Launch HN: Carve (YC S19) – Rent Cars from Local Dealerships - <AUTHOR> Hey HN!
We're Amos and Sam, co-founders of Carve. (https://www.drivecarve.com)
Carve is a car sharing marketplace where you can rent cars from local dealerships. So if you don't own a car but need one for a few days, you can get a car that fits your needs at a reasonable price.
We built this product because when we moved to New York after college, we both gave up cars, and even though most places we needed to be were easily accessible via Subway or Lyft, there were still lots of things we wanted to do that we couldn't using public transit or ride share apps. When it came to leaving the city to ski in Vermont or hike upstate, for example, the existing options were all either expensive (Zipcar, Car2Go), inconvenient (Avis, Hertz), or inconsistent (Turo, Getaround).
Sam and I are both from the Midwest, so neither of us are strangers to car dealerships—drive ten miles in any direction from our childhood homes and you'll see massive lots filled with cars waiting to be sold. We started speaking with these businesses and realized that keeping all those cars sitting around is really, really expensive. Compounding this problem is the fact that new cars sales are falling and dealership inventory levels are historically high.
In response to the issues that dealerships face and the slate of bad rental options, we built a platform on which dealers can list their cars to be rented. It's good for dealers because they can offset financing costs and depreciation of idle inventory without much effort. For renters, it means a short-term rental option that's on average 30% cheaper any other comparable option, offers a wider selection of cars, and allows for human-free pickup and drop off.
It works as follows. First, browse our site for a car. Once you make a reservation, we'll email you an Uber voucher for $20 off your trip to and from the vehicle pickup location (a 24-hour valet lot in the city). When you arrive at the pickup location, show the attendant your reservation email and they'll fetch you your car. Once you're done with the car, drive back to lot and hand the keys to the attendant. Use the Uber voucher to call a car to bring you back home.
At the moment, we're only operating in San Francisco, but we'll be expanding soon to Oakland and LA. If you're in SF, try us out and use the promo code HN10 to get 10% off of any rental!
We'd love to get some feedback and are happy to answer questions! <comment><USER2> I worked for a startup that had a similar business model: some car dealership has a fleet of cars depreciating in value (last year's models, loaners, trade- in cars) and they provide their inventory to the rental startup to partially cover the losses.

And it seemed like a great idea, at first. Customers had an option to either pay 2 to 3 times less for a normal boring rental car, or… to pick up something nice that had a V8 and leather heated seats in it. The other part of the equation was the customer service: in order to compete with Hertz, Avis and others, it had to be exceptional. And it was.

There was only one problem. Renting out used cars was only a temporary and partial solution for the dealerships. Eventually, all these cars had to be sold. But, as it turned out, if you're a dealership and if you're renting out a car for 2/3 of the month, you're constantly losing opportunities to sell it. Unsold used cars depreciate in value for evenn longer periods of time, take up more and more space… and those rental earnings no longer make financial sense.

Hopefully it won't be the same case here.

<comment><AUTHOR> Super good point. I've definitely run into that objection while trying to sign on used car dealerships--i.e. that they can't sell the car if it's being rented, so putting it on our platform might mean forgoing a sale.

But that's fine, because it basically means that dealerships typically only list cars that they have more than one of. So for example, if they have three Audi A4s in inventory, they might list only two of them with us. When they sell the other one, they'll take an A4 off Carve and put it back into sales inventory. In other cases, dealers will give us cars during periods of low sales and then putting them back into inventory when sales pick back up, thus minimizing the risk of a foregone sale.

<comment><USER3> Just to play devil's advocate...

But wouldn't a car dealer try to have a variety of cars models instead of multiple cars of the same model? Wouldn't it be better for them to be able to show a potential customer a variety of cars rather than just one model? For example, if they could only have 3 cars, wouldn't it make more sense for them to have an A4, a BMW 3, and an Acura TLX (for example) rather than 3 A4s?

Or maybe used car dealers have significantly more stock than I'm giving them credit for?

<comment><USER4> It's not about selection. Used car dealers buy what they can sell, and what they can get cheap at auctions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> >30% cheaper any other comparable option

I have a problem with this - the prices you list are much higher than comparable offerings from the national chains. Maybe that's because your pricing is more transparent? If so, you should bake the user's drive-away pricing right into the marketing of the page and compare against "the other guys". Or have a cost calculator that shows how much they would be saving.

You have a super-interesting value prop, but none of it is really available on the site. Even a dorky "how it works" on the home page would be nice.

<comment><AUTHOR> Totally makes sense.

The prices we're showing on the site are the all-in daily rates. So if the price for an Explorer is $65/day and you rent it for 2 days, you'll be charged $130. Whereas when I look at Hertz, the price for renting a standard SUV for their downtown location from the 28th to the 30th is $140 per day, but for two days the total all in cost is $320 without any extra add-ons.

It might actually make sense for us to show the prices on our site without taxes+fees included so as to look comparable with other companies' prices.

<comment><USER6> The problem is that other companies taxes and fees can vary widely. Plus, they will have a high pressure insurance pitch when you rent. Not sure if your product includes that or not.

<comment><USER7> > high pressure insurance pitch

Them: would you like to purchase insurance?

Me: No, I have my own thanks.

Them: okay.

Maybe since I rent almost exclusively from airports, I have a biased experience, but I don't think of rental insurance as being high-pressure.

<comment><USER8> They'll always claim your insurance almost certainly doesn't cover rentals, hoping that you don't realize it almost certainly does.

(I also find airports to be the WORST possible environment for this kind of thing; you're always rushing to return your car so you can catch your flight. You are forced to just accept that the scratch on the back left bumper wasn't there when you rented the car, because fighting about it will cause you to miss your flight. So it's a $500+ repair fee or a $500+ plane ticket. They have you over a barrel.)

<comment><USER9> > They'll always claim your insurance almost certainly doesn't cover rentals

I've never had such an insurance pitch. They usually pitch a "damage waiver" gap insurance which assures that any amount not covered by your insurances deductible is covered.

> I also find airports to be the WORST possible environment for this kind of > thing; you're always rushing to return your car so you can catch your > flight. You are forced to just accept that the scratch on the back left > bumper wasn't there when you rented the car, because fighting about it will > cause you to miss your flight.

Never had that experience either, everytime I've rented at a major chain we've done a damage walkaround at pickup, often the rental agency employee has noted things I would have missed, and on return (even at airports!) there's never been a problem.

Of course, I've never been so late back to the airport with a rental that pointing out that the damage was identified on the pre-rental walk-around would jeopardize my flight, either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The prices seem pretty hight to me, certainly not cheaper than the national brands.

If you rent the car for just 1 or 2 days, its pretty comparable to the national brands (but certainly not 30% cheaper). The cheapest car they offer is $45 per day, while the national brands seem to be about $55 per day or $90 for 2 days (in the city itself. Airports are much cheaper).

Any periods longer than that and the pricing breaks down. For a rental of 1 week, you can get a car from Alamo for $200 in downtown SF, but its $315 from carve.

Also, I've rented a lot of cars in my life, and the quoted price is always what I pay. They try to upsell you on two things - the insurance, and the prepaid gas, but as long as you say no to them, you shouldn't be charged any more than the quoted price.

That being said, depending on how smooth the pickup service was, I would consider using this. The worst part about renting a car is going to the office, watching someone type into a computer for 15 minutes (what are they typing for so long anyways?), and trying to upsell you on a bunch of crap. If I don't have to deal with that, and the price was comparable, I would certainly go for it.

2 questions

1\. how do you handle paying for gas?

2\. are there any mileage limits?

<comment><AUTHOR> We're definitely trying to make pick up and drop off as seamless as possible-- literally just call the Uber, get to the lot, show the attendant your reservation, and drive off. The rental car branch experience you're mentioning is an experience we think we can beat for sure.

On price, typically the cheapest cars they're offering are slightly lower end than our cheapest, though we're definitely trying to add some more budget cars to our service. Also, as our insurance costs go down, we'll be able to lower prices--maybe not massively, but I think it will certainly make our service an easier sell.

Re: mileage limits, we don't have any. With gas, we give it to customers on a full tank and ask that they return it full.

<comment><USER11> Wouldn't unlimited mileage have direct negative impact on resell value of the cars, forcing dealerships to factor that in and increase rental prices?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Im interested in how this works on the dealer side. Most dealers don't own their inventory, they're financed through "floor planning" companies like AFC.

Dealers pay substantial fees for the short term credit required to keep these things on their lots.

It seems like bad business to pay a huge finance fee only to rent the car out and have it not be on your lot anymore.

I'm also pretty curious about the tax and registration implications here. Dealers currently enjoy very different insurance, tax, and registration modalities than consumers do. State regulatory bodies are really sensitive to fraud in this space (getting a dealers license so you don't have to pay tax on your super car is a common structure). If you are now buying/financing vehicles for the purpose of renting them out, it seems like you're in a different classification than an automotive dealer.

Seems to me that targeting consumers a la Turo is much smarter. Curious the rationale surrounding this model.

<comment><AUTHOR> Once floor planning and depreciation are factored in, it still makes sense to put certain new cars on our platform, because off the lot depreciation is less substantial and rental revenues thus offset these costs. On other cars, namely luxury cars, you're absolutely right that it's not profitable to put new cars on our platform (though it still makes financial sense for used luxury cars).

