Ask HN: What code review tool do you use? - <AUTHOR>

We're still a small 2-3 person team but would like to start using a structured code review process.<p>What code review tools with web UIs do you use? Would you recommend it? Are there any cloud-based ones? <comment><USER2> Google has various open source offerings (including Rietveld, written by Guido van Rossum, who also wrote Python), see [http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2008/07/looks-good-to-me- sour...](http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2008/07/looks-good-to-me-source-code- review.html). I have no opinion on any of those, though.

</comment><comment><USER3> We use this Redmine plugin – <http://www.redmine.org/boards/3/topics/5878>

I would recommend it when you already use Redmine. It is very simple, but I don't think any more complex features are really that needed.

</comment><comment><USER4> I used reviewBoard but i don't recommend it. I want to know other recommendations too.

</comment><comment><USER5> Pair Programming. Seriously you get more than just code review.

<comment><USER6> Pair programming isn't a substitute for code review.</comment></comment>


Programming languages don't have speeds - <AUTHOR> http://john.freml.in/speed-and-programming-languages <comment><USER2> I think many people fully understand this. When people rave about, say, haskell being nearly as fast as C, what they _mean_ is that you can write much higher level, and thus shorter and more concise, code in a way that can be automatically optimized by the compiler quickly.

In other words, he's correct but also assuming incorrectly that because other don't spell it out, they don't know.

<comment><USER3> Oh it's more than that. Ever tried to write a trie in C? Yea I didn't think so. C/C++ are great languages for missing the forest for the trees. I'd call Java is faster than C/C++ for this very reason.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is one of my irrational prejudices regarding programming. It annoys me a little when people talk about their favorite language being "as fast as C" or "X times slower/faster than C," because such things simply aren't properties of languages, but of particular implementations on particular architectures. It bothers me almost as much as when people try to claim that "C/C++" is a programming language. :P

I admit, this really just makes me sound like some old kook with a huge beard who lives in the old programmers' home, or something, but I manage to restrain myself from commenting about it most of the time. So, rather than listen to me, I propose checking out the c2 wiki's page on the subject: <http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?AsFastAsCee> .

</comment><comment><USER5> His argumentation misses an important variable: The programmers time involved. Fix this, and fix the machine, and programming languages do have speed.

And certainly, the statement 'This problem solution in language X developed in Time T running on machine M is faster than the problem solution developed in language Y developed in time T, running on machine M' (often condensed into 'X is faster than Y' is certainly possible and valid, given that the programmers developing the program are about even in skill. (I don't want to assume the same programmer here. Language benchmarks have been shot because someone wrote a good C-Program and a horrible Python program and complained how slow the python program is).

</comment><comment><USER6> It's a nitpicky argument; competent people understand the meaning.

Languages have _relative speeds_ on the same hardware if similar algorithms are developed by experienced programmers. E.g. ML is hundreds of times fast _er_ than script languages on 4MHz CPUs.

Of course when you get into 'nearly as fast' territory then all bets are off. And skilled optimizers can usually tip the scales.

</comment><comment><USER7> so, can those of us writing in interpreted languages still fight about this?</comment>


Show HN: Statistics for every subreddit - <AUTHOR> https://subredditstats.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey, dev here. A while ago I noticed that the Reddit Metrics site had stopped working - looks like the original dev sold it to a company that decided not to maintain it. So I tried building on the concept and added a bunch more statistics that I thought would be useful. It might be a bit buggy still, and it's not as pretty as Reddit Metrics, but I think it gets the job done. I built it using nodejs and vanilla JS/HTML (which is why it doesn't look that great ^^) on glitch.com.</comment>


A/B test of banner ads vs. traffic - <AUTHOR> http://www.gwern.net/Ads <comment><USER3> What I learned from running hundreds of forums is that:

1\. Banners hurt unless they are relevant

2\. Filtering for banners that are relevant tends to reduce revenue rather than increase as there is a smaller pool of highly relevant advertisers

3\. Removing all banner adverts significantly increased engagement by every metric

4\. Some revenue is possible using affiliate links within the content (re- writing existing links rather than inserting awful links on a word match basis)

That last one is what I now do. Is it as profitable as running banners everywhere? No. But it is the highest possible engagement with some revenue, and if one focuses energy on reducing costs instead it can work well.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for sharing. I really wish there was a general web subscription with revenue-sharing between all visited websites. I hate seeing the ads on my own sites but have no viable way to replace them. And as a user I would like to support several sites, apart from disabling the adblocker.

<comment><USER5> It wouldn't work anyway. To make up for the advertising revenue, that subscription would have to be in excess of $100/month per household, and you'd need to get virtually every household in wealthy nations to buy into it. The amount of marketing money spent each year is on the order of 10-11% of all revenue made by companies selling consumer goods... you can't replace that with some $10/month subscription even if everyone paid it.

<comment><USER6> Something's not right with that equation. You're implying that on average, each household is spending over $1000 per month on things they get via the online advertising that they would otherwise not get at all.

And that's just not realistic. One-off purchases, maybe. Sustained 1k/hh/mth avg - I'd love to see a proof of that.

<comment><USER7> Total advertising spend worldwide is $600 billion. Online is about 1/6 of that, call it $100 billion.

To a rough approximation, that's footed by the 1 billion wealthy inhabitants of the EU, US, Japan, Canada, Australian, and New Zealand. (I said _rough_ , roll with me.)

That means that the _per person_ costs of advertising are pretty much $100 annually online and $600 annually for all content (mostly TV). Keep in mind, _those are real expenses_ expressed through household purchases.

(This means, by the way, that online content isn't free, you _are_ paying for it, only, you're doing so indirectly, through advertisers.)

By contrast, total direct expenditures on print media run about $125/person in the US. (Audio/video may add to that.)

If you look at _what_ is advertised, an awful lot is very high-ticket items. The FIRE industries (finance, insurance, real estate) were the largest chunk of spend as of a couple-three years ago. Electronics is another large segment.

The notion of some sort of universal content payments scheme, preferably indexed to wealth and income, has a great deal of economic justification. I've been exploring that for the past few years.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/search?q=universal+cont...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/search?q=universal+content+syndication&restrict_sr=on&sort=relevance&t=all)

<comment><USER8> So, if I block advertising, I'm indirectly wasting the money these companies spend on me, and are paying more for products without any benefit? That's a funny thought.

<comment><USER7> You're also avoiding the inherent manipulation of advertising itself.

But yes, the dynamics are a tad bent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As someone who has founded and runs an adserver for a living (we deal only with legitimate publications, nothing sketchy), I found this thought provoking.

Since I deal mostly in niche/local advertising, I might have a unique perspective. It turns out that the more relatable a banner ad is, the less offended the reader is.

That may sound obvious, and it probably is. But the general effect is that users engage with and are sometimes genuinely interested in banner ads for their favorite restaurants, venues, and other spots. Local and niche advertisers are part of the community. A Ford or Chevy ad is generally much less relatable.

So my overall point is that the nature of the publication and its advertising clients is going to impact whether some readers are turned off - so it's difficult to derive a rule of thumb for banner advertising as a whole.

<comment><USER10> As a user,I am most offended by ads that target me. I would rather see a completely unrelatable ad. It feels like learning new information that way,as opposed to being stalked and preyed upon.

<comment><USER11> The other option is to target the ads _to the publication_. As long as the publication is on a niche topic or geographically localized, you can choose ads that will likely interest people (local restaurants) without needing to track them. Tracking is only necessary when the ad venue is incredibly broad across topics and geography.

<comment><USER12> That's how old media has been doing it for centuries. But media is hard: you have to invest in personal relations with advertisers.

New media just outsources all the hard work to Google and other big ad placers. Easier but you lose editorial control over your work.

<comment><USER13> In fact, that's how Google started out with AdSense as well: It was called "content targeting advertising", because Google scanned your webpage and then served ads that related to the content of your webpage.

I don't know what happened along the road to lead us to the current tracking and spying mess.

<comment><USER14> What happened is the ad landscape shifted from targeting placements and content to targeting audiences and where they are in their journey to purchase. It simply performs better for advertisers and it's often more scalable. In turn, this makes the platform more money because sites that may have low value inventory can suddenly be sold for higher CPMs if an advertiser for example wants to bid on their retargeting data in the auction. It let's them price based on people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I used to roll my eyes every time I saw someone on HN talk about "signal to noise ratio," but I'm getting more and more swayed. Humans deal in abstractions: more clean an abstraction is, the more we can hold onto it.

So when I read a ~10% difference in traffic, I'm not surprised. Art, in absolutely any form, is always about focusing on your theme. And ads, by their very nature, blur that focus.

</comment><comment><USER16> The author's approach to estimating the value of traffic, even by subjective criteria, strikes me as puzzling, somewhat arbitrarily valuing ad-free page views at $0.02, despite the fact that they generate no direct revenue.

> _My website is important to me because it is what I have accomplished & is > my livelihood, and if people are not reading it, that is bad. How bad? In > lieu of advertising it's hard to directly quantify the value of a page-view, > so I can instead ask myself hypothetically, would I trade ~1 week of traffic > for $360 (~$0.02/view, or to put it the other way, $18720/year)? Probably; > that's about the right number - with my current parlous income, I cannot > casually throw away hundreds or thousands of dollars for some additional > traffic and so I feel comfortable valuing page-views at ~$0.02 or a bit > less._

If your income is as parlous as you say, then it seems bizarre to value any amount of unmonetized traffic over cash flow.

