Show HN: ThreeMap – 3D map visualizations and stuff - <AUTHOR> https://areknawo.github.io/ThreeMap/ <comment><USER2> Maybe promote it once there are some working examples that are cool. Otherwise it is hard to get excited about just the idea of creating a library.

<comment><USER3> Example is in the README:

[https://cdn.rawgit.com/areknawo/ThreeMap/a76571ba/example/in...](https://cdn.rawgit.com/areknawo/ThreeMap/a76571ba/example/index.html)

<comment><USER4> The example does nothing for me. Just a white page and errors in the browser console. That's not very compelling.

<comment><USER5> When I started (firefox) it was just a grey page with a frame rate graph in the top left. Turns out it started zoomed in way to far. Really cranking back on the scroll wheel revealed the map.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Please wait...

ThreeMap will NOT work with enabled _uMatrix_ / _uBlock Origin_ on the user side...[0]

[0] [http://i.imgur.com/rk7Kd0r.png](http://i.imgur.com/rk7Kd0r.png)

</comment><comment><USER7> Looks interesting. Is there any online examples of it in use?

<comment><USER8> After some clicking, via their github page:

[https://cdn.rawgit.com/areknawo/ThreeMap/a76571ba/example/in...](https://cdn.rawgit.com/areknawo/ThreeMap/a76571ba/example/index.html)

However, doesn't look too impressive to me :-( (Firefox)

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry for the inconvenience. I know that there are some issues with performance - antialiasing isn't fast enough (there are around 300k vertices in zoom 16 for example). I'll try to do better, as this is my first library too. Anyway, it is in early stages and working on, so expect updates in near future.

<comment><USER8> Probably I just suffer from a bug? [https://imgur.com/a/KdRVofD](https://imgur.com/a/KdRVofD) looks like some textures were not loaded.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Looks awesome. Keep it up!</comment>


Amazon's Slow Retreat from Seattle - <AUTHOR> https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/04/amazon-seattle-headquarters-tech-jobs-bellevue-crystal-city/586549/ <comment><USER2> > But in recent years, as Seattle's citizens begin taking Amazon to task for > its role in driving urban inequality

Right. It's Amazon's fault for bringing in high-paying jobs. Definitely has nothing to do with local politics.

<comment><USER3> This is the problem with looking at inequality all on it's own.

Take a population where everyone makes $20k per year. Great! It's equal!

Take another population where half make $30k and half make $50k. Oh no! Inequality!

I'd rather be in the 2nd population.

<comment><USER4> Maybe.

The folks making $30k in the second population may now be spending a bunch more in childcare and hours more on their commutes, because they've been priced out of the city and now have travel from further away.

As an example: [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/17/business/economy/san- fran...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/17/business/economy/san-francisco- commute.html)

<comment><USER5> The only way to be priced out is if the city refuses to accept more people and build enough housing for people. This is a conscious choice by power brokers in cities, to restrict housing availability and enrich homeowners and landlords and real estate speculators.

Pricing people is not an inevitable consequence of population growth, it's the consequence of an older generation of haves deciding that younger and less wealthy people do not deserve housing in a city.

<comment><USER4> > The only way to be priced out is if the city refuses to accept more people > and build enough housing for people.

Which, given that it seems to happen pretty much everywhere, must be factored into decision making.

"Wouldn't it be nice if humans didn't act like humans" is the sort of dreamy optimism that kills Communism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > But in recent years, as Seattle's citizens begin taking Amazon to task for > its role in driving urban inequality, and city leaders push to account for > this cost with higher taxes

What the hell? Maybe also mention as house prices rise so even Amazon employees are complaining about how hard it is to buy a house, and rents go up so that even Amazon employees start to think twice, and the number of local potential hires shrinks...(devs in Seattle who don't currently work for Amazon but would like to do so, as opposed to those have already quit or would never touch it)

But no, of course these aspects, the fundamentals of "can I hire people to work here and how much will I have to pay them", are not relevant.

</comment><comment><USER7> When I interviewed there, one of the interviewers took me to a window and pointed out all of the different buildings amazon either owned outright or had office space in. It was impressive, at least to realize just how big Amazon actually is.

I don't know that it's healthy for one company to dominate so much space, either from the company's perspective or a city's. At that point, with workers already being remote from each other (blocks or miles apart) it would seem to make more sense to me to focus on getting the company shifted to full remote work for anyone not needed in a data, phone or product center.

There are certain things that I miss about working in an office, but I don't know that I'll ever take another job that isn't remote again.

<comment><USER8> TBF, I'm sure groups aren't randomly scattered around the place. Still, as companies grow, there is a natural distribution of workers that you really can't overcome, especially if you want to keep people if they switch roles and don't want to relocate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Is natural disaster resilience a factor in geodistributing your white collar workers?

Everyone knows that the SF Bay Area will get bad earthquakes, and some accounts of the Cascadian subduction zone suggest that much of the Pacific Northwest coastal area (including Seattle) has a worse fate looming: [https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really- big...](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big-one)

</comment><comment><USER10> >Is its pivot to smaller communities a way to avoid messy politics?

I feel very confident there will still be "messy politics", but I think the tactical situation may be more favorable to Amazon in these cases.

>Last year, Seattle's city council proposed a per-employee head tax on the city's largest businesses, intended to raise $75 million for homelessness and affordable housing initiatives.

Even an introductory course in economics will equip someone to find a profusion of problems with this tax. Because taxes affect transactions, not entities, employees at large companies suffer relative to those at smaller companies. There is a perverse incentive for companies near the threshold to manipulate headcounts via subcontractors. And so on.

Companies like Amazon absolutely should pay for the welfare of the less fortunate, but the way there is not through such rash populism. From 1993 to 2016, the Democrats have been the party of sound economic policy, and I would expect better from a blog such as CityLab which presents itself as a promoter of realistic reforms. As Krugman said it:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/19/opinion/varieties-of- vood...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/19/opinion/varieties-of-voodoo.html)

> America's two big political parties are very different from each other, and > one difference involves the willingness to indulge economic fantasies. [...]

> But is all that about to change? [...]

> ...as the economists warn, fuzzy math from the left would make it impossible > to effectively criticize conservative voodoo.

This blog post certainly didn't make me feel very optimistic.

</comment><comment><USER11> The more I read about Amazon's expansion plans the more I believe that they never intended to place a substantial office in NYC, or at least had already abandoned the idea before the opposition to it even grew. It really doesn't seem like we lost anything we were actually going to get.

</comment><comment><USER12> It wasn't just Amazon that opposed it. There were mass protests against the head tax.

<comment><USER4> With 40k workers in Seattle, there'll be a lot of Amazon-aligned third parties. Construction, restaurants, etc.

Amazon wound up doing what they threatened anyways, even though Seattle gave up and rescinded the tax. I do wonder how those protesters feel about that after the fact.

<comment><USER6> Still smug and self righteous, plenty of them are anti-amazon in any other discussion and we're just happy to take their support on this. A significant percentage believed the head tax would be too expensive for small businesses (aka didn't even know who would have to pay it).

<comment><USER13> > (aka didn't even know who would have to pay it).

Small business people aren't stupid. It's sad you think they are. I can assure you that the small business people--the shop owners and house cleaners and barbers and contractors -- knew who had to pay it and who weren't.

You'd be surprised to learn that some people like things to be fair even if they aren't directly involved in a transaction or agreement.

<comment><USER6> No. They argued that small businesses would have to pay it and could not afford this cost. Some of them even tried to suggest that it would be a reasonable idea if it would only apply to larger businesses.

Also, you don't have to be stupid to not know that, just uninformed. I suppose it depends on the definition of stupidity.

<comment><USER13> Well, show me were people were saying that. Small business people who served large employers were correctly saying it affected them, and they knew the reasons.

<comment><USER6> I don't know, but it's not happening in this thread so far as I can tell so I'm not sure when he does.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> They could stand to go a bit faster.

</comment><comment><USER15> Yeah, you should see the composition of the Seattle City Council to understand why Bezos is backing away slowly. Basically all Democrat, with an activist Socialist mixed in and controlling the conversation (she was the one who pushed for "head tax", and continues to do so even after it was repealed). That's great for business, I'm sure.

[https://www.theringer.com/tech/2018/7/17/17578524/seattle- am...](https://www.theringer.com/tech/2018/7/17/17578524/seattle-amazon- kshama-sawant-socialist-local-politics)

</comment><comment><USER16> From the tone of the article and what I would expect to see from some of the comments here eventually, you would think that Seattle united in fighting its corporate fascist oppressors by taxing it fairly to cover the problems the capitalist class creates and in response, Amazon is moving far and away from the scene of the crime; both straw structured arguments are patently false.

There has always been a vocal minority in Seattle that has bemoaned any kind of growth and change in the city, and the recent cause that they latched on was all of disruptions Amazon was claimed to be at fault for, or how the "tech bros" ruined the city. These were probably the same people who hated that the Microsoft of a decade or two prior washed the city over with a tech scene, they probably complained that Boeing made noisy jets for the military industrial complex and those "av bros" were destroying neighborhoods with hundred and hundreds of months of established character. This is a west coast city that I have lived most of my life in and around, it has always been changing and growing, and I along with my wife, friends, and family, love it for the opportunities and ever evolving landscape.

