Why Net Neutrality Regulation is the Path to Ending Net Neutrality - <AUTHOR> http://hustlebear.com/2011/01/05/why-net-neutrality-regulation-is-the-path-to-ending-net-neutrality/

<comment> T-R > This is ONLY a debate about whether control over our access should be in the > hands of Internet Service Provider companies (ISPs) or… the Government.

As far as I'm aware, no one wants government to regulate the internet - <USER2> Neutrality supporters just want rules saying that ISPs can't regulate it either. The issue of censorship is irrelevant, and could even be made explicitly so, if that's what legislators who oppose Net Neutrality are actually worried about.

> [ISPs] are regulated by YOU!

Except in areas where there's essentially a monopoly, and the high cost of entry into the market is likely to keep it this way, where ISPs are free to abuse their market position for fun and profit.

> who's regulating the FCC?

The executive, legislative, and judicial branches.

> which hypothetical scenario is more likely? The FCC overstepping its current > authority, or ISPs delivering services that its customers are not happy > about?

... I'm speechless.

> Regulation = Freedom only in George Orwell's 1984.

And Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle".

<comment><USER3> > Except in areas where there's essentially a monopoly, and the high cost of > entry into the market is likely to keep it this way, where ISPs are free to > abuse their market position for fun and profit.

Which areas do you have in mind? "The FCC's own data shows that as of June 2008, 98 percent of zip codes have at least 2 broadband providers, and 88% of zip codes have at least 4 broadband providers."

And given the trend of increased access identified in that FCC report, what leads you to suppose things are likely to stay a certain way?

>> who's regulating the FCC? > The executive, legislative, and judicial branches.

Except the judicial branch, which the FCC decided to ignore after it started ruling the FCC does not have the authority to regulate the net. And except the executive branch, which already supports regulation of the net. It's a damn good thing we have three.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This (terribly wordy) article makes about 2 decent points:

1\. The FCC is more than happy to step in and assume the power to regulate the internet, as every entity desires growth.

2\. The more ISPs have to play to politics game, the more they will suck up to power, and look for ways to appease that power (ie gradual censorship).

To actually convince anyone, I'd suggest cutting most of the hyperbole and trimming up the salient points. In addition:

3\. Communication has always been tiered between bundles of lowest-common- denominator services, and general net access. Past innovations were driven by modems (at least $20/mo on top of a landline), while the masses had only dialtone.

4\. Don't be scared by graphics showing lots of hypothetical pricing options, the highest priced tier (what one currently considers "standard") will be the standard $20-$40 more than the budget tier. (A quick litmus test as to whether something qualifies as internet access is whether it allows ssh/vpn. And there will always be internet access available, barring it being made illegal, in which case government certainly isn't the _remedy_ )

4\. The more non-packagable applications there are in _widespread_ use, the more common the demand for standard commodity access. Bittorrent and VPN are quite embedded.

5\. If you are worried about net neutrality, work at a _local_ level. Cities _already_ have the power to regulate who strings wires on public land, and can even build out public infrastructure! The incumbents have been somewhat successful scaring off community fiber projects, but they won't win that battle indefinitely.

</comment><comment><USER5> Funny that this is posted the same day that we see this from MetroPCS: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2070797>

<comment> judd-hustlebear I don't see anything at all wrong with the Metro PCS offering. If you want any of their options, you're getting a fair deal. Completely unlimited internet access is still being offered, so no one is actually restricted or harmed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> First two sentences:

"Let's bring some perspective here. People have become hysterical. They are DEMANDING Net Neutrality."

I stopped reading there. Based on the other comments, looks like I didn't miss much.

If you're doing this hacky a job of writing, you're either out of ideas and need to hit a deadline, you're getting a backhander from someone, or both.

</comment><comment><USER7> Both sides say they want to keep the Internet free and open. Which side is lying?

<comment><USER8> I don't think anybody is necessarily lying, but you might ask which side has actual experience in D.C.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Lot of nonsense in this article:

 _> Regulation = Freedom only in George Orwell's 1984._

I guess we should stop regulating that whole "freedom of speech" thing. Who protects your freedom of speech? AT&T? Verizon? Did you forget?

THE GOVERNMENT.

Who makes sure your kids can drink from the same water fountains that white- kids drink?

THE GOVERNMENT.

I could go on of course, perhaps quote that god awful _regulation_ known as the Bill of Rights, but I think the point is clear. Unlike a company, its sole purpose isn't to "maximize profit". Its "Board of Directors" (Congress) and "CEO" (President) is elected by the entire People of the United States (or [insert country-name here]). We have the power, every few years or so, to throw these elected representatives out.

Net Neutrality is our generation's freedom of speech debate, and just like free speech, it needs to be protected. Yes, by... THE GOVERNMENT, because that's how you protect the nation as a whole.

<comment><USER10> In what way has the government protected freedom of speech? The first amendment is about stopping the government from restricting speech, and it's only when the government restricts speech that there's even a reason. In fact, the government tries time and again to restrict speech, and if they decide, collectively, to block it, there's no recourse besides moving to another country.

You've got press blackouts in the 1940s, you have the PMRC triggering congressional hearings about musical content in the 80s, you've got crypto laws in the 90s, you've got the DMCA, you've got the DHS seizing domains, you've got calls to have Wikileaks banned. Your all-caps "the government" did these, and keeps doing them, and I don't know which government you're watching if you think that these elected officials and unelected bureaucrats shouldn't be kept on the shortest leash possible.

The Bill of Rights regulates no one but the government itself. The government has two roles: to keep others from infringing on my rights, and to keep its nose out of my damned business unles I infringe on others'. It's doing a lousy job, but that's a different issue.

There exists no private entity that can legally stop me from saying what I want. They can keep me from doing it on land they own or with resources they own, but that's fine. I don't want them to be able to freely use my resources without my consent, either. That's the concept of private property. But I can get a bullhorn and run down to city hall and yell, I can publish a newspaper, I can create a blog. If $company_x doesn't want to host my blog, I can get $company_y to do it. If my government can stop me on a whim, though, then I'm screwed.

(Edit: typos, damnable phone, it's trying to censor me.)

<comment> T-R I agree with you that government should be kept on a short leash, for the reasons you state, but we don't want to strangle it, either - Government has a job to keep others from infringing on your rights. If ISPs are free to regulate traffic, then they have the power to strangle the business of a content provider by preventing their customers from accessing the content. Even if you argue that customers have chosen their infrastructure provider, how is the infrastructure provider not infringing on the rights of the content provider, which doesn't even do business with them?

<comment><USER10> I agree that the government's job is to keep others from infringing on individual rights, but I don't see a content provider's rights being violated. Let's say Verizon starts offering "everything on the net except NetFlix" as a package. They're not obligated to carry any traffic they don't want, and there's no law that stops them from blocking that traffic right now. They don't do it because they'd lose tons of customers; this is one evil thing that they have an incentive not to do. (If _all_ ISPs, or even all ISPs in a given area do this, then rights are violated, and they'd get slapped with violations of the RICO Act; that's a different matter, though.) They lose money if they do it. What if the FCC decides to kill off NetFlix, though? The downside for them is that somewhere down the line (still waiting for this in the case of the DMCA...) a judge tells them they can't.

Let's say it's fine for the FCC (or another government entity) to do this, though. What if I run open WiFi, but I block bittorrent traffic? Have I violated my neighbors' rights? I think I can do what I want with my pipe, but would this be under the FCC's authority? I'm not a business, sure, but what about the WiFi at, say, Starbucks? I trust a non-monopoly much more than I trust a government, which has a de facto monopoly over imposing its will by force on the populace.

Built into the laws of this country is an inherent mistrust of the government., the idea that authority over the populace has a corrupting influence, and that it should be kept limited to the extent possible. You hope for the best (a benevolent set of leaders) but plan for the worst (a power- hungry group of totalitarians). The Constitution's plan for the worst is to avoid trusting in our leaders' benevolence and keep them from getting enough rope to string us up. It's what I love about this country.

I think most of the commenters here agree on that principle, so I would like to apologize as it seems I've been a little abrasive, and we're all on the same side here (at least apparently). But I am secure in my belief that the government is too big already and its authority needs to be reduced, not expanded in any direction.

<comment> T-R We are really all on the same side - the concern on both sides is about centralizing power. Your concern is that we're giving government too much power, mine is that we're trading government power for corporate power, and we each see the power we grant as mitigated somehow - either by the 3 branches of government, or by the free market, and neither has faith in the other's mitigating force.

Starbucks free WiFi is an excellent point, which sheds light on the underlying philosophical debate. If an organization provides a resource (WiFi, water, a job), but only to a select group of their choosing, at what point do we call it supplying a service, and at what point do we call it discriminatory starvation? Is the glass half full, or half empty?

If there's competition, it's moot, but if there isn't any, we're giving the single supplier complete power over distribution (slippery slope to plutocracy argument). If we ban discrimination, it's also moot, but then we're giving government power to dictate rules for private organizations (slipperly slope to fascism argument).</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Does increase in responsibilities and headcount warrant promotion/raise? - <AUTHOR> Hello HN,
TLDR; Engineering Manager here. Direct Reports increased from 12 -> 24 + Responsibility up 2x. Does that deserve a raise or promotion?
I work for a Fortune 100 telecom company as a Software Engineering Manager. I have been recently informed of an increase in my direct reports of 100%(12 -> 24) and responsibility increase from a subset of the product to the whole enchilada(2x-5x) Should I get a raise or a promotion? If so, I have an offer with a 10% raise and promotion in the works with a Fortune 1000 company. Should I take that?
Would love to hear y'alls thoughts and opinions! <comment><USER2> I think if your Job Description changes and you have to manage more individuals the complexity of your job also increases. You should indeed get some sort of increase in $$$ or promotion, ideally both.