The reason we're targeting institutional owners (i.e. dealerships) rather than individual owners a la Turo is because it's generally less expensive to acquire dealership cars (i.e. much easier to onboard a dealership group with hundreds of cars than to get consumers one by one).

<comment><USER13> > to put certain new cars on our platform

"New" cars? Wouldn't the act of renting them out transform them into used cars and illegal to sell as new?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is amazing, wish you'd launched on Friday and I would have been one of your first customers.

I live in SF, needed to go to an event in San Jose with 2 other friends who live in the city. Looked at all the options on Friday. Zipcar needed a membership card which I didn't already have, Turo was slightly more expensive for the car near me ($60/day), Lyft Rental was super-duper expensive ($109 for the day), Lyft rideshare was even more so ($120 each way). Ultimately went with National, which due to my company's corp plan, was $40/day ($60ish retail) for any car (got a sports car), with CDW and liability and no deductible (both due to corp plan) with a slow checkout experience in SoMa. With Carve offering an (admittedly less nice) car for $45/day with Uber credits both way and a quick checkout, I would definitely take that up. Would be even nicer if there was a loyalty plan (so that my rentals for work can subsidize my private ones) and home delivery.

Quick UX bug: On the latest version of Chrome on a laptop, if I select a pickup date and then the same date as my dropoff, it seems to clear the pickup date. I can still successfully hit search and see the right results.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ahh, we'd love to have had you try it. Next time :)

Loyalty/membership program is something we've been thinking about and will likely implement sometime over the next few months.

Great bug catch!

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Perhaps, if you have not already, put in a "buy this car now" feature into the app for the dealer and the clients. It should spring up after a certain amount of time, and/or at journey end.

That way the dealer can use this as a way to manage clients trying before they buy, and every rental client is a potential buyer.

Obviously allow the dealer to make offers to the client, but non-obviously allow the renter to make offers to the dealer. And obviously take a (small to start) commission.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a really interesting idea. Only problem I foresee is that we might have rentals on that car lined up into the future, though we do have duplicates of most of our cars so we could get around that.

<comment><USER15> and the dealer can always get them into a new/different colour vehicle.

<comment><USER16> Or, even better, you could just upgrade the next client to a higher tier (unless the client, of course, disagrees when communicating this upfront or the higher tier is fully booked). I guess the cost of the upgrade to the next client is definitely covered by the sale of the car you had already reserved earlier.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This makes no sense... car prices are $45-65/day, but you get $40 in Uber vouchers to get to and from the place you got to pick your car up, leaving $5-25 for gross profit. There's no way that can be made profitable. That's $1825-$9125 gross profit/yr if you rent it out 365 days a year... This has to pay for depreciation, insurance, maintenance, and have a profit margin for Carve and the Dealership...

Not everyone will need the full voucher amount, maybe some people will rent it multiple days, but still, if you offer this, people will use it instead of asking a friend to drop them off/take a bus/train, etc...

<comment><AUTHOR> You get $20 total in Uber credit, not each way. Also, the voucher only works for trips that either start or end at the parking garage, so can't be used for other random trips.

True though that reservations become more profitable for us the longer they are.

<comment><USER17> Step 2:

> We'll pay up to $20 for your Uber to the dealership pickup location.

Step 3:

> We'll send you another $20 Uber voucher to cover the ride back.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oops, thanks for catching that! Error fixed :)

<comment><USER17> Maybe fix your downvote as well...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Do the dealerships sell the rented cars as new or used? Do they disclose that a car has been used as a short term rental?

<comment><USER19> A car can be sold as "new" as long as the warranty in service date has not yet been activated. Dealers use "new" cars as demos, for test drives, and intra- dealer transfers and deliveries.

If you ever go to buy a new car and it has more than 20 miles on the odometer, you should verify the warranty in service date before buying. If it has been activated, you should be getting a price that makes the transaction financially worthwhile.

<comment><USER20> Anyone who knows what they want out of a "new" car isn't going to want to accept one that already has 50+ miles on it, and 50 already is stretching it.

As a potential new car owner, you don't know how that car was driven for those tens or possibly in this case hundreds of miles.

Maybe not everybody cares, but there will definitely be a segment of the market that does. I don't think that's really an issue for this startup, but would be for any dealer they're working with that doesn't want to take significant hits because of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Typically the minimum rental age is 21 but I see in your FAQ it's actually 25 for Carve[1].

I feel like there is a huge market for ages <21 as that would be the time that new adults would need a car and would not necessarily accept the responsibility of paying monthly loans or have access to credit that would allow them to buy one outright. They would have the capacity to have enough money saved to rent a car for a few days or weeks, but they are turned away by every player in the space.

I guess this is more of a general question than pointed at you, but since you guys have researched the market maybe you'd be equipped to answer it. How come nobody offers rentals to <21 drivers? Furthermore, a question for Carve specifically, why 25 instead of 21? Would dealerships not bite even though the common minimum age for rentals is 21?

I understand that accident rates among this demographic are incredibly high and that would complicate your liability. What I don't get is why seemingly nobody in the car rental business wants to service this market - couldn't you just offer beaters or end-of-life cars to high risk drivers? Nobody needs a brand new Nissan Murano to drive 70 miles upstate. You can do the same drive in a 25 year old Corolla. I suppose I am biased because I am <21 myself (20), but I also own my car outright so I wouldn't be in the target market for this.

[1] [https://help.drivecarve.com/hc/en- us/articles/360031105291-H...](https://help.drivecarve.com/hc/en- us/articles/360031105291-How-old-do-I-have-to-be-to-make-a-reservation-Are- there-any-other-requirements-I-need-to-meet-)

<comment><AUTHOR> We'd love to serve customers younger than 25, and the only reason we don't is because insurance becomes prohibitively expensive. As a young company with very limited loss data, it was tough to get a carrier to underwrite a policy that doesn't have fairly strict driver eligibility requirements.

That being said, we're currently negotiating with a different carrier and will hopefully be able to rent to people 22 and up within the next 6 weeks.

<comment><USER21> Thank you for the quick response. I wish you the best of luck!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I have only rented a car a few times recently, for skiing and hiking far from home, but I like the idea of a smoother experience and I love anything that creates less waste :)

[https://www.drivecarve.com/search?startDate=2019-11-8_3-00pm...](https://www.drivecarve.com/search?startDate=2019-11-8_3-00pm&endDate=2019-11-10_4-30pm)

^^ I know it's 2019 and this is expected but I really appreciate this URL structure for search results. I have spent a lot of time working on booking sites and it used to frustrate me to no end that some projects used a very un- friendly URL structure. This will help your marketing team so, so much over time.

I'll offer some critique of the booking process that you probably already know of: travel is highly dependent on trust signals and push mechanisms like Best Purchase Guarantees, People Looking at This Hotel, countdowns, etc. Some I find gross while others necessary. I think you could look at the booking experience and find plenty of room to grow there. Right now, the car experience feels barren and fake to me. I bet there are some things you will find very helpful, like MPG, etc. so it's just about testing those assumptions.

Best of luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback! I'll let Sam know you like the URL structure :)

100% agree with this. This is V1 so we're working on updating the homepage and individual car pages to make it look less barren and add a degree of social proof and trustworthiness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I work for one of the major players in a similar space, and the best advice I can give you is to stay away from delivery because of the capital expenditures (lots of fundraising or massive credit lines) it would take to set up that network.

The "easy MVP" of delivery will be tempting - drive the vehicle to the customer, drop it off, the employee takes uber back but I would suggest staying away from that temptation.

I'd be interested in the deprecation curves you're modeling on the vehicles as I'm just trying to ballpark what that break-even point is for the dealer. The other issue for the dealer is that while they have excess inventory, they typically have excess inventory on vehicles that aren't moving quick enough so I don't think the target is luxury models but more functional users (e.g. your situation in NYC makes sense. You need a car to get away to a destination and the car itself doesn't matter much as long as it's clean and runs)

Looking forward to seeing how you guys grow.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's exactly where we're at in the thought process on delivery. Much more efficient to bring the customer to the car, not vice versa, and not all that much worse a UX.

<comment><USER23> I'd still advise and openly admit as a random stranger on the internet you can disregard this, that the Uber code path is much better until you guys scale much much more.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> You may also want to check out NextCar - these folks own a bunch of East Coast dealerships and decided to start renting around their dealerships: [https://nextcarrental.com/](https://nextcarrental.com/)

They work out of dealerships as well as airports which can provide an edge for some local rentals.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting--I'll definitely give these guys a look. More and more dealers are getting in to the rental space on their own.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> can you quantify national chains being "inconvenient"?

i find those sorts of statements to be a sort of "biz-smell". it is easy to make dismissive claims about incumbents...and dangerous when those claims do not clearly map to value statements about your product/service. They are "inconvenient because of X, unlike us because of our feature/service/attribute Y".

if someone has never rented a car from a national chain, or if they have never had an issue doing so (which is my experience) your assertion without context may fall flat.

the uber voucher is neat, but i've had avis bring a car out to my house and drive me home after returning it to the lot. all i had to do was chat with a human for 1-2min and explain my personal logistics. my experience is an outlier...but informs my analysis of the "inconvenient" claim.

