What It Takes to Hire 10 Employees in San Francisco - <AUTHOR> https://www.kapwing.com/blog/what-it-takes-to-hire-10-employees-in-san-francisco/ <comment><USER5> One item in particular you note is that Recruiters are "Not Worth It"

But also disclose that you got scared off of the $15k/fee and haven't tried that route.

In my experience the right recruiter can combine the utility of the "First- degree friends" and "Referrals" sections you list out.

I used to be anti-recruiter until we made it a point to "recruit a recruiter" and qualify them as hard as we would if we were looking for an internal role.

Interviewing recruiters through a process landed us a recruiter that is well known and respected in his niche, has built trust with dozens of candidates, and delivered strong hires.

We've gotten 6 amazing people in ~6 months and from an investment return basis I can't think of better money that we've spent.

The product side improvements that the new team members are delivering + reducing the brain damage you go through with bootstrapping hiring are high return investment categories in my view.

And the punchline is I think you $15k/hire is off - we've averaged $45k per hire (30% of first year) for engineering & sales talent in the $120 - 200k/yr range.

PS - As others have commented the "We spent less than $1,000 on hiring" should probably be amended, it weakens the rest of what is a very good article on boostrapping hiring!

<comment><USER6> I'll second this, I've worked with a few _really_ good recruiters.

Most of them are so-so, but the great ones are great and can find amazing candidates in a matter of days.

You are basically paying to hire someone whose only job is to keep in touch with great people.

The so-so recruiters go through LinkedIn, the best recruiter I ever worked with, when I told her the type of person I was looking for, had someone immediately in mind and got back to me the next day with a phone number.

<comment><USER7> > got back to me the next day with a phone number

That means when your recruiter will leave - he\she will take your employees along

<comment><USER8> Boy recruiters sure do have a shonky reputation - is it deserved?

Why the heck would I, as a recruiter, be so willing to shit in my own nest?

Treat your clients - former and present with respect and integrity and you'll continue to get work into the future.

Value money over good relationships and you'll soon be out of work.

The thing that bugs me is that this is self evident, yet people keep assuming recruiters would behave this badly.

<comment><USER7> Sorry. I will try to balance it a little - a bit of poaching can happen with each of your employees' departure.

<comment><USER8> If you are not my client then I will happily poach your people till you have none left.

If you are my client, then I will only find a job for your employees if the employee in question has already left the company, or if the client has explicitly said to me "can you find a job for this employee who has left us?"

Rules - there's rules for how to behave with integrity.

<comment><USER9> > If you are not my client then I will happily poach your people till you have > none left.

That was his point, as soon as your client is no longer your client you poach their engineers on behalf of your new clients. It might not work exactly like that with you, but I bet a lot of recruiters have no moral qualms about poaching from an ex-client.

<comment><USER10> I see nothing wrong with this. Employers are not entitled to their employees. While bad employers moan about getting poached, good employers make sure that their employees have meaningful reasons to stay.

In sectors with no such pressure, employees have to pee in bottles just to shave a little bit of productivity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Having gone on the journey of trying to spend the absolute minimum on recruiting to now effectively not caring what recruiters charge I think that paying, say, 15k for a strong senior engineer is a bargain. Stop wasting time generating leads at a pitiful rate, pay a pro to do it and concentrate on actually running your team and shipping product.

<comment><USER12> My experience has been that HR stonewalls all efforts to use external recruiters due to perceived cost. Yet at the same time they can't deliver quality candidates so a position stays open for 6 months; incredibly infuriating.

<comment><USER11> Unfortunate to be in your position. My solution is to not have HR and be a tiny company where we can happily ignore that kind of tedium.

<comment><USER13> > "not have HR"

and that's how you get bully psychopath CEOs sexually harassing people, infusing their religious / racist biases on the hiring process, etc.

Would much rather have HR + bureaucratic tedium than to be beholden to unbridled CEO whims.

<comment><USER14> HR doesn't prevent any of that.

<comment><USER13> Compared to how it manifests without HR constraints, boy it absolutely does. Are there examples of these bad behaviors in big companies? Sure, and that's hardly the point.

<comment><USER15> Do you actually have figures to back that up? HR's job is primarily to support the currently existing power structure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> _I also upgraded to LinkedIn Premium and started reaching out to engineers in my 2nd degree network. These people were complete strangers, and I had no reason to think they might be interested in Kapwing. This tactic definitely didn't work. Not only did I not get a single response to my messages, I got one angry response from a Recruiting Director asking me to buzz off and stop pinging people at her company._

Does anyone find LinkedIn useful? The importance some people put on having an updated LinkedIn profile with updated contact lists seems outrageously disproportional to the actual value the site provides. It seems odd, too. Social media site around making business contact, keeping your cv online, yadda yadda... but the promise of the platform never seems to have materialized.

<comment><USER17> I've gotten my last two jobs through LinkedIn (and likely otherwise wouldn't even know about the companies). Yes, the signal/noise ratio is very _very_ EXTREMELY low, but the variance (all on the upside, there's really no downside to LinkedIn) is well worth it.

(To clarify: this weren't just "last two jobs in the past 4 months while I was job hopping aggressively", but rather, 1 job that allowed me to from a low- income country to a high-income country, and another where I've significantly progressed in the past 4 years and have no intention of leaving it anytime soon as I expect the progress to continue.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The article says their best channels were friends and referrals via friends. As Patty McCord likes to say, the first 20 hires are easy, you just hire your friends and their friends. It's the next 100 that are tough, because at that point you've exhausted all your friends.

Edit: fiends to friends.

<comment><USER19> I usually try to exhaust all my fiends, so they'll stop bothering me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This article is arguing strongly for the core value of the recruiter - <USER2> saving.

True that founders must spend time recruiting, but this person has essentially turned the job of company founder into the job of recruiter. Founders should have better things to do than make the incredible time commitment this person describes.

OK recruiters cost money, but isn't the founder's time worth something?

>> I've had coffees or breakfasts with probably hundreds of candidates.

This is not how to do recruiting, it's wasteful of the recruiter and the job seekers time.

The first interview should be a phone interview and it should be sufficiently detailed that any in person meeting coming out of it appears to meet many of the requirements.

If you are doing hundreds of coffee meetings then you're wasting vast amount of time.

It may sound trivial but the denim thing is signalling "young".

</comment><comment><USER20> She preferred people from coding bootcamps rather than fresh CS graduates from good schools? Does not really make sense...

<comment><USER21> It makes a lot of sense. People don't need a CS degree to do programming or even to be really good programmers. They just need to have a passion for constantly learning and solving problems. Then they'll be able to figure things out as they go, just like all of us do. There's only so much pre- training you can do.

Also, a much better predictor than school, of how well someone will do at a job, is how they get along with their team. If they have a great degree from an amazing school, but they don't get along with their teammates, they will perform very poorly.

<comment><USER22> > It makes a lot of sense. People don't need a CS degree to do programming or > even to be really good programmers.

Even more so (and maybe more shockingly) you don't need to be a capable programmer to get a CS degree. I have worked with people who have master's degrees from respectable universities who have not used Git or a command line in their life.

And yes, both are teachable -- but then, everything is. It is hard to quantify exactly how much inexperience in any given discipline hurts the outcome to what degree, but I feel there is a strong bias towards algorithms over practical skills, including having worked on and completed real life projects, that does not correlate well with their importance in common real world situations.

<comment><USER23> This is an ever green topic that we aren't going to solve here, but for what is worth my take is that if you find someone that's self taught that nonetheless knows the asymptotic behavior of the common data structures and can fizzbuzz that's likely to be a better hire than a fresh CS degree applicant. Because you are less likely to get someone that "wants to work on interesting problems" or try to write a new project in Idris on the sly. But that said if you open the door to non-traditional applicants you are going to find yourself with a higher proportion that don't know O(1) from busy beaver and/or can't declare a variable in their supposed language of choice.

<comment><USER24> Kind of funny this came up. I used fizz-buzz in all my interviews for about two years (at first as a joke). Not a single new CS grad ever solved it in about a dozen interviews. The best I got was pseudo code like "if (i divisible by 5) { ... } else if (etc... "

Turns out modulo is not a well known operation.

<comment><USER23> Wow. I was using fizzbuzz as stand-in for basic ability to code problems and I guess I don't really care if someone doesn't happen to know modulo, but I am surprised. I certainly would expect modulo to be more well known that left and right shift for example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> From the photo I'm guessing you started your hiring process with:

1\. Throw away any resumes from old people

<comment><USER13> Or this was implicit ageism based on the peanuts salary & meaningless options comp package.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Your team appears to lack diversity with regards to age, and your conclusion makes it sound like that was almost a goal. Older engineers can offer a lot of wisdom and save a lot of wasted effort

<comment><USER27> I'd assume they had a salary boundary that excluded experienced individuals who expected more money.

<comment><USER28> Seed stage startup. Extremely likely it's not just salary but also equity.

How many highly experienced individuals are going to join a seed stage startup as a regular employee?

It's founder or no deal with early startups for most people I know above 40. You join as regular employee - maybe get 1-3% at the high end. Founder? Order of magnitude more.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> > angry response from a Recruiting Director asking me to buzz off and stop > pinging people at her company

LOL, name and shame, I'm looking to poach some people from a place that's so scared of this.

</comment><comment><USER30> Interesting take-aways. Surprisingly, investors didn't bring any good referral.

