Why I Canceled Amazon Prime - <AUTHOR> http://tck.io/posts/why_i_canceled_amazon_prime.html <comment><USER2> On our ranch, we have an automatic gate opener with keypad. While FedEx and UPS will use a key code if one is printed on the address label, USPS refuses to enter through an open gate. Maybe they were just afraid of the cattle ([http://www.LonghornSteers.com](http://www.LonghornSteers.com)).

Fortunately for us, UPS delivers virtually all of our Amazon orders (2-3 a week since it is easier to use Prime than drive into town). The day that Amazon uses USPS for us is the day we cancel Prime, too.

The only worse delivery company we have dealt with is DHL, who Microsoft uses. I think it stands for (D)ump the package (H)aul tail away, and (L)ie that no one was home. On numerous occasions, DHL has left thousands of dollars worth in software at our gate which is on a busy country road.

A tip that I have found with delivery drivers is to be nice and get to know them. Smile, ask them how they are doing, offer them a bottle of water on a hot day, etc. Many will go out of their way to help a friendly face.

<comment><USER3> "easier to use Prime than drive into town"

cheaper not easier.

My mom and sister live in a rural county with more dairy cows than humans, and its not just easier, but considerably cheaper. Not sure what its like where you live, but sometimes around here people assume 50 cents/mile total cost aka $1/mile round trip so a trip into town to a big box store isn't twenty miles away, its $20 away, round trip. Suddenly paying less to Amazon than the locals will charge AND getting it "free" in two days is looking like a great deal. When I visit I notice rural retail is rapidly dying other than convenience stores and bulk type stores.

<comment><USER4> > cheaper not easier.

Cheaper _and_ easier? Your post came off as immediately combative, but when I read the rest I realized that it wasn't at all. I don't mean to chastise you, only to point out how it was perceived.

Have a nice day!

<comment><USER3> Hmm could be. I didn't think either option would be hard, so it must have been an innocent word selection error, and I have immediate family who go into repetitive detail how its cheaper, apparently along with everyone else, making rural retail go out of business...

I've seen combative, and its looks a lot different than suggesting a different word and giving some back story that's shared experience for two people from cow country of course, but the city slickers in the audience would need significant background to understand. Maybe an analogy for urban people, would be imagine if the subway suddenly changed price to $20 per ride. Or adjusted for inflation of incomes and expenses in urban areas, if the subway changed to $200 per ride. Sure, its easy driving, nice scenery, no legendary California traffic jams, but its still very expensive.

Have a pleasant day

<comment><USER4> I see what you mean. It just looked like an argument.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Funny, living in a rural area I have the opposite problem.

I have a driveway that is an 1/8 of a mile long that is threatened by several beaver colonies trying to flood it out. Delivery drivers are terrified of my driveway because it has a reputation of eating their trucks. One time we replaced the water line that crosses out driveway and that evening a FedEx truck drove across it and, thanks to subsidence, the wheel sunk a foot into the ground.

The driver was terrified of calling for help formally (which would have consequences) so we called the highway superintendent and she sent her husband over to our place with a floor jack and we got him out.

UPS drivers frequently put packages in plastic bags, then drive to the top of the hill hoping they can make a cell phone call about what they've done.

I'd prefer to get small things delivered by USPS because USPS can put them in my mailbox and I can get them without any problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> How do you fit a 45lbs crib in a box that is 4'x4'x5' in your mail box?

That's gotta be a huge mailbox sir!

OR the post office could end its monopoly of your mailbox...

<comment><USER5> I get more little things than big things.

Certainly if other delivery services could use the box it would help.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _You see, the problem with Amazon Prime is that you are shipping almost entirely via the USPS._

I've never received a package from Amazon via anyone but UPS.

<comment><USER7> I live in Brooklyn too. Not sure if it's a regional thing but lately all packages have been delivered via USPS. I don't currently have the problem that the OP has but that's only because I live in a larger apartment building to which USPS sends a truck with all the packages for the day.

But I can definitely relate. USPS offices are usually in very unfriendly places as far as public transportation goes. Having to travel, wait on line and then carry your package home would be a deal breaker for me as well.

<comment><USER8> I also live in Brooklyn (no doorman) and pay $9/mo for a USPS registered mailbox at a laundry store so that I never have to deal with the physical post office. I used to go there to pick up packages and it was a hellish experience. $9/mo saves all of that hassle and it is definitely worth it.

<comment><USER7> Interesting! I will keep this in mind when I eventually move.

Curious, are there Amazon Lockers near where you live and if so, was there a reason why you chose not to use them?

<comment><USER8> No, Amazon Lockers are nowhere near me (Williamsburg). I just don't see how it would be possible for them to scale as large as "neighborhood mailboxes" which are literally everywhere. There are at least 3 cheap mailbox / package drops on Bedford Ave on the walk home from the L train so I never have to go out of my way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I live in an apartment complex, and I find that the general issue is that carriers just can't/won't bring packages to your door. With the exception of ONE delivery out of at least two dozen, I have never had a package come to my door.

I always get notified by the apartment building late in the day when they are either closed or I am out for dinner/errands, so I have to wait until the next day to actually get the package. It's always N+1 day shipping with this setup.

As much as it annoys me, I am not sure there's an answer. Can carriers really be expected to actually go to every door in a sprawling apartment building with all of their deliveries for the day?

<comment><USER10> Why not? I wouldn't pay my telecom for getting my data only as far as the nearest switching station. Why should I accept an almost-all-the-way-there delivery from a shipping company?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is a NYC problem not a Amazon Prime or USPS problem.

\- Have your packages shipped to a friends work place or somewhere with a doorman. I use Amazon Prime in the city and do just that, it's great.

\- You can rent a PO box that accepts packages at many mail-services type stores. Many of them have notification services too.

\- Get a business address at a co-working space, a lot of times they will accept your business mail and packages.

\- If you live over or next to a business, especially a bodega, you can sometimes convince them to let you ship packages to them. Just remember to buy something each time and keep up that rapport. :)

Otherwise there's just no good solution for shipping in NYC. :(

<comment><USER12> Read the rest of the article. Doesn't address his problem of getting the package back to his apt. He mentions lots of large heavy boxes.

<comment><USER4> I'm sure "over or next to a business" is a lot closer than the post office.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Why not use Amazon Lockers [1]?

It's actually sad that it's amazon specific. I'd love to see this rather implemented for the post services like USPS/UPS. In Germany, we have DHL Packstation and you can just have it shipped to those location and pick up your package 24/7\. It started getting a bunch of locations in 2004 and nowadays they have them every ~300-500m around big towns (like Munich for instance).

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=locker_hp_fd?docId...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=locker_hp_fd?docId=1000841451)

<comment><USER14> Yeah, Packstaton is fantastic. It's basically a free PO box.

I'm sure it works out well for DHL not only because they spend less time driving around delivering packages, but also because I now try very hard to avoid any online retailer that doesn't ship via DHL.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> _However, I would happily pay more than $79 /year for a version of prime which guarantees that the USPS will not be involved in shipping: not via FedEx SmartPost, not direct, not ever. I would venture to say there are a lot more people like me out there._

Any flavor of the comment "I would happily pay more than <current price> for <what I claim I want>" is always hysterical to me. This kind of statement does two things that are incredibly naive:

First it suggests that you as the consumer know at this point what you would or would not pay. You only know what that figure is when it comes time to pay. If Amazon upped the price to $99/year and switched to private carrier and gave you no choice, you might not be so happy.

Second, even if you do know 100% that you'd _happily_ pay more, it suggests that you as one data point know more about how to price a service like Prime than the legions of pricing analysts and product managers employed at Amazon who are privy to years of customer behavior data.

There's a reason Comcast and Verizon are constantly bitched about by consumers yet continue to lead their industries in customer volume. Individual consumers are fickle but really only care about immediate cost.

<comment><USER16> _> Second, even if you do know 100% that you'd happily pay more, it suggests that you as one data point know more about how to price a service like Prime than the legions of pricing analysts and product managers employed at Amazon who are privy to years of customer behavior data.

There's a reason Comcast and Verizon are constantly bitched about by consumers yet continue to lead their industries in customer volume. Individual consumers are fickle but really only care about immediate cost._

We understand things through the lenses of the tools we use to measure them. When you measure only "behavior data" (code for limited quantitative snapshots of transactions at specific prices), then you only see _what_ happens through the lens of pricing and you talk about people as sources of demand who are price sensitive or not, etc. etc. -- but you never get to the _why_ and all you might succeed in doing is hill-climbing optimizations, at best.

Instead, what if we figured out how to measure experiences (not touch points) and what if we took that ability to actually build demonstrably better experiences?

One small example in support -- look at the volume of reviews and the impact of Yelp -- if that's not the antithesis of consumers being price sensitive, I don't know what is. For better or worse (and ignoring astroturfing), Yelp demonstrates the power of consumer experiences (and an attempt at measuring them)

Trust me, the incumbent cable and telco providers are successful not because people are price sensitive but because the market is broken -- there's no competition, in large part due to regulated/legalized monopoly (or at best oligarchy) and they fight hard to keep it. If there were competition, there'd be a different picture...

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I actually have a similar problem with UPS. Last year we had a dyson vacuum delivered to our house that was left on the front porch, about 10 feet from the sidewalk. The box was the manufacturer's box with pictures of the vacuum and the brand written in big letters. We weren't home but when we did get there, there was no package.

