Apple fixes iTunes App search - Thank you Chomp - <AUTHOR> http://recoveryrecord.posterous.com/apple-fixes-itunes-app-search-thank-you-chomp

<comment><USER2> There is another side to this coin - <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4153610>

While I think in theory this is a good change, in practice they failed on part of it.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm personally not too thrilled with the change...This means that if you don't have a budget for promoting your app, and you are not featured, any app you release going forward is basically DOA, since you can't really rely on the app getting discovered via keywords. I exaggerate a little on being DOA, but things have become significantly more difficult for new apps.

<comment><USER4> I don't agree with that. If you have a low budget and rely on keywords for discovery, you shouldn't be competing in a crowded niche in the first place. Unfortunately, all niches will eventually get more crowded.

I'm not thrilled with the change because it was a surprise and was a big blow to my sales.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It'll be interesting the reaction of developers here, some will win, others will lose.

This could be the moment of truth for Apple.

<comment><USER2> It's frustrating that there was no heads up from Apple. In theory I think it's a great idea. In practice, not showing up at all for phrases that have my title and keywords in it really sucks. Seems like an oversight to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I would like to know the impact this had on daily sales. The Chomp update does not appear to have been applied to the Mac App Store.

</comment><comment><USER7> this is interesting. over the last few days i was wondering why some competing apps were slowly dropping in the rankings.

previously they were higher ranked in search for a specific keyword in their title. but with the new changes and my app being highly rated, i am now #1 on that search.

</comment><comment><USER8> This has nothing to do with Chomp.</comment>


P2 powers internal collaboration at WordPress.com, and is now free - <AUTHOR> https://wordpress.com/blog/2020/08/06/improve-your-remote-collaboration-with-p2/ <comment><USER2> I work at Automattic, and p2 is (in my mind) _the_ thing that makes our remote-only culture work. We don't really use email that much or other forms of async chat. When synchronous chat (like Slack) gets to be too in-depth, our motto is "p2 or it didn't happen." p2 has the widest visibility in the company -- anyone can search for a p2 post, or cross-post to other teams and divisions. Since many teams are spread across the globe, async conversations are crucial to staying aligned. That's why any kind of in-depth conversation, technical analysis, or decision making happens on p2.

Company culture is also important to making it work, in my mind. p2 is viewed as the source of truth for many conversations (including meeting notes and summaries of slack conversations), which is part of how it works. Additionally, anyone across the company is empowered to post on any p2 to start conversations, ask questions, or kickstart lengthy, technical discussions.

In response to another commenter, Automattic has been using p2 as its main form of async internal communication for years before it even hit 1k employees, so it's not the kind of thing which requires a ton of people to work. Once a few hundred people using it as the main form of async conversation, there is certainly more content than any one person can consume. :)

<comment><USER3> We use discourse for this. Any type of forum-like product is very effective as a complement to email and instant messages for the reasons you describe. For effective remote I think it's indispensable to have: Instant messaging, email, forum, wiki. Looks like p2 might also serve as a sort of "company directory" thing, which we also use another product for, but I don't get much as value out of that.

<comment><USER4> In 2000 I worked at a company that used an NNTP server for an internal forum. Back then it was common for mail clients to speak NNTP, so you could flip back and forth between correspondence and discussion in the same tool, easily reply to or forward posts by email, etc. That was the smoothest and most productive application of this idea I've seen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I used to work at WordPress.com (Automattic) after they acquired our startup Simplenote. P2 was great.

Now I'm at one of the big tech companies that is suddenly all-remote. I miss P2. It gives you a place where ideas can "stick" much better than with async chat, email, or wikis. At the top-level (per-team or per-project) P2s feel like much more than just another wiki aggregation page. You actually want to visit them to catch up on the latest.

The per-post threaded conversations promote more thoughtful, ongoing discussion. These naturally fade over time as new posts are made, a bit like HN or reddit. Generally this is a useful, organic default, and complements (rather than replaces) async chat.

It can be overwhelming once you're interested in tracking many P2s. But you can address this with discipline, culture, and more tools.

<comment><USER6> SimpleNote is awesome. Reliably, natively on all platforms, and: for years and years now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> There is a live demo here [https://p2customers.p2.blog/](https://p2customers.p2.blog/)

I don't get it. Looks like a regular news wall with endless scrolling and comments expanded.

Except anybody can post an announcement on top? and the previous ones disappear under the constant flow?

<comment><USER8> The idea here (I think) is that this is meant for use within an enterprise. Like a corporate wiki, but organized more like an aggregator site. I've seen a few similar products that were like enterprise facebook or enterprise twitter. They are sorta useful, but it's hard to get enough engagement to be worthwhile. Your company needs at least a few thousand people in order for them to generate enough content to keep people interested.

<comment><USER9> For context, a8c started using a prior version of p2 like eleven or twelve years ago, when we were positively dozens of people. We have smaller p2s for teams of three to four people.

tl;dr: nah, doesn't need thousands of people to be useful.

<comment><USER10> "a8c" is Automattic (makers of Wordpress) for anyone who was confused.

Obligatory "Mean Girls" ;) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pubd- spHN-0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pubd-spHN-0)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I contracted at Automattic and P2 was critical, but boy do you spend a lot of time reading and writing. You really don't want to half-ass a P2 post for a lot of reasons (a good thing), so what you get is very thoughtful but fairly verbose and voluminous posts and corresponding conversation.

Reading P2 tends to happen in between tasks, like email, but it's a little harder to keep track of what you did and didn't read, or be aware of an important comment that got by you.

It fixes a lot of things for async work that email falls short of, but probably still needs a few more tweaks to make it slightly more manageable given its nature.

</comment><comment><USER12> This looks really neat! Can anyone shine a light on what makes this different/better than Basecamp (other than being custom built for the way Automattic works, which is obviously a selling point for them). My understanding is that Basecamp does a lot of these things, although it's not self-hosted.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm sure this used to be a theme for WordPress at one point? Either way, it's really unusual how Automattic haven't released it to the public

<comment><USER14> > Can I self-host my P2? Not at the moment, but we plan to offer this option > in the future.

Yea - I see it as weird too. The _only_ reason I'm still an advocate for WordPress are the self-host-ability/full customization aspects. Otherwise, you're just another Medium that's going to take my data and use it against me.

Honestly, I wouldn't touch this until Automattic publishes the code. To a old- timer who's been leveraging WP for well over a decade: ew.

