An Empirical Study of Programmers' Acquisition of New Programming Languages [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://cs242.stanford.edu/assets/projects/2017/parastoo-gdietz44.pdf <comment><USER2> For reference, this was a course project done in my class at Stanford (CS 242: Programming Languages) last fall, not a peer-reviewed publication. Overall a great project. The title is a bit general, but the goal was to identify what resources people found most useful when learning Rust and why. My favorite bit:

> Participant behavior indicates that they found the in-line Rust Enhanced > compiler errors that showed upon saving to be quite useful. Participants > were not told about this feature, and only discovered it, on average, 1058 > seconds (17 minutes, 38 seconds) into the task. However, after finding the > Rust Enhanced compiler error feature, participants began saving every 30.6 > seconds, on average, with an average of 24.8 total saves per person.

<comment><USER3> And here I am, Saving after every change, regardless of the language.

<comment><USER4> If you save after every change why don't you use an auto save feature?

<comment><USER5> I do the same as parent comment.

I had previously automated it; from simple timers, to every X seconds of inactivity; and in my experience with it, the automation took away time when some editor/compiler stops your flow (errors out/fatally because you haven't completed your current typing), or more importantly, that setup started either colliding with the key press save muscle memory (leading to some frustration when the editor just paused slightly for analysis twice) or slowly removing that muscle memory when working with other editors/setup that didn't have the feature enabled.

I've since turned back (ages ago) and prefer this mental trigger to save and check for compilation/analysis at a pause in the flow.

I really feel that works best, I'm sure the automatic save will work for others...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > "Given the positive sentiments towards in-line compiler errors and the > lowered work-flow overhead resulting from removing the requirement of > compiling within the shell, we recommend language developers create packages > to make compiler mes- sages accessible in-line. This is consistent with > prior work suggesting that the location of error messages and their struc- > ture is critical [8]."

Ugh, this type of result is so depressing to me. I am a "young" developer (early thirties, most experience with modern C, Python and Haskell).

I just want to work in the shell! Stop foisting shitty UI tools on me to code with. They are not good. _They just aren't._

I just want a shell, non-window mode Emacs, and command line search tools. My workflow is read read read type type type ctrl-z from Emacs to the shell run run run fg 1 back to Emacs. Always use git grep and ag to find code, never ever use "jump to definition" features not even in huge codebases (it's just too slow mentally to rely on that context switch instead of ctrl-z git grep ... emacs -nw ...).

The absolute most I'll tolerate is syntax highlighting.

The idea of compiler errors popping up in my editor with little Xs or squiggly underlines like a MS Word doc makes me throw up a little in my mouth. Gross.

Every single time I've invested effort to become a proficient user of these types of tools, like intellij stuff and sublime and VS Code, it just kills productivity and I go right back to Emacs + shell programs.

<comment><USER7> Got to ask, what makes you use this workflow? What is it about your work that makes it more productive than more standard ones?

I get it to some extent; I'm a heavy Emacs user myself. But for instance, why C-z / fg1 between shell and Emacs, instead of using compilation mode[0], or having your shell in an Emacs buffer, via M-x shell, M-x ansi-term or M-x eshell? It works well with non-GUI Emacs; in fact, that's how I do most of my work when traveling (terminal Emacs via SSH to home desktop).

\--

[0] - [https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Co...](https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Compilation- Mode.html)

<comment><USER6> I've always found the experience of using shell within Emacs to be poor. I spawn a lot of shell tabs in my workflow as well. If I want anything to do responsive compilation or testing, I'll just have a separate tab open running some conttest command.

I also find when I use tmux, I avoid splitting windows or panes. It's always just one singular, dumb window per each shell tab, and just multiple sessions. I've tried and tried with it and the overhead of manipulating window placement is just worse than flipping between shells and treat it like all possible windows are always equal to the full shell window.

<comment><USER8> I use tmux the exact same way. Partially this is because opening multiple terminals is _trivial_ , and it allows all the normal sizing functions that window managers have figured out over years (or that I specifically coded as shortcuts into FVWM2).

Why would I want to use a shitty pseudo-window system inside of a real window manager, when I can just use multiple terminals and connect to a tmux session in each?

Given that I also do a lot of my development remotely, so it doesn't really matter what computer I'm on as long as it has either PuTTY or OpenSSH on it, and all it really takes is the remote system being set up initially with vim (which generally exists on the remote system already), optionally with a single .vimrc copied over, or for a more heavy environment a .vim directory with a few pathogen plugins.

It _is_ a trade-off. There are some things that are somewhat harder to do in a text environment (although it's generally just "harder", not nearly impossible), but there's also quite a bit of versatility. I have quite comfortably worked from a netbook for a month before. Smaller screen size and keyboard was the only problem.

<comment><USER7> > _Why would I want to use a shitty pseudo-window system inside of a real > window manager, when I can just use multiple terminals and connect to a tmux > session in each?_

With my workflow, Emacs is _the window manager_. It's good at that, especially in text mode.