These are the investors from their Crunchbase page [0]:

\- Kleiner Perkins

\- Sinai Ventures

\- Bryan Rosenblatt

\- Village Global

\- ZhenFund

\- Shasta Ventures

\- Ron Drabkin

\- Riverside Ventures

One day it would be nice to really, deeply measure how investors contribute to their portfolio companies.

[0]: [https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/kapwing#section- inve...](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/kapwing#section-investors)

<comment><USER31> I know VCs like to appear as if they provide an advisory role. I don't know how many actually contribute more than capital to their portfolio companies, my guess would be that you have to seek out a reputable company that provides more than money to get more than money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> The part on recruiters is very so so. $15K in fees,in a place like SF,where devs don't come cheap, is peanuts. Meeting tens of candidates means a lot of time spent not doing something else, something more important,so the cost doesn't become lower. There are some crappy recruiters out there, however a good one would not just get a good candidate but also save a lot of time.

</comment><comment><USER33> Before anyone says "Why limit yourself to San Francisco?", they weren't looking for a remote employee.

<comment><USER34> Why limit yourself to wasting money renting out pointless physical offices?

<comment><USER35> Although the existence of remote work has limited the benefits of a physical office, physical offices are not obsolete.

<comment><USER34> I say they are obsolete for programmers, video editors, graphic designers, anyone whose job consists of doing things on a computer.

<comment> the-pigeon Obsolete isn't the word.

I've worked on remote engineering teams for companies that have their non- engineering workforce go to an office for the last 6 years.

There's tradeoffs. Remote is much better for some things and in the same physical office everyday is much better for certain things.

There's a ton of blog posts that have been on HN over the years that go into the details of the pro and cons.

But anyone telling you it better one way or another in general is full of it. All depends on the details.

<comment><USER34> The "pros" of offices I hear are always along the lines of "I can't go interrupt people at their desks." I've yet to hear a comoelling one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> did you not get applicants older than 30?

<comment><USER37> From my experience hiring in startups (and personal life experience, having left the startup world at 28), over-30s have higher salary requirements than startups can afford. It's not even just a Bay Area thing; in pretty much all markets you pay a premium for experience.

<comment><USER38> I think I'd be happy to work on something interesting for crummy money. The trick is the interesting part.

<comment><USER39> I'd rather take more money, retire in my 30s and work on my personal projects from that point on.

<comment><USER38> If I was 30+ years younger, I would consider that.

One problem is being old school enough that it's darned difficult to work for free.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> On average a startup < 200 employees will spend around 15k+ on hiring efforts anyway. Recruiters can simplify, and streamline the process. Had many high quality recruits that stayed 2+ years with the company from recruiters.

It is a huge myth that the hiring experience with recruiters is poor. It is a huge myth that the quality is low.

Find the right recruiter. Get good candidates. The onus is on you to do your research.

Not a recruiter. Just someone who has worked with some amazing recruiters in the past. I've interviewed thousands of candidates, hired many of them, passed on quite a few. Hiring is always the same. Don't make it harder.

</comment><comment><USER41> [https://www.crunchbase.com/search/funding_rounds/field/organ...](https://www.crunchbase.com/search/funding_rounds/field/organizations/funding_total/kapwing)

Kapwing has 1 Funding Round totaling $1.7M

\---

[https://www.similarweb.com/website/kapwing.com](https://www.similarweb.com/website/kapwing.com)

In the last 6 months, kapwing.com traffic grew from 1.75 M to 3.3 M Total Visits per month.

3.3 M Visits per month is, usually, a good result on $1.75M investment.

</comment><comment><USER42> When you look at some of the ideas that are being done you have to think that the idea here is simply the investors are funding acquihire special purpose vehicle (for lack of a better way to put it). That is they invest in a company that they know has less than a solid chance of working out long term because of a good idea (or even forking to a better idea). And they know this. Then what happens is they have one of their other investments acquire the company a few years later as well as the fully vetted workforce.

</comment><comment><USER43> Their products are meme generators and what appears to be a frontend on ffmpeg. Not sure this kind of work couldn't be outsourced for bottom dollar rates overseas?

</comment><comment><USER44> > Remote Hires

> When it was difficult to hire, we considered outsourcing engineering work to > an external dev shop.

Outsourcing and remote hires are two completely different things.

<comment><USER45> This. I expected the 'Remote Hires' section would discuss why they needed a local dev, and why a virtual/home-based hire would not work. This section should have been named 'Outsourcing' \- since that is what they actually discuss in that paragraph.

Indeed, hiring a fulltime offsite employee is very different from outsourcing to a 3rd party.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Small nit-pick: Remote hires and outsourced teams are _very_ different things.

Hiring full-time remote individuals is great if your company puts in the work to be remote-friendly.

Successful outsourcing work to a dev shop (usually remote to some degree) depends on your ability to communicate your product's technical needs precisely.

</comment><comment><USER47> This focuses on hiring channels - but wouldn't an economist recommend competing on salary/equity or other benefits? Why isn't that a part of the strategy in such a competitive labor market?

</comment><comment><USER48> Well, the application, a web-based image editor, is kind of retro. Those go back to Ofoto, 1991, which became Kodak Gallery. Which failed. Not likely to become big.

</comment><comment><USER49> startup without VC in SF, is this still possible these days?

bootstrapping can happen anywhere but not in SF these days in my opinion due to cost associated, It used to be a startup in your garage, nowadays it's called lean-startup with remote peers(sometimes overseas to save costs further)

<comment><USER50> You say it yourself, you pretty much have to go lean to do an effective bootstrapped startup, and focus on profitability very quickly. Otherwise the salary costs will kill you unless you have very deep pockets.

One model that I would like to see more of is a type of co-op, maybe even part time. This allows you to defer payment in lieu of equity, at the obvious cost of not having people's attention as fulltime employees, and slower iteration time. The benefit is that you can actually get FAANG caliber engineers to work with you since you are paying entirely in equity

<comment><USER49> physically, to make startup a success out of 99% failure rate, you have to laser focused with a small capable team to break through somewhere. A loose team is really hard to make profit before everyone is burned out. Hiring is painful, or the most painful plus it's super time consuming and distracting, finding nice peers sharing equity is even harder, harder than finding a wife on tinder I feel. I don't have better ideas though.

<comment><USER50> I think I would have an easy time finding peers to share equity from my personal network, although I could only know for sure when push came to shove and it was actually time to start working. But yeah it could be really hard running an actual business where everyone is only working 8-25 hr/week.

For it to be viable, you would need to focus on getting an MVP up fast and reaching ramen-profitability. Then once there's enough money for everyone to pay their bills, you could start transitioning people to fulltime. Again since you are sharing equity generously, as long as you find like-minded peers, ramen profitability for each employee/co-founder is all you need

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> > Even though Kapwing is doing well, we didn't get a single referral through > our investors

Is this common?

</comment><comment><USER52> The fact that the article states the cost of $1000 at the outset is a bit disturbing given that it goes on to describe the intense amount of time and effort taken in the search for hiring.

It indicates to me that the person writing this article doesn't consider their time to be valuable, and raises all sorts of red flags about how they would value the time and energy of their employees.

Throw in the combination of the shared jean jackets and incredibly forced (almost desperate) smiles in the Hero/Footer image and the cult vibe is overwhelming screaming RUN AWAY.

Is this a coded cry for help? Should we rescue these developers?

<comment><USER52> I'm going to double down on this one. I poked around their site and read the blog post on their flyer campaign :

[https://www.kapwing.com/blog/postering-san- francisco/](https://www.kapwing.com/blog/postering-san-francisco/)

And it ends with this quote : "By the end of our 8-hour workday, we had: - <USER3> up 352 posters - Spent $96.16 ($31.08 for tape + $65.08 for printing) - <USER4> 25,497 steps - Walked 11.2 miles - Used over 400 ft of tape"

Nowhere in there does it say anything about the cost of paying the people to do that work.

They're very clearly and plainly stating that they do not put any value on the time of their employees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> I wish I knew an estimate of hour much time went into each hire. Specifically, how much of the founder's (or CEOs, ect) time went into each hire.

</comment><comment><USER54> Holy ageism, batman!

</comment><comment><USER55> Why San Francisco? Of all the tech cities in the country, why choose the most overheated and the worst managed? Seattle is right over there.

</comment><comment><USER56> > We've spent less than $1000 on hiring, but I've had coffees or breakfasts > with probably hundreds of candidates

Must've gotten a discount on the coffee.

</comment><comment><USER57> Am I the only person to search if "What It Takes" was the name of a new startup?

</comment><comment><USER58> "free housing"

</comment><comment><USER59> oof, jean jackets

</comment><comment><USER60> > [Cold outreach] Rating: Not successful. Kapwing's most senior engineer said > that he gets multiple cold emails from recruiters daily, so it seems > impossible to cut through the noise.

You are the noise.

<comment><USER61> I think the thing that a lot of people doing cold outreach really don't understand this. Pinging someone on LinkedIn with, "Hey we have a job!" is not differentiating you from the other 10 people that contacted that person this week.

But a good engineer already has a job. What makes your job's value proposition attractive enough that this gainfully employed engineer should engage with you?

One easy way to set yourself apart is to tell people what salary range you're working with up front. A good senior engineer is probably already getting paid well, so if your salary range is attractive, they're much more likely to respond. If they're not getting paid what they're worth, you may get their attention immediately. If your salary range is too low, your response rates will reflect that.

Beyond salary, find a way to communicate the most attractive and unique features of the job up front. Don't start with, "we have PTO, health insurance, 401k, etc." because almost everyone offers that. What sets your company apart? What about the work is compelling and interesting?