It was ordered from Costco and their service was fantastic. We had a replacement within a few days. The problem was UPS. After that incident, every single package had to not only be signed for, but actually have a person present to receive the package. I'm not sure if this was retribution on behalf of the delivery person, who probably got into some kind of trouble, but it is what it is. It is very difficult for us to get packages at home now.

I love prime, but it would be fantastic if I had the option to choose a shipper, even if I had to pay a couple dollars extra. USPS is actually much better about leaving packages, which are by far usually under $20 and small.

</comment><comment><USER18> I've been a prime member for years and I just (naively, I guess) assumed they ship everything UPS, because that's the only way I have ever received a package shipped by Amazon.

I'm in a suburb and whether it's UPS, FedEx or USPS, my item is always left on my porch unless signature requirements were specified. In the nine years I've lived here, packages have never been stolen. I, however, would prefer if Amazon shipped via USPS. My mail is delivered, very consistently, between noon and 1:00 PM. For UPS, however, I am almost always the last delivery, which is at 7:00 PM and sometimes later.

I also found it interesting that this person received so many credits for screwed up shipping. I would expect a company like Amazon would have analytics in place to monitor the frequency of these problems and intelligently pick the best shipper. Reading the comments and the problems that others have had with FedEx and UPS makes me wonder if the issue isn't so much USPS vs. FedEx vs. UPS, but instead the location being shipped to isn't served very well by any of them and USPS was picked because they have more pick-up locations conveniently located. Getting the "slip" in my area from UPS means driving about 20 miles to stand in line versus the USPS, where it's only 2 miles. But that's just a guess.

</comment><comment><USER19> For a second, I read the title as Jeff Bezos: Why I had to Cancel Amazon Prime and I was this close to picking up my pitchfork.

</comment><comment><USER20> So the real problem is that the US government can't provide a postal service that's fit for purpose despite being obliged to provide a service of uniform quality to all Americans. Switching providers might help but it seems the underlying systemic issue is with the USPS not being what it's meant to be.

<comment><USER21> It is? Maybe in this one case.

At my last office I would fail to get large/heavy FedEx deliveries. It would say delivery attempted, but nobody came. I'd get the package typically a day or two later. I assume it was just one really lazy driver.

I think the real problem is delivering millions of packages to people all across the country is a tough problem and there are bound to be weird little edge cases that only affect a few people.

<comment><USER22> Yep, never had a problem with USPS or UPS, but I absolutely hate FedEx Air[1]. They pulled a "we don't deliver in your area from Dec 20 to Jan 2" crap and I had to drive 90 miles to pickup the package myself. I told the vendor if they shipped the next package via FedEx, that would be the last one ordered[2].

I figure your local people are the determining factor since consistency seems not to be a corporate function for any of them.

1) mixing up Air and FedEx Ground will get you yelled at

2) we were getting parts and cables shipped overnight

<comment><USER4> "we don't deliver in your area from Dec 20 to Jan 2"

Um, what? That sounds like a WHOLE lot of pissed off holiday shoppers.

<comment><USER22> It was 1996, so I think most of the folks were buying stuff on shopping trips and not over the internet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> So this guy had to cancel his prime membership because USPS delivers shit service in his area in Brooklyn ? I sympathize with his issue in general but this has nothing to do with Amazon prime.

I think in general, the moment you talk about NYC boroughs, logistics are a totally different ball game compared to say suburban New Jersey but I am not defending USPS with this though. All I am saying is that Amazon Prime already runs with very thin margins and adding the luxury of being able to select multiple mail carriers for a region is probably not viable for amazon. Just my 2 cents.

<comment><AUTHOR> I would so happily pay more to choose my carrier. When I started Amazon Prime several years ago the amount I ordered from Amazon skyrocketed -- 2 day delivery for free? Crap, I don't ever have to go to Target, Toys'r'Us, the pet store, etc ever again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Yeah, we use Prime in Brooklyn. And the UPSP postal slip is something I never want to see.

Our Post Office has gotten a little better in the last year about delivering packages. Although they still sometimes try the wrong buzzer.

One thing, with your postal slip you can schedule to have it redelivered through the USPS website. I have had good success with this.

[https://redelivery.usps.com/redelivery/](https://redelivery.usps.com/redelivery/)

Fortunately very few of our Amazon deliveries are USPS, most of them are UPS.

<comment><AUTHOR> Tried that. We just get another slip since they're still not carrying the packages. It really does depend on your post office. Bed-Stuy? No way!

<comment><USER24> We have the Brevoort USPO on Atlantic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> For the stuff you don't want the post office to touch / screw up / fail to deliver / whatever -- pay the $4 / item prime rate for one day delivery. No post office involved then.

My only complaint with amazon using usps for the last-mile delivery (fedex smart-post, whatever ups's equivalent is) is that being just outside a good- sized city, fedex/ups will get it to their facility in a day or two, and then the post office will take another full week to move the package 5 miles.

<comment><USER26> I love the $4 overnight. When I'm deciding whether to do 2-day or overnight, I always do a little thought experiment: If I'm sitting around tomorrow and wishing my new thing was here, would I open my wallet and shell out four bucks for it to show up today? You bet your ass I would! I'm an impatient bastard like that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> And since I live where UPS and FedEx don't care about I despise every time I have something delivered via one of those carriers. Even though I live about 3 miles from a UPS distribution center my shipments usually arrive well after 9PM and usually in pieces.

I'm excited when I see my Prime shipment is via USPS. I know my mail shows up everyday around 4PM during the week and around 2PM on Saturday. My postal carrier is also nice enough to put the packages under the bench on my porch when I'm not home.

Of course, the standard disclaimer of plural of anecdote is not data applies.

</comment><comment><USER28> I have the opposite problem - USPS packages are put in a special mailbox in my building, but UPS and Fedex won't get delivered at all because I'm not home.

Even if Amazon's worried about letting the user choose what shipping option they want, they should show the shipping method at checkout as a read-only field, so that I know whether to ship a particular package to home or work.

</comment><comment><USER29> UPS/Fedex doesn't really fix this either in cities, since they can't leave the package and they always try to deliver during work hours (in my neighborhood) - so I get slips from them too. Really need after-hours delivery, I'd pay extra for that.

</comment><comment><USER30> A heads up to the author -- I've had Amazon Prime for three years, two of those in Phoenix and one in Austin, and UPS were always the carrier delivering the packages, unless I chose one-day or same-day shipping.

I also sell products on Amazon using their Fulfillment services, and the majority of shipments go out on UPS as well. I only ever see USPS shipments if the receiver is close to the Illinois warehouse.

EDIT: The real takeaway is that the article implies that USPS is Amazon's exclusive shipping carrier for Prime shipments, when in reality it varies based on geograpy, shipping speed and other factors. However, I would say that UPS delivers most shipments.

</comment><comment><USER31> I've had Prime deliveries by many different carriers. Since I've moved to a real house instead of a condo, the only difference I've seen in carriers is that the drivers will leave packages in different locations -- some drop it off at the front porch, some by the garage, once there was one by a side door... so I just need to take a walk around the yard to see if anyone left any packages anywhere.

When I lived in a condo, some carriers would leave packages by the door and some would just leave slips. For a long time UPS would only leave a note, then I'd have to go the next day to pick it up from the distribution center. Eventually I got them to start leaving packages though. Sometimes USPS would leave a note and sometimes they'd just leave the package, depending on the phases of the moon or whatever. But I don't get notes anymore at all at the house.

</comment><comment><USER32> Not so much an Amazon problem. As with a lot of services, we see quality private sector services (OnTrac, DHL, FedEx) being consistently better than bloated government services operating at a loss and subsidized by taxpayers. I wonder how much further the USPS would dip if Amazon stopped doing business with them.

<comment><USER6> _subsidized by taxpayers_

"The Postal Service receives no tax dollars for operating expenses, and relies on the sale of postage, products and services to fund its operations." [1]

[1] [http://www.carper.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/postal- reform-...](http://www.carper.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/postal-reform-myths- vs-facts#d53bdca2-972a-4146-bf80-0f639ad7b8f4)

<comment><USER33> Not directly, but they get special loans that are government funded. Guess where the money will come from when they default?

[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/16/us/politics/postal- service...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/16/us/politics/postal-service- reports-a-nearly-16-billion-loss.html)

<comment><USER3> Other than for hollywood accounting reasons or a political stunt, why would a profitable agency default?

<comment><USER33> One could ask why a profitable agency would take out billions of dollars in loans.

"theoretically profitable" is not the same as "profitable"

<comment><USER3> [http://money.cnn.com/2012/03/05/news/economy/postal_service_...](http://money.cnn.com/2012/03/05/news/economy/postal_service_loan/)

"a congressional mandate to prefund retirement health care benefits"

I'm not saying that's a bad idea in isolation. However if you're trying to make a political point that your enemy is a failure, merely force your enemy to do something sensible that no one else is forced to do, then when that destroys them, you can blame them for it, or something like that.

That was just round one. Here's round two of how to destroy the USPS, done in two simple quotes from the same story:

"In addition, it would give access to another $10 billion loan backed up by Postal Service property, which would have to be sold a decade later to pay off that loan."

"And individual Democrats and Republicans are united in their effort to prevent their own neighborhood post office or postal plant from closing."

Ta da! We require you to take out a loan, which you need because we forbid you from managing your own business, furthermore we also specifically forbid you to repay the loan. I'm sure nothing bad could happen in that situation LOL. I give 100% odds that this scheme will hit the fan as "proof of usps and bureaucrat mismanagement" when it is actually 100% the fault of congress meddling, of which at about 50% are trying to manufacture a political point to fit a predetermined agenda.