While terminal emulation / alternatives in Emacs have some rough corners, your all shell interactions are within Emacs buffers, which give powerful workflow advantages if you want to refer to previous results, or if you want to do some ad-hoc scripting.

<comment><USER8> > Emacs is the window manager.

Yeah, I've tried that with vim windows. It wasn't to my liking.

> your all shell interactions are within Emacs buffers, which give powerful > workflow advantages if you want to refer to previous results, or if you want > to do some ad-hoc scripting.

I'm not sure I'm understanding the advantage you see. I use named tmux sessions that survive beyond terminal closing that I reconnect to. I have history for months in those. I can use two of those and have an editing window and a window to see compile/test results. If it's a remote connection and the network fails, I just reconnect and reattach the tmux session, and I'm in the same position I was, with the exact same screen shown and history. I can move from home to work with the same amount of easy as well.

Since I would run tmux anyways just for that capability, I'm not sure the benefit I get out of folding both those windows into the editor, other than harder to manage resizing, and harder to manager if I want to add or remove windows temporarily.

I'm not sure what making the buffer part of the editor is gaining there specifically, but I think there _is_ something that I'm not gleaning from how you're explaining it. I'm just not sure it's enough to counteract the pain of in-editor window management (for me).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> No mention of Mozilla IRC?! If it weren't for the seasoned, patient Rust evangelists helping in #rust-beginners, I probably wouldn't be using Rust full time right now.

</comment><comment><USER10> Have not read this yet, but I'm very excited to find some time to do so. However, it seems that this does not reference any work done in natural language acquisition. I assume because the study authors are not conversant in the field. I'd love to know if anybody has seen any work that _does_ relate the two.

<comment><USER8> I suspect if you dig into the origins of Perl, you'll find some interesting stuff. If not on purpose, as a case study of what happens when a linguist makes a language (and what he thinks worked and what didn't).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> See. We can rewrite everything in Rust.

<comment><USER9> Only the parts that matter</comment></comment>


2015 sees mobile manipulators coming to market - <AUTHOR> http://robohub.org/2015-sees-mobile-manipulators-coming-to-market/

<comment><USER2> Fetch and PAL both working on very affordable versatile platforms shifting industrial robotics out of the factory line and into other applications.</comment>


Nuclear Fusion at 100: The Hidden Race for Energy Supremacy - <AUTHOR> https://hackaday.com/2020/01/23/nuclear-fusion-at-100-the-hidden-race-for-energy-supremacy/ <comment><USER2> "reactors reach the point of commercial viability by the 2030s or 2040s"

So... 10 to 20 years. I wonder if they included this on purpose, given the long an inglorious history of predicting commercially viable nuclear fusion "in 10 years"?

<comment><USER3> They're probably just using the usual combination of wishful thinking, fuzzy thinking, and ignorance of the engineering obstacles. There is zero chance of commercially viable fusion by 2030 and close to zero by 2040. It's possible we'll see an experiment reach breakeven by then, but the chasm between that and commercial viability is enormous.</comment></comment>


Early evidence on "predictive policing" and civil rights - <AUTHOR> https://www.teamupturn.com/reports/2016/stuck-in-a-pattern <comment><USER2> I thought this was an excellent treatment of the garbage-in-garbage-out aspect of this debate. Too often it seems people get wrapped up in the "Is it ethical to use a computer to judge someone?" implications, which are non-trivial, but also seem to be borne out of a general ignorance about the many ways we _do_ allow computers (or rather, computation) to make judgements about people.

Also, it's an excellent example of the power of research and tabulation, though it seems the link to the list of departments they researched is broken.

I think the use of crime modeling doesn't have to be controversial, but the first step is demanding transparency. It's scary enough when the police are the primary collectors and judgers of data, but even worse when they leave it to a vendor and assume it's hunky-dory out of the circular reasoning that proprietary algorithms are good because they are proprietary.

> _When the Fresno police briefed the city council about the Beware system, > the council president asked a simple question about those color-coded threat > levels: "How does a person get to red?" The officer didn't know, because the > vendor wasn't saying. As the officer delivering the briefing explained: "We > don't know what their algorithm is exactly… We don't have any kind of a list > that will tell us, this is their criteria, this is what would make a person > red, this is what would make a person yellow. It's their own system_

<comment><USER3> Aren't there numerous ML techniques potentially be applicable to evaluating potential future crimes where even the people responsible for writing the algorithm and feeding the massive dataset in don't really understand how a particular person might "get to red"? Transparency seems to be only part of the problem.

<comment><USER4> Maybe, but I'm not aware of any that have produced predictions on a broad in vivo population that are better than existing methods. It's one thing to do a heat map of a region at a certain time of day, and express that in terms of overall statistical risk. It's quite another to try and read the future intentions of a human being based on what amounts to a wealth of noise and a paucity of signal.