Regardless, great work launching! I will be looking forward to you expanding geographic coverage so I can give you a spin :)

<comment><AUTHOR> If you're a frequent car rental customer and are part of some of the bigger companies' loyalty programs (Avis Preferred, National Emerald, etc.) and typically rent from airport locations, than the rental experience can actually be really great.

But in a lot of use cases, specifically for people living in big cities that don't own cars, the experience is slow and expensive. To use me as an example, when I was living in New York I wanted to go skiing in Vermont and needed a car for the weekend. On the several occasions I used one of the big car rental companies, I'd pay in excess of $80/day for a midsize sedan, trek to a branch which was often far from where I lived, and wait in line to sign a bunch of paperwork at a desk. Another thing I found problematic was that I never new exactly which model I was going to get until I got there.

Peer-to-peer services solve certain aspects of these problems but were, in my experience, inconsistent--sometimes the car was nearby and great and other times it was far away, dirty, and the host was unresponsive.

We're trying to combine the scalability and variety you get with peer-to-peer services and the consistency you get with direct-to-consumer car rental.

<comment><USER9> > If you're a frequent car rental customer and are part of some of the bigger > companies' loyalty programs (Avis Preferred, National Emerald, etc.) and > typically rent from airport locations, than the rental experience can > actually be really great.

I'm none of those things, and when I've rented the experience has been great.

> On the several occasions I used one of the big car rental companies, I'd pay > in excess of $80/day for a midsize sedan, trek to a branch which was often > far from where I lived, and wait in line to sign a bunch of paperwork at a > desk

Every rental agency I've rented with has had pickup service of some sort (in the last few years, usually Uber/Lyft ordered by the rental office), and because they are smaller footprint and have business driven by accessibility, they tend to be more conveniently located for more people than dealerships.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This would be great if it helped me rent the cars I'm interested in buying. I'm trying to evaluate an Audi Q5 vs an Acura MDX right now and an extremely annoying thing is that I can't easily rent one from the dealership to take on a weekend trip and see how comfortable it is after a few hundred miles driving.

<comment><USER27> Hertz Rent2Buy might be an option. They present it as an extended test drive, where you get the fee waved if you buy the car, but they don't really care if you don't. The price when you don't buy isn't ultra cheap, but as I recall you don't get gouged on the nicer vehicles as much as with a regular rental, and they have a fairly diverse selection.

But fundamentally, it's nice if you're shopping for a car because you get to choose the make and model.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is great! I use Zipcar/Turo/Avis quite a bit since I don't own a car. Some notes:

* I would pay extra for unlimited mileage without worrying about overages. This is a major pain point for longer Zipcar trips to Tahoe or Oregon/Nevada

* The deductible is really high. Zipcar lets me pay extra for a $0 deductible.

* Mileage and deductible should be more visible, I had to go and read the actual terms. A small summary before booking might be good

* Mileage overage of $0.50/mile is pretty high considering I'm paying for gas

* UX nit, the calendar widget on the landing page requires me to scroll through a bunch of early morning AM times before getting to my time. The dropoff picker should default to the month of pickup as well.

I'm a big fan of your focus on minimizing hassle. The uber credit is clever! I'll definitely try you guys for my next trip.

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome feedback. Regarding mileage--the terms on the website are slightly outdated and we don't have mileage limits--so none of that mileage overage nonsense. We're also in the process of lowering the standard deductible $500 and adding a zero deductible option for an extra $10/day.

<comment><USER29> No mileage limits seems crazy. Won't dealers be upset if a car comes back from a week-long rental with an extra 2,500 miles on it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Interesting idea. I just suscribed to a manufacturer all-inclusive monthly plan which includes insurance, registration, the right to swap cars and unlimited miles. It is by no means cheap, but having month to month flexibility as well as no lump sum of cash down like a lease or purchase was a great option for me.

These prices seem insanely high though, maybe it's just I live in the south but... $65 a day for a Ford Explorer? I have a luxury German car and pay $34 a day, which again is not cheap.

I'll probably only end up doing my manufacture plan a couple of months, as honestly I don't drive that much. Spending $300-400 a month in Uber is actually eaiser and significantly less money.

<comment><USER31> Manufacturers are fundamentally in the business of pushing _new_ cars. No amount of financial engineering can make it a frugal option to drive a new car.

<comment><USER30> I am not entirely sure if the program is run by the US manufacturing division or local dealers. The car I got had 10,000 miles on it and is a 2019 model so not brand new.

<comment><USER32> Is it volvo? Didnt know it has unlimited and allowed frequent swaps.

<comment><USER30> Volvo is Swedish. :-). It is BMW. See [https://go.accessbybmw.com/justink9917](https://go.accessbybmw.com/justink9917)

* Full disclosure, above is a referral link. Though I can provide a promo code to waive the activation fee.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Hey Amos and Sam,

This is a great idea, and I don't think you need to make it a much cheaper option in the long run for it to attract customers (understand the incentive in the short term to acquire customers).

I live in SF, but travel to MSP a lot, and there is a local dealer that rents their fleet out and I usually rent from them, because they're close to the airport, they have a decent selection and the cars are well maintained. I would consider testing other markets than SF/Oakland/LA, and focus on places where people from those markets travel to (i.e. the midwest).

Excited to see what you accomplish!

<comment><AUTHOR> Both Sam and I are from Minnesota so we'd love to expand to MSP at some point :)

Our main focus right now is on people living in urban areas that don't own cars rather than on travel, which is a much more price-competitive market. That said, we're definitely not opposed to moving in that direction once we're a bit larger!

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Hi Amos & Sam this looks like a really cool concept. If I'm not mistaken another challenge you guys may face is the fact that a lot of dealerships are already doing this across entire brands such as Hyundai, how do you plan to tackle that? Also are you guys using a vehicle API such as [https://api.carsxe.com](https://api.carsxe.com) to vet cars and get detailed data analytics on the cars people are renting out?

</comment><comment><USER35> Most downtowns (mine included) don't have car dealerships nearby. I have no idea where the closest one is. I suppose I could take a Uber to a dealer less downtown when I want to Carve.

<comment><AUTHOR> All our cars are parked in valet lots downtown, so there's no need to go to the dealership + we'll give you $20 in Uber credit to get to and from the lot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Really nice checkout experience, I'm excited to try this out! I'm actually in the market right now for an SUV, maybe car shoppers are a potential market to reach out to (e.g. rent the car out cheaply for a week and let the salesperson give their pitch when you go to give back the keys). I am sure there are a lot of dealerships that would jump at that opportunity.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for giving us a try! Really looking forward to seeing what you think of the service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Hi Amos & Sam - Congrats on the launch. I'm one of the co-founder of Smartcar.com. Have an email I can reach you at?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey! Shoot me an email at email@example.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> fair.com did something similar and they call it subscriptions. They list dealer inventory and you can "subscribe" to a vehicle. They raised something like 1 billion from outside investors and just laid off 40% of staff. I do not think you are competing with Hertz. My nephew just rents a zip car when he needs a whip on the weekends. They are all over the city, he lives on the upper east side. Turo is not allowed in NYC. The main problem in the city is parking, accessibility and cost. Typically you only need a car on the weekends thats IF you can afford it. Everything in the city expensive. If you can target start ups in the city and the engineers that work there and bring them the cars to them when they need them it could be an idea worth testing. So many ways to slice the market on this.

<comment><USER39> Yes to bring the car too me! And pick it up too! This is a pain and a problem worth solving (in that people would pay for this). I rented a car last weekend to use on Saturday where I was leaving at 7am. I had to pick up the car Friday because the rental place is closed at 7am Saturday and spend 20 min finding a spot. Then had to spend another 15 min finding a spot on Saturday night, and they were of course closed by the time I got back at 9pm. Then Sunday returning the car I had to essentially park in the middle of the street blocking a lane of traffic along with about 10 other rental cars waiting for them to open at noon. At noon a rental employee comes out and starts yelling and essentially tells you to leave the car in the middle of the street and that you are good to go. I guess that was the good part.

Haven't tried Zip car. Too many NYC Zip car reviews of dirty cars left w/ empty pizza boxes etc and wouldn't want to be in such a small car in a highway in upstate NY.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> $55 a day for a toyota corolla is absolutely insane. So expensive. I fly all over and I'm a hertz gold member, I get my rentals for easily $10-30 a day. Plus my name is always on the board when I arrive at Hertz, just get in, drive away and sign a simple contract. I love Hertz

</comment><comment><USER41> Really cool idea - this solves a business model innovation problem for dealerships as well. I love the idea of being able to try for weekend BEFORE I buy or lease. Good luck with this - as a UX person I'd be happy to provide feedback on the app and service design.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! We'd absolutely love your feedback. Reach out to me directly at email@example.com when you have a minute!

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Your site doesn't seem to say anything about being limited to SF on the main page. I was a little confused at first having not read your last line about being SF only and was trying to figure out how I could check if you were in Denver for an upcoming trip.

<comment><AUTHOR> On our landing page in the box where you enter your dates and times, it says "Rent a car in San Francisco," but we'll add a banner to the top of the page as well just to ensure people know we're only in SF for the time being!

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Do you know anything about autoeurope.eu? I am renting there for years, sometimes months in a row, and nothing and no one can compare with prices + coverage. They somehow squeeze big players like Alamo and Hertz, providing exceptional prices for their rentals

<comment><AUTHOR> I've heard of them but haven't done much research. Will definitely check them out!