People call page views a "vanity metric" with good reason. You can't put food on your plate with page views. By valuing a single page view at $0.02, you're literally doing work for free, "for exposure."

We all make fun of businesses who ask professionals to work for $0 for exposure. It's no better when you're making _yourself_ work for unfair terms!

To put this another way, I think the author can probably arrange to _buy_ relevant traffic via Google AdWords at or less than $0.02 per page view. If traffic ("exposure") is that valuable, then, yes, stop running ads on your site, and instead buy ads of your own.

But if that sounds outrageous to you, if you would never reach into your pocket to pay Google $360 for a week's worth of website traffic, then you should rethink whether unmonetized page views are really as valuable as you think they are.

<comment><USER17> One can have enough money to value traffic but not enough to spend thousands of dollars for small amounts of additional traffic. As you have less money, the remaining money becomes much more valuable...

> it seems bizarre to value any amount of ad-free traffic over cash flow.

Also, while I do not know for certain how much each page-view is worth, I do know for certain that it is not exactly _$0_! Errors made on the assumption it is a cent or two are surely less than errors made on the assumption it is literally worthless.

(As it happens, the introspection was pointless because the effect came nowhere near the threshold, and if it had, I would've had to reintrospect anyway since my Patreon has been working better and I have more money since I began the A/B test in January. There's no reason to not revisit thresholds if circumstances have changed, after all.)

<comment><USER16> > _One can have enough money to value traffic but not enough to spend > thousands of dollars for small amounts of additional traffic. As you have > less money, the remaining money becomes much more valuable..._

If you have very little money, then every cent counts, including AdSense cents. Page views count only to the extent that they convert into something: Patreon patrons, consulting gigs, or what have you.

And I'm not saying your page views convert at $0 to those things, but I think it's plausible that you're off by an order of magnitude, e.g. that an ad-free page view is worth only a tenth of a cent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I honestly couldn't follow most of the math but found this really interesting. I used to do UX analyses at a marketing agency and would constantly link clients to [1]. Page speed is huge, especially on desktop where its easier to navigate away. OP mentions this, but I imagine the effect is massive on a site where users are actively researching a topic and have tens of tabs open and so can easily switch to a similar website.

I do think this test could have been done without banner ads involved. Looking at page load speed per user and how that effects traffic would likely have the same results.

From my link below:

> A 1 second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in > conversions.

[1] [https://blog.kissmetrics.com/loading- time/](https://blog.kissmetrics.com/loading-time/)

<comment><USER19> In my experience that kissmetrics blog is a load of nonsense in practice.

We massively reduced load time on the all the key pages from 4 secs to roughly <400 ms avg. No 25% bump in sales for us. At the time the client sold about 50-80 things a day on thousands of daily visits. A month later, they sold about 50-80 things a day. This was a fairly standard website similar to booking.com or any search/book site, basically location aware searches with a landing page for each venue and a "book" CTA.

I did a similar thing with their mobile site a year or two later, massively reducing the page-weight and reducing loading times on the devices I tested from seconds to again sub-second load times. Again no discernible bump.

<comment><USER20> Right - the pageload time only matters for certain sectors. We sell sports science equipment and our competitors have 10s load times; I'm sure they have no issue selling their stuff. If they got their load times down to ~1s I bet they'd sell more... but not that much more. We are in the 1.5s-2.0s load time and I'm happy with that; given we use Woocommerce to drive our traffic I highly, highly doubt I can get it much lower given our current site design which does very well engagement-wise. That's fine for us; our conversion metrics and related analytics show that we're doing very well for our industry.

For niche equipment you're either gonna buy it or you aren't. If it isn't Amazon, Google, Wal-Mart, or places where you are preying on impulse buys (Woot, LowEndBox/VPS, etc), then the page load times matter a hell of a lot less than something like user design.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> He seems to not show _how_ the ads looked like on his page. He seems to only attribute it to load time. But maybe the ads were visually annoying? Why no screenshots?

<comment><USER17> I have adblock so I don't usually see them and didn't make a point of screenshotting them. When I did (usually checking in Chromium that some CSS change was working), they were fairly ordinary AdSense ads, IMO. Like on DNB FAQ, they would usually be Lumosity or college ads. They weren't flashing or visually offensive, so I never saw them as a problem.

<comment><USER21> I looked at some of your pages on archive.org but saw no ads either. Can you give me a hint how to find the pages with the ads?

<comment><USER17> It was on almost all of the HTML pages (except the index & Modafinil) up to September. Perhaps the JS doesn't run when loaded from IA or something?

<comment><USER21> Good question. Even if it does not load, it should still show the adsense code in the html. But looking at some random post, I don't see it:

[http://web.archive.org/web/20150304235943/http://www.gwern.n...](http://web.archive.org/web/20150304235943/http://www.gwern.net/Haskell%20Summer%20of%20Code)

Adsense is usually a script loaded from googlesyndication.com which is not in the source here.

Maybe archive.org rewrote the html so much that it is not there anymore?

<comment><USER22> After a few moments of searching I'm going to assume that whoever specifically scraped and uploaded the page may have removed the adsense javascript. Doesn't look to be a normal archive.org thing.

<comment><USER21> You can upload pages to archive.org? Wouldn't that open the door for spam and other abuse?

I checked some other site and the Adsense code is not changed by archive.org. So something _is_ strange.

Maybe Gwern experimented with different types of ads and on that page at that time did not use adsense?

I _do_ see the adsense code in a snapshot from a year later:

[http://web.archive.org/web/20160629230243/https://www.gwern....](http://web.archive.org/web/20160629230243/https://www.gwern.net/Haskell%20Summer%20of%20Code)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> There are ways to have comments that are a lot less awful than Disqus.

<comment><USER24> I don't like Disqus mostly because the UX is clunky. Are there other things people dislike about it?

<comment><USER25> Being tracked by a single third party on every site that uses it comes to mind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The content is characterized as "highly technical longform static content in a minimalist layout optimized for fast loading & rendering catering to Anglophone STEM-types in the USA", which is definitely true, but I think there's an important subset not mentioned. According to [http://www.gwern.net/](http://www.gwern.net/) the most popular three articles on the site are about darknet drug markets, and #4 and #5 are reviews of specific controlled substances in the US. I don't know what the ads for these pages looked like, but here's an example from a Google search for "modafinil" in incognito mode with my adblocker turned off: [https://i.imgur.com/3dRssOy.png](https://i.imgur.com/3dRssOy.png) ["the silk road" and "lsd microdosing" didn't turn up any ads, but it's possible Google does more filtering on its own site than on others... I couldn't easily find any LSD review sites that used AdSense for a fair comparison]

If I saw an ad like that in a banner at the top of the page, it's going to cause an immediate, visceral reaction: the site is sketchy, maybe trying to scam me, and any content is going to have a big conflict of interest. To be fair, since I use an ad-blocker, I'm probably more ad-sensitive than the sample set... but who hasn't gotten their fair share of similar email spam before?

The CSVs don't have page information, unfortunately, but I'd expect most of the harmful effect comes from the drug-related pages.

<comment><USER17> The modafinil page didn't have AdSense during the experiment, and if it had, I think the content would have not involved modafinil; Google was burned badly years ago by mega-fines for allowing greymarket pharmacies to advertise and I assume it's totally filtered them out, so any served ads would be targeted at other personal characteristics, presumably. (I also vaguely recollect trying to buy some adwords once while experimenting with advertising gwern.net pages, and the drug categories being totally out of bounds.)

During the experiment, roughly, the most popular pages were a mix: [https://www.gwern.net/About#january-2017--- july-2017](https://www.gwern.net/About#january-2017---july-2017) The top 5 were modafinil (excluded from AdSense), spaced repetition (psychology), LSD microdosing, DNB FAQ (also psychology), and "Story Of Your Life" (physics/literary criticism).

</comment></comment><comment> Ruud-v-A I am curious, what constitutes "traffic", and if it is page loads, why is it the right thing to measure? Users who load the page are already visiting, regardless of whether there is an ad on the page or not. (Or does it include a delay to filter visitors who immediately close the page?) And they did not know in advance whether there was going to be an ad, so their decision to visit the site is not based on the presence of ads. (Unless perhaps if they had a particularly bad experience a previous time — bad enough to remember the domain and not follow the link.) I don't understand how turning ads on and off every two days can be used to understand long-term effects. There appears to be the assumption that there is a relation between a user seeing an ad or not, and subsequent traffic. There might be a small correlation because of visitors browsing the site, or likeliness to share, but if outside of the spikes, the majority of visitors arrive from an old external link or search engine, and they only read a single page, then how does turning ads on and off every two days measure impact on these users?

<comment><USER27> It is probably a combination of performance impact, lower page views per visit, and lower return rate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> What do you think the mechanism is on the connection between ads and pageviews? Or the mechanism for the autocorrelation of pageviews? Have you been able connect the dots on something like sharing to sites like HN?

<comment><USER17> > What do you think the mechanism is on the connection between ads and > pageviews?

