What is wrong with variational autoencoders? - <AUTHOR> http://akosiorek.github.io/ml/2018/03/14/what_is_wrong_with_vaes.html <comment><USER2> The equations on this page don't render for me on either Firefox or Chrome, making reading this a little jarring. See their paper [0] for what I think is easier to follow.

*A more informative title would be something like "Improving Variational Autoencoders with improved Evidence-Based Lower Bound [ELBO] methods. The "What's wrong with VAEs?" title, followed by paragraphs explaining how VAEs work, made me wonder why I was reading it in the first place, but practically improving ELBO methods for VAE implementations is a meaningful contribution.

[0] "Tighter Variational Bounds are Not Necessarily Better", [https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.04537](https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.04537)

<comment><USER3> Author of the post here; I'm not sure what's preventing the equations from showing. The blog are just a bunch of static sites generated by Jekyll, math is from mathjax.

<comment><USER2> mijoharas below correctly identified it as being the HTTPS Everywhere browser add-on I use which prevented them from showing. I don't know enough about browser/website design to be able to help fix the problem.

Thank you for your work, the post, and the response!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Where are the results? At least show me the MNIST samples either in the blog- post or the paper. And while your at it, show the closet datapoint to the sample. Is the model just memorizing the datapoints in the dataset?

<comment><USER3> Author of the blogpost here; the main results are the convergence curves of IWAE-64 and log p(x) in the paper, but thats a good point, thanks. We'll include samples in the camera-ready version of the paper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I thought it was that VAEs generate blurry images. Has anyone been able to make VAEs as good as GANs for image generation?

<comment><USER6> IIRC there was a NIPS 2016 paper that showed that the blurry images are because of the variational approximation used in the generator/decoder network. They replaced this by doing MCMC inference on the encoder network, and showed that you get sharper images, but much less efficiently. In general, variational inference will always tend to model the mean or mode of the data.</comment></comment>


E.W.Dijkstra Archive: The Humble Programmer (EWD 340) - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD03xx/EWD340.html <comment><USER2> I've always loved the title of that essay, since Dijkstra wasn't known for being humble.

An example from

[http://www.i-programmer.info/history/people/144-dijkstra.htm...](http://www.i-programmer.info/history/people/144-dijkstra.html?start=1)

He was legendary for not sitting quietly in lecturers and talks by others. Instead he would grow increasingly agitated until an outburst could not be contained any longer. David Gries recalled a time when he was lecturing with Dijkstra in the audience when he read "x=a" as "x equals a". This is of course a short hand for "assign a to x" and not a statement that x really is logically equal to a. From the back of the room Dijkstra shouted "becomes" and the room fell silent.

<comment><USER3> Is pedantry really opposed to humility?

I know of Alan Kay's witty invective ("Arrogance in Computer Science is measured in nano-Dijkstras") but having read much of Dijkstra I'm not convinced that he was really _arrogant_ so much as very insistent that programmers recognize their own limitations.

"As a slow-witted human being I have a very small head and I had better learn to live with it and to respect my limitations and give them full credit, rather than try to ignore them, for the latter vain effort will be punished by failure."</comment></comment>


Particle physics experiments have stopped answering to grand theories - <AUTHOR> https://aeon.co/essays/has-the-quest-for-top-down-unification-of-physics-stalled <comment><USER2> I see a human problem with an incremental experiment-driven model, instead of a theoretical model.

It's easier to get money to build a new collider if there's something specific to look for. "We're expecting to find the Higgs, but we need a better tool to look for it."

Trying to do the same with a data-driven model is a hard sell. "We haven't found anything, please give us a better machine so we might find something, but we don't know what"

<comment><USER3> No chance of getting funding by justifying 'this $multi-billion collider may or may not find new physics outside the Standard Model'.

The LHC only got funding because it was guaranteed to answer the question 'is there a Higgs Boson'.

<comment><USER4> Your last statement needs a citation; I think that's the line mainly used to sell it to the public in pop sci headlines.

<comment><USER5> The people who funded it were politicians who cater to public who read the pop sci magazines. I wonder if any significant number of people who actually made the funding decision looked at anything beyond "this will make you look like you support Science"

<comment><USER6> Funding on large science projects that I've seen, at least how the NSF does it, "filters up" where the proposal is passed through technically aware committee before being passed up to less technically aware people. And there is also the P5 committee which makes high-level recommendations about general directions and projects that can more holistically drive "important" (or at least what they deem to be so) science goals forward, where their advice tends to guide many levels of the funding process pretty strongly (if your proposal gets a low grade from them, you aren't getting funded, period). At the level of really big science, this "filtering up" process will go all the way to Congress, where of course you then have people with average-zero science knowledge making a final decision. But to get to that point, I'd wager most if not all science proposals will have passed many valid technical hurdles presented by knowledgeable people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hats off for the author and physicists. Imagine a blind and deaf person painting and writing songs.

I highly recommend Feynman's QED book [0], its easy to read and at the same time blows your mind off. You'll be proud of yourself after :)

[0] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QED:_The_Strange_Theory_of_Light_and_Matter

<comment><USER8> There is a blind (since birth) painter who is considerably famous - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTDQcSS809c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTDQcSS809c)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's a good article, but I have one big complaint: the terminology of bottum- up and top-down is reversed!

In the context of politics, magister-dixit or top-down has a negative connotation, and democracy or grass-roots or bottom-up has a positive connotation.

In physics we should disregard the political connotation.

Yes historically most new physics were top-down observations, i.e. noticing small (unexplained) deviations, and first modeling the deviation, and then eventually realising the underlying cause. A good example is the discovery that some planet motions: while most did seem to move in perfect circles, one of them had a measurable deviation, and after exhaustively trying to fit "state of the art" mathematics (degree 4 polynomialss or ovals), because Kepler incorrectly thought others would have already tried the simpler conic sections (ellipses for closed orbits). Only after the ovals kept failing did he try the too-obvious-otherwise-it-would-already-have-been-discovered conic sections, and found a very precise match.

Examples of bottom-up physics are the early theories of statistical mechanics like Ludwig Boltzmann's, or the atomistic theory of chemistry: with little experimental evidence, they could derive physically realistic behaviours for large ensembles of particles, and only much later were molecules and atoms discovered. Bottom-up is postulating smaller particles and investigating how they would influennce the behaviour of bigger collections, and then trying to prescribe experiments to prove their predictions.

So when the author of this article talks about bottom-up he is actually describing the return to top-down, explain as you measure deviations, and when he talks about top-down he seems to actually refer to the bottom-up postulates of new physics with hopefully falsifiable tests...

Again, a good article, but its nomenclature of top-down and bottom-up seems reversed to me.

<comment><USER10> Not quite. When talking about bottom-up and top-down, one can talk about small to large scales in size (microscopic to macroscopic) or or can talk about small energies to large energies. The two descriptions are inversely related because small length scales correspond to large energies, and vice versa (roughly due to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle). Conventionally, when particle physicists talk about top-down and bottom-up, they are talking about energy scales: "top" is high energy, more fundamental, smaller distances and "bottom" is low energy, more emergent, larger distances.

<comment><USER9> first, thank you very much for responding,

but still I have the impression that bottom refers to the more fundamental perspective, and top refers to the more general perspective...

i.e. the fundamental equations for electromagnetism are the maxwell equations with epsilon, mu and c for vacuum, and then one can use these as microscopic equation for other media and generate effective equations for other media so that the new maxwell equations are similar but modified, i.e. different scalar epsilon, mu, c or perhaps for birefringent crystals the epsilon and mu are genralized to matrices/tensors, or for nonlinear optics theres second and third order tensors... and those new effective equations are top and the fundamental is bottom... at least thats how I think most people would denote top and bottom...

I kind of see what you mean, but I don't think top annd bottom on energy scales is very significant, I think the derivabilitiy of new effective constitutive equations/propeerties from fundamental equations/properties is more top vs bottom...

but I agree, at a certain point its not a discussion of physics but just dictionary wars...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Next big movement in understanding the physical laws of the universe is going to come from the areas we least understand. Right now, that's astrophysics.

As John Mather put it, right now we're not even sure what the right questions to ask are... but we definitely to understand it yet.

</comment><comment><USER12> A completely clueless question: do they dramatically reconfigure the LHC and other colliders for each type of experiment?

Or can you do something like Google did with Tri Alpha Energy [1] to explore interesting parts of the state space, and just generate tons of data for people to chew on?

Or does reconfiguring it for human-directed experiments effectively explore the state space enough that there's data to chew on just fine?

Asking out of curiosity. I know the smartest people in the world are working on this stuff; not trying to "hey what if they just tried X…" on this :-)

[1] [https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/07/so-there-i-was-firing- mega...](https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/07/so-there-i-was-firing-megawatt- plasma.html)

<comment><USER13> The latter. They generate much more data than what they can even retain, so they filter it in multiple stages.

<comment><USER9> I think your answer (with which I agree) is a confirmation of the former. The questions-to-be-answered must be posed first, so that the low level filtering can filter out what we aren't interested in, because we can't record all the hits for each event and store them. (although I think one should consider it, perhaps if a huge part of the budget had always gone to storage, we might have petabyte databases for lower energies, which could now be stored on consumer HDD's and new patterns in old experiments could be found, while at the time of this old experiment this may have seemed senseless as no individual physicists could back then hope to have a local copy. Similarily today it would generate preposterous amounts of data, but if we record them now (even if expensive) then physicists 20 years from now might be able to store them on their future personal media...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The point is near the end:

"All these challenges arise because of physics' adherence to reductive unification. Admittedly, the method has a distinguished pedigree. During my PhD and early career in the 1990s, it was all the rage among theorists, and the fiendishly complex mathematics of string theory was its apogee. But none of our top-down efforts seem to be yielding fruit. One of the difficulties of trying to get at underlying principles is that it requires us to make a lot of theoretical presuppositions, any one of which could end up being wrong."

