Virality is overrated - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2010/04/23/virality-retention/

<comment><USER2> This reminds me a lot of the disease models[1] I studied in grad school. Say you have a population consisting of individuals who are either Susceptible, Infected, or Removed (dead or immune). The goal is to find the percentage of the population that will be infected over time.

The peak of the infection, as well as the length of time it's around in large numbers, depends on the ratio of two key parameters: the rate of infection and the rate of recovery -- or, phrased as the article did, "virality" and "retention" ( =1-recovery ). If you're relying on a viral product for revenue, then, tracking both of these factors is tremendously important.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compartmental_models_in_epidemi...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compartmental_models_in_epidemiology#The_SIR_model)

</comment><comment><USER3> These articles are always silly, as they assume you cannot work on both simultaneously, or take turns. You can though, and you should.

In my experience you start out with a decent amount of low hanging fruit in both areas, so you pick it, probably with a focus on virality in the beginning just so you can get your new users numbers up to help make engagement testing achieve significance faster. (You can't do an a/b test to determine whether people quit your app in 2 weeks or 3 if you're only getting 100 new signups a day, at least not in any reasonable timeframe).

So first you knock the easy virality stuff out. Do my users have good reasons to invite friends? Is it easy enough to do so, and is the invite messaging sufficiently attractive? Can I squeeze some more wall posts in here somewhere, and make the ones I have more attractive to non-users?

Then move on to the easy engagement stuff. Do I have solid daily return incentives? Do my users feel like they'd be missing something if they didn't log on tomorrow, and if not, how can I change that? Will they still have new and exciting things to do a week from now, with clear goals to get them there? What about a month? How about 3?

By the time you've picked that low hanging fruit, if you're making a Facebook app you're probably into some serious revenue. Then the hard work starts, as the low hanging fruit is gone, and you put 10x the work into getting .1x the performance improvements (which is still high enough ROI to justify it due to scale).

</comment><comment><USER4> Anyone else notice some of the images on that page only load when you scroll down to them? There's a javascript-triggered fade-in effect. You'll have to clear your cache to see it twice. I guess they're trying to save bandwidth by not transferring images users never scroll down to.

Also, Mashable's page sizes are huge... 2.4 megs on an empty cache, according to Firebug!

<comment><USER5> Huffpo does this to. It's pretty slick.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The editorialized headline is a bit misleading. Virality -as a metric- may be overrated, but the article clearly supports tracking retention as a good way to increase virality.

</comment><comment><USER7> Duh? Do we really need an article about this?</comment>


Downside of Bitcoin: A Ledger That Can't Be Corrected - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/10/business/dealbook/downside-of-virtual-currencies-a-ledger-that-cant-be-corrected.html <comment><USER2> This is a pretty big downside if you want to use the blockchain in commercial banking, where laws require that the ledger be redacted in certain situations, but I think it exemplifies a more general problem with blockchain-based concepts like Bitcoin and Ethereum -- they make assumptions about ledgers and contracts that are too "pure" to mesh with real-life financial regulations and contract law.

Examples of such assumptions: Bitcoin transactions in the blockchain can never be annulled, removed, or hidden from view; Ethereum contracts cannot be modified or voided by third parties (e.g. a judge).

Unfortunately, removing immutability from the blockchain turns it into something that isn't more trustworthy than any other kind of ledger -- so what's the point of using it? So, I don't expect this kind of technology to be viable for mainstream banking, or any other use case where the real-life legal system gets involved.

<comment><USER3> Typically banks already use immutable ledgers. If they need to change something they put append that correction onto the ledger too.

> removing immutability from the blockchain turns it into something that isn't > more trustworthy than any other kind of ledger

How is that in any way true? Immutability means you have a record of the real data and when it occurred. Other applications can be layered on top.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> An amendable distributed ledger is called a database

<comment><USER5> Downside of Secure Crypto: No Backdoors /s

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> haha.</comment>


Amazon Will Resume Selling Apple TV, Google's Chromecast - <AUTHOR> https://www.axios.com/amazon-will-resume-selling-apple-tv-googles-chromecast-2517483540.html <comment><USER2> Honestly, I'm kind of surprised that there are no laws in place in the U.S., even with them being hardcore capitalists, to prevent such a huge monopoly to choose what they don't want to sell on their marketplace simply because in the past few years they've decided to produce products that compete with Apple and Google.

Bezos' goal from 1997 was to be the 'everything store' as it's succinctly put in the biography about Amazon's rise, and they're doing a fine job of that. I have friends and family that purchase just about everything short of groceries on amazon. But what happens when they decide to enter more markets with their own products and cut off other competitors from selling who don't have the clout or leverage of a behemoth like Apple or Google? If Google had not pulled YouTube from their Fire devices it's unlikely they would have let them sell their products once again. Which shouldn't have even had to happen in the first place.

Also, I think this was only in the US because I was checking Amazon UK last week and you were still able to buy chromecasts and Google Home. This is probably because the EU has laws that restricts companies from taking advantage of their monopolised position and pushing competitors out.

<comment><USER3> Amazon does something even more insidious. Apparently if you're selling a cable or something and doing really well, Amazon will come out with a generic version of that which is cheaper, and they will be able to undercut your prices.

Basically, they're letting you validate the market and then jumping in once you've taken the risk and created the market.

<comment><USER4> This is pretty common in retail and predates Amazon (or even online shopping in general)-- for example, Kroger has Kroger-branded groceries; Best Buy has Dynex, Rocketfish, and Insignia for consumer electronics; Costco has Kirkland Signature everything.

Generics and private label brands are big business, especially in industries where consumers aren't brand sensitive (does anyone actually buy on-brand Motrin or Advil?). It's completely understandable that Amazon would want on that particular gravy train.

<comment><USER5> Amazon Basics rechargeable batteries actually have higher capacities than their name-brand competitors.

I saw Amazon Basics pants last night. But there's some places even I won't go.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Search for a Chromecast device on Amazon and you'll be greeted with pages and pages of Chinese Chromecast v1 and v2 lookalikes that have no Chromecast functionality. It's absolutely ridiculous that Amazon supports and profits from these types of third party sellers.

[https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search- alias%3...](https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search- alias%3Daps&field-keywords=chromecast)

</comment><comment><USER7> If they did this to Apple and Google, what prevents them from doing it to smaller companies that make similar products? How is this not anticompetitive?

<comment><USER8> This isn't anti-competitive because you're not required to sell your competitors products. I can't fathom requiring the Apple store to carry Amazon Fire Tablets and Android phones.

<comment><USER9> Why can't you fanthom that? If Apple would control Amazon level of commerce in field of electronics, not carrying them would mean that there's no more free market and no competition in the field. Any new (or existing) player couldn't enter the market no matter how good their product is.

The result is pretty much stores as they were here in the 1980s socialism - filled with a single crappy product with no other choice. Let's not have that.

<comment><USER10> "not carrying them would mean that there's no more free market and no competition in the field. Any new (or existing) player couldn't enter the market no matter how good their product is."

Um, go to the Apple website and order it or Walmart.com/Jet.com? If Amazon started purchasing or shutting down all other retailers, then it would be a monopoly. Simply being more successful than them doesn't make it so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> So, will Google in return allow Amazon (and maybe also others) to stream to Chromecasts from Android devices without Google Play Services?

Will they maybe even open up the API?

I doubt it.

Chromecast still has only a single server implementation, which is proprietary, and either a single proprietary client implementation, or potentially two proprietary ones (in case Amazon has reverse engineered Google's Chromecast client for the Chromecast support in the Prime Music app, I haven't verified that yet)

<comment><USER9> Amazon Music just added Cast support and Google never blocked that.

I don't understand your point about proprietary APIs though - will Amazon now also allow Google to replace firmware on FireTV sticks? ;)

<comment><USER11> You can only cast to Chromecast by using Google's proprietary API, with Google's proprietary library.

This only works on devices with Google Play services. On desktop, or on Replicant, LineageOS, CopperheadOS, or _Kindle OS_ , it doesn't work at all.

This is important, especially the last part.

The company at fault for missing Chromecast support in anything is always Google, because they chose not to make it an open standard, and because they chose to rapidly, sometimes even weekly, change the already obfuscated protocol, to prevent Amazon — and open source devs — from supporting it.

I spent hours every week updating my reverse engineered library to connect to it, but in the end, I gave up. Now I have a very expensive brick here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Do we think this might be a result of Amazon's smart TV device not selling as well as google/apple's?

<comment><USER13> I'm pretty sure this is directly in response to them pulling the Youtube App from the FireTV devices.

<comment><USER14> Yes, hopefully this won't now happen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Hopefully this means I'm not going to have to explain to my kids why Youtube doesn't work on the TV anymore at the end of this month.

</comment><comment><USER15> I wonder if Amazon realized that Google and Apple can block their app?

</comment><comment><USER16> You can't say that Amazon dominates retail to the extent that Youtube dominates internet video, but there have been a few occasions where Google has kept it's dominant Youtube video off of platforms that Google competes against.

Windows Phone, Echo Show, and Fire TV come to mind.

Is Youtube's share of the online video market large enough that this pattern of behavior would trigger antitrust concerns in the US?

How about under the EU's competition law, which kicks in at a much lower threshold? Would Amazon and Youtube both have a large enough market share to get them into legal hot water for anti-competitive behavior in the EU?

<comment><USER17> That's right and I can't believe there isn't more disgust at Google for the Echo Show drama. They blocked Youtube.com on this device -- the website, not an app. It's the most recent example of throwing net neutrality out the window.