Then there is the argument that Amazon is taking its toys and going to play ball elsewhere, used as proof that somehow Amazon wasn't going to work with the city to begin with. Amazon is probably at the top of the current curve of growth, and some of their recent announcements in jobs and locations show somewhat of a diminished drive to expand. Additionally, to pick up and leave, or to leave the region all together is pretty expensive and disruptive to operations. Bellevue is right across the lake. It offers a city government that wants to grow as fast as possible and as dense as possible, and willing to work with anyone. The recent announcement that the local transit authority was on schedule with the light rail expansion in Bellevue lines up with Amazon and a few other companies looking to expand in the city. Bellevue is looking to be a great place to be "in Seattle" without having to be in Seattle.

</comment><comment><USER17> hello, long time seattle tech person here - this article is a bit slanted and doesn't tell the whole story. i for one, however, hope amz stops building in seattle and starts in earnest elsewhere. it is has become a nuisance of a company that the city is becoming too dependent on. it's not healthy for our local economy, and i would love to see the am-holes spread out and infect other cities.</comment>


Facebook tracks all calls and messages on Android - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/dylanmckaynz/status/976368845635035138 <comment><USER2> If you scroll through the replies, he does admit to opting into a feature to integrate SMS and phone with Messenger [1].

No doubt there's a permissions/version and facebook-overstepping-ethics conversation to have here (as always), but this isn't as major as the title implies. It does seem like Facebook continuing using permissions after he opted-out.

[1] [https://twitter.com/dylanmckaynz/status/976825435026735104](https://twitter.com/dylanmckaynz/status/976825435026735104)

<comment><USER3> For what it's worth, the cell metadata in the post is from over a year before I even opted-into the SMS integration.

The SMS integration was disabled after a few weeks of usage, the app was too buggy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Android 6.0 was the first version to implement permission control. Looks like this guy was running 5.1, so we at least know how Facebook got access to that info.

Doesn't justify it though.

<comment><USER5> Android always had permissions:

[https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/manifest/permissi...](https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/manifest/permission- element.html) (see "introduced in")

Many apps request the phone permission to change their behavior on incoming calls, or during calls. For example, they would stop playing audio.

Access to text messages is sometimes requested to automate text message-based one time pad flows for the user.

<comment><USER6> By permission control they mean: [https://developer.android.com/training/permissions/requestin...](https://developer.android.com/training/permissions/requesting.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> isn't this the expected behavior for apps that you give the sms / voice call / contacts permissions to? i would be surprised if any such app did not display my call/sms history and autocomplete contacts.

<comment><USER8> I think it would be expected for _local_ access, on the device where the data was originally stored. It is wholly unacceptable for them to upload that data. If someone has my name and phone number and installs Facebook, they have just given Facebook all of my personal information.

<comment><USER9> That is how mobile messengers like Telegram work - when you install them, they upload your contact list to their servers to "improve your experience".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> He is using Android 5.1... that was before the whole permission system no?

Besides other people don't seem to be able to reproduce it.

<comment><USER11> Android Apps targeting Android 6.0+ need to handle grant/revocation of permissions at runtime. Previous versions of Android would simply ask for the same permissions upfront when a user installed an app.

<comment><USER12> Yes but it's still possible to target a lower version of Android and request all the permissions up front which must users would agree to

<comment><USER13> That's exactly what the Mi Home (for Xiaomi IoT stuff) app does. Pesky little buggers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> After reading this, I tried to download my data from Facebook. However, avast antivirus on my machine detected a Trojan in the zip file from Facebook with my data and blocked the download with this message: "We've safely aborted connection on bigzipfiles.facebook.com because it was infected with Java:Malware-gen[Trj]"

I find this very weird. Did anyone here faced the same issue ?

<comment><USER15> Unless Facebook is serving up malware in its zip files (possible, but unlikely IMO), you may have other malware on your machine that could be piggybacking off the connection to download more junk. I'd run a full scan with Malwarebytes to be sure.

<comment><USER14> This was the case indeed. A full scan weeded out the existing trojans.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Is this really surprising to anyone? I'm surprised that this information as available to download, but I'm guessing that's not because Facebook wants to provide it (there's probably laws in New Zealand which force this?).

<comment><USER17> You probably have the GDPR to thank for this.

I'm curious how to get your shadow profile's data if you don't have an account.

<comment><USER18> They will have to provide it to you upon request. If they've got some self- service system then great, but if not they'll legally have to do it manually.

<comment><USER17> I just used their self service system and they didn't provide any information about me that I didn't provide myself. For example, they didn't include my phone number, even though they surely have it since I a sure to have friends who has their mobile application installed.

My intention is to have a lawyer send them a letter asking for this information, but I'll wait until GDPR comes into effect first.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> If I don't have a facebook account and the facebook app is installed on my phone by cell provider but I've disabled it does it still do this?

<comment><USER17> If it's not disabled, then definitely it can do this. If it's disabled then it should effectively be uninstalled so it should be fine.

That said it would certainly feel much more comfortable if you could delete it altogether.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> It's interesting that this just dropped to the second page.

</comment><comment><USER8> How do I request such a zip for myself?

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://mobile.twitter.com/shell_ki/status/97680538533092966...](https://mobile.twitter.com/shell_ki/status/976805385330929664)

<comment><USER20> Notably missing on mbasic.facebook.com</comment></comment></comment>


Name Recessions After People - <AUTHOR> http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Name_20Recessions_20After_20People#1223696557

<comment><USER2> Where names have doubled up, I've used the most interesting surname or middle name. This has prevented three Recession Williams (a tip when choosing the next cabinet).

This titling system makes conversation so much easier: "Well, I survived Recession McAdoo, but Recession Andrew was a doozie! If they ever name a Hurricane after that guy, I'm outta here."

1797-1800 Recession Oliver

1807-1814 Recession Albert

1819-1824 Recession Crawford

1837-1843 Recession Levi

1857-1860 Recession Howell

1873-1879 Recession William

1893-1896 Recession John

1907-1908 Recession George

1918-1921 Recession McAdoo

1929-1939 Recession Andrew

1953-1954 Recession Magoffin

1957-1958 Recession Robert

1973-1975 Recession Pratt

1980-1982 Recession Donald

1990-1991 Recession Nicholas

2001-2003 Recession Paul

2008- Recession Henry

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_Unite...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_United_States) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Secretary_of_the_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Secretary_of_the_Treasury)

<comment><USER3> Greenspan's policies were the main cause of the current recession. I think we should give credit where credit is due.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This would encourage the wrong behavior, namely doing accounting shenanigans to put off the recession until your successor takes office.

<comment><USER5> This already happens.

Remember how, around 2000, we went from budget "surpluses" (based on projections which assumed the .com bubble would never burst) to deficits almost immediately?

Notice how we are bailing out the financial industry, in an effort to postpone problems? (I don't think anyone really believes the bailout will prevent a recession, though it might postpone it.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Unfortunately this will often mean the recessions are named after the person trying to fix them rather than the ones who are chiefly responsible.

I despise Bush as much as anyone, but he's only had a small part in getting us into this mess.

<comment><USER7> Without his made up war this would not have happen.

<comment><USER5> The housing bubble, generally thought to have begun in 1997, would not have occurred without the wars in Afghanistan (2001-present) and Iraq (2003-present)?

Ok.

<comment><USER6> Right. The pickle we're in is clearly the result of the actions of two Presidents, multiple Congresses, and millions of individuals.

Our budget deficit may be largely Bush's fault, but it's not the reason for the current woes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Damn it. I wanted to name this one "Scoble" or "Le Recession".

<comment><USER9> <pedantic>Récession is a feminine noun in French, hence it would be La Récession</pedantic>

<comment><USER8> Haha good point, but it was a play on "Le Web" and "Le Meur".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think we should name the recessions after men and go back to naming hurricanes after women.

</comment><comment><USER11> Yes, but not just some people, the people who caused the recessions in the first place.</comment>


The Hard Problem of Breakfast - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us//issue/88/love--sex/the-hard-problem-of-breakfast <comment><USER2> >> The stubborn fact remains that, no matter how deeply we probe into the nature of bacon, eggs, oatmeal, and avocado toast—to say nothing of shakshuka, grits, bear claws, or dim sum—or the interactions between these fundamental building blocks and, say, orange juice or coffee and the morning paper, we simply have no convincing theory to explain how such disparate, seemingly inert components give rise to the phenomenon we subjectively experience as "breakfast."

That's the best sentence I've read in a long time, despite the fact that the pandemic has me spending too much time surfing HN.