The mechanism that makes the most sense to me is via influence in social media resharing. This requires affecting only a few people (power users/the '1%') but can plausibly deliver the necessary effect size. The logical next step in the analysis would be to go back into Google Analytics and pull out another set of time-series and try to split between search engine, direct, and referrals; the decrease _should_ be concentrated as search engine < direct < referrals. I'm not looking forward to figuring out how to code that up as a time-series model, though...

> Or the mechanism for the autocorrelation of pageviews?

Well, some of the mechanisms there are obvious just from the referring URLs. Many people don't read HN via the front page, they use a third-party interface or a daily newsletter; so while OP is getting substantial traffic today, it'll also get traffic tomorrow from people catching up with today's 'best of HN' etc. And from HN it gets auto-posted to Twiter, and of course many people will only see the tweets later when they log into Twitter the next morning or evening. Then you have timezones - perhaps someone is asleep now even if they do read the HN frontpage directly. It might get included in blogger link roundups or sites like The Browser weeks or months from now - <USER2> autocorrelation. What about search engines? They'll notice, and will update. No one has mentioned any comparable experiments so right now my A/B test appears to be _sui generis_, so people debating the costs and benefits of advertising might link it over the next few months. And so on. Lots of possible ways.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> > ~60% of visitors have adblock

This is much higher than I'd expect. Of course, it is a special kind of site, but still. Can we say a model is in serious trouble yet?

<comment><USER12> I'm amazed they can even tell. A lot of people who use adblocking also browse as ghost traffic that can't even be analyzed.

<comment><USER25> Ad blocking means that your browser does not send HTTP requests for items that match the profile of ads and tracking beacons. A website can detect this by creating a local asset linked to from the HTML that is never rendered, but which looks like an ad from the ad blocker's perspective. If a browser loads your page, but subsequently won't load that dummy asset, it is probably using an ad blocker.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> As always, thanks for the very thorough write up. My immediate thoughts were highlighted in the "Discussion" section. Namely, the demographic of your website might respond more negatively to the presence of ads than the general population. This seems to be substantiated by the unusually high use of ad blockers (~60% vs ~18% [1]).

I also wonder if some of the drop off could be explained by the use of Patreon and ads. For instance, I would never pay for Hulu because they still show ads. Did you receive any Patreon cancellations or negative feedback from pledged users?

[1] US ad block usage as of Feb 2017 [https://pagefair.com/blog/2017/adblockreport/](https://pagefair.com/blog/2017/adblockreport/)

<comment><USER17> Patreon-wise, I had ads long predating Patreon, so presumably anyone signing up was already OK with that? I don't remember anyone ever complaining about both ads & Patreon, unless there's a complaint form on Patreon.com I haven't been checking. (Looking at the signup numbers, it goes from $619 for August to $645 for September/October, which at least is in the predicted direction, but too few datapoints to tell since the usual trend is upwards.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> How does this experiment methodology account for cross device mixed experience? Because of the multiple devices use, There will be lot of users that have seen both variation.

<comment><USER17> I think changes over time in device should be like any other unobserved variable like age or country or gender which might affect traffic: averaged out by randomization. The point of randomization is that on average, the two groups will be balanced. (If the intervention itself changes the mix and the changed mix then yields more traffic, then that changes what one might speculate about how it works but the simple result of ads->less-traffic is still true.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I would love to remove ads from all but one of my sites. But I have not been very effective at monetizing my writing some other way. I removed them from a bunch of sites and saw a decrease in ad revenue, but did not see some noticeable difference in either traffic or tips. (I only later added Patreon.)

There are myriad contributing factors that I can't isolate out. People don't like ads, but many of the people who loudly complain about ads will also very aggressively tell you that they will not tip, will not be a Patreon supporter and expect high quality content for free. They will aggressively say that your business model is your problem, not theirs, while actively shooting down any way to monetize content.

These are often people who make good money as, for example, programmers. Another thing such people have told me is to get a real job, like they have, and write for free. It is a kind of classism in a sense: Writers who provide good quality web content aren't seen as valuable or serious contributors the way programmers are. Yet, at the same time, people decry both the lack of good content and the trend towards content done as content marketing.

I get paid to write content done as content marketing. I rarely write anything I feel bad about. I work on projects I can believe in. But I find it frustrating because I would rather spend more of my time producing high quality, independent content for my own projects. These are projects intended to put out useful information and/or to be entertaining.

I am doing some unique things that add value to the world. I run a homeless site with useful information for homeless Americans. Most homeless services have terrible websites. They are almost always donor facing, not client facing. It is very challenging for a homeless person to find useful information online. I had a college class on internet search and I had a hard time finding information I needed.

The other thing is that a lot of homeless services are a very negative experience and can help keep you trapped. Services are often designed with the idea that homeless people are incompetent losers who can't be trusted to make good decisions. They often come with strings attached that can help keep a person trapped in poverty.

I want to promote market based solutions that can work for homeless individuals, but can lead to a future because they continue to be viable after you get off the street. Programs to help the homeless or help poor people often actively encourage failure.

I think I have worked out a couple of models that work, but I am not finding a path forward. I continually come up against the idea that I should just stop caring about marginalized people because there is no money in it. I should just go where the money is, and never mind that the world is going to hell.

And I can't quite bring myself to do that because there is scary stuff happening and I feel like if I don't do something, no one will. Because rich people aren't going to solve it. The attitudes of so many of them that poor people just need a handout (UBI), not earning opportunities, is part of the problem.

We have the technology to allow people with disabilities, like me and my sons, to work in a way that works for us. But I don't know how to overcome the attitudes that we shouldn't bother to try, we should just accept that we are losers unworthy of any respect.

The inability to get taken seriously is a big barrier to getting engagement and traction and that is a big barrier to turning it into money. The whole thing makes me crazy. It is a case of _the key is in the safe._

<comment><USER24> > I think I have worked out a couple of models that work

You should write these up in detail and post it to HN. I would read it!

<comment><USER32> I have written about them and posted stuff to HN. It usually doesn't get much attention.

Nutshell version:

1\. Flexible online means to earn money.

2\. Genuinely affordable market based housing, such as SROs.

I have several blogs where I talk about such things, like Mic Digs, Project: SRO and Write Pay. They don't get much attention.

Edit: just to prove my point, here is a recent piece on working for pay while homeless. I have submitted it to HN. You can go watch it be ignored:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15682882](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15682882)

<comment><USER24> Maybe you could do something like indie hackers [1] and highlight the stories of people that are trying to get off the streets by doing online gig work. That would be inspiring for people looking for help and interesting to everyone else.

[1] [https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses](https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses)

<comment><USER32> I did spend some time looking over Indie Hackers yesterday. I am unclear whether anything I do at all fits there. But thank you for suggesting it. I am trying to figure out how to get taken more seriously, in spite of it being an uphill battle for various reasons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm curious if any ad networks or SSPs are differentiating based on load times. I wouldn't think so because big sites that drive lots of impressions tend to load slower and aren't as concerned with page speed as someone like OP.

I'd also be curious to see his user to patreon donator conversion rate, and if removed ads and 'gaining' 10% of traffic would be worth it from a revenue stand point.

</comment><comment><USER33> Unless I misread this it sounds like the assignment is on 2 day chunks rather than some unique user ID. Just doing this at impression rather than user level makes me question the applicability of the results, but really interesting read nonetheless.

<comment><USER17> Per-user level doesn't capture the effects I am interested in. Imagine you click on a website and the banner ad makes you subconciously less happy and so you don't submit it to HN for thousands of other users to read; how would randomizing on you and thousands of others' user IDs help? There's no way to link your user ID's randomization to the subsequent visits (or non-visits) of thousands of other people; it just averages everything out to 0 ('500 visitors were exposed to ads, 500 were not; conclusion: ???'), when in fact the real answer is something like '-1000 hits because user yellow_postit was exposed to ads and didn't like them'.

But if you did it on a per-day or per-week or per-month basis, then you could see effects like that: "on ad-free weeks, there are twice as many submissions to Reddit which drives +100 hits per day" etc. Then you don't need to try to track each individual user's activities or reshares - whatever the effects are, they'll show up at the population level.

<comment><USER34> Isn't this particular test susceptible to confounding effects? Traffic fluctuates day-to-day, week-to-week, and month-to-month, so how can you be sure it was the presence-or-absence of ads and not something else? If you randomize at the visitor level, you are sampling from both high-and-low traffic days, and control for any external fluctuations.

<comment><USER17> Because you're randomizing at the 2-day level, on average there will be just as many advertising/high-traffic days as advertising/low-traffic days, and as many no-advertising/high-traffic days as no-advertising/low-traffic days. The randomization is unaffected by traffic and uncorrelated with it. The unit of analysis is each day, not each visitor. This is why it has to be run for several months, otherwise you don't wind up with a decent n=50 pairs.

That's the tradeoff here: it lets you look at the totals, but it takes a lot longer than if you randomize per visitor in which case you could finish the test in a few days, often.

<comment><USER35> The stats went well over my head but as a web analyst I thought maybe you could have asked a simpler question. Pick a segment of your site such as visits from Google Search who landed on your homepage (most likely people who searched "gwern") which should reduce a lot of those spikes.

<comment><USER17> Subsetting will also increase the variance of each datapoint (consider the extreme case of picking a subset which was 0 or 1 visits per day), so is probably not a win. It's also hard to imagine what subset properly reflects all sources of traffic and so is informative about the total effect of advertising. Search queries definitely is not it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't know how much research has been done on the subject,but personally I don't mind ads in general,I mind ads that target (stalk) me and intrusive ads.