<comment><USER18> > It's the most recent example of throwing net neutrality out the window.

Net neutrality is about the middlemen in the network, not the endpoints. You can't just point to every unfair or unethical business practice related to the Internet and call it a net neutrality violation. Net neutrality has a more specific meaning than that.</comment></comment></comment>


Best of Hacker News - <AUTHOR> http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=+&sortby=points+desc

<comment><USER2> Not that karma means anything, but it's amazing that the user who submitted Bellard's Linux-in-browser story received more karma from submitting that one URL than I have for the hundreds of comments I've made over the last eight months.

</comment><comment><USER3> Highest vote counts != Best of (IMHO)

<comment><USER4> You know this list is flawed when the 8th entry for Best of Hacker News is "Osama bin Laden Is Dead."

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm sure that eventually the "I don't learn anything on HN anymore, bring back the upvote count" thread will fall out of the top ten. The sooner, the better as far as I am concerned. If you haven't already upvoted the thread "How I Hacked Hacker News (with arc security advisory)," you should. That is a classic HN thread, full of interesting ideas, and well deserves your upvote even after most of the reported bugs have been fixed.

(Disclaimer: I don't have any karma dogs in this fight. I just like good, on- topic content here.)

<comment><AUTHOR> I noticed that most stories are quite recent, so I'd say if you normalize for total upvotes in the period that one would prolly be on top.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> funny, i was just mucking with the api.hnsearch.com yesterday for the exact same query. Then I got distracted with the nice weather...

Here's the same query w/the rest api, but w/o paging. use the parameters start and limit for paging.

[http://api.thriftdb.com/api.hnsearch.com/items/_search?filte...](http://api.thriftdb.com/api.hnsearch.com/items/_search?filter\[fields\]\[type\]=submission&sortby=points%20desc)

</comment><comment><USER7> The filter on date seems like the comments on Hacker News. Only difference is an occasional link will appear in the feed. Just wondering as to why comments are included in the filter.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is the true best of HN, imo: <http://www.skrenta.com/hn/>

</comment><comment><USER9> Thank you for providing the link! I'd trying been trying to get it before, but for some reason it wouldn't work.

</comment><comment><USER10> A reddit link amongst the top 3... shame on you HN.

<comment><USER11> Why shame? You should check the first comment on that post: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2004210>

<comment><USER10> I move: pareidolia.

Also, this oh-so-touching story smells way too much of 4chan/reddit style trolling.</comment></comment></comment>


Stop asking users for their timezone – use per-device settings and JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://trevoro.net/2013/whats-your-timezone/

<comment><USER3> This pretty much breaks progressive enhancement. If anything, the user's time zone should be first estimated from their IP address with a setting to override it. The client side solution to further refine it should be piled on top of this last, if possible. JavaScript is useful, but nobody should assume it's present.

Also, it should be noted which time zone a time is in. A naked date/time is about as useful as saying that you're 3 units away from me. What unit does "unit" represent? _shrug_

<comment><USER4> By your logic I'd be running a WAP site over Gopher to satisfy the progressive enhancement ethos. At a certain point it's absurd to assume javascript isn't there. [1]

What brought on this particular use case was a JSON response where all the times were in UTC. I'm not really into forcing a technique on someone when it isn't required. If that's not your use case, then you don't have the problem!

[1] [http://www.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/23.0/releasenotes/](http://www.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/23.0/releasenotes/)

<comment><USER3> No, that's patently absurd, although I have been known to use w3m while doing work in vim, and I'm super grateful when a site is usable from a text only browser. Screen readers and bots (including search engine spiders) have an easier time with well written HTML.

Progressive enhancement is far better for the end user and not all that hard to implement. Some people choose to disable JavaScript, and there are compelling reasons to do this especially if, for example, you're using TBB and want to minimize your attack surface, as has been demonstrated recently.

JavaScript isn't evil by any means, and it's really important for creating cool shit, but it should never be required. If I can't use your site with scripts disabled, neither can a lot of other people. Sucks to be them though, right?

<comment><USER5> > it should never be required

What a ridiculous statement. Lots of things are "required" if you want certain products to be useful. An XBox is required if I want to play XBox games.

Hell you _require_ a web browser just to be able to enjoy the pleasure of checking that "disable javascript" box (though be careful you don't use Mozilla) in the first place (I mean you could use CURL but then you don't actually get to disable javascript).

The point is lets stop kidding around about Javascript here, no-javascript guy.

> If I can't use your site with scripts disabled, neither can a lot of other > people.

People who need to disable Javascript are a vanishingly small portion of any potential market, there are many more use cases as far as web apps go where javascript is essential to any decent user experience. Not everything built on web technology is only about content these days. If you don't want to use that technology be my guest, but don't pretend your an important market to people developing on that technology.

> Screen readers and bots (including search engine spiders) have an easier > time with well written HTML.

True but two things.

1) Web applications rarely rely on SEO outside of landing pages and a content strategy neither of which should rely on javascript for obvious reasons.

2) Designing applications for disabilities is extremely hard. Much harder than simply using "well written" HTML. Do you know how hard it is for blind people to play most video games? Again we're talking about interactive applications, not simply content. With content there is no problems but as we already went over the web is __not only content __now.

Edit: One more thought, technically translating the time to the local timezone setting of the browser is "progressively" enhanced. You could always just display UTC time if JS is disabled assuming that was important enough to your users to disable JS (or for bots).

<comment><USER6>
      People who need to disable Javascript are a vanishingly small portion of any potential market.

Depends on who your target demographic is. I'm a "no-javascript guy" and my cousin is as too (well, "gal") for completely different reasons. She's on a rubbish computer not living in the U.S. (read: developing country) so often it's just faster and smoother to browse on a wireless connection with JS disabled. You'd be surprised at how common this is.

I frequently disable it while browsing casually and, for about a month or so, it was policy at work until we sorted out a few in-house security issues (namely browsing etiquette for some of the folks). Our CMS was broken during this time and the front UI was quickly re-written in plain HTML. After that, we sorta left it that way.

      1) Web applications...

The original post makes no mention of "application" or "web site" for that matter.

<comment><USER5> > You'd be surprised at how common this is.

Actually, I would. I would be completely surprised if it is common (by that I mean at least more than IE6 usage) at all. However, you've presented no evidence of this fact only anecdote. Seriously there is absolutely no evidence that there is a growing popularity of no-js people out there. Perhaps for very specific demographics, in which case I certainly hope whoever is building product for them knows their customer well enough to know that or God help them.

Either way they are not going to be building the latest in interactive experiences or web-based gaming for your cousin with her rubbish computer are they. That doesn't discount the fact that many people are building exactly that these days.

I'm tired of people on Hacker News making blanket arguments like "never do this" especially something as bland as requiring javascript. They have absolutely no clue what they are talking about.

Bottom line is if I (and Google and 37 signals and countless others) can choose to build something that doesn't support even IE8 I can quite happily choose to require Javascript to use my web _application_. I would be an idiot however if I required it for my blog.

<comment><USER6> Yahoo Blog on users with JS disabled (stats as of 2010):

[http://developer.yahoo.com/blogs/ydn/many-users- javascript-d...](http://developer.yahoo.com/blogs/ydn/many-users-javascript- disabled-14121.html)

For clients in the UK, it's a legal thing:

[https://www.gov.uk/definition-of-disability-under- equality-a...](https://www.gov.uk/definition-of-disability-under-equality- act-2010)

[http://www.rnib.org.uk/professionals/webaccessibility/lawsan...](http://www.rnib.org.uk/professionals/webaccessibility/lawsandstandards/Pages/uk_law.aspx)

FYI: Screen readers nowadays can run JS, but there are hiccups abound. Also I don't recall seeing "never do this", though I did see this: "JavaScript isn't evil by any means, and it's really important for creating cool shit, but it should never be required" from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6176036](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6176036) . Which, in context of the article, seems pretty reasonable to me.

This all started with when kintamanimatt mentioned that the article's technique breaks Progressive Enhancement, "JavaScript is useful, but nobody should assume it's present."

Obviously, I'll need to get an Xbox to play an Xbox game. I'll need Flash enabled on the browser to play a game built on that. Same goes for JS. But, again, the OP makes no mention of "applications" or "web sites" so I'm not sure why you're bringing up "the latest interactive experiences or web-based gaming" into this.

<comment><USER7> The Yahoo link says JavaScript was disabled on 1% of visitors as of 2010.

That percent should be even lower now instead of being higher.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I started to write a response, but it grew too long, so I wrote this blog post instead: [http://tech.bluesmoon.info/2013/08/dont-guess-at- timezones-i...](http://tech.bluesmoon.info/2013/08/dont-guess-at-timezones-in- javascript.html)

tl;dr: the timezone you use depends not just on the user and their environment, but also the event and its duration.

</comment><comment><USER9> I looked into getTimezoneOffset when implementing pre-orders here at Gumroad and realized that technically this is incorrect:

"Luckily, the browser already knows what timezone the user is currently in, so we can make use of the getTimezoneOffset() function"

Getting the timezone offset isn't the same as getting the timezone. Granted that in certain cases having the offset is good enough, but sometimes you need the actual timezone. In my example I needed to know when a merchant wants their pre-order to be released. For that to work predictably I needed to know their exact timezone in order to adjust the time for daylight saving properly. Remember that there are quite a few timezones that are UTC-7 and they can behave differently in regards to daylight saving.

</comment><comment><USER10> _Fortunately operating systems on laptops and mobile devices all adjust timezones automatically whenever they connect to the internet._

My laptop has never changed timezone automatically. And that is a feature in my eyes.