I think the author makes a very solid, implicit, argument regarding the problem of consciousness. The "problem" is hard to pin down. It doesn't seem any more implausible to me that consciousness is an emergent property from our brain bio/chem/physics then that hurricanes and diamonds and stalagmites naturally emerge from their respective environments. Or that massive spaceships emerge from Conway's Game of Life. Of course humans claim that we're special - "My consciousness is more important than a darned stalagmite!" \- thinking of ourselves as more important than rocks and hurricanes, as more special, gives us a desire to survive. Our predecessors who genuinely thought they were no more "special" than a stalagmite were ineffective at passing down their genes.

So I claim that the hard problem of consciousness is not such a hard problem, but rather just a case of us humans being obsessed with ourselves.

<comment><USER3> It's like asking "why is a flopping disc the icon for Save? Still today?" It's because it's the easiest approach to understanding "this means _Save_ ".

If eggs are what's for breakfast, fine. Don't make me think. It's too early.

<comment><USER4> Here, take this coffee...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm an atheist with zero spiritual inclinations whatsoever, but it does seem to me that science has not properly grappled with the hard problem of consciousness.

Everything I've read that tackles it from a science perspective seems like side-stepping, weasel words ("emergent property"), or wholesale denial ("it's an illusion"). Not very scientific!

There seems to be a collective hubris at play, where people are afraid to say "I don't know".

<comment><USER6> Here is my _Blindsight_ inspired hypothesis, that consciousness has been an accidental application to ourselves of mechanisms that are useful for predicting the behaviour of others: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23475069](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23475069)

In breakfast terms: if it has been fitness-increasing in the past to note that all the other animals go down to the water hole at similar times (thereby freeing up some desirable carcasses for scavenging? or at least making it easier to cross over to far away trees while the predators are busy elsewhere?) we may start to model mealtimes. Once we notice that others have a morning feed that affect our actions ("breakfast" is followed by "rush hour"), it isn't that big a jump for our grey cells to experience our own morning feed in the same category, as breakfast.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> HN needs to lighten up sometimes that article went over pretty easy. It might be a little scrambled, but you can poach meaning from it if you try. Things don't always have to have such a deep hard boiled meaning.

<comment><USER8> Puns are my bread and butter but even I'd have to say you're really milking it there. And I suppose this kind of humor is not just everyone's cup of tea.

<comment> blaser-waffle I think this thread is toast.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This article perfectly articulates my sentiments about the "hard problem of consciousness". It's a made up problem. There is no such thing as consciousness. It's a term we made up to differentiate ourselves from the rest of the matter in the universe because we wanted to feel special. There is no mystery of consciousness, the only mystery is why humans are incapable of accepting the fact that they are just stuff, like any other matter in the universe.

<comment><USER10> You've made a huge leap from there-is-no-hard-problem-of-consciousness to there-is-no-consciousness. Consciousness is the experience of being something. I know it exists, because I'm experiencing it right now. The experience is consciousness, despite being illusory in many ways. Even a completely illusory experience _is_ a conscious experience. In no way does it preclude my just being stuff, or other forms of stuff experiencing things too (and thus also being conscious). The mystery _is_ how I can feel anything at all _despite_ being just stuff.

<comment><USER9> But there is no mystery. Feeling is a self-referential concept. The concept of 'you' or 'me' 'feeling' presupposes a self, which smuggles in the conclusion that consciousness is related to some immaterial element.

Feeling is just how we experience reward and punishment. It's an epiphenomena of our machinery for interpreting and interacting with the world. An intermediate representation, essentially.

<comment><USER11> I think this comes down to a semantic dispute [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_dispute](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_dispute)

We may be meat robots, but we are social meat robots, so it's not surprising many of us feel a desire to discuss our shared meat robot-ness, aka "consciousness".

<comment><USER12> It is a semantic dispute, but in this case, it's an interesting one. The words in question are "I" and "feel". You even used the word:

>many of us feel a desire

Can you restate that clause without using any synonym for experience, subjectivity, consciousness, etc.? I posit that you can't, and the fact that you can't explain the most basic fact of existence except recursively is itself interesting.

<comment><USER13> Okay, first of all the fact that people cannot explain their experience does not invalidate their experience. Second of all, that is totally possible to explain if you know about the map-territory distinction and how it plays out psychologically.

Basically, humans are meat robots whose brain contains a symbolic-experiential map of their surroundings, meaning it (among many other things) associates symbolic concepts with sensations. Since humans self-model as part of their social behavior, the map contains a representation of themselves. The map also contains a sensory input and associated symbolic representation for its own operation; the meat robot calls "the meat robot sensing in the map that the meat robot is modelling itself" consciousness or "being itself". Separately, it calls the concept it associates with itself "I" and the sensory input of operating the map "being".

<comment><USER12> I don't disagree with your first point. I meant that it's interesting that there is a phenomenon that is undefinable _despite_ (in my view) self- evidently existing

I'm familiar with the map-territory distinction, but I still don't think that's sufficient. I'll grant that it's possible to define "I" as an arm's-length name for a representation - basically the same as "my body" or "my hands". And we can, without any philosophical complexity, do that with consciousness itself - I can talk about "my state of consciousness" in the third person.

That doesn't, to me, explain subjectivity. The simplest factory robot will have a model of self - likely a much more accurate one than mine. Is it conscious? Does it subjectively experience?

<comment><USER13> If it has a (recursive?) model of itself and a sensory input representing its operation, I would argue it's conscious. For instance, I believe computers are conscious in this sense; not in the sense that anything that computes is conscious but in the sense that `top` (or the Windows Task Manager) fulfills many of the listed traits - self-awareness, self-modelling, discrimination. Of course, computers can't actually _do_ nearly as much as we can with their consciousness, but that's a question of skills that are not themselves consciousness.

For the closest example, I think there's probably something it is to be like the Linux OOM killer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What is this supposed to be? I am with Animats on this one. Surely no better than GPT-2

<comment><USER15> it's an extremely poor attempt at a joke about consciousness

<comment><USER16> Not on consciousness but on the contemporary scientific treatment thereof.

<comment><USER17> So is it a joke on _" Gilbert Ryle: The Concept of Mind"_?

But it just reiterates his first example using _breakfast_ instead of _university_...

 _' The first example is of a visitor to Oxford. The visitor, upon viewing the colleges and library, reportedly inquired "But where is the University?"[3] The visitor's mistake is presuming that a University is part of the category "units of physical infrastructure" rather than that of an "institution".'_

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

<comment><USER16> Thanks for the reference. Interesting twist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Was this written by GPT-2? (Not GPT-3; it's not coherent enough.)

<comment><USER19> I was about to downvote this comment, but I went and checked the first 8 citations in the articles. None of them exists, and yes, the article makes very little sense as well.

<comment> crooked-v It's a satirical article, and thus has satirical citations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> You might prefer this description of breakfast:

[https://meaningness.com/eggplant/routine](https://meaningness.com/eggplant/routine)

</comment><comment><USER21> While I laud the analysis, the methodology seems questionable at best. Lacking strawberry, quinoa, chia, and even paprika. Where's the rigour?

<comment><USER22> It's lacking everything. Eggs and paprika are cheap as hell. The amazing egg is healthy despite 40 years lies

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I honestly thought it's a bit silly but I get the idea how complex breakfast is.

And I thought it was nice philosophers still have something useful to do and talk about these things because science will soon find out what makes breakfast, or if it even exists.

It's great HN is discussing this stuff.

Come to comments, oh, it's just about consciousness again.

</comment><comment><USER24> > It has long been understood that no breakfast can exist in the absence of > its constituent foods and their related supporting structures such as plates > and bowls, utensils, and toasters

How did this pass review?

<comment> crooked-v It's a satirical piece.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Is it April 1st already?

</comment><comment><USER11> This is a satire of "the hard problem of consciousness" in philosophy: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness)

<comment><USER26> It's very unfunny, even as satire.

<comment><USER13> Unfortunately, it is accurate to the questionable nature of that debate.

<comment><USER27> I took it in the spirit of questioning one's questions, and thought it was rather good. Russellian, even. Judging from the general reaction in here this may just mean I'm a dim bulb with a bad sense of humor.

<comment> aaron-santos You're fine. HN is uniquely unsuited to judging the quality of humor.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Hundreds of EPA Workers Leave in Recent Days - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/hundreds-of-epa-workers-leave-in-recent-days-1504660207 <comment><USER2> I see some comments noting that the EPA needs "serious trimming" and "some serious cleaning" and is an agency that needs to "focus on its core mission" (the implication being that the EPA is currently NOT focusing on it's core mission).

I spent about half a decade working in the solid waste/wastewater residuals industry (2008-2014) where the EPA plays a significant oversight role on facility operations. Further, the EPA plays a significant role on new facility development and design (my focus).

I found that the EPA staff I worked with were almost invariably helpful, well informed about the potential environmental impacts of our proposed activities, and adept at navigating the variety of systems/approvals required to comply with EPA regulations borne from laws passed by our representative government.

I was not always happy with the requirements imposed, but this was almost always because of a difference between the EPA and myself concerning risk assessment - and I can't blame the EPA for being less risk tolerant concerning environmental damage, that's their job.