<comment><USER20> To me it's different when a founder/hiring manager contacts me about a job, rather than a recruiter. On LinkedIn ~90% of job messages are from recruiters, once you filter them out, not many are left, and I typically respond, even if with just "Thanks for reaching out, I'm not available currently".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Problem: What does it takes to hire 10 employees in San Francisco?

Solution: Don't hire in San Francisco.

And not limiting your hiring pool to hip millennials could also help.

<comment><USER63> They forced the one guy who is over 30 to post and say he's over 30, so they managed to fight their age discrimination with a 31 year old.

This is the most unintentionally depressing post I have read in a long, long time. I really don't think I can keep working in tech much longer.

<comment><USER62> Followed by a flurry of downvotes that are undoubtedly from HN accounts at the company.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> I'd never get a job there as I have no denim in my wardrobe

<comment><USER65> I had the same thought, but then noticed that the jackets are company jackets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> "We spent less than $1,000 on hiring

And "I've had coffees or breakfasts with probably hundreds of candidates"

The real cost is over $1,000 unless the value of your time is $0.

Also, as someone else commented. So out of hundreds you interviewed, it doesn't appear that anyone over 30 was hired. What did the age breakdown look like? Ageism does exist in tech.

<comment><USER67> > it doesn't appear that anyone over 30 was hired

Not that I don't agree that age discrimination exists in tech, but this could just be an artifact of startups in the Bay Area.

North of 30 is when people tend to settle down and start a family. That's enormously expensive in San Francisco. My guess is that most over-30s in tech either A) decamp to a lower cost of living metro, B) have very high-paying FANG jobs that startups can't compete with, or C) are independently wealthy from prior ventures.

Either way they're not showing up to a relatively low-paying, very high-risk, low-security startup job based on the outside chance of their stock options hitting it big. Lottery tickets don't pay the mortgage or pre-school tuition.

I think the underlying issue isn't so much age chauvinism as geographic chauvinism. Why do blank-slate companies continuously insist on basing themselves in the Bay Area? There's no shortage of talented engineers in Columbus, Philadelphia, Huntsville, Dubuque or Boise. Certainly enough for a dozen-employee seed-round.

<comment> compiler-guy The author worked at Google prior to founding this startup. Presumably Google Bay Area. So they founded a company where they were, and where their contacts were.

Yes, they could have moved out of the area, but that has its own costs, not just financial.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> >matching corporate-logo-patch jean jackets

ew

</comment><comment><USER69> surprised that the fb ad was worth it. don't know any devs that us fb, let alone click on their ads.

can a startup like that pay bay area salaries?

<comment><USER66> Maybe that's why they're outsourcing a bulk of their work.</comment></comment>


How we increased ecommerce sales 100x - <AUTHOR> http://boagworld.com/design/8-ecommerce-improvements <comment><USER2> 11) Start with a really low base revenue so the percentage looks huge and grabs your attention

<comment><USER3> Sometimes to get attention you need to make outlandish claims.

The results are still valid, though (and the UX is gorgeous).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The changes described in the article look good. However, were they A/B tested? While Amazon.com may look cluttered, they used A/B testing to evolve the site to what it is now.

</comment><comment><USER5> Providing the user with a few options can be nice, but it doesn't work for all sites.

One of my companies sells gun supplies and accessories. There are tons of manufacturers and parts. Thus, for the redesign of our site, we went with a mega menu structure to help show all of the different departments and manufacturers.

People have responded very well to it.

The web site in the article is absolutely gorgeous though. I really like what they've done with the shopping cart.

</comment><comment><USER6> From reading the article what is obvious but unstated "Know and understand your target market intimately"

</comment><comment><USER7> I don't think this was addressed, but if so please correct me: what was the relative change per visitor?

In other words, adjusting for the increased traffic that you would expect over 5 years, do we see additional revenue growth? Or have they simply gotten more traffic?

<comment><USER8> Agreed. More data would be interesting. Have the changes upped the revenue per visitor, or turned more browsers into customers?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This headline get first prize for CTR!</comment>


Boston's Basic City Services Dashboard - <AUTHOR> http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/03/20/technology-longer-stranger-mayor-office/xPOOOy6Gnpc1xQlMq2XWAK/story.html <comment><USER2> Boston's neighbor, Somerville, has taken this a step further and made it all public: [http://www.somervillema.gov/dashboard/index.html](http://www.somervillema.gov/dashboard/index.html)

<comment><USER3> Although that doesn't seem to be the same thing as a "realtime" dashboard, that is an amazingly well-done site.

20 years ago it had the not-entirely-undeserved nickname Slummerville. It's remarkable how much it's changed.

<comment><USER4> The city site isn't bad either - [http://www.somervillema.gov/](http://www.somervillema.gov/)

Yeah, 20 years ago I wouldn't have considered a move here. Been here since August last year and we really love it. The city "works" with effective city services (call 311 for _anything_ ) an open planning process, social media communication channels, and a coherent vision for future development. If the city has a major challenge right now it's gentrification. The city has become almost too popular - and the influx has been driving up housing costs dramatically. The typical home purchase is a brutal bidding war. But for those of us already here, it's great.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The really cool thing, IMO, is the City of Boston app. You can report anything- grafitti, potholes, "can we plant a tree here please," and of course "the neighbor is leaving the trash out/marking a parking spot with a barrel/smells."

The cool thing is that the reports are all public and you can follow up on yours until they respond.

From a city manager's perspective, this must be terrifying- if more reports come in than you can handle. If you CAN handle the volume, though, it's pretty awesome.

<comment><USER6> It's my understanding that it's a blessing to city managers - they can't fix potholes they don't know about! :)

If they have a consistent backlog then they can make the case for more resources.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7>
      {
      "Potholes filled":
       {
        "total": 383,
        "one same street": 287,
        "near the mayors house": 287,
        "near campaign donors houses": 32
       }
       }

<comment><USER8> I know you're probably joking, but you're wrong about that. The Mayor's office of New Urban Mechanics (the most startup-like government office I've ever talked to), under the previous mayor, developed an app called Citizens' Connect, which allows citizens to quickly report and get the city to fix urban problems. In the case of potholes, it doesn't even necessarily require direct reporting, as at least one version of the pothole reporting app can use your phone's accelerometer to automatically report potholes as you drive.

Reference: [http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-08-23/potholes- the...](http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-08-23/potholes-theres-an- app-for-that)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I know these particular dashboards aren't real-time, but I'm still reminded of Dan Mckinley's, "Whom the Gods Would Destroy, They First Give Real-time Analytics"

[http://mcfunley.com/whom-the-gods-would-destroy-they- first-g...](http://mcfunley.com/whom-the-gods-would-destroy-they-first-give- real-time-analytics)

> _Real-time web analytics is a seductive concept. It appeals to our desire > for instant gratification. But the truth is that there are very few product > decisions that can be made in real time, if there are any at all. Analysis > is difficult enough already, without attempting to do it at speed._

In this case, the lack of context isn't just from not having a ready- comparison across timeframes...but what does it mean when "Graffiti Removed" peaks two weeks ago, and then flattens to a low as of today? Is it because sanitation crews aren't working as hard? Or is it because they've been working so hard -- and so have the cops -- that there's now much less graffiti to clean up?

Even with the sparse data here, I feel that there's a risk of a kind of "data overload"...in that nearly all of the data here is irrelevant without context...is it really more efficient for the mayor to glance at the dashboard every once in awhile and reflexively shout to his aides, "WTF is up with our potholes, check it out!"

<comment><USER9> > .but what does it mean when "Graffiti Removed" peaks two weeks ago, and then > flattens to a low as of today?

Without data, you wouldn't have asked that question, and you wouldn't have got an answer.

Analytics doesn't give answers, it gives questions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The way this article is written makes way more sense if you imagine the author were a time traveler not of our era.

<comment><USER11> Remember that newspapers have to write at a ~2nd grade level because the general public is stupid.

<comment><USER12> Any evidence newspapers write at a second grade level? I seriously doubt this.

That being said, there is an effort in politics to "dumb down" speeches in the last few years to reach a bigger audience. They still speak at high school level though.

[http://www.politico.com/politico44/2012/01/state-of-the- unio...](http://www.politico.com/politico44/2012/01/state-of-the-union- registers-at-th-grade-reading-level-112236.html)

>Obama's use of simple language is in part a reflection of his audience: the American voter in an election year. And it's part of a larger trend in simpler State of the Union language as the speech as transitioned from a simple address to Congress into a prime-time televised event.

[http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2012/05/21/study- congre...](http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2012/05/21/study- congressional-speaking-levels-move-back-a-grade/)

>A new study by the Sunlight Foundation found that Congress speaks at an average grade level of 10.6, equivalent to a sophomore in high school. That number is down from 2005, when Congress' 11.5 speaking level was in line with a high school junior.

>"We do it on purpose," Mulvaney said of himself and his other freshman Republicans. "People have been teaching this for decades. If you want someone to understand your message, you speak clearly and concisely."

EDIT: I went to the New York Times homepage and picked the first article I saw. It was this: [http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/22/world/europe/ukraine.html?...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/22/world/europe/ukraine.html?hp&_r=0) I than ran it though a readability score analysis: [https://readability- score.com/](https://readability-score.com/) It was written about at an 11th grade level.

<comment><USER11> I'm spouting a factoid heard long ago, maybe it's a 5th or 6th grade, I don't know. Regardless, it's _not_ at a college level.

Besides, you're quoting stuff about Congress/State of the Union, not newspapers. Similar audiences, but different things with different goals.

