary is a lot shorter than the article and the book [http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/coming_soon_getting_real_...](http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/coming_soon_getting_real_the_book.php) \- short enough now?!</comment></comment></comment>


Why IBM Will Win the War With Amazon Web Services - <AUTHOR> http://www.cio.com/article/742861/Why_IBM_Will_Win_the_War_With_Amazon_Web_Services?source=sflowtweet&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=sflow_tweet#!

<comment><USER2> This article is lame. I'm an IBM shareholder, and I want as much good news as the next shareholder, but the conclusions the author draws are absurd. He mentions Jeff Bezos' wife's review of that book to discredit Amazons marketing strategy? No wonder why all the CIOs I've worked for who read CIO.com made so many dumb decisions.

</comment><comment><USER3> this "bypassing IT and selling directly to employees" seems to be working for dropbox, box, github, basecamp?</comment>


Ask HN: I'm an expert in my field, how do I negotiate internship offer? - <AUTHOR> So there is an internship position on one of Apple's team where I'm an expert in that specialized field. I am by far the most experienced intern they've ever seen, and I say that as an understatement. I developed something, let's just say everyone uses, that is the best in the world in its category.
I'd like to negotiate my salary to reflect my skill and my value to the company. What advice would you recommend for negotiation? This is sort of special because I can't really say "well, ______ offered me a job of salary X", since that would be a normal team where I wouldn't have my massive skill advantage.
Thanks <comment><USER2> Experts (particularly world leading ones) get jobs not internships. If they aren't hiring you based on your expertise then it probably isn't particularly valuable to them.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have to complete internships in order to graduate.

<comment><USER2> Then the main thing is to finish the internship. As cool as your creation may be it is probably not that valuable to the people running the internship. Keep that in mind and don't negotiate yourself out of the internship.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> If you were an "expert" you wouldn't be negotiating an _internship_ offer.

(Side note: have you considered working w/ ESR? I think your personalities are very similar.)

Also: "Even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while."

</comment><comment><USER4> Can you tell us, Why you need an internship? What you did, why you consider you as an expert in the field?

<comment><AUTHOR> I have to complete internships in order to graduate. As I said in the post, I created something that is the best in the world in the category, and during the interview saying they were impressed, of course, would be an understatement.</comment></comment>


FCC report finds almost no broadband competition at 100Mbps speeds - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/02/fcc-report-finds-almost-no-broadband-competition-at-100mbps-speeds/?amp=1 <comment><USER2> I used to ask why anyone would ever need 100 Mbps, until I got 100 Mbps. Then I said the same about gigabit, until I got gigabit.

Now I've moved from New Zealand, with its amazing internet infrastructure, to Australia, where I'm lucky to get 10 Mbps, and it keeps dropping out. I couldn't even download a folder from Dropbox last night because my connection was too slow and flaky.

It should be the priority for governments on all levels, from town halls up to parliament/congress/whoever is at the top, to improve internet infrastructure to at least 100 Mbps. This is especially important for less populated areas if they don't want to wither and die out in the information economy.

What the USA needs is a grassroots movement to improve internet infrastructure. 120 years ago, telecommunications pioneers used barbed wire fences to build their own telephone infrastructure [1], this needs to happen again for the internet, but telecom companies apparently block this from happening.

[1] [https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/barbed-wire- telephone-...](https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/barbed-wire-telephone- lines-homesteaders-prairie-america-history)

<comment><USER3> What can you do with 1gb that you couldn't do with 100mb? I got 50mb and for the first time can't think of a reason to upgrade.

<comment><USER4> At those speeds, its nice to start thinking about decentralization. At a GB speed, your network is about as fast as a typical HDD. So whatever you store on an HDD can now be twice as fast to load if your friend has the same thing.

It would actually be way better, than HDD, because you could do smaller requests. Hard drives take about 10ms to respond to a random access. Your friends could have the thing on SSD or even cached in memory. So you'll get a significant speed up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I am currently out in the sticks in the U.S. near a major interstate highway. I have one option for wired internet which is DSL. The max speed is 5Mbps down and 0.5Mbps up. I have a choice between 2 wireless companies that will gladly lock me into a 2 year contract at ~$100 a month with a bandwidth cap of 200-300 GB a month. I have asked around and it has been this way for ~10 years and the local ISP has no intention of an infrastructure upgrade. I check the broadbandnow website every month and there are no new options. This is the free market most of the people living in rural America deal with. I previously lived in a major city and had 100Mbps down and 30Mbps up with no data caps.

Now think about how slow that is. I have to wait for Youtube to buffer up and Netflix/Hulu were so unusable I canceled my service. Watching anything live only works at the lowest possible resolution. VOIP is completely unreliable and gaming is spotty at best. The last time I had internet options this slow was the end of the 90s. Using census data there are 10,000+s of people out here dealing with this garbage level service.

The U.S. government defines broadband as 25Mbps down and 3Mbps upload at a minimum. I currently do not have broadband internet.

<comment><USER6> What speed is your LTE?

<comment><USER5> According to a chart of the local LTE mobile internet options the max speed is 10Mbps. The fast test on my phone just reported the max speed as 1.9Mbps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> 43% with less than two choices for 25mbit is more concerning. 25mbit is around what you'd need for a family of four without being bandwidth crunched all the time.

<comment><USER8> I'm curious why you think 25 mbps is what you'd need for a family of four? Is there some sort of data out there for this?

Netflix states you need 3.5 mbps for SD, 5.0 mbps for HD.[0] With a family of four, does this means everyone could be watching HD Netflix, and do various other browsing simultaneously, and still be under 25mbps? If so, wouldn't 25mbps be far above what a family of four would need "without being bandwidth crunched all the time"? (Assuming that HD video would be the most data- intensive thing) Especially since, likely more often than not, everyone in the house will not be streaming HD video simultaneously.

The reason why I state this is because, while I get more speed is always better, we seem to often state X mbps is the bare minimum that should be achieved, but never say why. It makes it seem we are letting the perfect, or great, be the enemy of the good in some scenarios. For instance, if 10, 15, or 20 mbps is perfectly fine for most households, then shouldn't we use those numbers instead?

[0]: [https://help.netflix.com/en/node/306](https://help.netflix.com/en/node/306)

<comment><USER9> > Assuming that HD video would be the most data-intensive thing

I think this is the wrong assumption to make. I have a 30mbps-ish plan right now, and I can slow my apartment's connection down to a crawl by initiating a large download.