You may have to work a few months in your new role before your boss will consider a pay increase. While you wait, collect the facts and figures that show how your new role benefits the company. Decide the maximum and minimum you'll accept, then ask for a meeting.</comment>


How Remixing Became the Most Important Art Form in Contemporary Culture - <AUTHOR> https://thump.vice.com/en_us/article/remixing-kahn-interview-feature <comment><USER2> "Attention Economy" is a nice term.

FWIW I both love and hate remixes; sometimes they bring out an aspect of the track that artist didn't emphasize enough in the original mix. Sometimes the remixer makes an entire new song from the skeleton of the original using only one symbolic sample.

Sometimes remixers do a poor job and are uncreative and just want to be famous.

In that way it's not too different from music generally, just lowers the bar for effort involved.</comment>


The Rise of Men Who Don't Work – And What They Do Instead - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/12/upshot/the-rise-of-men-who-dont-work-and-what-they-do-instead.html <comment><USER2> The silent yet steady substitution of unemployment benefits with federal disability insurance is well covered in an episode of _This American Life_ [1]. We, as a country, have a shoddy system for re-training low-skills workers facing technological obsolescence. We have also set up a system under which unemployment benefits are largely a state liability. Disability, on the other hand, is federally funded. The intersection of these trends, as documented by _This American Life_ , lands us in the curious situation of state governments encouraging their unemployed to seek disability benefits (thereby shifting their burden onto the federal budget).

In the short run, state unemployment and federal disability benefits have similar effects. Social stability is enhanced through buying off the poor. But long-term disability is not designed for the under-trained. Its means-testing paradigm discourages even the exploration of employment options which might jeopardise the applicant's disability status. Thus a one-way valve to dependency on the state's largesse.

[1] [http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/490/t...](http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/490/trends-with-benefits)

<comment><USER3> And it's not just disability benefits. When you stop and really analyze it; Medicaid and health insurance credits, SSI, food stamps, EITC, FICA, progressive income tax rates, refundable tax credits, phased-out tax deductions, even things like housing and energy assistance, etc.

There's easily $60,000 of services, utilities, fees, and taxes that you pay when earning $100k, that you get for free or don't have to pay if you earn $0. As @fredophile says, then you still have to add in the direct/indirect costs of going out and earning that money (e.g. childcare for starters), and you can easily gain net-zero or negative benefit all the way up to $100k of household income.

I'm sure people must have researched this extensively, and can give a properly cited cost analysis, but it's something I've been calling the 'middle class crucible'. Until you break out on the other side of $150k household income, the vast majority of your earned income is effectively running on a treadmill. E.g. On the order of 80 cents of each dollar you earn.

Every progressive (means-tested) social support program or tax rate, by definition, is a penalty for working. These programs have grown so big, and phase-out so aggressively in the income curve, it's an incredible trap / attack against the middle class.

<comment><USER4> That actually sounds like you might be able to back that up - would be interesting to see the actual stats. But I think you're missing a certain qualitative difference though - the services the 100K-income household is getting for their 60k are _significantly better_ than the services the 0-income household is being given. Obviously they're probably spending money on better food than the food stamps would cover, they're likely living in better conditions in a better neighborhood, and their health insurance probably gives them more choices than they would have on medicaid.

<comment><USER3> There's definitely a qualitative argument. Certainly that's what you see if you turn on any ad-supported media, and you're inundated with that "quality of life" everyone is _selling_ to the middle-class.

But for example, you can pay ~$1000/mo for a family of 4 for "Silver" health insurance and earning > $63k you would have to pay the full amount. Credits pay for almost the entire cost (aka $12,000 of tax-free income from the Fed) if your household income is $33k. So under just one program (ACA), $30k of incremental work disqualifies you from $12k of assistance. And that's for the same exact plan/service.

Then you get below $33k household income and instead of paying thousands for a Silver plan with a $6,000 family deductible, you pay basically nothing and have no deductible for Medicaid / Medi-Cal. That's effectively a $24,000 / year value for a family of 4. [1]

In both cases, you can argue about access to top-specialists for chronic care, but certainly access to acute care coverage is equivalent (i.e. hospitals can't base their ER services based on ability to pay). In many ways Medicaid is better because deductibles are a hell of a lot lower than $13,500 Bronze / $6,000 Silver.

By the way, Whole Foods takes food stamps. So that's another example where you get straight up cash for not working. Up to $8,400 / year, cash on a debit card, which phases out as household income goes to ~$30k / year (plus allowed deductions) for a family of 4. [2]

If you have a qualifying disability and have to make the choice of giving up work and going on DI, assuming you have the work history credits, it's another up to $31,000 / year of income (not entirely tax-free though). [3]

That's over $60k right there, and there are many more programs to account. It would add up to well over $100k except you can't fully stack all of the programs, e.g. CA SDI payments count against SSDI payments.

I was thinking about making a "how much do you lose by working" micro-site as an excuse to play with D3 and interactive visualization, targeted to residents of California, but the whole thing was too infuriating I haven't mustered the motivation to do it.

[1] - [http://www.coveredca.com/shopandcompare/#incomeGuidelines](http://www.coveredca.com/shopandcompare/#incomeGuidelines)

[2] - [http://www.stanworks.com/community-reports/other- services/co...](http://www.stanworks.com/community-reports/other- services/content.php?nav=food-stamps/food-stamps-faq.htm)

[3] - [http://www.disabilitysecrets.com/how-much-in- ssd.html](http://www.disabilitysecrets.com/how-much-in-ssd.html)

<comment><USER5> While this is interesting, I'm not sure what point we should really be taking away from it. That government assistance is so good it's a motivator not to work? It's easy to play with numbers and make it look like you're "losing money" by working, but it's somewhat disingenuous. For instance, in practice that "$30K of incremental work" is statistically very likely to involve a job with a company that provides health care for their employees and dependents.

Furthermore, your description of the way food stamps work is correct but elides how that "phase out" works. Under current CalFresh guidelines[1], a household of 4 grossing $30K a year would get $98 a month. If they grossed $24K a year that would go up to $218 a month -- an extra $1440 a year, when you work it out, which is to say much less than what they'd net by just making another $6000 a year.

[1]: [http://foodstampguide.org/calculating-the-grant-how-much- do-...](http://foodstampguide.org/calculating-the-grant-how-much-do-you-get/)

In practice, I'd suggest that most of these calculations are going to work out in roughly the same way: yes, you're "losing out" on government assistance by making more money, but the benefits you accrue from _actually making more money_ more than offset that.

<comment><USER3> chipotle_coyote, you give the perfect example (actually it's close to the worst case part of the curve). A family of 4 making $24k/year, working their ass off to increase their income 25% to $30k/year. But at the end of the year, what happened?

      Gross Increase in Income: $6,000
      - FICA:                  ($  918)
      - Fed Income Tax:        ($  900)
      - State Income Tax:      ($  500)
      - Reduced Food Stamps:   ($1,440)
      - Reduced EITC:          ($1,260)  [21% phase out after $23,260]
      - Reduced ACA:           ($ ???)   [Just about to lose Medi-Cal]

That's just top of my head. There are other programs I'm definitely forgetting or don't know about. There's _at least $5,000_ of additional taxes you pay, and credits you lose, for earning that $6,000. If I had all the numbers, I'm sure said hypothetical family is _worse off_ earning the extra $6,000. They literally now have less money to spend on food every week.

Think about how broken this is. At the point in the curve where adding $6,000 in family income could actually be life-changing, the government claws back _at least 83% of it_?! Fucking A... (sorry, this really makes me mad).

> "$30K of incremental work" is statistically very likely to involve a job > with a company that provides health care

I count benefits as part of income. So if part of the increased payroll expense is actually spent by the employer paying for a private health plan (with a high deductible and cost sharing with the employee) that's a huge net- loss for the family versus getting cash income from the employer and keeping their free health care from Medi-Cal. (It makes zero difference to the employer, ACA penalties aside, either way it's a fully deductible business expense)

Edit: I see you gave two examples, $24k vs $30k, and lets say $30k vs $60k. If we do a detailed realistic budget accounting for all costs, credits, programs, etc. you will find "earning $60k" you actually have less money to spend than "earning $30k". You will be net-negative if you have any significant health care expenses at all. It's completely counter-intuitive, and in fact, borderline insane.

<comment><USER5> > I count benefits as part of income.

While there's a case to be made for that, it's not what most people do -- and it's not what you do for computing benefit eligibility for food stamps, ACA, and other government programs, AFAIK. So I'm not sure you _should_ count benefits as income for this purpose. In principle you're right re: getting cash income instead, but in practice, I'm not sure it's that clearcut.

Re: taxes vs. credits, it would be _really_ interesting to actually work that out. I'm not convinced your take is right, but I'm not convinced my take is right, either. :) I didn't intentionally pick the perfect example; the $24K a year came from typing "2000" into the spreadsheet I downloaded from the CalFresh web site because "3000" was too high to qualify. I didn't actually try any numbers other than 2000 and 2500. But my suspicion remains that _most_ people would be better off actually working than taking assistance programs, both in purely pragmatic terms and in less quantifiable terms -- I've known a fair number of people who make assistance-qualifying incomes but I haven't known a single one who wants to be in that position. (Which is of course anecdotal, but it's still interesting to me.)