<comment><USER13> I've heard this so many times. With this logic, Ernest Hemingway writes at a 2nd grade level.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, sure, that's true. Doesn't mean it's wrong when talking about newspapers. They're different bodies of work. Journalists generally aren't writing narratives laden with literary themes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I feel like I've seen dashboards become more and more popular lately. I've been meaning to set one up for my company for a while now but never got around to it because of the difficulty of getting it setup right and finding the right metrics (even when using the popular services such as geckoboard, leftronic, etc..)

Who here uses a real time business dashboard? Why or why not? Any problems you've experienced with it?

<comment><USER15> I've tried a number of them, the biggest issues are always service integration and keeping a history.

Having one dashboard that integrates all of our different analytics, business, and project management systems and keeps a decent history is really tough.

[http://www.geckoboard.com/widget-directory](http://www.geckoboard.com/widget- directory) is really cool if you don't need to go back in time.

I always end up building manual solutions and storing the data in a middle-man database like mysql. I have high hopes for ElasticSearch + Kibana as a better middleman and dashboarding system.

<comment><USER14> Have you given cyfe.com a try? Looks like they mention "historical data" where they archive your data history.

<comment><USER15> Nope, thanks for the tip, this looks promising!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I want to, with all my soul, leave a snarky comment about Boston bravely entering the early 2000s, but more than anything I'm saddened that decision makers whose choices impact the lives of millions don't have easy access to the sort of data visualizations that a soon-to-fail social media startup has up on monitors on Day 3.

<comment><USER17> Boston's previous mayor, for 20 years, didn't even allow voicemail on phones at City Hall. But he did fund an office that build the Citizens Connect app and made great strides in freeing up public data. It's a refreshing change to have a mayor who will now look at the data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Its a good idea, but man could they have made the dashboard look a little nicer, maybe bigger graphs?

</comment><comment><USER19> These are some lousy metrics to run a city by. It indicates how _much_ they are doing, but not how effective they are. These metrics are glorifying the work the city does, rather than striving for a better city.

The best metrics are the ones where _zero_ is the goal. Imagine, instead, if the dashboard showed:

* open potholes

* streetlights out of service

* buildings with graffiti

Then, instead of patting themselves on the back for _doing so much_ , they might have an actual goal.

<comment><USER20> You can't report on data that doesn't exist.

Do they have a take on the three points you listed above? I know they have an app for reporting pot holes, but how complete is the data?

At least they can monitor performance over time, and start asking questions like:

> If more pot holes are being filled now, is it because of an increase in > performance or because we have more deteriorating roads?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> DC has had something like this for a few years. See e.g. [http://track.dc.gov/Agency/KA0](http://track.dc.gov/Agency/KA0) for dashboard and [http://data.dc.gov/](http://data.dc.gov/) for a massive list of available datasets.

</comment><comment><USER22> It looks like they based the design on a napkin the mayor drew on to explain what he wanted.

<comment><USER23> funny enough though, its probably equally effective.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Can someone at least style the dashboard?

Does the Mayor really only care about street lights, pot holes, and graffiti?

I wonder if my city has something like that. Oh wait the past Mayors of Atlanta have been corrupt like Bill Campbell who took all the money.

</comment><comment><USER25> Judging by the article's image, I thought they were going to bash this "dashboard". I mean... it looks absolutely terrible.

I'd be curious to know how many tax-payer dollars went towards this state-of- the-art dashboard.

</comment><comment><USER26> The city of edmonton has had this for awhile now, and it's publicly available - [https://dashboard.edmonton.ca/](https://dashboard.edmonton.ca/)

</comment><comment><USER27> It seems to me that the big flaw in this is that if something isn't reported (deaths, DUIs, truancy, etc), then the Mayor doesn't see it.

        And while some might find the concentration of information overwhelming,
        Walsh finds it helpful.

        "You learn to focus on certain things," he said.

So he's focusing on things that are reported. What about the things that aren't reported? You can't just focus on things that are reported, you also have to see the missing pieces and work with those.

Not that this isn't cool... I just wonder what the repercussions of his "focus" can be...

<comment><USER28> No matter how much data we give him, we're still going to have this problem.

The only solution is to not give him any data at all, which is ridiculous.

<comment><USER27> I don't think that's the "only" solution. I think another solution would be getting more data less frequently... A weekly report of everything instead of an instantaneous report of 10% of things...

I'm really just thinking out loud here. Not criticizing this at all. I think it's better to have some data than no data, as you pointed out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> He's looking at the dashboard wondering why the graphs take up so little space, and are surrounded by so much whitespace.

</comment><comment><USER30> Vanity metrics for a mayor?</comment>


This is what you want, This is what you get. - <AUTHOR> http://news.quelsolaar.com/#post26 <comment> daniel-cussen This guy is wrong. In GTA, gas stations serve a purpose. They may not pump gas, but they make fabulous explosions.

</comment><comment><USER2> Damn. Now I have "The Order of Death" playing in my head.</comment>


On using Subversion for web projects - <AUTHOR> http://athleticsnyc.com/blog/entry/on-using-subversion-for-web-projects <comment><USER2> Wait... there are still people who do any non-trivial programming without version control?

<comment><USER3> That was my reaction immediately as well:

"Then, as version control started to creep into the web development community"

Mmm... ok what community _was_ that.

Well I guess it explains a lot of things today.

Any tips how I can avoid these people?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think the author is talking about primarily static projects with minimal db usage-- Running svn update doesn't execute any db schema changes or data migrations!

Looks like most of their work is promo sitelets for ad agencies. Not the most challenging stuff technically (at least on the backend).</comment>


Daimler has new electric trucks and a buyer for them - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/09/daimler-has-new-electric-trucks-and-a-buyer-for-them-the-united-parcel-service/ <comment><USER2> DHL is already successfully producing its own electric trucks for the last mile, albeit with a lower load capacity.

[https://www.streetscooter.eu/](https://www.streetscooter.eu/)

<comment><USER3> And they do so because German car manufactures weren't interested in building an electric delivery truck for them...

<comment><USER4> Which shows that Tesla is not the only new player in town.

Given that much of the value chain isn't provided by OEMs anyway, commercial vehicles (where comfort and optics aren't as important) can be produced without the help of an OEM.

<comment><USER5> Which also goes to show how ridiculously easy an electric vehicle is to produce, considering there isn't much to the engine nor transmission (the two most complex items) necessary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Once electric vehicles become more prevalent than gas-powered vehicles, imagine the affect on the city and its noise levels. A place like NYC where these trucks will be tested seems to be defined by the "hustle-and-bustle" and the noise/sound of vehicular movement is part of that. I wonder what the overall affect on noise of the city will be: you can hear more birds than you thought existed in the city? You no longer are begrudgingly awoken by the garbage truck in the early morning. What are the positive and negative results of reduced vehicle noise?

<comment><USER7> Some "road noise" is caused by tires making contact with the road surface. This might not apply in stop-and-go traffic, but certainly has an effect on highways which pass through many cities. Also, _honking_.

<comment><USER8> To add on to that:

Just cruising down the highway in an wouldn't be appreciably quieter if EVs weren't chock full of things to mitigate NVH because low NVH is a selling point that the manufacturers of EVs need to reinforce/live up to.

The fan on most cars is louder than the engine at idle. An EV still needs a fan to draw air over an A/C condenser at idle.

<comment><USER4> Only where it's hot. I've driven several EVs in Europe and not noticed a fan noise at all. But you only use the A/C ~5-10% of the time here.

Tyre noise is different, on motorways EVs are not much quieter (for cars, not for trucks). In cities the difference is huge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm curious how this will affect trucking productivity. Drivers need to be in their vehicle to be making money. Most trucks, I imagine, have a range of about 300 miles. A 60 mile range is very short. Since recharging could take hours(??) what is the remedy? Can these batteries be swapped? Does the maintenance cost outweigh the productivity cost?

<comment><USER10> Just from the figures provided, if you're using close to the range each day, it's €3500 a year in savings, one daily recharge cycle up to €7000 a year, two recharge cycles up to €10500 a year. And then perhaps reduced maintenance on top. It does seem quite significant if the capital and battery replacement costs aren't too high.

I also wonder whether logistics companies can fit charging into their existing operations; delivery vehicles have to come back to a depot once they are empty, and there must be a period of downtime while the van is being filled.

These companies also know the distances each van has to travel to deliver it's combination of packages, in effect you have the information to eliminate range anxiety. You could have a percentage of your fleet electric, and put them on routes which were high density and near the depot. You could then be confident that they will return to depot with charge to spare, and recharge them at the loading bays while waiting in the normal course of operations.

This truck can charge fully in an hour, so assuming a half hour turnaround time for reloading, there would be no downtime on a route thirty miles or less. As the range and the speed of charging increase, the percentage of the fleet which you could switch to electric would increase.

<comment><USER11> Do you mean 3500€ by "E3500" ?

If it's hard to put the euro symbol with your keyboard, try maybe to write 3500 euros, I had to stop to understand what you meant.

<comment><USER10> I'll copy and paste your Euro symbol, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Can someone point me to studies that model the effect of replacing all fuel- based vehicles with electric counterparts on availability of things like rare earth metals? I'm all for electric cars and such but have been wondering about the consequences on earth resources since current battery tech is not exactly environmentally-friendly either afaik.

<comment><USER13> Batteries don't need rare earth metals and neither do newer electric motors.

<comment><USER14> Do any currently-non-rare metals suddenly become rare when you increase worldwide electric vehicle production 100x though?