25mbps might be enough for a family of four whose connections are _consistent_ , but I'd wager that the average home's traffic is more on the bursty side.

<comment><USER7> That could be solved with better QoS on the router right?

Obviously a download from a good server will saturate a 100mbps line, but so what? Other than video games and massive file backups, 25mbit is fairly fast. I pay for faster, but it's only a marginal improvement.

<comment><USER9> Better QoS on consumer routers would definitely help, but it's not a panacea -- ballooning website sizes also lead to bursty network conditions, and I wouldn't be surprised if my router's QoS is configured to prioritize HTTP(S) connections. Same goes for automatic updates.

Edit: I meant to add this:

We have the ability to provide (or at least develop) 100mbps connections to the vast majority of Americans, and we recognize that Internet transfers aren't getting any smaller. It's good to look at ways to improve the status quo (e.g., QoS), but we should also be looking to change the status quo itself.

<comment><USER8> Your edit is essentially the point of my original post. Yes, if we can get 100mbps for the vast majority of Americans, that would be awesome. But, if the vast majority of Americans would be fine right now with 10-15-20mbps, wouldn't it be better to analyze our national broadband capabilities based on that benchmark? From what I understand, 100mbps is overkill, so why use that as a benchmark?

I come at this with the thinking that, it's not "us" that's building out the infrastructure, but the telco companies. So, really what we are doing is analyzing the build-outs telcos are doing, and judging whether it is good enough or not. Is it really fair to say that, if there aren't 3+ telcos providing 100mbps, but there are 3+ providing 15mbps, that's not good enough?

<comment><USER9> Well, I disagree that the vast majority of Americans are fine with 10/15/20mbps. They might get by with it, but I'm sure they notice their streams buffer or drop in quality when they do (or their system does) something bursty.

In light of the obscene amount of money that taxpayers have sunk into ISPs, there's no need for that. They may be the ones building the infrastructure, but they're taking advantage of us along the way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This reminds me of the former Romanian dictator's comment that his people simply just did not need color tv. I didn't think I'd ever see that kind of stupidity from the US Congress and regulators. Busting up monopolies is clearly no longer in fashion.

<comment><USER11> Сhaushesku considered that people doesn't need a TV at all, so blackouts became usual thing.

By the way, I don't think it's all about monopolies. It's just expenses, companies should invest huge amounts of cash just to reach last mile. Who will take such risks after some company already built infrastructure which you can just double and hope for underbidding your opponents?

<comment><USER12> Well for starters, municipalities could compete.

Unfortunately for us consumers, Comcast has lobbied pretty well and made it against the law for municipalities to start their own ISP.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Surprisingly, in Myrtle Beach, SC we have multiple high speed providers choices: HTC (as in htcinc.net, a local telco cooperative offering gigabit fiber), or Spectrum, who just minutes ago I heard for the first time that their new default tier in our area is 100mbps. Not sure if they go much hiher though, because a few years ago TWC was going to offer 300mbps cable service, and then the Spectrum merger cancelled that expansion.

Either way, I'm happy with my high speed fiber service. And I likely have competition to thank.

<comment><USER14> >a few years ago TWC was going to offer 300mbps cable service, and then the Spectrum merger cancelled that expansion.

Are you sure they don't offer that? I live in Charlotte, and that's what I have.

<comment><USER15> They are also bringing gigabit by end of 2018: [https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2018/02/chart...](https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2018/02/charter-promises-gigabit-internet-to-virtually-all- customers-this-year/)

<comment><USER16> Not sure I'd call 940/35Mbps gigabit (better providers use that to refer to 1/1Gbps — Charter's marketing wank doesn't sit too well :/)

<comment><USER17> Comcast is at 1gbps/35mbps.

What's the overhead of ACKs? It feels to me that you probably couldn't saturate the connection without getting buffer bloated by ACK traffic, at which point can it really be called 'gigabit' if it's not theoretically attainable?

<comment><USER14> ACKs are TCP, not IP. They only claim 1gbps for IP traffic, not TCP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> While it's healthy to understand these stats, consider that some people knowingly move to places which are not thoroughly served by broadband providers, and some of them don't really care.

I know and talk to enough people who knew, in advance of making a choice to move, that they were moving somewhere with absolutely no home terrestrial broadband, and did so anyway. Often mobile (or even satellite, which is generally quite limited in terms of upstream bandwidth and latency) internet is enough for them, or the pros of living there outweigh that con; many _could_ arrange to bridge to a neighbour fairly cheaply through directional radio but neglect to because, again, it doesn't bother them all that much.

Home terrestrial broadband is a commodity, not a right, nor even a necessity (though some may like to frame it as such). It is more important to be employed, out of prison, fed, and housed, than it is to binge watch the last remaining bottom-of-the-barrel content on Netflix. As improvements to codecs roll out, even more people on the same slower connections will have access to high quality video (and the ability to share it), which is the major strain on those connections in the first place, and it won't take people forcing others to give a damn about broadband.

<comment><USER19> But did they move because of the lack of broadband, or in spite of it?

And by the standards of your last paragraph, anything beyond a nutrient slurry would be considered a luxury. Not a compelling argument.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> In my area (Midwest USA), you can only get 100Mbps or more from either

A) Cable company. In my case Mediacom. B) Fiber, which is also offered by Mediacom as well as some rural providers to select locations.

DSL is barely 20Mbps around here, and you can't even get 10Mbps service in some spots two miles off US 20. As someone who'd like to buy a home in the country, I find this lack of coverage a much bigger issue. Forget competition, there's practically no service at all.

<comment><USER21> Much of my county doesn't even have water and sewer pipes. People just spend the thousands to tens of thousands of dollars needed to build septic systems and wells and accept that is the trade off for living in the country.

<comment><USER22> You say that like it's a bad thing. Wells and septic systems are so common that I would struggle to believe they're a "trade off".

Where I grew up (on well water and a septic tank), people couldn't believe that city folk _pay_ for their water, and what's more, that they pay to have it _go down the drain!_

A septic tank costs ~$5k and will last for 40 years. Over the lifetime of a septic tank, my city water bill will have cost me $24,000.