More recently I have had a wonderful experience with the EPA's hazardous materials program which provides guidance and some funding for the identification and remediation of hazardous materials in old buildings. In the case of buried petroleum tanks, common here in New England, they even assist monetarily to get these environmental hazards removed when discovered (many have been abandoned for decades, unmarked). This program is invaluable for small, old communities who have the legacy of poor environmental decisions made during our industrial revolution literally built into their environment (lead, PCBs, asbestos, etc.).

If you have had direct contact with the EPA and it's gone poorly - share your story. But generalized mudslinging at EPA staff seems mean spirited and likely the product of several decades of media narratives aimed at destabilizing our country's already limited focus on environmental protection.

</comment><comment><USER3> Turning the US into the kind of country where it is unsafe to drink the tap water.

<comment><USER4> You realize the EPA has its own fully supplied SWAT teams and everything? The EPA has gone waaaaay past just the drinking water thing. Also they ensured crappy drinking water by mass dumping a bunch of waste and ruining one of the rivers in southwest CO.

Government agencies in the US need very serious trimming. Too many friggin bureaucratic power mad lifers running around who don't give a rat's ass about all those "little people" stuck with their obamacare.

<comment><USER5> >You realize the EPA has its own fully supplied SWAT teams and everything?

...And? When they find a massive crisis like Flint and need to swoop in and gather evidence you want them to what... send a form letter? Of all the agencies of government that SHOULD have a SWAT team, they're at the top of the list. If they're doing their job properly they're investigating both private business and other government agencies. _NOT_ having a "SWAT" team means their potential targets have more than enough time to destroy evidence. If my options are giving the DEA 200 SWAT teams or the EPA 1, I'll vote for the EPA every time.

<comment><USER6> When something like Flint happens, they'll blame EPA for letting it happen on their watch and exploit the situation to call for _further_ cuts to EPA. If this sounds disingenuous, its because it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Similar things are happening at the State Department. Trump's budget calls for a ~30% reduction, the professional staff is being ignored and shut out of policy by Tillerson (and Trump), veteran high-level talent is leaving, and hiring programs have been stopped - they are even reneging on people already in the programs. Imagine if you read about that happening at an SV company ... except at the State Dept, the stakes are war and peace, freedom and oppression.

[http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/07/31/how-the-trump- administra...](http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/07/31/how-the-trump- administration-broke-the-state-department/)

[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/28/opinion/sunday/trump- till...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/28/opinion/sunday/trump-tillerson- state-department-diplomats.html)

[https://duckduckgo.com/html?q=state%20department%20resignati...](https://duckduckgo.com/html?q=state%20department%20resignations%20site%3Aforeignpolicy.com)

</comment><comment><USER8> "We're giving long-serving, hardworking employees the opportunity to retire early..."

Tech companies need to up their game when it comes to euphemism.

<comment><USER9> the EPA is killing it..

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Mirror: [https://archive.fo/Hp48r](https://archive.fo/Hp48r)

<comment><USER10> Thank you very much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Here's the historical EPA budget and employee count from 1970 until now: [https://www.epa.gov/planandbudget/budget](https://www.epa.gov/planandbudget/budget)

$8B/yr doesn't seem like that big of an investment to keep 320 Million people healthier and safer.

</comment><comment><USER12> Who wants to help setup a hackerspace next to the EPA HQ to scoop up all the newly-available talent?

<comment><USER13> Good point. No-one will take you up on that, because as much as we hate to admit it, we know the newly-available EPA talent is good for some other org to take in, not our org, heavens no.

As others have noted in other comment threads, EPA needs some serious cleaning. It is an agency that has gotten so large that it is no longer effective.

Our drinking water and rivers and lakes and air are becoming unsafe everywhere. We need EPA to focus on its core mission.

Trump is a results-oriented guy. If EPA is in charge of clean water, and you have Flint... the course of action is clear. Trump is a simpleton: just produce the results you are supposed to produce, and he'll go find some other heads to lop off.

Predictable action from a simple-minded guy.

<comment><USER12> Any good tech for home water filtration or testing? Our sewage line up here in Twin Peaks (SF) broke a few weeks ago, mud in my sink. Been sketched out by my water since, interested in the latest and greatest in home water tech. 5 stage filter system on amazon for <$200, but too big for my studio apt. Would be cool to test my home water somehow, see how it scores.

<comment><USER14> A friend of mine has this in their apartment [http://a.co/4GZcGdC](http://a.co/4GZcGdC) but I'm guessing that's the one you're talking about.

That same amazon page has this for testing [http://a.co/dVZweID](http://a.co/dVZweID) which I've seen come up a lot when doing research, but it'll only tell you if something is in the water, not what.

I usually skim thesweethome.com for things like this, too.

[http://thesweethome.com/reviews/best-under-sink-water- filter...](http://thesweethome.com/reviews/best-under-sink-water- filter/#picked) [http://thesweethome.com/reviews/best-water-filter- pitcher/#h...](http://thesweethome.com/reviews/best-water-filter-pitcher/#how- we-tested)

<comment><USER15> That RO system is overpriced and undersized (3 gph). Buy better kits from wholesalers that use standard parts (50-200 gph) for the same price. (200 gph can be tankless and generate product water on-demand) [http://www.wateranywhere.com/index.php?cPath=23_411](http://www.wateranywhere.com/index.php?cPath=23_411)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Could you provide a non-paywall link please?

<comment><USER17> Go to the linked page then click this bookmarklet:

javascript:window.location="[https://m.facebook.com/l.php?u="+encodeURIComponent(window.l...](https://m.facebook.com/l.php?u="+encodeURIComponent\(window.location.href\);)</comment></comment>


Three cheers for Daniel Radcliffe, geek - <AUTHOR> http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=2741

<comment><USER2> "Reads science fiction, likes computers, enjoys challenging games, is generally into bright-person stuff."

I've never liked or bothered with science fiction, whilst I consider myself pretty techy (I prefer to say techy than geeky). Why is reading science fiction considered something bright people do? I'm not convinced it ties up at all.

<comment><USER3> Me neither, not really into science fiction; probably qualify as bright.

The reality is that just as ESR has done over and over again he has cast the hacker persona as a reflection of himself. If you read his writings on hackers then he's really describing himself and imagining that everyone is like this. Here he's saying that the 'geek persona' is another ESR-type.

I found this very annoying when I read the hacker description in The New Hackers Dictionary because there were thinks that I just wasn't:

1\. Learn to write your native language well.

2\. Read science fiction. Go to science fiction conventions.

3\. Train in a martial-arts form.

4\. Study an actual meditation discipline.

5\. Develop an analytical ear for music.

6\. Learn to play some musical instrument well, or how to sing.

7\. Develop your appreciation of puns and wordplay.

So 1, 5 and 7 are things that I'm in agreement with. I have no interest in 2, 3 or 4. 6 would probably be fun.

<http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html>

<comment><USER4> I've seen enough mention of 3 & 4 on this site to say it fits in well with this crowd.

I'd recommend checking out Philip K. Dick for science fiction worth reading (more on the nature of self than on rocket ships).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why would he have suspected Radcliffe of being a "face person"? He's not just "famous for being famous", he's famous for starring in an incredibly successful series of movies.

<comment><USER6> >Why would he have suspected Radcliffe of being a "face person"? He's not just "famous for being famous", he's famous for starring in an incredibly successful series of movies.

Being famous for being in a movie seems very close to being famous for being famous to me.

When he was in the first Harry Potter movie Radcliffe was just a cute looking kid that could act a bit, they could have probably chosen from dozens of others and had a similar success.

He was chosen almost certainly because his face fit the bill - he had the right look. He most definitely wouldn't have been chosen if he'd been ugly.

So his fame, as opposed to someone else's fame is largely IMO down to his face - certainly it's not down to his being a geek or his apparent intelligence. He was also helped by nepotism it seems.

Now, he also appears to have taken well to his role and made the best of it and so his continued "stardom" and his career beyond the first Harry Potter is certainly laudable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Now if we can get him to read (and endorse?) Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality...

</comment><comment><USER8> I would say that acting may involves many skills, but mostly requires being a pretty face. Some kind of "sophistication" as described on [http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/11/bah- sophistication.htm...](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/11/bah- sophistication.html) may help - which in the end would make the person quite unlikely to be a geek IMHO</comment>


Twitter.com down? - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com <comment><USER2> Looks down from here too [Greece].

However I can connect via twitter client [Metro Twit]

</comment><comment><USER3> Down for me too in Sweden.

</comment><comment> n-gauge Down for me (uk)

<comment><AUTHOR> Intermittently down for me..

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> works for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ugh.. has Indian govt banned Twitter next!