<comment><USER9> Further context from a friend: [https://wptavern.com/automattic- relaunches-p2-self-hosted-ve...](https://wptavern.com/automattic- relaunches-p2-self-hosted-version-on-the-roadmap#comment-337091)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Lots of comments on 1,000+ people teams.

What about sub 100?

We are fully distributed. Lots of Slack and Zoom. Trying to create a central source of truth in Notion but that feels very static.

Any smaller teams using this?

<comment><USER16> Any wiki software suffers from the problem that only a small percentage of the company uses it. It's essentially a tax on the most productive people. If someone asks you for the same thing 8x, you will write it down and share it via a wiki.

I've spend years trying to solve the problem - how do you get the average person writing more at work? What I've come up with resembles a company "journal", but helps you automate any routine communication or update (daily standup, weekly update, retros, etc).

Would love any/all feedback on the idea, here's the website ([https://www.friday.app/](https://www.friday.app/)). You can use it as an individual, team, or with the entire org.

<comment><USER17> > how do you get the average person writing more at work?

Some people have many answers, but other people have many questions. So I think encouraging people to ask more (even stupid) questions might be a way to get the discussion going.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It looks very similar to Zulip.

Can anybody contrast both ? Zulip would bring the best of slack and p2 right?

<comment><USER19> We recently adopted Mattermost at Canonical to replace IRC. While it's a great IRC replacement I am very much missing the ability to thread into sub-topics like Zulip. And creating whole new channels is hard for other team members to discover.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Anyone remember forums? I have been floating the idea in my org that forums are so much better than slack/discord, and we have regressed in our communication abilities.

Topics. Sub forums. View unread, link to posts, quoting, attachments. Voting. Reply by email. So many great things came from forums.

<comment><USER21> Forums were great. Unfortunately the realtime chat eclipsed it. Then everyone went to Facebook groups.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I have known P2 since it was a theme. What i dislike is that now, WordPress has stopped development on the orignal p2 theme which could be self hosted. How much of the hosted p2 is different than the theme ? No idea. [https://wordpress.org/themes/p2/](https://wordpress.org/themes/p2/)

This is what i believe goes against the open principles evangelized by WordPress.

</comment><comment><USER23> I'd like to use some alternative to Teams, but the Office 365 and videochat integration is so convenient that my not-tech-savy staff would have a lot of trouble working with anything else. Microsoft has done a great job on vendor lock-in with Teams.

</comment><comment><USER24> I used P2 back in ~2012 when Onswipe and Automattic were working together on a joint plugin for WordPress.com. It was a long time ago, but I remember it being… weird? Maybe it was the culture clash, but at the time it felt disorienting.

</comment><comment><USER25> I could imagine this becoming popular for college classes and research teams. Simple, clean, and powerful.

</comment><comment><USER26> No pricing information if I want to use P2 for my company internally? Even as a SaaS?

<comment><USER27> This version is free but there will be premium versions.

<comment><USER26> All right! Can't wait to see your paid solutions!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> SaaS advertising for a closed source/proprietary, hosted, PHP app. No mention of end to end crypto, so third party doctrine applies to all your communications, including DMs. Your chatops are only as secure as their hosted auth system, which you can't review or audit.

I don't think the world needs more things like this.

Give me something open source that I can hack on, or run on my own machine, ideally in a modern language.

This feels like too little, too late, in a world already cluttered by shiny, hosted tools that offer you zero privacy from the hosting provider (which you can't change).

A company that does things like this can't really be said to have a commitment to free software. Free software is like veganism or respect for the rule of law in society: it's not something you do sometimes, when you feel like it. Either you believe in software freedom, or you do not.

You should not be writing source code that you expect your customers to use but not be able to read and modify.</comment>


Ubuntu Snap auto updates broke my setup and there is no way to turn them off - <AUTHOR> https://raymii.org/s/blog/Ubuntu_Snap_auto_updates_broke_my_development_setup.html <comment><USER2> > The snap store / backend is also not open source

A direct attack on user freedom. If Canonical can do this to enough components of Ubuntu, they can prevent forks, since a useful OS would require that infrastructure.

</comment><comment><USER3> What's the Canonical's response to this? Surely, they care about their customer base, right?</comment>


Controversial U of T Prof Now Making over $500K a Year in Donations (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/43dwj9/controversial-u-of-t-prof-now-making-over-dollar500k-a-year-in-donations <comment><USER2> For all the criticism that Vice gets from the anti-pc crowd that read - to me at least - as a perfectly neutral and fact based article about someone who is something of a curiousity.

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://www.patreon.com/jordanbpeterson](https://www.patreon.com/jordanbpeterson)

This page has been removed.

<comment><USER4> Yes, he quit a few months ago. This is an 8 month old article. He has a video on his YT channel on why he quit (censorship - quite a few left Patreon).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is from 2017. There is a video where he discloses that he makes quite a bit more. This also is prior to him outright cancelling his Patreon account and moving to Sunscribestar due to the censorship issue regarding YouTuber Sargon of Akkad. He also makes millions from his book sales, and he even revealed he makes $200k a month from an online service, presumably his "self- authoring program." There's also no doubt hundreds of thousands from his speaking engagements.

The real question is why do you think this is important? Jordan Peterson has done his part in introducing some of the critical talking points into mainstream political conversation, i.e. (paraphrasing both) "we do not have a good conception of determining when the left has gone too far" and "the end result of intersectionality is individualism, which is what liberal societies have already been correctly centered around for hundreds of years."

He's obviously slightly insane, with his over eagerness to attribute archetypal meaning to just about everything, and his willingness to explore his inner monologue with absolutely no attempt to clarify the absurdity of the hypothetical he's putting forward, but I would argue that the good far outweighs the bad. Conversations have gotten far more sane, and he had played his part in it.</comment>


Show HN: One Click Shopping Everywhere - <AUTHOR> https://www.getcarte.com/

<comment><USER2> I like the concept. A couple of thoughts:

1) I wonder how you can secure the lowest price however. I'm guessing there's no way you can slurp in all the targeted promotional offers that a user receives from a specific retailer and apply them in the checkout process.

2) Do you make judgment calls as to when it makes sense to get things cheaper vs. get them faster (i.e., best buy has something a couple bucks cheaper but Amazon will get it to me 3 days faster).

3) How are returns handled?

Cool concept but this gets hairy fast.

</comment><comment><USER3> How do I know I can trust you and your site?

If you are legit, then how can I trust you won't pull a Target or Home Depot on me?