The problem with meaningless sloganeering is even if a slogan is generally correct, there will of course be outliers in opposition. This seems to be the case with the USPS. It would seem that blind faith based belief is so weak, the only way to enforce conformity is to intentionally sabotage a minor outlier.

The TLDR is they're being set up. (Edited to add, its the old game of take away authority needed to succeed, while leaving behind the responsibility of resulting failure. For a .gov, the USPS is actually pretty well managed, which is why its being targetted).

<comment><USER33> _TLDR is they 're being set up_

They're being set up the same way that Social Security has been set up to go bankrupt, Medicare has been set up to go bankrupt, Obamacare has been set up to crash and burn, the Community Reinvestment Act was set up to cause a housing bubble, government backed student loans were set up to cause hyper- inflation of education costs...

You see a pattern?

They're being set up because they are part of a system that has failure baked in from the beginning. Not failing is the odd surprise when it comes to government control of large complex business entities -- and even then the question of whether or not some apparent success is actually failure depends upon how closely you look at how much it cost to prevent catastrophic collapse (ie, the military).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Here in Amazon.com's home town of Seattle, Prime works flawlessly (no surprise there). Sometimes things arrive by USPS, but most often it's via UPS. Occasionally Amazon will even deliver package themselves. In fact, they once delivered a three item order to my house via all three methods in one day.

I'm sure NYC is a big market for Amazon and no matter what the root cause is of the problem you are talking about, I'm sure it's one worth solving for them. Have you emailed Jeff B. about this? From the below Business Week article, it sounds like he pays attention...

[http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-10-10/jeff- bezos-a...](http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-10-10/jeff-bezos-and- the-age-of-amazon-excerpt-from-the-everything-store-by-brad-stone)

<comment><USER26> Also in Seattle, and prime is great, except for when they use Ontrac. I once had a next-day shipment fail to show up, and on the third day I called Ontrac to find out why. The rep told me, and I'm completely serious, "the driver just decided not to do his job."

I actually appreciated the honesty, but I hope they fired the driver.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> In these posts read the woes of what happens when a new system is created that does not reveal it's externalities - factors at first not noticed and that are not put into the cost equation but which, over time are revealed.

When I was a boy in a small town most goods were available in local stores. Local dealers maintained inventory. I could handle and inspect goods before buying them.

Some items were not available locally. I would call long-distance, order a part, give an address and a credit card number (or mail a check) and wait a week - what could be easier?

Today we order stuff on the Internet.

But is that better for the end-user? Although focused on delivery problems, many of these posts would suggest that it is not. And we haven't yet broached the subjects of expected vs received product, returns, overcharges, identity theft, etc.

</comment><comment><USER36> I have more of a problem with lasership, but really my problems are kind of petty.

I once ordered a hand plane on Amazon. I was planning on going to home depot (about 20 minutes away) but Amazon had same day delivery for $3 extra (prime). Easy choice, it was 10am, and by the time I get home i'd have the tool to continue work on my project. The website said delivery would be at or before 8pm. It ended up showing up at my door at midnight.

On one side, its incredible that at 10am I made an order, and about 14 hours later I had the order... on the other hand I probably would have just picked up a similar item (granted worse quality) at the store had I known it would be late.

<comment><USER37> I used to share you pain - lasership was the worst!

Routine non-deliveries that they'd report as delivered, only to have it randomly show up 1-2 days later. Customer service was pretty bad too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> In the UK Amazon has its own parcel delivery service that is used to deliver the majority of the larger parcels in my area. But it's not great. Some of the drivers decide they don't have time, or it's near the end of their shift, and log deliveries as no one home. I've had this confirmed by some of the drivers that do bother delivering.

So while I've been home all day, I get an email (usually around 6pm) claiming no one was in when they attempted the delivery.

This is frustrating when it happens once, but it has now become a regular occurrence and complaints just end in a free month of Prime being added to my account (had 4 extensions this year so far).

<comment><USER39> If you live north of Perth in Scotland and a parcel is sent via one of the big couriers it often gets subcontracted out to a local courier or franchised operator who can add another two to three days to deliver something that should be next day. I used to live in Perth and never had a single Prime delivery arrived next day as promised - in one ridiculous example, they shipped a parcel from their Greenock fulfilment centre to Perth and it took a week to arrive!. I ended up getting half the money back and cancelling Prime.

Four years later I found myself eligible for the free trial and have given Prime another shot, so far so good with 3 out of 3 orders arriving next day via Royal Mail.

"Some of the drivers decide they don't have time, or it's near the end of their shift, and log deliveries as no one home" \- yes that is truly annoying and verging on fraudulent behaviour.

<comment><USER4> I wouldn't say "verging on." It's an outright lie.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Does anyone else think that USPS in New York City is just horrible and shitty in general? I had a similar experience at the branch in Chinatown where I was treated horribly just for asking to speak to a manager (which took over 45 minutes to happen). You just feel so powerless to do anything because even the people "in charge" can't even seem to help you or are mysteriously "off the clock". The package was eventually delivered but only after 2 hours of time were wasted on my end...

</comment><comment><USER41> You're blaming USPS, but the problem is that you live in an apartment building. Such is life in the city. I live in Brooklyn as well and I solve this problem by having a doorman :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Must be nice to have enough money to pay the astronomical rents that a doorman building costs!

<comment><USER41> Oh, it is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> > However, I would happily pay more than $79/year for a version of prime which > guarantees that the USPS will not be involved in shipping ... I would > venture to say there are a lot more people like me out there.

On the surface, it sounds like it would make sense for Amazon to let you choose your carrier for some additional cost.

But that sort of active, involved, optimizing customer is probably where Amazon takes the biggest loss on Prime.

Bezos has probably done the math on the value of the goodwill of those customers.

<comment><USER43> In a lot of cases, they do let you upgrade for $3.99

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I used to have similar problem where I lived...

The USPS guy would regularly heave a package over a fence onto a stone patio (fragile packages be damned). Or lasership (a last mile carrier) would never actually deliver on time despite marking it in their tracking system as delivered (yet they would magically show up the next day claiming that it must have accidentally been delivered to a neighbor, though none ever claimed they did).

I would gladly pay a premium to choose delivery companies.

</comment><comment><USER44> > You see, the problem with Amazon Prime is that you are shipping almost > entirely via the USPS. Normally, I bet, in most of the country, this doesn't > bode a single issue.

Nah, we have exactly the same problem here in Germany. I think that this will be one of the biggest challenges for Amazon in the coming years and can imagine them building their own delivery service for that reason.

</comment><comment><USER45> This post is just bitching at Amazon for a problem with USPS in his area. Thanks for the misleading title.

</comment><comment><USER46> Thank you -- knowing this makes me certain I will not be signing up for Prime at this time. I think the USPS squirelliness is not limited to any particular region... I have had nightmares with various post offices over the past few years.

</comment><comment><USER47> > I would venture to say there are a lot more people like me out there.

How many people reside in areas where they go around on foot vs by jeep?

Also:

> doesn't bode a single issue.

Should probably be "doesn't pose a single issue". Bode means:

indicate by signs; "These signs bode bad news"

<comment><USER48> > How many people reside in areas where they go around on foot vs by jeep?

Cities have a _lot_ of people, last I checked.

<comment><USER47> > Cities have a _lot_ of people, last I checked.

Sure, we know that, but that wasn't the question I asked, which probably requires some more detailed knowledge of the USPS to answer. I'm sure there are others like him, though, but to really reason about it you'd have to take all the numbers into account.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Totally addressed to wrong person. Should have been sent to Patrick R. Donahoe.

</comment><comment><USER50> Isn't it cheaper to deliver a given list of packages in a more densely populated area? It looks like some of USPS' customers are getting screwed.

</comment><comment><USER51> I'm in Seattle, and 80% of my Amazon packages come via OnTrac and UPS. USPS is mostly books - and only from 3rd party sellers.

</comment><comment><USER52> Definitely a problem, but mostly for those in a large city. I have never had a package come via USPS in Utah.

</comment><comment><USER53> It must be a regional thing. I've never had an Amazon Prime delivery made by USPS.</comment>


Why Ball Tracking Works for Tennis and Cricket but Not Soccer or Basketball - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/543986/why-ball-tracking-works-for-tennis-and-cricket-but-not-soccer-or-basketball/ <comment><USER2> There is some controversy about the accuracy of ball tracking in cricket, [http://www.news.com.au/sport/cricket/shock-drs-howler- questi...](http://www.news.com.au/sport/cricket/shock-drs-howler-questions- accuracy-of-hawkeye-technology/news-story/3878095d2386cd9e8192a4ccbf523f83)

</comment><comment><USER3> why not add a tracking system on/inside the ball itself, so you always know exactly where it is, without depending on video?

<comment><USER4> For solid spherical objects like baseballs and cylinders like hockey pucks I think that makes a lot of sense (pun intended) but for air-filled hollow spheres like basketballs maybe not so much as people might think it would upset the balance of the balls.

If IIRC, hockey tried garish bright puck colors --maybe a special coat could help track the balls as well rather than an active sensor.

<comment><USER5> Yes, I remember when FOX aired the NHL and used the puck tracker. It was very distracting in my opinion.

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

<comment><USER6> Aah yes the Glow Puck! The Glow Puck came about before ubiquitous HD TV. This was FOX's way of helping viewer's track the puck. (As an aside, it is my opinion that HD has helped hockey viewability more than almost any other sport.) A couple of interesting Glow Puck facts:

\- The batteries inside of the pucks would only last a short time (15-30 mins). Combine this with sensitive chips being hit at 80-100 MPH and a Glow Puck would only last a couple of shifts a game. FOX went through loads of them.