<comment><USER23> Yes, and occasionally, you might have to get a guy with a backhoe to come out and do some work. That's $1000. That's assuming that you don't need a new line, which would take a perc test and a new permit. All the while the guy with the backhoe is looking at your system and wondering how it ever worked or got signed off in the first place.

It's several hundred to get it pumped every couple of years, I think I'm remembering in the range of $600 and just shy of 3 years between pumpings.

Then the well needs power, and someone needs to do the generator in a power outage, or you get to chip in for a spiffy one with an autostart, and the only time the well head ever acts up is on national holidays when if you can get someone out, it's 3x overtime.

You know, I kind of like city water now.

<comment><USER22> You say that like city water never needs maintenance. My neighbor had roots growing into his pipes from a tree on city property, but since the pipes were on private property he had to have them replaced on his own dime, and also fix the flooding in the house from the backed-up sewer line.

I'm not arguing that septic tanks are better, and I apologize that many people reading my comment seem to think I am. What I'm arguing is that septic tanks are not uncommon. On the contrary, basically everyone outside of city limits is using one.

<comment><USER24> Most cities I lived in serviced the lines up to the point they entered the house, though. Not as much to worry about.

<comment><USER25> All the cities I have lived in would only serice lines up to and including the meter. Everything downstream of the meter was the property owner's responsibility.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm a short term renter who tends to move somewhere new about once a year inside of the USA for work. I have been choosing where to live primarily around the speed of the ISP available in the building. I have had 1Gbit for the last two years and would never want to downgrade.

It's a national embarrassment that we don't have this kind of access in more places.

</comment><comment><USER27> For those in the east bay, Bay area, looking for another provider, keep an eye on this one: [https://www.lmi.net/services/internet/phiber/](https://www.lmi.net/services/internet/phiber/)

They claim 50$/mo (60 after first year) for speeds up to 1 GB/sec. But, its not available yet, but will be sometime in 2018, they say.

Here's another one, I'm looking into: [https://common.net/](https://common.net/)

unfortunately, alot of these aren't ready yet in my area

<comment><USER28> sonic.net is also doing gigabit in the bay area, including expanding to the east bay.

We have it at my home in San Francisco and it's been rock solid so far. It was slated for December 2017 but we got it even earlier, in October.

<comment><USER29> IIRC LMI resells Sonic (at least for DSL, not sure about fiber).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> It's not broadband for me, it's monthly data caps. I can stream 4 different netflix shows, on 50Mbps, and blow through 1TB monthly cap in 3 weeks. No point of getting even faster connection.

<comment><USER31> Where in the world do you live that you still have data caps?

<comment><USER32> IIRC, most US broadband providers have published data caps (and had secret unpublished ones before the FCC's transparency rules, the one bit of the earliest Net Neutrality regulation that wasn't struck down, forced them to be disclosed.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Comcast recently upped my speed from 75/5 to 150/5\. My downloads still top out around 40 on non speed testing sites. I'm looking for something else that has better upload speed; I started with 20/5 on Comcast and over the last 5 years the speed has been going up on paper. I have a 32/8 channel modem attached to a ubiquiti gateway on gigabit Ethernet, so the bottleneck is on the Comcast side. Advertised speeds only match reality for a select few sites that are used for speed testing from my experience.

</comment><comment><USER34> I recently moved to Nashville and signed up for the AT&T gigabit offering which is 1Gbps up and down with unlimited data for $80 a month (what a deal).

Wireless devices cap out at around 400Mbps on Speedtest.net because they hit wireless throughput maximums. My iMac which is attached to my AirPort Time Capsule via CAT6 pushes around 700Mbps up and down. I'm fairly certain I am not being capped, just that Speedtest.net POP's probably can't push that much bandwidth to max out my 1Gbps connection.

<comment><USER35> Your contract with AT&T probably only guarantees you 70% of the advertised speed. I've never had an issue with speedtest.net POPs being able to handle gigabit tests. I have lots of experience with underperforming AT&T connections of all kinds. I would try another speed test site if you think that is the bottleneck.

<comment><USER34> @bigjimmyk3 brought up a great point. Most consumer routers can't push 1Gbps fully. Also, I am actually routing through two routers. The first being the AT&T supplied router/modem combo, then that flows into an Apple AirPort Time Capsule in bridge mode. All CAT6 cabling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I pay $75 for 7/0.768Mbps and $220 for 50/10Mbps for 2 business lines.

My only option is Spectrum cable. They are offering 100Mbps fiber for $770/month if sign up for 5 years contract.

<comment><USER37> $770/mo for 5 years contract? I assume that's on your business lines and has a service level agreement with it?

<comment><USER38> Not the parent, but yes (we used to have fiber service from Charter). It's also symmetrical so 100Mbits up, which is an order of magnitude faster than their residential copper service. The 5 year commit is to cover their cost stringing fiber from the closest splice point to your facility (could be several blocks). If you can peer with them in a building that is already fiber-fed on their network, the cost should be lower.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Last year, I was talking to friends in Africa with Internet faster than mine and cheaper to boot! WTF!

</comment><comment><USER40> I live in NYC and only have a single option over 15Mbps.

</comment><comment><USER41> Free market. ;-{</comment>


My first SaaS, don't be gentle - <AUTHOR> https://www.uptimemate.com/ <comment><USER2> What's your USP over, say, UptimeRobot? Looks slick, but thought I'd ask :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Great question. Next to Uptime monitoring we also monitor your website Speed performance and Health performance.

Every week we scan your website for 404 errors and mixed content violations and SSL Health.

Every week we monitor your Google Page Speed score and Server ping times and store historical data.

We also build a very powerful, but simple to use notification system. For example, we gave you the option to receive an email when your website assets (css, js, images e.t.c) exceeds a certain limit. Or when your Google page speed score is lower or higher than x.

And we think that it doesn't hurt to invest some love in great UI ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hey, you on Indie Hackers?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes ;-) Have we met before? Can't remember, sorry!

<comment><USER3> Haha, no. I was thinking you should make a post on there and link it here. Better for conversation, IMHO.</comment></comment></comment>


Customize iOS7 App Switcher with custom card view - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/vpdn/MMAppSwitcher <comment><USER2> It looks like the trick here is to hook into a global NSNotification called "UIApplicationWillBeginSuspendAnimationNotification", which is assumed to be "app will enter background", and then throw up a fullscreen UIView on top of everything.