"Instead, many of us have switched from the old top-down style of working to a more humble, bottom-up approach. Instead of trying to drill down to the bedrock by coming up with a grand theory and testing it, now we're just looking for any hints in the experimental data, and working bit by bit from there."

In practice, both ways to look at the evidence are needed. And in pure science, sometimes a lot has to be done in many different directions before some of non-obvious directions bear fruits. One of big dangers is inventing the experiments that will surely "confirm." The big insights come also when something expected by the most is not confirmed, like the famous

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_exper...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_experiment)

Without these experiments Einstein wouldn't be able to invent General Relativity. The popular culture talks too much about Einstein but sadly doesn't understand and hardly even knows Michelson.

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

His experiment, from the end of the 19th century, is also the basis of the LIGO experiments that just recently confirmed gravitational waves:

[https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/ligos- ifo](https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/ligos-ifo)

"Although much more sophisticated, at their cores, LIGO's interferometers are fundamentally Michelson Interferometers, a device invented in the 1880's."

The 1880's experiments didn't "confirm" what was "expected" but they are one of the most impressive science success stories, looking from what we know now.

Of course, LIGO itself is a technological marvel compared to what was possible in 1880, and we should celebrate all the advanced experiments where our reach extends. Not "confirming" expected can be even much bigger story, even if it disappoints those whose "pet" "expected" theory is not confirmed.

<comment><USER15> Kind of tangential but this reminds me of Feynman:

> It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart > you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong.

<comment><USER16> The funny thing about that quote is that Feynman ignored it all the time. Back during the post-WWII explosion, Feynman would get told about some exciting new result and regularly said that the result was wrong because it contradicted theory and was experimental error. And it usually was error. A lot of those anecdotes in his oral history: [https://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels- bohr-library/oral...](https://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr- library/oral-histories/5020-1)

<comment><USER17> Experimental data comes with confidence levels. There's no point in being excited at low confidence extravagant data.

This does not detract from his phrase in any way.

<comment><USER16> Yes, it does. He didn't say, "it doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, unless of course, it's sufficiently beautiful that it has high posterior probability such that you will dismiss an indefinite but potentially large number of experiments showing it's wrong until enough experiments have been done that you have to admit that it's wrong because it disagrees with them".

Of course, Feynman was right to dismiss those experiments. It's his quote which is cute, oversimplified, and wrong. It's Duhem-Quine all over.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Wow, an article explaining standard model and unification but also mentioning "E=mc2 (energy equals the square of the mass)"!

<comment><USER19> You just forced me to skim the article for that nugget!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Minor point, but:

> A test case for the bottom-up methodology is the bottom meson, a composite > particle made of something called a bottom quark and another known as a > lighter quark.

I thought mesons were just a quark + an antiquark, I suppose they meant another (anti)quark that's lighter than the bottom quark?

<comment><USER21> Mesons have a wide variety. Some are quarks plus different anti-quarks (e.g. up + anti-down). Neutral mesons are not just quarks plus their anti-quarks, they are usually quantum superpositions of multiple quark/anti-quark pairs. For example, the pi-0 meson is a superposition of up + anti-up _minus_ down + anti-down, all divided by the square root of 2 (quantum mechanics is weird). However, it gets even more complicated when spin comes into play, an up + anti-down meson could be a charged pion with 0 spin and a mass of 139 MeV or it could be a rho meson with a spin of 1 and a mass of 775 MeV.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Just have to add a comment on some things.

It is unfortunate that they refer to the 26 dimensions...

> [...] particles as tiny vibrating loops of string that exist in somewhere > between 10 and 26 dimensions.

... of what is known as "Bosonic string theory". It is called bosonic because it only has bosons (e.g. photons) and no fermions (e.g. electrons). This is obviously not a realistic theory because of that reason, and it also suffers other serious problems. But, this was the first formulation of string theory, not meant as a fundamental theory of gravity even, and if you do open some of the famous text books in string theory, you do find that it starts with the bosonic string theory. This is because it is a more gentle introduction.

The "between 10 and 26" comment is also a bit unfortunate. String theory is ten dimensional (space-time, meaning I include time in there). A lot of physics is formulated in terms of perturbation theory, meaning you have that the full result is expressed as an infinite sum of smaller and smaller terms, and you can truncated this infinite series and get a approximate result. This holds if the parameter you are expanding indeed is ever-smaller, which it isn't necessarily. One of those parameters (string theory has two of them built in) is the string coupling "g_s". If you start taking this parameter large than one, so the perturbation breaks down, string theory (type IIA in particular) grows an extra dimension into a theory known as M-theory. Note that this theory has no strings, it only has other fundamental objects. Similarly, there is an F-theory that is in some sense 12D, which also describes non-perturbative physics.

So, if physics in our universe is described by this non-perturbative physics, then sure, it's 11D or so, but we do not know which parameter regime of string theory our universe is in ( yet ;) ). But it is not a choice willy-nilly.

Then regarding effective theories against fundamental ones. Effective theories, or models rather, are things like: the inflationary model, cosmological constant to explain dark energy, standard model, minimally- supersymmetric standard model, F(R) gravity, DBI gravity, and so on. The problem is that there are too many of them. Claudia de Rham had a talk a month or so back in which she said something along the lines of (this is how I remember it) "We are quite good at excluding effective gravitational models, but we are however better at constructing new ones.". We need some deeper understanding of what is allowed when it comes to model building, and even theory building. But the point is, for gravity for example, that there are several models out there that are consistent with observations, but we do not know which ones can be consistently included in a fundamental theory.

And theory gives us ideas of what to look for. In this thread "seeing extra dimensions" are discussed, but it is misrepresented a bit. There are potentially several ways that we could start seeing evidence for extra dimensions, at least in principle. For example, "compactification" which means that we make the extra dimensions small, hidden for us, comes with the so- called "Kaluza-Klein tower" of particles, in which particles are essentially separated in mass inversely to the size of the size of the extra dimensions (small extra dimensions -> high mass). So this is one indirect way of how one could in principle see them (then they may be very massive, and virtually undiscoverable, but space-time warping brings down these masses... so we don't know).

Some of the particle physics experiments are looking for, in a sense, "anything that deviates" from the standard model. Note that for such experiments, _any_ fundamental theory would have the same "problem" as string theory: it must show new physics at higher energies than already explored. LHC results are often seen as a "string theory is wrong"-result, which is not true, but what it rather shows is how boring the universe is at those energies, independently of the theory. Hopefully theory can give predictions in other places as well (in addition to the predictions of susy, extra dimensions, etc), like of what gravitational waves can say something fundamental about black holes.

</comment><comment><USER23> If they are going to use up to 26 dimensions in their theories, of what use is a machine that only senses the 4 dimensions we normally perceive? Maybe all these missing particles are in some of the other 22? I'm sorry, but I don't think solid answers to some of the big questions are ever going to be found using these experiments.

I also question whether thinking in terms of particles is even the right paradigm. We may be just attempting to mold observations into our own incorrect model.

<comment><USER24> It's fun to speculate, but it's worth pointing out that science progresses via actual work.

If you know how to build a machine that senses more than 4 dimensions, please build it and run some experiments! If you can't, then recognize the limitations of critique. Anyone can sit back and say "hey, what if we're doing things wrong?" Scientists already spend most of their time in this area of thinking.

The operative question isn't "what use are our limited experiments?" Scientists know their experiments are limited. The real question is, "how, specifically, can we do new experiments?"

Or for theoreticians, it's not "is our model incorrect?" Scientists know the theories aren't correct... not totally correct, anyway. The real question for a theoretician is, "what new model can I propose that matches all known evidence, and also opens the door for new understanding?"

<comment><USER23> I guess I was just thinking out loud, but then I did read the article and have read many other like it over the last 30+ years.

I can see it must be fun to speculate, but also seemingly profitable for some of these guys too, eh? I wonder how much a "theoretical physicist" gets paid, anyways?</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Alice in Wonderland - <AUTHOR> http://bookses.com/read/52907151d8529aa435000001

<comment><USER2> I am terribly confused by the interface, although I assume its intention is to sort of remind me of rap geniuses "explain" feature, but for Alice in Wonderland. I love the idea, but the execution needs a bit more UI work :)

</comment><comment><USER3> Hmm. I looked at this first on my iPad and I was all "why is this person linking to the Project Gutenberg edition of Alice".

Now I'm looking on my laptop and it's hard to even begin to savor the illos - they're all overlaid on each other.

Cool idea, though!

</comment><comment><USER4> I cannot understand how to use this, images are loaded as I scroll down, but if I mouse over text, I sometimes get different images overlaid on top of the already overlaid images. It is very confusing.

</comment><comment><USER5> I love the book and its gorgeous illustrations, so I welcome this project.

However, the interface needs a lot of work. The current version is really difficult to view due to the way overlay is handled. Also, there is a reason why pop-up comments are activated on click on RapGenius, it's a major distraction otherwise.

Can't wait for the improved version!

</comment><comment><USER6> This is a really fantastic idea, and really needed - I would enjoy showing these to kids. The illustrations of these classics now in the public domain have so much character (one day the work of Quentin Blake will go alongside these).

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow thank you so much!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interesting UI.

On a side note, I wonder why Project Gutenberg books are all encoded with CR- LF. The first thing I do whenever I load one is get rid of them so that the text can be reflowed properly as paragraphs instead of lines.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Good point. I was thinking there might be poetry so I just replaced the CR-LF with regular new lines.

<comment><USER7> I didn't think about the poetry aspect, that's a good point. Maybe it could be a toggle in user preferences.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Work needed. Specifically: overlapped images are a mistake, and the typography is not well done. Recommend checking out medium.com for optimal type handling, and Gingko which has gone further towards a sane UI.

[https://gingkoapp.com/hyperloop](https://gingkoapp.com/hyperloop)

Gingko discussed here

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6302825](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6302825)

IMO, novel interfaces like these have a fundamental problem - they're better for creating or combining content than actually consuming it.