I can tolerate ads that target the page content or random ads just fine.

<comment><USER36> > I don't know how much research has been done on the subject,but personally I > don't mind ads in general,I mind ads that target (stalk) me and intrusive > ads.

That used to be my position. I think I still don't mind honest-to-goodness _advertising_ : this product/vendor exists and has these features. I actually do still see this kind of ad on sites connected to electrical engineering; presumably other competitive technical product areas like photography or scientific/industrial equipment have it too. But the more I've experienced the dissonance of being hit with bursts of mainstream advertising after moving to a generally lower-advertising lifestyle (ad blockers/NoScript, cord-cutting, more judicious selection of news sources, etc.), the more distinctly I've felt the reality that we're almost a century into the general trend of "advertising" being a euphemism for psychosocial manipulation. In other words, modern advertising is for-profit propaganda. In my view, it's not enough for the media of advertising to be more passive. The technology is amplifying it, but the overall strategy is what's fundamentally exploitative. Many people think that merely by being cynical about this, they're immunizing themselves. It's tempting to think that if you study the techniques and make snarky remarks like, say, "oh, look how _cool_ this Lexus is; if I buy it that means I'm _powerful_ and _important_ ", then you've somehow defeated it. Make no mistake: that's just another strand in the web. The idea that the advertiser wants to push is still being normalized in your mind, even through the filter of irony.

I don't intend to be alarmist here. Humanity has just about survived a century of this crap, after all. Life goes on. Revolutions, both figurative and literal, haven't been rendered obsolete by the sheer marketing budgets of incumbents. But I think we _have_ evolved a warped view of what qualifies as normal, honest communication.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> > A decision analysis of revenue vs readers yields an acceptable damage of ~3% > total traffic loss. Power analysis of historical ... traffic data > demonstrates that the high autocorrelation yields very low statistical power > with standard tests & regressions but acceptable power with ARIMA models.

Was all that math worth your time, or would you have made more money selling tamales on the corner?</comment>


Comets can't explain weird 'alien megastructure' star after all - <AUTHOR> https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn28786-comets-cant-explain-weird-alien-megastructure-star-after-all <comment><USER2> >>> "The alien-megastructure idea runs wrong with my new observations," he says, as he thinks even advanced aliens wouldn't be able to build something capable of covering a fifth of a star in just a century. What's more, such an object should radiate light absorbed from the star as heat, but the infrared signal from Tabby's star appears normal, he says.

That seems a rather unambitious approach to possible alien tech. We today clearly could not build, or think of how to build, such structures. That isn't to say that the technology isn't possible, just that we do not understand it. If aliens were able to create and fly structures of such size I think it safe to say they would also be in possession of tech we cannot contemplate.

<comment><USER3> If there's no plausible model that involves aliens and explains the observations, it's not science. "Advanced aliens did it in a way we don't understand" is basically a "Goddidit" argument.

<comment><USER4> I think your view of what science is is a little too narrow. "Aliens did it in a way we don't understand, yet" is a hypothesis, which could be supported or refuted. The famous quote by Asimov is 'The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka" but "That's funny..."'

We've got something funny here, which may be (probably is?) nothing new, or may be exciting.

<comment><USER5> It is a conjecture or speculation; it is not a _hypothesis_ , in the scientific sense, because without something more than "some way we don't understand", it makes no falsifiable predictions of future observations.

Now, speculation of this type can be the starting point to developing a testable hypothesis, so its not completely outside the scientific process, but it's far sorry of even a hypothesis.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the point, I agree if we're speaking precisely and not colloquially. But...

> "its not completely outside the scientific process"

Here you unfairly (imo) diminish the role of wonder and speculation in science, which isn't something at the fringes of it, but part of the very soul and essence of it.

<comment><USER6> There is an unfortunate side effect of the rationalism movement that the (mostly correct) dismissal of religious explanations and pseudoscientific ideas: A lot of people who should know better also dismiss philosophy, conjecture and other ideas that don't have a firmly established theory as unscientific. These things are an important part of the scientific process. A lot of the key scientific tools and knowledge we have today started out as philosophical riddles.

Ironically, this same mistake has been made time and time again throughout history when science has made great strides. Someone points out that "that's funny", and are immediately shot down for coming up with ridiculous ideas that are not supported by the current theories.

This might not describe OP, but it's a pretty common phenomenon that often shows up in discussions where the boundaries of our current scientific knowledge are close. E.g. AI, the un-observable part of the universe, experiments that seem to break physics (e.g. the RF resonant cavity thruster), what is consciousness, etc.

<comment><USER3> And for every outlandish hypothesis that turned out to be true there have been a hundred for which a much more mundane explanation has sufficed. As Carl Sagan said, "They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."

Many of us _yearn for_ novel, exciting discoveries with extraordinary explanations. The desire for novelty is a fundamental part of the human condition, and alien intelligence is one of the most thrilling, evocative, thought-provoking ideas that exist. However, the very fundamental point of the scientific method is to explicitly work against this bias - to ensure we're pursuing the _truth_ and not our pet ideas.

As I brought up in another comment, it is wrong to single out "aliens" in the vast space of hypotheses just because that concept happens to be especially accessible and fascinating to laypeople. There are a plenty of possible explanations that are astrophysically novel and interesting and don't involve such a huge multiplication of entities as the aliens hypothesis does.

<comment><USER7> >And for every outlandish hypothesis that turned out to be true there have been a hundred for which a much more mundane explanation has sufficed.

A 1% probability of aliens seems pretty significant to me. Obviously it's more likely that it's not aliens, and no one disagrees with that. But the fact that it's even a possibility is very interesting and makes it worthy of investigation.

Anyway there isn't anything inherently unlikely about aliens. You make it like it's incredibly unlikely that aliens exist, so any hypothesis that includes them must be incredibly unlikely. A lot of people have higher prior probabilities on the existence of aliens.

<comment><USER3> "Aliens exist" and "an advanced technological civilization built a physics- defying megastructure around this specific star" have rather drastically different prior probabilities.

Anyway, I'll give the megastructure conjecture much more weight the second someone in the research community suggests it, preferably with some sort of a testable hypothesis. As far as I know it has been purely layperson speculation and as such not much more plausible than the ramblings of UFO believers or free energy cranks.

<comment><USER7> >I'll give the megastructure conjecture much more weight the second someone in the research community suggests it, preferably with some sort of a testable hypothesis

Neither of those things should increase the probability at all. Just because a researcher believes it doesn't make it more likely to be true. Neither does the fact that it's testable.

Conversely, you shouldn't lower the probability because those things aren't true.

<comment><USER3> The Bayesian interpretation of probability is that it is a measure of _subjective uncertainty_. As such, a plausible model proposed by a credible member of the scientific community very much gives me a reason to update my priors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > "The alien-megastructure idea runs wrong with my new observations," he says, > as he thinks even advanced aliens wouldn't be able to build something > capable of covering a fifth of a star in just a century.

Oh, really? So we are speaking for alien's abilities now because we don't believe in them or their abilities to build things? That sounds like a cognitive bias. Here's another bias in the same vein:

> "No flying machine will ever fly from New York to Paris …[because] no known > motor can run at the requisite speed for four days without stopping." - > Orville Wright

What Orville should have said was, "No flying machine will fly from New York to Paris until we develop a motor that can run at the required speed without stopping until it gets there."

<comment><USER9> And his second justification is even more baffling:

> "What's more, such an object should radiate light absorbed from the star as > heat, but the infrared signal from Tabby's star appears normal, he says."

As if intelligent beings with an interest in capturing a fifth of a star's output would only be absorbing the human-visible spectrum of its radiance.

<comment><USER10> It's a thermodynamic argument, not an anthropocentric one. Irrespective of your technology, you can't just absorb all the energy of a star without re- radiating it, unless you want to cook yourself inside a gigantic space thermos.

<comment><USER2> Perhaps they are bouncing all that energy off-axis. That we cannot see the light doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Perhaps they are reflecting it back on the star for some reason. Or maybe we are seeing a mirror that is pushing some interstellar ship away from the host star. Luckily for us it would be traveling perpendicular to our vantage point, ie not coming here. Perhaps we should be looking for a mobile IR emitter somewhere nearby but accelerating away from this star. (I call dibs on the naming rights!)

<comment><USER11> You wouldn't be able to direct all of it off-axis. In order to do any meaningful work with it, some of it must be lost as heat or the entropy of the universe does not increase. That would violate the laws of thermodynamics. Essentially, you can reduce the entropy of an isolated collection of particles, but only at the expense of increasing the entropy of another collection of atoms, and only if you move the entropy around.

There's a slim possibility that a sufficiently advanced civilization has improved the efficiency of their process sufficiently to the point where the thermal radiation isn't measurable with our technology, but there still must be thermal radiation if any meaningful work is being done with the harvested energy.

<comment><USER2> Yes, but not necessarily thermal radiation aimed in the narrow direction necessary for us to detect it. Thermodynamics does not guarantee that all necessary information propagate in nice measurable spheres for all to see equally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > "The alien-megastructure idea runs wrong with my new observations," he says, > as he thinks even advanced aliens wouldn't be able to build something > capable of covering a fifth of a star in just a century.