\- The chips changed the weight of the pucks enough where the players _hated_ them. The heavier pucks especially messed with wrist shots and passing.

<comment><USER7> All this and more is covered in a fascinating article about the development of the technology:

[http://ethw.org/First- Hand:Recollections_of_the_development_...](http://ethw.org/First- Hand:Recollections_of_the_development_of_the_FoxTrax_hockey_puck_tracking_system)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why many smart people are not social? - <AUTHOR> http://www.rajeshsetty.com/2011/11/13/why-many-smart-people-are-not-social/

<comment><USER2> These sound like post-hoc justifications for introversion.

Introverts are introverts. Not all smart people are introverts, but the ones who are not social are introverts, and it's just their personality.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, these sound like justifications for introversion because the society today thinks that everyone needs to be social.

I agree with you about the personality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> What an ad-hoc argument with a weak basis. Some people are just introverts, and many smart intelligent people are naturally deep thinkers who prefer solitude over noisy chatter at a pub. This can shed more light: [http://www.ted.com/talks/susan_cain_the_power_of_introverts....](http://www.ted.com/talks/susan_cain_the_power_of_introverts.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> The power of introverts is a great talk. Thanks for sharing. I agree about the preference to the solitude part (one of the items in the blog post)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think the internet is a great enabler for those with introverted personalities.

Some of the most introverted people I know are often quite active on social networks. For those people, sending out a tweet comes easier than speaking up at a party.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is true too but during our surveys and interviews, we observed this far less than the other case which is to stay away from the social networks.</comment></comment>


50+ Segmentation Faults per Hour: Continuing to Stress Ryzen - <AUTHOR> http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ryzen-segv-continues <comment><USER2> Note that it appears that a large number of the segfaults which Michael (phoronix) is reporting may be coming from a software issue. In particular, people on the phoronix forums are reporting that conftest segfaults are a known software issue and also one has reported that he was able to reproduce the conftest segfaults on an intel CPU.

So not saying that there's not a problem with Ryzen, but it is possible a large number of the errors are false positives arising from a known software issue.

I would wait Michael runs the same test on an Intel CPU with no problems to pass judgement.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. It is a very basic comparison, which should be done _before_ posting the article. I don't understand why he keeps posting these before running the exact same test on different processors (an Intel or even a different AMD should be ok)

<comment><USER4> Most likely to generate clicks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have the same with a Kaby Lake laptop btw (XPS 13) where random segfaults happen. This is with the very latest BIOS update from a day or two ago. Modern CPUs suck.

<comment><USER6> Can we all switch to Xeons and <whatever server CPUs AMD has out now>? Or do those have similar issues?

<comment><USER5> No idea, but honestly I can't be arsed anymore with new stuff when it's so unreliable.

This is from a few minutes ago (the timestamps are hours old, but that's because dmesg timestamps don't take into account sleep time)

[Sat Aug 5 13:46:21 2017] </comment></comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>[ cut here ]</comment><comment></comment><comment> [Sat Aug 5 13:46:21 2017] WARNING: CPU: 0 PID: 16026 at drivers/base/firmware_class.c:1225 _request_firmware+0x51f/0x8a0 [Sat Aug 5 13:46:21 2017] Modules linked in: ccm rfcomm fuse xt_CHECKSUM ipt_MASQUERADE nf_nat_masquerade_ipv4 tun xt_addrtype nf_conntrack_netbios_ns nf_conntrack_broadcast xt_CT ip6t_rpfilter ip6t_REJECT nf_reject_ipv6 ip_set nfnetlink ebtable_nat ebtable_broute ip6table_nat nf_conntrack_ipv6 nf_defrag_ipv6 nf_nat_ipv6 xt_conntrack ip6table_mangle ip6table_raw br_netfilter bridge stp llc overlay ip6table_security iptable_nat nf_conntrack_ipv4 nf_defrag_ipv4 nf_nat_ipv4 nf_nat nf_conntrack libcrc32c iptable_mangle iptable_raw iptable_security ebtable_filter ebtables ip6table_filter ip6_tables cmac bnep sunrpc arc4 uvcvideo videobuf2_vmalloc videobuf2_memops videobuf2_v4l2 videobuf2_core videodev media btusb btrtl snd_soc_skl snd_soc_skl_ipc snd_soc_sst_ipc snd_soc_sst_dsp snd_hda_ext_core dell_wmi wmi_bmof snd_soc_sst_match [Sat Aug 5 13:46:21 2017] tpm_crb snd_hda_codec_hdmi snd_hda_codec_realtek snd_soc_core snd_hda_codec_generic snd_compress snd_pcm_dmaengine ac97_bus iTCO_wdt iTCO_vendor_support hid_multitouch mei_wdt dell_laptop dell_smbios dcdbas intel_rapl x86_pkg_temp_thermal intel_powerclamp coretemp kvm_intel kvm ath10k_pci ath10k_core irqbypass crct10dif_pclmul crc32_pclmul mac80211 ghash_clmulni_intel intel_cstate intel_uncore intel_rapl_perf ath cfg80211 joydev snd_hda_intel snd_hda_codec rtsx_pci_ms snd_hda_core memstick snd_hwdep snd_seq snd_seq_device snd_pcm snd_timer snd i2c_i801 soundcore hci_uart intel_pch_thermal mei_me btbcm idma64 btqca mei shpchp processor_thermal_device btintel intel_soc_dts_iosf intel_lpss_pci bluetooth wmi soc_button_array intel_vbtn tpm_tis tpm_tis_core ecdh_generic pinctrl_sunrisepoint [Sat Aug 5 13:46:21 2017] rfkill int3403_thermal intel_lpss_acpi pinctrl_intel intel_lpss intel_hid int340x_thermal_zone int3400_thermal tpm acpi_als acpi_thermal_rel sparse_keymap kfifo_buf industrialio acpi_pad rtsx_pci_sdmmc mmc_core i915 crc32c_intel i2c_algo_bit drm_kms_helper serio_raw drm nvme nvme_core rtsx_pci i2c_hid video [Sat Aug 5 13:46:21 2017] CPU: 0 PID: 16026 Comm: kworker/u9:0 Not tainted 4.13.0-0.rc3.git1.2.fc27.x86_64 #1 [Sat Aug 5 13:46:21 2017] Hardware name: Dell Inc. XPS 13 9360/0839Y6, BIOS 1.3.7 07/04/2017 [Sat Aug 5 13:46:21 2017] Workqueue: hci0 hci_power_on [bluetooth] [Sat Aug 5 13:46:21 2017] task: ffff9d2bf69e8000 task.stack: ffffb77c07014000 [Sat Aug 5 13:46:21 2017] RIP: 0010:_request_firmware+0x51f/0x8a0 [Sat Aug 5 13:46:21 2017] RSP: 0000:ffffb77c07017c50 EFLAGS: 00010282 [Sat Aug 5 13:46:21 2017] RAX: 000000000000002c RBX: ffffb77c07017d18 RCX: 0000000000000000 [Sat Aug 5 13:46:21 2017] RDX: 0000000000000000 RSI: ffff9d2cff40e118 RDI: ffff9d2cff40e118 [Sat Aug 5 13:46:21 2017] RBP: ffffb77c07017cc0 R08: 0000000000000487 R09: 0000000000000007 [Sat Aug 5 13:46:21 2017] R10: fffff404518d9200 R11: ffffffff94313aed R12: ffff9d2c81d13ae0 [Sat Aug 5 13:46:21 2017] R13: ffffb77c07017d10 R14: ffff9d2c94f424e8 R15: ffff9d2c695de068 [Sat Aug 5 13:46:21 2017] FS: 0000000000000000(0000) GS:ffff9d2cff400000(0000) knlGS:0000000000000000 [Sat Aug 5 13:46:21 2017] CS: 0010 DS: 0000 ES: 0000 CR0: 0000000080050033 [Sat Aug 5 13:46:21 2017] CR2: 000000fd4a1b4b48 CR3: 00000004536d4000 CR4: 00000000003406f0 [Sat Aug 5 13:46:21 2017] Call Trace: [Sat Aug 5 13:46:21 2017] ? snprintf+0x45/0x70 [Sat Aug 5 13:46:21 2017] request_firmware+0x37/0x50 [Sat Aug 5 13:46:21 2017] btusb_setup_qca+0x22d/0x410 [btusb] [Sat Aug 5 13:46:21 2017] ? __pm_runtime_resume+0x5b/0x80 [Sat Aug 5 13:46:21 2017] btusb_open+0x45/0x250 [btusb] [Sat Aug 5 13:46:21 2017] hci_dev_do_open+0x6c/0x590 [bluetooth] [Sat Aug 5 13:46:21 2017] ? try_to_wake_up+0x59/0x470 [Sat Aug 5 13:46:21 2017] hci_power_on+0x4e/0x200 [bluetooth] [Sat Aug 5 13:46:21 2017] ? lock_timer_base+0x81/0xa0 [Sat Aug 5 13:46:21 2017] process_one_work+0x193/0x3c0 [Sat Aug 5 13:46:21 2017] worker_thread+0x4a/0x3a0 [Sat Aug 5 13:46:21 2017] kthread+0x125/0x140 [Sat Aug 5 13:46:21 2017] ? process_one_work+0x3c0/0x3c0 [Sat Aug 5 13:46:21 2017] ? kthread_park+0x60/0x60 [Sat Aug 5 13:46:21 2017] ret_from_fork+0x25/0x30 [Sat Aug 5 13:46:21 2017] Code: 08 48 83 fb 28 74 45 48 8b 8b a0 ee aa 93 e9 e6 fe ff ff 48 c7 c7 a0 ad fa 93 e8 4d 71 2f 00 48 c7 c7 88 15 cf 93 e8 42 86 b6 ff <0f> ff 41 b9 90 ff ff ff e9 06 fd ff ff 48 c7 45 a8 ff ff ff 7f [Sat Aug 5 13:46:21 2017] ---[ end trace ff5be3b6989ab935 ]---

<comment><USER7> Modern hardware is unreliable, especially under GNU/Linux. Ryzen didn't give me any problem under Windows, but GNU/Linux.. the same can be said of Skylake/Broadwell i915 gpu driver. Both my Thinkpad T450s and X250 are not able to get past a few weeks uptime while using Debian. Under Windows they can go on for months.