</comment><comment><USER9> Interesting. Seems like a _significant_ improvement over highlighting and margin-notes, and more collaborative.

For a while now I've been thinking that something like this would be great to have _on e-readers_. Maybe someone here knows of one that has it / is capable of general programming for it? Specifically e-ink, I'm still not a fan of regular screens for lots of reading.

</comment><comment><USER10> "Unless you are craigslist." Isn't that the crappiest design ever?!? And isn't it the greatest website idea...and even more interesting since it's so good and it looks like (what he said) :=)

Alice has a right to be skew and whacked out. It is odd, though. Still, ravishing. Thanks for posting.

</comment><comment><USER11> Seems similar in theory (if perhaps not in execution) to the open source epub.js project[0].

[0][http://fchasen.github.io/epub.js/](http://fchasen.github.io/epub.js/)

</comment><comment><USER12> This has big potential although it immediately reminded me of Rap Genius and how they've already expanded into other written media. Keep at it and good luck!

</comment><comment><USER13> Rep Genius annotations for books, cool.

</comment><comment><USER14> "The best book on computer programming for the layman." \--Alan Perlis

<comment><USER15> "… but that's because it's the best book on anything for the layman."

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This looks like a pile of shit. Sorry. It might be a good idea but it looks like a pile of shit. Unless you're craigslist, if the design sucks no one will use it.

<comment> k-mcgrady Nice constructive criticism there. If you think it's shit don't apologise, but at least offer constructive ways the creator can improve upon it.

<comment><USER16> Just trying to get the ball rollin.</comment></comment></comment>


Why Menus Suck - <AUTHOR> http://500hats.com/why-menus-suck-food-tech-revolution/

<comment><USER2> I do not understand why people continue to pay any sort of attention to Dave McClure. He cannot write a cogent sentence to save his life. He's a perfect symbol of the move-fast-think-later VC culture that is draining the fun out of tech.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Too many items" is a problem with the restaurant, not the menu.

"Not enough pictures" - I prefer a good description than a photo. A photo doesn't tell you much at all...

"Simpler and more obvious recommendations" - I want recommendations from the waiter. Only sometimes, though. I'd rather go in based on the entre description rather than a recommendation from some random user.

I'd go on, but yeah...

</comment><comment><USER4> My, that was certainly cringe-inducing. The only thing I really came away with is: I hope I'm never trapped in a room with Dave McClure... _< shudder>_

</comment><comment><USER5> Is anyone as annoyed as I am that there were almost no capital letters on that entire website?</comment>


Ask HN: Can I keep using the MIT-licensed version of Handontable for my SaaS? - <AUTHOR> In 2017, I made a very niche data-analysis side project with an excel-like UI powered by Handsontable (https://github.com/handsontable/handsontable) which was MIT licensed at the time. A friend in consulting suggested I turn it into a subscription business and I made a modest income from in starting later that year. I had issues with mental health, so I took a lot of time away from tech, and had the friend answer support emails for about a year. During this time, revenue grew modestly but I no longer actively maintained or marketed it.
I recently returned to work / computer related activity and found out that Handontable went from an MIT license to one that requires payment for SAAS use. There's actually a HN thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19488642 .
AFAIK, I haven't even run npm update since early 2019 or late 2018. If I continue using the code as is, do I still require a subscription as per the new license? I don't actively plan on maintaining the business unless something breaks (it is a very simple product and paying hosting fees is about as far as my daily involvement goes).
Thank you in advance for you advice - I am really curious on how to resolve this. <comment><USER2> The answer you want is "Yes, of course," of course. That's why "AFAIK" prefaces something that would be answered by an audit. But audits aside, the internet isn't a lawyer. Pay one if it's important. If it isn't important, then it isn't important.

In practical terms, a business that can't afford necessary legal advice isn't really viable as an ongoing concern. Good luck.

</comment><comment> core-questions IANAL, but my understanding is that you can generally keep using the previous version under MIT and any version that was still released under MIT; you just can't update past that to the non-MIT versions without falling into the new SaaS clause.

That said, you should find out how much the payment is and see if you can just pay it; maybe you can negotiate a good deal with the author. They've gotta eat too, right?</comment>


Uber and Lyft drivers' median hourly wage is just $3.37, report finds - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/01/uber-lyft-driver-wages-median-report <comment><USER2> I question the authenticity of the $3.37 number when I see that the paper this article references was published by an organization funded by these bodies:

Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, BP, ClearPath Foundation, Conoco Phillips, Duke Energy, Electricité de France, EnBW, ENGIE, ENI, Eversource, Exelon Corporation, ExxonMobil, Gas Natural Fenosa, GE, Golden Spread Electric Cooperative, Inc., Iberdrola, IHI Corporation, EDPC J-Power, Kiewit Energy Group Inc., National Grid, Norwegian Ministries, PSEG, Southern Company, Swedish Energy Agency, Toyota Motor Corporation, TransCanada Corporation

I think Uber/Lyft economics are problematic, but these guys have pretty solid incentives to make Uber/Lyft look unviable.

[http://ceepr.mit.edu/support/associates](http://ceepr.mit.edu/support/associates)

<comment><USER3> Instead of giving in to a gut reaction, you should read the paper. All research must get funding in one way or another. If you exclude research due to funding sources and potential conflicts of interest, you wouldn't be left with much.

<comment><USER4> How exactly would you suggest people read the paper? The article linked to a brief [1] which says literally absolutely nothing about how they conjured up their numbers. And the paper itself is here [2]. It's rather worse than a paywall. Instead the paper is restricted to their "sponsors" until an embargo of up to 6 months.

This sort of behavior should not instill confidence in the paper's conclusions. And I think it was completely reckless of the Guardian to run an eye catching headline with absolutely 0 justification given to the numbers other than an implicit appeal to authority by calling it an MIT paper. Though such is the state of the media today.

[1] - [http://ceepr.mit.edu/files/papers/2018-005-Brief.pdf](http://ceepr.mit.edu/files/papers/2018-005-Brief.pdf)

[2] - [http://ceepr.mit.edu/publications/working- papers/681](http://ceepr.mit.edu/publications/working-papers/681)

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure if it's purposeful, or how long the hole will remain open, but you can see the full paper. Remove the "-Brief". [0]

The paper is fairly open about their methodology, and give access to things like the actual survey being answered, rather than just saying "a survey matching these criteria was used".

Most of their data apparently has come through Harry Campbell [1], and his yearly survey, which has it's own data and methodology out in the open [2].

I'm not remotely qualified to analyse it, but you can see the data from therideshareguy's survey if you're looking to critique the results of this paper. (I've edited this paragraph to try and get less push/offensive. I'm still not happy with it, but the aphasia is kicking my butt. Rest assured, I'm just trying to be helpful, and just wanted to point the direction to discussing the data. Still not happy with this phrasing either.)

[0] [http://ceepr.mit.edu/files/papers/2018-005.pdf](http://ceepr.mit.edu/files/papers/2018-005.pdf)

[1] [https://therideshareguy.com](https://therideshareguy.com)

[2] [https://therideshareguy.com/2018SurveyReport](https://therideshareguy.com/2018SurveyReport)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > "The companies are losing money. The businesses are being subsidized by > [venture capital] money … And the drivers are essentially subsidizing it by > working for very low wages."

Last time I pointed that out I was downvoted for some unknown reason.

My neighbor was talking about buying a new car to drive for lyft/uber and I was like "the trick is to tear up _somebody else 's_ car." We'll see if he heeds my advice though I kind of doubt it since he has an MBA and I'm just the resident slacker who happens to know the business.

<comment><USER7> I don't get it. Taxicabs such as in NYC are famously expensive to buy into, and yet drivers somehow afford it and make livings on them. So if they are clearly not losing money, why is it that a company that's supposed to be vastly more efficient due to use of computers can't make a profit? Are the tech overheads really that high?

<comment><USER8> Taxicabs such as in NYC are (were) monopolies. The price you paid was far above what the market rate should have been, which is why drivers were able to make livings on them. Uber/Lyft are simply forcing prices back down to the market rate which is where the prices should be in a free market. Driving isn't really something that should be a career.

> "Why is it that a company that's supposed to be vastly more efficient due to > use of computers can't make a profit?"

Well Uber/Lyft are probably focused on growth now. They will make plenty of profit once they dominante every city with driver-less cars.

<comment><USER9> > "Driving isn't really something that should be a career."

Why not?

<comment><USER10> This question would have made sense 10-20 years ago.

<comment><USER11> No, I'm still confused. What is the problem with being a taxi driver for life and expecting a good wage?

<comment><USER12> Only middle class professionals have "a career" and therefore deserve to have enough money to live on, don't you know.

It's the primary reason we don't need a minimum wage - working in the service industry or any other relatively unskilled work isn't "a career" so it doesn't matter if it only pays 2 bucks an hour, so goes the reasoning because nobody should be expecting to do it for long or make a life out of it.

It's myopic.

<comment><USER13> If teachers can't be expected to support their family off their income, why should someone doing something that can be crowd sourced as a side gig? Just because I can make $15 tying peoples shoes doesn't mean that I'm entitled to support a family off of it.

<comment><USER11> Because it is in your(society) interest that people can support themselves and their families with just one job. Otherwise you end up spending more on benefits and support not to mention on all the problems that come with chronic unemployment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Uber is losing billions and their drivers are making peanuts. That sounds sustainable.

<comment><USER15> It's sustainable because we're on the cusp of the autonomous vehicle revolution. [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/26/technology/driverless- car...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/26/technology/driverless-cars- california-rules.html)

This is similar to how the huge army of people stuffing DVDs into envelopes at Netflix is going away. It might be slow, but I don't think there will be tons of people watching DVDs from them in 2030... [https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/23/netflix-dvd-business- still-a...](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/23/netflix-dvd-business-still-alive- what-is-it-like-to-work-there.html)

<comment><USER16> > It's sustainable because we're on the cusp of the autonomous vehicle > revolution.