<comment><USER5> From india, works for me

<comment><AUTHOR> Worked for a while and then down again..</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are good free project management tools? - <AUTHOR>

I am working on a personal project and would like to manage my project in a better way. so instead of scribbling on paper, I would like to use some software meant for project management. This is just a starting so I dont want to spend a lot of money. All I want to know if there are some free tools available that people are using? <comment><USER2> Sandglaz: <http://www.sandglaz.com> I'm the Co-Founder and we use it ourselves internally as well. It's a freemium model (so there is a free version and a paid version). The paid version is 50% off until end of January.

</comment><comment><USER3> Fogbugz, while not quite project management, has a 'startup' edition which is free. <http://www.fogcreek.com/fogbugz/StudentAndStartup.html>

</comment><comment><USER4> Django Admin. A few models, couple of custom templates. An hours work and does everything we need, nice and simple.

</comment><comment><USER5> Trello.com can be adapted for a variety of projects. It's free and is from a respected software firm, Fog Creek.

</comment><comment><USER6> RedMine (Ruby on Rails) and Trac (Python) are nice, for technical projects.

</comment><comment><USER7> Basecamp has a free tier.

</comment><comment><USER8> andbang.com is new (i found it on HN) and dead simple. it's what i use most. podio is great if you need something more powerful and customizable.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I saw asana and I liked it</comment>


Chaffing and Winnowing: Confidentiality without Encryption (1998) - <AUTHOR> http://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/Chaffing.txt

<comment><USER2> It's cool but basically solves a problem that no longer exists. Once you've caused enough suspicion, they can simply dig up the records of all the data you've sent, both chaff and wheat, and serve you with an order to disclose your authentication key/lawfully hack you computer and obtain it without asking/apply some lead pipe cryptanalysis and get it anyway. In the end, it's no better than regular encryption, at the cost of being at least twice more inefficient.

Still, for all the crypto export nonsense, 1998 appears to have been a more innocent time:

> "But access to authentication keys is one thing that government has long > agreed that they don't want to have."

<comment><USER3> Near the bottom they mention using more than one wheat stream to achieve something like deniable encryption. If they ask you for the key, give them the one that produces innocent-looking messages.

<comment><USER4> I'm sure if law enforcement doesn't like your innocent looking messages they can just keep demanding that you give them the real key.

How easy is it to produce a stream of messages that is fake but looks real?

<comment><USER3> Depends, how good are you at creative writing? I can think of a lot of messages you might send to someone that you'd want to be private that aren't nefarious plots. Weird fan fiction. Deviant porn. Messages exchanged with a secret mistress. Depending on the situation, you might even want to give them a fake copy of your nefarious plot. Include more than one extra set of messages if you like and give them whatever keys you like in whatever order is appropriate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> See also "Chaffinch: Confidentiality in the Face of Legal Threats" by Richard Clayton and George Danezis from University of Cambridge, which has some more plausible deniability.

([http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rnc1/Chaffinch.html](http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rnc1/Chaffinch.html))

</comment><comment><USER6> I've thought about writing a Chrome plugin to do something similar. While on it would randomly chaff the low order bits of any image you upload, and would automatically add a chaff postscript to every Gmail. An adversary would have no clue which images/messages contain ciphertext, and which contain nothing but random chaff.

</comment><comment><USER7> Was unreachable for me, here's the cached version: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:zgl1Lf2...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:zgl1Lf25QRIJ:people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/Chaffing.txt)

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm probably misunderstanding this. The way I'm envisioning this is basically a half-dozen parallel conversations, with only one of them being the actual conversation.

Couldn't it be easily defeated with contextual analysis? I mean, if it were English sentences, the attacker could just choose a set of packets that make grammatical sense. Or in more real-world examples, you'd just choose the packets that form a valid HTTP session.

To work around this, you'd have to choose your chaff packets to flow seamlessly from one to the other, which would make chaffing a really hard problem.

<comment><USER9> Keep reading: the first example is a bit misleading (for the reason you state) and the article gets more interesting.

They deal with this problem by coding the message with single-bit packets, always contrasting 0s with 1s.

<comment><USER8> Yup, that was the critical piece I was missing. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Kind of interesting scheme that doesn't really work in 2013.

Wouldn't this be vulnerable to replay attacks, or am I missing something?

<comment><USER11> If Alice's messages could all be intercepted and manipulated prior to Bob's receiving them, then yes, they could be changed without either party knowing.

Combined with asymmetric encryption of the messages, you should be able to prevent that from happening.

<comment><USER10> Without any manipulation why wouldn't this be vulnerable to a replay attack?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Might be just me, but I'm thinking encryption is way easier than this.

<comment><USER7> But that's rather missing the point, isn't it? The premise is "Under circumstances where encryption is not a viable option, what secure communication methods might be possible?" so responses that ignore the premise, like "just use encryption" or "just don't get into such circumstances", aren't the most salient critiques.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Isn't this still, in essence at least, Steganography?

<comment><USER2> Nope. You would be painting a huge red target on yourself if you tried something like this.

The purpose of steganography is not to get noticed in the first place. It's orthogonal to regular cryptography.

<comment><USER14> Unfortunately, common steganography algos used on images are easy to detect with statistical analysis.

<comment><USER15> Can you elaborate?

<comment><USER5> People read a book, they see a simple description of steganography, they whip up an implementation as a proof of concept, they share that code, other people think it's secure when it's not meant to be.

([http://www.ifp.illinois.edu/~ywang11/paper/CISS04_204.pdf](http://www.ifp.illinois.edu/~ywang11/paper/CISS04_204.pdf))

([http://eprint.iacr.org/2005/305](http://eprint.iacr.org/2005/305))

([http://vision.ece.ucsb.edu/publications/sullivan_ICIP06.pdf](http://vision.ece.ucsb.edu/publications/sullivan_ICIP06.pdf))</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Stack Overflow lays off 20% of staff - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/02/stack-overflow-lays-off-staff/ <comment><USER2> Extensive discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15613101](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15613101)

</comment><comment><USER3> I actually think GitHub is a competitor. More and more often I find myself getting answers by reviewing discussion about issues on GH. Also, places like Discord I've ended up in commmunities where I can get answers to my programming questions. It's anecdotal, but it has caused my usage of SO to drop over the last year and a half or so.

</comment><comment><USER4> > "I don't see HackerNews or GitHub as competing against us directly for the > same dollars or even the same attention," CEO and co-founder Joel Spolsky > said at the time.

Does Hacker News make "dollars"?

<comment><USER5> It promotes YCombinator startups, which in turn makes them money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This entire thread has devolved into capitalism vs communism!

<comment><USER7> Cool!</comment></comment>


How can Swift be so much faster than Objective-C? - <AUTHOR> http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/242816/how-can-swift-be-so-much-faster-than-objective-c <comment><USER2> Two words: PowerPoint Slide.</comment>


QuestDB – OpenSource Time Series Database - <AUTHOR> I would like to plug new time series database, which I'm writing: QuestDB (https://github.com/bluestreak01/questdb)
This project was born out of the realisation that data can be handled much faster than existing databases would lead you to believe, and a general fascination in how fast hardware can do these things provided you ask it the right things to do.
This brief history aside, the aim of QuestDB is to provide a full fat SQL dialect for querying data,
including time series, simple, fast and convenient tools to import, export and otherwise integrate data into your existing workflow.
To that effect I have done quite a lot already and would like to invite you to check out list of features on my github page.
I would be delighted if you could look at the source code and ask whatever questions you may have and of course leave comments however harsh they may be.
I'm hear to learn.
Thanks, Vlad <comment><USER2> Why every new timeseries database needs to implement SQL dialect, which is awful when it comes to time-related data? Why nobody looks for other languages and data processing models anymore? There were so many research papers about that!

<comment><AUTHOR> In this case rationale for SQL was relatively mild learning curve. Surely it is a good thing? But you raised a good point. In QuestDB SQL is implemented into syntatic sugar over java-based streaming model.

Writing support for another language wouldn't be that hard provided there is consensus on what suitable query language is?</comment></comment>


FAQ: What programming language should I learn first? - <AUTHOR> http://programmingzen.com/2011/03/28/what-programming-language-should-i-learn-first/ <comment><USER2> Which programming language do you learn first? The one your friends use.

If your friends don't program (or you don't have any friends), learn Python.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. I learned Java first, and it's a hugely non-optimal choice... but I was playing the hell out of Steve Yegge's game, Wyvern (<http://www.cabochon.com>), and it was 100% Java/Jython. As such, I had competent developers to talk to.

I work 0% in Java now, of course.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I found the whitespace rules on Python frustrating when first beginning. I'd be inclined to do Javascript/HTML first. It's fun, easy, and very visual.

<comment><USER5> Was Python your first language? After using other languages, I too found the significant whitespace to be frustrating at first, but I wonder if someone for whom Python was their first programming language would be similarly frustrated or not?

<comment><USER6> Python was my first language and the white space rules simply "made sense" for me at the time. In fact, using Python for a while at such an early stage started to ingrain a oneness with Python's unique syntactic idiosyncrasies. It seems somewhat second nature at this point.