(Also, I don't think you can really count every possible credit -- most people can't qualify for disability income, for instance. And the observation I made about not wanting to be in that position is _extremely_ relevant here; I've known a couple people who get permanent disability income and they absolutely do not consider it a good thing. They're making less than they were when they could actually get employment, and that's not getting into unquantifiable but real things like damage to their self-esteem.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Look ma, that's me! Free of a soul crushing corporate job, back to doing a "startup", I may not have the cash rolling in, but at least I'm in control of my destiny. Hey Ma, I'm moving in!

I think there are a lot of people out there like me. I have some money coming from side projects, several opportunities to grow that, and several opportunities for new side projects.

And quite a long personal runway before I have to "get a job" again.

If I can get to personal ramen profitability, that would be great.

And if my cofounders and I get a real startup off the ground that can pay us salaries.... well, then I can start showing up in statistics as employed again.

But either way, it's not as big a deal to me as it would be to men of my age 20 years ago.

And that's a huge shift-- in opportunity towards the individual.

<comment><USER7> I have never had 'a job' and had startups (and later mature companies) since I was 15 (I am 40 now). I am not sure what age you are, but you need to know this thing for sure if you are past, I think, around 30 as running a life like this can be very painful. There simply is a tiny chance of 'big success' while most just live in almost poverty the first 20-30 years of doing this. That's also why I think you are probably young and haven't seen that yet ; most give up and tell stories to their kids later about it.

Not to squash your enthusiasm; just saying that 'control of my destiny' is mostly not true at all; you are being lived by actual constraints of life. If you get a mortgage, kids, spouse, investors etc these constraints can easily 'live' you instead of you controlling anything. I was lucky, but just saying to be careful in thinking this and keep tabs on the 'do I actually still like this' factor. A regular job, for most of my friends who started out with me, was a blessing.

<comment><USER6> I'm older than you. Have done this before, spent 6 years "unemployed" traveling the world before I "got a job" that turned out to be a terrible decision.

Of course you don't have control over your destiny to the point of just wishing you had a million bucks... but I also now don't have a psychotic boss whose only experience has been in the military micromanaging software development and doing everything he can to "control" things without any understanding of software development.

<comment><USER7> Indeed that's a reason I do it as well and I applaud all for going that route ; I'm just saying that if you do it for that reason you might turn out in a smaller prison than actually having a boss. But if you are not greedy, don't care about materialistic things too much, know how to save money for a rainy day and have a family that supports that way of living, I wouldn't want it any other way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > The places with the highest rates of male nonwork include parts of Arizona, > New Mexico, Nevada, Kentucky, West Virginia, Arkansas and Michigan.

The areas of high unemployment in Arizona and New Mexico overlap almost exactly with the Indian reservations. A problem deserving its own analysis.

<comment><USER9> Does that mean that more Indians are unemployed, or that the reservations were placed in the greatest economic crapholes that could be found?

<comment><USER10> The folks living in the reservations have not grown their economies. Economic growth isn't something that happens automatically; you have to go out and start new enterprises, invent new technologies, etc. Some cultures are simply incapable of this and will eventually die out; if you want an extreme example go read "Don't Sleep, There are Snakes" by Daniel Everett.

<comment><USER11> Perhaps you should look at the conditions that were imposed on these areas. Horrible government education and health care, relocation of individuals resulting in horrific suicide rates, boarding schools that beat students for keeping their culture and language, US government mishandling resources to the point the Dept of Interior was required to cut their internet connection multiple times. Never mind the oil and uranium problems.

Its a culture problem, but not from the Native American side. The current generation suffered all these things and is trying to dig out of a hole. The next generation is better poised to grow as the culture is returning.

Also, I would love for you to go to the Seminoles and read them your comment. I expect they would have a words. I would imagine these stats also don't cover pow-wow circuit youth very well, but that would take research.

As a side note, this is the most ignorant and racist comment I have read on HN.

<comment><USER12> There was this article recently that being poor is a set of bad habits and someone commented "poor is a permanent condition, broke is temporary."

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2590535](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2590535)

Stating it that way seems reasonable enough. I haven't read "Don't Sleep, There are Snakes" fully but from summaries I'm guessing the tribes refused to accept Western ways and were comfortable living the way that let them survive for thousands of years. Which is a reasonable thing to do if you could isolate yourself from the rest of humanity and competition.

This article about Northern native tribes [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8449134](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8449134) says that they were far enough along building a settled society of farmers and villages when apocalypse struck and the survivors became roving nomads. Just like all our post-apocalypse movies!

<comment><USER11> You are missing my basic premise, the culture was almost destroyed and is in the process of building backup now. The book has nothing in common with the experience of US Tribes.

The tribes ran the gamut in what they had before Columbus. It is know that trade routes existed bring things only found in the arctic regions south to the deserts and beyond.

<comment><USER10> Oh, I agree completely. If smallpox hadn't been a factor, then the tribes would have been strong enough to compete. They would have kept their cultures and been able to adapt and grow. It's good to hear that they are rebuilding their culture; it means that they won't die out.

The world would look very different today if the European explorers had brought back a virulent disease (like smallpox) instead of merely chronic ones (like syphilis). They simply had no idea what the risks were. They lucked out with malaria and yellow fever as well; most of Europe is too far north for them to be as big a problem as they are in Africa, or as they were in the American south.

<comment><USER11> "If smallpox hadn't been a factor, then the tribes would have been strong enough to compete."

Smallpox is the least of the problems that the tribes faced. The government abuse of land and wealth, the beating out of culture, the killing of food sources, and parking the tribes in the middle of nowhere on land that wouldn't grow anything. Broken promises and laughing officials are the problems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I live in france, am 29, I worked 2 months in my life.

"what they do instead"

Trying to go back to school, I learned programming for 2 years in some technician school program, did not get the degree, after that I expanded my programming skills by myself, but it has been pretty bleak. I'm quite ashamed of myself. I have many ideas of projects, but they really seems to be out of my reach in terms of skill, experience, motivation and networking. I took anti depressants for 4 years but am not so unhealthy in term of mental health...

I'm back at school again, for some equivalent degree, but on 1 year, I have an internship starting wednesday, I really hope it will hook me to some job opportunities.

If I don't get the degree nor a job, well I could really try to start some crowdfunded game project or social network, but I don't feel the industry really needs that many programmers. Maybe I'm really incompetent.

<comment><USER14> > I don't feel the industry really needs that many programmers.

That's definitely false, at least in the US.

<comment><USER15> That's definitely false, we aren't virtualizing brains, we don't have sapient AI, and Mesa still needs tessellation shaders. Plenty of work left to be done.

<comment><USER16> Are those the problems that are best solved by throwing more and more programmers at them? If anything, the people doing the grunt work would be PhD students (save the shaders, perhaps).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> There are books on this phenomenon. Part of what they say is now men have access to their basic needs with out needing to work as much. Entertainment is abundant and relatively cheap and sex isn't tied to marriage. You can lounge around and be if not exactly satisfied, at least not terrible wanting for stuff. Of course these guys are screwed when it comes to retirement.

<comment><USER18> Shortly before meeting m'lady, I'd nearly paid off the house and otherwise driven my expenses to near zero. The prospect of withdrawing from the system ("going Galt") was becoming a realistic option; grow much/most of my food (as my folks had growing up), find a mundane job in walking/biking distance (notable as I lived in the country), and spend my time writing what software I wanted and puttering in a back-to-basics life. We live in a culture of cheap abundance, and if un-hitched and rent/mortgage-free then very little work effort is needed to get by in a comfortable, if humble, lifestyle. (Then I met m'lady, and life got very expensive very fast.)

<comment><USER19> Are you saying 'm'lady' unironically?

<comment><USER18> Yes, as the period referred to spanned unmet/acquaintance/girlfriend/wife. "M'lady" seems a more respectable term than "significant other".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The article states that every month the Census Bureau and Bureau of Labor Statistics asks all men who are not working and not receiving unemployment benefits what their situation is.

How does this process work? Having been in this population, I know for certain nobody from the government has ever asked me for this information.

<comment><USER21> Not all of them, just a random sample of the population which includes some of them: [http://www.census.gov/acs/www/](http://www.census.gov/acs/www/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The problem is there is a multiplier affect from technology today that causes unemployment. The average IQ required to be economically relevant is increasing each year.

<comment><USER23> Do you have any alternatives to what we seem to be doing at the moment? Namely, propping those individuals up from life-failure by state aide programs funded by people that are able to sustain themselves and supposedly others.

<comment><USER24> I would say that this is actually a good solution. It's lopsided today since we don't officially acknowledge that this is what we're doing, but if the trend continues, you and I will also eventually be hit by this development (unless we're exceedingly lucky).

Global wealth tax on large personal fortunes (say, 0.2-1.0% per annum of fortunes greater than $2MM) and even redistribution to everyone will make the solution more transparent and fair.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> (A little facetiously, but..) Perhaps this is just the decrease of work required that was historically expected by economists, being applied unevenly.

Of course there's nothing in the article to suggest many of these people are happy.

</comment><comment><USER26> >Some countries have developed policies that encourage older people to leave the labor force, so they do not "crowd out" younger workers

Classic lump of labor fallacy.

<comment><USER27> You've alerted us to the existence of a fallacy, but you make no effort to explain what the fallacy is or how the argument you are refuting has committed this fallacy.

You did this in a previous discussion with me as well

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8691296](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8691296)

Of course, you are absolutely free to do this if you wish. But I did take the time to explain why I felt you had misdiagnosed the situation, and explained how the position I held was not undermined by the lump of labor fallacy.