We still have drivers on subway trains. When those drivers lose jobs to autonomy, maybe we can think about being on the cusp. Until then, I see it as a fantastic story that can be used to milk VCs for cash.

At <$4/hour, it's a better investment to automate a fast food restaurant like McDonald's or Burger King. They pay twice as much for labor. Pouring a coke and cooking burgers and fries should be a pretty straightforward challenge. They've already done Pizzas.

<comment><USER17> The SkyTrain in Vancouver, Canada does not have drivers.

It has been in service since it was built for the 1986 World Expo.

Autonomous trains are not nearly as widespread as they could be, but this is not for technical reasons - it is for political reasons.

<comment><USER18> Pretty sure one of the Boston subway lines is autonomous (from the airport?), along with a smattering of subway lines around the world.

<comment><USER19> Blue line? Nope, it has a driver.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> That seems too low. Most drivers I use have been doing it for years. They wouldn't at those rates.

<comment><USER21> The recent internal Uber study found that long-term drivers learn how to optimize their rides for the highest fares. So there are significant differences between what the median driver makes and what the "pro" Uber drivers make.

<comment><USER22> This is the concern I hear from policy makers. If Uber/Lyft drivers are "optimizing" their rides and only seeking out the most profitable routes and areas, then cities no longer have a egalitarian transportation system.

Need a ride and you're in an obscure part of town? Welp too bad.

<comment><USER20> Taxis did this 100x worse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> As a former pizza delivery guy, this seems odd to me. Before expenses, I'd make between 12 and 20 an hour depending on the night. The car I drove then had a KBB value of less than $3000 and it would have been eligible to use as an Uber. I just don't see how you could possibly have such high levels of expenses unless you were paying like $600 a month for your car.

<comment><USER24> As a passenger, I'm very often in $40K+ vehicles. Even on a 60 month loan, that'd be over your $600 number just on car payments.

<comment><USER25> In 200+ rides, I don't think I've ever once been in a $40k+ Uber vehicle unless I've used Uber Select.

<comment><USER24> hm. It appears I'm off on my car prices. I thought japanese minivans were in that range, and with pool, those are really common. looking, they look closer to $30K than $40K if you don't spring for the extras. doing a survey of car manufacturer websites, my impression of how much vehicles cost appears to be around $10K high across the board. The base model honda accord is only $23K? that is way less than I thought.

I use uberx to work, and pool home most days; I've used select once. I think I get a Mercedes C-class at least once a week, some of them looking pretty new. Oddly, I almost never see BMWs. I remember the other night I got in some giant four door American pickup that looked new and very expensive, but I don't know enough about trucks to recognize the model to verify that impression.

Still, the standard Prius is gonna be like $400/month on a 60 month loan, and that's just the loan. I imagine that there would be much value in the vehicle after those 60 months, if you drove full time in it, and I imagine the Prius has lower operating costs than most vehicles in it's class.

I do occasionally get tiny economy cars... but not very often, which seems weird, as if the major cost was the car, you'd think drivers would optimize for that by buying smaller cars, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

<comment><USER23> Honestly, if you're buying a new vehicle to use for Uber you're insane. Perhaps they got more people roped into that or leasing than they ought to have and that's responsible for these issues. But you can get a used car that's more than adequate at a reasonable price even with terrible credit.

At least in my area, most of the vehicles have been 5+ year old Toyotas (almost entirely Camrys, and a Prius or two) that were likely purchased with over 100k miles on them. The nicest thing I was ever in was a new Honda Civic.

<comment><USER24> That'd be like 10K for another 100K miles? probably more with maintenance. I'm not sure that's a better deal than a $18K civic brand new, if you really planned for driving a few hundred thousand miles, especially when you factor in gas differentials.

My impression is that the cost per mile on new cars is pretty good if you actually drive them for a few hundred thousand miles. The savings on used cars mostly comes in if you don't plan on driving enough to wear a new car out before getting your next car; otherwise transaction costs can be... significant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I ran these numbers when I had access to the data. Varies by region but this number is still much too low. Even if 30c/mile in costs is correct the hourly is still way off

</comment><comment><USER27> It seems that yet again, "efficiency" in startup-speak just means "offloading cost onto other people".

</comment><comment><USER28> Lyft rents out cars on a weekly basis. If a driver completes enough rides they don't have to pay a rental fee. Rental includes maintenance and driver only pays for gas.

That is much simpler to calculate. Someone should do the math on that.

</comment><comment><USER29> Any Uber drivers want to chime in?

<comment><USER30> This seems rather low. Granted it's been almost two years since I drove for (primarily lyft) and I was making 50k/year for about 70h work a week. And also I gave myself about 6 weeks of vacation over that year and half.

<comment><USER31> $50,000 per year for 70 hour per week works out to $28,571.43 if it were a standard 40-hour work week. Oh, and no benefits and you get to pay for gas and wear-and-tear on your car. So I guess if you're okay spending almost every waking hour working for peanuts and no health insurance, then sure.

<comment><USER30> Honestly it was more like 60 h a week and it's not so bad because that "includes commute", and also the schedule is really flexible (includes working around logging off for social events, for example). It was some of the least stressful years in my life, if for no other reason than I got to sleep in every day (not waking to an alarm ever).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The economist behind the study admits this is wrong and has adj the figure to $8.55 from $3.37. Here is the response he posted.

[https://twitter.com/StephenZoepf/status/970754550968676352/p...](https://twitter.com/StephenZoepf/status/970754550968676352/photo/1)

He also admits to using "donated" labor from students. $0 is even less than $3.37 ;)

</comment><comment><USER33> [https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/11/can-uber-ever- delive...](https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/11/can-uber-ever-deliver-part- one-understanding-ubers-bleak-operating-economics.html)

I have always thought Uber drivers are either mispricing their vehicle cost, or doing some sort of tax optimisation.

If you have a nice car that you only drive a little bit on the weekend, so that most of the cost is in the fixed stuff (age based depreciation (a 5 years old Porsche with 0 mile is still 5 years old), insurance, parking etc), and the tax man let you allocate cost based on miles driven (I am not based in the US), then Uberring where you "try to get business" by driving up and down a highway would be great.

</comment><comment><USER34> I guess what makes driving different than other low-wage jobs is that it's a _relatively_ easy job to obtain if you already have the vehicle: you don't have to do a bunch of interviews, you don't need a huge amount of ability, you can start making money pretty much immediately. Having a _reliable_ income can be important (as opposed to jobs that limit your hours, etc.).

Of course, it's obviously a terrible wage. Anecdotally, the drivers I've encountered were all doing it for extra _side_ income and _not_ as a main job.

<comment><USER35> In addition, driving in the comfort of your own car with your own music is genuinely more enjoyable than working in a greasy fast food kitchen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> This doesn't surprise me at all and it's because of hidden costs incurred by the driver, combined with an implicit bidding system that drives down wages.

Hidden costs:

1\. Vehicle wear and tear (cars cost you money when you drive them)

2\. Vehicle depreciation (cars cost you money even when you aren't driving them)

3\. Interest and fees associated with auto loans and leases

4\. Insurance premiums

5\. Gas

6\. Unexpected/unplanned for tax bills

But the feedback you're getting about your income is just the dollar figure that shows up in your account, which is vastly higher than the true amount you could reasonably keep as profit. It makes $10 feel like $100.

Combine that with the implicit bidding system. And by this I mean, market forces will naturally saturate Uber and Lyft with drivers until the price falls low enough that drivers won't accept it. And because of the factors I listed above, that natural price point is practically guaranteed to be well below minimum wage.

The whole setup is just beautifully engineered to trick poor people into thinking this can be a career. I've often thought about which is worse, this or Herbalife. I think Uber and Lyft might impact more people than Herbalife, and generally those people start with less, so I might give it to Uber and Lyft.

Actually, it's also a profession that has one of the highest rates of workplace fatalities, so I'd definitely give the title to Uber/Lyft over Herbalife.

<comment><USER37> The insurance point deserves further discussion - in many states your normal coverage is voided by driving for profit. So if you get into an accident where they can prove you were working, you aren't going to get anything. I know many people who are driving for Uber and Lyft and have no idea about this

<comment><USER38> Both Uber and Lyft have insurance policies that cover drivers and passengers during rides, and in most cases the maximum coverage per accident is $1 million.

[https://www.uber.com/drive/insurance/](https://www.uber.com/drive/insurance/)

[https://help.lyft.com/hc/en- us/articles/115013080548-Insuran...](https://help.lyft.com/hc/en- us/articles/115013080548-Insurance-Policy)

<comment><USER39> However, the insurance provided by Uber and Lyft only cover when you have a passenger in the car -- they don't cover you when you are driving to pick up the next person. And your own insurance also doesn't cover you during that period, unless you buy a separate commercial rider.

<comment> V-eHGsd_ that's not true. it covers the driver while the app is on.

[https://www.uber.com/drive/insurance/](https://www.uber.com/drive/insurance/)

> While you're online with Uber before you accept a request, you are covered > by our insurance policy for your liability to a third party if you are in an > accident when you're at fault

<comment><USER40> Only when you're at fault?

<comment><USER41> If the other party is at fault, _their_ insurance should cover _their_ liability for your damages.

<comment><USER42> ... _if_ they have valid insurance and _if_ they don't flee the scene.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> > Drivers earn a median of 59 cents per mile while incurring a median cost of > 30 cents per mile, the report said, adding that for nearly a third of > drivers, the costs are ultimately higher than the revenue.

> The paper reported the average driver profit to be $661 per month.

The posted $3.37 number is before taxes!

</comment><comment><USER43> This headline is a confusing a statement based on what the paper says. The paper[1] claims "Results show that per hour worked, __median profit __from driving is $3.37 /hour before taxes". The profit has subtracted from it amortized losses associated with vehicle wear and tear/deprecation. This makes sense knowing the nature of the business, but if a Domino's delivery driver, who similarly uses his own car for the job, says to you that is hourly wage is $9, would you assume that he was subtracting out vehicle deprecation?