How can you assume that just because I'm doing a weekend trip that I want my whole life to be centered around the timezone in that particular place?

<comment><USER11> Most people want their clocks to be correct, local time, including their laptop clock. It's a better assumption to make for most people.

Of course, it can always be turned off for others, like yourself! :)

<comment><USER10> Citation needed. I'd say that a vast minority (that actually cares) wouldn't want the OS to change the timezone behind their back on a laptop.

On a phone (which also acts as a wrist watch for most people), yes. Laptop, just no.

What OS does this? And how?

<comment><USER11> OSX for sure. "Set time zone automatically using current location". Checkbox inside system preferences.

I think it's pretty safe to say most people want their laptop's clock to match their local time, because how is a wrong clock useful? Of course, if you're travelling for business with complicated schedules and meetings in home times, you clearly might have different needs, but most people just want their clocks to be right.

And you certainly don't want to keep your original timezone but change the clock setting -- then just _everything_ 's wrong! :)

<comment><USER10> _On my laptop_ , any time that isn't the current time in my hometown is the wrong time.

And it is moronic for the OS to do this change behind my back (I don't know how OS X present this but thankfully Windows 7 doesn't do this madness by default).

How do I know that my OS got the time right? (did it perhaps get the time from my VPN location? was the network I connected to badly configured?) Since a laptop isn't connected to the net at all times I also have to consciously be aware of whether I've even been connected yet in this particular time zone.

<comment><USER12> So if you travel to Tokyo for a week, you still want your laptop displaying the time from your hometown? That seems rather unusual.

And for the record, OS X does it by sniffing for wifi access points. The particular access points available at any given location is a pretty reliable means of tracking location, assuming that there are any (if there are no access points, it can't find your location, and therefore won't touch your clock). The only exception are access points that themselves move, e.g. wifi on planes. I would assume that these access points are disregarded.

This is the same system that iOS uses to enhance the GPS (especially on iPod Touches and Wifi iPads, where you have no cell towers).

<comment><USER13> _if there are no access points, it can 't find your location, and therefore won't touch your clock_

This is the part that scares me and has gotten me into trouble in the past. Basically it means I do not know if my clock is local time, home time, time of the last timezone I visited or something random and thus I cannot trust it.

This isn't just a hypothetical, but has bitten me in the past. Fortunately it lead to me showing up for my train an hour too early rather than an hour too late. But after that I never let my OS play around with my timezone settings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I wrote a javascript library that detects the standard time, the daylight saving time for the current time zone : [https://github.com/dsimard/timezonedetect](https://github.com/dsimard/timezonedetect)

Garry Tan, cofounder of posterous, said of it : "Finally, timezones in javascript done right. The world has been made a better place via this fine javascript library."

</comment><comment><USER15> I want to agree, but there are times when you have to ask for timezones, like when you want to collect and present data in discrete time units like days. If a user wants to know how many app installs they have per 'day', you have to know what time the time the day they care about begins and ends before you start dumping data into those time delineated buckets. It's not always the timezone their browser uses. Especially not with agencies that are providing these services for clients that are somewhere else.

</comment><comment><USER16> UTC, not GMT.

<comment><USER17> I had the same reaction. Whenever I read GMT I know instantly that the author is not a big time nut and to take the rest with a grain of salt...

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> _> Luckily, the browser already knows what timezone the user is currently in_

Incorrect (though usually true, I'll grant). I've often seen people with older Windows laptops (newer Windows variants, 7 and 8 certianly Vista maybe, are much better at this) that are set to display UK time but think that they are in UTC-0700. This can be fun when using file synchronisation tools... If the OS doesn't know its timezone then the browser won't either. This is a moot point when you are talking to just one user, until that user fixes their clock settings of course, but becomes a significant issue as soon as you need to coordinate timed actions between users.

Detecting the local time offset from your reference clock isn't always useful either: the machine's clock could be completely wrong so it says 01:23 where the user's wall-clock says 21:00 and your reference time matches neither.

Also some users may wish to fix your interface to a timezone other than the one currently set on the device they are currently using. Someone on holiday or on a business trip might want to keep some things linked to local time back home so they find it easier to coordinate with people there. Conversely someone currently in their home timezone might want to force your interface to match a non-local timezone for coordinating with teams/friends elsewhere in the world. You can't rely on them adjusting their clock in this circumstance as they may not be using their own machine and so might not be able to adjust the time/timezone settings (or may wish to keep them accurate to current local for other reasons).

 _tl;dr:_ Dealing with time values when there are _any_ international concerns it harder than we tend to assume.

</comment><comment><USER19> UTC offset is well and good if you are talking about today, but as soon as you start displaying past or future datetimes, DST will bludgeon you over the head.

And depending on your app, users might _want_ control over the timezone. When a teacher creates an assignment in canvas-lms, the due date defaults to midnight of the selected day. It would be surprising if it set it to 2am, just because the teacher happened to be traveling when the assignment was created.

<comment><USER20> Exactly. I have run into this problem with event calendars. For example: Schedule a recurring event for 1pm. It happens to be EDT at the moment so you store the event date/time in UTC by adding 5 hours. Then, in days, weeks, or months, we change to EST. The 1pm meeting is now showing at noon.

To fix this I run a cron job on the ST/DT boundaries that increments or decrements stored date/times in the event calendar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> While we're at it, why (if I'm in the US) do I have to keep selecting my state, town etc., in addition to my zipcode?

<comment><USER22> Because zip codes do not equate to cities 1 to 1. Many cities have multiple zip codes, and some zip codes span multiple cities.

Zip codes are based on postal routes, cities are not.

<comment><USER21> Zipcode plus address is usually plenty though. And it's certainly good enough to obviate the tedious selection of the state from a 52-item dropdown menu.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> If you do localise content, make sure it's what your users want.

When it comes to Rotten Tomatoes, I'm glad it asks my location because I prefer US film reviewers to my local film reviewers. If I let Rotten Tomatoes know my time zone, I can't access US reviewers (that I'm aware of).

</comment><comment><USER24> jstz is a great JS library that we use at my startup for automatic timezone detection [http://pellepim.bitbucket.org/jstz/](http://pellepim.bitbucket.org/jstz/)

</comment><comment><USER25> Timezone — is not just offset! Proper use of timezones is not so simple unfortunately. And browser usually doesn't provide correct timezone name that could be used reliable (like Europe/Berlin).

</comment><comment><USER26> It seems most people resort to storing time in UTC, but this isn't your only option: any fixed time zone will do. If you're in a corporate setting and the majority of your users are in the same time zone as your servers, then it makes sense to use that time zone. There's fewer date conversions that way. For half the year there will be basically no conversions and for the other half it's a 1 hour DST conversion - which many time handling libraries have optimized (I'm in the United States in an area that observes DST for half the year).

<comment><USER27> Storing datetimes in fixed timezones that _do not observe DST_ will do (but it is still not recommended), but you can't say _any_ fixed timezone will do. Say you're storing datetimes in EST/EDT and you have a global audience. On the day the US goes back to standard time, how do you know whether 1:30AM in your database is the "first" 1:30AM or the "second" 1:30AM when you need to display the event to someone in Dubai? Are you going to store some extra metadata to indicate whether DST was in effect beside the datetime? Just store UTC.

<comment><USER26> A fixed time zone doesn't shift for DST, otherwise it wouldn't be fixed - <USER2> definition. All you need is a fixed reference point. There's nothing sacrosanct about UTC.

<comment><USER27> It wasn't clear what 'fixed' was, since that isn't normal terminology. I took 'fixed' to mean "pick a single timezone and stick to it".

If you need to pick a timezone which does not observe DST, that rules out (generally speaking) most of North America and Europe and a lot of other places. So maybe you want your new time base to be Asia/Tokyo, Asia/Shanghai, Asia/Kolkata, Europe/Moscow? You're still at the whim of governments who constantly tinker with DST -- sure Europe/Moscow is "fixed" now, but it wasn't as close as 2 years ago.

To each their own, but I would not get into the business of depending on any particular zone in tzdata staying as it is currently defined for any amount of time in the future.

<comment><USER26> I meant fixed as in unvarying. So we store our time data in EST (UTC-05:00), instead of UTC. For half the year the stored time matches the local time it's to be displayed in and so no conversion is required. The other half of the year when local time is UTC-04:00 we only need to shift the stored time by one hour to display it properly.

Many time handling libraries are extremely efficient at adding/subtracting an hour from time. This is important because we have many legacy systems using this data (think mainframe COBOL to today's latest technologies with a smattering of everything in between). So it's not just a single time handling library in use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> GMT? Surely they mean UTC as GMT is no longer precisely defined by the scientific community.</comment>


Firefox shrinking customization capabilities - <AUTHOR> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1222546 <comment><AUTHOR> I don't understand what is going here. They spent a lot of effort to add these customization capabilities and also the extensions support. People lowed Firefox exactly because they were the best in this. Developers spent a lot of effort to produce nice solutions. Why are they converting Firefox to a minimalist browser? One more year and Edge will be more flexible :)</comment>


A defense of the GPL - <AUTHOR> http://enfranchisedmind.com/blog/posts/a-defense-of-the-gpl/

<comment><USER2> I care a lot about having the source of programs available (freedoms 0 and 1), but there's one thing that's always concerned me.

Everyone says that "you can still charge for free software, as long as the source is GPLed", and hence the model is a drop-in replacement for the standard software-vendor model. As long as you trust the goodwill of people, you believe that those who want to use your work will pay full price for it.