<comment><USER8> Funny, I've got several Linux systems and the limiting factor to uptime is power outages.

<comment><USER7> My anecdotal experience is that I can get better uptime using Windows rather than Linux in consumer computers. The i915 bug made me end up using a Windows host with Debian in a virtual machine, just so I could trust that my computer would not freeze every few weeks.

With older computers (T420, X201) and Xeon servers I got months and even years uptime. Maybe I just got unlucky with my recent acquisitions or maybe the complexity of the new hardware together with the lack of support for Linux means that these kind of bugs are and will become more prevalent in consumer hardware.

<comment><USER9> I find your experience intriguing, since I've never been able to get my windows installations to reliably provide solid uptime. I've had many issues with inconsistent performance, stuttering, and "slow degradation" of Windows, while even the 3-4 year old linux installs feel quite snappy.

At this point I suspect getting reliable computers is a lottery.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is a non-article, an exercise in bias confirmation. Without a control with no segfaults, or a root cause, it's not useful.

<comment><USER11> In the article (or perhaps the original article that is linked in this one) they explain that they ran the same tests on Intel processors without any issues whatsoever...

<comment><USER12> Except that people are indeed running the same test on Intel systems and getting the same segfaults:

[https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/phoronix/latest- phoron...](https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/phoronix/latest-phoronix- articles/967080-ryzen-test-stress-run-make-it-easy-to-cause-segmentation- faults-on-zen-cpus/page10)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This seems like a shill article because black box testing makes almost no sense in this situation. These are seg faults not hardware lockups. Maybe get a kernel dump and gdb? You know, debugging.

</comment><comment><USER14> At the very least the exact same tests should be run on Intel CPUs.

This will isolate the issue. If Intel CPUs report the same errors as some users are reporting this is in extremely bad faith.

Phoronix can write 2 articles and spend days on this. Why has he not run the test on Intel yet?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> similar problem on EPYC

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/6rmq6q/epyc_7551_minin...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/6rmq6q/epyc_7551_mining_performance/)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/6rrbsp/epyc_confirmed_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/6rrbsp/epyc_confirmed_to_suffer_from_the_segfault_issue/)

<comment><USER12> The segfaults repro on Intel systems as well with his setup:

[https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/phoronix/latest- phoron...](https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/phoronix/latest-phoronix- articles/967080-ryzen-test-stress-run-make-it-easy-to-cause-segmentation- faults-on-zen-cpus/page10)

The segfaults being seen on that Epyc test are not the fault of the hardware - either that, or they're a problem that is common between Intel and AMD processors somehow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> In some respects this is vastly better than a once-a-month fault. AMD have a better chance of reproducing it even if, clock speeds being what they are these days, the are a tonne of instructions churning between events.

</comment><comment><USER16> Should people planning to buy a Ryzen system hold off until this is fixed?

<comment><USER11> The tester in the article says he hasn't had this happen on his daily use machine, and that it seems to only happen under very strenuous workloads. Most people should be fine but there's still a risk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Everybody should be ignoring this "test" by someone who obviously has no idea what conftest is or does :)

</comment><comment><USER18> From what I've read so far, he just keeps replicating the issue without really attempting to mitigate it. Does anyone know if he's tried disabling ASLR yet?

</comment><comment><USER19> How much money does Intel pay for such articles?

<comment><USER20> It's funny, to say the least, how these articles pop up merely days before the 1920x launch. The press just received their Threadrippers a few days ago...

Edit: No I'm not saying this is Intel, but it's sad that their release will be overshadowed by this. I really hoped for AMD to finally catch up with Intel because we all could profit from a second big player in the game.

<comment><USER21> What? Plenty of people are running simple test suites and stress tests on new CPUs to write up. This is nothing out of the ordinary at all.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Evertracker - My First Real Side Project - <AUTHOR> http://blog.danielna.com/post/26958036780/evertracker-first-real-side-project <comment><USER2> Any developer/entrepreneur who realizes the wisdom and accuracy of Don Rumsfeld's famous tongue-twister is on the right path:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_are_known_knowns>

* [T]here are known knowns; there are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns; that is to say there are things that, we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know, we don't know. _

<comment><USER3> Even more wise is realizing that it's ludicrous to most people!

<comment><USER4> And wisest yet is using it as a barometer to rule out ever listening to those people who find it ludicrous.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Don't feel bad about not creating a "profitable side-businesses after one marathon 48-hour coding session in a single weekend". I bet a lot of side projects posted to HN took much longer than 48 hours to complete even if the author claims it was all done in a weekend. You should be proud for having released anything at all. And kudos for being candid about the level of time, effort and perseverance that went into your project.

</comment><comment><USER6> Great job on the app and the video. Looks like you took care to really make the process as simple as possible... that being said, tracking every minute of my day gives me anxiety.

</comment><comment><USER7> Looks like a great app, but testflight says I can't install it on my iPhone 4S - is there any reason you're not supporting this device?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not exactly sure about the technical details, but that "can't install on the device" notice is what everyone will see until they send us the email that requests access. The email automatically submits an iPhone-specific identifier that is used to install the application. I _think_ this is what is usually required of testflight, but I could be wrong.

We're all on the 4S, so once we get the email we'll do our best to add you to the testflight list as soon as possible. Sorry for the confusion.

And we've heard from a lot of Android users, and we feel your pain! One of the developers on our project doesn't even own an iPhone so you have someone vouching for you on the inside. It's definitely on our list of to-dos.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Great idea, and well presented. For those new-year's resolution type of folk, being in the habit of keeping track of your daily accomplishments goes a long way towards helping you fulfill your personal goals.

If you have success with this, I'm sure people would be excited to see updates that let one track units other than time and 'ones', such as calories and distance travelled.

</comment><comment><USER9> That was a really enjoyable story about the process danielna. I don't have to know the first thing about your app to have learned something. Much better than barfing out "Here is my project vote for me."

So now I _will_ check out your project and vote for it if it is the best ;)

</comment><comment><USER10> I have loved this idea for years. I had wanted this same app when the iphone first came out.

However, it would be great if some of these activities can be triggered based on GPS location rather than clicking.

What about setting waypoints to track between. I set a waypoing GPS location for my home. Then I set one at the rain station near my house, then again near my job and finally at my job.

Measure commute times between all these points automatically.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, this feature has been requested a lot. And one person even commented on using NFC to have even finer control of automatic tracking. For example, having a NFC tag in your car detect when you get in and when you arrive and get out of your car. Tons of really cool ways to make this App even better.

<comment><USER10> I think NFC might not work too well, as the range is fairly small. So you may need to swipe your phone near it? But I am not sure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Now this is the kind of stuff I love to see on HN!

</comment><comment><USER13> There was an interesting collaborative working hack in there with using Dropbox for real time development with Xcode and two devs on different laptops (at least thats what I think they were doing).

<comment><USER11> Yup, you're correct. It worked well since there were only 2 of us and we were working and separate parts most of the time. Updates were always instantaneous and we always knew when someone was working on a file because we would get a notification as soon as they saved a change. Not the best setup, but it worked for us.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Nice article Dan! And thanks for including a picture of Mochi, he'll appreciate the celebrity status within the start-up community.

</comment><comment><USER14> Great app! Something I planned to build long time ago... Great job guys!

</comment><comment><USER15> Awesome work Dan. Excited to give this a try.

</comment><comment><USER16> Awesome app and idea. very useful!

</comment><comment><USER17> Awesome blog post Dan!

</comment><comment><USER18> Great article!</comment>


Fine-Grained Text to Image Generation with Attentional GAN - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.10485 <comment><USER2> I only read these papers for the pictures anymore.

<comment><USER3> In that case, you might have missed the text link to the supplementary materials!

[https://1drv.ms/b/s!Aj4exx_cRA4ghK5-kUG- EqH7hgknUA](https://1drv.ms/b/s!Aj4exx_cRA4ghK5-kUG-EqH7hgknUA)

It's not so good at faces -- zoom into the last page if you want to have nightmares.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> [1] has a sequence of images showing how the drawing bot gradually creates a v.realistic image of a bird with yellow body, black wings, and short beak. (Tao Xu et al. via Microsoft)

[1] [https://blogs.microsoft.com/ai/drawing- ai/](https://blogs.microsoft.com/ai/drawing-ai/)</comment>


Even Techies Can't Afford San Francisco Anymore - <AUTHOR> https://www.buzzfeed.com/carolineodonovan/even-techies-cant-afford-san-francisco-anymore <comment><USER2> I don't think it's that they _can't_ afford San Francisco anymore, it's that they don't _want_ to afford San Francisco anymore.