[1] PDF: [http://ceepr.mit.edu/files/papers/2018-005-Brief.pdf](http://ceepr.mit.edu/files/papers/2018-005-Brief.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER44> The median driver, huh?

I'd guess 90% of the Uber/Lyft miles driven are done by 5% of the drivers.

The median driver is probably someone halfassing it like I did. Trying it occasionally for an hour or two, without much of a plan. Seeing what it's like.

<comment><USER45> Part-time drivers are also likely to already own their own car so factoring in 100% of vehicle depreciation is disingenuous. It only makes sense to father most if not all of vehicle depreciation for those drivers that are working full time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> But hey, they are free to choose their own times and rides. You surely cannot put a price on Freedom. You get screwed a bit, well a lot but it is all for the greater good.

</comment><comment><USER44> Statistics is tricky.

Remember that the median _driver_ drives very few rides.

The median _ride_ is driven by someone who does it more or less for a living, and who makes a lot more money than this.

Also remember that this single fact was cherry picked from the report to make a good headline, not to give the best understanding of the situation as w hole.

</comment><comment><USER47> Based on the numbers we have, the average earnings per mile is close to $0.545, but the medium profit of $3.37 seems quite off.

</comment><comment><USER48> If people truly were making $3.37/hour full-time I think you would see very few drivers; it's grossly misleading to assume so many people aren't capable of managing finances. It looks like the full paper itself is currently embargoed so it's hard to examine the methodology. However, just looking at the math (assuming I did it right) it seems the conclusion are misleading (the numbers themselves indicate they probably just sampled all ride-share drivers throughout the US rather than full-time ones):

revenue: $0.59/mile cost: $0.3/mile monthly profit: $661 Average fuel consumption is ~26.4 mpg so let's round to 25mpg Average fuel cost: $2.5/gallon Average number of working days/month: 21.75 Average number of weekend days/month: 8.65

0.59 * x - 0.3 * x = 661 0.29 * x = 661

x = 2279 miles

2279 miles/22 days = 103 miles. 2279 miles/8.65 days = 263 miles 2279 miles * 0.59 = $1344/month in income or $16128/year. 2279 miles * 0.3 = $683/month in expenses ($273/month in insurance, maintenance & repairs, $273/month in fuel, & $136/month in depreciation). . Average fuel price is $2.5.

2279 miles/25mpg = ~91 gallons. 91 gallons * 2.5 = 227/month in fuel.

Where it gets tricky is we don't have data on the average speed of an Uber driver & whether the 103 miles includes driving around waiting for rides. Let's assume a conservative average speed of 40mph.

103 miles/day / 40 mph = 2.5 hours/working day/month. 263 miles/day / 40 mph = 6.575 hours/weekend/month.

The faster you drive the less you work so if my average speed of 40mph is too conservative, then the average driver drives even less. It seems like this builds an average profile of a driver is one who picks up a rider or 2 on their way to/from their main job & then picks up some extra cash driving a bit on the weekend. The average driver probably doesn't consider Uber as their sole source of income but rather as extra income their making when they otherwise wouldn't be doing anything. Now of course that's probably less money per hour than they could pick up from picking up additional hours somewhere or even something like Task Rabbit. However the average Uber driver probably sees it as more reliable in terms of total revenue than Task Rabbit, it requires minimal effort, & it has extreme time flexibility that a second job wouldn't (just turn on the app whenever you want to make money).

Anecdotally the full time drivers I've asked in LA & the Bay Area told me they're pulling in 60-120k depending on how many hours they put in & the area they drive in. I didn't know this but apparently Uber & Lyft offer a lot of incentive programs that only the most active drivers can t take advantage of that significantly bumps your income (trips/day, trips/week, miles driven, etc). If you're not doing it full time then you're not getting these bonuses which is going to further impact your $/mile (of course I suspect the fares & costs are higher in these areas too). Since 40% of your cost is fuel consumption, drivers doing this full-time are going to prefer fuel-efficient, cheap cars than the average driver doing this on the side. This is obviously a more complete picture than the misleading news reporting might indicate.

*EDIT: As another comment pointed out, the cost numbers are artificially inflated. They're attributing to the entire cost of insurance to driving whereas from the model above the average driver already has a car. Thus they need to actually use the fractional increase in the more expensive insurance they need for the ride share vs what they would get otherwise. I suspect the same problem applies for depreciation where they're not using the fractional increase of depreciation cost due to driving more but just the overall vehicle depreciation which was going to happen anyway. Even the full time drivers probably would have bought vehicles anyway so the depreciation & insurance cost isn't reflective of that anyway.

TLDR: The main problem of the "study" can be summed up as follows: they take income from those who do it occasionally & subtract the costs of the ones who do it full time. Given the threat ride sharing poses to personal car ownership, it's not surprising such a misleading study is sponsored by people who would be impacted by reduced car ownership.

</comment><comment><USER49> This article is not informative. It leans on an MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research study, with no publicly described methodology and a hidden "full" report. Its a waste of time for everyone imo.

This type of "science" journalism is everything that is wrong with the intersection of media and research. Funding aside, the researchers are isolating a non-transparent, non-reproducible data finding, out of context, and feeding it to the press. On the other hand, the press is reporting this finding, and weighting believability upon credential, instead of reasoning. The head researcher of the article even lists his key credentials as follows: "..His work has been covered in numerous popular press articles..". Good, informative, transparent research? who cares, credentials are accumulating.

The output is statistical nonsense. Its a complete waste of time for anyone looking for real information, because the findings are not contextualized in any meaningful way. The article does not come close to offering apples-apples comparisons of other surveys that would give the reader a working understanding of the economic dynamic it talks about.

I'm so confident that the findings are meaningless because I used to own several businesses where I hired 100s of professional drivers. It would be easy to manufacture results like this $3.37 "median" finding. Many drivers in any given year start and quit with no idea of what the job entails or the economics, yes, even when you tell them explicitly up front. I've seen first- time drivers that want to use vehicles that get 12 mpg. Some drivers just shouldn't be drivers; they can't navigate, avoid traffic, or follow basic instructions. Many drivers aren't ready to treat the situation as a business with a profit and cost center - it's not trivial to quantify costs, and many people don't think that way at all. Also, some new drivers that might make good drivers, take some time to learn. They can take a while to work into a rotation and earn more lucrative rides. Also, many drivers take time to understand the principle that some times of day are busier and they will make more money during that time.

Context matters, a lot.

Also, I frequently ask Lyft / Uber drivers what they make. In many different cities. Its all about the same as I used to see in my businesses. It's not magic, the drivers who stick with it understand the system and make anywhere from nominally above minimum wage to maybe 3X minimum wage for the most capable and most opportunistic drivers.

The basic economics of professional contract drivers has been about the same for dozens of years. I'd speculate what might have changed, if anything, is that Lyft / Uber have normalized driving as a profession, and have strong brands that attract more people. Maybe that results in higher churn rates than the industry has ever seen. That would actually be really interesting if a university researched that trend and explained it through quality scientific journalism.

I feel journalists who are serious about presenting research findings will provide: 1) a complete and transparent understanding of the methodology of the findings, 2) impartial reviews from believable research peers, 3) a concrete and thorough description of the context of the finding. This seems like a minimum journalistic standard. It shouldn't be good enough to point to a dude associated with MIT and say "this dude says this thing so <press narrative>". If journalists rely upon credential, without reasoning, to assert truth, its just manipulation hiding behind assumed pedigree.

</comment><comment><USER50> I've taken many Lyft and Uber trips in SF recently. It's amazing how many have new, high end cars.

One driver was a PYT and recent immigrant driving a luxury Mercedes C class. Wasn't hers. Sugar daddy's? Something else?

Doesn't make sense. I feel there's something else going on.

Many will have a story about being hired to transfer a bag or a box. Drugs? Money? Guns? Even then there couldn't be enough business to make a good profit.

<comment><USER51> I haven't seen many. The few I have been in have been people just doing it for "fun" if they were bored or to keep themselves out of trouble. They never seemed to be the people coming in from Stockton or Reno and needed the money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I find articles like this dubious when they state an outlandish claim, even if supported by a study, and make 0 effort to explain or justify the results. Instead appealing to the implied authority of said study, that the reader is apparently expected to unquestioningly believe.

That number is obviously going to be controversial. How was it calculated? What assumptions were made? In their own article every single other source they reference provided higher numbers. How much higher? What were the exact reasons for the discrepancy? They did state that other studies showed higher earnings because "there are numerous ways to report income and to calculate costs and time and miles spent on the job." Why did this study report lower income, more miles, or higher costs?

I wish the job of journalism was still to inform people, and not just to get people to click on things.</comment>


Show HN: EphChat – Ephemeral, Anonymous, Encrypted Realtime Chat - <AUTHOR> https://ephchat.com

<comment><USER2> Really? I wouldn't trust this with any form of secure communication.

[https://ephchat.com/?room=%3C/title%3E%3Cimg%20src=%22http:/...](https://ephchat.com/?room=%3C/title%3E%3Cimg%20src=%22http://i.imgur.com/FdxVfli.png%22%20/%3E%3C/head%3E)

<comment><USER3> works in chat message too, just got redirected to example.com and someone's embedding an audio file using their username so I'm guessing there's just no sanitization anywhere

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> 1\. Open ephchat.

2\. Click change name.

3\. Paste the following contents and hit enter.

      <img src="#" onerror="javascript:void(function(setVal,sendClick,text){setVal.value=text;sendClick.click();}(document.querySelector('#chatText'),document.querySelector('#chatButton'),'hello'))"/>hi

<comment><AUTHOR> This has been fixed. Thanks!

<comment><USER4> Nice!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Judging by the other comments, this is a good example of all the ways _not_ to build such a system.