But when you give everyone the right to redistribute, for any cost they choose, I feel that might jeopardize potential sales.

For example, a friend of mine wrote an image processing application with a very niche and important application. He wanted to sell it for $200 a copy, lower than what most commercial tools for the same functionality cost. He also wanted to release it as open source/free software.

However, if anyone bought a copy of his software, that person could legally redistribute for free or for a very low cost, say $10. If this person's publicity is better, he/she'll get more sales for a tool he didn't even write. And someone who isn't endowed with a large enough budget would love to get the software from a legally clean channel.

And yes, it even results in atrocities like this - [http://cgi.ebay.com/Audacity-1-2-6-audio-editor-computer- sof...](http://cgi.ebay.com/Audacity-1-2-6-audio-editor-computer- software_W0QQitemZ280446402896QQcmdZViewItemQQptZLH_DefaultDomain_0?hash=item414be88150) . Mark Pilgrim's book got re-distributed on the Kindle for a nonzero charge ( <http://diveintomark.org/archives/2009/10/19/the-point> ) and he handled it in a very mature, respectable and elegant manner.

I wish someone can explain to me how a non SaaS model - where one writes software for a requirement and sells it as binaries - will work effectively when someone can just re-sell your work or give it away for free.

I don't have any trouble with someone making a few bucks sneakily, but when it prevents me from selling my software for my livelihood, I will be concerned.

I am still young and inexperienced and potentially very wrong about all of this. If that is the case, please correct me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Software created in-house for companies, for "retail", and tools created for programmers themselves have very different constraints, and I don't think license discussions usually account for this. There's lots of software that would never be written for free, period. Open source projects are strongly skewed towards things that are useful for programmers, or at least fun or interesting technically.

Beyond that, though. I don't know. My preference has been towards BSD / MIT licenses, but I also know that there's a fairly strong economic incentive for some people (web startups, for example) to use free software without necessarily contributing back - or even to take credit to look good to bosses or investors - and I'm not comfortable with that. It's a thorny issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Well said! Let people who create decide how to distribute their creations. Also, that was a really good analysis of the history of balkanization of BSD derived OSes.</comment>


Beg HN for feedback: I wrote Receipt Party to organize your digital receipts - <AUTHOR>

Small business people, contractors, and organization addicts of HN, I'd love to hear your expert feedback on my recent project.
Receipt Party aims to be a system for organizing digital receipts that iss so simple, you'll actually use it.
Here is how it works: when a receipt lands in your inbox, you forward it to email@example.com  At the end of the month, you get an envelope containing hard copies of all of your digital receipts, organized by vendor and date.
The site is http://www.receiptparty.com <comment><USER2> This seems weird.

Why would I login and tie this to my Facebook account? Why not an e-mail since I'm making purchases through that?

If anything, I'd rather install something in my Gmail/Yahoo account that basically had a one button click mechanism that shows up when the app reads that the e-mail address/subject is a receipt (especially with common online companies like Ticketmaster, Amazon, FreshDirect, airlines...) I don't want to have to remember to forward it to a certain e-mail address. I'd rather the app say, "hey, this looks like a receipt, would you like to archive it?"

<comment><AUTHOR> That's an excellent idea. I went with Facebook login because it was the simplest thing I could think of to do before launching - I will be adding "regular" account creation with email addresses very soon. It would be awesome to be able to say "hey, this looks like a receipt, would you like to archive it?" if I could do it accurately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Congratulations on the launch!

How does your service work with receipts as PDF attachments in the email?

We are working on a receipt related service as well, CostJar - <http://costjar.com>, although mainly from the point of digitizing and reducing paper receipts.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Re: PDF attachments, it saves the attachment so that when you view your account online, the receipt shows up as a link (which you'd click to download/view the PDF). The PDF gets printed along with all the other receipts when it comes time to make up the monthly envelope of receipts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd be more interested if you held on to them indefinitely in digital form (with reliable backups, etc.)

<comment><USER5> "You can view or print your receipts anywhere and anytime through our website."

"Forwarding your receipts to ReceiptParty doesn't just mean that we'll organize them and send you hard copies. You can also view all of your receipts, organized by vendor and date any time."

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Clickable: <http://www.receiptparty.com>

</comment><comment><USER7> How much does it cost?

<comment><AUTHOR> For now it's free. When I add paid plans, my intention is to keep a free plan where you'd download the receipts instead of getting hard copies in the mail.</comment></comment>


Is Every Speed Limit Too Low? - <AUTHOR> http://priceonomics.com/is-every-speed-limit-too-low/ <comment><USER2> This article ignores a lot of peer-reviewed literature from planning, public health / injury prevention, and civil engineering in favor of some folksy wisdom of a lieutenant cop. A good starting mental model is that vehicle speeds increase both the frequency and severity of crashes.

The article weakly, and quietly made an argument that I _do_ agree with. Namely, roadway design needs to accompany speed limits to ensure people actually drive the desired speeds. Wide lanes, big setbacks, homogenous environments encourage speeding regardless of what is posted. But let's be clear, we should have our design follow our policy, not our policy follow bad designs that were put in place by roadway engineers of yesteryear.

That message seemed to be lost in the race to tell us something tantalizingly counterintuitive. I love "everything we know is wrong" storytelling as much as the next guy, but only when that's actually backed up with solid evidence. Take for example this gem from the article:

> "We all speed, yet months and months usually pass between us seeing a > crash," Lt. Megge tells us when we call to discuss speed limits. "That tells > me that most of us are adequate, safe, reasonable drivers. Speeding and > traffic safety have a small correlation."

That would seem to be at odds with this peer reviewed article (sorry, paywall, but you can read the abstract):

> Respectively, they found evidence for an exponential function and a power > function between speed and crash rate. Both types of studies found evidence > that crash rate increases faster with an increase in speed on minor roads > than on major roads. At a more detailed level, lane width, junction density, > and traffic flow were found to interact with the speed–crash rate relation.

Link to article: [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001457505...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001457505001247)

Priceonomics's banner ad tells me it is selling a new book titled "Everything is Bullshit." Quite right.

<comment><USER3> Respectfully, you didn't read the rest of the abstract to the article you cite, and the next few sentences support what the article says:

>Other studies looked at speed dispersion and found evidence that this is also an important factor in determining crash rate. Larger differences in speed between vehicles are related to a higher crash rate. Without exception, a vehicle that moved (much) faster than other traffic around it, had a higher crash rate.

Which is the whole point of this article. The article isn't saying that isn't dangerous, it is saying that speed _differential_ is more dangerous than speed. It is saying that speed limits are generally ignored by most people (most people drive some combination of the speed of traffic and the speed they feel comfortable with), however the few people that DO listen to them cause accidents because it makes the differential speed much higher.

> A good starting mental model is that vehicle speeds increase both the > frequency and severity of crashes.

This is a horrible starting model. The severity of crashes is physics, but the frequency can't be looked at in isolation. Even the article you cite hints at the fact that the relationship isn't that simple: In figure 1, rural roads with higher speed limits have a shallow linear relationship between crashes and speed, while urban roads with lower speed limits have a much steeper, exponential relationship between crashes and speed. Which counteracts a very simple "speed increases the frequency of accidents".

<comment><USER2> Respectfully, I did, and you're failing to acknowledge what I wrote in my initial posting.

> it is saying that speed differential is more dangerous than speed.

No it's not, the article is saying that a delta in speed is _a_ factor in crash frequency. (And no, I didn't copy paste the whole abstract, because I was posting the part of the abstract germane to the quote I cited from the original article.)

> This is a horrible starting model. The severity of crashes is physics, but > the frequency can't be looked at in isolation.

No, it's still a good starting model. If you read _all_ the way to the end of that abstract, I think you'll see my point:

> Without exception, a vehicle that moved (much) faster than other traffic > around it, had a higher crash rate. With regard to the rate of a (much) > slower moving vehicle, the evidence is inconclusive.

So, much faster moving vehicles always had higher crash rates, while much slower vehicles... inconclusive.

There's a saying in statistics (George Box) that all models are wrong, but some models are useful. I think you'll find examples where speed isn't a problem, but those aren't the norm. If you're looking for a simple univariate model that goes a good long ways toward explaining vehicle safety, I'd challenge you to come up with a better one than what I've proposed here.

<comment><USER4> The article isn't claiming that faster speed == safer. It clearly states that raising the speed limit has little effect on the speed that most people travel. The only group of people whose driving speed it significantly affects is the 10% of people who follow the speed limit exactly (who are usually the slowest drivers). Therefore, by raising the speed limit, a large majority of drivers will drive at the same speed (no faster), but the slowest drivers will speed up and the speed differential drops, making the roads safer, as your linked article agrees with.

There was little evidence presented that justified the assumption that most people won't drive any faster with a raised speed limit, but if we take that as true, then its conclusion is consistent with the research you linked. It is NOT making the claim that driving faster is safer. In fact, it again clearly states that in an ideal world, everybody would just travel at slower and safer speeds, but that we can't effectively enforce such a low speed limit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I found myself disagreeing with the premise that highway speed limits don't influence people's driving speed. I may simply be part of the 15%, but consider the following anecdata: On I-90 in upstate NY, the "speed limit" is 65. I've gone by several state troopers at 70-75 without issue or confrontation. I don't go faster, not because traffic dictates, but I'm concerned about litigious policemen. To put it in Freakonomic terms, I'm going just slow enough that I won't get caught. If the limit was 10 mph higher, I'd drive 10 faster, as would everyone who was on the road for more than one exit (or governed semi tractors).