Assuming I use your service to buy something with an account I already have with one of your partners, how do you keep all that secure so you're not exposing way more than just my credit card data?

</comment><comment><USER4> Hey, I fail to understand the value prop here. Admittedly I mostly use Amazon, and the checkout is super simple. Second I would be more concerned with using a company I have not heard off. I usually use PayPal if I am unsure about the site. Am I missing something?</comment>


Character by character TTY input in Unix, then and now - <AUTHOR> https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/RawTtyInputThenAndNow <comment><USER2> Would you agree that the whole TTY subsystem makes very little sense in this day and age? Why not let programs operate in raw mode by default and provide user-level library calls for input line buffering?

<comment><USER3> It's important for job control. Like Ctrl+c or Ctrl+z.

<comment><USER4> Why not do that screen/tmux style, where shell takes input and passes it to foreground program, unless it's one of those special key sequences?

<comment><USER3> That's not what happens with screen or tmux (or xterm, or sshd on the remote side of an ssh connection...). These allocate a pseudo terminal (PTY; which is a structure in the kernel) and connect to the master end. Using that they emulate a terminal, which has a virtual keyboard and a virtual screen. A shell (or another program) is started, with its input and output(s) connected to the slave end.

The virtual keyboard might be X11 key events in the case of xterm, or a network stream in the case of sshd, or simply the stdin downstream from another terminal in the case of tmux. That keyboard character stream is fed into the write fd of the master end of the PTY.

The virtual display is implemented by processing data read from the read fd of the master end of the PTY. That might involve drawing to an X11 window in the case of xterm, or sending back data over the network in the case of sshd, or writing to stdout connected to another terminal in the case of tmux.

The important part is this: The job control is still done in the kernel as part of the PTY implementation. That implementation is where for example a Ctrl+c (0x03 byte) is converted to a SIGINT which is then sent to the slave program.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The fact that the kernel TTY driver is responsible for handling erase in cooked mode leads to a wrinkle: in order to do that correctly it needs to know if you're using a multibyte character set, and if so, which one (because a single erase must erase an entire multibyte codepoint).

Linux uses the (non-POSIX) IUTF8 termios(2) flag to indicate a terminal is using UTF8. If this is set on a terminal which isn't UTF-8, you'll see some odd results - for example, in a terminal using the single byte character set ISO-8859-1 but with IUTF8 set and in cooked mode, if you type:

      áá

and then backspace once and hit enter, the process reading cooked mode will recieve "á\n" \- the erase has eaten two ISO-8859-1 codepoints because it thought that they were a single UTF-8 codepoint.

I've never used a non-UTF-8 multibyte terminal (like BIG5 or SHIFT-JIS) but I don't think erase would work correctly in cooked mode on such terminals.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is incredibly timely. I've been trying to figure out if it is possible to create a universal shim that would always give me readline-like behaviour while supplying input to an ongoing program.

Something like this:

./shim.sh | ./some_horrible_cli.rb

That way I could always rely on my linux shortcuts. Ie, no "^A^K" when I try to kill a line; it would just kill the line.

Is this possible?

<comment><USER7> Good news! This already exists. It's called 'rlwrap' and it's awesome.

<comment><USER6> Thank you! :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think that protected mode existed in old Unix systems and so was not delineated between user space and kernel space as described.

Protected mode and the separation of kernel and user space was only available since 80286 processors starting in 1982.

Refs:

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

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

<comment><USER9> There is a world outside of Intel, especially back in the 80's and 90's...

<comment><USER10> And especially back in the '60s and '70s, when Unix and its predecessors were originally developed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Th discussion of ssh is interesting and calls to mind the SUPDUP protocol, which moves all the character echoing, cooked mode, and even some local editing — including screen movement for Emacs!) to the local (user end) of the network connection. Might be worth reviving.

</comment><comment><USER12> This really helps me understand how read() works as I am currently learning C programming. Didn't know that ctrl+D still sent everything before it in the buffer to the read call, and that a read of length zero and EOF was the same thing.

<comment><USER13> Ctrl-D is maybe the hardest part of TTYs to emulate if you want to bypass the accumulated legacy of the kernel-level TTY device API. It's very easy to make read() return 0 forever, but it's next-to-impossible to make read() return 0 exactly once, except for TTY slaves.</comment></comment>


SpaceX's Falcon Heavy launch is reportedly set for February 6th - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/ChrisG_NSF/status/956964986353528832 <comment><USER2> This is an announcement of an announcement. Those are the quintessence of offtopicness, so please don't post them.

On HN, there's no harm in simply waiting until a thing happens.

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22announcement%20of%20an%20an...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22announcement%20of%20an%20announcement%22&sort=byPopularity&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0)

</comment><comment><USER3> Considering the number of delays, push-backs and holds on this rocket, don't be surprised if it doesn't. And that's okay- once a rocket is more than a meter off the ground, it's either going to space or exploding, so caution is the right trait to have.

All that said, I'll still be watching live whenever it happens. If they pull this off, it'll open up a lot of new possibilities for the space industry.

<comment><USER4> Which new possibilities? BFR definitely will; FH seems to be just an incremental improvement: D-IVH level of capability combined with reusability, on a much cheaper price - but nothing which would enable doing something which wasn't done before.

<comment><USER5> Doesn't it have much higer payload to LEO and GTO though? It's much more than D-IVH payload if Wikipedia is to be believed:

FH: 63800kg LEO, 26700kg GTO

D-IVH: 28790kg LEO, 14220kg GTO

The Falcon 9 actually comes closer to the D-IVH in expendable mode than the D-IVH comes to the Falcon Heavy.

<comment><USER6> The Falcon Heavy not only lifts vastly more (it will be the most powerful rocket excepting the Saturn V - which has not been in commission since 1973), but I think understating the scale of price difference is also not really reasonable.

The Falcon Heavy is looking at a cost of around $85 million. The Delta-4 Heavy starts at $400 million. Compare price per kg and it's quite insane. For low earth orbit that's $1,332/kg for a Falcon Heavy and $13,893/kg at the low end pricing for a Delta-4 Heavy. The Falcon 9 weighs in at $2,684/kg.

Each cut in price opens up possibilities that were not there before. Make it $1/kg and that'd be rather self evident, but each price decline opens up the doors for companies and individuals who previously were only being held back by price.

<comment><USER4> Not correct calculation, as FH may be $85M only when reusing all 3 cores, for a big payload penalty.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's been on the launch pad for weeks, and had a successful static test. Space-X has to launch it soon or tilt it back down and take it away.