I think this is an undocumented notification, so it's possible other iOS versions will break this feature.

<comment><USER3> I can't find it at the moment, but I think there is a supported way to achieve the same thing. I remember it being mentioned at WWDC to allow apps to hide sensitive data in the UI before the screenshot for the app switcher is taken.

<comment><USER4> Yes I remember that as well, all you have to do is set the UI you want to be screenshotted in the applicationWillEnterBackground notification/application delegate callback. This has been around since fast app switching (iOS 2.3 I think, the golden old days :)) but has gotten much more prominent with the new app switcher.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'll wager Apple will shut this down or reject apps that do this.

If you're going to do this you have to consider the ramifications of how stale the information on the card becomes over time. The example, showing a "Checked in since..." will become stale if someone checks in/out on another device.

A real iOS 7 API to update these cards in the background would be a nice addition.

<comment><USER6> The cards are already showing stale information, including Apple's own apps: [http://d.pr/v/NuY5](http://d.pr/v/NuY5). As for background updates, there are some ways around through iOS7 background modes, but the situation could certainly be improved. I agree there should be an Apple provided "AppSwitcher Kit" framework.

<comment><USER5> Right now though, I have this intuitive belief that when I close an app, it "pauses" and the card I'm seeing is a frozen state of what the screen looked like when I hit the home button.

I don't know if that's how other people perceive it, but it does feel extra- wrong when you hack it to try to convey timely information in the switcher.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Maybe I'm too pessimistic, but I expected the example to be just the app's logo. Ie: oh, that's my Dropbox app because instead of the Dropbox UI, I see the big Dropbox logo (Nothing against Dropbox or their app). I also wonder if we'll ever see the app switcher card being used as advertisement space.

A little less cynically: If you can redesign a screen in the app to remove clutter and highlight the important information for the user for the app switcher, why don't you do that _in_ the app? Sounds like it might be a better UI design. Now, I can think of many reasonable counter examples, but I'd challenge you to spend more time on the app UI where your users spend most of their time.

<comment><USER8> The switcher view is a) purely read-only, b) scaled down in size from the normal view. I think it makes sense for info to be presented differently in this case. When you make an icon smaller, you don't just take the existing design and scale it down. You also remove detail you can't afford to try to make the design clearer overall.

</comment></comment><comment> k-mcgrady Nice idea. Probably something Apple should be making available easily via the API as it could make the task switcher much more useful.

</comment><comment><USER9> Interesting stuff, surprised the built-in apps don't do something similar to this.

As an aside, is there anything similar to this for android? I've tried a fair bit of googling but can't find anything or the right search term.

<comment><USER10> There is a method `onCreateThumbnail()`[1] that is supposed to allow you to do this, but it doesn't appear to work (reported bugs in 4.0-4.2). The best you can get at the moment is to blank out the thumbnail[2] (for security reasons) or opt out of being shown in the list [3].

[1]: [http://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Activity....](http://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Activity.html#onCreateThumbnail\(android.graphics.Bitmap%2C%20android.graphics.Canvas\))

[2]: [http://commonsware.com/blog/2012/01/16/secure-against- screen...](http://commonsware.com/blog/2012/01/16/secure-against- screenshots.html)

[3]: Use android:excludeFromRecents="true"

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm guessing Apple will shut this down. The thumbnails are there for the sole reason of you visually identifying the apps as you left them. If applications can change that snapshot at will then it becomes a mere gimmick.</comment>


Microsoft Now OpenBSD Foundation Gold Contributor - <AUTHOR> http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20150708134520 <comment><USER2> Worth noting that Facebook and Google are both silver contributors.

=== [http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/contributors.html](http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/contributors.html) ===

For 2015 The OpenBSD Foundation will recognize donors in the following categories based on contribution amount.

On request we will provide a link to your website for donations of $5000 or more, and display your logo for donations of $10,000 or more.

        Iridium: $100,000 to $250,000
        Platinum: $50,000 to $100,000
        Gold: $25,000 to $50,000
            Microsoft Corporation
        Silver: $10,000 to $25,000
            Facebook Inc.
            Google Inc.
        Bronze: $5,000 to $10,000
            2Keys Security Solutions
            Mandrill
            genua mbh

</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>===

<comment><USER3>
        Gold: $25,000 to $50,000
            Microsoft Corporation
        Silver: $10,000 to $25,000
            Facebook Inc.
            Google Inc.

Arguably these are small amounts for all three companies, but what is the best way to calculate a fair share - not just for large companies but for anyone? For example,

* How much does OpenBSD need?

* How much does each company benefit from OpenBSD's work?

* How much would it cost to license the software if it were proprietary? How much would it cost to build and maintain it in-house?

<comment><USER4> Those are hilariously small numbers. The accounting departments of those companies probably wouldn't even blink if one extra zero were added to the end.

If you're funding open source products like this, companies should fund at least 3-5 full time senior engineer salaries per year. We should praise "donating" $3 million to $10 million per year. Anything less is a joke seeing these amounts are from multi-billion dollar companies _built on_ free software.

Imagine you lived next to a free buffet that only accepted donations. You ate there every day of the year, saved thousands of dollars over buying and making your own food, then thought you were being "generous" by dropping them a tenner at Christmas. Also, you're a full time tech employee who cashed out millions in stock and have several million dollar apartments in cities around the world. But, sure, you're generous by dropping them $10.

<comment><USER5> You don't get to be a successful company if your accounting department doesn't blink if there are zeros appearing on invoices.

<comment><USER6>
      "I didn't get rich by writing a lot of checks"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> All the comments in the thread are focussing on comparing Microsoft's contribution to Facebook or Google for one project and giving credit to Microsoft. But, it is important to remember that Google and Facebook contribute to OSS in different forms. For example, Google spends regularly on Google Summer of Code. There may be other example for Facebook as well.

I am not a fan/employee of any of these companies. I am just putting the contribution into a different perspective.

<comment><USER8> CoreCLR alone is ~2.6 million lines of code, with several million lines of code to go [1]. I would wager that by raw LOC, Microsoft will open source more code in 2014-2015 than Google and Facebook combined.

[http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/archive/2015/02/03/coreclr- is...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/archive/2015/02/03/coreclr-is-now-open- source.aspx)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> FYI - Gold contributor means the donation was somewhere in the range of $25,000 to $50,000.