There is very little crowding on the stretches of highway I'm most familiar with. If the speed limit was 120, I'd probably cruise around 90 or so, assuming it wasn't rush hour. I propose that there is a diminishing impulse for travel rates as they increase, but also that on well-cleared, divided, limited-access highways, we have diminishing utility for speed limits as a regulating concept. Highway driving is the easiest driving to do. There are more variables in control than anywhere else. Why not re-evaluate the roads, not based on the 85th percentile of drivers living under the threat of litigation based on arbitrary bureaucrats, but on simple road capacity and volume?

<comment><USER6> It's not an arbitrary premise, it's studied:

 _"Over the years, I've done many follow up studies after we raise or lower a speed limit," Megge tells us. "Almost every time, the 85th percentile speed doesn't change, or if it does, it's by about 2 or 3 mph."_

<comment><USER7> And it's apparently controversial:

 _Just as Megge can point to the results on hundreds or thousands of roads which have become more safe or equally safe when the speed limit increased, other researchers looking at data sets of speed limit changes have come to the opposite conclusion and advise that raising speed limits comes with the price of thousands of roadway fatalities._

Although the article seems to support Megge and the studies he likes, it's not clear why (other than maybe that it makes for a more interesting blog post).

And honestly, I can't imagine I'm the only one who feels comfortable going 80 on a 65 MPH highway but not on a 55 MPH highway. I guess it is possible, but it seems hard to believe.

<comment><USER6> The speed limit drops arbitrarily from 65 to 55 from MA-146 to RI-146 at the state border. Risk of a ticket aside, 80 is fine on either side of that invisible line (long straight flat highway with trees on either side).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I studied Structural Engineering in University, which was under the Civil program, and, at least in Canada, we don't design for what people will go, but for how drivers can handle unexpected conditions, like cars turning out in front of them, a loss of traction due to ice, and visibility at night. I've also seen multiple studies that show that during high visibility / traction days (summer during the daytime) the speed limit can be safely raised to at least 130km/h for most highways that are 100km/h.

One interesting thing I observed while driving to university was that there was this one section of highway that was marked at 60km/h, but _everybody_ drove around 95km/h. Every now and then there would be a cop that would give out a bunch of tickets, but it didn't seem to change the speed people went.

Well it turned out that the person that ordered the sign had a dyslexic moment, and the speed limit was later changed to 90km/h. What was interesting was that the design of highway (the guards, the lane width, the shoulder, the banking of the ramps) were all cues for drivers and they drove the actual intended speed without regard to the maximum speed sign.

I think that's neat.

<comment><USER9> When I lived in Lincoln Park, Chicago (a dense urban neighborhood), there were no speed limit signs. I think the speed limit was 25 mph, but between the narrow streets, parked cars, frequent intersections, and lots of pedestrians, I rarely felt comfortable going faster than 20. They could have had 100 mph stop signs all over the place and I still wouldn't have gone faster than 20.

<comment><USER10> There really aren't any speed limit signs anywhere in Chicago, and people drive a sane speed depending on the street. And it seems to work, too.

[http://www.suntimes.com/27575224-761/chicago-among-safest- us...](http://www.suntimes.com/27575224-761/chicago-among-safest-us-cities- for-pedestrians-study.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _Disclaimer: I am from Germany._

The speeding system we have here seems to make a lot more sense to me: On most highways, there is no speed limit. The only (theoretical) limit is the motor limitation of 155 mph (250 km/h), which can be taken out, but will almost always lead to losing any kind of motor warranty.

In practice, there are limiting signs to 75 mph (120 km/h) for passages where the road is not good enough or there are narrow curves, unclear conditions etc. In my experience, this system works wonderfully: when the road is good, you can drive as fast as you like, so people are more concious about paying attention to the road and their rear mirrors, especially when hogging up the left lane.

I acknowledge that completely overtaking this system would be impossible for the US, simply because the roads are not up to it and the driving tests are not rigorous enough, but I think Germany serves as a fine example that there would be no harm in raising the speed limits a few notches.

<comment><USER12> Yes, the main point is that I pay more attention when driving faster on a freeway. One need only take a road trip in Australia to see how ridiculous low speed limits on open roads are. 110 kmh limit with, yes, very strong enforcement in place, in a completely rural area with few cars around, no people, no pedestrians, on a long drive (it's ten hours from Melbourne to Sydney with basically nothing in between).

Result -- zone out on cruise control, look at your phone, talk to others in the car, etc. Focus on the road? Nope.

<comment><USER11> Exactly -- sure, you can still hide behind a truck and go 100 km/h all the time -- but most cars efficiency sweet spot is around 130 km/h, and driving at that speed leads to more dynamic, occasionally passing trucks, etc.

<comment><USER13> What is an "efficency sweet spot"?

When I consistently drive at the speed limit (in the Netherlands, 120km/h) I have to fill up every 4 working days. When I consistently drive 100 km/h I only have to fill up every 5 working days. Takes 20% longer but the tank also lasts 20% longer.

<comment><USER14> Depends on the car. If you have a tiny engine, then it will use large amounts of fuel at high speeds. If you have a large engine, it will use less. My personal experience:

Peugeot Partner 2.0 HDi - 6-7l/100km when driving in city traffic, 12-13l/100km when driving at 140km/h,

Land Rover Discovery 3 4.4L V8 - 15-16l/100km when driving in city traffic, 9-10l/100km when driving at 140km/h.

Basically your engine should stay below 3000rpm - if you have to keep it at 4000rpm just to maintain a certain speed then it's too much for the engine and it's not being efficient.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The data from Montana always struck me as interesting. It's not an awful lot of data presented in this report [1], but there was a substantial increase in traffic fatalities when Montana shifted from "Reasonable and Prudent" speed limits to posted-and-enforced speed limits.

I then found this report [2] which indicates that yearly fatalities are approximately double of what they were in the late 90s (and is now around the third highest fatality rate in the nation [3]). It's a good guess that traffic volume has gone up, but safety technology has improved as well, so there are a number of variables that have to be accounted for. The differences are certainly stark enough that it merits some consideration, though.

Nationwide, traffic fatality rates have been on a steady downward march over the last couple of decades [4], so Montana's tremendous leap in fatalities is absolutely anomalous. If I was debugging it, I'd start looking at what changed around that time. On the face, it certainly looks like posting and enforcing speed limits made the roads less safe, though.

[1] [http://www.hwysafety.com/hwy_montana.htm](http://www.hwysafety.com/hwy_montana.htm)

[2] [http://www.mdt.mt.gov/publications/docs/brochures/safety/hsp...](http://www.mdt.mt.gov/publications/docs/brochures/safety/hsp_report.pdf)

[3] [http://missoulian.com/news/local/report-montana-highway- deat...](http://missoulian.com/news/local/report-montana-highway-death-rate- rd-highest-in-u-s/article_f0baa0c4-9998-11e3-8d21-001a4bcf887a.html)

[4] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_in...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_in_U.S._by_year)

<comment><USER16> Dear readers, the Montana Speed Limit paradox is made up by an advocacy group with a barrow to push. Remember folks, trust but always verify. To quote from [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Speed_limit#Montana](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Speed_limit#Montana) commenting on [http://www.hwysafety.com/hwy_montana_2001.htm](http://www.hwysafety.com/hwy_montana_2001.htm)

      The source looks somewhat unreliable and biased. I looked up FARS data for
      1998,1999,2000 for number of fatal-crashes in Montana (state), for (nhtsa)Roadway
      Functional Classification=Principal Arterial - Interstate and get the following
      figures for crashes by month:
      1998-4,0,2,4,5,1,5,4,0,0,3,2,30
      1999-2,2,4,2,1,0,2,9,4,2,1,5,34
      2000-2,1,4,5,1,5,3,3,3,1,4,4,36
      However the "study" has
      1998-4,0,2,4,5,1,5,4,0,1,3,2,31
      1999-2,2,4,2,1,0,2,7,4,1,1,4,30
      2000-4,2,8,5,2,7,7,3,4,1,6,7,56
      I've removed the section, it's obviously made up numbers for 2000 for interstates
      to suit an argument, nowhere near fact. There is a reason for the use of reliable
      sources in Wikipedia and this is a case in point. Alex Sims (talk) 10:13, 25
      January 2011 (UTC)

See what someone with an authoritative sounding domain name can do!

<comment><USER15> I was looking for government numbers for those years, but didn't have much luck. Thanks for the FARS keyword - that looks like it should have the datasets I need! I'm going grab and parse them and see if there's an actual difference in the data.

I somewhat doubt the data was made up, but it's possible that the roadway classifications were chosen in such a way that the datasets supported the point.

<comment><USER16> No I think the so called paradox was made up, To verify:

      http://www.nhtsa.gov/FARS
      Select tab "Run a Query Using the FARS Web-Based Encyclopaedia"
      "Query Fars DATA" which takes you to
      http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov//QueryTool/QuerySection/SelectYear.aspx
      For each year 1998,1999,2000
        Select Query Year, e.g. 2000, then Submit
        In the top section Tick
         "Roadway Function Class"
         and "Month", then Submit
        Select State: Montanta, and RFC Roadway Function
        Class "Rural-Principal Arterial-Interstate"
        Select Univariate Tabulation
        Select Variable - Crash Month and "Show Zeros" Yes

Output

      1998-4,0,2,4,5,1,5,4,0,0,3,2,30
      1999-1,1,3,2,1,0,2,9,4,2,1,4,30
      2000-2,1,3,5,1,5,3,3,3,1,4,4,35

Then lose your doubts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> IIRC, Sweden has had a "zero pedestrian deaths" goal for the last 10 years or so. Part of that policy was road design, but another pillar was the reduction of urban speed limits to 18 mph, and vigorous enforcement of such.