<comment><USER15> No. Rare earths actually aren't "rare", they just require a lot of processing because they are pretty diluted where they are found. So using those other metals more doesn't make them magically rare, since they are mined differently.

<comment><USER14> TIL, thanks

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> We had fleets of electric trucks in the UK back in the 1970s: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_float](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_float)

</comment><comment><USER17> That is good news. Trucks are congesting Europe's streets and long-distance cargo should be transported preferably via train.

This is also interesting and should be applied on a wider scale: [http://www.cargobeamer.eu/](http://www.cargobeamer.eu/)

<comment><USER18> Some day, somebody is going to figure out how to do JIT train shipments and make a lot of money here.

Having said that, trains have last-mile weakness. Trucks are congesting Europe's _highways_ mostly. Wait until you see a train arrive to a terminal not far from city center, dozens of smaller trucks rush to get their cargo. At least trucks can arrive to their own depots located on the outskirts, while anybody who wants to ship by rail has to come to the same common terminal.

It's far from a silver bullet.

<comment><USER17> > Having said that, trains have last-mile weakness.

This is exactly where an electric truck might come in handy.

>At least trucks can arrive to their own depots located on the outskirts

All cargolifter terminals will be far outside of a major city. An exception might be harbors.

<comment><USER18> "will be far outside of a major city"

Then you have the problem of last mile again and see a lot of trucks on street.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The big car companies often produce EV announcements like this but when you look the small print its always years away from mass production. They are literally just trying to get press attention away from Tesla instead of putting the effort into properly competing with Tesla. They are making 500 of these trucks and the range is 60 miles. Its very meh.

And this will keep happening because in the core of it, the big car companies are too big to pivot to electric. Even Nissan and BMW who have divisions that have put in some good effort will likely be foiled by their own dealer networks and inertia.

The Chevrolet Bolt looked brilliant but they're not bothering to build or sell many and it looks like they might not even make a Right Hand Drive version.

<comment><USER20> _> its always years away from mass production_

Mass prodcution in 2019 sounds pretty good to me. But yeah, it's still technically _years_. :)

<comment><USER19> Lets meet back here in 2019 and see if they actually bother.

<comment><USER20> Yup, I wouldn't bet on them. But it still sounds a bit better than these "50 % of cars will be electric by 2050 (so we do nothing now)" statements.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Oh man such ugly vehicles. Daimler, you should be ashamed of your selves.</comment>


Industry pushes sugary products, while obfuscating the health hazards - <AUTHOR> https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2018/12/412916/sugars-sick-secrets-how-industry-forces-have-manipulated-science-downplay-harm <comment><USER2> I started to notice that sugar content has increased in sodas.

I used to work in a grocery store 12/13 years ago, and I remember stacking sodas on the shelves. The sugar content was 35g. I stacked them everyday so as far as I remember this was the norm at the time for a one serving in California.

Only a couple months ago, I started looking at the labels of sodas again. The content varies from 39g to 55g in California.

I was recently in Utah, and I took a picture of label of ginger ale. I compared it to the exact same can in California, the one in CA has less sugar content.

<comment><USER3> Are you sure that's adjusted for serving size?

<comment><USER4> Does the US not have a section telling you the nutritional content per-100g (or 100mL or whatever "standard" measurement you folks have) so you can compare products? Or is everything given in serving sizes (which can be arbitrarily chosen by the producer)?

<comment><USER5> 55g of sugar per 100ml of product would be insane. Coca Cola has about 10-12g per 100ml. Starbucks Mulled Fruit Drink (widely reported in the UK as a very sugary drink) has about 14g per 100ml.

<comment><USER4> That wasn't my point -- I was confused that there isn't a standard way to compare food content in the US. In Australia, by law, nutritional information contains a column with the "serving size", and a column for 100g or 100mL of the product so you can compare similar products much more easily) I can only imagine how difficult it would be to compare the nutrition between two different drinks or foods if they have different container sizes.

In other words, you could easily track the change in sugar content over the years if you paid attention to the "per 100{g,mL}" column without having to do any maths.

<comment><USER5> Sorry, yes, I agree with you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's mind boggling how much sugar is in everything. Just looked at my girlfriend's Starbucks Chai tea container. 100g sugar! She would be better off drinking a bottle of Coke. And Starbucks are supposed to be good guys .

On a related note: how do they get that much sugar into these drinks? If I made a liter of Chai tea and poured 100g sugar into it I don't think it would be drinkable.

<comment><USER7> > It's mind boggling how much sugar is in everything

I remember traveling to Western Europe a couple of years ago (I live further East) and trying to buy plain yogurt from a supermarket, I mean yogurt which should have tasted as close as possible to the one my peasant grandma used to make. It was close to impossible to find such a product, as even the yogurt labeled as "plain" had a sweetish taste, you could definitely tell that they had put sugar in it. I imagine that in the US the state of affairs regarding sugary foods is even worse.

<comment><USER8> Can't be Germany, natural yoghurt is commonly available here. And yes, US makes it very difficult to buy healthy food.

<comment><USER9> its Amazing how much less sugar common foods in Germany have than the USA. It took us a bit to adjust but when we got back all the bakery sweets here tasted disgusting. Wish we could change the culture here to be closer to European in that aspect.

<comment><USER10> When I was about 10 years old my parents took my siblings and me on a 5 week vacation to the US (I'm from Europe). It was a lot of fun, but I distinctly remember that it was impossible for me to eat the bread that we would buy at the supermarket because it was just too sweet. And this was not because my parents just bought some bread but they actually tried to find some "normal" tasting bread and it was not possible.

But for pudding the problem was kind of the reverse: It was hard to find normal tasting pudding because instead of sugar and fat there were artificial sweeteners in everything.

<comment><USER11> I used to eat rye bread because it was heartier than white or 'wheat' bread. Because unlike modern wheat rye still had historical ratio's of carbs to protein.

Now it's just rye flavored white bread.

And all the healthy hippie dippie bread have buttloads of hidden sugars in it.

So now I mostly avoid bread.

<comment><USER4> You can always bake your own bread. Takes only about 10 real minutes of your time (plus 2 hours proofing and 30 minutes baking), you know exactly what's in it, and it's certainly cheaper (you just need flour, water, salt, yeast, and optionally a little bit of olive oil).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Sugar, all by itself is bad (awful bad), but when you add "Red 40" to the mix children go into instant hyperactive-overdrive. They start bouncing off the walls and you might as well be feeding them crack cocaine.

I spent a total of 24 days watching our grandkids this year and everyone of them was a battle over what they'd eat. I could not get the oldest (11 years old now) to take a single bite of real food during the course of two 10 day stints or the past four days. I did only slightly better with his younger sister, 5 years old now, and she's getting worse, not better.

Last night we had a huge spread of wonderful homemade food for Christmas Dinner and those two kids didn't taste a bit of it.

It's like watching my grandkids get slowly poisoned. It's insane and there is nothing I can do about it.

<comment><USER13> That sounds like poor parenting more than anything else. Also, the "sugar -> hyperactive ADHD kids!" thing is a myth.

<comment><USER12> It is no doubt poor parenting.

And no, sugar does make kids hyperactive. You really only have to spend time with them to know this. Anyone who says otherwise hasn't.

<comment><USER14> Actually, sugar does not cause hyperactivity in children. As soon as you double-blind the people evaluating the children's activity levels, no one can tell which children had sugar.

Here are some links to the research:

[https://www.webmd.com/parenting/features/busting-sugar- hyper...](https://www.webmd.com/parenting/features/busting-sugar- hyperactivity-myth#1)

[https://www.psychologicalscience.org/uncategorized/myth- too-...](https://www.psychologicalscience.org/uncategorized/myth-too-much- sugar-causes-hyperactivity-in-children.html)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions#...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions#Nutrition,_food,_and_drink)

The reason most people have this misconception is confirmation bias. Children are almost always eating sugar, and almost always "hyperactive".

If you still don't believe me, (I'm sure _your_ children are different), do your own study. It would be a fun thing to do with your children, and very easy. It's very important that make it double blinded: [https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-a-double-blind- study-27...](https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-a-double-blind- study-2795103)

If you're right and your study shows it, you'll overturn a 30 year scientific consensus, and probably become internationally famous.

<comment><USER12> "you'll overturn a 30 year scientific consensus"

Wouldn't be the first time but I still wouldn't be famous..

My first wife suffered from postpartum psychosis twice years before the cause and effect was recognized by the health care industry and both times I pointed out the connection and then argued with her doctors about it.

When you're right, you're right. Doesn't matter what others say or think. I know I'm right on this issue. The science needs to catch up and start trashing those junk "pay for conclusions studies" and that's what this particular link posted here talks about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> How long do we wait for "market forces" to magically correct under the information asymmetry of rich corporations vs the common person which inhibit the public from understanding the danger introduced in order to make more money?

<comment><USER6> The free market can only work if everybody had perfect information and no secrets. Otherwise whoever has more information can manipulate reality.

<comment> cgrand-net Perfect information and unlimited computing power.

<comment><USER16> I think this is a more important point that is always missed in free market debates. You need not only perfect information, but also unlimited computation power _and_ skill to compute necessary information. If you can get a CSV file of global potato and onion producers with transportation cost, but you have no means of solving this TSP problem, you will not make an optimal decision.

In particular, relevant to this thread, if you have a magical CSV file created by an Oracle associating every food available in US with how "healthy" they are and how much calory they provide, in order to build a 2500 calory diet that maximizes health and minimizes cost, you need to solve a knapsack-like problem. In this environment market will necessarily be a little random not because we don't have enough information but because we don't have enough computational power.