Just my own opinion, but if you're going to cite this fallacy, I do think you should be explain how you feel it relates to the current discussion and be prepared to engage in a debate about whether it is relevant.

<comment><USER26> Fair enough.

The main reason why there is a lump of labor fallacy is that it rests on the fact that there is just a fixed quantity of jobs in the economy. A fixed amount of jobs means that thers is only a fixed amount of goods and services people desire. But this is wrong because human wants and desires are unlimited. This is the basic condition in economics. So in theory there is an infinite amount of jobs to be done to cater to our infinite wants.

Now, there are structural reasons for why there isn't universal employment. These can range from government policies, to technological reasons. If people want multistoried houses, and builders can build them, they will have jobs but if the government has policies which block those houses, the builders will not have those jobs. Another thing people want is to travel into space, say a visit to alpha centauri. There may be tourism operator jobs who can do that but technology does not exist which can take us there.

The main focus of government policies to promote and encourage job growth should be on building technology to promote new job creating industries, promoting skills growth to manage these industries, and removing or modifying policies which hinder job growth.

If trade or immigration caused a loss of jobs, the 90s would have been a time of high unemployment. It wasn't because a new industry came up to generate jobs and other jobs were created to service those workers. The same goes for policies to shorten hours or promote early retirement.

<comment><USER27> Yes, that's more or less the lump of labor fallacy. I'm still not sure why it's relevant here.

Here's the full quote from the nytimes article:

"Some countries have developed policies that encourage older people to leave the labor force, so they do not "crowd out" younger workers. But studies across countries and time suggest that crowding-out may not actually be a problem. Economies do not appear to have a fixed number of jobs. When more older people are working, they are earning money that they will then spend in ways that may create more jobs for young people, for example."

So in this case, I don't disagree with you, but it seems that the times article identifies the lump of labor fallacy immediately after the quote you provided.

<comment><USER26> >still not sure why it's relevant here.

I think it is important to point out because so few people still know about it. If few people know about it, they are likely to support harmful policies that they think will help the economy or job creation, but will not.

<comment><USER27> Oh, I agree, I'm just not sure why you felt it was necessary to point it out when the article had already done just that. I don't really see what your comment ads. Were you worried that people had only read the first sentence in the middle of the article and stopped there, not reading the next sentence?

In the other case - our previous discussion, I explained how I though you had misapplied the lump of labor fallacy. You claimed that notion that H1B workers could displace local workers commits the lump of labor fallacy.

I made an argument that very specific, targeted immigration programs designed to increase workforce in a narrow sector of the economy can in fact cause market distortions that lead to displacement and deterrence. This is a pretty common objection to these sorts of visas. Many people who support free markets and free immigration see a real problem when the government starts creating programs where a worker is allowed to come to the US only under certain employment conditions (in this case, related to working as an employee to a high tech company).

Even Milton Friedman chimed in:

"There is no doubt," he says, "that the [H-1B] program is a benefit to their employers, enabling them to get workers at a lower wage, and to that extent, it is a subsidy."

I assure you that Milton Friedman was aware of the lump of labor fallacy. It's a bit more complicated than just citing a fallacy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> As of 2011, there were 3.5M disabled veterans, of which 800K were receiving significant disability benefits.

[https://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/facts_for_...](https://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/facts_for_features_special_editions/cb12-ff21.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> That's an awesome graph. I mean, we could say some things like that the thickness of the gray bit is not so clear, or that it might be better if smoothed, perhaps the legend would be better elsewhere than in the coloured areas, but... it is still a totally expressive and elegant graphic.

<comment><USER29> Yes it made me realize the rise of retirement-aged persons who don't retire. "Can't" retire? What a shift, in only 14 years!

<comment><USER9> I did a lot of work a while back doing longevity projections, i.e., stochastic models of the rate of change of mortality rates at different ages as time goes by. It is a bit of a trend that pension funds might choose to offset their risk by entering into longevity swaps, which work like interest rate swaps, swapping floating payments for fixed payments.

Anyway, I attended a few conferences on aging, and all that fun. One thing that stuck out was that, in Germany at least, the ratio of workers to retirees of 4:1 will be more like 2:1 when I reach the current age of retirement.

Another is that you need to consider years of abled life.

A last is that I will never retire, and probably you won't either.

Note that, in Bismarck's time, life expectancy was about 55:

One persistent myth about the German program is that it adopted age 65 as the standard retirement age because that was Bismarck's age. This myth is important because Germany was one of the models America looked to in designing its own Social Security plan; and the myth is that America adopted age 65 as the age for retirement benefits because this was the age adopted by Germany when they created their program. In fact, Germany initially set age 70 as the retirement age (and Bismarck himself was 74 at the time) and it was not until 27 years later (in 1916) that the age was lowered to 65. By that time, Bismarck had been dead for 18 years.

<comment><USER30> Another myth is that the designers of Social Security in the US did not expect lifespans to increase over time; we are actually a little below target right now on expected lifespans.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I am mesmerized by the age 40 bar. It barely moves; a few more people are retired or are in school. My armchair speculation is that turning 40 really makes people reexamine their decisions.

<comment><USER32> At 40+ you realize you've pretty much accomplished everything you're going to with your life. All those plans and ambitions? You've had 40 years to act, if you haven't done something yet, chances are you're not going to. Its all down hill from there. Hopefully you've got a family you can put you're energy into. At least this was how i felt 40+, ymmv.

<comment><USER32> Thanks for the down votes, guess it's wasn't obvious enough I posted my personal experience, was the ymmv (your mileage may vary) at the end not enough?

<comment><USER33> I think you might be suffering from the current "downvote mania that we're not allowed to talk about or else you'll get downvoted" on HN.

EDIT: I disagreed with you, with a following comment, and didn't downvote you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I occasionally see the rise of the single-breadwinner family where a woman has a job celebrated as forward progress for gender equality or something, but that's misguided. Frankly, a lot of men are just unable to work and then their families are forced to subsist on the woman's job, which still pays, on average, less. Newspapers talk a lot about high-powered female executives with stay-at-home husbands and so on, but that's a small sliver, not somehow representative of the trend.

<comment><USER35> A more subtle point is that the incentive structure for men to work had has evaporated. In divorce (which is largely initiated by women), men stand to lose more in alimony and child support. The economics say that if you marry (and far more people decide not to do these days), you probably shouldn't be the sole breadwinner and you certainly shouldn't earn more than your wife.

I know a number of couples where the man just doesn't work and is supported by his wife. I don't think it's a conscious choice, it's unconscious and based on incentive.

<comment><USER34> Alimony isn't just magically awarded in every divorce case, you know.

<comment><USER35> True, but child-support and the children go overwhelmingly to the mother.

<comment><USER36> I might be wrong, but something like 4% of divorce cases have custody determined by the court, so that's a decision made by fathers (I have custody of my kids, and had no problem getting it, FWIW).

<comment><USER37> True, but it's not a choice made in a vacuum. Often the context is: I'm the only one making enough money to support the kids, so I _have_ to work for this to work out at all, and I can't afford day care. So for the sake of the kids the mother gets custody. "Choice," true---but not free and uninfluenced, as you imply.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> > People in the military, prison and institutions are excluded from these > figures.

One of these is not like the other…

Everyone in the military (at least, who's not also imprisoned) should count as fully-employed.

<comment><USER39> I think the reason they excluded those in the military is to allow an apples- to-apples comparison through time. It could be argued that the large number of draftees through the early 1970's forced some otherwise nonemployed into employment.

<comment><USER11> I think you are right, but I think they are wrong for doing it given the importance of the military in a lot of regions and the military being a known career path for many young males.

<comment><USER40> It's not employment because it doesn't generate wealth.

Your warm feelings about it notwithstanding.

<comment><USER11> So, excluding all government jobs would be appropriate? No police or fire in your numbers either?

<comment><USER40> The government owes $118 trillion total (adding unfunded liabilities). When it can balance its budget than maybe we can have this discussion.

Otherwise, anyone can steal $18 trillion from the masses under the pretense of using it for the public good - when really all (yes, 100%) it does is pay debt interest according to the government's own report on how tax money is spent - and "create" several jobs for you as well.

So no, those shouldn't count unless you want to keep on living on fantasy land, believe government's inflation numbers (and close your eyes when you go grocery shopping), and ignore the fact those government "jobs" do not make us more competitive to other countries. You don't win in the global economy by giving everyone jobs, but by allowing people to create real jobs that compete with other countries so that we as a population become wealthier.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Why do they exclude men in the military from their numbers?

<comment><USER42> They aren't really market participants when it comes to the labor force.

<comment><USER43> Why aren't they considered market participants?

<comment><USER42> Military law punishes them for quitting.

(Walking away from a civilian employment contract wouldn't normally result in criminal charges)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> This related article, also dated today, was linked at the bottom, and is a longer read with more/different details and stories:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/12/upshot/unemployment-the- va...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/12/upshot/unemployment-the-vanishing- male-worker-how-america-fell-behind.html)

</comment><comment><USER18> Where does minimum wage [objectively] fit in?

If an employer can't pay someone what a job is worth, either the job doesn't get done or a machine is found to do it - leaving someone without the opportunity for a job. Yes, it may not be a "living wage", but no wage is even less desirable.

I've started using Taco Bell's remote ordering app. The clerk, seeing how I'd ordered (not using his services), yesterday thanked me for making his job easier. Couldn't help thinking that rather than happy, he should be scared: with all the talk about pushing for $15/hr minimum wages, coupled with automation of order-taking, he's facing prospects of no job instead of an easy one.