The number of accidents did not drop substantially, but what did drop was the _severity_ of the accidents. An accident that would have been a fatality in the past is now a broken leg or two.

<comment><USER18> Sweden actually has a goal of zero traffic deaths overall. [http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist- explains/2014/02/ec...](http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist- explains/2014/02/economist-explains-16)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> There's got to be a term for it, but the factors that influence how fast people drive on a road include how well it's been maintained, how congested it is, but also purely visual factors like whether there are trees or signs or buildings crowding the edges of the roads.

There's also the "They aren't serious about it" effect. Warning signs should be reserved for locations where it really would be dangerous to exceed a certain speed, either because there's an intersection just after the crest of a hill, or a reverse-banked curve, etc. So people have been trained to ignore the warnings because they're so familiar and have proven (most of the time!) to be not all that important.

<comment><USER20> "Traffic calming" is the term used for the stuff you described that causes drivers to instinctively slow down. Curb extensions at crosswalks and narrow lanes seem to be the most effective measures, in my personal experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'd trade a reasonable (15-20mph) speed limit on city streets if it meant people could blast it on the highway.

It's silly to me that so much of the speed limit conversation is around highways, when really the dangerous streets are the fast non-highways (where you see the unfortunate folks walking in the shoulder.) If anything we should slow those down so people don't go faster than 30mph, if we want them to be safe environments for walking.

Sure, speed up the freeway all you want, but don't conflate the freeway's inhumane paved wasteland with every street.

</comment><comment><USER22> Their reasoning about the dangers of low speed limits make a lot of sense when you're looking at highways, but I don't think they'd necessarily apply to city or residential streets where there are frequent red lights, pedestrians, etc. Of course, the right thing to do there is probably to configure the roads so that people drive more slowly naturally by narrowing lanes, having trees on the side of the road, etc.

<comment><USER23> It doesn't even make any sense regarding highways. Ignoring their embarrassingly flawed standard for setting speed limits based on a percentile of speed limited traffic, there are so many other factors that go into the danger of traffic that are wholly and totally separate from speed. I would argue that the speed is exponentially less significant than the skill and training and experience of the drivers.

Take a comparison of the USA with Germany (where there are even roads that don't have a posted speed limit, which foreigners misunderstand for unlimited speed allowed). The USA's per capita automobile death rate is over twice as high as Germany's, in spite of speed limits in general being lower in Germany and there being far more and more generous roads in the USA. That's even with Germany being far more populated than the USA.

So you might say, well, Americans drive more. Statistically speaking though, you would think that more driving on wider, bigger roads and in less densely populated areas would lead to less accidents and not more. And then when you look at the statistics of automobile deaths per miles driven you get a 55% higher death rate in the USA than in Germany. There seems to be rather tenuous correlation between traffic danger and speed, at best.

The problem is horrible drivers, not speed. We should have a far more rigorous system of driving qualification and recertification. But who are we kidding, speed limits and enforcement have nothing whatsoever to do with safety.

Divest the conflict of interest between governmental coffers and speeding tickets and then you can maybe start having a case that the motivations are somehow related to safety. But that's a whole different issue called unfettered government corruption and graft.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic- re...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic- related_death_rate)

<comment><AUTHOR> The data in the Wikipedia article you cite can also be sorted by road fatalities by 1 billion vehicle/kms. This accounts for variance in population, auto ownership, and amount of driving.

      Country and traffic fatalities per 1b veh/kms.

      United Arab Emirates 310
      Brazil	55.9
      Slovakia	24.5
      South Korea	22.8
      Bulgaria	19.1
      Estonia	17.5
      Cyprus	16.7
      Czech Republic	15.7
      Malaysia	13.8
      Spain	8.5
      New Zealand	8.3
      Japan	8.3
      Belgium	7.7
      United States of America	7.6
      Slovenia	7.6
      Austria	6.9
      France	6.3
      Canada	6.1
      Switzerland	5.6
      Israel	5.2
      Australia	5.2
      Germany	4.9
      Netherlands	4.9
      Malta	4.9
      Finland	4.7
      United Kingdom	4.3
      Iceland	3.8
      Sweden	3.7
      Ireland	3.4
      Denmark	3.4
      Norway	3.3

As usual, everyone in the Nordics is home counting bullion, so nothing going on there. But among the more vibrant quarters the U.S. doesn't seem especially dangerous.

<comment><USER24> In New Zealand, the posted speed limit is often too high for the road. If you drive the speed limit, YOU WILL CRASH AND DIE - frequently taking another car with you.

This is because:

1) Very few divided highways 2) Blanket speed limit of 100kph on open roads 3) Fun road obstacles - hairpin turns, single lane bridges, blind corners and no shoulder drops down cliffs.

<comment><USER25> Wow, I was thinking just that. It's the only place i've seen posting a 100km/h limit on a narrow, barely two lane winding road, hugging a cliff. It was almost like a dare. The speed I felt safe at was no more than 50 km/h

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I've lived in the US all my life, with my excessive number of years split between Michigan, North Carolina, and northern and southern California, and in all of those places the proper range of speeds was anywhere from the posted speed limit to a hair under 10 MPH over the posted speed limit (I prefer the latter :). Go slower than that and you start blocking traffic, go faster than that and you might get a ticket.

This is when driving on highways and major roads, at least.

I vividly remember the days of 55 MPH speed limits in the US, and it was pretty much the same then (a hair under 10 over was the optimal speed, but 10 over was a lower speed back then).

Anecdotal experience and all, but at least for me and other drivers that I've observed or talked to about it, just because people tend to go over the limit doesn't mean that the limit has no effect.

This is all fine by me. I only mention it because this is exactly the kind of topic overly logical people (and/or inexperienced drivers) tend to get bent out of shape about. Just because the speed limit isn't strictly enforced doesn't mean it's useless, and just because a cop could theoretically take advantage of people's behavior and give a bunch of tickets to people for going 5 over doesn't mean that it's a conspiracy by the police.

</comment><comment><USER27> I think that the road design is a key factor in how fast people drive, not limits.

Wide lanes, one-way streets, and cleaned-up sides without obstacles encourage driving faster while narrower passes and trees/bushes on the side make you naturally slow down. On a road or street well designed you would drive at the limit even if you didn't know what the limit is because the limit is set to the "natural" speed of the road. This is what I believe is behind the sergeant's thinking.

On residential streets, a very narrow design would be the first thing to do in order to slow down automotive traffic and make the street more pleasant and safe for pedestrians. There are streets where it's nearly impossible to drive faster than 10 mph, so there are really no practical limits for speed governance in road design.

Conversely, on highways even astonishingly high speeds can be reasonably safe such as on German autobahns. Highways are mostly protected against the worst accidents such as head-on-head collisions. Things usually go wrong when someone disrupts the traffic flow by unattentive, blind lane changes. This is a completely different safety assessment than what's in effect on the streets of populated areas.

<comment><USER28> A similar effect can be noticed on sections of roads with dedicated overtaking lanes. Cars that are travelling below the speed limit for long stretches of road (and can't be overtaken due to the road), tend to speed up to the actual speed limit when an overtaking lane comes along - likely due to the more open road, they feel safer driving faster, etc.

This makes it more difficult for all the (often frustrated) drivers behind to pass the slow car when the time comes, often meaning they put on the afterburners and exceed the speed limit to overtake - which could lead to more accidents, especially if they are trying to squeeze past at the end of the overtaking section, if it is quite short, or there are many cars stuck behind as 'prisoners'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> The problem with speed limits is that people think they are a license to go that speed, or a little faster, regardless of the conditions. Americans are nearly universally useless at slowing down for things like ice, heavy rain and fog. They ignore things like stopping distance and diminished reaction time in poor visibility.

I agree that there is room for debate on speed limits under ideal conditions on well-maintained roads with bridges that have not been left to rot for decades.

Anyone who has driven internationally will recognize that Americans turn into homicidal/suicidal maniacs when conditions deteriorate--all because they don't understand that the speed limit only applies in ideal conditions.

Driving on U.S. roads in bad weather is a horror show.

<comment><USER30> _The problem with speed limits is that people think they are a license to go that speed, or a little faster, regardless of the conditions_

I never thought about it that way, and I agree. Speed limit should DEFINITELY be dynamic depending on weather conditions, location, time, traffic etc...

<comment><USER31> Sounds like an idea for a startup. Electronic Paper Remotely Updating Speed Limit Signs. Get a government contract to replace all the signs and PROFIT :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I didn't get this from the article, but are there no automated cameras in the USA? In Belgium there are tons (I pass 5 on the 10 minute drive to my girlfriend), but they're a joke. If people know the road they're taking, they drive however fast they like, until they get near a camera. They slow down until they're out of reach and then speed up again. Also only about 1/3 actually have a camera in them, but they get rotated every once in a while.

Actual policemen with a camera are rather rare - considering how much road we have - and they get reported to radio stations. Though they're not allowed to tell listeners where they are exactly, only which road they're on.

<comment><USER33> In the US, automated cameras are generally limited to capturing people driving through red lights, if they are used at all.

<comment><USER34> In many urban areas there are speed cameras as well. I live in Washington, DC, and there are lots.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Having moved to the US from Germany, it always stroked me as particularly dangerous that it is common to overtake cars on the right and have slow cars and fast cars in any lane. The article mentions that different speeds are dangerous. I think enforcing cars sorting themselves properly into the right lane would make a huge difference in reducing accidents and allowing traffic to o faster. I wish law enforcement could focus on that instead of giving tickets to people who go 5mph/h faster than most other cars.