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I think you are on to something RE using dealership cars as high-end rentals.

I use DriveFlow, which is a Car as a Service. It is owned by a dealership chain.

It is $1100/mo. I love it.

[https://www.driveflow.com/](https://www.driveflow.com/)

<comment><USER45> >$1100/mo.

Holy crap, really? How much do you use it to justify that high of a cost? My car, and this number is going down monthly because I paid for it in one lump and it's getting older every month, only costs me $416/mo with maintenance and fuel. I suppose it saves on storage, but I already had a place to store said car, so that's not really an added cost?

Edited to reflect an accurate number after I realized I double entered insurance in fuellog for a year.

<comment><USER44> Yeah, so for $1100/mo I get:

\- Insurance (1K deductible)

\- Unlimited vehicle swaps

\- 1200 miles/mo

\- Each car comes freshly detailed and is usually under 3000 miles

\- Unlimited (local) roadside assistance swaps - eg if I get a flat tire they will come swap me out into another car and I just drive away - this happened to my wife and it was amazing to just grab and go

\- Allowed to put pets in the car (extra $100/mo)

As I have customers I drive around in-town frequently, I always need to have a nice, modern, clean car on short notice. The cars so far have been BMW m240i, Audi S3/S4, Audi Q5, Land Rover Discovery.

I feel it is worth the cost. My BMW lease before this was $700/mo. And then add in insurance, detailing, maintenance (tires). It is about the same honestly. I just have a lot more flexibility now.

Also it is a monthly operating expense, which makes the tax situation a lot easier (versus lease/purchase and then reflecting that on taxes).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> As an FYI, car rental in Europe is a million times worse than my experiences in the US. I would be very motivated to try another way to do it. It is totally normal to have a 1-2 hour wait in the UK or France at most airports, for example.

<comment><USER16> This is unfortunately the case during peak season (i.e. Italy or Spain in August). On the other hand, during off-season periods, the queue is often in the realm of 15 mins.

The thing I've always found though is that off-season in EU is _way_ cheaper than US. Went to Italy last month, 1 week for a medium sized car was something like 100 euros. And it's not unusual to rent a car for ~6 euros per day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> > human-free pickup and drop

> arrive at the pickup location, show the attendant your reservation email

> drive back to lot and hand the keys to the attendant

Just pointing out this pitch inconsistency, love the idea and hope you guys spread to other cities soon!

<comment><AUTHOR> Oof, that's glaring. Thanks for the catch!

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> As a used car dealer, I would love to participate in this.

UX tips: let user choose times later, initially show date options only. Also show am option to select the city, to make it clear where this service is available.

<comment><AUTHOR> Let's definitely chat! Shoot me an email at firstname.lastname@example.com

Re: the UX feedback--I'll let Sam know!

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I don't have any comments about the product but the background image on your site is 5MB! Makes the page look like it's loading slowly even if below the fold everything is ready to go.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for feedback! I'll get Sam to work on making load times way quicker.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Doesn't this burden the dealership's service revenue? They have to pay to maintain this fleet of rentals, which is going to be resource pressure for their service departments.

<comment><AUTHOR> Dealers do service their own cars, but we cover the costs. So if a car on the platform requires an oil change, the dealer performs it but we pay.

<comment><USER50> I see. How do you plan on turning Carve customers into leads for the dealership, to drive traditional car sales?

(disclaimer: I work in automotive, and very closely with dealers)

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely been thinking about this when it comes to getting new dealerships to sign on with us.

One thing is leaving information about the car and the dealership in the vehicle + providing dealer contact info in case the person wants to reach out to the dealer. Do you have any other ideas?

<comment><USER50> Well this is, as far as I can tell, an intractable problem with automotive because of the nature of the whole market, from OEMs to dealerships & dealership groups to consumers.

Dealerships live and breathe leads. People renting cars definitely do not want to be sales leads for dealerships. So I think this may be a pothole along your way to the success I hope you achieve. :)

<comment><USER27> _When_ I want to buy a car, I want to drive the car, or a car like, the one I'm interested in for an extended length of time before committing. A regular test drive is way too short and although sometimes they let you take it by yourself for longer, I feel like I'm imposing if I am not likely to buy it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Great idea. Again utilizing the excess capacity. Couple of questions: 1\. How are you financing uber vouchers ? 2\. Are they allowing cars to be rented beyond certain mileage limit ?

<comment><AUTHOR> 1\. We have a business account with Uber and just pay them based on the number of vouchers that are used.

2\. We don't put mileage limits on our cars, so dealers don't really have a way of limiting mileage once the vehicles are on the platform.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> In most states dealership cars typically have dealer plates which only allow them to be driven during test drives or by dealership employees. How do you handle that?

<comment><AUTHOR> We require that dealers tag and title the cars before giving them to us (usually $200 which we reimburse).

<comment><USER48> Doing this would add an extra "owner" to carfax history, lowering the value of the car. As a dealer this would be a huge deterrent to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'd encourage you to think about what you are doing for climate crisis. Nothing else really matters these days.

Is this business model helping or hindering emission reductions? Our climate, history, and society will not treat you well if the latter.

Consider an EV-first approach, working only with dealerships who have EVs (worst case PHEVs) to lease. That will help people decide to switch to EVs, and you can be part of the solution, not the problem.

</comment><comment><USER53> Where in SF do you serve? Literally just the city?

Are there mileage limits, since these cars are presumably sold as new/ish?

<comment><AUTHOR> Right now all our lots are located in SF proper, and we provide $10 of Uber credit each way to get there and back. We're working on ramping up operations in Oakland right now though.

There aren't any mileage limits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Trying to book a car from mid dec-Jan, but it does not allow choosing a date in 2020. Is that intentional?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not intentional! Working to fix now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Does this include delivery? That's the missing link I always notice with non- airport car rental.

<comment><AUTHOR> We don't currently offer delivery, but all our lots are downtown and we pay for your Uber to and from the lot.

Delivery, especially at our size, turns out to be pretty expensive to do, so we think it makes more sense in most cases to deliver the customer to the car, not the other way around.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> how does insurance work for the rental period? prices seem similar to hertz and enterprise, why would i chose it above those?

<comment><AUTHOR> Liability insurance and physical damage are covered, but there is a $2000 deductible.

As to why you'd choose us over Hertz, Enterprise, etc., the prices you're seeing on our website include things like taxes and fees, so by and large they're substantially lower than the big rental car companies for comparable cars.

Convenience is also a big thing we've focused on. Our lots are all downtown, as opposed to rental car company branches, who have a few lots downtown with limited inventory but tend to do most of their business at airports. We also pay $20 towards the Ubers to get you there and back again. Finally, since our lots are valeted 24/7, all you have to do is show an attendant your reservation email and the car is brought to you, which makes for super smooth pickup and drop-off process.

<comment><USER57> $2000, yikes! Will one's credit card insurance benefit apply here like with a more classic rental to cover some of that?

<comment><AUTHOR> If the credit card used to book the car offers what's called a "Car Rental Collision Damage Waiver" then they'd cover the deductible for you.

We're currently renegotiating our insurance product, so hopefully we'll be able to bring the deductible down to $500. We're also most likely going to offer an add-on option to reduce the deductible to $0.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Do you have plans to cover South Bay?

</comment><comment><USER59> I feel like Turo will not like this?

</comment><comment><USER60> Do you presently own cars?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, all cars are dealer-owned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Sounds like Skurt re-born.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think Skurt worked with rental car companies to deliver vehicles to customers whereas our cars come from dealerships and we don't deliver.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Genius Idea! Not so catchy name "Carve" \- got to be more "Uber"

<comment><USER63> I kinda like it, it's got the word "Car" in it. "I drove a Carve to get here" sounds more natural than "I took an Uber"

<comment><AUTHOR> Believe it or not, my co-founder and I actually ended up flipping a coin to decide on the name! I wanted DrivesUs (mostly because the domain was available) but now I feel like Carve sounds a little more sleek and pithy.

<comment><USER64> DrivesUs would be a problem for me, because I'd keep forgetting whether it was DriveUs or DrivesUs</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ontology Is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags (2005) - <AUTHOR> http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html <comment><USER2> I enjoyed this piece, mostly because I disagree so strongly with it :-). Clay takes the topic of Ontology, contextualizes it into an impractical domain, and then calls it overrated. Cars are overrated too because they can't cross oceans right?

When done correctly, ontology combined with knowledge graphs can make an impractical problem much more practical. Consider for the moment the problem of 'fake news'. What characterizes 'fake news' is that it has facts or concepts that are not in alignment with "true" facts (authoritative). And without getting into the debate of what is and isn't true, you can take a document, a knowledge base populated with trusted facts, and a topic ontology and score that document for alignment with the existing data set. Whether you use that for checking Wikipedia articles or flagging fake news its a very powerful combination.

<comment><USER3> I know this might be fuel to the fire on here, but I think Tanushree's work at Georgia Tech in her paper "A Parsimonious Language Model of Social Media Credibility Across Disparate Events" [1] is a good stab at the "fake news" problem with a lens of "credibility".

As a disclaimer, we tried to get this model off the ground in YC summer 2017 batch but were rejected after the phone interview. I did not assist in the research; only an effort to publicize.