</comment><comment><USER6> Where is the server source code? I'm not seeing where messages are stored/transmitted to clients?

Also [https://github.com/bmmayer/ephchat/issues/2](https://github.com/bmmayer/ephchat/issues/2)

<comment><USER7> You criticized about the random code generation function. Could you explain why it is bad? Though I code, I am no expert and would really like to know.

<comment><USER6> This is the offending code: [https://github.com/bmmayer/ephchat/blob/ec375c7974ea825f887f...](https://github.com/bmmayer/ephchat/blob/ec375c7974ea825f887ff4ca1cca2349018a187e/php/functions.php#L4-L20)

This is the proper way to do it (h/t @tptacek): [http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2014/02/25/safely-generate- random...](http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2014/02/25/safely-generate-random- numbers/)

mt_srand() + rand() is just hilarious. The md5(uniquid()) thing is a common randomness anti-pattern in PHP projects that needs to die in a fire.

In PHP, a very brief example of the code to achieve the proper way of generating randomness looks like the snippet I posted in the issue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is misleading - it uses Firebase for the server! How can the OP claim that the server is not storing messages if the OP doesn't control the server?

I have no reason to trust that Firebase isn't storing the messages. Why should I?

</comment><comment><USER9> Reminds me of a little encrypted chat app I made with a friend a few weeks ago. Ours is intended for two-way communication: [http://cifrachat.herokuapp.com/](http://cifrachat.herokuapp.com/)

</comment><comment><USER10> For something a bit better, check out [https://chat.echoplex.us](https://chat.echoplex.us) Or description at [https://echoplex.us](https://echoplex.us)

</comment><comment><USER11> uhh. trivial HTML injection, "trust us" security model. lame.

</comment><comment><USER12> This is not secure at all. I expected some kind of XMPP-OTR stuff...

</comment><comment><USER13> Is firebase even open source? How is this anonymous? Does anyone know what data firebase collects from its users?

</comment><comment><USER14> The text I type to the room is cached locally.</comment>


Why a Greece Deal Matters: A Visual Guide - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/07/12/business/international/100000003795310.mobile.html <comment><USER2> Why is it that nobody in the Eurozone is willing to discuss the fundamental and disastrous consequences of a unified monetary policy with independent fiscal policy?

Are we going to wait until Greece has to be bailed out a fourth time? Or a fifth time? What about when Spain defaults? This is going to keep on happening until the underlying problems are addressed. Ultimately, the EU is going to need the ability to tax and spend to redistribute wealth and keep the economies working. It's the same way the US taxes New York, Massachusetts, California, etc... to give to Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and so on.

I know it will be unpopular politically, but the EU really needs to make itself look more like the United States of Europe if it wants this whole unified currency thing to work. They have been trying to ignore the elephant in the room for so long that smaller countries are drowning in its shit.

<comment><USER3> It will never be like the US because Europe countries don't share a single language / culture, nor a common history.

The engineer in me really feels safer having many small independant systems than a single mega unified thing that is too big to fail - but it's another story.

<comment><USER2> Having a bunch of small systems is no good if the failure of any one system brings the whole thing down.

I'm not personally convinced that a Greek exit from the Euro would be the disaster that the news outlets like to think it will be. I think it will suck for the Greeks and basically brand them as a third world country, but it is probably a better solution than a few years of crippling austerity followed by another default/bailout/more austerity.

On the other hand, a Greek exit would also mean that the Eurozone countries wouldn't be forced to examine the aggregate fiscal policy and figure out a way to prevent this sort of problem from happening elsewhere.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Most of this bailout money will go straight back to paying interest on the bad loans that caused the crisis. Much of these loans came from banks in the very same Eurozone countries that are imposing this deal onto Greece. So much for European solidarity...

The austerity imposed on the Greek people will shrink the economy and ensure that the next few generations will be labouring in servitude to pay off the debts of the previous generations. The supreme irony in all of this is that Germany was able to thrive after WW2 in part because of the writing-off of more than half of their government debt, something that Angela Merkel has claimed is 'off the table'.

Further reading: [http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/29/where-did- the-g...](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/29/where-did-the-greek- bailout-money-go) [https://medium.com/@gavinschalliol/thomas-piketty-germany- ha...](https://medium.com/@gavinschalliol/thomas-piketty-germany-has-never- repaid-7b5e7add6fff)

<comment><USER5> Bad loans did not cause the crisis.

Bad loans are a symptom of a poor fiscal situation.

No one forced Greece to take out loans.

Consider this write up :[http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2010/10/greeks- bearing-bonds-...](http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2010/10/greeks-bearing- bonds-201010)

This was before the "Greeks as Victims" narrative gained wide currency.

 _"The way they were keeping track of their finances—they knew how much they had agreed to spend, but no one was keeping track of what he had actually spent. It wasn't even what you would call an emerging economy. It was a Third World country."_

 _As it turned out, what the Greeks wanted to do, once the lights went out and they were alone in the dark with a pile of borrowed money, was turn their government into a piñata stuffed with fantastic sums and give as many citizens as possible a whack at it._

<comment><USER6> No one forced Greece to take the loans. No one forced banks to loan to Greece. Both parties are at fault. Both parties ought to take losses. Only one is in this case.

<comment><USER7> Lenders already took a 53.5% haircut in 2011. In return, the Greeks were supposed to implement structural reforms and privatization. They delayed implementing that until 2014 at which point they officially repudiated their side of the agreement (but kept the money).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_government- debt_crisis#2...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_government- debt_crisis#2010.E2.80.932014)

So yes, so far, only one side (lenders) has taken losses.

<comment><USER6> Your view is quite selective. Greece can't repay the loans and never will. Their economy has shrunk and they are in the midst of a major depression. It is quite incorrect to say Greeks have not suffered.

Also, by the time of the haircut the banks that did the original lending to Greece were not holders of the private bonds. They had been unloaded. Ever since 2009 almost all money given to Greece from the so called bailouts have merely been transfers to primarily German and French banks. The bailout has been nothing more than a propping up of German and French banks while at the same time doing great damage to the Greek economy.

To be sure Greece has a pretty messed up government and they need to mature politically. The Greek people have suffered greatly and need to reform but further austerity is not going to help them.

<comment><USER7> _Ever since 2009 almost all money given to Greece from the so called bailouts have merely been transfers to primarily German and French banks. The bailout has been nothing more than a propping up of German and French banks while at the same time doing great damage to the Greek economy._

In that case, Greece should be fine with no further bailouts - all they need to do is officially repudiate their debt. Then they can go on running Greece independently without any reforms and they won't need to beg the Germans and Bulgarians to send them money.

<comment><USER6> Given your previous comments with regard to your knowledge of finance you know this isn't such an easy thing. Their financial system is intimately tied into the euro and remaining part of the EU.

<comment><USER7> If the Greeks produce X euros worth of goods/serviecs and consume Y euros for Y < X, this should be a minor problem at best - paperwork, really. The actual problem is that Greece can't pay for their current levels of consumption. They haven't been able to pay for consumption in quite a while actually, but previously EU lending propped them up.

This is why Argentina's default wasn't anywhere near as bad - they were fairly close to consuming as much as they produced.

Unlike Greece, Argentina also instituted necessary reforms - for example, import substitution and breaking sticky wages via a 13% _nominal_ wage cut for govt workers and pensioners [1]. Greece has steadfastly refused to do these things in spite of having ample time.

[1] Recall why Keynesians promote inflation - to inflate away _real wages_ , which this cut also did.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> From the OECD. Here are a few articles that explore the EU's approach on sovereign debt crisis. One is form 2011, and the other is from 2012. The 2012 article discusses the "Greece Problem":

      The "Greece problem" needs to be resolved once and for all
      with a 50% (or larger) haircut on its sovereign debt and
      necessary ancillary policies, so that its chances
      or remaining in the euro improve. (2012)

1\. 2011 - [http://www.oecd.org/finance/financial- markets/49191980.pdf](http://www.oecd.org/finance/financial- markets/49191980.pdf)

2\. 2012 - [http://www.oecd.org/finance/financial- markets/49481502.pdf](http://www.oecd.org/finance/financial- markets/49481502.pdf)

3\. Greece @ OECD.org: [https://data.oecd.org/greece.htm](https://data.oecd.org/greece.htm)

<comment><USER8> I'm actually surprised that the OECD has said that. Similar research has been published by the IMF as well. So these organizations have experts and yet spokesmen and officials give the opposite advice of what they tell them. Good thing they have transparency at least.

<comment><USER4> Indeed – illustrates very clearly how governments, institutions and corporations aren't the unified hierarchies they present themselves as, and instead can be many-headed organisms pursuing sometimes contradictory aims. Compare to Samsung and Google suing each other for patent infringement while operating a revenue-share scheme on ad profits.

<comment><USER9> I don't think Samsung and Google have sued each other for patent infringement. I could be mistaken. Do you have a source?

I believe you meant to say Samsung and Apple perhaps?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> If you'd like to visualize the physical amount of euros relative to the size of a human and delivery trucks: [http://demonocracy.info/infographics/eu/debt_greek/debt_gree...](http://demonocracy.info/infographics/eu/debt_greek/debt_greek.html)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Access via a Google query: [https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CB8QqQIwAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2Finteractive%2F2015%2F07%2F12%2Fbusiness%2Finternational%2Fwhy- the-greece-bailout-deal-matters.html)

</comment><comment><USER10> The real reason the Greece deal matters, is the rest of the EU are looking at it as a proxy for what will happen to Spain and Italy next. These two make up a much larger proportion of the EU GDP, and are facing their own major debt crises.

<comment><USER5> Spain and Italy have cut their deficits in half.