</comment><comment><USER36> If there's a state that should win the price for speed limits that make no sense, it must be Hawaii. We have stretches of straight, extremely wide highways with no intersections and a speed limit of 40mph. Then you come to an old, narrow, and curvy road and it's 55mph. Or it could be 35mph. It's like the speed limit is set by a random number generator.

</comment><comment><USER37> There is very little in this article about the interests of anyone not driving— crash severity is due to speed deltas, and pedestrians and cyclists are almost always moving much slower than automobiles. And a self-interested driver won't slow down to keep pedestrians safe, since pretty all of the consequences of a auto-pedestrian crash fall on the pedestrian.

<comment><USER38> Granted the consequences are almost aways greater for the pedestrian, but running someone over is very detrimental to the driver as well - there might be severe criminal or civil liabilities depending on where the accident takes place, among many other consequences

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> The lower the speed limit, the easier it is to generate traffic ticket revenue. It's a money game. In California, they tell you that whatever the judge tells you your traffic ticket fine is, say $100, your total is 6 times that when administrative fees are added in.

<comment><USER31> They're more if you add in how much your insurance premiums go up. I believe it's $300 per year per point so $900 for 1 point since they last 3 year. (at least it was $300 a year for me for getting 1 point).

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I believe low speed limits give police officers a legal means to stereotype drivers and pull them over. Since everyone is now speeding, they can pick and choose who to pull over and have a legal reason. Young? sketchy car? minority?

</comment><comment><USER41> This article continuously states that speed limit signs have little to no bearing on how fast people actually drive, and it says Lt. Megge is actually arguing this. If it has no bearing on how fast people drive, and changing speed limits actually doesn't affect the speed of traffic like they say in the article, why are they changing them? Why are they too low right now? Why does the 85th percentile matter at all? If people pay as little attention to speed limit signs as is mentioned in the article, wouldn't changing them have no effect on safety whatsoever - be it lower or higher, better or worse?

<comment><USER42> Cops would spend less time issuing useless tickets and concentrate on the real speeders.

A driver looking out for cops is a distracted driver. You shouldn't be worried if you are following traffic and going at a reasonable speed. That's not the case at the moment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I'm an advocate of getting rid of speed limits completely. Rather than having speed limit signs, post signs that suggest the highest speed for reasonably safe driving. If there is an accident that causes you or someone else damage, the court can use those signs as a way to say that you went against better judgment and assign a greater punishment.

I'd love to know what the best speed to drive at is, rather than having the posted speed limit be the speed at which no one drives except when the police are around.

<comment><USER44> The punishment idea never really seems to deter drivers, and it has one critical flaw: the punishment for driving like a maniac and causing a 10-car pileup that killed a whole bunch of people is already that you didn't survive it either.

Getting bad drivers killed along with several other innocent people is not an acceptable way to solve the problem of road safety.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> All traffic laws do one thing: increase the likelihood that all drivers behave predictably. Going a certain speed. Stopping at a stop light. Not changing lanes erratically. It's all about being predictable to other drivers so they have time to react to your presence. Being unpredictable is the quickest way to get into a collision. Speeding but being predictable is a lot safer than going the speed limit and swerving erratically.

</comment><comment><USER46> An interesting rhetoritcal question is what will be a suitable speed limit when we have roads that are 100% autonomous vehicles?

</comment><comment><USER47> I used to live in Atlanta where all of the major highways were capped at 55 around the city. The average highway speed was probably 75-80. If you drove the speed limit, you would be the most dangerous car on the road by forcing the flow of traffic to run around you.

Let's just focus on getting self-driving cars out the door as quickly as possible.

</comment><comment><USER48> Raising the speed limit to the 85%/15% ratio isn't necessarily the safest way to handle the driving. If there's a road where more than 15% of drivers are going faster than the speed limit, one option is to raise the speed limit, but the other option is to change the road so people won't drive so fast on it.

<comment><USER6> That would likely make the road more dangerous for the 85% who drive under the limit. Like any engineering project, roads must be designed with headroom…

<comment><USER49> That doesn't have to be the case. There are ways to make a road where people _want_ to drive more slowly but that isn't any less safe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Since this is HN, what about technological solutions? Better speeding cameras could enforce speed limits universally. Self driving cars would obey speed limits automatically, however they could safely drive at much faster speeds than humans (albeit with significantly reduced fuel efficiency, which I think will be an issue.)

</comment><comment><USER51> The assumption is that there's no enforcement mechanism, so you might as well give better guidance to the few people who comply voluntarily.

Perhaps the police will just go the other way and have a fleet of drones enforce compliance.

<comment><USER31> Well I don't want to die but I also don't want the ticket. In SF between Candlestick Park and Oakland the speed limit is 50 but most traffic goes 65-70.

I have a friend who got his last point going 65 in that area. He pays $7000 a year in car insurance because of his points.

So, I'd rather they raise the speed limit to 65 (so people got 65-70) rather than keep it at 50 which almost everyone but a few (me) ignore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> The trick to speed control is to set the speed limit 10-20 mph slower than you expect traffic to actually go, and never or infrequently enforce it until it exceeds +20mph. This is the M.O. for many places already.

</comment><comment><USER53> Speed does not cause accidents. Bad driving does.

The two are sometimes, but not always, linked.

We should stop focusing on policing speed and start policing bad driving.

</comment><comment><USER54> Using the article's logic, why have speed limits on country roads at all?</comment>


Gifted Form – One React-Native form component to rule them all - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/FaridSafi/react-native-gifted-form <comment><USER2> Aren't mixins deprecated?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. [https://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2016/07/13/mixins- cons...](https://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2016/07/13/mixins-considered- harmful.html)</comment></comment>


Insects Are in Serious Trouble (Major Decline of Insect Biomass) - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/10/oh-no/543390/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> I'm sure many of us have observed this over the past two decades. 20 years ago I could drive to California from Arizona and by the time I got to San Jose my windshield would be smothered in insects. Not so much now, just a few on the whole trip. I recently drove to Albuquerque and noticed one hit my windshield on the way back. One. Which I tried getting off with the wipers, but it was stubborn (must have been a big one) so I ended up squeegeeing it off at a gas station. There definitely has been a reduction in insect population here in the southwest.

</comment><comment><USER3> Maybe this is due to widespread use of insecticide? Even so, I'm shocked that the decline is so significant. In none of the major extinction events of the past have insect populations dipped so dramatically.

But regardless, I dislike most insects. So long as this doesn't impact humanity's ability to thrive on the planet I don't mind. Since we're doing just fine in the face of such significant losses in biomass I don't really worry.</comment>


Twitter quietly rolls out algo timeline - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/settings/account#personalize_timeline <comment><AUTHOR> Configurable under the Timeline option in account settings, also mentioned in the docs: [https://support.twitter.com/articles/164083#settings](https://support.twitter.com/articles/164083#settings)</comment>


The Birth of Obvious Corp. - <AUTHOR> http://evhead.com/2006/10/birth-of-obvious-corp_25.asp

<comment><USER2> Note: from 2006.

</comment><comment><USER3> In other news, the management structure at the plant has been rearranged with Canary M. Burns at the top.</comment>


AT&T Seeks Supreme Court Review on Net Neutrality Rule - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-28/broadband-providers-to-seek-high-court-review-on-net-neutrality <comment><AUTHOR> Techmeme summary: _AT &T, CenturyLink, industry associations ask US Supreme Court to overturn Obama-era net neutrality rules barring ISPs from slowing or blocking rivals' content_</comment>


Ask HN: How do you stay uptodate with all the tech? - <AUTHOR>

Im a webdev, doing websites and apps for my employer, and i have a hard time keeping up to date with even just a few technologies im using, i use twitter, read on HN and Reddit, but still it feels like im constantly missing imortant stuff.
Right now im learning AngularJS and Laravel, so i have a back and frontend framework to learn. Still theres tonns of other stuff im interested in.
So how do you my fellow devs stay up to date no matter what your intrests are? <comment><USER2> I came across [http://uptodate.frontendrescue.org/](http://uptodate.frontendrescue.org/) few weeks ago, they give valuable advices and many resources to keep getting up to date.

About web standards, frameworks and related tools, I recommend you to cast a glance on [http://webplatformdaily.org/](http://webplatformdaily.org/)</comment>


Zen is boring - <AUTHOR> http://homepage.mac.com/doubtboy/boring.html

<comment><USER2> Brad Warner is fantastic.

Check out his blog: <http://www.hardcorezen.blogspot.com/>

And his articles at Suicide Girls: <http://suicidegirls.com/members/Brad_Warner/news/> (the articles are ok but the site itself is probably nsfw)

Hardcore Zen is my favourite book.

</comment><comment><USER3> Slightly off topic but I just sat quietly for a few minutes and received a bit of enlightenment in the form of some creative fixes to some bugs in my code. :P

</comment><comment><USER4> the beatnik in the author comes out at the end:

You don't need to go hang-gliding over the Himalayas, you don't need to screw your luscious and oh-so-willing secretary or party all night with the beautiful people. You don't need visions of merging with the totality of the Universe. Just be what you are, where you are. Clean the toilet. Walk the dog. Do your work. That's the most magical thing there is. If you really want to merge with God, that's the way to do it. This moment. You sitting there with your hand in your underwear and potato chip crumbs on your chin, scrolling down your computer screen thinking "This guy's out of his mind." This very moment is Enlightenment. This moment has never come before and once it's gone, it's gone forever. You are this moment. This moment is you. This very moment is you merging with the total Universe, with God Himself.