Thet could have _built_ it over hundreds or thousands of years. All we can infer is that if it is aliens, they _deployed_ it in just a century.

<comment><USER13> When we're taking some solar-system-spanning megastructures, it's not clear that the dichotomy between building and deploying actually exists.

<comment><USER12> Maybe, but I think it is plausible there would be. Suppose we wanted to build a set of megastructures for collecting solar energy.

I'd guess we'd get the materials from the asteroid belt, or by taking apart Mars (or maybe Mercury or Venus, if we want to keep Mars for terraforming). I'd guess we'd set up the construction area for building the megastructures in the same general orbit where we get the raw materials, or we might move the materials to somewhere near Earth.

For deployment, though, we'd want to move these closer to the Sun, because you collect more energy per unit area the closer you are to the Sun. If we are putting them closer than Earth is to the Sun, though, we'd probably want them away from Earth's orbital plane so we wouldn't have the annoyance of them blocking out the Sun on Earth.

An observer at some other solar system is only going to see our megastructures if we've got them in an orbit whose plane intersects the observer's solar system. Those who can see them when they are under construction won't see them anymore when we shift them from construction orbits to deployment orbits, and those who can see them after we put them in deployment orbits won't see them before that when they are in construction orbits.

Another possibility is that what we are seeing is a redeployment. Maybe they were originally deployed in one configuration which from our vantage point was not visible, and then due to other future projects that configuration was no longer optimal and so they moved them to a new configuration which is visible to us.

<comment><USER13> It just makes sense to me that you would want to do as much of the construction on-site as possible. It's probably easier to ship raw materials through the solar system than assembled solar panels or whatever, which are potentially fragile. However, I must admit that edeployment is an interesting possibility.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The sci-fi novel "The Dark Forest" by Chinese writer Liu Cixin describes a similar phenomenon. In that case it was achieved by detonating bombs to produce "interstellar dust clouds", in order to cause flickering of the light from the star, visible from other systems.

Maybe the aliens from KIC 8462852 read Chinese sci-fi novels.

<comment><USER15> That's interesting. Perhaps there is some "natural" process that's producing dust clouds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> One possibility not mentioned is that the expert who eyeballed the old photographic plates to determine that there was a slight dimming did not do so under double blind conditions, and his assessment is tainted.

I don't mean to suggest this supports one hypothesis or another. But I'm not convinced his opinion on the dimming is so valuable if it was done without proper controls. There may very well have been proper controls, but unfortunately that didn't come through in the article.

<comment><USER17> Yes, came to say the exact same thing. I am not at all familiar with the photographic plate procedure, but it seems likely there is room for all sorts of tinkering with parameters like gain, lighting conditions, white balance, whatever that would allow any bias to shine through.

<comment><USER18> The aperture, exposure time, etc would all be recorded with the plate, so any bias would be absolutely minimal. Additionally, photographic plates don't have a single star on them, but rather a field of stars, so any overall bias would be applied equally to the entire field and weighted out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> If you take a a purely reductionist approach to existence and sentience, there is no qualitative difference between comet dust cloud and alien megastructure. They're both natural processes, just differing in the degree of complexity.

<comment><USER20> Most would disregard this as a simplistic, unscientific thought, but the problem is they haven't studied the other side of things with any effort. I feel more and more that reality exists as a fractal, and any direction you focus upon yields its own profound truths. Time exists as a constellation of attention -- and this particular go around it happens to lie within the measurable, observable spectrum.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Disclaimer: I have a layman's understanding (at best) of astrophysics.

Couldn't this be explained by an orbiting planet colliding with another body and breaking apart? Couldn't this satisfy the number of "comets" required for the hypothesis?

<comment><USER22> I have a degree in physics... and this seems like as reasonable an explanation as any other to date. We know planets migrate, we know large collisions occur, which tend to be followed by periods of bombardment (e.g. Thea/Earth -> Moon, Jupiter from inner to outer system), so the observations, particularly coupled with the gradual but significant dimming, could correspond with Kessler syndrome on a stellar scale.

Actually, I say that, but they also address this in the paper - a planetary collision would result in a huge amount of excess heat - infrared - and there isn't any. So scratch that. Whatever did this is cold from our point of view.

<comment><USER23> I don't get it. Couldn't it have cooled down already and we're only seeing the junk?

<comment><USER22> Unlikely. The only place for thermal energy to escape is into deep space, in the form of infrared radiation. Given that the dimming has been large and recent, it would have to have been a recent collision - which would take millions of years to cool.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> There is a thing called the Kardashev Scale[1], which is a way of measuring technological advancements of a civilization. According to the scale there are 3 levels of civilizations and we are not even at the 1st. I've done some reading on this before and the general assumption of many futurists and theoretical physicists is that our brain wouldn't even be able to comprehend what we'd see if we ever witnessed a civilization of the 3rd level. I know it's way out there, but couldn't this be the case here?

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

</comment><comment><USER25> Could there be something weird going on with the star itself? For example, could it be producing super large sunspots or something like that?

<comment><USER26> I suspect that fusion/fission models don't allow for the way it's being observed.

<comment><USER18> Possibly a new variety of variable star, like the Beta Cephi and slowly pulsating stars [1]? The article doesn't have any information as to what sort of spectrographs, etc have been taken.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slowly_pulsating_B- type_star](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slowly_pulsating_B-type_star)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'd be curious if anyone evaluated the fluctuations to look for a signal. If aliens had the technology, dimming a star might be a smart way to communicate with less advanced civilizations.

<comment><USER28> Well, when the frequency of your dimming spans across a century (and only for 20%).. you'll be long dead when the bit has flipped.

<comment><USER27> There are lots of ways to encode a signal. Perhaps there are very minor dimming a and brightenings that happens more frequently.

<comment><USER29> like a carrier wave in am radio?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Mr. Wright claims that these megastructures don't make sense with our technology, but perhaps even for these very advanced aliens this is not easy? Perhaps these are their pyramids? They may well be tossing immeasurable robotic efforts or genetically modified biological suffering at building these megastructures.

It's worth considering that this is something extraordinary even for this civilization that is far more advanced than we are. Rather than a hum-ho project for an extremely advanced species (or sentient AI).

This is probably a pyramid-scale project.

</comment><comment><USER31> let's face it, this article was put out for the chance the publication could use the words 'alien megastructure' to grab some views.

</comment><comment><USER32> I always wondered if perhaps a rocky planet broke apart. Could still be aliens or some kind of massive collision.

</comment><comment><USER33> The first thing that comes to mind is that this is probably due to something like a giant dust cloud somewhere close to the star or close to us, and we are or it is moving into position behind it, leading to this dimming.

</comment><comment><USER34> Reminds me of the beginning of "Pandora's Star" by Peter F. Hamilton. If you don't know him already, but you like Sci-Fi, you should definitely consider having a look at his work.

</comment><comment><USER35> Can we get this title changed? It seems excessively click-baity while not making sense. If comets could explain it, it wouldn't be an 'alien megastructure' star, right?

</comment><comment><USER36> To be fair, the SETI people kind of ruled out radio-emitting aliens as the source.

"Aliens did it" is still the worst explanation. It just happens that we ruled out all a lot of better ones.

<comment><USER37> To me it is in the same league as those "theories" that support intelligent design that run along the lines of "Well we can't prove God didn't do it" and Ancient Aliens theories where that manic guy with the crazy hair says the same stuff.

Filling in knowledge gaps with the the word "aliens" is a laughably childish approach to science in my opinion.

<comment><USER38> This line of reasoning is so frustrating.

There is no reason to believe that God(s) exist. Someone who claims that they do has the burden of proof.

There is also no reason to believe that we Earthlings have the universe all to ourselves. It is an extraordinary claim to suggest that we do. _Someone who makes such a claim also bears the burden of proof._

The idea that gods and Type II civilizations are equally implausible is, to put it bluntly, ridiculous.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I appreciate that the article referenced Bowie's "Space Oddity" and "Starman"</comment>


Ask HN: Looking for technical co founder to move forward - rush-tea

Currently I am a one-man show, however I have my prototype working and for me to move forward (either get funding, more technology development, or accepted in incubator program like Y Combinator and others), they all require 2nd co founder.
I am currently located in Southern California, and would prefer my partner at least in California (Silicon Valley or southern California would be better).
As for me, I am what you say a non technical co founder.  However I am a do-er and I get my things done.  I refused not to be able to achieve my goal.  My personal motto is better to have a 0.00001% chance than not trying at all. I have a vision on how I see this, and I would like to move forward with someone who shares the same passion and vision with me.
I would like to find out more about you, so please email me at rush.tea AT gmail DOT com about your passion in startup, what it would take you to be successful, your skillset (of course. :) ), and questions on what you need to know about me.  It takes two to tango and I hope we can take it to the next level together. <comment><AUTHOR> I am in silicon valley and experienced in Technology ( around 14 years). Let us communicate via mail tusjain AT yahoo DOT com.</comment>


Tablesorter.js: A jQuery plugin for HTML table sorting - <AUTHOR> http://tablesorter.com/

<comment><USER2> datatables is far superior imo.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, that one is very nice. Thanks!</comment></comment>


Two incomes with long commute, or one income with a shorter commute? - <AUTHOR> My wife accepted a full time (non-tech) job in a popular vacation spot. We can either live with long, but tolerable commutes, or we can live with a single income very close to her job.
I'm currently a full-time telecommuter, but I anticipate that I'd need to commute to a major city for my next job if we rely on both incomes. In this case, she'd commute about an hour south, and I'd commute to the major city about an hour north.
The alternative is that we can live rather inexpensively in this popular vacation spot, and due to my wife's hours, I can watch our children while she's at work, and still have about 25-30 hours a week free for technical pursuits. In a few years, when the kids are in school, I'll have plenty more time.
Is anyone in such a situation? Is 25-30 hours a week enough for a "single person business?" What about flexible telecommuting jobs, or flexible contracting on open-source projects? In any case, my wife will provide a comfortable safety net.
Would love to hear how other people make this work! <comment><USER2> Do you mean commuting in a car or by public transportation?