[http://www.tradingeconomics.com/spain/government- budget](http://www.tradingeconomics.com/spain/government-budget)

[http://www.tradingeconomics.com/italy/government- budget](http://www.tradingeconomics.com/italy/government-budget)

Robust growth predicted for Spain : [http://www.oecd.org/eco/outlook/spain- economic-forecast-summ...](http://www.oecd.org/eco/outlook/spain-economic- forecast-summary.htm)

 _Robust growth is projected over the next two years, driven by very supportive financial conditions_

[http://www.oecd.org/eco/outlook/italy-economic-forecast- summ...](http://www.oecd.org/eco/outlook/italy-economic-forecast-summary.htm)

 _After a long recession, the Italian economy has started its gradual recovery. Output is projected to grow by 0.6% in 2015 and by 1.5% in 2016_ /

<comment><USER11> If reducing your budget matters, then Greece has a very prosperous economy. Reducing your budget does not matter if doing so sends you into a (bigger) depression that makes your debt grow.

Spanish debt is growing fast, having almost doubled since 2010 ([http://www.tradingeconomics.com/spain/government-debt-to- gdp](http://www.tradingeconomics.com/spain/government-debt-to-gdp)).

<comment><USER5> If.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A nice visual guide of all Euro countries. Some still have too much debt compared to GDP. Scandinavia seems to be doing just fine.

<comment><USER13> Unfortunately it's hard to see how austerity measures (in the "bailout" deal) are going to improve debt compared to GDP. It certainly didn't in Greece, where a 6% rise in debt (post-haircut) went with a ~35% increase in debt/GDP, because austerity tanked the economy.

It's also unclear what exactly "too much debt compared to GDP" means. What number is too much, and under what circumstances?

Additionally, while Finland's debt/GDP may be "fine", for your definition of fine, Finland's economy is not doing fine, thanks to the constraints imposed by the Euro and the same austerity policies in place throughout Europe. [1] [2] Even now Finland has 8%+ unemployment and 0.8% growth. Indeed for these reasons, Finland is expected to become one of the most indebted countries in Europe. [3]

[1] [http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/06/01/the-finnish- dise...](http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/06/01/the-finnish- disease/?module=BlogPost- Title&version=Blog%20Main&contentCollection=Opinion&action=Click&pgtype=Blogs&region=Body)

[2] [http://www.interfluidity.com/uploads/2015/07/Greekovery.png](http://www.interfluidity.com/uploads/2015/07/Greekovery.png)

[3] [http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-01-23/is- finland-a...](http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-01-23/is-finland-a- victim-of-the-austerity-medicine-it-prescribed-for-europe)

<comment><USER14> > It's also unclear what exactly "too much debt compared to GDP" means. What > number is too much, and under what circumstances?

It is clearly meant according to the Maastricht criteria:

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

"2\. Government budget deficit: The ratio of the annual general government deficit relative to gross domestic product (GDP) at market prices, must not exceed 3% at the end of the preceding fiscal year (based on notified measured data) and neither for any of the two subsequent years (based on the European Commission's published forecast data)."

"3\. Government debt-to-GDP ratio: The ratio of gross government debt (measured at its nominal value outstanding at the end of the year, and consolidated between and within the sectors of general government) relative to GDP at market prices, must not exceed 60% at the end of the preceding fiscal year. Or if the debt-to-GDP ratio exceeds the 60% limit, the ratio shall at least be found to have "sufficiently diminished and must be approaching the reference value at a satisfactory pace"."

Or in easier words:

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

"2\. Government finance:

Annual government deficit:

The ratio of the annual government deficit to gross domestic product (GDP) must not exceed 3% at the end of the preceding fiscal year. If not, it is at least required to reach a level close to 3%. Only exceptional and temporary excesses would be granted for exceptional cases.

Government debt: The ratio of gross government debt to GDP must not exceed 60% at the end of the preceding fiscal year. Even if the target cannot be achieved due to the specific conditions, the ratio must have sufficiently diminished and must be approaching the reference value at a satisfactory pace.".

<comment><USER13> > It is clearly meant according to the Maastricht criteria:

It was not clear to me, but thank you for the explanation.

What insanity that the European nations would cripple their economic tools with a treaty like this. There are times when debt/GDP absolutely should be in great excess of 3%, and times when debt must be greater than 60%, and no country should require 'approval' to tackle their own economic problems.

Fortunately, I suppose, it looks like these sections of the treaty are not enforced very strongly.

<comment><USER15> _> it looks like these sections of the treaty are not enforced very strongly._

Or at all, for certain countries. Germany and France routinely break pretty much any parameter, in various directions, and absolutely nothing happens.

But as soon as a minnow spends a little bit more, oooh boy...

<comment><USER14> > Or at all, for certain countries. Germany and France routinely break pretty > much any parameter, in various directions, and absolutely nothing happens.

Germany has been very strict on their own budget in the last four years and tries hard to satisfy the Masstricht criteria. For the following data, cf. [http://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/wirtschaftsdaten104.html](http://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/wirtschaftsdaten104.html)

budget deficit/surplus of EU countries (% of GDP) (Haushaltsdefizite/-überschuss der EU-Länder): -3 is allowed, Germany has

      2012: +0,1 %
      2013: +0,1 %
      2914: +0,7 %
      2015 (estimate): +0,6 %
      2016 (estimate): +0,5 %

which is (IMHO) exemplary.

From the Maastricht criteria only "total debt (% of GDP)" (Gesamtschulden (in % des BIP)) is problematic, since there only 60% is allowed. But also here Germany is working very hard to satisfy this criterion:

      2012: 79,3 %
      2013: 77,1 %
      2014: 74,7 %
      2015 (estimate): 71,5 %
      2016 (estimate): 68,2 %

<comment><USER16> Well it does illustrate how transient "exemplary" is. Ireland and Spain were exemplary in the years leading to the crisis, beating Germany in the debt and surplus metrics.[0][1]

Media like to show "feel good metric" to put a patriotic positive spin (us good, them bad) on the result of regular political arm-wrestling between temporarily weaker countries. You won't see those metric in France however the media will use different things to achieve the same effect. The idea is to build a moral high horse so that your people can forget that over there, few people have benefited but a lot will pay.

[0] [http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/tgm/table.do?tab=table&init=1&l...](http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/tgm/table.do?tab=table&init=1&language=en&pcode=teina225&plugin=1)

[1] [http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/tgm/table.do?tab=table&plugin=1...](http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/tgm/table.do?tab=table&plugin=1&language=en&pcode=teina200)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> There is a far more serious issue at stake: The threat by the hardline creditors, most importantly Germany, as well as by 'euro-skeptics' in the UK and elsewhere, that European integration and union are not goals and ideals, but transactional economic arrangements that are good only for the money. When is the last time you heard someone argue the political and security benefits of the EU and the costs of losing it?

<comment><USER18> What are these politcal benefits? Security benefits, seams like the EU is more likly to cause war then to make it go away.

Contrary to popular belive you can make agreements without the EU. If you want to have a security agreement, create a security agreement.

<comment><USER19> The people creating the EU were not mistaken that the only way to create security benefits was by creating the EU. They instead were well acquainted with a popular theory that said trade and economic interdependence reduces the risk of war. The architects of the EU wanted to increase this interdependence not for economic gain but to tie together the economies of Europe so closely that war would be next to impossible.

<comment><USER18> Yes, they were idiots. Trade does help, true. But you can agree to free trade and free movment of people WITHOUT things like common currency and sharing of debt. These things cause problems, and many people have pointed this out.

There are different visions of the EU, some wanted it to be a free-trade zone others want 'United State of Europe'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is really about a institutional setup. If Greece is allowed to make debt common to the hole EU, it will set a president.

The marekt thought that debt was held in common and bond yields were the same for everybody, now they have to make it clear to markets that this is not the case. Because if it was the case, then ALL the debt is held by everybody.

[https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-lDRRJhgiFTE/T9tShSNsaII/AAAAAAAAA...](https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-lDRRJhgiFTE/T9tShSNsaII/AAAAAAAAAqU/7LcljR9adLM/s1600/Europe+Bond+Yields.png)

It does not need a PhD in Game Theory to see what the likly outcome of such a system is.

Greece is in the unfortinate situation of beeing the case were this choice has to be made. Its not all their fault, but its also not their fault.

This is just on of the problems of the EU and the Eurozone.

Its my beliefe that if debt should be assumed commonly, it will break up the EU because no voters in any country would agree to this.

It is really sad, and if you want to blame somebody, its the eurocrats who have steamrolled over many economists and many others who have point out the idiocy of their plans.

<comment><USER20> << Its my beliefe that if debt should be assumed commonly, it will break up the EU because no voters in any country would agree to this. >>

But that's exactly what happened in the early days of the founding of the US, when Alexander Hamilton negotiated the Funding Act of 1790: "The Funding Act authorized the federal government to receive certificates of state war- incurred debts and to issue federal securities in exchange." [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funding_Act_of_1790](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funding_Act_of_1790)

Without the Funding Act, the state governments would've defaulted on their Revolutionary War debt. By assuming the debt of the states, the US greatly strengthened their collective borrowing ability and also brought the states closer together into the union.

<comment><USER18> If you WANT a "United State of Europe" then yes, common debt makes sence. But in that case all nations lose their sovereignty and absolutly no nation in the EU has voted on this, and not a single one would agree to this.

I, for one, am against a United States of Europe and theirfore Im against common debt.

If we want to attempted such a project we should start by democratically asking people if they want it, not just imposing it. That EU doing this now would essentially be taking away sovereignty in a undemocratic way, and theirfore it would be tyranny.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Am I the only one who found it odd for a `nytimes.com/interactive` feature to be ... non-interactive?

<comment><USER22> I also expected more from the d3 visualisations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The deal is terrible ... I cannot see how it will pass parliament. It is dooming Greece for a century. And on top of that the privatization fund is deeply humiliating.

<comment><AUTHOR> Krugman agrees that the list of demands is "madness": [http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/07/12/killing-the- euro...](http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/07/12/killing-the-european- project/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I don't understand how they plan on reducing tax evasion if it can be justified as only going to Germany anyway.