</comment><comment><USER5> Zen and the whole "enlightenment" thing is a basically a sedative which some people mistake as some kind of puzzle or IQ test. The whole point is to help you achieve a kind of inner peace. Although it may be entertaining to some, that's not its purpose and it has little to offer anyone already living a healthy life.

<comment><USER6> You're quite wrong. It's not really about achieving an inner peace, it's about being right here, right now. If you're angry, you're angry. If you're ecstatic, you're ecstatic. It's about learning to not waste the time we have by paying attention to what we do have.

It's not about being sedated at all, if anything, it's about waking up.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, I have no first hand experience of the phenomenon we're talking about ;) But the way I understood it, it's about no longer not seeing reality by being distracted by your own thoughts.

<comment><USER7> You are all wrong and you are all right - that is Zen.

<comment><USER8> Wrong.

<comment><USER9> Frog.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Try vipassana.

<comment><USER6> And here's a book (complete text online) about vipassana meditation that is very practical:

<http://www.urbandharma.org/udharma4/mpe.html>

<comment><USER11> Or you can just do a free 10-day course from this organization: <http://www.dhamma.org/> or others.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If you think Zen is boring, you've never reached Nirvana.

<comment><USER13> If you think Christianity is dumb, you've never been to Heaven.

<comment><USER12> I'm not talking about the religion of Buddhism, I'm talking about a mental state of nothingness. I only wish I could reach that state without the use of mind altering substances. As great as Nirvana is, it doesn't seem worth the effort to train the unenhanced mind to get there. That process is what is boring.

But if you're looking for shortcuts, I've got plenty of them.

<comment><USER13> i was comparing one imaginary place, and arguments based on it, with another.

<comment><USER12> But Nirvana is real. Close your eyes and try and think of nothing. That's Nirvana. Close enough, at least.

<comment><USER9> That's easy, what's with the mind altering substances? I've never seen the need; it isn't hard to get into a state of semi sleepiness and drift off somewhere in your imagination.

<comment><USER12> I am talking about having absolutely no thought in your mind, conscious or otherwise. How long can you hold yourself like that before you think of anything?

<comment><AUTHOR> How can you know whether you have unconscious thoughts in your mind?

<comment><USER12> You can't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Christianity without a god, I suppose. Or, swaying in a hammock without a hammock. "Zen" seems mainly interesting for the paradoxical aphorisms it induces. One hand clapping and all that...

Think twice about anyone selling a philosophy so unfalsifiable.

<comment><USER15> Zen is not a philosophy; it's a technique. Not unlike masturbation.</comment></comment>


OpenOffice.org Update Sets Downloads Record - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcworld.com/article/152768/openoffice_open_source.html?tk=rss_news <comment><USER2> The title is somewhat misleading. OpenOffice did very well, and 3 million copies of the recent update were downloaded in one week. This may be a record for OpenOffice, but it falls far short of a real "record", as firefox 3 had over 8 million downloads in 24 hours.

<comment><USER3> That's what I thought as soon as I read the title, too.

Firefox's record: <http://www.spreadfirefox.com/worldrecord/></comment></comment>


OS X sudoers exploit addressed with 2015-006 update - <AUTHOR> https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201222

<comment><AUTHOR> Running a non-destructive version of what was documented here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10020378](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10020378) now fails with "bash: line 1: 3: Bad file descriptor"

      echo 'echo \\\"$(whoami)\\\" >&3' |
      DYLD_PRINT_TO_FILE=/tmp/foo newgrp</comment>


Pix2code: Generating Code from a Graphical User Interface Screenshot - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.07962 <comment><USER2> Funny you get a 100% accuracy when you use a wysiwyg designer and those have been around for years.

Don't get me wrong it's still pretty cool.</comment>


How Popular is Twitter Bootstrap right now? - <AUTHOR> http://blekko.com/webgrep?page=view&id=a744b0064b2c89befcbb06bd9d12cb0a <comment><USER2> The last discussion of Twitter Bootstrap seemed to end pretty ambiguously.

Is Twitter Bootstrap what everyone should be using to make their MVP when they don't have a designer? Or is it sufficiently non-cross-platform compatible and specific to Twitter's requirements (no jQuery/jQuery UI?) that one should just use another admin theme from Theme Forest?

(Also, Blekko somehow supports grep on its dataset, but doesn't support it without voting? Is this a social mechanism, or does their infrastructure actually work in a way that this is an expensive operation?!)

<comment><USER3> That's an interesting point -- Bootstrap can really help out on projects who don't have the time or money for a designer, where that project would otherwise look like a Geocities page.

At the foursquare hackathon in SF last weekend, there were at least three teams using it. I think it'll get old very quickly unless someone writes some sort of generator to customize the way it looks. But until then, I think it looks solid and has a lot more uses than anything on ThemeForest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was previously using 960GS as my starting point and Bootstrap is a significant improvement because it comes with better default theming and the LESS layout is robust so I can churn out better looking designs quicker. It's also more flexible since you can specify an arbitrary number of columns not just 12 16 or 24.

</comment><comment><USER5> I have been using a themeforest theme for the first version of <http://www.kodesk.com> and it gets very cumbersome to update very quickly. Too many jQuery plugins I don't know about, to many dependencies and you end up not really understanding how some CSS classes work too. And support is clearly lacking.

Now I'm completely rewriting the site using Bootstrap because 1) its documentation is simply awesome and 2) being an open source project, the support is likely to be much better.

</comment><comment><USER6> Very cool for prototyping. Using the lesscss version for my side project now and feeling comfortable. I just added the github repo as a submodule in my project's repo. Also, if you are worried about writing semantic CSS - I have a small snippet on my blog <http://blog.akash.im/semantic-css-with-twitters- bootstrap> that'll help.

</comment><comment><USER7> For people that are curious about other websites using it.

<http://builtwithbootstrap.tumblr.com/> A showcase of sites and apps built on Twitter's Bootstrap toolkit.

This has been posted before and is not my site.

However, we are also using it building our MVP.

</comment><comment><USER8> I think bootstrap is perfect for internal products, generally those product have low budget, and using bootstrap give you a nice design and "guidelines",

It will also consolidate all your product with one interface which is always nice.

I think it is also good for mvp, thing is, yeah as said earlier, if everyone start having project looking the same its not going to be good, and the first impression might change from wow i like this product, to ah, another twitter bootstrap project

<comment><USER9> I use Bootstrap in this way. I just pulled the components I wanted, and appreciate how self-contained it is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I started with including bootstrap linked from github to try it out and ended up keeping it. Ended up writing an entire weekend project in it. It's a great way to simply organize your site and keep it looking nice.

If you're a themeforest person you can totally use bootstrap to override for better form elements and still enjoy a decent theme.

It's seeing a lot of nice updates regularly too, which is nice. I was really happy to see the drop down menu on the menu bar.

</comment><comment><USER11> At Code for America we're using for a number of internal projects — it's incredibly easy to customize, and the code itself is surprisingly well- written.

</comment><comment><USER12> I am using it as a template for a side project and we decided to switch our internal tools over to it within my company to limit the amount of time we waste trying to make our tools look just right when we're the only ones looking at them.

We use compass (sass), haml, coffeescript, and sinatra for most of our stuff, so our apps are super clean and easy to manage. There is a Twitter bootstrap compass port on github too.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm using for all my admin/reporting/quick little sites I make now. It's exactly what I was looking for

</comment><comment><USER14> I used it for <http://analyticsrock.com/> \- initially I was using 960js and a bunch of other CSS projects, but Bootstrap allowed me to replace almost all of them resulting in a much cleaner code base.

<comment><USER15> Glad you introduced me to it, it is really an awesome lib.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm using it in 3 projects, and it's recently gotten even better. I'm digging it.

</comment><comment><USER17> Love it, using v 1.3 as a ruby gem in dev and 1.1 in production: <https://www.tentative.ly> . Worked out well for our product, moved to it from Blueprint/Compass.

<comment><USER18> link to the gem version of it? Did you create it yourself or are you using something 3rd party?

<comment><USER17> <https://github.com/seyhunak/twitter-bootstrap-rails> I didn't create it, but it's useful in a rails 3.1 / Heroku Cedar env.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I also need help with wich patterns should i use. I added: bootstrap.min.css bootstrap-1.1.1.min.css bootstrap-1.0.0min.css

You can pick only 3, do you think i got it right?

<comment><USER19> You should not request another report. You should upvote this one and wait till results come out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> <https://github.com/twitter/bootstrap/graphs/traffic>

<comment><AUTHOR> cool link. but i'm curious to see it in "production" enviromments!

<comment><USER21> I launched a site in production using a slightly modified bootstrap. It was a weekend project I showed off here.

Unless it gains traction, spending any time or money on a themeforest design just seems like a waste. If it takes off then I can always get it professionally designed later!

Plus, bootstrap looks amazing and the design of the site got a ton of complements from non-technical folk.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Its clean and good. Using it on 2 of my projects.

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm also using it, it's really pretty good.

It's my personal website: <http://daltonmatos.com>

</comment><comment><USER24> what's interesting is what a need there was in the market for such a project. just a good looking set of defaults that hackers can start using and make things look good. i think this thing will blow up if they add some mobile components too. getskeleton.com or cssgrid.net etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> A mobile Twitter bootstrap would be a killer feature! Also, i had never worked with LESS before, and i'm loving it!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm using it too. loving it!</comment>