Either way, the one resource I cannot get more of in life is time. The more I get on in life the more I protect this resource. And I vow to never give my time to long commutes.

That said, I think that 25 to 30 hours per week is plenty of time to run a side business or consult.

Obviously there are many other factors, but when it comes to my time, it is very near the top of my priorities.

<comment><AUTHOR> My commute would be by train. She would commute by car, but approximately three times a week.

<comment><USER2> My only experience is in the NYC area where the trains are notoriously over- crowded, in need of repair/replacing, and very hard to enjoy during busy hours. And trying to work on those trains is futile. So needless to say, I'm not a fan.

Some people have the constitution to make long commutes regularly. I am not not one of those people.

Best of luck to both of you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Quality of life vs. money. Which do you think is more important? :)

<comment><AUTHOR> My fear is that the situation where I can't commute into a major city gets very boring. If the cost of living were the same in both locations, then we'd pick the longer commute so I can have a career "when I want it."</comment></comment>


Making a Living Collecting Cans - <AUTHOR> http://priceonomics.com/making-a-living-collecting-cans/ <comment><USER4> _> Eric Dunn of Community Recyclers does not hesitate when we ask him why the recycling centers have closed: "Getting rid of street people by getting rid of recycling centers is the bottom line. It's basically class warfare concerns."_

We need to start showing real compassion for each other. Removing one of the few legit ways the poor can generate money is not the right thing to do. They need help. Recycling helps the environment AND the poor! How many things are there in the world like that? Closing them down because the bike-riding, starbucks-sipping, smartphone-talking, organic-eating fancy & polished crowd feel uncomfortable around the poor is selfish IMHO. One day, we won't be able to sweep the unpleasant truths of our society underneath the rug anymore. What then? Oh, actually, I know. They'll make it illegal to be poor, so they'll all be in jail. Thus solving the problem __ONCE AND FOR ALL__.

<comment><USER5> This is shortsighted. Why not just give them money? We already spend money on waste management to collect the stuff.

But no, we can't, then it'd be a handout. And we, even community-minded people like Eric Dunn, can't stomach the thought of just giving people money. So we make them do pointless make-work, like collecting bottles.

The middle class people you illogically rage against are the ones funding the poor indirectly (and convolutedly) through their waste. Why not cut out the misery and give them the money directly? IMO it's less respectful, more demeaning, to insist a street person dig through trash to collect a bunch of cans before we give them their daily bread.

<comment><USER6> Collecting bottles is hardly pointless. Recycling is a positive, both for "recycle" and "clean up bottle trash" and clearly some people are not motivated enough by the current CRV taxes. You could think of it as specialization.

<comment><USER7> No one cares if they collect litter. People don't want hobos rummaging through their garbage. Stealing all of the bottles out of recycling bins is also not accomplishing anything.

<comment><USER8> >People don't want hobos rummaging through their garbage

I have no objection to them doing so at my house in SF. They few I've spoken to about it seemed very nice.

>Stealing all of the bottles out of recycling bins...

Are you sure it's stealing? AFAIK, it's only stealing if the bin is on/at the curb. I believe it's otherwise legal.

>...out of recycling bins is also not accomplishing anything.

The question is: is the system as a whole accomplishing anything? The removal of cans from residential bins is the unintended consequence of a wider rule, which has (according to the article) reduced litter levels in CA considerably. All systems have unintended consequences. What alternative system do you propose that reduces litter and increases recycling rates? What side effects does it have?

Finally (I'm going out on a limb here): I don't think it's our place to judge. What I see when I look out the window is a person who has the determination and energy to push a heavy cart up a hill on a cold night, and yet a person who has -- despite those traits, which society values -- found themselves in an unenviable life position right now. When I see that paradox my reaction is to allow them their wish. Not because I do or don't approve of the system, but because I approve or hard work, and applying yourself, and because the very existence of their paradox assures me that I don't know enough to do anything other than make sure I'm not getting in their way.

<comment><USER9> Even if it's not stealing (and I don't see any reason to actually call it that), it's nonetheless pretty close to pointless to move remove bottles and cans from recycling bins that will be picked up by a truck anyway into a shopping cart and drag them across town. It may be a slightly negative side- effect of an on-balance worthwhile policy, but it's odd to consider it positive when there are better ways to help people.

<comment><USER10> > nonetheless pretty close to pointless to move remove bottles and cans from > recycling bins that will be picked up by a truck anyway

Not pointless: less curbside pickup volume per truck means you can run with less residential-serving trucks (less time trundling back and forth to a big recycling distribution center).

It's a kind of ingenious way to decrease spending on municipal recycling collection, levying it on the consumers of the products apt for recycling directly. I actually wish the deposit were a little bit larger. What they do is enormously backbreaking and demoralizing work.

<comment><USER7> The trucks will just be going to the new distribution center instead of the old one. Also, the article points out that this doesn't decrease spending since the city would otherwise make the money from the stolen cans.

<comment><USER10> When you put refuse to the curb, it's generally regarded as discarded. That word -- stolen -- doesn't mean what you think it means.

<comment><USER9> If the collection is partly subsidized by the presence of recyclables in that refuse, does that change things? I don't know enough about trash collection to know to what degree that's the case (I would expect it to vary by municipality).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I live 2 blocks away from this recycling center and visit Safeway almost everyday for either food or getting off the Muni.

It's terrible.

Just a few of my headaches:

• Smells absolutely terrible

• When walking down Castro with my girlfriend we use the other side after many overly aggressively slurs from the slew of bums that hang out by this heap.

• It draws numerous crews of drifters that recycle cans then binge on the spoils on the steps of safeway. Fights break out weekly.

• It creates a "hobo highway" in which my female friends now avoid because it is filled with bums. This looks like rape alley at night.

• Bums bring their dogs to wait in line and they shit all over the sidewalk. That was awesome to wipe off in the morning.

• The really crazy bums like to ride their carts down market street flying through red lights, which I was almost hit by last month.

It might be cool to support the ongoing of recycling centers so less fortunate people have a way to make money but try living next to the place before writing an article about how you think its so unhippie of San Francisco.

<comment><USER12> I used to live a block and a half away, and I still live 4 blocks away. I agree, it's not the most desirable thing to have in a neighborhood.

However, the amount of NIMBYism and mental gymnastics that goes on in SF is infuriating. The same citizens who support a government that spends $200m a year on homelessness are up in arms when services for the poor appear in their neighborhoods? The hypocrisy in SF is incredible.

<comment><USER13> _The same citizens who support a government that spends $200m a year on homelessness are up in arms when services for the poor appear in their neighborhoods? The hypocrisy in SF is incredible._

I don't understand your amazement. It makes perfect sense for me. You want to pay money so that you don't have bums in your backyard. We do that in Europe, and works pretty well -- nowhere I've seen homelessness as rampant as in SF or Seattle.

<comment><USER14> Well, the thinking is generally "let's give stuff to the poor because _we 're such nice people_", not "let's pay off the poor to darken some other doorstep". This is the mindset behind your parent comment. If you want to not have bums in your backyard, you can do that much cheaper and more effectively than by paying them to stay in your backyard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If you like this story I definitely recommend watching _Carts of Darkness_ : [http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/carts-of- darkness/](http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/carts-of-darkness/)

It's about the homeless in Vancouver, who not only collect cans for money, but then ride their shopping carts down mountain roads to get to the recycling centers. It tells a story about homelessness in a very intriguing way and the action scenes are pretty intense.

</comment><comment><USER16> Modern waste management facilities can actually sort out cans and bottles from the other trash. For the cans they use electromagnet while the trash is on the belt that makes the cans jump farther than the garbage. For the bottles, something about the speed of the belt and an air pump. At any rate, better to get these people the help they need and out of the trash.

Source: modern marvels episode on wastemanagement and actually got to take a field trip in college and when I saw the cans jumping I was pumped to have see that episode of mm.

</comment><comment><USER17> The secondary effects of the bottle deposit plus curbside recycling are visible in my town, Portland Oregon. I know a homeless person who survives on can recycling and I see many other people doing the same work of pulling cans out of curb-side recycle bins and delivering them to supermarket recycle centers for cash. He works hard at it and while I'm not sure of the dollar amount, it appears to be a significant source of income.

Intentionally creating these secondary effects to increase the options for people to work outside of 'traditional employment' for even paltry sums has a lot of potential.

</comment><comment><USER18> Claiming that "it's a neat system that rewards litter reduction" involves overlooking the non-trivial amount of garbage cans that get dumped out on the street to make collecting the cans easier.