<comment><USER5> Just curious as the name is familiar - do you go to Georgia Tech?

<comment><USER4> I don't sorry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The problem is that the police are being asked to do what amounts to population control, of a historic problem population in the US, that has no real desire to be controlled, on the behalf of people with no real desire to be seen as controlling them. The most the algorithm can do is provide a justification for well-known solutions to crime (or the perception of crime), but laundered through math & obfuscated reasoning so as to not be seen as too racist.

Somehow, up until like the 1960s-1970s, this was not an issue. What changed, and what reason do we have for believing that any modernized algorithmic solution would be better than now-abandoned social technologies with actual empirical track records?

Hell, the vast majority of the time, you can't even accurately describe the problem in eg Chicago without being shouted down or deflected into someone's pet policy proposal.

<comment><USER7> _The problem is that the police are being asked to do what amounts to population control, of a historic problem population in the US, that has no real desire to be controlled, on the behalf of people with no real desire to be seen as controlling them. The most the algorithm can do is provide a justification for well-known solutions to crime (or the perception of crime), but laundered through math & obfuscated reasoning so as to not be seen as too racist._

Considering a group of people a "problem population" due to their race is racist, but I think this perspective is shared by many people in America. How do we get police to stop being agents of racism when so much of the population condones it?

 _Somehow, up until like the 1960s-1970s, this was not an issue._

Was it not an issue, or did you just not hear about it? The 1960s civil rights movement happened (and in many ways is still happening) for a reason.

<comment><USER6> _Considering a group of people a "problem population" due to their race is racist, but I think this perspective is shared by many people in America. How do we get police to stop being agents of racism when so much of the population condones this sort of thing?_

Blacks have ~4x the murder rate of the combined white / hispanic population, and IIRC something like 6-8x the murder rate of the disaggregated white population, depending on how exactly you segment hispanics. It ends up being approximately half of all murders. Note that this tends to be a geographically concentrated population, often next to an incredibly low-murder urban(e) white area, so you end up with cities like Chicago where the goal is to keep the anarchy from spilling over into your tax base.

It's not delusional to think that dealing with facts like this is a major area of concern for law enforcement and local political leadership, especially when people are so quick to denounce any contemplation of reality as racist.

I guess if you wanted to put on your PC goggles and studiously avoid any discussion of race, you could do the intellectually dishonest thing and talk about things like "the population of South Chicago", but being intellectually dishonest doesn't seem to have gotten us very far.

[https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in- the-u.s.-...](https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in- the-u.s.-2013/tables/table-43)

<comment><USER8> OK, so let's say people agree with you all the sudden. Now that you've framed it as a race thing, what sort of policy are you going to implement based on what you decide?

If you're going to take any kind of punitive action against people based on their race, that's not a "offending the PC police" thing, that's a human rights violation. If it's not punitive, then that's affirmative action, which you already have and has been discussed to death.

What's the point of framing the discussion around race, given that the result of going down that avenue isn't useful, and that the discussion itself is going to be bitterly divisive?

<comment><USER6> You're misunderstanding me. I am saying that the raw statistics indicate that dealing with crime in serious way requires imposing not-crime on the black population. That is just a point of fact, and Eric Holder's subordinates at least agree with me.

Mechanisms to do this run into exactly the sorts of problems you mention (all of the plausible solutions appear to be either "racist" or empirically ineffective).

There are discarded social technologies from <1970 that evidently succeeded in reducing both the black crime rate, and probably also the extent to which black crime affected whites & was thus basically ignorable. Examining those technologies in depth & figuring out what if anything is useful sort of exceeds the bounds of a tiny comment box.

But let's please get accurate diagnoses first of the decision calculus facing, say, Rahm Emanuel as he decides what policies to implement, and why he doesn't seem to be able to crack the problem.

Giuliani was able to mostly solve the problem in New York, but he was able to do things like eliminate freedom of movement for blacks, avoid effective criticism due to his protection of large swathes of the media community, import replacement populations to drive out his more troublesome constituents, finance it via a boom in his city's FIRE economy, etc. It's not clear that that would work in, say, Detroit, or that those policies were in retrospect conformal with contemporary ethics.

<comment><USER7> Men commit more crimes than women. Do you think we should eliminate freedom of movement for men? "Import replacement populations" of women to drive them out?

The reasons people commit crimes are complex. Visible attributes like skin color or gender do not cause people to commit crime, and using statistics to argue this is incorrect and racist.

<comment><USER6> For whatever reason you're refusing to engage with the existence of black crime as a problem, and deflecting to whether I secretly believe in particular causal mechanisms or am arguing for heresy. In fact I've been clear in not advocating for particular causes. I've also been clear in not advocating an Emperor Giuliani solution.