<comment><USER10> I'm pretty sure they got a donation closer to the lower $25,000 bound. I check the fund raisin page quite often and up to this morning it showed a total of $100,000 raised. It's now at $125,000.

Still great regardless of the amount. I'm happy that the money was donated to the project.

<comment><USER11> [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.openbsdfoundation.org%2Fcampaign2015.html)

100k -> 125k, yep

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Theo de Raadt always complained that such companies never gave back. HNers were always quick to suggest he change his open source licence. Hopefully this means him and his crew can do a better job than they are already doing without them feeling they compromised on their values.

</comment><comment> vezzy-fnord Probably has something to do with their OpenSSH adoption, indeed.

Theo de Raadt actually praised Windows in a ruBSD 2013 interview, saying their exploit mitigations were second to OpenBSD.

<comment><USER13> Another way to read that is as more of a slam of his major competitor.

<comment><USER14> Only if you try hard.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's a shame that three top contributions by multibillion companies combined hardly cover a decent yearly salary for a single developer.

</comment><comment><USER16> Yay! OpenBSD does great work, I'm glad they are getting serious support now. Hopefully other large vendors do the same thing...I'm looking at you Intel, HP...

<comment> liviu- Both Intel and HP have donated to OpenBSD: [http://www.openbsd.org/donations.html](http://www.openbsd.org/donations.html)

<comment><USER16> I stand corrected. Cheers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> What's in it for microsoft though? What is their end-goal? If they support opensource I'd rather they port some major programs to other platforms to make those platforms more viable.

<comment><USER18> If I heard correct, Microsoft wants to add openssh support to Windows 10, server and client.

<comment><USER19> This has been possible with Cygwin for many years.

<comment><USER20> Yes but you don't get Powershell. If you're even remotely into actual scripting on Unix you'll love Powershell's consistency and separation of data/presentation.

<comment><USER21> I spent fifteen years scripting on Unix for a living. I consider powershell to be garbage. Lack of 'separation of data/presentation' is what made unix ubiquitous. It's also what made HTML ubiquitous. I think it's great that powershell is getting full, native ssh support -- because then I can manage windows computers in a non-ridiculous way, regardless of what PL wankery Microsoft shoved into the syntax.

<comment><USER20> > Lack of 'separation of data/presentation' is what made unix ubiquitous.

I think standardization and easy scripting made Unix ubiquitous. Making a regex to search for start time in ps output did not.

> It's also what made HTML ubiquitous.

Most HTML on the internet uses CSS for presentation.

> I think it's great that powershell is getting full, native ssh support -- > because then I can manage windows computers in a non-ridiculous way

So it's non ridiculous, but you'd still be using Powershell, which you just said is garbage. I'm not following.

You seem /really/ pissed off. I'm not sure why.

<comment><USER21> > I think standardization and easy scripting made Unix ubiquitous. Making a > regex to search for start time in ps output did not.

So was it easy or not?

> Most HTML on the internet uses CSS for presentation.

...now. That was extremely not the case during the period that HTML grew popular.

> So it's non ridiculous, but you'd still be using Powershell, which you just > said is garbage. I'm not following.

It's non ridiculous because my control scripts can be written in a real scripting language, dispatching generated powershell commands to windows machine over the same protocol that real computers use. Powershell itself isn't really the attraction in this case.

> You seem /really/ pissed off. I'm not sure why.

I'm not sure why you would think that. They're just opinions. I can consider something garbage without getting emotional about it. Actual garbage in a garbage can, for instance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Microsoft windows dying, this is new business of microsoft ? [http://blog.sudoask.com/great-dictator-on-software-dying- and...](http://blog.sudoask.com/great-dictator-on-software-dying-and-unix- like-systems-is-the-will-back-again/)

</comment><comment><USER23> Good they're contributing something back. They should sponsor more developers to work on infrastructure they could integrate into their offerings. Even from their evil perspective, they'd still be able to use their EEE strategy for people foolish enough to buy their non-standard version. They'd benefit from increased innovation and reduced costs as projects get bigger. We'd benefit with components that had financial support to keep improving and maybe get more security review than certain FOSS projects that have never heard of that.

So, it's in their interest to expand their role in open source software whether they intend to play nice or evil. They'll benefit and we'll possibly benefit either way. At the least, quality and innovation should both go up. Microsoft could always use more of those. ;)

</comment><comment><USER24> Canadian tax structure does not consider "software projects" eligible for charitable contribution, so the donations are not generally tax deductible.

This is why i'm not sending a check right now

<comment><USER25> ... Which makes me wonder why the OpenBSD hasn't filed for 501(c)(3). I'm sure it comes with strings, but given the donation revenue they've generated, tax- deductible status could be a big lever in pure dollar terms...

<comment><USER23> They say on the foundation website that, in Canada, the overhead of doing that is too high to justify it. They're hardly getting in donations so any amount of overhead can detract significantly to the project. If it's serious overhead, that's a serious loss. So, they're just not doing it until they get enough donations to justify it.

<comment><USER26> This is unfortunately backwards. Many large corporations will only donate and provide matching donations to registered non-profits. Applying for 501(c)(3), and whatever the Canadian equivalent is, would be the gateway to much larger donations. Yes, there's overhead and headache, but the benefit is that being a registered non-profit is one of the requirements for corporate donations.

The reason the project gets so few donations may well be that many businesses and individuals have to weigh donating to OpenBSD (not tax deductible, not registered as a non-profit) versus literally any other cause that is tax deductible. Simply put, a dollar to OpenBSD doesn't go as far as a dollar to say, the Linux Foundation (a 501(c)(6)).

<comment><USER23> The counter I expected and I totally agree with that. They might be shooting themselves in the wallet with this choice. Although, Theo and others have repeatedly said how little companies even try to donate to them. They might have wasted significant amounts of their funds complying with Canadian requirements for little to no gain.

So, I'm not sure which is the best route given the two facts: plenty of opportunity for gain and loss on each end. I'd like to see them at least attempt to get the status then tell a bunch of potential donors it's tax exempt. If money doesn't roll in, drop the status. If it does, keep it. Seems like a worthwhile risk to take.

What do you think?

<comment><USER26> Absolutely worth it. It isn't terribly costly to get registered as a non- profit, especially for low revenue organizations. I run a student organization at a mid-size university, and it's only just barely cost prohibitive for us, given that we don't stand to gain much from our current status as a de facto non-profit.