I'm in the same boat. The rent prices are insane, so much so that it's actually cheaper to live in Las Vegas, fly in once a month, and get a hotel, than to pay rent prices in the Bay Area.

I can elaborate if wanted, but I didn't go to college so that I could graduate, plow my entire paycheck into rent, and live like a college student again.

<comment><USER3> > so much so that it's actually cheaper to live in Las Vegas, fly in once a > month, and get a hotel, than to pay rent prices in the Bay Area.

That doesn't really make sense at all. Are you saying you only need to work or be in the office "once a month"? Or does flying in "once a month" mean flying in on the 1st and leaving on the 30th?

<comment><USER2> [http://www.realtor.com/news/trends/rent-in-vegas-commute- to-...](http://www.realtor.com/news/trends/rent-in-vegas-commute-to-san-fran- save-money/)

If you can swing a four day workweek, is the key. Otherwise, if you can work onsite only one week a month, Vegas (and other places) is the clear value winner. You know, if you don't mind the airport.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What's the end game for this if nothing changes and new housing doesn't materialize? Is it just a real estate bubble that will pop during the next economic dip? If there is another tech bubble will occur in a city like Seattle or Denver? Will the big players start to pack up shop and move to cheaper cities, because even fresh talent now requires +200k just to pay rent?

<comment><USER5> Constant influx of 100k recent grads and an efflux of others who didn't hit the equity lottery to afford at a minimum a down payment..

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> As someone who graduated in 2011, I feel like I really dodged a bullet with San Francisco. I've had managers in job interviews (even living in Boston!) tell me that I was crazy for not moving west, in my position, that you had to be in SF if you wanted to get into tech, do it now while you're young, etc. One person flat out told me I wasn't really serious about tech because I wasn't moving west. Recruiters assume that you'd be willing to relocate to SF, friends are constantly moving there -- there were definitely a few times that I considered it.

All said though, I think I've received much better opportunities in Boston, I love being around a more culturally/educationally diverse group of people, and I'm not sure the social pressures in SF would have molded me into a "better" person. Honestly, I'd probably hate "SF me," and I couldn't have asked for (or really wanted) a better early career than the one I'm having.

Although I have friends who are regretting their choice to move, and that sucks, I have to admit to a certain amount of schadenfreude, watching everything unfold in the last couple years. I'm sure San Francisco will be a tech hub for years to come, and I'm sure other tech hubs will continue to emerge, but it was a great early lesson for me that moving for a career often isn't the magic bullet that people think it is (or that staying put is a death sentence) -- especially in tech.

Certain extreme examples aside (it's hard to be a lumberjack in New Mexico), "career options" should be only one factor in choosing where to set your roots (or whether to set them at all), and, at a certain point, you can only take advantage of _so many_ opportunities in a lifetime, so there is a saturation point at which more of them become meaningless. Also, watch out for terrible advice when you're young :-p

<comment><USER7> The Boston region was, once upon a time, thought to be competitive with SV. But it fell behind in hype at some point during the 80's and never came back. I would be unsurprised that it is a decent tech market even today!

<comment><USER6> Yeah, it's great! More than enough tech jobs to go around, "average" software engineer salaries are only ~$10k less than San Francisco, and with all the MIT and Harvard grads around, you get to hang out with an interesting bunch of folks.

There are little hubs of "SF-like" technology centers, like Kendall Square: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kendall_Square#Businesses_and_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kendall_Square#Businesses_and_organizations) and and the south Boston Innovation District (hate the name, it came from Mayor Menino, but he was very successful at getting it running). But if you walk a few blocks in a straight line, you can easily get out of the tech bubble and go to a hundred year old Irish pub, or hang out with people who don't know how to program, which is why I like it!

There's also the "holdover from the 80's" tech office parks in Burlington, where MITRE is and Sun Microsystems (RIP) used to be. Lots of good newer companies there too, and my husband keeps trying to convince me to consider working in Burlington because real estate is so much cheaper, but I don't think it's going to happen any time soon! The good thing is that all the guys who used to work there are often working in the city now, so you get a LOT of graybeards and people who developed Java, or Linux tools 30 years ago, or are influential in the IETF hanging out. It's just a really great culture. Obviously different from San Francisco, but I love it!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Even techies, who want to raise a family, can't afford San Francisco anymore".

Dublin/Livermore is pretty cheap. If only more tech companies would take a hint and start building East Bay locations. If your employees can't afford to live close enough to your offices, then you should move your offices closer to them, or where real estate is more reasonable.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think that's pretty reasonable. An alternative would be to create a culture of working remotely without decreasing productivity. I remember reading something about Buffer and their approach to remote work and having a more distributed team.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> So why are firms locating in SF rather than the valley or east bay where their workers actually live? The commute to SF is long and parking fees are ridiculous.</comment>


How GPS Receivers Work - <AUTHOR> http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/gadgets/travel/gps.htm <comment><USER2> Oh boy. What a strange article. While they try to explain all intricate details, their funny use of analogies turns most things they tell either wrong or at least wildly off the mark.

A GPS receiver only receives at a single frequency (leaving out doppler for now) but _correlates_ several pseudorandom codes in simultaneously. It needs four sattelites no to increase the accuracy, but to solve for the fourth unknown, time. Also it doesn't use a quartz clock that resets "lets say at midnight" but measures the relative state of it's correlators' counters (that's what's often called "pseudorange"). And DGPS doesn't correct for incorrectly sent out almanacs. It only corrects for unknown propagation properties of our atmosphere (rather oddly described as slowing down of electromagnetic energy). DGPS also doesn't help you with multipath reception due to reflections at skyscrapers.

</comment><comment><USER3> They left out one of the more interesting aspects of GPS calculations, which is the corrections that must be made for special & general relativistic effects.

<comment><USER2> Those corrections are not actually essential for GPS to function. In first order it's only the satellites clocks that have to be run at a slightly elevated frequency (or is it the other way round? Don't know). The actual GPS receivers don't have to mess with relativity at all.

<comment><USER3> The satellite clocks run at a slightly lower frequency than the desired frequency on Earth: 10.22999999543 MHz instead of 10.23 MHz.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gps#Relativity>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This tutorial from Trimble is a little more detailed: <http://www.trimble.com/gps/index.shtml>

The really interesting innovation in GPS is the way they use a priori information about each satellite's signal to "amplify" the signal by processing: <http://www.trimble.com/gps/sub_amplify.shtml>

</comment><comment><USER5> If you want to compare the precision of various positioning methods:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_Area_Augmentation_System#C...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide_Area_Augmentation_System#Comparison_of_Accuracy)</comment>


Asserts as Comments - <AUTHOR> http://thevivekpandey.github.io/posts/2018-04-15-asserts-as-comments.html <comment><USER2> > Writing comments explaining your motivation

This. Comments saying what you are doing is a code smell - not always wrong, but always worth a second look as to why the code wasn't clear by itself. Comments saying WHY code just did something are great because they convey the real info future me will need.

Despite the quoted statement, the article proceeds to give assertions/comments that don't fulfil that purpose. Assertions are fine, but (unless I misread) this is solving a different problem than good comments solve.</comment>


This is engineering: Landing F-15 with one wing - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3K8BfI6BPM

<comment><USER2> With the afterburner on the plane can basically fly with no additional lift, so with a nose-up attitude you can get all the lift you need from the downwards component of the thrust and the lift from the main fuselage (which is why modern jet liners fly "nose-up" these days - extra lift from the body). The flight surfaces in the tail give you pitch, yaw and roll, so flying isn't really the problem.

Landing. That's the problem, and as the saying goes: take-offs might be optional, but landings are compulsory. Part way through I was thinking that the flying would be possible, but the landing not.

When he mentioned the tail-hook and cable I still thought "no chance," but the tearing out of the tail-hook will have bled enough energy from the system to make it work. I didn't know the F-15 landing gear was so far inboard.</comment>


Why don't we have code hot swapping on mobile? - <AUTHOR> http://smotko.si/hotswapping/

<comment><USER2> As I recall from my distant Android app development, you could redeploy to your phone (connected via a USB cable) in seconds, and it was never a big hindrance.

You typically just have a 'cheat code' to take you to any level or whatever so you are never far play-wise from where you want to be debugging.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are right. Deploying takes seconds + a bit more to get to the state you're testing. This isn't bad, it's actually quite amazing when you think about it. But compared to instant feedback, it's in a completely different ball park.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Most likely security.

While this is handy for development work, the temptation to leave it in the final version ("Hey, it works now, why 'fix' it?") would be pretty high.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, but couldn't this be handled by the OS? You could have a special option in the development tools, that allows you to run hot swappable apps.

<comment><USER4> It already exists. The manifest has a "debuggable" flag that allows for a remote debugger to attach to a running app. Nothing on the Play Store is debuggable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> On iOS a system could be build to support some form of hot code swapping. Reason being that application can load NSBundle objects at runtime and NSBundles can contain (among other things) executable code.

Sadly, Apple doesn't allow apps to use this in release versions, as apps could more easily exploit potential flaws in the system this way, since one could bypass Apple's approval process.

More info on NSBundles here: [https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/Cocoa...](https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/Cocoa/Reference/Foundation/Classes/NSBundle_Class/Reference/Reference.html)

Apparently a more "low-level" approach is possible as well, but again not allowed by Apple: <http://stackoverflow.com/a/10509453/250164>

</comment><comment><USER6> In fact there are some solutions out there for code injection using bundles on iOS, e.g. the following video:

<http://vimeo.com/50137444>

It packages it all up as a plugin for Xcode.