It rather reinforces my point that there is unlikely to be a good solution to the problem when the response to pointing out very simple and agreed-upon statistics about black crime, and that any solution would presumably disproportionately affect blacks - is to point and shout "racist". That's what I'm saying. A solution to vastly disproportionate black crime would probably be, ipso facto, racist.

Incidentally, I agree with you that men commit essentially all violence, to say nothing of violent crime. There's pretty much societal consensus that measures disproportionately targeting male crime are A-OK, eg, the fact that young men are far more likely to be stopped by the police than young women, or disparities in sentencing between male and female crime, or the use of sex- offender registries, etc.

In fact management of large groups of men has been a concern for literally millennia. For instance, maintaining order in militaries, or in prisons, or managing boomtowns. "Import women" has been a solution (promoting female immigration to boomtowns, or brothels and baggage trains in <1900 militaries), as has been the imposition of hierarchies with recursive responsibility for enforcing order (militaries in general & prisons) or sequestering violence from the population at large (prisons & to some extent militaries). We've actually gotten pretty good at it through the use of social technologies we _haven 't_ thrown away.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "The target of the Jihad was a machine-attitude as much as the machines," Leto said. "Humans had set those machines to usurp our sense of beauty, our necessary selfdom out of which we make living judgements. Naturally, the machines were destroyed."

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

Seriously though, how is this not the crudest sort of cargo-cult machine worship? I'm not paying taxes to be judged by a goddamned machine. It's crazy. If the people _we 're paying_ to administer the system are so degenerate that they would delegate their most essential function to a machine then we need to vote them out in favor of sober, responsible, educated adults. It's like they're admitting that they can be replaced by a script!!!

Knowing what I know about computers, and computer modelling, I'm appalled that people would make, buy, and employ these sorts of "voo-doo" machines.

(Thin sans-serif body font means you hate your readers, and making it grey means you _really_ hate them.)

<comment><USER2> > _I 'm not paying taxes to be judged by a goddamned machine_

I'd be shocked to learn that the IRS does not use _some_ form of mechanical computation to determine probabilistically whether or not a given taxpayer should be audited for possible tax fraud in a given year.

<comment><USER9> Maybe so, I'm not privy to their methods, but I wouldn't be surprised that they use, e.g. statistical models, computed on machines, to help them figure out whether or not to look more closely at a given taxpayer.

But however unpleasant it may be, an audit is not a punishment. (Someone is abusing their power if so.) Not anymore than being selected for jury duty is a punishment.

Also, you used the word "probabilistically". We should not be assigning sentences based on the roll of a die, eh?

Insurance companies use machines and statistical models to set rates. But they also have strong feedback to improve accuracy. They lose money if they get it wrong.

Here we are talking about _judgement_.

I know far too much about computers to ever credit the idea that these machines can replace a human judge. The people who have put these things into practice are deeply incompetent and should be voted out of office and replaced by folks who won't devolve to crude machine-worship.

<comment><USER2> An audit may not be a punishment, technically speaking, but neither is being predictively policed, _technically_. Neither is being stopped for a brief patdown because a suspect in an armed robbery is black and you happen to be black and within the vicinity.

The latter situation is most definitely an algorithm whether it be administered by a computer or human -- e.g. 1. is there a person in front of me. 2. Is this person male? 3. Is this person dark-skinned? 4. Is this person within X meters and inside a timeframe of Y minutes from a reported crime?

As for making judgments probabilistically; hate to break it to you, but that's already the status quo. Exhibit A: _Probable_ cause.

And probabilistic thinking is most definitely behind sentencing guidelines. Let's take the recent and still controversial case of Brock Turner, the ex- Stanford swimmer convicted of sexual assault [0].

Aren't the following aspects of the Turner case all a manifestation of probabilities?

0\. That his bail was set at $150,000, based on the likelihood of an accused (and not yet guilty) rapist of his status would break bond.

0.5 The likelihood that he did indeed sexually assault the victim and was not ignorant as to her state of consciousness or consent.

1\. The _recommended_ minimum sentence of 2 years in prison for his convicted crime.

2\. The probation officer's recommendation that he be given a "moderate" county jail sentence.

3\. The judge's determination that Turner, based on his lack of prior criminal record, be given 6 months in county jail.

4\. The county jail's determination that Turner serve only 3 months in county jail because of good behavior.

5\. The post-incarceration penalty that comes with Turner to be thought of as a Tier III sex offender, which means he has to register 4 times a year (presumably based on some statistic that that's enough polling frequency to adequately track him), for the rest of his life.