Although the Falcon Heavy is almost as big as the Saturn V, the launch setup is far simpler. It's lifted into vertical position at the pad. No vertical assembly building, no crawler-transporter. That's a big improvement. Takes some extra structural strength, which costs some payload, of course.

<comment><USER8> It's been up and down several times over the past few weeks. It only takes a couple hours to move it in or out.

The fact that Falcon 9/Heavy only support horizontal integration is a bot of an issue for some payloads (particularly those with people, or big optics). SpaceX will be adding vertical integration (the ability to mount the payload after the rocket is vertical) to its pad at LC-39A.

<comment><USER9> Are they? I was under the impression that crew can be loaded via the Crew Access Arm with the rocket vertical, but Dragon would still be integrated horizontally.

<comment><USER10> Dragon likely will be integrated horizontally but some national security payloads need vertical integration.

<comment><USER11> Why do some national security payloads need vertical integration?

<comment><USER12> They won't say, because they're secret. But it's probably optics or just some legacy designs that they don't want to qualify for horizontal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Can't wait to watch this one.

It will be absolutely amazing to watch 3 boosters come back down to earth and all land. Even if they don't all land this time, they will one day.

<comment><USER14> At this point, the landings seem like one of the least likely things to go wrong. Which is pretty amazing.

<comment><USER3> I'm a little worried about the two nearly synchronized landings not far from each other. Any interference between them and... well, we'd get a fireworks show.

<comment><USER15> No doubt they will return via two different paths with a degree of vertical/temporal separation. Landing them in parrallel is just asking for trouble.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Oh MAN this is exciting! And I realize it's the first Falcon launch in some time where no one is confident it won't blow up. The Falcon 9's record of flights and landings in 2017 were so consistent it almost started to feel "normal". But not anymore!

I sure wish I could see this one in person. Maybe one of the later Falcon Heavy flights once the hype has made the tickets more accessible and affordable. Heck, last year I was able to get to see a Falcon 9 launch for no additional cost beyond admission, so maybe it won't even be that long.

</comment><comment><USER17> What is the best location to watch the launch from?

</comment><comment><USER18> Sending ufo over LA night sky again soon?

<comment><USER19> No, it is launching from Kennedy Space Center.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Google Alerts Alternatives? - <AUTHOR> I love the ability to know about new search results, but I'd rather not rely on Google to find this information. What other tools FOSS or commercial are out there? Let's say I'm interested in knowing if the SuperBowl gets cancelled for 2021. <comment><USER2> Ever use pmalerts?</comment>


Sound check: the quietest place in the U.S - <AUTHOR> http://features.crosscut.com/sound-check-the-quietest-place-in-the-us <comment><USER3> I had a wonderful experience of Pure Silence at Muir Woods. I happened to be there near closing time on a weekday and there weren't many people. There is a little bend in the Hillside Trail near Bridge 4 ([https://email@example.com,-122.5802347,18z](https://email@example.com,-122.5802347,18z)) with a bench and a sign to keep quiet. I sat down there, closed my eyes and just listened.

It was eerily quiet - I couldn't hear any people, cars or anything. Pretty soon I was able to start picking up the smallest sounds, like the occasional far-away chirp, leaves rustling. I started hearing my own heart beat very clearly and the quiet became so overwhelming it felt like I was in a sensory isolation tank rather than the forest. It was quite lovely.

</comment><comment><USER4> After reading this I'm thinking people need to get out more. Never stopped to hear crickets or rain or stand in a forest and listen? Maybe I'm the oddball because I grew up in a state with more cows than people.

Nature is awesome, get out and get a way, unplug and you'll see how nice an afternoon can be. If you can survive 3-5 days in the wilderness with a backpack and a few good friends you can really forget about the world - <USER2> much that walking back into a bathroom with running water and electricity seems amazing.

</comment><comment><USER5> As I read the title of this, my mind jumped to a stunning experience of total silence I had ... on the Olympic Peninsula as well. I wasn't in the Hoh, was probably south of there, on one of my weekend day-trips to anywhere that wasn't Tumwater. Driving my truck, something had led me a dozen miles or so out an old logging road and into the interior. It's surprising to find how on the Peninsula one can get 40, 50 miles from the nearest human, yet be in a place just a few hours from Seattle. I stopped to stretch my legs, parked in the middle of the road, and walked ahead, leaving the ticking truck behind. A few minutes later I paused to look into the woods and turn around, and it hit me. Abso-fucking-lute silence. Nothing. As I remember it there weren't even bug noises. Or wind. I froze in wonder, realizing what it was that I was experiencing and how otherworldly it was. Silence doesn't happen to hearing people in everyday life, and when it's finally encountered, it hits like a brick.

I recall one other such incident, that time while sitting down for a rest while hiking high in the mountains northeast of Sacramento. More recently I've discovered an approximation, a local sonic minimum, while biking the Columbia Plateau trail SW of Spokane WA. It's well worth the efforts to get to these places, the only word I can think of to describe the experiences is "transcendental". For me, the feeling has been that of the "self" diminishing towards nothing, towards becoming just part of the background, while the world around becomes strikingly more vivid and clear and detailed. I'm not one who meditates, one of the "mindful", or an "in-the-moment" person, but I do wonder if this is what they seek?

</comment><comment><USER6> The quietest nature place I've experienced is the Sonoran Desert in mid summer mid afternoon.

With the temperature approaching 120F nothing stirs (wildlife and insects are all hiding from the sun waiting for it to cool a bit). If you are out far away from the city and no plane is overhead it is dead dead silent. A weird silent.

<comment><USER7> Same in Death Valley in August. No plane/car noises, no animal noises, no wind noises. Bliss.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Although I did enjoy the article, I was thinking it was going to be about literal noise levels. So I did a quick search and found a map of that:

[http://www.nature.nps.gov/sound/soundmap.cfm](http://www.nature.nps.gov/sound/soundmap.cfm)

</comment><comment><USER9> My personal opinion is that outside is the quietest when it is snowing, windless, and the trees are holding a few inches of snow. You can hear snowflakes landing on your jacket.

I've also experienced extreme quiet deep within a cave when by myself. Turn off your light and it doesn't take long to start picking what you think are your companions out of the silence but it really turns out to be nothing.