I know minimum wage is meant to help, but it only contributes to increased unemployment and inflation.

<comment><USER45> [Objectively] in countries where a minimum wage has been introduced at a higher rate than the US and is reviewed each year it has pushed up wages but had little effect on employment.

e.g. see for instance this discussion [http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/02/labour-m...](http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/02/labour- markets)

Further I can't really stand the crocodile tears of business who want to employ workers at below living level wages. Their fake concern for worker is nauseating.

If workers are having to top up wages with food stamps and government aid then the business, management, and shareholders rather than the worker are effectively being subsidised by the taxpayer.

And if you let companies lower wages to compete then the bad employers drive out the good. Far better to make them compete on the product or service not how badly they are willing to treat people.

<comment><USER46> 1\. min-wage raises are so modest and so slowly phased-in (in the US) so to not produce smoking-gun employment drops, and employers prepare in advance for them, so sloppy underpowered studies don't show any large effect. marginal effects are small and so you need a powerful study.

2\. do you want people who receive food stamps etc. and aren't hireable at $8/hr to have any legal on-the-books employment options or not? either way they're getting the food stamps.

3\. _I_ personally would rather see more Costcos+Trader Joes than Wal- marts+McDonalds, so i want to believe your 'bad employers winning' unless we force higher pay, but presumably people won't work for bad employers, so i don't see where your forecast is coming from. anyway it seems a little cargo- cult. you can't just start paying $20/hr instead of $8 and suddenly beat Costco.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I know this isn't entirely on point but I couldn't help thinking of Mr. Jaggers replying to Pip's question "what will I do?" with "Be a gentleman, of course!" (Dickens reference) when I saw the title.

</comment><comment><USER48> "The decline of traditional pension plans and rising education levels, which are associated with less physically demanding jobs, may both help explain why the elderly are working longer."

Nice spin there, NYT.

<comment><USER40> Nice catch of the propaganda machine at work!

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> "Men Who Don't Work – And What They Do Instead"

Surprised that "read HN" isn't listed as one of the "insteads". Which reminds me, I really ought to do some work.

</comment><comment><USER50> > To the extent that rising nonwork reflects more men graduating from school, > that's good news. Male high school graduation rates have risen 5 percentage > points since 2000, and people with more education earn more and are less > likely to be disabled later in life.

I am not positive this computes. People with more education might earn more _now_ but that doesn't mean that their wages or the amount of jobs in their domains won't go down when more people have a degree.

</comment><comment><USER51> This article describes the growth of disability benefits and the way they are dispensed: thelastpsychiatrist.com/2011/09/how_to_be_mean_to_your_kids.html

</comment><comment><USER52> De-paywalled: [https://archive.today/nOnpV](https://archive.today/nOnpV)

</comment><comment><USER53> There are lot of factors which are discussed but not considered when it came to concluding this topic.

The increase in population : Instead of comparing the ratio or the percentage of working vs non-working with the present population it compares x out of every 100.

The increase in jobs : 2000 vs 2014, the number of jobs available has also changed which is not taken in account. As mentioned in the article older people end up creating more jobs.

The increase in unemployment rate : Yes, this contradicts with the above mentioned increase in jobs point but this should also be a factor. This also is affected by people not-from US who work in US.

The Shift in Generation : 14 years brings/builds a very different minded person and this person might have a different approach to living.

The higher standard of living : This also is one of the reasons why older people are still working and won't leave their jobs as their value is appreciated, helps pay the debt and they could satisfy all their needs to live a life of luxury(?) and fulfil all their ambitions.

<comment><USER54> Middle East wars creating more disabled people.

<comment><USER53> And the article very precisely says

> _(People in the military, prison and institutions are excluded from these > figures.)_

<comment><USER54> Are veterans?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> The only remarkable thing about this NYT article is that it appeared at all. Read Charlse Murray "Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010".

</comment><comment><USER56> None of this is new or surprising. It would be more interesting to apply this kind of visualization to industries, % or part-time jobs, freelance workers, etc.

</comment><comment><USER57> Are there any notable instances of unqualified founders beating the odds and starting a successful business?

</comment><comment><USER58> One of my neighbors is 62 and brilliant. He's worked at Pixar and Silicon Graphics. He cranked out web sites for sites you probably go to. He lost his last job when the company went under. He now applies for jobs all over town and never gets a reply.

If age is the reason, these places don't know what they're missing.

<comment><USER59> Maybe with that much experience they don't think they can afford him?

<comment><USER58> I forgot to mention that. He applied at large and small companies but, the kicker is, he's all set for retirement, doesn't need the money, and only wants to bring in about $20K to $30K so he can help fund a non-profit he likes.

<comment><USER60> I've wondered about this. I often do interviews and say, "This guy isn't gangbusters, but he could help us out with <grunt work that's piling up> if he's willing to work for the right price."

My bosses usually wince at that sentiment, probably because I'm underestimating how much overhead is or something, but there should be a number that makes it worth it, right? And if the guy ends up being smart and reliable, you could ask him to retrain for a job with more responsibility.

Am I missing something? How else are we going to get all these unemployed men retrained in another field, especially growing ones like tech?

<comment><USER61> If your company is having that discussion in the context of full time employment, the indirect costs (i.e. non-salary things like health insurance, 401(k) matching, etc) are a significant factor in the equation. As salary drops, these (relatively fixed) indirect costs become a larger percentage of the cost of retaining someone.

If you measure the value of the employee by the salary you pay him or her, the ratio of total costs incurred by the company to value derived by the company for this one employee increases as that employee's salary drops. This is one of the major reasons that temporary jobs and part time work have become popular solutions to this problem: the indirect costs associated with these types of hires are lower.

What we really need, in an ideal world, is a set of personal benefit programs (health & life insurance are the big ones) which are completely uncorrelated with your employment status or location. Forcing employers to shoulder the burden for personal benefits leads down a dark and dysfunctional path where the programs are not controlled and managed by those who have an interest in them for what they provide, but by those who have an interest in minimizing the costs of such programs.

<comment><USER60> Retraining an unemployed philosophy major to run tests and route bug reports seems feasible as well. There are armies of people that would kill to be a barrista (with benefits) or an administrative assistant. Are you saying Starbucks can find a way to make them more productive than they cost, but engineering organizations can't?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> >When more older people are working, they are earning money that they will then spend in ways that may create more jobs for young people, for example.

But... older people earn 2-3 times more than a younger one (at, least in Portugal). So for each old people there could be 2-3 younger working.

So if you lay off 100 old people you can get ~2500 younger people working. Of course, I doubt that the productivity will be lower per person, but here you are paid by how old are you (not, experience) * what you know</comment>


Introducing Wakari - Scientific Python in the cloud - <AUTHOR> http://continuum.io/blog/introducing-wakari

<comment><USER2> I can see this being useful for teaching environments, but I'm not so sure how useful this would be for actual scientific research.

Most universities tend to have their own computing cluster, which will make storing the (potentially large) datasets easier, and furthermore use of the CPU time is free!

Javascript ploting for the next set of graphs I need to produce for my research though is something I'm actually pondering about. It has the ability to be interactive which can be really helpful.

<comment><USER3> Useful for heavy computation on smallish datasets, but not for moderate computation on big datasets. Here at work the datasets are several gigabytes so this would not be a solution.

After reading the blog post this looks like an enhanced IPython notebook with some additional packages. It could be a good platform to test-drive their technology though.

(I hope this comment does not come across as being too negative --- the tech is cool --- but I really wonder what the use case for this tool is.)

<comment><USER4> _> Useful for heavy computation on smallish datasets, but not for moderate computation on big datasets. Here at work the datasets are several gigabytes so this would not be a solution._

This is just a closed beta for the very first initial version of the product. We absolutely intend to make it a powerful platform for computation on big datasets.

Many people are storing data in S3, and many datasets are sourced from locations on the web or remote data providers, anyway. With Wakari, you can have extremely efficient access to those datasets via IOPro (<http://continuum.io/iopro>), which is adding indexing on S3 data in the next version.

We will also be adding sharing, collaboration, and publishing features in the next version. I completely understand that it might not fit every situation (or your particular situation right now), but I hope that eventually you'll find these other features fairly compelling.

 _> After reading the blog post this looks like an enhanced IPython notebook with some additional packages._

Not the case at all. We provide a fully sandboxed Linux environment, accessible via the browser, with a complete installation of Anaconda Pro. The IPython notebook is an _additional_ feature of Wakari, and not vice versa.

One thing we haven't showcased very much is the fact that you have concurrent access to many different Python environments. Python 2.6 + Numpy 1.5? No problem. Want to try out Numpy 1.7 on Python 3.3? Just change the drop-down, and you get another shell with that. Want to play around with Travis Oliphant's Numba compiler for Python (<https://store.continuum.io/cshop/numbapro>), but don't want to go through the hassle of installing LLVM, LLVM-Py, and Numba on your own system? You're just one button click away.

Like I said, I can understand that Wakari isn't going to solve everyone's problems right now, but it's fairly cool even in this initial version, and it'll only improve over time. :-)

<comment><USER2> _> We absolutely intend to make it a powerful platform for computation on big datasets._

The datasets I run on tend to be several terabytes and all the clusters that I use utilize various distributed filesystems (eg. Lustre [1] or Dcache [2] or Xrootd [3]) to store these files across local storage on all the nodes of the cluster.

I think for big datasets some kind of support for these distributed filesystems will be necessary as most private (scientific) computing clusters use them. The complication is of course that to use these filesystems, one needs to build support for each access protocol into a python module (off the top of my head I'm not sure if they exist yet; perhaps they do). While most of these filesystems do offer standard posix 'mounting', this is usually not recommended for performance reasons.