<comment><USER7> Having in the long ago gotten used to Fortran on punch cards, Python wasn't that much of a reach and as it solves a particularly annoying problem (code formatting) I didn't have that much of a problem of getting on board with it. On other projects in other environments I typically run all code through a formatter and accomplish a similar goal. Regards first language? I really don't think it matters just so long as there is a second language to come...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> My response always is:

1) Pick one. It doesn't matter.

2) If you're still asking me after I've given Answer #1, then Ruby or Python. But really, it still doesn't matter.

</comment><comment><USER9> I wonder when I see this type of question, if the person is really going to learn the language or just do a survey to get a feel for programming.

If your trying to get a feel, then maybe something simple with good tutorials like Small Basic <http://smallbasic.com/> wouldn't be such a bad thing.

Weirdly, I would say Postscript and work your way through Adobe's cookbook ( [http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/ps/sdk/sample/ind...](http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/ps/sdk/sample/index_psbooks.html) ).

</comment><comment><USER10> Before learning programming, you better learn how to express your thoughts on paper using a formula, a condition, a repetition. For that, Python is the best "editor" out there, whatever you write is easily understood as pseudo-code.

Then when you are ready to make the jump, use Python, you already know how to, just continue using it, you are now a programmer.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'd suggest PHP. It gives you the ability to create something for the web and you're able to share it with your friends by simply sending them a link. plus there's a lot you can do with it (eg. start facebook) and the documentation (esp. for beginners) is abundant.

</comment><comment><USER12> The amazon link to python programming says Python 3 on the cover. If that is in fact what it's referring to, not sure if that's really what's best to learn right now. I started with 3 then realized I had to quickly downgrade to 2.6.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think that for learning programming, Python 3 is perfectly fine. Python really is one of the closest languages to algorithm pseudocode, be it 2.x or 3.x. Furthermore, downgrading to 2.7 is not that hard, if the newcomer decides that they want to start messing with Django or other 2.x libraries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Depending on your disposition, I would actually recommend learning with Processing. Java based, and you get visual results.

</comment><comment><USER14> What about Logo?!?

</comment><comment><USER15> C++ - after that learning every other language is a matter of hours.

<comment><USER8> Problem is, you die before ever getting there.</comment></comment>


I'm curious how(Stanford Algo)class is going to work,looks  impossible. - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/111327064904383598474/posts/78JPsu2vh1h

<comment><AUTHOR> The need for automatic gradeability of submissions eliminating whole categories of teaching (here proofs of algorithms) from ever going online is interesting. Especially when combined with the pressure to have large _numbers_ of people enrolling (and finishing) the course. There is already a claim that this dilution happened with Stanford CS 229A online class (the Stanford student's blogpost discussed here)</comment>


Buffett: Wealth, Estate Taxes, and the Ovarian Lottery - <AUTHOR> http://www.mymoneyblog.com/archives/2009/06/buffett-wealth-estate-taxes-and-the-ovarian-lottery.html <comment><USER2> Sure, a large inheritance is undeserved. But when you get right down to it, everything you have and everything you are is undeserved. You can't choose your parents, you can't choose your DNA. You can't choose the country you're born in, the ideology you're raised with, the opportunities you'll have, the events in your life that shape your psyche, the friends and enemies that taught you who to be.

Even when you make decisions, take action, seize opportunities, the grit and courage and insight and endurance that enables you to do so originally came from somewhere else. Someone taught you that. Something made you that way.

I am the sum of the curses and blessings and happenstances of history. You cannot factor them out of my identity. There would be nothing left. Asking who I would be had I been born in Bangledesh is like asking what a square would be if it had been a circle. The question is wrong-headed. I would be someone else.

And asking whether the son of Sam Walton deserves wealth is like asking whether Audrey Hepburn deserves to be beautiful. It's the wrong question. Gifts--from parents or forefathers or strangers or the universe--are never a matter of deserving. They are not to be worked for or worked off. They are to be embraced with gratitude, and cherished with an earnest effort to make the most of them.

The idea that gifts should be received with guilt, that jealousy on the part of those who don't receive them justfies taxing or destroying them to make things a little more fair, is the attitude I find repugnant.

Perhaps Albert Einstein does not deserve to be so intellectually creative, but that does not mean half of his intellectual energies belong to the state. Perhaps you or I do not think the son of Sam Walton deserves wealth. It is irrelevant; it only matters that Sam thinks he does. What he does with the wealth is his responsibility, as what you do with your gifts is yours. The fact that these things are _gifts_ does not in any way change the fact that they are _ours_.

<comment><AUTHOR> Everything you say is correct, but I believe it misses the point. This isn't about what's deserved, it's proactive: it's about things that Buffet thinks are good actions to take for a better running society. It's split into two parts: build up some barriers to the establishment of an entrenched American aristocracy and try to increase the opportunities for those who weren't graced by as fortunate of a birth.

<comment><USER3> dude I just upvoted you& it's not counting it!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't have kids, but I am reasonably sure that when I do, I might choose to work harder than otherwise in hopes of providing a better life for them. That includes leaving them money after I die. I might be gone, but the money is a product of my labors. It was still mine to spend.

Furthermore, I have never found Buffet's malinvestment in lucky scions argument convincing. Yes, they were born lucky, but you shouldn't handicap them for that reason. Morover, clearly some very wealthy people do chose to give most of their money away as opposed to giving it all to their heirs. Buffet and Gates have both pledged to do so with most of their money.

Merging the two ideas: if the government is collecting assets to prevent malinvestment in unworthy heirs after the proven patriarch dies, why shouldn't the government chose to confiscate the wealth of those who they deem to be making bad investments while they are alive?

<comment><USER5> The purpose of the estate tax is not so much to ensure that the capital being taxed is put to better use (which I'm not sure would be the case on average; the government would surely be a better entity to entrust with the money than a profligate son, but those are not the norm from what I can tell, and wiser offspring could be better investors than Uncle Sam), as to ensure the continuation of the meritocracy in our society. By their inherited wealth, scions of prominent families can exercise significant power over the rest of the nation, and this power will tend to be exercised to the detriment of meritocracy, since a system that rewards talent and energy runs exactly contrary to the interests of the inherited-wealth class. (Humans care about _relative_ wealth and power socially, even though absolute wealth production is not a zero-sum game)

However, it is true that being able to pass on wealth to one's children can be an incentive to produce more, so _that_ on the other hand points to the benefit of a lower estate tax.

So, I think the best compromise is somewhere between the pro-meritocracy 100% tax and the pro-short-term-productivity 0% tax; that way there is still a significant incentive to earn for one's offspring, but if 1/x of the money is taxed away in each generation (and the important thing is not where it goes, but that it is taken out of the hands of the rich family), there is an exponential-decay curve for the wealth and power of the family. However, it's important that the tax is high enough to counteract the interest gains that even uninspired investing can bring. I won't venture to propose a sweet spot, but I think that approach should provide the most balance and social benefit overall.

<comment><USER4> I think wealth decays naturally anyway; especially if the descendent are not fit. Inflation and the exponential growth of offspring are already pretty good tools of attenuating growth. Moreover, it is easier to lose a fortune than to make one.

However, I do agree with you that it might be a robust guard against the inherited wealth class gaming the system. I would prefer to intervene when such injustice is committed, but admit that that is not always easy to do. The argument you use for curtailing that risk is similar to the argument I would make in favor of term-limits.

<comment><USER6> You would be surprised how hard it would be to lose billions of dollars. That kind of wealth is usually locked up pretty tight such that access is only available to some trickle of dollars coming out of the interest, trust funds, etc...

If a trustee loses everything then the next year, they have access to another annuity distribution.

<comment><USER4> Which is to say, they are well diversified. With increasing diversity and massive assets it becomes more and more difficult it to earn exceptional rewards. Does most paths of asset returns exceed inflation and familial growth?

This is actually an interesting experiment. I'll run a crude test this weekend bootstrapping against the S&P500 to see how likely it is for wealth to propagate X generations into the future and report on Monday.

<comment><USER6> That is interesting. Warren has a bet out against someone that a portfolio of hedge funds will not outperform the total market returns after accounting for taxes, management fees, etc.

as diversity approaches 100%, performance approaches market returns.

The question is, how long can extreme wealth remain extreme wealth? Considering the wealth gap is increasing, I would suggest forever unless there is a "market correction" like socialism or something.

<comment><USER4> If that was the case, you would expect there to be a few hundred-billionaires out there.

<comment><USER7> There are a few hundred billionaires out there. 5 billion barely get's you into the top 100.

<comment><USER4> Hundred-billionaire as in an individual with greater than 100 billion; not a few hundred people with greater than 1 billion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> How in Cthulhu's name does this not mention that Warren Buffett's father was a Congressman, Howard Buffett of Nebraska (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Buffett>)? Probably, I think, because it would sound bad. It sounds modest to say "I didn't get here entirely by my own efforts; I was lucky to have been born in the US, instead of Bangladesh." It doesn't sound modest to say "I didn't get here entirely by my own efforts; my father was a Congressman who had a strong personal friendship with Murray Rothbard, one of the most famous economists in history."