<comment> k-mcgrady Much higher VAT? Tougher penalties for tax evasion + more thorough investigation?

<comment><USER25> And the people of Greece would vote for a government that does that?

<comment> k-mcgrady Do they have a choice at this stage? Personally I don't think austerity is a good way out but when you have no money, no one will give you money, and nobody even wants anything to do with you, there aren't many other choices.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Xplat delta updates for .NET applications - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/fintermobilityas/snapx.demoapp <comment><AUTHOR> Is anyone interested in an checking out our xplat update solution? It's been in production at our company since April 2019. It has a lot of features such as: built-in support for delta updates, release channels (test, staging, production) and automatic deployment using GitHub Actions. It uses Avalonia for xplat gui (offline and web installers are supported). Visit [https://github.com/fintermobilityas/snapx](https://github.com/fintermobilityas/snapx). Documentation and demo application is available here: [https://github.com/fintermobilityas/snapx.demoapp](https://github.com/fintermobilityas/snapx.demoapp). If you want to chat you can join our gitter community: [https://gitter.im/fintermobilityas- snapx/community](https://gitter.im/fintermobilityas-snapx/community). This is not a commercial product that we intend to sell to end-users and will forever remain free. The goal is to give back to the open source community :)</comment>


London Tops Silicon Valley for Tech Talent, but There's a Catch - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnbc.com/2015/09/29/london-tops-san-francisco-for-tech-talent-theres-a-catch.html <comment><USER2> California is a better environment. The UK government allows covenants not to compete (Non-compete agreements)

<comment><AUTHOR> Totally agree... California is a much better environment... and non compete's stifle innovation and creativity, similar to excessive IP protection terms.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do you know anyone who can sustainably code for 30+ hours a week? - <AUTHOR> When I say code, I mean it though. Daydreaming, looking at HN, answering emails, trips to make coffee - all that does not count. <comment><USER2> It depends on what the code is. If I'm working on writing unit tests for relatively simple code taht didn't have any tests when it was origionally written I can do 30 hours a week with out to much trouble. If I'm doing new development for non-trivial features I generally can't get 30 hours in unless I get lucky and get in the flow several days during the week.

</comment><comment><USER3> My 2 cents, if you are working an 8 hour day / 40 hour week than typically I'd expect realistically a 6 hour productive day from most people. This includes debugging, design work, refactoring, writing tests, design discussions, helping other devs on problems etc. But not daydreaming, playing on the web or getting coffee, that's what you do the other couple of hours a day.

This is exactly how I try to do estimating as well, plan on 6hr days for productivity, and tasks are never less than a 1/2 day no matter what anyone says. Even the ten minute task for updating that 1 line of code turns into a few hours by the time you have tested, deployed, communicated and documented the update. And in the few rare times it turns out to be a less time, the bonus time makes up for the some of the tasks that will inevitably run longer.</comment>


Ask HN: What approach would you suggest for Text classification? - <AUTHOR> Hey everyone!
We are trying to solve a problem where we need to classify the articles into the right categories.
Currently, using a FastText to train a model with 100,000 articles categorized into 600 categories. The loss seems to be converging but the precision is not going up, another thing that requires clarification is that can we use pre-trained Wikipedia English embeddings to categorize text.
What would you recommend using FastText or some other algorithm/approach towards this problem?
Any suggestion/ideas would be appreciated.
Thanks. <comment><USER2> FastText is state of the art when it comes to word embedding due to its ability to generate embedding for even words it has not seen, so perhaps your problem lies in your model's architecture, are you using convolution neural nets or just basic feed forward networks I have had great success using CNN for text classification, and in your words pre-processing are you filtering out stopwords(very common words in English that throw confusion to a models ability to correctly classify text's).</comment>


Why I don't use Google analytics - <AUTHOR> http://thomasalwyndavis.com/2010/09/why-i-dont-use-google-analytics/

<comment><USER2> Basically the article just sells Clicky (and every link in the article is an affiliate one to Clicky), but Clicky isn't going to work for a lot of people because their daily max page views is 500,000.

I'll concede that's a fair few, but I'm already above it and Google Analytics is still free for me and doing most of what I want. The only bits I feel are missing from GA I've hacked into my software (detailed trackback reports).

<comment><USER3> i think you mean 5 million

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> _Clicky lets you track your individual visitors in realtime also using a feature they named Spy. Spy shows you what page the visitor is on, where they are on the map and what they have downloaded and clicked._ (Using your IP address to identify you on the dashboard.)

Oh my God, that's a _horrible_ breach of my privacy.

<comment><USER5> You should probably turn off your computer now. Visitor info like that is available to anyone who runs a website.</comment></comment>


35 years of US federal minimum wage adjusted for inflation - <AUTHOR> http://i.imgur.com/7kRykeS.png

<comment><USER2> Would be enlightening to see CPI_n variations, eg:

(1) adj: Housing | Urban vs Rural or Index[a]

(2) adj: Schooling | Univesity Tuition (state or private)[b]

_________

[a] [http://www.census.gov/construction/nrs/pdf/uspricemon.pdf](http://www.census.gov/construction/nrs/pdf/uspricemon.pdf)

[b] [http://money.cnn.com/2012/10/24/pf/college/public-college- tu...](http://money.cnn.com/2012/10/24/pf/college/public-college-tuition/)</comment>


WireGuard support in Mikrotik RouterOS v7.1beta2 - <AUTHOR> https://forum.mikrotik.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=165248 <comment><USER2> We have been waiting for years for UDP OpenVPN, but we get WireGaurd before most major distros. That's something

<comment><USER3> Actually, WireGuard has first class support now on a large number of distros, without the need for any additional compilation: Ubuntu 16.04, 18.04, 20.04, Fedora, Debian, OpenSUSE, Arch, Mandriva, Alpine, Nix, Void, OpenWRT, and others. Check out www.wireguard.com/install/ for the whole list.

<comment><USER4> AFAIK most of these are DKMS, so compilation (although automated and supported by distro) is still necessary.

<comment><USER5> At least it will eventually propagate to all distros now that it's in the stable kernel!

Fedora and other distros with recent kernels already have it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> That was actually really fast considering how long wireguard has(n't) been around. We don't even have it in stable Linux distributions yet.

I guess there is some significant demand for it from Mikrotik's customers. I'll probably use it.

<comment><USER7> There are lots of stable Linux distros running the stable kernel which is 5.8. it is just distros like RHEL that call themselves stable, but are actually antiquated and honestly just give users a bad experience because most of the software is outdated. Wouldn't expect anything less from IBM.

<comment><USER8> And it's somewhat silly to freeze the kernel. The Linux kernel is meticulous about backwards compatibility. Spin up any distribution user space in docker, and watch it work.

<comment><USER9> Freezing the RH kernel is mostly to keep closed source kernel modules working. Some proprietary software has those, unfortunately.

<comment><USER10> Red Hat also customizes the kernel they've standardized on to disable hardware functionality which they do not want to support under SLA; they have two general ways of doing it, disable compilation of the entire module (where possible) or add the specific PCI ID to a filter-out on that module's supported hardware. The methods tend to route through a custom routine in their kernel patches which notify the user the hardware has been seen but will not function/be supported by their kernel.

This goes the other way around a well, they often cherry-pick new code and pull it back into their curated kernels to support the latest hardware offerings of their partners (Dell, HP, Broadcom, etc.) without pulling in possible unstable newer kernel code around it; they have contractors from those hardware companies assisting in the work to backport hardware module features.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The ball's in your court, Ubiquiti

<comment><USER12> It's not.

Why would one want that workload on their router when they can offload it to a $35 Pi?

<comment><USER13> One of the main selling points of Wireguard is that it runs much leaner than OpenVPN or IPSec tunnels, especially on embedded hardware, so there isn't much of a workload in the first place.

<comment><USER14> Crypto used by IPSec (aes, sha) is often accelerated by hardware - and the above mentioned Ubiquiti has hardware for that. Chacha/Poly used by Wireguard are not.

<comment><USER13> There's a benchmark done with the EdgeRouter that shows that Wireguard's throughput exceeds that of hardware accelerated AES + IPSec:

[https://an.undulating.space/post/181227-er_alternate_firmwar...](https://an.undulating.space/post/181227-er_alternate_firmware_vpn_benchmarks/)

Of course, benchmarks from random strangers are not gospel, and the results aren't particularly damning. But even then, you're assuming that you have the luxury of running on a chip that comes with a hardware crypto engine. Good luck trying to get AES encryption/decryption speeds at anywhere near line rate with a Raspberry Pi or a run-of-the-mill router.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Has MikroTik ever made _any_ source code available?

<comment><USER16> who knows, but I run openwrt on my mikrotik rb2011* switches.

<comment><USER17> Do you happen to know, if the RB2011 will be stuck on the (dead-end) ar71xx release, or whether somebody is working on porting it to the newer ath79 platform with LTS?

<comment><USER18> It doesn't seem like porting new devices to ath79 is very involved [1]. I would highly encourage you to make a project out of porting RB2011.

[1] - [https://git.openwrt.org/?p=openwrt/openwrt.git;a=commit;h=7a...](https://git.openwrt.org/?p=openwrt/openwrt.git;a=commit;h=7a705c067f729e1f6edf4945985ec4f5761ca0ab)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> OpenWRT has support for WireGuard as well.

<comment><USER19> As does VyOS.

<comment> kube-system Anyone have any experience here with getting wireguard running on pfsense?

<comment> 867-5309 I don't think *BSD supports wg yet. would love to see this

<comment><USER20> It was added to NetBSD yesterday.

<comment><USER21> Nice :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > added Layer3 hardware offloading support for CRS309-1G-8S+IN, CRS312-4C+8XG- > RM, CRS326-24S+2Q+RM and CRS354-48G-4S+2Q+RM

The Marvell switch chip supports IPv6 but for now Mikrotik only implemented support for v4 offload.. :/</comment>