From what I understand, the cost amounts to a few hundred dollars in legal fees for paperwork, less if you're willing to use some hip website to do it, and some annual compliance costs (keeping receipts, filing tax returns).

I have no idea why they wouldn't pursue that. Maybe it's much harder in Canada?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> How much does one need to contribute to be Gold?

<comment><USER28> > > [http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/contributors.html](http://www.openbsdfoundation.org/contributors.html)

Iridium: $100,000 to $250,000

Platinum: $50,000 to $100,000

Gold: $25,000 to $50,000

Silver: $10,000 to $25,000

Bronze: $5,000 to $10,000

<comment><USER29> OT, but incidentally, gold is more valuable than platinum at the moment:

[http://www.kitco.com/charts/livegold.html](http://www.kitco.com/charts/livegold.html)

[http://www.kitco.com/charts/liveplatinum.html](http://www.kitco.com/charts/liveplatinum.html)</comment></comment></comment>


Dissecting Gmail's Email Attachments - <AUTHOR> http://webstandardssherpa.com/reviews/dissecting-gmails-email-attachments/ <comment><USER2> I loved simple vanila JavaScript in this article.

</comment><comment><USER3> We spent an absolutely ridiculous amount of time making drag-and-drop work across browsers in the pure-website version of Inky (<http://inky.com>). Its absurd difficultly was one of the reasons we migrated to an installed app model for our first release.

Making a "real" mail client that runs in a web browser is incredibly difficult. Basic things you take for granted when writing a desktop app, such as being able to copy text to the clipboard, or -- seriously -- being able to position the cursor in the editor window below the quoted text for "bottom posting", are a huge, grinding pain in browsers. And don't get me started on key bindings. Keyboard handling in browsers is still a comedy of errors.

It's gotten a lot better over the last few years, but it's still really hard to mimic some standard desktop app functionality using pure HTML/CSS/JS.

</comment><comment><USER4> It doesn't mention what to do if the browser doesn't support FormData. What I had to do at Grooveshark is just force the user not to be able to drag/drop if they don't also have FormData.

</comment><comment><USER5> An interesting dissection. I need to implement something like this that's a bit simpler than most of the very heavy JS libraries.</comment>


Linode SSD Beta - <AUTHOR> https://forum.linode.com/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=10406 <comment><USER2> I know there is this theory that server hardware needs to be more durable therefore you should pay an order of magnitude more, but all of my server workloads are write somewhat frequently, read randomly, and delete almost never. It is my understanding, that commodity consumer SSDs should work fine for this workload.

I assume Digital Ocean is using consumer SSDs, and it feels like it shouldn't be a problem with the exception of the bad neighbor issue.

<comment> steve-howard Actually I thought it was going the other way: "Old school" is that server hardware should be reliable so it doesn't go down, and "New school" is that hardware should be cheap and there should be a lot of it so that if one server goes down we don't care.

<comment><USER2> Both DigitalOcean and Linode are in the "old school" camp. They are in the business of providing reliable hosting at good prices.

My question was along the lines of: Using consumer HDs in servers is a disaster because the 24/7 read workload eventually breaks spinning platters. Server grade magnetic disks are a must in servers. Consumer grade SSDs are acceptable in servers because they don't wear out from 24/7 reads. Consumer SSDs fail from constant deletes+writes. Server workloads don't produce many deletes, therefore it is safe to put consumer SSDs in servers.

Is the above correct? Is the premium for server grade SSDs a myth? Should I feel safe using Digital Ocean under the assumption they are using consumer SSDs for multi-tenant servers?

<comment><USER3> Some workloads are write-intensive and some aren't. For a hosting provider there's no way to know what the customers are going to do. I would expect that SSDs attract customers who are going to actually give them a workout, though.

<comment><USER2> > Some workloads are write-intensive and some aren't.

Did you read what I wrote? Do you mean delete-intensive?

<comment><USER4> I don't think there's any truth to your notion that deletes are somehow _worse_ for a solid state drive than other kinds of writes. Overwriting a sector has the same effect on longevity as erasing it and filling it up again, but in the latter case, you can use the ATA TRIM command to defer the flash block erase latency (which is significantly higher than the flash program latency). The only way in which deletes are "bad" is if you're comparing to a workload that fills the drive once and then moves on to fill a different drive - but that's not a fair comparison against doing all the writes to the same drive.

Different workloads can somewhat affect how much write amplification results from the wear leveling, but the best-case there actually is to have no long- lived data on the drive, ie. lots of deletes.

<comment><USER5> I think he's assuming that since it's actually rewritten flash-memory bits that degrade, if you don't delete data, then you don't rewrite. So without deletes, all writes simply fill more of the drive and you shouldn't see degradation.

Modern flash drives do indeed try to level the writes across all bits, but he's talking about work-loads that don't rewrite at all.

<comment><USER6> I wouldn't call an application that writes once and never deletes anything on the hard drive a write-intensive workload. Filling up a SSD with write-once data means paying well over 50¢/GB for your writes, which isn't something you can do if you are "write-intensive" \-- if you're writing 100x the capacity of the drive over its lifetime, _then_ you are really write-intensive, at which point the distinction between delete-intensive and write-intensive is nearly nonexistent for obvious reasons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This sounds pretty cool! What sorts of considerations does one make when you are deciding between more RAM or SSDs?

 _Random IO is processed first through the SSDs (the thing that they are really good at) while sequential IO short-cuts to the hard drives - which is pretty slick._

I'm curious, what do you use to develop something like that? Is it build on top of something? Built into the kernel? I wouldn't even know where to begin...

<comment><USER8> Sounds like SSD's are used as a cache, like ZFS does with its l2arc.

<comment><USER9> Does ZFS use some sort of last-used eviction to purge the cache? It seems like differentiating between random/sequential IO is a bit different than LRU.

<comment><USER3> The design is documented here: [https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/blob/master/module/zfs/arc...](https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/blob/master/module/zfs/arc.c#L3993)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Every time I think I'm done with Linode, they draw me right back in. I guess I'll wait to see about the pricing, but I imagine this will be a serious challenge for Digital Ocean to overcome, since their main selling point over Linode is cheap SSDs VPSs.

<comment><USER11> Waiting for digital ocean to give me some free upgrades =)

<comment><USER12> Have you been on Digital Ocean for a while? How do you like it so far?