<comment><USER9> Buffett didn't get any benefit from knowing Rothbard. But yes, his family's influence probably helped him out, as he has repeatedly acknowledged.

<comment><USER8> He didn't? I'm highly skeptical of that. Buffett's business strategy and general beliefs are largely based on Austrian economics.

<comment><USER9> He owns lots of maturity-mismatched assets. He hasn't done much with gold. He's bought into lots of highly regulated companies. And he advocates punitively high income taxes on some activities, and high income taxes on most other activities.

So no, I don't think Buffett is a Rothbardian. He's similar only in the sense that he understands economics very well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> One of the commenters on this post made the salient point that the existence of the estate tax is probably one of the biggest drivers for the life insurance industry.

<comment><USER11> Every tragedy benefits someone. Right now the makers of Purell and other instant hand sanitizers are having banner years due to swine flu. That isn't an argument in favor of epidemics. Oil companies made a fortune due to increased demand when people started flying less after 9/11. That isn't an argument in favor of terrorism.

<comment><USER12> I think the point is more then this. It brings up a question: can you really stop people from leaving wealth to their children in some way? How many loose ends will you need to chase down. Inheritance is intertwined with property & ownership.

Life insurance is one way around estate taxes. I'm sure there are others.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > The odds were fifty-to-one against me born in the United States in 1930. I > won the lottery the day I emerged from the womb by being in the United > States instead of in some other country where my chances would have been way > different.

This isn't true - the odds of Warren Buffet being born in America, given that his parents were American and had him, were 100%. There's no random chance associated with where you're born - it was the result of what your parents and their parents did. They worked hard to get over to the States, or wherever else, and to make a good life for their kids.

Actually, that whole viewpoint that's come into fashion these days worries me a little. Before, one of the biggest ethics to live for was "making life better for your children" - you'd work hard, and sacrifice, knowing your kids would have a better life than you did. It's what my Great-Grandparents did, what my Grandparents did, what my Parents did. All came up poor, I came up lower middle class, my kids will probably come up reasonably wealthy.

But nowadays, a lot of people write that off as the "birth lottery", or luck, or chance, and think that happiness in your own life, right now, is the highest virtue. They even _almost_ look at it as a bad thing for parents to work very hard for their kids specifically to have the best life they could, calling it things like a birth lottery or random chance. There's nothing random about why I was born in the States, or why my kids will be - it was a direct result of five or six generations of slogging towards a better life from miserable conditions elsewhere.

<comment><USER7> Ignoring the argument is silly, you don't chose your parents. So, you don't chose the single largest impact on your success but, that's not the issue. The question is "Do we want a society primarily controlled by those who inherited money?" The reason we had huge numbers of smart people become investment bankers was the fact that conning stupid wealthy people is profitable. But, it's also a zero sum game that does little to help society at large. It's far better for society when the most efficient method for gathering wealth is generating it.

<comment><USER13> > The question is "Do we want a society primarily controlled by those who > inherited money?"

There's a Dutch expression, "Clogs to clogs in three generations." It means the first generation, who wears clogs (regular people's shoes), they work hard and make money, they know struggle, they're frugal.

The second generation doesn't know about making money and struggling, but their parents explain what it was like and teach the kids how to manage money and keep the fortune alive.

The third generation doesn't learn these things from their parents, because their parents don't really know either, and the third generation wastes the money and winds up back in clogs - regular people's shoes.

So - will society be controlled by people who inherit money? Not unless there's government backed heredity privilege, like European nobility, the Japanese samurai system, or the Indian caste system. If not, things balance out over time. How many of the astoundingly wealthy families from 1850 are controlling society now without having added anything? Not many.

> The reason we had huge numbers of smart people become investment bankers was > the fact that conning stupid wealthy people is profitable.

I would rebut this, but I don't think it's a well thought out view. Some investment bankers moved money around without doing anything of value. Many did incredibly valuable things. They built and developed real estate, ports, railroads - heck, I know a guy who put the money together for researching technology for non-government spaceflight. Pretty cool stuff.

> But, it's also a zero sum game that does little to help society at large.

First, I think it's very easy for someone not inside an industry to claim that their work is useless/easy/unimportant while maybe missing the intricacies in it. Second, I'm not sure what this has to do with my comment, which is that I think the mental concept of "birth lottery" and de-emphasis on family is a scary thing. It seems to say that people should support and even things out for everyone irrespective of what their parents do, while parents working hard to give their children a better life is a huge motivator and has been for almost all time, much more so than improving the common good. If you look at history, for instance, whenever farming was nationalized under a war economy or communism, output fell. People working to feed the nation work less hard than people working for themselves and their children. This has been borne out in many different places, throughout ancient and recent history.

> It's far better for society when the most efficient method for gathering > wealth is generating it.

Agreed. Getting back to your original point, I'm not ignoring the "birth lottery" argument - I think it's flawed, and I'm addressing that flaw. The question isn't about who gets to control society, it's about what is the fundamental unit of society? Is it the individual? The family? The community? The nation? The whole planet? The prevailing Western view seems to be focusing on things on a national level. I don't think that's a good thing. I think a mix of individual choice, strong family support structures, and entire planet development is the answer. I think, arguably, the nation is one of the worst places to work on developing humanity.

That's my opinion based on my reading and research into behavior and history, but it seems like societies that empower individuals do well, it seems like societies that promote family do well, and it seems like societies that promote the whole planet do well. It seems where things are controlled by the nation more than by the individual, family, and whole planet do more poorly.

I'm not worried about inherited money controlling the planet, because it really only has a heavy influence in the next generation, many of whom do great things and make their own contributions. After that, without contributions it burns itself out. I am worried about national level empowerment, because it grows on itself and doesn't burn out unless it collapses in a bad way.

This is my opinion based on my readings and research, and I'd be happy to hear others' opinions who agree or disagree.

<comment><USER14> I've heard that saying as well (only it was "Rags to Riches in three generations, rags to rags in four"), but as far as I can tell, the Rockefellers are still around, still rich, and are at the sixth generation ( <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockefeller_family> \---the legacy section of that page makes for interesting reading). The Kennedy's are still around, still rich and are in the fourth generation ( <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennedy_family> ). History has yet to see what happens to the Bush family ( <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_family> ), currently on the fourth generation.

The Hilton family ( <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilton_family> ) on the other hand, might fall into your theory.

<comment><USER7> I think what grandchildren are going to do with money is somewhat random.

My grandfather understood building wealth through investments as do I. However, my mother and older sisters don't. A friend of mine's grandmother had real wealth, as in her home was featured in home and gardens etc. He had a multimillion dollar trust fund and burned out on drugs until he died after his fourth or fifth motorcycle accident.

I know many young people with enough money to never work again and mostly they are fine. But, it's the people with handed great wealth that seem to be hardiest hit by it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I find it interesting that (at least in the given extract) Buffett only highlights one of the two sources of unfair advantage (unfair starting conditions, but not unfair monopolies) that help people get exponentially rich with a non-corresponding increase - or even status quo - in the level of effort, quality of work, irreplaceability or risk to quality of life.

\--

Banded tax - versus flat rate - is not fair. But neither will your fourth million dollars be.

From society's point of view, until we have more rationality and ideality of labour-reward on the income side, I don't think fairness arguments can really be mounted to the abolishment of taxes that make it unfairly expensive to be rich.

\--

That said, with regards to inheritance tax, I have always really struggled to find any theoretical solution to the inconsistency I perceive in the system - children will always have unequal starts in life related to the efforts and success of their parents; be that in somewhat intangible notions like forming a great network of contacts, or right down to trying extra hard to woo a mother/father that will give the kids a great genotype. Why start - or stop - at money? Has political, social or economic science ever sought to justify that?

<comment><USER16> _Why start - or stop - at money?_

Not sure what you're getting at, but going all the way back to Plato's Republic, there have been proposals to engineer society with children. More recently,

 _Children's Societies were one of the features of kibbutz life that most interested outsiders. In the heyday of Children's Societies, parents would only spend two hours a day, typically in the afternoon, with their children. In Kibbutz Artzi parents were explicitly forbidden to put their children to bed at night. As children got older, parents could go for days on end without seeing their offspring, other than through chance encounters somewhere in the grounds._

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

It doesn't work, of course. Nature will out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> My question is whether society is better served by

1) the destruction of excess money 2) preservation of meritocracy

and furthermore, whether interests of children of wealthy parents are better served through

1) leaving them oodles money 2) leaving them a society where a) things are affordable because there's less money chasing goods b) meritocracy reigns c) not to peg one's identity to money alone

In the small, accumulation of money is a fine thing. In the large, you have corporations whom - in the name of profit - bribe, cajole governments and government agencies, that result in sending people to war, poisoning your food, and endorsing medicines that do not work. Setting a limit to the accumulation of a mere number means that humans can turn their attention towards other activities that are beneficial to society as a whole.

<comment><USER18> Money and wealth are different.