</comment><comment><USER19> In Buenos Aires, they're called cartoneros. At around sunset, they roll in from the surrounding (poorer) neighborhoods, and start stacking cardboard in the streets. It's very surreal. They recently formed a collective and are trying to get official recognition from the government.

[http://pulitzercenter.org/articles/argentina-cartoneros- wast...](http://pulitzercenter.org/articles/argentina-cartoneros-waste- pickers-economy-government-recognition)

</comment><comment><USER20> The onus for taking back empties should be on the individual stores that sold them. So basically a change in law.

In Europe customers can return their own empties when they go shopping, by dropping the bottles into fully automated machines that dispenses the refund. So they get to benefit, and the problem is distributed.

In California, in my experience, the scarcity and sheer nastiness of return centers keeps most individual consumer from returns.

My one time attempt of returning empties in California took three trips to the distant and frequently unmanned center, and finally yielded a voucher only valid in the supermarket on which's premises the center was located. No thanks.

Edit: After my post I found this gem in the comments, enough said!:

 _A Functioning CRV System

These dynamics are fascinating to me because I've lived in both San Francisco and Michigan. Michigan is one of the states with the highest redemption values for cans at 10¢ each, plus the cost of living (and thus salaries) are much lower than in San Francisco, so each can returned makes a much bigger impact on everyone's finances. The result was EVERYONE returned their own cans, every family from the lower class to the wealthier ones has a trash can in the kitchen and "a place where they put cans".

It was shocking to me when I moved out to California and nobody saved their cans - the culture in Michigan is that throwing away cans is like throwing away money. Then I realized why after I tried to return a bag full - <USER2> Michigan, almost every major grocery store has machines that process can returns - completely self service, at almost every grocery store. The grocery stores use it to get customers in the store, and recycling is organized and incented. In California, when I tried to return that first bag, I had to go to a recycling center that was nowhere close to where I lived and in the middle of nowhere. I waited inline behind 20 or so homeless people, and the facility was filthy. In Michigan, the machines counted every individual can and gave you a receipt readout with precisely how many cans, glass bottles, and plastic bottles you turned in. In California, they sloppily weighed your bag and handed you cash. It was way more difficult to turn in the cans and it was less accurate and half the value per can. The whole system felt like a rip off & waste of time.

The crazy thing is what people perceive the point of the can redemption system to be. In Michigan, everybody gets that its supposed to get people to recycle, and it clearly works. Its like an easy way to save a little spending money or get some cash off your grocery bill every couple weeks. In California, a lot of the people I talked to about it thought it was a program to help the homeless, because they were so used to the trashcan foraging activity. I don't know how to respond to the idea of closing recycling centers, but having lived in Michigan where the can redemption system is functioning, it feels like keeping recycling centers open to help homeless people have an income is masking the harder problem, which is what do we do to help these people get work and stop relying on entrepreneurial trash collection as a living?_

<comment><USER21> > The onus for taking back empties should be on the individual stores that > sold them. So basically a change in law.

The store bought them from someone else, so why ding the middle person? The last owner should deal with them.

<comment><USER20> Because the 'middle person' is making a profit, and has to share the responsibility to keep this stuff out of landfills. Hence the CRV system.

<comment><USER21> So is the original supplier, and the only reason it is stocked is the person buying it. Perhaps taking some actual personal responsibility would be a good thing instead of legislating it on someone else.

<comment><USER20> If personal responsibility would work, we wouldn't need any laws. It's either stick or carrot, as in this case.

<comment><USER21> I don't believe in punishing a merchant for the sins of his/her customers.

<comment><USER22> do you also not believe in merchants collecting Sales Tax?

<comment><USER21> That is a bit of an odd jump since the transaction takes place at the merchant where recycling doesn't.

The merchant is part of and in control of the transaction generating the sale tax, but has no say on where the product goes after the transaction. That part is all on the customer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm confused with priceonomics. They seem to be in the business of blogging now? The link to their product is a tiny thing at the bottom.

</comment><comment><USER24> Growing up in rural Oregon, collecting cans & bottles was my entire 8-year-old income. $0.05 per container went a long way.

<comment><USER25> I think one of the reasons for returnable cans and bottles is to teach children about money and work. Many people I know once ran the can business in their household as children.

EDIT: This requires grocery stores to take return bottles, I'm not sure if I would let my children to a hobo-filled recycling center.

<comment><USER14> My brother and sister (both 10) "run the can business" in their household now, but what that actually means is that my dad saves the cans and drives them to the recycling center when they think they have enough. What exactly is the lesson to be drawn about money and work?

(I can tell you that the reason that system obtains in the household is that my mother feels very strongly that recycling is the moral thing to do, but I'm still struggling as to what lessons a child would draw even if their parents wanted them to)

<comment><USER25> If you show initiative and return the cans you can obtain money that would not be available otherwise. Pretty straightforward in my mind.

<comment><USER14> Well, again, in my family's model of returning cans, there's no initiative involved -- they don't do the work of collecting and they're not responsible for getting the cans to the recycling center; they just go along for the ride and get handed some money.

If hypothetically they were supposed to be responsible for returning the cans, they'd quickly discover that they don't have access to many cans, _and_ that they have absolutely no way of transporting them to a recycling center, or even going to a recycling center without bringing any cans.

My sister visited me over the summer a couple years ago, when she was 8, and I let her hold on to the jiao I received as change (US equivalent value: roughly 1.5 cents to the jiao). This made her happy (especially when she noticed a chinese mother doing the same with her child), but I didn't think it was some big project to teach a child about money; I did it because it made her happy and the quantity of money was too trivial for me to worry about her screwing up. It was trivial for her too; she never saved up enough to buy anything (most likely candidate: a roll of mentos, which would have cost 20 jiao. Turns out it's kind of inconvenient to carry around dozens of tiny coins.).

Anyway, as far as I can see, pretty much the only initiative a child _can_ show is to pester their parents into recycling the cans for them. That doesn't differ much, in my mind, from just pestering the parents into giving them money.

<comment><USER25> Our families and countries work differently.

This scenario doesn't work if the only place to return cans is a recycling center that has no other function and is located at a far away place or if the monetary amount received from cans is trivial. It doesn't work too well either if a child can just pester for money instead of having a fixed allowance + bonuses for work.

In Finland the return amount is currently 0.1-0.4€ per can/bottle and one can return them to the nearest grocery store. For me that was some serious pocket money - even a few bottles could buy some candy.

And it wasn't about pestering my parents to go to the store, more like tagging along when they went. I still had to carry the cans (or at least carry as much as I could if there were a lot) and return them to the machine myself - <USER3> different from just getting money handed over.

Anyway, my personal experience from my country of residence is that returning bottles is a good way to make pocket money especially if you can monopolize bottles from your own household and you have poor income.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Instead of trying to criminalize this, it should be seen as a first rung to get people reintegrated into society. The people that pull a night shift are demonstrating amazing work ethic.

<comment><USER27> Some of the people pulling night shifts are unable to integrate into society because of drug or alcohol problems, or because of stigma against people with mental illness, or because of learned helplessness.

There's not much difference between going through trash to get soda cans or being the guy who stacks the dishwashing machine, except that dishwasher guy loses the job if he doesn't turn up whereas the can-gathering guy just loses a night's wages.

EDIT: But I do strongly agree with your post. Criminalising this seems wrong headed - these people are helpful to society and are working, and we should be thinking of ways to help them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> > _If customers ask, supermarkets must either redeem cans themselves or pay a > fine of $100 per day - as must all stores and cafes in the area._

It sounds like this is mainly a question of enforcement - and the willpower in the city to back that enforcement. Here in Sweden we have no law forcing stores to take back their cans, but I don't think I've ever seen a supermarket however small without a recycle vending machine. Then again, we don't have the homeless problem SF does.

<comment><USER29> Are you sure there's no law in Sweden? In Denmark, any store that sells more than a certain number of bottles has to have one of the reverse-vending machines to take them back and repay the deposit.

<comment><USER28> I assumed there was, but I googled it and there isn't. [https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=panta+f...](https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=panta+flaskor+lagar&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8#q=pantflaskor+skyldighet+butik&rls=en)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> In Finland, one gets 0.15€ per can returned and slightly less/more for different kinds of bottles. It is very easy to return these since every grocery store has a return machine and one can just take the money without buying anything.

The consequence of this is that some people patrol the streets and collect every returnable can they can find just like in this article. However, during summers it seems to be very lucrative business as many people go to city parks to enjoy the sun and some beer. Very few people bother to collect their own cans since one can just toss the can and be sure that someone will collect it within minutes.

I've noticed that the can collecting business is somewhat organized during the prime season. Major parks seem to have groups of people (sometimes quite young, children even) who try to monopolize the can collecting in each park. Periodically there is a car that takes all their cans presumably to a bulk return center. None of these people are ethnic finns.

I'm not sure how I feel about this. It seems horrible that some people venture off from one country to pick up the thrash of others in another country. OTOH the trash problem is reduced and we cannot interfere with the free movement of people within EU.

</comment><comment><USER30> When energy prices were high in the late 1970s, my dad and I went out on evenings and weekends collecting cans. At the time it was profitable to do this without any deposit, and we made $200 (in less inflated dollars) on a good week. We made enough money to buy two aluminum bicycles, as well as many other things.