I whole-heartedly believe this is our best bet at combatting "fake news" online for the moment. Taking the lessons of "The Most Human Human: What Artificial Intelligence Teaches Us About Being Alive" [2], we might tease out credibility instead of fact or fiction to help guide our biased/opinionated labels.

From the abstract:

"In other words, the language used by millions of people on Twitter has considerable information about an event's credibility. For example, hedge words and positive emotion words are associated with lower credibility"

[1]: [https://credcount.com/whitepaper.pdf](https://credcount.com/whitepaper.pdf)

[2]: [https://www.amazon.com/Most-Human-Artificial-Intelligence- Te...](https://www.amazon.com/Most-Human-Artificial-Intelligence- Teaches/dp/0307476707)

<comment><USER4> The problem is that "Fake News" is a misleading category in itself. The primary issue with "fake news" isn't political it's advertising. Fake news is made mostly to lure you into clicking or sharing which in turn increases the advertising revenue. A lot of it is saying outrageous conspiratorial stuff but in essense it's not different than tabloid news which are often also "fake news"

On top of that what might be considered fake news by some doesn't have to be by others because it might have utility.

And lats but not least. Combatting fake news would mean that you would be able to cover all contextual interpretations of a given statement which we simply don't have access to.

So from my perspective you can't battle fake news in any meaningful ways which won't end up doing more harm than good as "fake news" is not really fake in some objectively defined way.

<comment><USER5> > what might be considered fake news by some doesn't have to be by others > because it might have utility

Do you have an example of this in mind?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've been working on a tag-centric document manager for the last 90 days:

[https://getpolarized.io/](https://getpolarized.io/)

It allows you to tag and manage everything you're reading and the primary management metaphor is the 'tag'.

It's a central repository for all your reading. PDFs, web content, and it supports annotation (highlights, comments, etc).

There are a bunch of clear wins here.

Related tags are awesome. You can build a bunch of really nice derived metadata just by managing your tags on the documents.

For example, I've been reading a lot about growth hacking as I'm trying to get Polar to 100k users. (We're officially 10% of the way there today!)

Since I have a bunch of documents named 'growth' Polar recommends startups, venturecapital, and marketing as secondary tags.

Also, since Anki supports tags (and Polar supports Anki sync) these systems are compatible.

Polar tags are also Twitter tags. While we haven't enabled this feature yet your annotations could be exported to Twitter and the systems are compatible.

We're still getting users that want hierarchy though. I'm not sure what I want to do here.

I'm considering building out algorithmic hierarchy.

For example, if you have two documents with the first tagged 'tech, microsoft' and the second tagged 'tech, linux' we can infer that tech is the parent of 'microsoft' and 'linux'

... and it would still support tags.

the problem I have now is that folder hierarchy is still being requested by our users but I'm resistant to implement it yet.

<comment><USER7> Tags do not fit spatial memory. Tags are utterly worthless in any spatial context.

You're at the mercy of a search engine's implementation and index foibles for finding things through search queries.

A hierarchy maps onto our spatial memory, which we use to figure out where we've been and go back to it.

There's a lot to be said for maintaining spatial metaphors in information space.

Another little detail here is that spatial organisation (in meatspace) is a shared environment. A single 'shared' ontology is useful even if it's nonsense, because it's still a shared frame of reference in which navigational directions can be shared.

<comment><USER8> If you use modern NLP you can embed tags into vectors and then just use dot product between query and targets to rank them. There's even a fast library for that in Python called 'annoy'. It is capable of relating any query to any tag.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> All I see is a giant ad for ED pills.

This is what I see: [https://archive.fo/rZchC](https://archive.fo/rZchC) over time: [https://archive.fo/http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_o...](https://archive.fo/http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html)

<comment><USER10> There may be malicious software on your computer.

<comment><USER11> this redirected on both GP and archive.fo's servers... I can't replicate, but I think we can rule out malicious software on GP's computer.

<comment><USER10> That makes sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Ontology's key strength is that it allows for discovery. Yes it's a form of curation, with all the bias that implies. Sometimes I want a domain expert to curate hierarchical lists for me to explore.

Both Ontology and Tagging have their place. The net is vast and infinite, sometimes it's nice to have a map.

</comment><comment><USER13> This article is 14 years old, and dates back to a time when the debates about the "semantic web" had a lot more wind in their sails. (I made similar arguments around that time...)

<comment><USER14> I had a whole semester on the semantic web in 2008. Having grown up with the internet as it was, I thought it was useless nonsense

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I enjoyed reading this article, but was perplexed at the statement "Cities are real. They are real, physical facts. Countries are social fictions." City names and boundaries are just as, if nor more, socially constructed as those of countries.

<comment><USER16> This is true of names and borders, but the cities themselves remain where they are even when names and borders change, so they're more persistent than countries.

<comment><USER17> That might seem logical on the surface, but dig just a little deeper and the flaws become readily apparent.

For example if you're looking for the population of New York between 1850 and 1950, you would see a potentially dramatic shift of the population around the turn of the century, which would be misleading if you didn't already know the caveat about the consolidation of the city in 1898.

However that shouldn't discourage the tagging of data by city. It just means that a city, as metadata, is no more or less functional than country, as the grandparent comment suggests.

<comment><USER16> Well, yes, few things are entirely immutable. Cities do grow and (rarely) shrink or disappear. But this is rare enough that it's useful to hang other data off of their names.

For example, take the locations used in time zone databases, where an official way to name a location is something like America/Los_Angeles. The assumption is that major cities don't get split across time zones and users know which cities they are nearby that they share a time zone with. Country names aren't used.

A lat/long pair would be more precise, but sometimes precision isn't needed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > You need a hierarchy to manage a file system.

I find this a strange assertion after several paragraphs which vociferously assert hierarchies are redundant in the virtual space. In fact, OS/400 is a 'single-level' store using objects, so it has even been shown in practice that you do not need filesystems to build a useful OS, if I am not mistaken.

Am I mistaken?

<comment><USER19> I also found this assertion surprising. I often wish filesystems had good native support for tagging and not just a strict hierarchy. Even hardlinks / symlinks seem like a poorly supported afterthought, especially on Windows, and generally not worth the effort to use them for user-level data organisation. But I'm not sure how a purely tag based would work in practice, so thanks for the pointer to OS/400.

Another example is the Windows Start Menu. The hierarchy is basically useless and a huge pain to use. I have give up on maintaining a sensible hierarchy long ago. Windows 10's search is much better, except when it fails you're forced to go back to the hierarchy. One thing missing here is that you can't navigate from a search result to the hierarchy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> "when people were offered search and categorization side by side fewer and fewer people used categorization to find things"

Two thoughts pop into my mind which guide me gently to the conclusion we need to be careful here.

      1) every configuration is a set of trade-offs
      2) any parameter or paradigm pushed to extreme produces perversion

On point number 1: categorization contains the benefit of discoveribility when you lack the information necessary to form the search query in the first place.

On point number 2: search forces you to generate the query and direct your attention towards a given subject. However, some of the most important discoveries you have ever made in your life were when other people held your attention in conversation and kindly directed it in a direction it wasn't going but that arrived at an illuminating destination.

We need all implementations to some degree to get all possible benefits. I suspect this is why suggestion algorithms have flourished but in doing so they create echo chambers because they are a charicature of yourself bending your own ear.

If only algorithms could suggest what you needed to hear and not what you wanted to hear.

Some books I have bought at my local bookstore I never would have found on Amazon. It's amazing what being able to direct our own attention and have the world organized in exactly that way has done for us, and it is equally as amazing as the paths we are lead down when we let other people direct our attention.

<comment><USER17> As a solution developer, I find the most bang for my buck is when I produce solutions for people who come to me with a problem rather than a solution.

Imagine if Google made you answer the question "Why?" five times before it showed you results. I wonder if a well trained network would produce such accurate results we would no longer need to see a list of results, and could simply hit the lucky button.

But good luck finding a user who's willing to answer "Why?" five times rather than brute-forcing a search engine into their "echo chamber," as you accurately described it.

<comment><USER20> Well theres no disagreement from me that what you describe is how it plays out.

My caution is that we have found the equivalent of cheap, fast, microwavable meals and we are now consuming them almost exclusively and in 15 ~ 20 years it's going to become painfully obvious what deleterious side-effects arise as a result of that. We can't see it now, so we don't feel the need not to do it, and that simply is what it is, but in time it will act as a control signal that nudges us to modify our behavior.

This is both a great and terrifying time to be alive. The 20th century was full of some pretty hefty social experiments and the thing with those were they were obvious and in your face. The 21st century versions are much less obvious and reveal themselves very slowly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This article has made the rounds so many times that surely Ontology must be underrated for now.

</comment><comment><USER22> I think this highlights exactly the dangers of social media and communities centered around fixated niches.

I've been thinking lately of how to remedy that and this post came up at just the right time to get the mind juices flowing. At a high level I see a decentralized community that doesn't rely on forums/tribes/subreddits and incentivizes tagging like old school del.iciou.us. This enables higher chance of cross pollination and less group think. I could really see it working well with some flavor of ethereum/ipfs/incentives.

Something something, everything is in cycles? Hah.

<comment><USER23> Eh, people will resist levers of control. Even levers with good intentions.