<comment><USER17> This is generally the argument against command economies, in _favor_ of market economies. It's formally referred to as the Economic Calculation Problem.

<comment><USER16> I wasn't making a point against/in favor of free market nor was I suggesting this was a hidden factor I just unraveled. I just don't see this discussed in free market debates, here or in reddit but I think this is a very practical problem for some markets. I personally try to take as much rational decisions as possible and one of the limiting factors for me is knowing good enough algorithms to efficiently compute rational decisions. Of course, we don't have perfect information, so that's a problem too.

EDIT: I must also admit that I know absolutely nothing about economics. I'm a regular software engineer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> >Stop Blaming Yourself

I'm not sure if such advice is good. Of course, the industry should start reducing/removing added sugar from products. You can keep eating what you're eating, keep blaming the evil corporations and wait for ages until the industry starts changing.

Or, you know, you can take a bit of responsibility for own eating habits and get noticeably healthier in a matter of weeks. Adapt to the reality where most packaged products are full of sugary stuff and therefore should be avoided as if they are spoiled. Maybe buy less packaged products, and buy more fresh food. Maybe cook sometimes instead of watching TV. Maybe start paying more attention to ingredients and don't buy products which contents is more appropriate for a chemical lab rather than a kitchen. It doesn't take much and it definitely is not "an incredible burden" as the article states. Yes, it's a burden, but far from "incredible".

And no, you don't necessarily have to start going to the gym to become healthier. It would be a nice addition to your new lifestyle, but it's not strictly required.

</comment><comment><USER19> Sugar industry mirrors the approach that the oil industry has taken. Both should be addressed aggressively by introducing real education, researching and developing worthwhile alternatives. Both have unprecedented costs to humanity.

</comment><comment><USER20> My father in-law is in hospital right now with gallstones and various other infections due to this. He had severe stomach pain and went to the hospital.

Tomorrow he'll be transported to another hospital via helicopter and airplane for operation.

It's not too serious when treated but the doctors say it's due to high sugar intake.

Personally I prefer natural sugar over the artificial stuff but, as with everything else, moderation is key.

<comment><USER3> What do you mean by "artificial stuff"? Pretty much all sugar sold for human consumption comes from natural plant sources: corn, beets, sugar cane.

<comment><USER20> Aspartame, sucralose, saccharin etc

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The crazy part is that a lot of people would go absolutely insane if their sugar was to be cut off all of a sudden.

That's the one thing we don't want to hear. And in doing so, pretend that everything is great. The same goes for canned and long shelf-life food.

If you eat a healthy diet then getting naturally occuring sugars is not a problem.

And I understand the argument that eating 'healthy' _might not_ be possible for everyone. Especially someplace like US where organic food costs ten times more than anything else.

<comment><USER22> So, your argument is that on a healthy diet, you can eat whatever you want. Got it.

And the fallacy that organic food = healthy is absolutely mind boggling to me. Study after study has shown that there is minimal difference in the nutritional quality of "organic" vs "non-organic" foods. It doesn't matter, and also the perceived benefit to the environment is nil.

And whats wrong with canned and long shelf-life food? Are you against vegetables being kept for long periods of time without refrigeration and maintaining 99% of their nutritional content? Ditto for Jams and Honey which are both long shelf-life food due to their extreme abundance of "natural" sugar.

<comment><USER21> The funny thing is that I have no reason to talk out of my butt. I am just expressing my personal experience with food.

My idea of a healthy diet is fruit, seeds, nuts, and occasional grains / legumes. The 'Steve Jobs' diet if you will.

It's honestly surprising to see how much lighter and energetic you become once you drop meat and huge blocks (carbs) of crap that makes you feel like you ate something worthwhile.

<comment><USER23> Given Steve jobs prematurely died due to his diet, I feel like that wasn't a wise choice in anecdotes.

Funny thing is how much more energy and lighter I became when I only ate meat. So much for dropping meat.

<comment><USER21> Actually, Steve Jobs was following solely a fruitarian diet. So, maybe I was just testing your wits, huh?

And here I was thinking that I am the sensitive one. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> In a desire to eat healthier, I decided instead of eating candy as a snack, I would eat dried mangoes. It naturally contains fiber, Vitamin C and natural sugars.

When I go to the supermarket and look at the labels, I see most of the brands don't just have the mango's natural sugar, but add extra sugar as well. If I go that route, I might as well have a candy bar. Luckily, one brand I found does not add extra sugar.

<comment><USER3> If you can shop at Costco they have good prices on dried mango with no added sugar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The article, while making copious allusions to damning research, is light on actual damning research and heavy on rhetoric. The linked website ([http://sugarscience.ucsf.edu](http://sugarscience.ucsf.edu)) is also full of references to studies that are suggestive but nothing conclusive.

What's really worrying is the constant refrain that they just "knew" something had to be wrong. Doesn't exactly inspire confidence in their research. They then keep following up with references to diabetes, as if diabetes is obviously a sugar consumption problem, but I understand that that's not the case ([https://www.diabetes.org.uk/guide-to-diabetes/enjoy- food/eat...](https://www.diabetes.org.uk/guide-to-diabetes/enjoy-food/eating- with-diabetes/diabetes-food-myths/myth-sugar-causes-diabetes)).

All in all, with references to research that is weaker than they suggest, fearmongering rhetoric, and pushing a narrative of Big Sugar stifling honest, brave scientists, this article is indistinguishable to a layman (me) from an antivaxxer screed.

And honestly? The comments here are also indistinguishable from comments on an antivax website.

<comment><USER26> >They then keep following up with references to diabetes, as if diabetes is obviously a sugar consumption problem, but I understand that that's not the case

In good faith anyone talking about sugar consumption being the cause of diabeties is obviously talking about type 2. Your linked articles is muddying the waters and introducing type 1 highlighting people are born with type 1...no one thinks type 1 has anything to do with sugar consumption. That is elementary and bad faith discussion.

Type 2 is when the body no longer responds to insulin. What triggers insulin? Types of sugar not processed by the liver, which go into the blood and requirie the body to produce insulin to regulate blood sugar levels. With type 2 the body continues to produce insulin normally but the body no longer responds to the insulin...it's all triggered by sugar.

To put it another way if you remove sugars requiring insulin production from the diet...100% of type 2 cases can be prevented. Only laymen argue this point as it's not controversial...all thats needed is a single case of type 2 to disprove that, but none exist to date. Further, many cases of type 2 can actually be reversed through diet (ie avoid sugars that trigger insulin spikes) and lifestyle changes.

How about nonalcoholic fatty liver disease? Do you believe that is not caused by the other types of sugar (ie sugar processed in the liver)?

<comment><USER25> The link I included specifically says:

> With Type 2 diabetes, though we know sugar doesn't directly cause Type 2 > diabetes, you are more likely to get it if you are overweight. You gain > weight when you take in more calories than your body needs, and sugary foods > and drinks contain a lot of calories.

It's misleading to talk about sugar when the problem is obesity.

I don't have answers to your questions as I am not an expert on nutrition and it would be stupid to hold opinions on what I don't know. However, I don't have to be an expert on nutrition to note that the UCSF link is contradicting other domain experts (may or may not be damning) and is being intellectually dishonest (definitely damning).

<comment><USER27> It's misleading to deflect from sugar onto obesity when consumption of sugary foods is a primary driver of obesity.

<comment><USER28> It's an important distinction though. It's possible to consume sugary foods and not be obese. See twinkie diet.

<comment><USER26> But skinny people get diabeties also...and if you follow a Twinkie diet and manage to keep your calories consistent and not gain weight you will be priming your body for obesity.

All those twinkies have triggered insulin, a side effect of which increases cell size, with significant impact on fat cells. If your fat cells are enlarged from insulin, then you are primed to become obese because your cells are ready to store more than someone who hasn't been wrecking their body with insulin spikes from twinkies all day every day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Why has everything got to be an "Evil Corporations" plot? I remember explicitly learning that sugar is bad for you from the food pyramid in elementary school and implicitly from being told I can't have candy well before. If some companies tried to convince people that sugar is healthy they wasted their money. Every few years we get a new food bogeyman, so seems like whatever science is out there is far from conclusive. I have a hard time believing that the link between sugar and all these diseases is so obvious that it was found and buried by what is essentially a marketing department of some food company, while completely eluding every independent researcher out there.</comment>


Spatial Data Structures for Better Map Interactions - <AUTHOR> http://chairnerd.seatgeek.com/spatial-data-structures-for-better-map-interactions/ <comment><USER2> Spatial data structures are great, and heavily used in all kinds of mapping applications. Most of the systems I've worked with used the more constrained quadtree structure, where the map is divided into uniformly-sized tiles, and a level-of-detail hierarchy is built. This is good for raster data, where each tile is a picture and the whole world is covered by tiles. The R-tree has great advantages when the complexity is not uniformly distributed across the map, for example, vector road data, where vast areas on earth have no data, and most of the data is concentrated in small urban areas.

I believe PostGIS, which adds spatial operations to Postgres, uses an R-tree as its spatial index.

An improvement on the R-tree, the R(star)-tree, uses a different node splitting algorithm and includes re-insertions (similar to balancing a B-tree), reducing both coverage and overlap. The insertion complexity is greater, but in general, R(star)-tree query performance tends to be a bit better for mapping applications. Generally, maps don't change that often, so building the tree tends to happen far less often than querying it.

There are many more specialized spatial data structures available, for example, Kd-trees, which can be perfectly balanced and are useful for storing point data.