</comment><comment><USER10> From the title, I thought this was going to be about the anechoic chamber in Minnesota. ([http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20121022-the-quietest- place-...](http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20121022-the-quietest-place-on- earth))

</comment><comment><USER11> In a previous career I was a Park Ranger, working in Yellowstone National Park.

During my final tour in the park (this is early 2000s), at one point I had some time off coming that _wasn 't_ for other uses. Normally on my days off I would drive the 1.5 hours into Jackson, Wyoming to do some grocery shopping and hit the library. Check out a few books and borrow a computer for a little bit to check my email or browse the Internet. The ranger station only had dialup that could only be used in the evenings.

Anyways, this time, I was blessed with two days off back to back with nothing planned, so I booked a backcountry campsite clear on the other side of the park in the Cache Creek area. If you look at a map of Yellowstone, it's in the far upper right corner.

I got up early before dawn and drove the ~3 hours up to the trailhead. It wasn't a bad hike. Beautiful day, clear and sunny. I seem to recall it was about 5 miles in to the campsite, a bit strenuous near the beginning but easier once you got into the valley. I took my time. Set up camp about dinner time, made some mac and cheese and enjoyed nature. Didn't say a word. Just ate in silence.

The sun set, and the illumination I had was provided by my flashlight and a small battery powered lantern. I read some by lantern. It was chilly - yes, even in the summer Yellowstone gets a bit cold after sunset. Before going to bed, I turned the lantern off and just _sat._ Not doing anything but just sitting, looking and listening.

Stars.

So many stars.

One of the few times in my life I was ever able to see the band of the Milky Way was that night in Cache Creek. It was beautiful, but that wasn't the most amazing part.

The absolute quiet of the area allowed you to hear every single little sound and the darkness seemed to amplify them. You could hear even a slight breeze rustle everything around you.

And I could swear I heard wolves howling.

Sitting there beneath that huge blanket of stars surrounded by nothing more than the sounds of _nature_ , I couldn't help but think that I'm looking at the same things, hearing the same things, that the Native Americans and early trappers in the area heard and saw, unspoiled by the modern world.

That hike gave me a deep appreciation for the need to protect these spaces. Not just as parks for everyone to visit, although that is important, but the importance of preserving the backcountry experience in as pristine and natural a condition as possible. At one point while I was working at YNP one of the other rangers told me that 90% of the visitors to YNP never venture more than 200 yards from the road. But for those who can make the hike out into the backcountry, the experience is more than worth it.

Also, as a side note, if you're interested in the National Parks and the (incredible) story of how we're protecting these places, I highly recommend Ken Burns' _The National Parks: America 's Best Idea_. [0]

[0] [http://www.pbs.org/nationalparks/](http://www.pbs.org/nationalparks/)

</comment><comment><USER12> They say it's quiet by describing the sounds? Try camping in petrified forest national park and get back to me. You will hear your own heart beat all night long.

<comment><USER13> It struck me a little odd as well. I assumed going in that it was going to be somewhere in the Desert Southwest on a windless evening.</comment></comment>


Kickstarter: Mailbird - a Sparrow-like email client for Windows - <AUTHOR> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1798647582/mailbird-needs-its-wings

<comment><USER2> Looks pretty good. If it works half as well as Sparrow it could be huge!

</comment><comment><USER3> Looking good</comment>


Ask HN: Rate my startup beepl.com (http://alpha.beepl.com) - <AUTHOR> http://beepl.com/ The best way to get users to answer questions is by matching the right questions with the right people.
Beepl does exactly that by measuring users' interests, their involvement in various topics, the quality of their contribution and the level of their expertise within a specific field.
We call it a social expertise footprint: http://alpha.beepl.com/user/stevenf
Beepl is a bit more like Vark, less like Yahoo! Answers - it's a question platform.
And we've got in twitter too (with the facebook soon to follow): http://alpha.beepl.com/twitter/
Launching in private alpha (or maybe even going live) in September 2010.
What do you think?
PS - I'm getting in new features daily, plus it's running off of a single 0.5GB gogrid instance (nginx), it may be that there're some things temporarily broken....
Thanks,
Jan Paricka
http://alpha.beepl.com/user/jparicka <comment><AUTHOR> OK, in the nutshell, the idea behind beepl is that the best way to get users to answer questions is by matching the right questions with the right people.

Beepl does exactly that by measuring users' interests, their involvement in various topics, the quality of their contribution and the level of their expertise within a specific field.

We call it a social expertise footprint: <http://alpha.beepl.com/user/stevenf>

Beepl is a bit more like Vark - it's a question platform.

And we've got in twitter too (with the facebook soon to follow): <http://alpha.beepl.com/twitter/>

Launching in private alpha (or maybe even going live) in September 2010.

What do you think?

PS - I'm getting in new features daily, plus it's running off of a single 0.5GB gogrid instance (nginx), it may be that there're some things temporarily broken....

Thanks,

Jan Paricka

<http://alpha.beepl.com/user/jparicka>

<comment><USER2> I see this when i click through your profile link:

<http://cl.ly/3287295c175670b5d513>

should I be seeing the edit profile form and the delete followers buttons?

It's still all confusing .. maybe a video walkthrough explaining the concept behind the site and the features would help. Why'd someone use this over Ardvark or quora or in the future, facebook Q&A?

also, the "Ask ____ a question" box is so easy to miss ..too much wastage of screen space since it requires me to navigate to the bottom of the page to post a question and there's a whole lot of blank space between the profile info (which for some reason comes across as a form) and the ask box

<comment><AUTHOR> > Why'd someone use this over Ardvark or quora or in the future, facebook Q&A?

The fun part is that you do not have to use beepl in order to use beepl. For example - beepl already drives questions from twitter. And if people answer to them, beepl will reply on the responder's (twitterer) behind. Beepl is built to help - and that's precisely what it'll do. It connects questions with people based on their interests and expertise. Nothing in random on beepl (this is still in TODO). It's one great questions mashup. It also measures how or whether the question is interesting / not interesting. Also employs the semantic engine, custom built knowledge base, crm114 discriminator, question mutilator, etc.. so why would someone use this over Vark, etc? Because all these lack of these features. Their all brain-dead technology - more like phonebooks. Beepl is more like Internet 3.0, with AI, big brother and all that...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Little bonus - free wallpaper [http://picasaweb.google.com/sopybeepl/BeeplArtwork#542634728...](http://picasaweb.google.com/sopybeepl/BeeplArtwork#5426347287599061234)

<comment><AUTHOR> And my Desktop right now <http://tweetphoto.com/40827362>

I need some feedback folks. Criticisms. Anything. Please..