People seek a payoff. Even if you have some interconnect, that forces patterns of use, why are they crawling through your pipes?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The same is so true for programming, in particular OOP. In my experience, code is much easier to change when a loosely coupled set of interfaces is built as opposed to an hierarchy of classes.

<comment><USER25> Indeed. This is also why I think OOP is missing something to scale better in terms of flexibility and domain size. The ideal code structure for a particular need is rather arbitrary. OOP "prefers" things in a hierarchy, both in terms of inheritance, and in terms of an object being less powerful than a class (in most languages). You can force or use OOP outside of these, but it's unnatural in my opinion.

For example, why is it not easy to add an "onClick" event handler method to a particular button in a Java GUI? One has to use lambdas instead. Attempts to reorg the GUI engine to remedy such create side-effects. Java's OOP model is simply not powerful enough to do GUI's naturally. Conway's Law seems to apply to domain structures as well. Fit matters.

Something like Lisp allows one to create behavior-containing "structures" that are customized to a domain or need, but can get too confusing. Lisp can easily get too hard to read and follow for most mortals, and is why it never became mainstream despite being around for 60-ish years.

We need something in between traditional OOP and "full meta".

<comment><USER26> You can do OOP without inheritance. I do it all the time, including in Java. It works extremely well alongside dependency injection. You still get all of the other parts of OOP, like encapsulation and polymorphism.

The only real trick is to use delegation patterns instead of inheritance, i.e. dispatch requests to class members rather than super/subclasses.

It doesn't feel awkward or unnatural.

<comment><USER25> It does feel awkward to me. I tend to view it more like RDBMS design and queries where the structures fit the domain and one can query for subsets or dispatching using something as flexible and simple as SQL (relatively speaking).

Then you could easily answer:

A) Show me all the GUI event handling code for all buttons. B) Show me all the event handling code for Form X. C) Show me all the event handling code for all buttons within forms having at least one drop-down list.

Similar goes for executing code (running business logic), not just code inspection. Then one doesn't have to crawl object graphs as often. Early databases did graph crawling, but then Dr. Codd showed a better way, and graph-DB's mostly withered. I'm waiting for the Dr. Codd of code and behavior dispatching management to come save the day.

I'd like to explore using relational modelling for behavior, not just attributes (data). I used to do such in xBase (dBASE, FoxPro, etc.) because of its dynamic nature and ease of editing tables, including code _in_ tables. I thought that direction was the future, it looked bright to me. Then OOP came along and killed the seeming birth of table-oriented programming.

(It might seem like a security risk to put code in tables, but the difference between a file system and database are not different enough to say putting them in a database is "bad" while putting them in a file system is "good". I'd like to blur the distinction between a file system and database, but maybe that's a diff topic. Plus, one doesn't necessarily have to put code "in" the tables, just references to it in tables. One just needs a system/convention to track and map each to the other.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Interesting, the url picks up as:

"Female Viagra UK, Buy Viagra - Online Pharmacy, Best Offer"

When pasting in a notes app. Couldn't tell if it was an inside joke with regards to the subject matter.

</comment><comment><USER28> This is one of my favorite articles, which I first read when it was new and still informs how I think about organizing information and the web.

</comment><comment><USER29> Anyone know what Clay is up to at the moment? Seems to have gone very quiet in the last 5 years.

</comment><comment><USER30> The site is now displaying spam :(

</comment><comment><USER31> Reddit is basically a flat ontology for images, if you think about how most people use it.

</comment><comment><USER32> Queue up the quotes from "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"

</comment><comment><USER33> [2005] should be added to the title

> This piece is based on two talks I gave in the spring of 2005 -- one at the > O'Reilly ETech conference in March, entitled "Ontology Is Overrated", and > one at the IMCExpo in April entitled "Folksonomies & Tags: The rise of user- > developed classification." The written version is a heavily edited > concatenation of those two talks.

<comment><USER34> Google has this dated as [2014] - June 14 to be exact. Google also shows the exploit-affected site title as mentioned in other comments...

[https://www.google.com/search?source=lnt&tbs=cdr:1,cd_min:1/...](https://www.google.com/search?source=lnt&tbs=cdr:1,cd_min:1/1/2005,cd_max:&tbm=&q=inurl:http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> This is a great post.

The problem with the thesis is that just because classical ontology doesn't work for the entire internet, doesn't mean that we can't apply it in many domains.

Formal ontology could be used very well in a variety of areas.

Informal, or less concise ontology again in many areas.

And leave tagging for the rest.

<comment><USER36> Aren't tagging and "informal ontology" pretty much equivalent?

<comment><USER35> Well there are surely other informal ways of doing 'ontology'.

The point being - more rigorous methods can definitely be valuable in areas, and I don't think it's a good idea to ignore this fact.

It's a bygone issue because there wasn't a critical mass in place to make it work, but there could be.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Haha, if you don't enjoy this you will enjoy it anyway.

</comment><comment><USER38> 2005\. did what he predicted happen? I think not?

<comment><USER39> Might be good to add a date to the title.</comment></comment>


Shape Up: Product Development at Basecamp - <AUTHOR> https://basecamp.com/shapeup/ <comment><USER2> This is amazing. This is the most comprehensive write-up on software product development I've ever read. By anyone. And it's the _only_ post on product development I've ever read in my entire life that has specific examples that aren't fiction.

Six week cycles? Ha. How nice it would be to work at a company that has a product, customers, and isn't fucking insane. Remember, friends don't let friends work for VC funded startups.

> We don't count hours or question how individual days are spent. We don't > have daily meetings. We don't rethink our roadmap every two weeks.

I think I've wasted the last 10 years of my life. Let's see 20 minute standup meeting every work day for the last 9 years. That's 20 * 5 * 48 * 9 / 60 = 720 hours of my life wasted in standup meetings.

<comment><USER3> I appreciated the section discussing the difference between "appetite" and "estimate".</comment></comment>


Allocators in Rust - <AUTHOR> http://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2014/11/14/allocators-in-rust/ <comment><USER2> Why does the default glibc allocator have relatively poor performance? (What makes it slower, and why hasn't it been changed?)

<comment><USER3> This stuff is out of the scope of my knowledge, but I do know libraries such as OpenBSD's memory allocator are slower due to security optimizations. jemalloc is not known for it's security, instead it seems to be focused on performance. Security features such as ASLR, not leaving old memory around, zeroing out memory on release, etc, are not things that improve an allocators performance.

<comment><USER2> Good point. I wonder if Rust's allocator needs fewer security features because of heavy compile-time heap safety checking. For example, I don't believe use- after-free or double-free is possible in Rust due to Rust's lifetime system (barring use of unsafe code blocks).

<comment><USER4> I second that question, as it was my first thought about the difference to the malloc in glibc, or whether it's just ignoring the supposed benefits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was curious about Rust's support for within-application custom allocators, it looks like this is still under discussion: [https://github.com/rust- lang/rfcs/pull/244](https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs/pull/244)

</comment><comment><USER6> "How much allocation takes place in Rust vs in the other language?"

Wouldn't the distribution of the allocations matter too, switching between the two allocators frequently showing the worst case and reuse of one of two minimising the effect.</comment>


Anko is a scriptable interpreter written in Go - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mattn/anko <comment><USER2> One wonders what explains the involvement of Ruby's creator Matts, and what the project goals are.</comment>


Millions of educated, experienced workers are tossed aside by a strong economy - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/07/23/millions-educated-experienced-workers-have-been-tossed-aside-by-strong-economy <comment><USER2> I keep hearing that we're in a strong economy, but the reality is that we aren't. It's a strong economy for the rich and powerful, but not really anyone else.

Most American's can't afford a $1000 emergency [1].

Wages actually went down last month [2]

78% of Americans are living Paycheck to Paycheck. [3]

Nearly half of all Americans are low-income or in poverty. [4]

1/5 of children in USA are living in poverty [5]

I want someone to explain to me how this is a "good economy". I keep hearing it. It's total nonsense. I'm glad WaPo is bringing up that workers are still struggling despite these claims of a "strong economy".

[1] [https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/most-americans-cant- aff...](https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/most-americans-cant-afford-to- pay-for-even-a-minor-emergency_us_5a68e67ae4b0022830090e5b)

[2] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/06/15/for-t...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/06/15/for- the-biggest-group-of-american-workers-wages-arent-just-flat-theyre- falling/?utm_term=.0afbedc4d098)

[3] [https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/24/most-americans-live- paycheck...](https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/24/most-americans-live-paycheck-to- paycheck.html)

[4] [https://kairoscenter.org/wp- content/uploads/2017/02/Poverty-...](https://kairoscenter.org/wp- content/uploads/2017/02/Poverty-Fact-sheet-Jan-2017.pdf)

[5] [http://www.nccp.org/topics/childpoverty.html](http://www.nccp.org/topics/childpoverty.html)

<comment><USER3> Many of the facts you stated are relatively invariant to the strength of the economy. I do not have good sources to describe how they have changed over time, but I would assume that points 1,3,4, and 5 are true nearly all the time. Additionally, for point 2, real wages going down on a timespan of 1 year is essentially noise in the face of rising real wages by various measures by FRED.

[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/tags/series?t=real%3Bwages](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/tags/series?t=real%3Bwages)

<comment><USER4> If it's invariant then I find it even more disturbing.

<comment><USER3> A lot of these facts are designed to make scary headlines.