If you're really interested in this stuff, the holy bibles for spacial data structures (which I keep in a special place on my bookshelf) are a pair of books written by H. Samet: The Design and Analysis of Spatial Data Structures, and Applications of Spatial Data Structures: Computer Graphics, Image Processing, and GIS.

EDIT: Formatting, and apparently you can't write the asterisk character on HN

R-Tree paper (1984): [http://postgis.org/support/rtree.pdf](http://postgis.org/support/rtree.pdf)

R(star)-Tree (1990): [http://epub.ub.uni- muenchen.de/4256/1/31.pdf](http://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/4256/1/31.pdf)

PostGIS: [http://postgis.net](http://postgis.net)

H.Samet textbooks: [http://www.cs.umd.edu/~hjs/design.html](http://www.cs.umd.edu/~hjs/design.html)

<comment><USER3> The spatial data structure literature is quite incomplete, and there is a lot of confusion about what to use when. Many of the issues with spatial indexing performance at companies I go into is that they are doing it wrong, not that they necessarily have a fundamental problem.

It should be pointed out that R-family data structures should only be used for data sets that are (1) small and (2) relatively static. They scale very poorly in a number of ways. The primary reason they are used in databases is that they can handle interval (i.e. non-point) spatial data types without the possibility of pathological space complexity (bad when talking about databases) and fit B-tree indexing models adequately, which that software understands.

Quad-tree variants can scale well for point data types but are often terrible for indexing non-point data types due to pathological space complexity.

Grid-file variants are the canonical structure for large-scale spatial data sets if the data is static. However, the number of companies implementing these correctly at scale is approximately zero in my experience.

For general, scalable, online/dynamic spatial indexing structures, there is another family of algorithms and data structures (adaptive spatial sieves) that are basically ignored in the literature even though they were first described in 1990, albeit in a not very useful form at the time. If you are doing petabyte-scale real-time indexing of polygons at extremely high rates, this is what you would use but little is published about them because most modern variants did not come out of academia.

And the most advanced algorithm family for indexing point-like data is not in the literature _at all_.

(Background: my day job involves extreme-scale, high-performance spatial indexing software and I invented a few spatial indexing algorithms back in the day that are still the state-of-the-art in their respective algorithm families.)

<comment><USER4> > And the most advanced algorithm family for indexing point-like data is not > in the literature at all.

So what is it? Is it patented, secret(classified)?

And how do you know it is the most advanced without a peer review?

BTW "adaptive spatial sieves" on Google search produces exactly 0 results. Is there another name for it.

Spatial indexing is interesting and complex but not exactly rocket science, there have been a good number of people thinking about. It is hard to believe there are general approaches there that haven't been thought of yet. But again, but I am not an expert, so I could be wrong.

Can you write some more about it, I am very curious.

<comment><USER3> What makes spatial indexing different than other areas of computer science is that its fundamental operands are interval types (like hypercubes). Almost all other areas of computer science focus on solutions that only work on point- like data and so many idioms and intuitions computer scientists use are not actually valid when dealing with spatial representations. Data types that require no less than two integers to describe break the assumptions of computer science developed for data types that require one integer to describe.

Oddly, there are almost no people working on the computer science of spatial representations and indexing. That was how I became involved in the first place; I needed solutions to specific problems for which no active research was being done in academia (and I was talking to people like Samet at the time). And to this day, academics _still_ aren't doing any interesting work on spatial structures.

The algorithms are not classified, just not published. There are a couple patents out there on spatial sieves -- I am the inventor on the first practical one -- but more sophisticated and advanced variants exist that will probably never be patented. Widmayer (respected CS academic) was the first to propose this approach to the problem of generalized interval indexing but a useful algorithm was not discovered until my work in 2007.

The point indexing algorithm family I mentioned has never been patented or published anywhere but was based on the development of a novel theoretical CS construct that allows the expression of polymorphic space-filling curves. These are essentially adaptive to the information theoretic properties of the high-dimensionality data set but still embarrassingly parallel and distributable. I don't think these are being used in production anywhere (yet) but they've been around for several years. Very cool but the number of people that grok them can be counted on one hand.

All modern research on computing with spatial representations is being done at one of a few companies, which is why nothing is published. People like me, and I haven't done the pure research in years, don't have time to generate hundreds of pages of fairly deep content. Consequently, learning advanced spatial indexing is fairly prohibitive; you have to figure it out yourself, which is far from easy, or be at one of the handful of places where they are using it.

<comment><USER5> I found some related papers for others who are interested:

[http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.56....](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.56.3068&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

[http://bmi.osu.edu/resources/techreports/ahmedBokhariV21.pdf](http://bmi.osu.edu/resources/techreports/ahmedBokhariV21.pdf)

Also a book:

Space-Filling Curves: An Introduction with Applications in Scientific Computing

by

Michael Bader

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> adam-a The other way to do this, which is common in (older?) 3d video games, is to render your scene twice, once normally and once with each object shaded in a unique flat colour. Then sample your second bitmap at the mouse position and map the pixel value back to your list of objects. This is very fast and only falls over when you start to have transparent objects, in which case ray- casting and r-trees become appropriate.

<comment><USER6> This is basically a grid[1] where the resolution is down to 1 pixel. Not a bad solution!

[1]: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_(spatial_index)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_\(spatial_index\))

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you find yourself doing big-time spatial queries, consider using the PostGIS extension for Postgres, which uses R-Trees-on-top-of-GiST indices: [http://postgis.net/](http://postgis.net/)

In addition to ray-casting and R-Trees, there's another alternative for the "point in polygon test" not mentioned by the article: compute the Winding Number. Appropriate for a very low number of polygons where a full spatial index might be overkill.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_in_polygon#Winding_number...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_in_polygon#Winding_number_algorithm)

I think seatgeek made the right choice in this case though with a client-side R-Tree.

Aside: does anyone know what browsers use for hit-testing polygons defined by the <map/> tag?

</comment><comment><USER8> the rtree implementation they found [1] isn't connected to leaflet except that the org that it lives in also manages some leaflet plugins, Vladimir, the author of leaflet, does have his own rtree implementation [2].

For the record I manage the one in the article.

1: [https://github.com/leaflet-extras/RTree](https://github.com/leaflet- extras/RTree) 2\. [https://github.com/mourner/rbush](https://github.com/mourner/rbush)

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, you are right. I must have looked at Vladimir's implementation and then just associated him in my mind with the leaflet-extras implementation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> tl;dr: we re-implemented imagemaps.</comment>


BitTorrent Live stream of Egyptian protests - <AUTHOR> http://live.bittorrent.com/channel/rt-test <comment><USER2> I would love to see someone familiar with torrents and streaming videos to put together a project that enables decentralized but "bundled video streams" of live video content coming from handheld devices like the GoPro. The reason for bundling the streams is to make sure new streams that have not attracted a swarm can piggyback off the swarm for existing streams. Inclusion in the bundled stream would just require a quorum of the existing streams choosing to update their stream to include the new stream. This would also help discover since you could "flip" through the channels on the same bundled stream.

<comment><USER3> That's a great idea and an important next step in this type of technology and the world of reporting.

<comment><USER2> Another approach would be to let the swarm nominate videos to include in the bundle. Whenever a new stream is added, others in the stream are notified of its inclusion, they can check out that new stream, if they think it is relevant to the original stream, they can start bundling it in as well. As more nodes broadcast the same new stream, it rises in the ranking of nominated streams for inclusion. Once a quorum of swarm nodes thinks a stream should be bundled it is added. Of course other users can specifically avoid certain streams if they think it is spam or if they have limited bandwidth to share.

This approach would basically work like a "decentralized" video subreddit. i.e. an "ephemeral" social network with accompanying live video.

Streaming of live comments/chat over torrents would also be fascinating.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> at-fates-hands The Reuters stream is live and crystal clear: [http://live.reuters.com/Event/World_News](http://live.reuters.com/Event/World_News)

Not sure if this has been posted in another thread, so I apologize if this is already out there.

</comment><comment><USER4> The NY Times is doing a good job of keeping their coverage up to date.

[http://projects.nytimes.com/live-dashboard/egypt- political-c...](http://projects.nytimes.com/live-dashboard/egypt-political- crisis)

</comment><comment><USER5> It's a 2 megabit stream at 854x480.

</comment><comment><USER6> To clarify, this is not streamed from the actual location.

It's an RT live feed that's being pushed out as a BitTorrent live stream from a safe home, probably nowhere near Egypt.

</comment><comment><USER7> It's incredibly inspiring to see the strength of Egyptian people. I would've thought after the first revolution their energy would've been spent and they simply wouldn't have the numbers to try it a second time. Boy was I wrong.

Americans, Canadians, British, Germans, French and all the rest of you NATO puppets, take a look at what real democracy is.

</comment><comment><USER8> Can anyone speak to the quality of the stream?

<comment><USER9> Pretty good, not HD but steady

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Cool.</comment>


Found a bug in the GCC system (not deep, complex or new, but very frustrating) - <AUTHOR> http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/HuntTheBug.html?HN

<comment><AUTHOR> Right, I believe I now understand more of what's happening.

Prior to C99 there was no strtof. Some people may have rolled their own, but it wasn't provided, you used strtod and cast to float if that's what you wanted.

Then C99 included strtof, so the code (and hence symbol) became available in the libraries. However, to avoid clashing with legacy code in which someone used their own version, the prototype is only declared if the compiler is in C99 mode.

That means that if you're not in C99 mode, you use the symbol strtof, and you don't declare the function for yourself, the compiler successfully finds the symbol in the library and links to the C99 code, but hasn't declared the prototype, so you don't get what you think you get.