Perhaps I'm outside of the intended use case anyway. To a certain extent this problem is solved for my field of research (of course nothing ever works all the time heh), as all LHC/OSG Computing Grid centers run the same Scientific Linux distribution with the theory being that any code that works on one should work on another.

But this sounds great for teaching classes and labs! I look forward to using it.

[1] <http://wiki.lustre.org/index.php/Main_Page> [2] <http://www.dcache.org/> [3] <http://xrootd.slac.stanford.edu/>

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the feedback!

You're right that for scientific use cases, the data access story defines mode and methods of computation. Your use case of having a large dataset stored across many files on a distributed FS is one of the cornerstone motivations for building Blaze, next-generation distributed Numpy:

<https://speakerdeck.com/sdiehl/blaze-next-generation-numpy>

<http://vimeopro.com/continuumanalytics/pydata-nyc-2012>

Rather than traditional "load all the data into memory" sort of approaches, Blaze is inherently out-of-core, and allows the user to define mappings of an index space onto local or remote files, and then manipulate that structure at the Python prompt as easily as if it were a small matrix stored in memory. There are existing PGAS approaches that are similar in spirit, but they tend to invoke heavyweight MPI machinery or make assumptions about the regularity or structure of the dataset that is being distributed across the cluster. Our guidance in designing and implementing Blaze is to make simple distributed things easy, and hard things possible; we are not trying to solve decades of distributed computing and linear algebra problems as a start-up. :-)

So, hopefully you can see that with Blaze as your data access mechanism, and Wakari as a web-based front-end, you should be able to do large scale compute from within a web browser.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> And so continues the trend of software with Japanese names. Wakari, or 「わかり」, means "understanding" or "comprehension".

<comment><USER6> Actually it's not a complete word. So, it's like "understan" or "comprehen". Probably because it's still beta.

<comment><USER5> Nope, it actually is a complete word: <http://tangorin.com/general/%E3%82%8F%E3%81%8B%E3%82%8A>

You probably came to that conclusion from the fact that the word 「分かります」 means "to understand". Actually, 「分かります」 is made up of two parts, 「分かり」 (the same word that started this whole discussion), the nominalized form of the verb 「分かる」 ("to understand"), and the polite suffix 「ます」. 「分かり」 (or 「わかり」, as it's often written when nominalized) can of course be used by itself as well.

> Probably because it's still beta.

From a software branding perspective, that would be a really stupid thing to do. It would severely damage your SEO, and you'd be stuck renaming all kinds of resources and files after you go out of beta.

<comment><USER7> Whoa there cowboy. I'm pretty sure that tkf (if he's the same one who's submitted pull requests to my projects) is from the land of the rising sun. And his second statement was a joke. And funny IMHO

<comment><USER5> > I'm pretty sure that tkf (if he's the same one who's submitted pull requests > to my projects) is from the land of the rising sun.

Him being Japanese doesn't automatically make him an authority on Japanese grammar. The small Midwestern town I grew up in is chock full of white-as- bleach European Americans whose ancestors have exclusively spoken English for several generations. Most of them couldn't tell you the difference between an adjective and an adverb if their lives depended on it.

The same goes for many of the foreign (read: white) English "teachers" in Japan. Most of them barely graduated from college, couldn't find any other work, and so they decided to go to Japan to teach English. In actuality, _they_ should be going back to America and spending a couple years in middle school remedial English classes.

In fact, just to confirm, I got out my copy of Koujien (an authoritative Japanese dictionary comparable to Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary or the Oxford English Dictionary) to look up 「わかり」. And sure enough, there it is:

> わかり【分り】

> わかること。さとること。のみこみ。会得えとく。了解。

> And his second statement was a joke. And funny IMHO

Well, that went over my head. If so, then his first statement was probably meant as a joke as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm a big fan of the concept, but this is hardly new (although the interactive graphs are great)

For anyone who wants something like this, check out the IPython notebook and Sage:

<http://ipython.org/> <http://sagemath.org/>

<comment><USER4> This is our MVP, so there are a lot of shared features with some other existing projects. One of our "deep tech" features I don't think anyone else has is the ability to quickly and dynamically switch between different Python environments, meaning that you can easily try out new versions of libraries or test your code with new versions of Python.

We are also iterating on the overall UI and user workflow, to really facilitate the data exploration & analysis process with Python.

<comment><USER9> lmonade (<http://www.lmona.de>) is another (free) scientific software distribution that tries to address these problems. The technology underlying lmonade, basically Gentoo linux, can handle this.

        $ eselect python list
        Available Python interpreters:
          [1]   python2.6
          [2]   python2.7 *
          [3]   python3.1
          [4]   python3.2

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the pointer! However, note that we offer all of the Scientific Python stack built against each of these interpreter versions (and against different Numpy/Scipy versions) as well. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I notice this seems to be a web based portal to a linux environment? If so, anyone care to explain the advantages over say just offering a VNC server to the same linux env?

<comment><AUTHOR> Great question. This is our first release, and we will be fleshing out features, here are a couple of advantages to our approach. We will be able to have much finer grained sharing than is possible with VNC. Eventually you will be able to publish a single interactive plot, or a single environment to collaborate on. For many new users, VNC is a non starter because of the setup involved. VNC works really well for controlling a single computer, but it doesn't help you much with managing clusters, python execution environments, sharing or many of the other things that we are doing with Wakari.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm very excited to give this a try. Congrats on the mvp release.

<comment><USER4> Thank you!</comment></comment>


Ting: a new mobile phone carrier startup (built on Sprint) - <AUTHOR> http://beta.ting.com/

<comment><USER2> This is password-protected.

<comment><USER3> <http://ting.com/> seems to work.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Alcamine – Automate your job search - <AUTHOR> https://alcamine.com/ <comment><USER2> A little feedback. I had to read your opening sentence three times before I understood what you were trying to say. Either make it three sentences or cut the fluff and just say "Receive 15 new jobs in your inbox every day." Then farther down the page you can talk about how my information will stay private. If I'm getting jobs to my inbox, then I obviously am not spending time applying to jobs, so that's a given.

<comment><USER2> Also: this is the part that was most helpful in helping me understand what you actually do "Yes, we parse and read all incoming emails to your @alcamine.com email address. That allows us to rate it against your preferences, score it, and pull in relevant information for you when viewing it. Once you find an opportunity you'd like to learn more about you can "Take it Offline" and continue the conversation from your personal email. We are here to help you find a great job and maintain your privacy, not exploit it."

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree the opening copy needs to change. We're going to push a couple updates tomorrow after we go through all the feedback we've received. Thank you for checking it out.</comment></comment></comment>


Copernicus birthday Google doodle animation  - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/geekmom/2013/02/happy-birthday-nicholas-copernicus/ How is this animation done in HTML5? Any other examples like this? <comment><AUTHOR> I am curious on how this animation done in HTML5? Any simillar examples out there that give an idea?</comment>


Samsung hires two AI experts to boost machine learning - <AUTHOR> http://m.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20180604000366#cb <comment><AUTHOR> Sebastian Seung is doing some of the coolest stuff in neuroscience, so this should be impactful for Samsung.</comment>


'No Religion' Officially Overtakes Christianity in New Zealand Census Stats - <AUTHOR> https://www.tvnz.co.nz/one-news/new-zealand/no-religion-officially-overtakes-christianity-in-new-zealand-census-stats <comment><USER2> Thank God for that.

<comment><USER3> Praise be, under his eye.</comment></comment>


Lawsuit Alleges School Wi-Fi Harmed Child with Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/lawsuit-alleges-school-wi-fi-harmed-child-with-electromagnetic-hypersensitivity/ <comment><USER2> The more random crap we put into our environment, the more we alter lifestyles to adapt to unprecedented physical demands, the more people will have symptoms from ghost like causes.

Take the same Chronic Lyme disease, gluten free crazes, rise in autism, depression ADD, etc. Most of those have to do with inflammation, some sort of immune system malfunction.

Removing as many potential causes as possible is not an unreasonable course of action when the scientific and medical industries offer no solutions for decades. And people with symptoms from ghost causes are left to experiment on their own with gluten freedom, Omega-3 to Omega-6 balances etc.

WiFi is not essential to education or in general. Kids can learn on stationary wired computers then play outside to get the unrest out of their system. Instead they're stuck running around with tablets indoors. In a perfect world, schools would at least teach healthy habits.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wi Fi in the schools is a disaster. Constant screen viewing hampers brain development, cognition and the biological effects of chronic microwave exposure may cause cancer, neurological problems, blood brain barrier permeability, reproductive harm, etc. There are now over a dozen sperm studies that confirm sperm damage from using a laptop. Microwave radiation from Wi-Fi routers was classified a Class 2B carcinogen by the W.H.O. in 2011. None of these microwave emitting devices were ever pre-market safety tested. When we measured the microwave exposure in my daughter's school it was 50x's higher than standing 100 feet from a cell tower. Science confirms this but the 4 trillion dollar telecommunications industry buys scientists, media and members of high profile agencies. Industry money is the second highest source of revenue that the U.S. "Government" has. How can it be that the FCC is funding this disaster and is also in charge of regulating microwave exposures of wireless devices. Exposure levels in the US are 100 x's higher than levels in Russia and China. What do they know about harm that we are not telling??? 34) Scientific Studies Related to Exposure to Microwave Radiation from Wi-Fi

[http://www.wirelesswatchblog.org](http://www.wirelesswatchblog.org)</comment>


What's new in Jekyll 3.4.0 - <AUTHOR> https://forestry.io/blog/post/what-s-new-in-jekyll-3-4-0/ <comment><USER2> Jekyll now prevents double forward slash errors. In this case Jekyll will not append a forward slash to url: because the baseurl: input already contains '/'.