#1 and #3 are both symptoms of a common cause- essentially zero savings rate for a wide swath of the American population. For the large fraction of people, failing to save is a behavioral phenomenon. For many people, doubling their income would still result in them living paycheck to paycheck.

For #5, 17% of canadian children are living in poverty, 1 in 5 French children live in poverty, and poverty affects more than one in four children in the UK today ([https://globalnews.ca/news/3739960/canadian-census- children-...](https://globalnews.ca/news/3739960/canadian-census-children- poverty/)) ([http://www.france24.com/en/20150609-unicef-report-france- chi...](http://www.france24.com/en/20150609-unicef-report-france-child- poverty-economic-crisis-education)) ([http://www.cpag.org.uk/content/child- poverty-facts-and-figur...](http://www.cpag.org.uk/content/child-poverty- facts-and-figures)). Of course, each country sets its own poverty line to represent a socially-empathetic income level, resulting in pretty-even levels of nominal poverty across countries. It is not that surprising that expanding the scope of headline-worthy impoverishness to be "low-income or in poverty" would result in headline #4.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The economy and the education system are out of sync. We are turning out a TON of degrees for a few jobs and expecting people to be able to just succeed based on a 4 year degree program. All the while the economy does expect a 4 year degree for some jobs that really shouldn't. So you're expected to waste money on a degree you don't need to work a job that won't help you pay back your degree because they aren't paying you what you need to pay off that debt.

I don't have a solution. I just see that I know plenty of people who have GREAT degrees, are very intelligent and are working in a field where their success is more defined by who they are then how they were educated. I think whatever solution we do have, needs to take a look at both the economy as well as the education system and how we prepare our young for a life in the workforce. Because at the end of the day that's what we're doing, we're educating our young to be able to step into our economy and profit.

Again, I don't know the solution. Regulate the number of graduates within a certain degree field? Regulate jobs so that we force jobs to accomodate the degrees? Unionize alternate jobs so working at walmart / factories becomes profitable again? I don't know I just worry about what my children will do when they enter the economy and how will they stay in the middle class.

<comment><USER6> > Again, I don't know the solution. Regulate the number of graduates within a > certain degree field?

Stop providing loan guarantees for all students regardless of the marketability of the degree they've chosen?

<comment><USER7> And make loans dischargeable like any other loan.

<comment><USER8> Exactly. If the burden of collecting the debt is on the loaner, they will do a better job of enforcing who gets a loan (which is traditionally the job of the loaner anyway). Student loans get handed out like candy and now we have a continuously-compounding problem of growing tuitions and debt.

If bankruptcy could fix student loans, then the ones giving out loans would be a lot more careful, schools would stop wasting hundreds of millions on new buildings that that are 80% empty, and we wouldn't have a large segment of the middle class population in indentured servitude.

Seems pretty simple to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> >"She once had her own office, secretaries and assistants, along with titles like "director" that spoke to her decades of experience. Now, she's a temp — one of many.

>Levi was laid off from her job at a law office during a merger in early 2015, and has struggled to find long-term work. In late 2016, she filed for bankruptcy."

How do you go from director at 59 to filing bankruptcy in fewer than two year after losing your job? Fiscal irresponsibility

<comment><USER2> >How do you go from director at 59 to filing bankruptcy in fewer than two year after losing your job? Fiscal irresponsibility

This is a very entitled and selfish statement. The act of simply existing is very expensive in the USA, and if you have children or have unexpected medical bills that can be tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands, you can easily eat through all of your savings very quickly and not be able to pay back debts I'm sure they could pay before they were laid off.

<comment><USER10> _This is a very entitled and selfish statement._

It doesn't take a huge imagination to realise the unexpected could happen, especially at that age. If you have had a reasonable career in a well paying job then it is irresponsible not to put something away for a rainy day.

<comment><USER11> In the United States, a bad medical problem can cost five-to-ten years' salary. That's one hell of a rainy day fund.

[https://www.cnbc.com/id/100840148](https://www.cnbc.com/id/100840148)

<comment><USER10> The article didn't mention a bad medical problem, rather some low level issues.

I'm not sure using the lack of socialised health care as an excuse for not managing your finances is sensible. It's only a minority that need expensive health care before 65 but it seems it's the majority who aren't managing to live within their means.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The waste of human potential is staggering. The purpose of the economy should be to enable making full use of it. Instead we focus on profit.

<comment><USER13> You have to work out a system, then, to figure out who pays to employ the people doing unprofitable work. Not as easy as it sounds.

<comment><USER14> Lots of things are _profitable_ but never _absurdly and increasingly profitable_ , which is the trap we are now in.

There's no credit given for having a tidy business with steady profit. Instead you have to have "growth" and other this-quarter-must-be-better-than-last- quarter-or-else crap that "investors" want.

<comment><USER15> What sort of credit are you looking for? There are millions of tidy small businesses with steady profit. Just because you don't see newspaper articles about them doesn't mean they don't exist. Look around.

Small businesses are often able to get credit in the form of bank loans once they have established a track record of profitability.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The recession was a market correction not just for housing prices but also for labor prices, and a lot of educated/experienced workers have learned that the market doesn't value their skills like they thought they did.

</comment><comment><USER17> What is paradoxical is that American voters keep voting to reduce taxes for the rich, who don't do anything with that saved money to increase businesses.

Taxes should be lower for the poor who would thus spend more and keep the economic engine running and create jobs.

Taxes should be much higher for the rich so that that money is used by Govt to do infrastructure work (create jobs) or pay down debt (and thus provide services and create jobs).

Lowering taxes for the rich just allows the rich to seek investments that will increase their own wealth, not necessary creating jobs (Some VCs are an abberation to this).

<comment><USER18> They keep electing people who reduce taxes for the rich. If it was up for a direct vote, I doubt most of these tax bills would pass. The last one was deeply unpopular with the public.

Some of it's just failings of a two party system. You vote for the one you like better, but given a binary choice it's a fairly non-specific vote.

<comment><USER17> I think this a great opportunity for someone to make a real time "consequences" website.

Whatever the candidate says, fact check it and display a few important impacts to people directly. Economic is the easiest. Another good one is jobs, taxes, quality of life, debt, inequality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I am having hard time understanding the problem articulated in this article. Can someone with English as first language summarise the actual technical arguments ?

For example I see that there is one graph with part-time, full-time graph. The full time employment has increased rapidly while the part-time graph remains the same. How is that possible ? Also, sharing economy is a new thing where a lot of people who would be "unemployed" in past are now doing part time work. A lot of work can be done online today staying at home and hence more people might have taken up part time work.

Another graph shows how part time and full time wages have grown and it claims part-time wages have been stagnant. The graph does not show that.

\-- "I'm overqualified for these jobs, but they don't think that I would be happy to do them," Corcoran said. "I'm not finding any interest in a 60-year- old guy with gray hair and, honestly, kind of a limited shelf life." \--

Aren't these people actually the perfect candidates for part time experimental work positions where you could fire them easily ? (In almost all countries old people have hard time finding new employment)

</comment><comment><USER14> Many "jobs" today won't even cover cost of living in their areas, making UNDER-employment a valid issue that is too easily ignored in statistics that show lots of people "employed".

Also, being forced to take on a massive amount of debt just to have a chance to _get_ a certain job makes that job less valuable overall. A company can still boot you out in less time than it takes to pay off debts so you're really trying to find _continued_ employment to justify an investment such as having to move or obtaining a degree. And of course you might acquire new debts while paying off the older ones.

These situations tie the hands of so many, and that's not a "strong" economy. If there's no _truly_ disposable income, you're essentially expecting people to set aside their basic needs to raise your stock price.

</comment><comment><USER20> This sums up in a nutshell the 40 year slide in Mens wages:

" _When he first started working iron, Hartnett was making about $43.90 in today's dollars. On his last project, he made $16.93._ "

</comment><comment><USER21> Why the U3 statistic for unemployment is far from telling the whole story: [http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=us+adult+population,+us...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=us+adult+population,+us+labor+force+participation)

</comment><comment><USER22> I find it amazing how much US cares about employment rate. Then people start talking about U3 vs U*. I know they mean something... they always come up.

What I'm curious about these statistics is: how do the statistics track the self-employed?

Seems to me the gig-economy is not about part-time jobs but about part-time self-employment.

So, if you are self-employed and you pay your taxes, from the government's point of view you are OK. But that doesn't mean you are profitable or making a living wage.

In IT, if you are 'benched' the employer pays you regardless. But a 'benched' self-employed person is basically an unemployed that is burning through cash paying taxes, health insurance, etc.

<comment><USER23> > _that doesn 't mean you are profitable or making a living wage_

These statistics are tracked to a pedantic level of detail by the BLS. You can get numbers of people by industry and zip code and earnings bucket and quarter for most categories of self employment going back to the early 1980s. Moreover, unemployment isn't mean to measure if people are getting a liveable wage. It measure if they're getting any wage. The problem you cite is an issue, but it would quickly resolve itself into unemployment as the cash stores ran out.

<comment><USER22> I wasn't thinking only about the self-employed (as in S-corp) but also LLC owners that are employees at their own company and smaller ventures/startups(?).

Indeed, at some point the money runs out and that will become actual unemployment, but it will show up in statistics with a rather long delay or not at all.

In the mean time, you have people doing literally nothing while on paper the economy is overheating.