Note: I'm not implying that you agree with any of these aspects of the case. Just saying that if you're concerned about statistics and likelihood playing a part in our criminal system, then that ship has long sailed. In defense of the machines, if a machine had been the sole determiner of Turner's sentence, we'd at least be able to audit it and know how it weighted things. With the human judge, we don't have a clue as to whether the judge's personal relationship with Stanford was a factor, or even if he read the probation officer's report correctly when giving the seemingly light sentence. Hell, we don't even know how the probation officer interpreted the victim's wishes [1]

[0] [http://www.daytondailynews.com/news/news/crime-law/greene- co...](http://www.daytondailynews.com/news/news/crime-law/greene-county- sheriff-no-kid-gloves-for-brock-turn/nsQCT/)

[1] [http://www.cbsnews.com/news/probation-official-called- brock-...](http://www.cbsnews.com/news/probation-official-called-brock-turner- crime-less-serious/)

<comment><USER9> Dude you are working _way_ too hard to do... what?

What's your angle?

For me, it's really simple: The day that a machine decides how long I spend in a cage we are going to have a serious problem.

<comment><USER10> He is trying to think rationally. Sometimes attempting to find the right answer, rather than simply the one that feels good, is in fact "hard".

I'm glad some people put the effort in rather than just chasing positive feels.

<comment><USER11> Mr. Stucchio:

Mass democracy is the root of this problem. One proof is observing the way in which democratic decision-making has devolved chiefly into emotional appeals to in-group moralistic bromides. To me, the degree to which one seriously desires rational thinking as a basis for lawmaking is the degree to which one desires a reduction in the number of cooks in the kitchen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Remove the scary word "algorithm" and this whole issue seems blown up around something fairly mundane. If the police hand calculated how many crime reports came from each area no one would care.

People are so scared of algorithms. There is now scientific evidence confirming that severe distrust of algorithms is a pervasive human bias. Search for "algorithm aversion". They do trust them when they are believed to be infallible, but as soon as they learn they can make mistakes, they vastly underestimate them. And this is a damn shame, because in almost every case even very simple statistical procedures outperform human "experts".

Worse is this nonsense that algorithms can be "racist". As if a computer can have prejudice or care about anything other than maximizing accuracy. The media loves to fuel this narrative. E.g. the big hoopla when Google's image tagger tagged a black person as a gorilla. They had to remove it and apologize.

<comment><USER13> If you ignore history it can be really easy to come across as casually racist.

<comment><USER12> What on Earth are you talking about?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Wow, cool! I am the technical founder of PredPol and he uses a screenshot of the original version, which I wrote in my college dorm room in his article. Somehow the fact that somebody took so much time to criticize it somehow makes me feel special. (I don't work there an

</comment><comment><USER15> "The fact that we even call these systems "predictive" is itself a telling sign of excessive confidence in the systems."

If you are worried about the outcome of the language in police intervention and court cases then "Speculative policing" would seem a more appropriate term for the technology and cary less weight. This might be an area suited for the FTC to step in and ask the industry to fix their marketing to be more inline with what they actually offer.

</comment><comment><USER16> I like that they begin by addressing the use of the word "predictive". How we frame an issue deeply effects how it is received, perceived, and accepted.

</comment><comment><USER17> Also see "Watchbird" by Robert Sheckley: [https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/29579](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/29579)

By the way, DRM is an example of such approach, where people are judged as guilty by default by digital systems.

</comment><comment><USER18> Possible heretical thought, could it be that predictive policing suggests the same high crime neighborhoods that are normally responsible for most crime, because they are responsible for most crime (at least the kind that the systems track)?

That would make them useless, true, but not racists (most of these neighborhoods would probably be predominately african-american, but they would also be predominately poor, which we know correlates with crime).

<comment><USER19> I'm sure most people would not deny this mechanism exists. The distinction is whether one focuses on this mechanism (correct Bayesian inference) or the various biases and feedback loops described in the article. Personally I believe that progressives miss the forest for the trees: there is a huge gap between White and Black crime that encompasses almost every kind of crime[0]. While I am against any policy that exacerbates this gap, or otherwise discriminates against Black people, I feel that there is a huge effort by the progressive movement to promote an understanding of these subtleties, while at the same time actively repressing general knowledge of the basic facts about race and crime. For example, progressives like to point out that for drug charges this gap could be explained by uneven enforcement (though I don't know if this claim is accurate - the evidence is somewhat indirect) but fail to mention that for most other crimes this claim is not tenable.

And fyi, a very basic fact[1] in the field of criminology is that being black is predictive[2] of crime even after controlling for income and education. I'm not criticizing you for not knowing this since this fact is considered "racist" when expressed by non-experts, and experts only refer to it among themselves, in order to avoid the fact being misinterpreted.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United_S...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United_States)

[1] It's not entirely uncontested, but it certainly represents the majority belief in most social science disciplines. See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United_S...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United_States#Modern_theories_of_causation).

[2] "predictive" is a term of art, meaning that it has a positive coefficient when used on the right hand side of a regression where "crime" is on the left hand side, along with other right hand side variables which depend on the context.