I'm pretty happy about that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ya it's a great addition. It was a really common issue for many getting started with Jekyll.</comment></comment>


5 Things I've learned working with a women-dominated engineering team - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/90304317/a-male-ctos-lessons-on-working-with-female-majority-team <comment><USER2> Not exactly an unbiased report. The person responsible for hiring and running the team says she did a great job! Maybe if the gender mix had been reversed then it would have worked just as well because she is a great manager? If the take away is supposed to be that you should hire a majority of people as females, well that does not scale. If only 1 in 10 developers are female then building a 70% female team is not possible for everyone to do.

</comment><comment><USER3> "THE WOMEN SOFTWARE ENGINEERS ON MY TEAM HOLD THEMSELVES TO EXTREMELY HIGH STANDARDS"

That does sound awesome (shouting notwithstanding). I've noticed that this doesn't happen with teams of men.</comment>


Ask HN: Why am I a terrible software engineer? - <AUTHOR>

It seems like my biggest problem is that I can't read large amounts of code. I don't get to participate in interesting work. I forget everything, even stuff I write down.
Now days I work in sustaining engineering and I'm fairly bad at it (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7188437)
I've been allegedly been doing this for years but it really feels like I have the experience of someone who's recently out of school.
I setup a github and try writing out stuff on my own but no one cares about it. It's mostly private repos anyways. I spend 10-20 hours after hours working on extra stuff. That may be too much as I have other (serious, very real) commitments
Some of you will say 'get good'. That's technically true but it's also what I'm trying to do.
I'm wondering if I've just made serious career errors or maybe I am just permanently screwed. If I never give up and never quit, maybe I'm at my limits?
Maybe I'm a leech like another askHN post talked about (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7196455) and don't know it or how to fix it? <comment><USER2> My bitbucket repository[1] has 8 public projects and over 25 private. I know people don't care about them but I have fun writing them. That is the key, liking what you do, not do it for getting recognition or else. If one day you can come up with a complete project that you think other people can enjoy you are more than welcome to share it and push it to take off, but the most important thing is that you do it for you first. it's not even about being good, I have seen simple projects taking off easily and amazing super complex projects getting shut down immediately.

[1] [https://bitbucket.org/Duiker101](https://bitbucket.org/Duiker101)

</comment><comment><USER3> Neither of these 2 posts say how long you've been doing this work for.

Maybe your just using a language that doesn't relate to you? Have you tried writing in Java? PHP? Ruby? You might be a crappy C programmer but excel in Java.

I sucked in FoxPro but really excel at PHP and am getting pretty good at Obj-C. It's all a matter of how badly you want to learn something. PHP is my career, but I want to be an iOS developer. So everyday, I try. I fail often, but the more I've worked with the language, the better I've gotten and I struggle with it less now adays.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Neither of these 2 posts say how long you've been doing this work for.

Good point. I've been working since 2007. I think the last real new code I wrote was in 2010. Before that, I did something in 2007-2008-ish.

Mostly C/C++. I want to do something else, that's true. maybe android development or ML stuff. I've been reading about that but I don't think I have what it takes

<comment><USER3> > I've been reading about that but I don't think I have what it takes

There is no such thing has not having what it takes. We're fortunate in that you don't necessarily need a degree to excel in this industry. A recruiter asked me just the other week - "how have you gotten this far without a proper education? " \- I didn't know how to answer her. What'd you mean, how? I worked my ass off, learned new things and every job I got I made sure it was a step forward, not backward.

It's impossible to learn a new language over night. But dedicate time to it and over a couple months / year - you might get good enough to use it at a real job.

Always make samples of work and store them somewhere. Start basic, and move gradually towards complex projects. Never know, maybe a startup comes of one of them...

<comment><AUTHOR> I meant that it seems like i'm too dumb. it was like this in school, too. I remember in a networking class I was always bewildered at what the professor was saying and everyone else got. he used the socratic method of teaching; asking questions in a logical fashion. he didn't call on me after a while.

i do keep trying to read and learn about ML or any new tech, but it always seems like I'm clueless because there's more stuff I don't know or never knew about. it's never good enough to get a job. just thinking about it now makes me feel like a loser when i should feel excited at new knowledge. maybe i'm just burning out. i feel like I'm at the end of my life

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's debatable who actually does read large amounts of code; see: [http://www.gigamonkeys.com/code-reading/](http://www.gigamonkeys.com/code- reading/)

I personally only read large amounts of code when trying to grasp the overall structure of a large application. But I'd rather not read large amounts of code; I'd rather read a design document! But not everyone writes them... :-(

I would opine (based on experience!) that work like bug-fixing _can_ be so monotonous that your mind starts getting a little mushy as you do it day after day after year after year. It doesn't tend to be the kind of work that promotes great engineering thought. It's . . . a job. Which is okay, as far as it goes. But if you want to grow as an engineer, you need to design and build things.

I would suggest reading:

[http://philip.greenspun.com/seia/](http://philip.greenspun.com/seia/)

and especially:

[http://philip.greenspun.com/seia/writeup](http://philip.greenspun.com/seia/writeup)

which talks about professionalism for software engineers. You might find some inspiration there. (And the whole book, even if you don't build web applications, is still a worthwhile read to gain some insight into how a professional software engineer thinks.)

<comment><AUTHOR> By reading code, I also meant debugging. They don't really explain how things work and their response is usually 'just read the fucking code!' so I presumed that I just am terrible at reading code.

<comment><USER5> That sounds like you work at a fairly shitty place. I don't know you or your place of business but based on that statement there is a good chance that you are a lot better than you think and it's just time for a change as your current place is bringing you down.

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe I'm a leech like another askHN post talked about ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7196455](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7196455)) and don't know it or how to fix it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It doesn't sound like you're passionate about the work you're doing. Find a way to bring passion to your code and it will practically write itself.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't write code, i fix bugs exclusively.

although, when I'm at home and I work on my own stuff I feel at peace and maybe in control at least. that'll probably be my vacation i hope to take soon; just working on my own shit.

<comment><USER6> Try making that your mainstay. Develop a project from start to finish that centers around your passion. Fixing bugs is probably your slump.</comment></comment></comment>


THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE WILL STOP SCREAMING IN ALL CAPS - <AUTHOR> http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/science/the-national-weather-service-will-stop-screaming-in-all-caps/ <comment><USER2> The USMC finally went lower case, when Gen. Robert B. Neller became commandant on 2015-09-24.[1]

[1] [http://www.marines.mil/News/Messages/MessagesDisplay/tabid/1...](http://www.marines.mil/News/Messages/MessagesDisplay/tabid/13286/Article/174868/assumption- of-command.aspx)</comment>


Proof of Love: Declare your love for all time on the Bitcoin blockchain - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/blockai/proof-of-love

<comment><USER2> ahh more blockchain spam</comment>


My First Passive Income Project, One Year Later - <AUTHOR> http://www.sparklewise.com/my-first-passive-income-project-one-year-later/ <comment><USER3> Disclaimer: The author is an ex-colleague of mine.

Congratulations, Tommy, even though I think you had bigger ambitions of this project initially.

I am curious what your lessons learned are. Correct if I am wrong, but I would say that initially your niche was gift certificates for businesses, because it would be much better to monetize than personal ones. Now you are also doing personal gift certificates. Is this because actually business owners also don't want to pay for gift certificates or is that market just too hard to address?

Would you do it all again (doesn't sound like it from this post)? If you would do a project like this again, how would you go about choosing your niche this time?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Maarten!

True, I had bigger ambitions for this - in retrospect, I think I should have talked to spa owners, golf course owners etc. to see if they would buy it (what everybody says about customer development)

I think it's a bit hard for non-native english speakers living far away from the US to do this - in general, I think doing customer development for a different market that you don't especially know or have easy access to is tough (or maybe I'm just rationalizing to avoid being uncomfortable)

What I'm thinking at the moment is addressing a market I feel connected to: for example developers, entrepreneurs, bloggers but then, there's lots of competition :-)

<comment><USER3> It's ironic how "what everyone says" is often still the right advice. Maybe this is one of the things you need to learn from experience, no matter how smart you are and how many blogs of smart people you read.

I am thinking maybe the reason that there is so much more competition in these markets you listed, for a big part is that they are much more addressable. We "technology people" almost have a reflex "I have a problem, I am going to google the solution.". That reflex might be much less developed with spa owners and other small business owners. They might be more inclined to ask a fellow business owner, how they handle problem instead. Maybe you would need to run ads in spa-owner-magazines (I don't know if that exists) to reach them or something like that.

EDIT: I don't know if you agree, but maybe another lesson is: just because a market is big (US), that does not mean it's the best business opportunity. Maybe you should have started this in France first and then scaled to other countries when and if you had a working business model. [I am just thinking out loud, I think if I would have worked on the same idea, it would have turned out much worse.]

<comment><USER4> _ads in spa-owner-magazines (I don't know if that exists)_

This may seem like a trival remark, but I'm making it because many people don't know: magazines exist for _everything_. No matter how small a niche seems, I have always been able to find a magazine or trade journal, either online or offline, that addresses it. Spa Management Journal: <http://www.spamanagement.com/>

One of the first places you should look when trying to understand how to reach a new set of potential business customers is a trade journal search.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, these magazines exist mainly so that people can place highly specialized ads in them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Congrats on the income. It's nothing to scoff at.