Of course, I'm sure it's a small percentage of the population... so probably not very relevant.

<comment><USER24> "For consistencies sake" (or more likely, to make the numbers look better) the stats have been compiled the same way for a century or more with criteria relevant to an economy mostly employing unskilled manual laborers for factory work and ag work. Because unskilled laborers can find a job if they want in less than a year, they drop off the unemployement rolls after a year. Of course its trivial if you have an esoteric degree and decades of experience to end up in a situation where there are no skilled jobs in your field... at all... regardless how "hot" the economy might be for other people with other skills, and in a year it won't matter anyway as you drop off the list of unemployed and onto NEET or similar status. That is the situation with almost every person in the linked article, they have 2020 skills and experience, no jobs exist for those skills, and they'll will only appear for a short time in unemployment stats designed to track unskilled manual laborers working at a Ford plant a century ago.

<comment><USER25> The only problem with that rant is that the entire premise is false. Unemployment _benefits_ have a time limit, but unemployment _statistics_ do not (you only fall off of the headline unemployment statistic if you become institutionalized or employed, stop actively looking for work, or die.)

<comment><USER26> Even some of the people who stop actively looking for work are still tracked in unemployment statistics, just not in the U3 rate that is usually reported headlines. Discouraged and marginally attached workers who have stopped looking for work because they don't think they will find a job but who would like to work if they could find one are tracked in the U4 and U5 measures.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> That's because it's not a strong economy. Millions have stopped looking for work and never started after the recession. Wages have stagnated even for white collar jobs. Employers are unwilling to pay competitively. Millions like the ones in the article are underemployed and underutilized. How the fuck is that a strong economy?

<comment><USER28> You know, I keep hearing the 'many stopped working during the recession' thing bandied about like received wisdom, and have not seen any statistics to back that up. Note: I am not saying it's not true, just that I personally haven't seen any studies or reports to back up that fact. Have you a link? All the U6 (real) unemployment rate numbers I've seen indicate 'real' unemployment is back to pre-recession numbers

<comment><USER29> [https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000](https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000)

There's this. This doesn't exactly back up the claim - there are a lot of reasons people might not be participating.

<comment><USER30> Especially this: [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU01300060](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU01300060)

25-54 year Labor Paticipation Rate is those that you'd expect to be working but aren't.

<comment><USER23> The difference between the 25-54 and civilian participation rates are largely attributable to retiring boomers. Participation rates depend heavily on demographics. They matter for things like dependency ratios. But quoting them without the context of a large generation retiring and increasing time spent getting educated hides the full picture. That said, the 3 percentage point drop in 25-54 participation is largely attributable to the opioid crisis—that's a disturbing start to a trend.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> > And once we knew where to look, we found their stories hiding in plain > sight, in the Labor Department's data.

In other words, you began your research with conclusion already in mind, and then looked for a way to present this data to show this conclusion.

Excellent statistical work. That's exactly how such research should be done.

</comment><comment><USER32> From an employer standpoint, educated and experienced = expensive

<comment><USER33> And everyone is looking for a deal. And sometimes people have to be burned by going cheap. Although sometimes they do get lucky and get someone decent for a pittance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> It is time for Universal Basic Income.

[https://www.yang2020.com/](https://www.yang2020.com/)

<comment><USER35> That's always the easy answer, isn't it?

<comment><USER36> Until you have to find enough money to pay for it.

<comment><USER37> There is a lot of savings in its low administration costs. Since it would replace a number of social programs that have high administration costs, a UBI actually saves money.

There can be additional cost savings in UBI (and even in existing social programs) if it is structured to incentivise people to work. Many existing social programs actually disincentivise people from working because they lose the income from the social program if they work (too much) and it results in a net loss for them, so they don't bother working.

If a social program is structured so that people don't lose all of their social program income when they work, then they realize a net gain in their income and they continue working. The longer they continue working, the more likely it is that they will gain experience allowing them to make more income on their own, resulting in a further reduction of their social program income.

A very simplistic example would be to remove 50 cents for every dollar they make at their job. If they received $500/month when not working, by the time they're making $1000/month at their job, they're receiving no social program income anymore.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bitbucket having a major outage - <AUTHOR> http://status.bitbucket.org/

<comment><USER2> been up and down for at least the past hour</comment>


New research plots personality distribution across UK - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-31816926 <comment><USER3> It is interesting that a couple of areas score well on both agreeableness AND extrovertedness.

I wonder regarding London which way round it is, do the people who live there NEED to be louder to be heard, or is it that people live there because they're louder already thus the crowded environment meshes better with their preexisting personality.

I've always known I have no desire to live in London. I might commute there, but I'd never live there. Hampshire is more my scene, quite, pretty, but work still gets done.

<comment><USER4> Big Five personality traits have a decent association with social class (1). I think what the map is showing is that the social class split is uneven in Britain.

Positive association with higher social class: Extraversion, Opennes and especially Conscientiousness.

Negative association with higher social class: Neuroticism, Agreeableness.

1: Chapman. B. P., Fiscella, K., Kawachi, I., & Duberstein, P. R. (2010). Personality, socioeconomic status, and all-cause mortality in the United States. American Journal of Epidemiology, 171, 83–92.

<comment><USER5> My understanding is that social class is a _lot_ more complex in the UK than in the US - particularly "upper class" doesn't mean "wealthy", at least traditionally.

e.g. My wife had a relative who had millions in the bank but was resolutely and proudly working class.

Edit: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_structure_of_the_United_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_structure_of_the_United_Kingdom)

Note that I am most definitely not trying to defend the UK class system - <USER2> is profoundly weird at times.

<comment><USER4> Say Conscientiousness is about being organized and dependable. Would you say that higher social strata exhibit these characteristics, more so than in the lower echelons, even in UK?

<comment><USER5> Well, I've never met someone from the upper class (i.e. aristocracy) - but I wouldn't say "organized and dependable" are the first words that come to mind when thinking about aristocrats.... :-)

Actually, one notable example of viewing the working class as "organized and dependable" is Sam from Lord of the Rings - who is based on Tolkien's batmen from when he served on the Western Front as an officer (being middle class he was naturally an officer):

 _"My 'Sam Gamgee' is indeed a reflexion of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and recognized as so far superior to myself."_

[https://johngarth.wordpress.com/2014/02/13/sam-gamgee-and- to...](https://johngarth.wordpress.com/2014/02/13/sam-gamgee-and-tolkiens- batmen/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Strange that they didn't include Northern Ireland in their research, it would have been interesting to have data for the whole of the UK rather than just part of it.

<comment><USER5> "In a handful of districts the response was too small to be reliable, which is why Northern Ireland was excluded."

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "BBC Lab UK tests are now closed"

That is lame. I wanted to see how they got these values.

<comment><USER8> Doesn't seem to be closed. I just tried and it worked fine (non UK IP).

<comment><USER9> > (non UK IP).

UKIP members would rank rather low in Openness and high in Neuroticism...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I have always said that the further from London you get the nicer the people are.

</comment><comment><USER11> Live in Cambridge.

Get told ideal place to live is Oxford.

My degree of agreeableness has just plummeted. ;-)

</comment><comment><USER12> Is the raw data available anywhere?

</comment><comment><USER13> Would be interesting to see any correlation between personality type and areas that have fluoridated water supplies.

<comment><USER5> Plenty of data here on fluoridation in the UK here:

[http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/Fluoride/Pages/Introduction.asp...](http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/Fluoride/Pages/Introduction.aspx)

Of course the NHS is socialist so the purity of their essences may already have been compromised.</comment></comment>


PageRank is an abomination (mathematically) -- discussion - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/hwvl9/pagerank_is_an_abomination_mathematically/

<comment><USER2> A summary for those of you who don't have time to wade through poorly-written articles: PageRank, like almost all machine-learning algorithms, has some knobs which you can tweak to get various results. This guy, as an algebraic topologist, hates knobs and calls that "bad math."

<comment><AUTHOR> >>PageRank, like almost all machine-learning algorithms, has some knobs which you can tweak to get various results.

PageRank is a machine-learning algorithm?

"You can tweak" means Google can tweak not the user...

<comment><USER2> > PageRank is a machine-learning algorithm?

PageRank is the definition of a machine-learning algorithm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Omitting "(mathematically)" from the title seems misleading.

<comment><AUTHOR> Updated.</comment></comment>


Glamour Magazine to Cease Print Publication - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/20/business/media/glamour-magazine-ends-monthly-print-publication.html <comment><AUTHOR> > Although the number of Glamour's paid subscribers has remained stable over > the last three years, at around 2.2 million, Ms. Barry said it was time for > the publication to break away from the printed page. "This is my plan, > because it makes sense," Ms. Barry, a former executive producer for social > and emerging media at CNN Worldwide, said in an interview. "It's where the > audiences are, and it's where our growth is. That monthly schedule, for a > Glamour audience, doesn't make sense anymore."

Serious question: Has any print magazine ever survived as a digital standalone, once the print version went away?</comment>


Live feed of Missouri Highway Patrol radio comm traffic - <AUTHOR> http://www.broadcastify.com/listen/feed/17925/web

<comment><AUTHOR> So far, some firefighters have pulled back after what appears to be an ambush with small arms fire. MHP is missing a trooper. Plenty of fires.</comment>