<comment><USER13> I've been using them for a similar period as _xur17_.

Have not had a single issue, bar some packet routing at AMS1 that just lead to latency for a few minutes. Their API is getting quite nice to tie into, though I've had to resort to screen scraping for some of the newer options.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Also worth mentioning that for 59€/mo Hetzner is offering a dedicated i7-4770 Haswell with 32GB RAM and dual SSD raid1.

[http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex40ssd](http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex40ssd)

<comment><USER15> NB: +99€ for setup.

How is everyone satisfied with hetzner? I have a few friends that run setups on their systems, mostly for heavy forums. I'm more interested how do you deal with large backups? Seems to me it's just easier to buy machines in sets for redundancy and every now and then move things over to glacier.

<comment><USER14> Hetzner includes 100GB on a SAN in a distinct datacenter with every dedicated plan (500GB is 10€, 10TB 80€.) Of course you could also push to Glacier, but that'll get counted in your outbound bandwidth (2€/TB after 20TB/mo)

<comment><USER15> Do they charge for traffic between machines at hetzner?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> kind-of related, is anyone using bcache with linux yet? how easy is it to get working? does it speed things up as expected?

[http://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2013/07/linux-...](http://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2013/07/linux-3-10-out-with-better-ssd-caching-and-radeon-support/)

<comment><USER17> Well, I've been using it for over an year now. Yes, it does really speed up things. I've found out that people grossly over estimate need for SSD space. I'm using 64 GB SSD with 3TB drive and hard disk is really rearely touched. I've even enabled power saving spin down for it, so I know when it starts. In normal daily usage HDD isn't being touched at all. It's only when something like linux updates are being run or so. I've also enabled write-back caching without maximum time limit. If you use write-through caching it naturally causes HDD to run all the time. I've chosen to cache everything, not only random reads. Because I have plenty of space with 64 GB SSD. I don't know what people are doing who claim thei need larger SSD than that. Maybe they're working with large data sets or have absolutely massive games or so. As summary, yes, I love it. SSD is never full, I'm not running out of disk space and yes, I do get pure SSD performance over 99% of the time. Only if I pickup some movies or music which has been around for months without being accessed then there's HDD access of course. Setup was ok, because I did it when I replaced my computer so I built everything from scratch anyway. I'm going to blog about that, but I have huge backlog of stuff to get blogged. P.S. Some cache vendors (like Seagate Hybrids drives) recommend using write-through caching, because in the case SSD dies, you'll still have fully working file system on HDD. With write-through caching, things are going to be very badly messed up if SSD dies. Practically totally unrecoverable situation. But that's why we got backups, right?

<comment><USER18> _" With write-through caching, things are going to be very badly messed up if SSD dies"_

You probably meant the reverse of that (With _write-back_ caching... etc.).

<comment><USER17> Yep, true.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > Chicks dig scars

Chicks? Really? Come on Linode, you should be better than this.

<comment><USER20> Purify! Purify!

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Sounds over-engineered, slower and possibly over-priced. A consumer SSD will be faster and so long as it is trimmed correctly and not fully utilized, it should be sufficiently reliable.

<comment><USER20> For people that require a large bulk of data but who also leave most of it cold, unused, front-caching SSDs are brilliant. Paying four times as much for twice the performance and far better reliability is a no-brainer for this- what's the opposite of a bottleneck- accelerator? Data reserve+pump?

What would you guess is the average interval between accesses for any given byte-on-disk a Linode customer has? If it's hours, days, or weeks, I'd call it reckless to be spending money to put those bytes on expensive SSD systems.

Make the hot stuff fast, be price conscious with the rest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Things I really wish they could add or improve.

PHPBB? What year is this? The Website design and structure seriously needs some thought and work. LongView, either have a trial only version of bump the free tier retention to 24 hours. What is the point of a 30 minutes graph? Get rid of the Add on, those pricing are just plain stupid. Give options to increase Memory without buying new plans for $10/GB at a maximum of double current capacity. So a $20 1GB plan could be increase to $30 2GB Memory with everything else the same $20 Plan. That should just make Linode competitive against DO. Linode CDN - A CDN coming from those 6 Linode DC with Data coming off your transfer pool. May be any Data served over CDN would count as triple the amount of data from your pool. SSD Speed up. From the Data on ServerBear, this new SSD tier is working as well as its competitors. I am sure the NodeBalancer could do with a price decrease or bump in concurrent connection.

DO has all of the above in the pipeline for releasing this year, so lets hope Linode react quicker.

</comment><comment><USER23> Linode has "developed" nothing. Linode is using bcache as a tiered storage but there are problems such as certain IO patterns will bypass bcache and hammer the disks causing slower-than-disk-alone IO speed.

</comment><comment><USER24> From the description it sounds like they're just using bcache for the storage layer, or one its equivalents (IIRC Facebook came out with a very similar patch). Still pretty cool

</comment><comment><USER25> So SSDs are bad for server loads... what secret sauce does Digital Ocean have that Linode doesn't? Did they write their own storage layer that's doing something cool?

</comment><comment><USER26> Lindo SSDs are expensive, and the good SSDs are really, really expensive. Although the cheaper SSDs exist, they wear out more quickly, potentially slowing down as they wear, and have slower overall throughput. Not a good combination for use in multi-tenant server workloads.

</comment><comment><USER27> > Random IO is processed first through the SSDs (the thing that they are > really good at) while sequential IO short-cuts to the hard drives - which is > pretty slick.

Any idea why the sequential benchmark numbers improved 4-5x when it is still "short-cutting" to the HDs?

<comment><USER28> Possibly because the HDDs are free to only do long sequential reads, as opposed to having to seek to some random place every now and then.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Sounds promising. SSDs have good potential as a cache for bigger backend spinning disks.

</comment><comment><USER30> while its a welcome move, it should have been done some time ago.

</comment><comment><USER31> Too late.

About 8 months too late.

<comment><USER32> Too late for... ?

<comment><USER31> For me, at least.

I run a small blogging network. Linode have upgraded RAM, added cores, added disk space. They've done everything except improve random-access I/O, which is a major bottleneck for Wordpress installations thanks to MySQL's penchant for joining tables on disk regardless of indices.

I moved to DigitalOcean about 8 months ago simply to get access to SSDs. In most other respects I preferred Linode.