<comment><USER2> I can't speak for the progressives that you have read from, but I can say that there is strong movement on the conservative front for criminal justice reform. Here's a good op-ed by Doug Deason:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/30/opinion/ruining-lives- with...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/30/opinion/ruining-lives-with- criminal-justice.html)

His first anecdote gets at the issue to which I believe you misattribute to progressives, "actively repressing general knowledge of the basic facts about race and crime":

> _I am a Republican businessman, and President Obama and I do not see eye to > eye on most issues. But I agree with him on the inequities of the criminal > justice system. I learned about it firsthand. Like many 17-year-olds, I did > something stupid. It was 1979, and I threw a party at the home of neighbors > while they were out of town. (Their son had given me a key.) The party got > out of hand, ultimately getting the attention of the police. I was charged > with felony burglary._

> _My actions were wrong and irresponsible. They could also have ruined my > life, affecting my ability to go to college or even get a job. But unlike > many in my situation, I was able to fight the charge._

Perhaps the progressives you accuse of deliberately spreading ignorance, are indeed not focusing on the "basic facts". But they might argue that that focus is flawed in the first place. If blacks _were_ disproportionately targeted and punished for low-level offenses, then that leads to a disproportionate number of people who have criminal records. Even if you ignore the material impact of incarceration, there's the issue of how criminal record can be a negative factor in job searches and overall participation and trust in society.

The basic fact that a greater proportion of blacks commit serious felonies is probably not considered a basic fact for folks who believe that blacks have also a greater proportion of being disenfranchised. It's probably more like a tautology.</comment></comment></comment>


Predicting whether a startup will succeed or fail. - <AUTHOR> http://techzinglive.com/page/463/76-techzing-interview-thomas-thurston-modeling-disruption

<comment><USER2> Is this really an hour long audio recording? Anyone got a transcript?</comment>


The Finale of the Ultimate Meta Mega Crossover - <AUTHOR> http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5389450/1/The_Finale_of_the_Ultimate_Meta_Mega_Crossover

<comment><AUTHOR> HN readers liked Eliezer's Harry Potter fanfic (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1385932>); I thought you might also appreciate this earlier one by him. I actually like it better than the Harry Potter.</comment>


Annual Performance Review: Albert Einstein - <AUTHOR> http://norvig.com/performance-review.html <comment><USER2> Yes, and do something about that hair!</comment>


Parellagram – Dynamic Image Resizing with Go - <AUTHOR> http://parellagram.com/posts/carving <comment><USER2> Cached: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://parellagram.com/posts/carving)

</comment><comment><USER3> The video at the end is neat to watch, and after that video, there was another that showed "Improved Seam Carving for Video Resizing" here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJtE8afwJEg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJtE8afwJEg)

The video starts off not very impressive, but once they get to the forward energy method, it' pretty cool how it is able to show video with objects and edges that are smooth frame to frame.

One of the neat use cases was to remove shaky camera effects.

</comment><comment><USER4> Seam Carving is available as the Liquid Rescale plug-in in GIMP

[http://liquidrescale.wikidot.com/](http://liquidrescale.wikidot.com/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> It DOES use GIFT - [http://github.com/disintegration/gift](http://github.com/disintegration/gift), but eh.. it works

</comment><comment><USER5> "We can see that the area with the least visual information (the sky) has been reduced while other regions of the image such as the boat, water, and buildings, remain intact."

Except the tower on the right has been "redesigned" by the algorithm.

<comment><USER6> The castle looks exactly the same... what was "redesigned" ?

Original: [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cb/Broadway...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cb/Broadway_tower_edit.jpg)

Seam carved: [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ed/Broadway...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ed/Broadway_tower_edit_Seam_Carving.png)

<comment><USER7> You don't notice the difference between the proportions and distance between the woman/sky and the castle?

The clouds are much smaller/thinner and the woman is a fraction of the distance apart.

(Edit: Nevermind, I mistakenly thought you were trying to say you didn't see a difference. Not that you were countering their point that the castle was "redesigned".)

<comment><USER6> That is what seam carving does. What do you think was supposed to happen?

Look at the pics again, the castle is exactly the same. The grass, sky and distance between person has been changed. The whole point is to shrink the dimensions by keeping the main things as they are in size, detail and proportion and cutting out the stuff in the middle.

<comment><USER7> No kidding. In the comment I was replying to you said you didn't see a difference.

(Nevermind, I misunderstood your comment.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Seam carving works great on scenary images. I have accidentally used it on a collection of portraits, and every image ends up at the bottom of uncanny valley. They are so frightening that I can't look at the thumbnails and have to remove them under cmd.

</comment><comment><USER9> The github repo: [https://github.com/aaparella/carve](https://github.com/aaparella/carve)

</comment><comment><USER10> I found the video, where they just vanished a person out of a picture, to be a mite disturbing. Stalin would have loved that.

</comment><comment><USER11> Why didn't you call it "parallelogram"?