Regarding your point (a):

Things can become more affordable by innovations in technology, production and distribution. Services may not become more affordable because service is provided by human being. And by definition, the above average service always costs more than average.

I don't think in the name of profit is the cause to the problem. Lacking of political power to punish corporation corruptions and being oblivious of public wellness are the root cause.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> It is unfair that your country of birth is arbitrary. Surely the appropriate policy to ameliorate that is to relax immigration barriers? That seems more relevant to the problem than estate taxes.

</comment><comment><USER20> Another rich guy telling those not as lucky as him how lucky we are. Oh, and btw, pay your taxes.

<comment><USER11> That's dismissive of his very valid points. Buffet is one of the most selfless rich guys of all time. Also one of the most infamously direct and honest. He's not saying that as part of some sort of Orwellian consipiracy to quell the masses. He's saying that because its true.

He points out regularly injustices such as the fact that his secretary pays a higher tax rate than he does, thanks to the ridiculous capital gains laws in this country. He points out regularly that people like him should have to pay higher taxes, including the estate tax. He lives less lavishly than most people who have .1% of his wealth.

He's already given most of his fortune (the largest single donation ever) to charity and will give the rest when he goes. He's a real-life Robinhood.

<comment><USER9> _He points out regularly injustices such as the fact that his secretary pays a higher tax rate than he does, thanks to the ridiculous capital gains laws in this country._

Corporate tax rates plus capital gains tax rates exceed normal income tax rates. The only way you can claim that he pays less in taxes on selling stock is if you assume that the company's profits -- the sum of which, discounted to the present, is the value of the stock -- somehow don't affect the value of the stock.

If we cut capital gains taxes to zero and added an equivalent amount to corporate profits (say, a 40% annual tax rate instead of 35%), the government would make an equivalent amount of money from the same economic activity, and Buffett's theoretical tax rate would go down. Similarly, if corporate income taxes were zero and his capital gains were taxed at 40%, he'd pay much more than his secretary, but the government would collect the same amount.

If the strength of his argument is independent of the magnitude of the problem he's arguing against, there is a flaw there.

Buffett is an admirable guy. But the line about his secretary is a rhetorical flourish, nothing more.

<comment><USER11> They're his words (paraphrased) not mine, and it is impossible Buffet is unaware of corporate tax. My guess is its more than rhetorical flourish too since he's not known for that.

Your making the argument that corporate taxes reduce his personal income, and therefore should count as his taxes. Ok. But if corporations did not have to pay taxes, they would pay their employees more, including secretaries. It's impossible to say for sure that a 35% corporate tax rate reduces secretary salaries by 35%, but it is something highly significant.

In a roundabout way the secretary is paying that corporate tax too. Its effect is not as directly measurable on her as it is on Buffet, and might not be 1 for 1, but it's undeniably there and equally applicable to her tax rate.

Also Social Security reduces her pay by 12.4% (half of which is paid by her employer but again would likely go to her if not). Since its capped at $100k income, it rounds to 0% of Buffet's yearly earnings.

*I should point out that I am aware I've grossly oversimplified the effect of the corporate tax on the secretary, I trust but you get the point.

<comment><USER21> The corporate tax rate is only paid on profits.

Profits and pay for workers are in competition. So raising the cost of profits actually increases the incentive to pay workers more. This is why many actual nonprofits are poorly managed; they are funneling profits to workers rather than to shareholders.

<comment><USER9> _Profits and pay for workers are in competition. So raising the cost of profits actually increases the incentive to pay workers more._

That is not how it works. When car companies start losing money, they don't give people raises; they fire them. When Goldman has a great quarter, they don't cut people's pay -- they give them bonuses.

Nonprofits are managed because they exist to spend money, not to spend it well.

<comment><USER21> You are missing the point. A company has money after expenses (I'll abbreviate it MAE) which must be distributed. (Or in the case of GM, they have negative money after expenses.) You are discussing the behavior of companies in response to changes in MAE.

I'm discussing how a fixed amount of MAE is distributed in response to changes in incentives. Each dollar of MAE can be given either to shareholders, to employees, or can be invested. If you raise the cost of distributing money to shareholders (this is what the corporate tax does), companies will divert money to employees and investments. I.e., no one will pay dividends if there is a 100% dividend tax.

<comment><USER22> I think you're mistaken in thinking that money will be distributed to the average worker in this scenario. It would all be paid out to the same shareholders as a salary instead of capital gains. The regular employees wouldn't see an extra dime.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Hey babycakes, consider adding "via @venturehacks" when you post our tweets.

I'm assuming you got it from us. Because we linked to it. And no one else on the web links to things.</comment>


Ask HN: Review Preceden's paid conversion funnel - <AUTHOR> http://www.mattmazur.com/2010/05/precedens-revenue-conversion-funnel-infographic/

<comment><AUTHOR> HN, I put together the infographic in this post to show my success so far with charging for my web app, Preceden. I don't have a lot of experience charging and am looking for any feedback you all may have.

Two specific questions:

1) What's a "good" conversion rate for a freemium web app? And since the answer is almost definitely "it depends", what factors go into it?

2) What do you think of the site's current free/premium breakdown (you can add less than 20 events for free, more than that is $29 for unlimited events). As mentioned in the post, both the max event limit and the price are hard to get right and I'm not sure how to arrive at the optimal numbers.

Also, and unrelated, when I submitted this through the "submit" section on HN it removed the "Ask HN" from the beginning of it. I went back in and added it, though I'm not sure if it was intentionally removed because it linked to an outside URL. I didn't see it in the FAQ, and am curious.

<comment><USER2> Nice infographic! In answer to your questions (just my opinions, mind):

1) The industry average (at least from sources talking about it) is around 1-2% of all signups upgrading, so you're at par there. I think, however, that this is not very helpful. Continuing the 'par' theme, what would you say is a 'good' handicap in golf? There's no such number, really, except in relation to certain goals. Likewise, I think your conversion rate should just be one of the things that you tweak in order to maximize your profit, which is most important thing in the end. Be aware that it may be much better to have a 1% conversion rate at a higher price than a 5% conversion rate at a lower one. Or vice versa.

2) I'm not sure about whether this is good or not, I'm afraid. It's quite a unique service you're providing - there's not a lot to use as a benchmark. Something to take into account is that people generally upgrade when they hit a 'pain point' in the app. That's when I go over my dropbox free storage limit, for example. For Bingo Card Creator it's when you want to print the cards you've created (I think). The pain point in your app is unclear. What is it people are using it for? Perhaps you don't want to limit the number of events, but rather the usage of the created timeline? Upgrade if you want to save it as an image, print it, embed it in your website, save it online etc. Remember that the more people put into something, the more willing they will be to pay to get past the pain point (it is a hassle for me to signup with anyone other than dropbox if I'm already using them, for example). Also think about the scenarios in which you are saving people a huge amount of time. For Bingo Card Creator, it's teachers spending hours messing about with Word trying to make different cards. The app saves you that time. Is there an equivalent for your users, or a particular subset of them?

Just some random thoughts there.

As a final thought, related to some of the above points, think about whether it is a good idea to stop people entering all the data they want to enter, which you're doing. Perhaps it might be better to let them enter as much as they want, but require an upgrade to stop it all just disappearing (or all but 10 events of it disappearing) as soon as they leave the site (or 24 hours later, or whatever). Then you've got people putting more into your app, and you're introducing a more natural pain point: pay up to keep all the work you've just done, or to print it, or to share it in its entirety.

<comment><USER2> One last thought - I see the 'Gantt Chart' box on your front page. This is possibly one of those subsets-of-users-more-willing-to-pay I mentioned: workers or teams in need of a quick gantt chart to plan their work. Last time I looked for a quick way to make a gantt chart I found nothing good - your app looks like it could do it really well. Plus then you've got professionals, who are generally more likely to pay. It might be worth you having a whole separate page for business use.

If I ran a team of workers and wanted a gantt chart for our work, and put X minutes/hours into creating it (dozens of sub-projects) in your app, and then you asked me for $29 to keep it, I'd pay, no question.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, thanks for the feedback.

I think you're right in that I need to do a better job at addressing the pain points. One of the interesting dilemmas about it is that people are using the app for many different uses, which is great, but it makes it hard to sell to a specific audience. You might be right in that I need a business section, similar to what I think RescueTime does.

I'm not sure about charging folks to keep their data from disappearing though. As a user, I think I'd get really frustrated with an app that did that. It's kind of like ransoming off the user's data, isn't it?

Bingo Card Creator has been a big inspiration for me. That's where the $29 price came from.

Again, appreciate it.

<comment><USER2> You're right. I didn't express it very well, but my point was really about where you choose to cut people out of your premium offering. As it stands, you're doing it 'on the way in', as it were, i.e. while people are entering data. I was suggesting you do it 'on the way out', i.e. when people have taken the time and effort to build something for themselves using your app, and now want to do something with the timeline.

That's separable from the question of how to actually make the cut-off (and deleting data, as you suggest, may be too brutal)

But anyway, it's just thinking out loud rather than a definite suggestion.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>