<comment><USER33> Hey fellow Australianite.

I've been looking at using DO instead of Amazon, the main stumbling block for me is I cannot seem to figure out if they offer any configurable firewal. Ie I want to modify port rules, blocking them mostly.

Does DO offer this, and how have you found them so far?

My use case is similar to yours - hosting for multiple shopping carts running on MySQL, hence the appeal of SSDs.

<comment><USER34> Another Australianite here.

You can just bind to localhost if you don't want things to be open to the world, or modify iptables.

Your other issue in Australia is the latency to DO's servers - ~200ms for the US and 350+ for a European droplet. Cloudflare may help there, though.

<comment><USER31> It's a blog network. Latency matters, but not so much that I can justify paying the ruinous bandwidth rates Australian hosts want. I'd be looking at several hundred extra dollars per month for what is really a quite modest operation.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Pigeon Towers: A Low-Tech Alternative to Synthetic Fertilizers - <AUTHOR> https://www.notechmagazine.com/2016/10/pigeon-towers-a-low-tech-alternative-to-synthetic-fertilizers.html <comment><USER2> In Cappadocia (central Turkey) there are millenia-old settlements carved out of volcanic tuff. You can hike down a valley and see structure after structure, not protected in any way, just out thre for anyone to climb into and explore. Churches, domestic dwelling, tombs... it was amazing.

But the most common type of structure was a simple cave dug into the rock, with fifty to a hundred niches carved into the walls, and then the door was bricked uo with just three shoebox-sized openings left in them.

We eventually found a guy there who represented himself as a guide, and he told us that these were pigeon coops, which the folks who inhabited these settlements used for their eggs. Which made no sense to me. Pigeon eggs are tiny. That's an awful lot of work for an egg the size of your thumb.

But what makes perfect sense is to keep pigeons for their droppings. The place is practically desert. The soil is infertile. But with fertilizer... you could survive.

<comment><USER3> "volcanic tuff"

I thought you'd made a typo there.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuff](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuff)

</comment></comment><comment> lota-putty It's far better to compost agri waste directly than this pigeon-shit(chewing a dollar to shit a penny). Pigeons eat mostly seeds so does sparrows. Any insect/pest eating bird species fare better here wrt farming.

<comment><USER4> Composts need worms and other type of insects that compose the waste plants. It could be a slower process in certain part of the world if these insects are not plenty as a result of dry climate.

Besides the production output is probably far higher than what the pigeon consumption (not a penny for a dollar as you suggest), otherwise why would these people bother for thousands of years.

<comment><USER5> Compost needs microbes more than macrobes.

Anyway, it seems like the system is much more passive than folks are realizing. The bird waste collects over long periods of time, and is presumably removed in a mostly composted state.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As elegant a solution as [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windcatcher](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windcatcher) towers. Millennia of agricultural refinements...

<comment><USER7> Which I remember from it being covered here before.[1]. I seem to recall it was covered in more depth before that discussion, but can't locate it at the moment. :/

1: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17670608](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17670608)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The investment in perpetuated technology in this region is high. Qanat for instance [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qanat](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qanat)

These things demand social capital. They don't work well as solo effort they need love and repairs

</comment><comment><USER3> It seems to me the major downside here is that you have to disperse the guano yourself.

A roost on wheels, akin to a chicken tractor [1] would work better wouldn't it?

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

<comment><USER9> Perhaps such precise manual application can also be an upside.

<comment><USER3> Perhaps. Would you want to manure a field by hand though?

There would also be a health benefit to the birds not being in their own excrement all the time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Interesting their waste would be collected and put into fields given the serious health risks involved.

[https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/61646.php](https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/releases/61646.php)

<comment><USER11> Using human waste (night-soil) in the fields was a common practice in England, Japan, India, and elsewhere for centuries.

<comment><USER5> "Night-soil" is much more palatable than "humanure"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Can anyone think of an equivalent expression in software?

(Genuinely curious here. Many software solutions are derived from ecological phenomenon and agricultural practices - this seems like a neat one to mimic.)

</comment><comment><USER12> > Pigeon Towers: A Low-Tech Alternative to Synthetic Fertilizers

This only works if you like perpetual motion machines.

They feed off the grain in the fields so they are not going to give back more from the fields than they take.

But they do turn grain into meat, eat pests, sold for status symbols and racing, and most of all are a important part of a nation identity.

I'd like to see a proper study but 100% doubt they could be used to increase yields in itself and while we destroy native lands for farming we must use it at as high a levels as possible.

I suspect even when land was less intensively farmed 1000 years ago their status (Google for pics, they are impressive and not just Iran) and liking meat was still what made them viable, not crop yields.

I also suspect they are just a sneaky way to steal from you neighbours, this is what is more interesting.</comment>


Quicksilver + python + dropbox = awesomeness - <AUTHOR>

I'm posting this up because I found it very useful, and you probably will too.
I needed away to quickly record my thoughts, whether its a startup idea, some task I have to complete, a quote I read somewhere, anything. I wanted the process to be super fast and very easy to do. Now of course I could've just made a todo.txt file and just open it up, but that's stupid.
I wrote a script that takes a string as its parameter, it lowers the case, caps the first word, adds a period, and puts a plus (+) at the beginning, and appends it to a file. Both the script and the file live in my dropbox folder, so its accessible from all my computers. Then I setup quicksilver on my mac so that whenever I type ctrl+space+(t)(o)+tab+(string_to_save)+enter, it executes the script with the string and saves it in the todo file in my dropbox folder.
So now whenever I have some really cool idea I don't want to forget, I just immediately save it and I'm good to go. I hope you guys find this as useful as I did.
<code> #!/usr/local/bin/python
import os,sys
if len(sys.argv[1:]) == 0:
    sys.exit()
todo = str(" ".join(sys.argv[1:])).strip().lower().capitalize()
un = os.popen('whoami', 'r') path = "/Users/%s/Dropbox" % un.readline().strip()
with open('%s/todo.txt' % path, 'a') as t:
    print >>t, "+ %s." % todo </code> <comment><USER2> >I could've just made a todo.txt file and just open it up, but that's stupid.

I hope that was tongue and cheek.

<comment><USER3> tongue _in_ cheek:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongue_in_cheek>

<comment><USER2> thanks</comment></comment></comment>