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Guys, I think this might as well work! Agreed?</comment>


Ask HN: Would you be interested in reading a book on developer's career - <AUTHOR>

Hi, I'm considering writing a book about the career of a software developer. Again. Will you be interested? https://leanpub.com/baaad <comment><USER2> If the finished product is anything close to what you've described on your website, then yes. Still, I've come across books like this in other fields and they tend to not be very good. Maybe non-writers overestimate their ability to write? Or it could be that professionals at the top of their fields misjudge their expertise on what it takes to 'make it'. Becoming great at something often boils down to the basics. One person's unique path or perspective on how to get there isn't always transferable.

</comment><comment><USER3> My primary skill is design, but I try learning to code whenever I find some time to spare. I'd love your book if it has something in it for a person like me who has no clue about what it is like to be a developer. Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER4> If the software dev was really good and the story was interesting and constructive.

</comment><comment><USER5> This kind of question is kind of pointless.

If you think you have a compelling story to tell, write it and share it. I would be interested in reading a book about how grass grows if it were written well enough. I've read books on engineering problems (bridges falling down, etc) that would be boring in a textbook but the author somehow turned it into a compelling narrative about how engineering has changed over the years.

Just write it.

</comment><comment><USER6> Yes.</comment>


Social Media and Self Harm: The Need to 'Do Something' - <AUTHOR> https://www.thesociologicalreview.com/the-need-to-do-something/ <comment><USER2> In my Twitter timeline, posts about self harm or suicidal ideation are generally met by a supportive atmosphere of concerned people.

When there is the opportunity, I try to make comments that validate people in a way that doesn't promote or encourage self harm, suicide attempts, etc.

I've attempted suicide. I know a fair amount about such issues.

No, shutting down the conversation isn't a good move. Instead, we need to promote best practices that make such conversations more constructive.

It can be done.

<comment><USER3> The biggest hurdle to conversation I find in my experience is that people who have never been there find it difficult to comprehend the mental state you're in when you're depressed. At least in my experience, social media would have been just a drop in the sea. In a way, suggesting social media is a problem just reflects how little understanding people have over what is going on inside a depressed person's mind.

The moment you wake up in the morning, you have some idea whether you're going to have an 'easy day' or a 'difficult day'. From that point on, it's a constant battle against your own mind, trying to avoid letting things become a 'bad day'. If you stub your toe on the door frame leaving your bedroom, your day is now a 'bad day' and you have 12 hours of mental struggle to look forward to. You haven't even had the opportunity to find out the clothes you wanted to wear aren't clean, that you're out of milk so you have to have toast for breakfast. You haven't had a chance to drop your spoon on the floor, or accidentally slam the cupboard too loudly. You haven't made it to work or school yet where you'll have to deal with all your least favourite people. And every one of these things makes your day harder, and harder, until you can't hold it back, and all of a sudden you're being held hostage by your own mind. Shit is already hard before you get to social media. Sure, social media probably contributes, but _so_ many things contribute, you cannot eliminate them all.

<comment><USER2> To my mind, the bigger problem is that when people talk about big feelings, especially in any strongly expressive fashion, people get sucked into talking about feelings as if feelings are the end all and be all.

Feelings come from somewhere. When I try to engage people, I try to address root causes of feelings. I don't try to massage their feelings or something like that.

Most people either try to somehow stop the outpouring of negative feelings or respond by countering it with an outpouring of positives because their entire focus is the feelings. This tends to go bad places for everyone involved and one danger is that if everyone is nice to you when you are openly whining about being suicidal, that may actively "reward" you for being suicidal.

People who are suicidal are often people who are being generally treated like shit on a routine basis by a lot of the people around them. So being nice to them only when they are openly suicidal actively encourages suicidal ideation. Most people are too clueless to make an effort to find opportunities to engage them positively that don't promote suicidal feelings.

<comment><USER3> The difficulty people have with treating the source of a feeling is probably because a lot of the time it's difficult to identify the source. I think many people often go with what their body tells them about what might resolve a symptom that they're feeling in the short term (get drunk and party), but in the long run the root cause may be something entirely different (develop relationships that are more intellectually stimulating).

In addition to positives acting in a way that can prolong a mental illness, often they can also deepen it as well. Generally you're aware of what you could be, or should be, or want to be, but can't be and don't understand why. This in itself can trigger negative thoughts and reinforce the cycle.

<comment><USER2> Oh, I spent about 3.5 in therapy. It's somewhat second nature at this point for me to wonder at root causes in myself.

But I feel like I failed to communicate something. Let me give a few examples from actual conversations I've had:

Someone was talking about having recently self harmed again after x amount of time refraining. They were saying they felt so ashamed and like such a failure, that refraining for so long had been a big accomplishment.

I told them it was still a big accomplishment. That fact remained true and was in no way diminished by their recent self harm.

Someone who is incredibly sweet and interesting and knowledgeable has a lot of baggage. When their baggage trips them up, they don't know how to stop and the kind, supportive replies they get keep the drama rolling. It is complicated by an "either/or" framing of certain things.

A couple of times, I've managed to say a thing that largely stopped the drama. They then took a break and did me time activities. When they "came back," they were much more able to focus on things other than their own baggage and emotional drama.

In short, I've put down a lot of baggage. I sometimes can help other people put down the baggage.

That's my focus. If they drop the baggage, their emotional landscape changes.

Because feelings come from somewhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The worst syllogism in modern politics: Something must be done, this is something, therefore it must be done.

<comment><USER5> It's one of the reasons the US system seems to be working best in these times; the constitution making laws difficult to change works perfectly to stop moral outrages and controversies and make people reconsider whether that 'something' is the best solution.

<comment><USER6> The reaction seems to be concentrating power in the President who can "do something". The centralizing of power and erosion of the original US system has been monotonic for the last 200 years.

First they came for the states by broadening the interstate commerce clause far beyond any rational reading. And now congress has ceded its authority in key areas such as treaties (fast tracking), declarations of war, and in process now: the right to subpoena information (we'll see how this one turns out).

<comment><USER7> I think if the current situation isn't ... resolved ... resulting in a significant transfer of power either by precedent, legislation, or judicial action away from the executive to the judicial branch, the legislative branch, and the states – I think if that doesn't happen that this will be an inflection point leading to the failure of the American Republic.

I think too many people take for granted the stability and continuation of a system of government.