<comment><USER7> You can also run arbitrary code from the standard debugger although it may not be possible to actually change the code substantially it can be useful for exploring and experimenting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's not just mobile; the only implementation of hot swapping for C I know of is MSVC's debugger, so I'm out of luck as an OS X and Linux user. Would be cool to implement.

</comment><comment><USER9> Interesting article. I would love to see less limitations on mobile development.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree. For me code swapping is such an important feature. I can't imagine how people are doing game development without it. On the other hand, there are a lot of games for mobile devices, so I guess it's not impossible...

<comment><USER10> Like we always did.

Compile, re-deploy</comment></comment></comment>


Another Amazon Alexa Privacy Problem - <AUTHOR> https://blog.thetravelinsider.info/2019/07/another-amazon-alexa-privacy-problem.html <comment><USER2> _I'd been bumped up to a woman (Melissa, in their Puerto Rico call center) who grandly described herself as "the last point of contact on the leadership team". There was no-one, anywhere in Amazon, more senior than her who would or could talk to me or help address my concern, and she was so senior that she refused my request to speak to an American representative._

Puerto Ricans are American</comment>


Tesla Safety and Fire Report Q2 2019 - <AUTHOR> https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport <comment><AUTHOR> Q1 2019

"In the 1st quarter, we registered one accident for every 2.87 million miles driven in which drivers had Autopilot engaged. For those driving without Autopilot but with our active safety features, we registered one accident for every 1.76 million miles driven. For those driving without Autopilot and without our active safety features, we registered one accident for every 1.26 million miles driven. By comparison, NHTSA's most recent data shows that in the United States there is an automobile crash every 436,000 miles."

Q2 2019

"In the 2nd quarter, we registered one accident for every 3.27 million miles driven in which drivers had Autopilot engaged. For those driving without Autopilot but with our active safety features, we registered one accident for every 2.19 million miles driven. For those driving without Autopilot and without our active safety features, we registered one accident for every 1.41 million miles driven. By comparison, NHTSA's most recent data shows that in the United States there is an automobile crash every 498,000 miles.*

*Note: Since we released our last quarterly safety report, NHTSA has released new data, which we've referenced in this quarter's report."</comment>


MSVC and GCC Support C/C++ Pre-Processor Macro Push and Pop - <AUTHOR> http://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/2009/01/01-16-09-pushmacro-popmacro.html#comments

<comment><AUTHOR> I did not know this. At first, reading the post I thought it was talking about MSVC's #pragma warning(push) and pop. Also, I like the subtly wrong example in one of the comments.</comment>


Show HN: ZangoDB Is a MongoDB-Like Interface for HTML5 IndexedDB - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/erikolson186/zangodb <comment><USER2> You may want to check out the CouchDB project, they recently added a Mongo- like query interface. Also check out PouchDB, the JS version of Couch which can use (among other browser storage options) IndexedDB, offers a Mongo-like query interface, and syncs with Couch. There may be some good ideas in there that you can use for your own project.

<comment><AUTHOR> The functionality and behavior of ZangoDB was tailored specifically for porting a rather complex Mongo-based application to the browser. Syncing was not one of the requirements. However, I am currently working towards adding syncing support, and I am investigating developers' requirements. I will look into how PouchDB handles this. Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Have you planned on a simple sync with a backend DB (any nosql? couch/mongo/rethink..)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, it is a goal to eventually support syncing. I would like to create a plugin system for it so developers could add syncing support for whatever DBMS they desire. The priority is for MongoDB though.

<comment><USER4> If you write something for Couchbase (which PouchDB supports) I'd be interested to hear about it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am largely impartial to which backend to support. All though MongoDB seems ideal considering that ZangoDB supports it's document based language. Would you, based on your experience and preferences, say that Couchbase should have a higher precedence than Mongo?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Payment processing system that available to startups from Turkey? - <AUTHOR>

I checked Stripe and Braintree but they're not available for signups from Turkey, any alternatives? <comment><USER2> Check Paymill. They have a pretty good integration and are one of the strongest players in the market. They claim that they support Turkey too, but since I am located somewhere else I cannot check that. Otherwise they are cool Good luck

</comment><comment><USER3> Despite not (currently) being ideal, allowing users to pay in bitcoin would be pretty neat.

</comment><comment><USER4> PayPal?!

<comment><AUTHOR> PayPal's commission too high and integration was not simple as Stripe, Braintree. If only option is PayPal; i can get a vpos from a bank and its much easier plus lower commissions</comment></comment>


A Commentary on the Sixth Edition Unix Operating System - <AUTHOR> http://warsus.github.io/lions-/ <comment><USER2> Had to go find the famous "you are not expected to understand this" comment in the context-switching section.

Looks like it's at line 2238 if anyone is interested in taking a look at it and the code that we are so famously not required to understand.

<comment><USER3> What was that about? Any link for background story?

<comment><USER4> That comment was supposedly put in the code for an intern who was still learning about the system. "You are not expected to understand this", as in, "this will not be on the test".

<comment><USER5> The comment was put there by Dennis Ritchie to state that the context switching code was hard to understand. It depended on the hardware of the PDP-11. He wrote that comment to indicate that it was complex, buggy, and that they didn't quite fully understand the code either.

[https://thenewstack.io/not-expected-understand- explainer/](https://thenewstack.io/not-expected-understand-explainer/)

<comment><USER4> Thanks, I should have googled before replying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I learned C and the Unix kernel from Lions' Commentary. I still have a _licensed_ original copy. I should find a good library for it. The Computer History Museum already has a copy.

<comment><USER7> The Internet Archive has Lions' "Experiences with the Unix Time-Sharing System" [1] Would they be interested in your copy of the commentary?

[1] [https://archive.org/details/experiences-with-unix- tss](https://archive.org/details/experiences-with-unix-tss)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Dang, brings back amazing memories of seeing the Unix source listings on my office mate's desk in the Aiken computer lab.

I think Harvard got the first official copy outside of Bell Labs in about 1973 or 4. Memory vague.

It was first used on an 11/45 to run the Intro to Programming course for the hoi polloi, running an interpreter for the PPL language, a local higher level language invented by Chuck Prenner as assisted by Al Spector, who was in my class and who ended up as IBM's chief scientist of some stripe.

It was also used by Peter Langston to write one of the first (the first?) Empire games. It was so engrossed by that I think Peter and others eventually dropped out after getting lost in it.

There's something very special about those early C listings. We already used Bliss-10 and -11 from CMU, but C was clearly a different take on low level systems programming.

</comment><comment><USER9> What was obvious to us in that class of 1974 at UNSW was that when we were allowed to power down the PDP at 5pm from the Dec OS running 3 terminals and insert the Unix's RK05, we could run 30 terminals doing the same stuff. We weren't put off by it crashing about every hour, only encouraged to fix it, but we all pretty much in my opinion were defensive about all the heavy criticism from the establishment and the lack of time to explain much.

</comment><comment><USER10> From the introduction: "The co-operation of the "nroff" program must also be mentioned. Without it, these notes could never have been produced in this form. However it has yielded some of its more enigmatic secrets so reluctantly, that the author's gratitude is indeed mixed. Certainly "nroff" itself must provide a fertile field for future practitioners of the program documenter's art."

Had he waited another year, he would have had access to TeX...

</comment><comment><USER11> Amazing. I love this structure.

</comment><comment><USER12> Why does the code start at line 100?

</comment><comment><USER13> (1977!)

Only 13 signals.</comment>


Reddit is already one of the most heavily censored websites on the internet - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/apu3oz/with_the_recent_chinese_company_tencent_in_the/ <comment><USER2> I cut all my dealings with reddit about a month ago. It's amazing the amount of time I have regained, apart from a complete change in how I use the Web.

How did that come about? I'll tell you. It's quite a strange tale.

One day, I happened to go to reddit's front page. It was accidental, I usually only visited a tight selection of my subscribed subreddits, and had done for about 10 years.

On that front page was a thumbnail of a piece of medical equipment being used. Being from a medical background, I clicked on that picture and confirmed that it was indeed an ancient piece of equipment, and still in use today. So I commented 'I haven't seen one of those for 50 years!'. And that was that. No big deal, hey?

Then, a little later, I received a message saying that I had been banned(!) from some never-previously-heard-of subreddit for 'participating' in the 'the donald' subreddit. HUH?? WHA??

So I looked back through my history and discovered that the medical equipment photo had been a posting on 'the donald'. I had been banned from some other third-party subreddit for merely commenting on a piece of medical equipment.

When I posted about this weird occurrence on the 'collapse' subreddit, my post was censored. It was disappeared without trace in less than an hour.

So that's why I now have more free time than I have had for years, and why I have expunged all trace of reddit from my bookmark list.

</comment><comment><USER3> The biggest thing for me was when reddit started quarantining subreddits. No matter how distasteful the red pill aubreddit is, what rules did it break exactly? Also, why is the subreddit holdmyfries allowed when the subreddit fatpeoplehate was banned?</comment>


3D Printer Hack: Embedding Water and Metal - <AUTHOR> http://makefastworkshop.com/hacks/?p=20160920&v=1 <comment><AUTHOR> This has been a lot of fun exploring over the past few days. Let me know if you have suggestions/questions about this kind of hybrid approach using 3D printers.

Anything else you'd like to see printed with multiple materials?