And by default you don't get warned.

To repeat the moral: use -Wall.

</comment><comment><USER2> And let's emphasize the last line of the posting:

" _The moral? Always use -Wall_ "

<comment><USER3> I always use "-W -Wall -ansi -pedantic". Substitute -std=c99 for -ansi if you swing that way. I then run my code through a couple of other static checkers just to see what comes up.

This frequently results in me finding some subtle bug which otherwise could have taken hours of head scratching or single-stepping in gdb to locate.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, I've been using "-Wall -Werror -Wstrict-prototypes -pedantic" as of late and I clearly need to start thinking about a -std or -ansi.

C is a somewhat weak foundation for static program analysis but that doesn't mean we can't try to make the most out of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Misleading headline -- GCC is behaving according to spec. It would have a bug if the output had been 5.7 in both cases.

Arguably, allowing procedures to be called without prototypes is a bug in the C spec, but I doubt it'll be removed any time soon simply due to sheer volume of extant legacy code.

<comment><USER5> It's strange, though. He includes stdlib.h, and according to my man pages:

       NAME
           strtod, strtof, strtold - convert ASCII string to floating-point number

       SYNOPSIS
           #include <stdlib.h>

           double strtod(const char *nptr, char **endptr);
           float strtof(const char *nptr, char **endptr);

Furthermore, here's stdlib.h:

        extern float strtof (__const char *__restrict __nptr,
                             char **__restrict __endptr) __THROW __nonnull ((1)) __wur;

Perhaps it works on my machine because I'm not using an out-of-date version of GCC (gcc (Debian 4.4.4-2) 4.4.4)?

<comment><USER6> Scroll down in your manpage to the "CONFORMS TO" section. You'll see that strtof was only introduced in C99. This means that stdlib.h tests some macro to determine whether it's in C99 mode before declaring the prototype for strtof.

<comment><USER7> GCC doesn't use C99 mode by default? Is it going to become the default at some point?

<comment><AUTHOR> To be fair, recent versions probably do. For reasons I won't (or can't) go into, I have a tendency to be using slightly older systems. That's why I'm more interested in finding out how things can be traced, rather than worrying about this specific mis-match between my expectations and the system's behavior.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Besides this not being a GCC bug, the explanation is also wrong.

"Apparently GCC has a built-in version of strtof, which it compiles into your code if you're not using c99."

No, your libc has a function called strtof which the compiled program links to. Just like any and every other external reference and completely independent of where the prototype comes from.

<comment><AUTHOR> OK - I've edited the original, and will probably do so further as my understanding increases.

Summary in a comment elsewhere in this submission.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've been bit by this before -- in my case it was math.h and hypot. It was quite frustrating to debug something that I assumed would be correct, so did not look at.</comment>


Apply HN: Wiredhere|Connecting you to Fitness partners and trainers near you - <AUTHOR> Website: www.wiredhere.com
What we do:
Wiredhere is a mobile app that allows users to find partners or trainers in sports and fitness. Tennis, gym, and even basketball partners will be easily accessible within the app; as well as knowing who the best trainers are due to our rating system.
How:
Users simply choose their facility or university they attend, the activities they're interested in, and that's it. The user will than get a push notification through their phone soon as someone creates an activity and is looking for a partner.
We are partnering with our University rec center as well as 2 other local gyms near us to have their trainers use our platform. All users will be able to rate the trainers similar to how ratemyprofessor.com operates.
About us:
We're a group of 4 entrepreneurs who has known each other collectively for over 20 years. We are two programmers experienced in a number of languages, a sysadmin, and a data scientist. We also have worked together in the past with startups, so we actually get along (unless there's a debate on who gets the last portion of tea).
Feel free to ask us ANYTHING. We love criticism. <comment><USER2> How does the app coordinate meetings with users with similar interests? for example, Do users communicate through chat in order to schedule a meeting?

<comment><AUTHOR> The app coordinates meetings with users by first getting the facilities they belong to.

So whenever they create an activity, the location is automatically pulled for the other users.

We DO have the chat functionality already there, but we didn't want them coordinating the meetup location on there because we think that's too complicated.</comment></comment>


NASA's InSight lander has touched down on Mars - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/26/world/nasa-insight-mars-landing-today/index.html <comment><USER2> > It will take between two to three months for the robotic arm to place the > mission's instruments on the surface.

I haven't read about this mission before. Anybody knows why does it take so long?

<comment><USER3> They were saying on the stream that they would first build a replica of the ground environment in the lab to test run the deployment. And I believe this also includes the time to drill a deep hole.</comment></comment>


Introducing the beta for Steam Broadcasting - <AUTHOR> https://steamcommunity.com/updates/broadcasting

<comment><USER2> I've been poking around the frontend code to see if their broadcasts could be embedded, and the answer looks like no.

[https://gist.github.com/hayksaakian/8fdc4589ebf908a573a2](https://gist.github.com/hayksaakian/8fdc4589ebf908a573a2)

the magic happens on

[https://gist.github.com/hayksaakian/8fdc4589ebf908a573a2#fil...](https://gist.github.com/hayksaakian/8fdc4589ebf908a573a2#file- embed-L115)

you provide a user id an name, and the player JS will feed everything as appropriate.

the current issue involves cookies and CORS issues.

\- you can't watch steam broadcasts without being signed in

\- steam uses your cookie to generate a viewer id

\- there are two steps to getting stream data:

\- 1) fetch json containing a manifest link,

\- 2) load the manifest link

\- both steps check your cookies to verify the viewerid you claimed matches your actual viewerid</comment>


10 Awesome Startups You've Never Heard About - <AUTHOR> http://nichegeek.com/10_awesome_startups_you_ve_never_heard_about <comment><USER2> I don't think any of them is the next Google or YouTube, to be honest. Take for example the first one: I thought the locksmiths can crack any door within seconds anyway (typically just by looking at it), so that service is completely useless. The others are also weird, but you never now - I guess the dog food vending machines could be really big (dog owners are weird, too).

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Heybuddyvending has some serious potential in a market like Boston or NYC which are full of colleges and in need of internships.</comment>


Charlie Brooker teaches Jon Snow to play video games - <AUTHOR> http://www.channel4.com/news/charlie-brooker-jon-snow-games-ps4-playstation-video

<comment><USER2> I liked this:

       CB: Twitter?

       SN: Yes

       CB: That's a video game

       SN: That's not a video game

       CB: Yes it is a video game. It's a massively multi-player online RPG
           in which you choose an avatar and you act out a persona loosely
           based on your own in order to gain followers. It's a video game.

Later on John Snow complains about the violence depicted in the Lego game. Charlie has already stated that a "4 year old would play this game".

Actually I disagree. I wouldn't let my 4 year old play this game. I agree with John. It is too violent. I also wouldn't let my 4 years old watch the Avengers or Ironman either, on which those scenes appear to be based.</comment>


Fork The Blockchain And Block The Seized FBI Coins. - <AUTHOR> https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=412041.0 <comment><USER2> So, we're going to take a distributed currency whose basis is anonymity and impartiality and let the core "community" decide to blacklist some of that currency. And they're going to do this because they don't agree with what someone has done with that money.

<sarcasm> Yes, this makes perfect sense. </sarcasm>

</comment><comment><USER3> Put this beside the definition of 'Fungibility'. If you can't melt it down and remove all serial numbers, it's not :-)

</comment><comment><USER4> Never quite thought about this way that Bitcoin could crash into the side of a mountain.</comment>


Ask HN: Mail-server reputation monitoring service? - <AUTHOR>

At the startup I'm at, we are putting together a newsletter and want to keep an eye on our mail-server's reputation to make sure our e-mails get through.
I found the following: http://www.mxtoolbox.com/services_servermonitoring.aspx https://www.dnsstuff.com/products/mstc
Anybody have recommendations for these or other solutions? <comment><USER2> Email is a pretty complicated, and frequently opaque, field.

5 years ago, most spam filtering was based on tech solutions (better Bayesians, DNS blacklists, RDNS ptr checks, SPF, etc.) Now it seems to be more "relationship" based.

First is to monitor your IP address rep by using the tools mentioned below. I also highly recommend SenderScore.org (run by ReturnPath, one of the big deliverability players).

Next step is to make sure you have the proper "feedback loops" setup with the large email providers. You can google how to set that up. This establishes a relationship between your IP and their servers -- e.g., with Gmail, a "report spam" click will get reported back to your email systems, so google knows you're trying to be good about removing unwanted recipients.

The last step is to use a deliverability expert. With something like mailchimp, you will see some of the tools, but you have to pay them to send your emails. If you want to send yourself, check out PivotalVeracity or Unica. They maintain accounts on almost all relevant email providers' systems, and they give you a seedlist that tells you how many emails got through, etc. They aren't cheap -- about $15-20k per year. But they let you run your email infrastructure and give you the necessary feedback about your email deliverability.

<comment><AUTHOR> Travis thanks for the advice!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Thank you for recommending our Server Monitoring. This tool is great for monitoring your server for up/down activity or if you server has been Blacklisted we will alert you.

Our site has several other tools on it that you may find helpful including SMTP diagnostics to confirm your PTR and rDNS records and and MX Lookup tool as well.

Thanks again, @MxToolBox

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable links: <http://www.mxtoolbox.com/services_servermonitoring.aspx> <https://www.dnsstuff.com/products/mstc>

<comment><AUTHOR> Recently found this also. Looks interesting for anybody who might find this in a search.... <http://litmusapp.com/></comment></comment>