<comment><USER6> In my opinion the parliamentary system has proven to be more effective. In this system the Prime Minister with a majority has near dictatorial control over both the legislature and the presidency so that he/she can move quickly.

However the backstop is the no confidence vote which operates like impeachment. This is not a theoretical power but is exercised relatively frequently in parliamentarian systems. Failure to pass a budget is also by default a no confidence vote making it very rare one isn't passed. I think deep down the US feels that as well. The democracies they have created throughout the world do not mirror the US system of government.

The problem we face today with the US centralizing power in the presidency is that impeachment is seen as a "nuclear option" and therefore is not an effective backstop.

<comment><USER8> At least in my parliamentary country, a PM with an absolute majority can also block a no confidence vote, which is why only 1 of 30 such votes in the last 45 years have actually passed. Is it different in other countries?

> I think deep down the US feels that as well. The democracies they have > created throughout the world do not mirror the US system of government.

Well, that assumes those decisions are made solely with the best interests of the people in those democracies in mind.

<comment><USER4> No British Prime Minister has lost a confidence motion since 1979, but I think it's worth noting that a) a PM with a majority can only block a no-confidence vote with the support of their party's MPs and b) the threat of a no- confidence motion is frequently sufficient to force a resignation.

Callaghan was the last PM to lose a no-confidence vote, but that's not the full story. Major and Brown resigned after losing an election, but Thatcher, Blair and Cameron all resigned as PM. May is expected to resign before the next general election. No US president has resigned since Nixon in 1974, which suggests a marked difference in security of tenure under the different systems - we might not kick our prime minister out of office very often, but they usually leave office of their own volition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Huh that's a bizarre take on the situation. Try explaining this to a parent whose daughter is suffering from ED and Self Harm. The sociologist/apologists won't let instagram do anything since it breaks their fantasy of free speech being always "net" positive. And Apple won't let the parent monitor her own daughter because think about PRIVACY!!!! The truth is the industry optimizes for anarchy under the guise of liberal ideology and privacy. As society wises up to this ruse we will see great push back against the fake SV philosophy.

<comment><USER10> It's not Instagram's problem, nor should it be made to be.

Apple could certainly do more to facilitate MDM, but a phone known for letting your parents track your GPS and MITM your communications would not prove popular with the kids.

In the end the parents are the ones provisioning the device, paying the phone bill and are ultimately responsible for both it and its user...yet they have no administrative privileges over anything of relevance.

By all logic children should never be given access to fully-encrypted black boxes.

<comment><USER11> Giving parents unfettered ability to violate their children's privacy does not serve the children's interests.

Many parents are abusive. Many children are discovering a sexuality or identity that their parents would find unacceptable.

In these cases, and many more, ensuring that the parents can read every single message their children send—and every single website they access—is much more likely to lead to serious negative outcomes for the children (at best, a repressed identity; at worst, suicide due to having one's self rejected by one's parents).

<comment><USER12> Would such abusive parents get their child a private phone knowing it limits their power over the child?

Maybe privacy-respecting tech is one of many solutions to bad parenting. Though I suspect getting to know ones neighbors well would be a far more effective first step.

<comment><USER11> Many parents are only abusive some of the time. As I understand it, the scenario of abusive some of the time, lavishing with gifts some of the time is actually not that uncommon.

Also, if most or all phones respect the child's privacy, it becomes harder for the parents to get their child a phone that lets them micromanage the child's life.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The man who shot down a Baby Killer - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tees-37164689 <comment><USER2> _" This success in the skies above London, which saw him awarded the Victoria Cross just 48 hours later, was due to a mixture of the 21-year-old's own bravery, an improved defence strategy and a revolutionary flammable bullet."_

I've always found it interesting how you virtually never see stories with this sort of tone or content (using positively charged words like "bravery" or talking about military honors) from the BBC about soldiers on the German side, unless they were effectively acting on their side.

Similarly, you virtually never see articles detailing the lives and "bravery" of Vietnamese soldiers, or Iraqi soldiers in the US mainstream media.

This is understandable (if not excusable) during the wars themselves, when censorship and "patriotic" pro-war sentiment is rife, but now, decades after those wars, it's interesting that the taboo still holds strong.

I'm sure there were many "brave" and interesting people and actions to write about on all sides of any war, considering the number of people involved and the historical drama of the events. But you really only hear from the mainstream media of these countries about the "bravery" and "heroic" actions of people on their own sides.

That may vary in Germany, considering the collective guilt many Germans feel over their country's role in WW2. So stories of "heroic" Nazis are probably not very prevalent there.

On the other hand, considering the allegedly unrepentant and arguably revisionist views of many Japanese about Japan's role in WW2, there may be more stories about "heroic" and "brave" Japanese soldiers still told in Japanese mainstream media.

I don't read enough German or Japanese media to say, though it would be very interesting to know if my guesses about them are right.

It would be similarly interesting to know how many stories of "brave" Iraqi soldiers are told in the Iranian media, and of "brave" Iranian soldiers in the Iraqi mainstream media, etc.

Because of this tendency, people who rely on only their own country's mainstream news to paint them a picture of what happened during that war tend to get a very one-sided and incomplete view. I personally see this as a great failing of the mainstream media to educate and inform their viewers and listeners on history. They could be doing a much better job.</comment>


Intel, AMD to Bury Antitrust Hatchet; Intel to Pay $1.25b - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2009/11/12/intel-amd-to-bury-antitrust-hatchet-intel-to-pay-125b/

<comment><USER2> Great for the duopoly.

Maybe not so great for companies getting locked out of the market (like Nvidia).

<comment><USER3> Also Via is probably left out in the cold.

Good news for AMD stockholders(stock is already up 20%+).

<comment><USER4> VIA/Centaur settled a patent lawsuit with Intel a few years ago and got a 10-year license.

<comment><USER5> Let's hope more and more free and open-source software make x86 compatibility a need of the past.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Avoiding spending more money on litigation has to be a win for everyone, including the customers of these companies.

<comment><USER5> But what about the chi^H^H^Hlawyers?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder how comparable this agreement will be to the one signed between Microsoft and Apple that ended their legal battles over "look and feel." They signed patent cross-licensing agreements about five years later.

But the agreement came when Apple had all but lost the PC market to Microsoft --the agreement was Apple's way of capitulating and Microsoft allowing Apple to save face.

What does this mean for the Intel monopoly position in the market?