</comment><comment><USER31> I live in a fairly rural area of Michigan and there are a few guys who I see biking 30-40 miles a day picking up cans, 12 months out of the year.

In SF you could make a ton more money just sitting on a corner with a sign asking for money. Especially if you get a spot near a MUNI/BART stop.

<comment><USER32> Wonder if any homeless setup a stand/bag in a high-traffic area and ask for donations of empty cans/bottles? Put up a little "recycling service" sign.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I lived 1 block from this recycling center for 4 years. It attracts nefarious sort of homeless who among other pleasantries, defecate on sidewalks, break-in to parked cars, yell violently at each other and passerbys (probably due to mental illness of varying severity), and maintain packs of un-domesticated pit-bulls. I am pro-recycling but the patrons of this center are a danger to the community and that is why it is closing and should be closed. NIMBYism takes on a different meaning when your city allows violent, mentally-ill homeless to do as they wish on the streets w/o proper care. I think the recycling policy issue here is sort of tangential.

<comment><USER34> > NIMBYism takes on a different meaning when your city allows violent, > mentally-ill homeless to do as they wish on the streets w/o proper care.

Well, it's a good thing closing one "recycling center" will go a long way towards fixing that problem in San Francisco.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> It always makes me sad when I see people rummage through the dumpsters in front of my house. Here in Germany most I see doing this are older people. Some of them could be my grand parents. I know nothing about them but old people should not have to rummage through my litter to make a living. It is simply embarrassing. Germany is one of the richest countries in the world still I have the impression that there are more and more people rummaging through litter.

We can shoot people on the moon, have a space station orbiting our planet, and we can heal once fatal diseases. Is poverty really such a tricky problem to solve?

</comment><comment><USER36> I use to take recycling to that very spot (in banner image)! more than 20 years ago. Which I would never have remembered without seeing that picture. Human pattern recognition / memory recall is neat!

</comment><comment><USER37> If you're that poor, drink tap water and don't buy beer and soda. You'll save way more that way than you could possibly make recycling.

Here's another idea, don't accept it. Don't settle for poverty. One of the main problems I have with welfare systems is that it causes people who don't have to, to settle for being poor. If you just accept it, you'll stay that way. (I realize the improbability that someone so poor is reading this.)

<comment><USER38> You are a 40 year old mother of three children that has just been divorced and has been out of the labor market for 15 years. You have only a high school diploma and no marketable job skills. To make matters worse, you don't live near any major population centers, and without savings you can't afford to move. What do you do? It's important to recognize the extremely difficult situations people get stuck in when every disadvantage is compounding. There's only so much a stiff upper lip can do. The competition for regular employment at this level is fierce, and compensation is just enough to keep you from improving your situation. You can reasonably argue that this person has made a lifetime of poor decisions, but suggesting that people should simply "not settle for it" is not a solution.

<comment><USER37> It's neat how you picked an example that doesn't apply to my point.

I fully understand the difficult situation people get "stuck" in. The reason people are "stuck" is many times because no one is telling or showing them that there are ways out. They are simply mailing them a check to hold them over until the next check. But I know more than a handful of people who got out of the ghetto and welfare situations and it wasn't a government program that pulled them out. There was community help, like churches, for instance. But in almost every case they bootstrapped their way out. They started by deciding to be honest. They accepted responsibility. They listened to good advice.

When flat broke, what are you going to lose by moving? What do you have to move? Not much. Try something, anything.

My overarching point is that welfare handouts hurt more people than they help in the long term. They create reliance instead of independence.

EDIT: As I thought about this a bit more, I realized your scenario and my point are not that far apart. The 40 year old woman with a high school diploma and 3 kids in your example may not be able to change her own circumstances that easily but she has three little minds that she can mold day after day about rising above those circumstances. Instead, what we usually see is poverty passed on to the next generation. If she accepts poverty as a way of life she is more likely to pass the mindset on to her kids.</comment></comment></comment>


The Magic SysRq key - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key

<comment><USER2> I'm surprised no one has commented about this yet, I use this trick all the time as a NOC tech. Holding the sysrq key and typing:

R E I S U B

is much better than holding the power button.

Just remember: Raising elephants is so utterly boring

<comment><USER3> > Just remember: Raising elephants is so utterly boring

FTA: the word "BUSIER" read backwards

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does the Sysrq key do anything else besides this? It doesn't make sense for everybody to have it on their keyboards just to serve low-level developers. The same goes for scroll lock and to some extent pause. A lot of keyboards combine these together and make them hard to find but they're still there for every computer user on the planet to look at and read while they're trying to find a key they actually want.

<comment><USER5> Well, at least in my Spanish keyboard there are two functions for the SysRq key, as the keycap says:

Impr. Pant. | Pet. Sis. -- which is expanded to --> Imprimir Pantalla | Petición a Sistema -- which translates to --> Prnt Scr | SysRq

So that binding makes the key actually useful for everyday activities.

<comment><USER6> Yes, the key is the same on English keyboards too. I've no idea about USB keyboards, but on AT keyboards that key actually generates two separate scan codes depending on whether it's pressed without alt (PrtSc) or with (SysRq). So in a sense SysRq is genuinely a separate key, that just shares its button with another.

(I don't remember what happens to the Alt key press when you use it to invoke SysRq - I suppose it just appears as normal and so the Alt+SysRq combination sort of doesn't exist.)

Interestingly the SysRq scan code is far easier to detect - there's just one value to watch for rather than (as with PrtSc) a whole sequence of them. Probably a legacy of its having its own key on older keyboards.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Knowing these is a must if you're doing embedded development. I have a printout of the table on this page posted on the wall of our validation lab.</comment>


Introducing Tcl 8.7 Part 11: The ZIP virtual file system - <AUTHOR> https://www.magicsplat.com/blog/tcl87-zipfs/ <comment><USER2> This isn't going to help anyone .... But the RISC OS operating system had the facility to go into archives as if they were directories at the operating system level in 1991. ZIP and a few others were supported out-of-the-box.

They weren't just read-only, you could write to files as well. Albeit slowly.

There was no process of "mounting" an archive such as a ZIP to a particular "mount point". You simply treated the ZIP as if it were a directory and accessed files inside it.

If modern operating systems had the same feature, this Tcl feature would be unnecessary.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure about writing directly (vs save as), since I only use it for reading, but you can directly open the contents of zip files from Windows explorer or file open/save dialogs. Just provide a full path. For example, c:\archive.zip in the address bar, or c:\archive.zip\file.txt in the filename field.

Having said that, I rarely use it, since I prefer higher compression than zip gives me, and files in uncompressed containers on my drives are usually like that to keep windows defender out.</comment></comment>


The decentralized Dropbox - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/internxt/X-Core <comment><USER2> How about SyncThing?</comment>


New MacBook Pro keyboard design may fix dust problems after all - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/07/new-macbook-pro-keyboard-design-may-fix-dust-problems-after-all/ <comment><USER2> Hopefully. I live in a pretty dusty country (Kampala, Uganda) and I'm hoping to upgrade this winter.</comment>


German BND Aided NSA in Spying on Dutch, French and Austrians - <AUTHOR> http://jacquesmattheij.com/German-BND-Aided-NSA-in-Spying-on-Dutch-French-and-Austrians

<comment><USER2> More than being out of control, the spies seem to be _in_ control. They do what they want, without oversight, and government leaders are "shocked, shocked" when these things are exposed.</comment>


Django-smtpd allows you to handle email messages just like Django processes HTTP requests. - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/p/django-smtpd/

<comment><USER2> The website proclaims this loudly:

> _This is a quick hack. Never use this in the wild._

Would be nice to know why, and what the alternative would be.

</comment><comment><USER3> As an avid Django user, this doesn't interest me in the slightest. Msybe if the name were better.</comment>


Ribbon map of the Mississippi River (late 1860s) - <AUTHOR> https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/mississippi-river-ribbon-map <comment><AUTHOR> [http://common-place.org/book/one-mississippi-coloney- fairchi...](http://common-place.org/book/one-mississippi-coloney-fairchilds- ribbon-map-of-the-father-of-waters-1866/) One Mississippi: Coloney & Fairchild's Ribbon Map of the Father of Waters (1866) — Nenette Luarca-Shoaf. "Two inches wide and eleven feet long, it mapped, among other things, a reunited nation."

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Browsable/downloadable version in the Library of Congress: [https://www.loc.gov/resource/g4042m.ct000797/](https://www.loc.gov/resource/g4042m.ct000797/)</comment>


Ask HN: Suggestions for email provider separate from vps - <AUTHOR> I currently use a shared hosting provider to handle my email for several domains, but I run all other aspects on a digital ocean droplet.  The costs for this shared hosting provider has skyrocketed.  I am looking for a good email provider that does not break the bank that I can setup a few domains on with a dozen or so email accounts.<p>Can anyone suggest a good provider? <comment><USER2> Google Apps for Business is good and affordable. $5 per email address. They only charge per email address, so you can add multiple domain support to each address.

Just in case, they do offer phone support that is very helpful for emergencies.

We have been using them now for several years and have never had a major problem. Several months ago we had to merge another Google Business account into our existing account and late on a Saturday night we had a support rep working with us through the entire process to minimize downtime and also ensure we didn't lose any email along the way. They followed back up with us several days later to see if everything was working properly and if we had any more issues. I was pleasantly surprised considering the horror stories you hear about Google in general.</comment>