<comment><USER12> Dude's last name is Parella</comment></comment>


Show HN: Notepin – Extremely simple blogging platform - <AUTHOR> https://notepin.co <comment><USER2> Feedback: I can click on the heart 10 times, and all ten are registered, artificially inflating the 'like' count. Whats more, I can then refresh the page, and click on it another ten times. And then just keep doing that until the end of time, or an integer overflow.

<comment><USER3> Finally my posts will receive many likes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What's the differentiate between this and the million other simple note taking apps like write.as

<comment><USER5> I know there is in no way that you meant any offense to your question at all. And just as you should, this is a great question you asked. "Why did you do it? What compelled you to spent however many hours on this project?"

While most of us SaaS developers dream of making it big, with thousand of people paying just $2 or $5 a month -- I know, small dreams, but just to have that validation is pretty amazing. Whether we are giving it away for free or for money and having people use it... do construction workers keep a portfolio of all of the buildings they ever worked on or do they just show up for the paycheck?

Anyways, point is... sometimes we do things for practice, learning, and experience.

I'm not the author of NotePin but I could certainly answer that question, and it comes down to: why are people still starting blogs in 2020? Why do I keep my blog going after 7 years? Three reasons: Perspective. POV. Experience.

I created [https://mypost.io](https://mypost.io) in 2015. Very first project I ever made. I took a free course online at Stanford University to learn about databases. While the teacher was a nice lady, she was boring. How do you make anything about relational databases fun to learn? I took a test.. really just didn't understand what it was asking, and so, after a few sessions, and even googling it... I still couldn't figure it out.

MyPost would be the foundation for everything I'd learn about PHP and MySQL databases.

Once I got my hands on it.. I started looking at PHP's built-in SQLi function and then discovered a few database frameworks that assisted in making life even easier. At the time I built MyPost, support for PHP 5.6 was ending. Here I was.. just got done building my very first project... about to release it to the public, and PHP 5.6 support was ending. So I had to make a choice... and I updated to PHP 7.x, and everything was broken. So I had to relearn some PHP and make the code compatible with everything I had already done. I'm very happy I spent the next month on it upgrading the code and it did teach me a lot.

Of course, I did monetize the blogging platform as well to keep it going. When I had it free, I had Russian hackers completely dominate it and use it to spread millions of dark web urls. The traffic was awesome... millions of people visiting.

Until I got hit with that DCMA... I spent a few hours deleting the damage they did, which were hundreds of thousands of posts added to the database in as little as 24 hours. I deleted them. More popped up.

Once I added the paywall of just $12 for a year to use the service, unlimited posts. I still had people signing up and paying for it, but the "Russian hackers" completely disappeared, off to use another service they can exploit.

We all develop our own web apps with our own visions. 99% of the time, someone else built it already. But no one built it with the vision you had. And that makes us human with the billions of thoughts and ideas that we have throughout our lives. Some of us read, write, develop, build, create... just to get our "dream vision" out there into the world.

I used to be a gamer. Sitting on my computer for no less than 10 hours a day, battling on MMOPRGs or single player games.. loved 'em. Not something I was really sharing with the world and not something that really satisifed the seratonin levels of excitement. However, when I'm coming up with the creative process of design, development, and functionality... get everything working, send it out, and people start to use it, or adopt it as their everyday tool... that is a far better feeling than any video game ever gave me. Maybe I'm stupid, maybe I'm just a natural-born programmer trying to share gifts with the world.

So.. it's this guy's take on a notepad or editing tool. Pretty cool :)

<comment><USER6> this is totally a whole blog I'd be willing to read.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Note Pinco" is prone to being bullied.

<comment><AUTHOR> ?</comment></comment>


England's Mental Health Experiment – Free Talking Therapy - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/24/health/england-mental-health-treatment-therapy.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&smid=tw-nythealth&smtyp=cur <comment><AUTHOR> The English NHS gathers a lot of data. Here's some for the IAPT programme: [http://content.digital.nhs.uk/searchcatalogue?productid=2447...](http://content.digital.nhs.uk/searchcatalogue?productid=24470&q=iapt&sort=Relevance&size=10&page=1#top)

Here are my notes (not criticisms) of the article:

> offers virtually open-ended talk therapy

IAPT (Improved access to psychological therapy) is normally time limited to about 10 weeks. The range is something like 6 to 12 weeks. You can self refer again, but I guess some places would put limits on how often you could try it.

There's not much provision of the IAPT model for children, who normally have different services.

You can usually self-refer, you don't normally need a GP referral. (That's not true everywhere, but it is what's intended).

> at clinics

Some of it is telephone based, not face to face.

> The goal is to eventually create a system of primary care for mental health > not just for England but for all of Britain.

Health is devolved in the UK. That means that there is a different health system in England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. England can't force the other countries to take up IAPT.</comment>


Conditional rendering in React Native may crash your app - <AUTHOR> https://koprowski.it/2020/conditional-rendering-react-native-text-crash/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, this weekend I wrote an article about conditional rendering with && (logical AND) operator.