<comment> Tuna-Fish Right now, Intel can easily maintain their position on products alone -- the only place AMD can compete is on the low end, and even there Intel can cut prices to where AMD just can't compete if Intel feels like it.

All the anticompetitive stuff happened when AMD genuinely had the better product, and until that happens again, I doubt anything will happen to Intel's position.

<comment><USER8> Let's just hope that it DOES happen again!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> That money will be redirected to investors. Btw, AMD holds a debt of comparable size.

<comment><USER10> Their debt is about $3.7 billion [http://www.forbes.com/2007/05/14/amd-debt- spansion-markets-e...](http://www.forbes.com/2007/05/14/amd-debt-spansion- markets-equity-cx_af_0514markets16.html), so this only partially helps.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: good locations to live in Portland, OR? - <AUTHOR>

I'm moving to Portland in a month and I am going to rent an apartment. I am looking for suggestions for a location that has a tech vibe, decent bars and restaurants, and all around good quality of life.<p>I have heard good things about the Pearl District. I think it is a bit out of my price range. <comment><USER2> When I used to live there (over a decade ago) I really liked the Hawthorne area just over the bridge in SE. I believe most of the tech companies at the time were out in Beaverton but that was before the current startup craze.

I worked in Hillsdale which is just out of downtown. Nice area but but I don't know about the tech scene.</comment>


The Ticket Trap: Front to Back - <AUTHOR> https://www.propublica.org/nerds/the-ticket-trap-news-app-front-to-back-david-eads-propublica-illinois <comment><USER2> "We decided against showing trends over time on ward pages because the overall trend in the number of tickets issued is too big and complex [...] it would have been outside the journalistic goals of highlighting systemic injustices."

<comment><USER3> I appreciate the goals of this project, but IMO they aren't being very rigorous about it, and really only arrive at the conclusion that "more blacks are poor, and tickets hit poor people very hard", which I think anyone would already agree with before this study. I don't really understand what the ward breakdown adds.

"Which Ward Owes The Most?": right, poor people can't afford to pay tickets and build up debt.

"Where People Are Ticketed Most": this seemed promising. I clicked and mostly majority-white neighborhoods popped to the top. This is explained away by saying they're more congested; OK, fair enough, but try to control for that by population density? Or something? How am I supposed to read "unfair to minorities" out of that?

"How Ticket Type Varies By Ward": maybe there's something here, but this seems just as related to other factors to me as the previous point. From what I've seen in Chicago, the majority-black neighborhoods are vastly different than the majority-white neighborhoods (I feel like ProPublica would agree), so a difference in ticket type seems incredibly logical. Yet here it's not dismissed like they dismissed the previous category.

"What Happens if You Don't Pay": right, poor people can't afford to pay tickets and it ends in a property seizure or bankruptcy.

"Who Appeals and Wins": sorting by "Percent contested and won" the minority neighborhoods fair very well, consisting of 5 of the top 8.

<comment><USER4> Perhaps to call out the politicians who could do something about the preying on the poorer areas?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The project would smell sweeter if the top page of the app weren't hitting facebook.net --

[https://projects.propublica.org/chicago- tickets/](https://projects.propublica.org/chicago-tickets/)

</comment><comment><USER6> It's interesting that Low income people are the ones disproportionally hit by the number of tickets, but I guess the question that needs answering is: are they in fact breaking the law?

I don't think I've ever gotten a parking ticket for something I haven't legitimately done wrong, they suck, but if you break the law you get a ticket. So I'm just curious is the map supposed to help us understand that the police are disproportionately ticketing in low income areas, and by that reasoning less in higher income areas ?

Just trying to understand what's the lesson we should take away from this. Should we forgive tickets to people who are low income?

<comment><USER7> I don't think that's what they are trying to say at all:

[https://projects.propublica.org/chicago- tickets/](https://projects.propublica.org/chicago-tickets/)

Some of the insights they pull from this data: Most tickets are issues in majority-black wards, in places with high poverty rates. Motorists in these wards were found more at risk of losing a vehicle or declaring bankruptcy. Most tickets that are contested are in more well-to-do, majority-white wards, and contested tickets have more than a 50% chance of the driver being found not liable.

Here's what I draw from this: Parking tickets frequently trap the poor into a cycle of debt. People who have money and free time have more resources available to challenge the ticket and not have to pay.

That doesn't say to me "we should forgive tickets for low income residents" but it says to me we need to find other ways to enforce the parking laws that don't just make the poor even poorer.

<comment><USER8> Tickets should be adjusted for income. If someone making $200,000 a year has to pay $50 for parking in the wrong place then someone who makes $20,000 should have to pay $5.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Microservices and using Make to wrap their chosen build tooling - I love it!

This is similar to what my team does with a set of about 20 computer vision and NLP web services, in an environment with fairly high web traffic (Alexa top 300 site), with a large and distributed team of engineers.

In our case several parts also involve Docker & CI such that common Makefiles are used by all parties and all config is externalized to the build and/or runtime environment.

It has worked extremely well for many years now.

</comment><comment><USER10> I have always enjoyed articles like this that clearly explain the problem they are trying to solve, why they are solving it, and how they are solving it all the way down to the tech stack (which is the most interesting bits along with UI design for me). Worth the read time.

</comment><comment><USER5> Propublica list of data sets, some offering free download:

[https://www.propublica.org/datastore/datasets](https://www.propublica.org/datastore/datasets)

</comment><comment><USER2> What made me wonder: Single developer setting up app with a bunch of microservices in the backend claiming low maintenance, would really be interested in an evaluation 2y in the future.</comment>


Malcolm Gladwell: Underdogs - <AUTHOR> http://gladwell.typepad.com/gladwellcom/2009/05/underdogs.html

<comment><USER2> HN comments on the original article:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=592043>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=605720>

</comment><comment><USER3> As I understand it the full court press isn't used all of the time because it has a tendancy to leave the defending basket more vulnerable once the opponent manages to get the ball down the court (some of the defending players are still down towards the other basket).

This applies in business as well. Sometimes its best to defend your core business (your basket) tightly and let the competition have its way on the outskirts (their side of the court) of what is important to you. You can't always be defending everything all at once. I guess it boils down to how you manage risks.

<comment><USER4> Also one of the things to keep in mind is that the offense usually adapts pretty quickly, since there are very effective measures againts any kind of press. So in general you do not play press for long stretches at once, if you are going against someone at least your own strength. Mixing in the press for little spurts though, is generally a good help, if properly executed.</comment></comment>