But what that means is someone else is able to monetize your traffic better than you. Someone is willing to pay 10 cents (or whatever) for your visitor and presumably they make more than 10 cents from that person to make it worthwhile.

So you need to reduce your ad income by increasing your own conversion rate. A/B testing. Find out what terms people who come to your site are searching. Find out what terms you are ranking well in Google for.

High ad revenue means lost opportunity IMHO.

<comment><USER7> Absolutely not; those persons that _may be_ making more than you probably have a more bast experience about their business than you. They are also investing much more time which (hopefully) you use in something that you consider more relevant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Congratulations. Good job, I wouldn't say no to a few hundred a month with no effort. ☺

Have a look at some of the stuff patio11 is doing for SEO & content creation. Might be helpful for you.

<comment><USER9> patio11's blog, in case you're not familiar with it: <http://kalzumeus.com/>. Read everything there. No, really.

I'd imagine you could benefit from doing some industry-specific content creation. One that comes to mind immediately is spa/massage gift certificate templates. I have no idea what search terms business owners are using to find these things, but you should be able to determine if industry-specific keywords will help with a trivial amount of research.

Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> I think I've read every single of patrick's posts :-)

What I've done is to have a blog at www.giftcertificatefactory.com/blog - <USER2> blog post was made after keyword research and attracts quite some long tail traffic.

However, I must say it's quite a boring job to do that (I'm not THAT passionnate about gift certificates, to say the truth). You might be fine outsourcing content creation, but for this first site, I wanted to know what it took to do it.

If I'd do additional content creation, I'll most probably outsource it :-)

Thanks for the additional ideas!

<comment><USER10> You know how many bingo activities I've ever written? _SQL query_ Eight, out of the 1,000 or so on the site.

I strongly, strongly suggest you spend one week writing a custom CMS which hooks into your certificate generation backend and then pay somebody $10 to $15 an hour to write boring copy about [pet care gift certificate], [massage therapy gift certificate], etc etc etc. All you need is an underemployed American recent graduate. They exist in spades and many of them are trivially reachable online.

This will 10x your business.

<comment><USER11> As someone who had to have this explained to me several times in person before it clicked and I said "Holy Sh%t":

 _You seriously do not understand what Patrick did with BCC until you understand where the bingo activities came from._

<comment><USER10> Story in a nutshell: I wrote CMS to make pages about bingo cards, got a teacher to use CMS to create pages and attendant bingo cards, used this as bait for long tail searches. They look for very specific things, I generally have _exactly_ what they are looking for. This is my Rumpelstiltskin machine: in goes straw, out comes gold, or at least a modestly successful business selling niche software to a few hundred thousand visitors a year.

Close variations of this technique have worked for businesses with diverse interests not limited to elementary education. (Their stories are not generally mine to tell, but Thomas has shared on HN that this was a win for Matasano.)

The reason this is motivational for non-toy businesses is that a one-time software investment plus minimal management overhead plus money equals scalable customer acquisition, and money to scalable customer acquisition is a very motivational formula.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Interesting. I think getting few hundred bucks per month from a single passive income project is pretty good. I have quite a few of these and only a small portion of them exceed the hundred bucks mark.

I see just one basic problem with your project: you are horizontal, not vertical. Seeing that you are able to do that well in horizontal market, I think if you focus on a vertical you may do much better.

Oh yes, and ads are pretty good revenue stream. I have a site that makes more from ads on a couple of care-free pages than from selling paid software that I put a lot of efforts on (to support customers, to release new versions, to market, etc). Ad/affiliate income can be the easiest and the most passive you can imagine (although it doesn't bring the same personal satisfaction as earning from something good that you have built and marketed yourself).

</comment><comment><USER13> Congratulations. A related question, and something to open up to others here in the thread, what is the current state of ad networks for low-to-medium volume sites?

I am still mostly using adsense, and haven't had a chance to checkout other options. Are there any other networks worth investigating or implementing or is adsense still the gold standard?

<comment><USER14> <http://www.projectwonderful.com/>

never used it personally but it was recommended to me by someone that had for a mid volume site.

<comment><USER15> The majority of sites that I've seen using Project Wonderful gave been online comics, and since that's a big market for the site, I personally couldn't recommend it for just anyone. While I do think the idea behind it is really nice and a great way to promote smaller advertisers, I've only been able to sell ad space really cheaply since a lot of markets are just underrepresented. Makes me sort of wish PW was a bit bigger.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> That's a phenomenal foundation considering how short it's been since you started putting ads on. Seriously, continue tweaking the site for a year or two in your spare time and it could do really well. You're already doing the content-creation stuff, so ramp that up 1000x and you're sorted.

One thought - maybe integrate with Facebook somehow to get gift certs marketed for birthdays. "Bob's having a birthday, click here to create them a personalised gift cert."

</comment><comment><USER17> Congrats, Tommy.

If you don't mind me asking, what CPM do you get from the ads? Which are the ones that work the most, the horizontal visual banner on top, the textual ones in the right, or the squared image in the bottom?

I'm quite surprised that you managed to have such high number for such a small niche. That's great!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey man, thanks!

I'm the first surprised here! As I said in the blog posts, RPMs are way higher since I started tweaking the ads.

RPMs were 9.75EUR last month ($13).

The best performing ads are the one in the template gallery (horizontal banner) at <http://www.giftcertificatefactory.com/templates/personal/>

People on french forums didn't actually trust me when I gave them the numbers ;-)

<comment><USER18> I'd like to see the version of your site which displays ads.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's the one operating at the moment :-)

<http://www.giftcertificatefactory.com>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Nice to see a bootstrapper getting some love.

Congrats, hope it keeps gaining steam while you get to keep tweaking it.

</comment><comment><USER20> Numbers are quite good, but I wondered: is this official income on which you pay taxes? How do you declare this income? How much taxes do you pay? And, if applicable, is this still worth it after you pay taxes?

Even though it will be very country specific, I'm very interested in your experience.

<comment><AUTHOR> yes, I have to pay taxes :-) Right now I don't pay many taxes, it's about 20% (it's a new special status in France for sole entrepreneurs who are just starting out). So remove 20% of the gross income, and that's it. Still worth it if you ask me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> can you add your traffic details to the post?

<comment><AUTHOR> what do you want to know? For example in February it was:

\- 16.391 visits

\- 14.579 unique visitors

\- 67.485 pageviews

\- 3.99 pages/visit

\- 3:00 average visit duration

\- 33% bounce rate

<comment><USER22> I made a website here: <http://textbookcentral.com.au/> Like yours it fails to solve the business problem. I managed to broker, so far, dozens of textbook trades out of tens of thousands of visits and thousands of buy/sell interactions.

Do you (or anyone else) think it's worth it for me to put Ads on my website? I have resisted so far because I thought the revenue would be insignificant.

\- 2000 - 4000 visits (higher during semester breaks, lower in mid-semester)

\- 2000 - 3000 visitors

\- 20000 pageviews

\- 6 page/visit

\- 1:20 visit duration

\- 8% bounce rate

Once upon a time patio11 suggested I become a part-time person becoming the other side on any textbook sell or buy transaction. I didn't do it because I figured to make a loss of at least $5-$10 on each transaction to make it worth while for the other person to buy from me to make it worth it for them instead of from the store. I would've bankrupted myself doing that for the 1700 textbooks requested/offered. (Also got to know someone who had more headway into this same problem my website was solving; he owns a real book store near a university).

Looking at your example I think maybe I can make income from ads instead... but I'm not sure if a quarter of visits can equate to a quarter as many ad conversions.

<comment><AUTHOR> Your book listings seem to be missing big time on SEO potential, no? I think you should have individual pages for each textbook, with proper on-page optimization (title, H1, small paragraph of text...).

That's probably a lot of work, but can you test it on a subset? Then you see if it's profitable and you could hire someone to write the remaining descriptions.

That brings us to the monetization: you should do the math - traffic levels, CPC, CTR (for that you could try to have ads on a few pages).

I don't have that much experience with ads but from my experiments with a few websites, ads might make sense in a situation and not in another... So you have to test.

<comment><USER22> Almost all my traffic comes from searches for "<coursecode> textbook", and heads to individual pages that look like

[http://textbookcentral.com.au/26/university-of-new-south- wal...](http://textbookcentral.com.au/26/university-of-new-south- wales/buy/69897/acct1501/?query=)

That doesn't look like an individual page but it actually is; there's a unique link for every dialog. I'll definitely follow your advice and test some ads on small number of pages and see how that goes first.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Very nice and solid base to build on! You mentioned your income, but what is the cost structure (both monetary and timewise)?

<comment><AUTHOR> I did a lousy job of tracking my time for this project. I worked on this website from February to June, but nowhere near full-time of course (it's still quite small). I did spend lots of time on SEO which would have been better spent outsourcing to someone else on oDesk.

I wish I had solid statistics about time invested to give you but I don't :-(

I outsourced creation of the certificates, and parts of the site design for a couple hundred bucks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Tommy nice article man! And you're on top of hackernews. Why dont you create an app to send gift cards with? Apps are hot, and its quite easier to rise to the top i think....

However i might be biased :-)

</comment><comment><USER25> Way to go!

</comment><comment><USER26> Not bad money for ads. That surprised me.

</comment><comment><USER27> Now I realize why Internet are full of stupid sites full of Ads. They´re money collect only. Start build a site that you proud of and you will never aloud shit ads pollute your creation.</comment>