<comment><USER2> (I can't tell from the post if you are able to print 2 materials, or just embed 1 in another, so I'm not sure if this is what you are looking for)

At one point I wrote a STL converter for medical images (DICOM -> STL), for MRIs and CAT scans: [https://github.com/chrisvana/printer](https://github.com/chrisvana/printer)

It would be interesting to print a cancer tumor with one material the and the surrounding tissue with another. Some data here: [http://www.cancerimagingarchive.net](http://www.cancerimagingarchive.net)

<comment><USER3> > It would be interesting to print a cancer tumor with one material the and > the surrounding tissue with another. Some data here: > [http://www.cancerimagingarchive.net](http://www.cancerimagingarchive.net)

Wow, that's like the first cool reason I have stumbled upon for a dual- extruder printer. :) (a lot of people think they need a printer with dual- extruders -- they don't, and actually the biggest reason they don't need it is 3d printing suddenly gets twice as difficult when you're doing it with dual- extruders)

<comment><USER4> > 3d printing suddenly gets twice as difficult when you're doing it with dual- > extruders

Not really... If you use something like this [http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1680034](http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1680034)

In this case, you extrude motor 1 and print. Then to switch, you retract until you're before the Y, and extrude with filament 2. Use a wipe-tower to get a consistent flow, and you have 2 colors (of the same material) with 1 hotend.

<comment><USER5> My experience would be that it is a lot more difficult.

I've got one of these (the cyclops) and when it works it works well (although even with a wipe tower you get some colour bleed).

[https://printedsolid.com/products/e3d-dual-extrusion- chimera...](https://printedsolid.com/products/e3d-dual-extrusion-chimera- cyclops)

It is very easy to jam one of the colours, you have to be very careful about retraction distances because if you retract to far the other colour can leak into the cold end part and solidify and then you only have one colour working.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


BourgeoisBear/DaddyTimeMono: A Monospaced Font - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/BourgeoisBear/DaddyTimeMono <comment><USER2> That looks awesome! I really like the clean look and easy to differ between O's and 0's .

<comment><USER3> May want to re-download it. The first push didn't include the hinted version. It will look a lot better at small sizes with latest version.</comment></comment>


PICO-8 lighting, part 1: thin dark line - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@krajzeg/pico-8-lighting-part-1-thin-dark-line-8ea15d21fed7#.2prysaoe5 <comment><USER2> I'm reminded of how I was watching a friend play a game recently (can't remember the name, sadly) with a really clever and unique way of accomplishing line-of-sight lighting effects. It's a top-down 2D game, but the engine is 3D, and all level geometry that would block LOS simply projects upward an infinitely tall black tower (with a slight gap between the bottom of the tower and the ground plane, so that you can see enough of the geometry sprites to determine that there's a wall there). Combined with a fisheye lens effect on the camera to exaggerate the towers, it's a very convincing and artistic effect.

EDIT: Found it, it's called Teleglitch: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEnS4wPRETw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEnS4wPRETw)

<comment><USER3> Wow, that is a really clever technique. Thanks for sharing!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Author of the article here - if you have any questions or feedback, I'll be happy to answer them or listen to it, respectively :)

<comment><USER5> Loved part One! Stop hanging around here and get Part 2 written!! You have a good writing style and it was easy to follow whats going on. I also like the indepth of what PICO-8 is doing behind the scenes. I've read other articles, but yours is the first time it's clicked.

Thanks!

<comment><USER4> Hey, at least let me have a few moments to bask in the glory!

Actually, I've been working on the draft of part 2 when my Medium notification bar started going crazy - which is how I knew that something strange happened (the strange thing being an HN frontpage, apparently).

So, no worries, part 2 is coming soon (TM).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> To anyone that's remotely interested, I'd really suggest getting yourself a copy of PICO-8 to fiddle with. When people post their games, they include all the code/assets by default, so there's a ton of stuff to read and learn from and it generally is a fun tool to mess with. I'm working on my first Tetris clone atm myself

<comment><USER4> Indeed, the PICO-8 BBS [1] is a smorgasbord of open-source games of various kinds and quality.

A lot of people (including me) practice extreme open-source for PICO-8 carts by licensing them as Creative Commons, which is easy to do - you just click a checkbox on submission.

This in turn leads to the best games being tweaked and remixed quite a lot - for example Celeste [2] (in my opinion, the best game on the platform) has at least one variant with a lot of new mechanics and gameplay [3].

[1] PICO-8 BBS: [http://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?cat=7](http://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?cat=7)

[2] Celeste: [http://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=2145](http://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=2145)

[3] Perisher: [http://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=27694](http://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=27694)

<comment><USER7> We in the PICO-8 community also have both a Slack and Discord where you can ask for advice and show off cool projects :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Thanks for sharing. I love the education licensing! I've been teaching with Scratch and MinecraftEdu/ComputerCraft (which also uses Lua) and this looks like a promising addition to my classroom tech stack. Extra-cool that it is DRM-free and doesn't require an account to use...these sources of friction can really negatively impact classroom productivity for students age 8 - 12.

Frankly if it requires an account I flat out won't use it in the classroom unless it is really simple and complies with COPPA (like Scratch accounts, especially the new classroom accounts)

<comment><USER9> I just don't get why pico-8 itself isn't free software. :(

<comment><USER10> I hope you mean free as freedom. I'm not surprised that Pico is not open source. It's still in development and author is really careful about design and building a community around it. Pico is such a creative environment thanks to its limitations and last thing community needs is fifty incompatible forks that would change pallete, resolution or token limit :)

<comment><USER9> Yes, free as in freedom. The educational character might profit if - for those curious to do so - it would be possible to look into the mechanics of this 'game'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is great, the PICO-8 is very neat, and I love seeing these kind of explanations. It's really impressive what some people have managed to do despite the constrained environment.

</comment><comment><USER12> Wow, that looks ridiculous. Had no idea Pico-8 was capable of that.

Although when I was working on a game for it, I didn't do much more than draw lines and fills on the screen :).

</comment><comment><USER13>
      decide it's impossible on the puny simulated CPU

Doesn't PICO-8 had no limitations on CPU? It is not an emulator that slowdowns the clock to a certain frequency. It is as fast as Lua gets.

<comment><USER4> Calling it a CPU is a simplification, but PICO-8 does emulate limited CPU resources by limiting how much code you can run per frame.

Lua code runs at exactly the same speed inside the PICO-8 executable on a PC and in the HTML5 export on a mobile - in both cases much slower than in a standard Lua interpreter on my PC.

My guess is that PICO-8 is counting and limiting the number of opcodes the Lua VM is allowed to execute per frame, but that's hard to confirm.

It's certain though that everything you can do in code (from variable assignment to graphics operations like rectfill()) has a certain "cycle cost", and you get a limited number of "cycles" per frame - just as if it was a real machine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This reminds me of some of the articles I've read about various hacks pulled on classic video game consoles to get acceptable performance out of the limited hardware. PICO-8 has crossed my radar and piqued my interest before. I think I shall pick up a copy and start poking around.

</comment><comment><USER15> Very interesting and entertaining - thanks for posting.

</comment><comment><USER16> Awesome to see PICO-8 on the front page! Nice article!</comment>


From liberal beacon to a prop for Trump: what has happened to WikiLeaks? - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/oct/14/wiileaks-from-liberal-beacon-to-a-prop-for-trump-what-has-happened <comment><USER2> WikiLeaks never aligned with US party politics.</comment>


Supreme Court upends Bayh-Dole: Serious ding to University patent ownership? - <AUTHOR> http://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=9a3ce2e1-121b-4e65-8eb8-ed9106142298

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry for the sparse link ... I couldn't find a better source this early.</comment>


Cheap JTAG/SWD Debug Adaptor - <AUTHOR> http://armstart.com/products/ibdap-cmsis-dap-jtag-swd-firmware-debug-probe

<comment><USER2> Arm vendors lately have arduino form factor dev kits for around $15-30 with onboard jtag. I don't notice better performance using a jlink over an onboard debugger. I've never tried but it looks like you could use the onboard debuggers on your own pcbs and skip the $500 debugger.

<comment><USER3> I've been using a debugger based on the USBDM project. [http://usbdm.sourceforge.net/](http://usbdm.sourceforge.net/) Same performance as PEMicro's $300 Multilink + $200 GDB Server. And no restriction on using them for production.

Been thinking of open sourcing the board I designed. The only real issue is, needing $1500 to pass FCC licensing since it's designed to fit in a case.</comment></comment>


Big Changes for Mainstream Chip Architectures - <AUTHOR> https://semiengineering.com/big-changes-for-mainstream-chip-architectures/ <comment><USER2> _Looked at from another angle, these changes shift the nexus for innovation from manufacturing and process technology to architecture and design on the front end, and to post-manufacturing packaging on the back end_

</comment><comment><USER3> Article is about increasing the performance per watt.

Before reading, I guessed it was about lowering the "Non Recurring Expenses" of chip design. Currently that is the part keeping enthusiast away. Once we reach any kind of 3D-printing style on demand layout, we will have a github of chip design.

<comment><USER4> At the moment, Tempo Automation[1] is probably the closest thing to the goal you describe.

[1]: [https://www.tempoautomation.com](https://www.tempoautomation.com)

<comment><USER5> Custom circuit assembly has been available for decades, and if everything else fails, can be done at home.

It also has no relation at all with chip fabrication.</comment></comment></comment>


Black Preschoolers Far More Likely to Be Suspended - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/03/21/292456211/black-preschoolers-far-more-likely-to-be-suspended <comment><AUTHOR> > There are big racial differences in how school discipline is meted out: > students of color are much more likely to be suspended or expelled that > white students, _even when the infractions are the same._</comment>