Conditional rendering done wrong leads to errors in React Native that seems to jump on occasionally. Prints characters in web React and leads to confusion.

Read what is happening and how to prevent further mistakes.</comment>


Show HN: I also created a Chrome Ext that reveals use of zero-width characters - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/roymckenzie/detect-zero-width-characters-chrome-extension <comment><USER2> The demo button just points to the image, is it supposed to go somewhere else?

<comment><USER3> That's an image that is a screenshot of the extension working. Not a link to a demo. I made the same mistake :D</comment></comment>


Show HN: Stock Faces, High Quality Faces for Mock Avatars - <AUTHOR> https://stockfaces.com <comment><AUTHOR> Howdy all, this is a small tool I put together that I thought could be helpful to others here.

A few weeks ago, I was really inspired to make a desktop native client for Matrix.org chat. I decided to do it in rust, but then found that there was a library for matrix clients already in progress, so I decided to start with the UI. While working on that I decided that I wanted some pictures of people to use as avatars. But I discovered that when I went searching for them that I couldn't find anything that was free, high quality, and having an explicit license, so I decided to fix that.

Unsplash is a great service that provides CC0 stock images that are mostly really high quality, so I had a source for the faces. I then found a python machine learning library that had a face detection algorithm built in. I just ran every single Unspalsh image through the face detector, doubled the bounding box and set a crop for just that person.

With the faces' URLs pushed into a sqlite DB I then made a backend server in rust to serve the image links (I'm thinking I might want to track popularity if people end up using this) and the paginated JSON for image info.

Next I wrote the front end in Elm, mostly just because I'd been meaning to try it for months now and every time I do a React/Redux app I get annoyed at how much boiler-plate & repetition I takes to write something.

If you want, you can checkout the (still pretty messy) source here:

[https://gitlab.com/azdle/stockfaces- api/](https://gitlab.com/azdle/stockfaces-api/)

[https://gitlab.com/azdle/stockfaces- web/](https://gitlab.com/azdle/stockfaces-web/)</comment>


The Problem With Microsoft... - <AUTHOR> http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/03/29/the-problem-with-microsoft/

<comment><USER2> The vision thing...</comment>


Uber Co-Founder's Startup 'Operator' Will Get You What You Want - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/07/operator/#.auxoxl:ciV3

<comment><USER2> What a well written advertisement.</comment>


University of Florida guts computer science department in budget-cutting move - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2012/04/university-of-florida-guts-computer-science-department-in-budget-cutting-move.ars <comment><USER3> Even more so than free healthcare, the one thing that separates the US from the "rest of the world" is the availability of free higher education. Of course, the caveat is that most of the rest of the world is far more restrictive of _who_ may attend university.

In the past, this was always touted as an advantage of the US system. Sure, you have to pay for college, but you don't have to stress over a placement exam that will determine your fate at an early age. Anyone with the motivation can get a higher education.

Except, that's not how things have turned out. It seems that attaining a college degree has become an obligation in the US, for no good reason. People like to talk about the ever increasing proportion of the population that hold college degrees, but does anyone ever ask if the fraction of students with college degrees matches the fraction of available jobs that require college degrees?

Instead, the US seems to have a death-grip on the notion that "more college graduates = more better jobs". So, instead of scaling back college acceptance rates and spending limited funds to provide an excellent education to a few, the US will water down college education until its as filling as the beer its college students will spend most of their 4 years drinking, only to emerge with a degree in underwater basket weaving.

<comment><USER4> > but does anyone ever ask if the fraction of students with college degrees > matches the fraction of available jobs that require college degrees?

I think the imbalance is actually in the other direction, if you ask it that way: the fraction of the population with college degrees is considerably _lower_ than the fraction of available jobs that require college degrees. Unemployment among people who don't have college degrees is very high, suggesting that there aren't enough no-degree-required jobs. And when no- degree-required jobs do come on the market, they get massively over-applied for, like when McDonald's announced 50,000 job openings and received _a million_ applicants.

Now whether those jobs _should_ require college degrees is another story. For better or worse, employers demand degrees for a wide range of jobs, and you often won't even get past an automated HR screen if you don't have one. Until employers start offering more jobs to people without degrees, people will continue to feel that they need one, so they can qualify for those openings.

<comment><USER5> > available jobs that require college degrees

It seems to me that a large number of jobs that list a degree as a requirement don't gain much by requiring a degree, except a smaller stack of resumes to dig through.

Why does a secretary position require a bachelor's degree? Especially when it's _any_ bachelor's degree, regardless of major?

<comment><USER6> > It seems to me that a large number of jobs that list a degree as a > requirement don't gain much by requiring a degree, except a smaller stack of > resumes to dig through.

Yes, the stack of resumes is smaller. However, I think the key here is that the _employer believes_ the stack of resumes is likely to have a higher ratio of "good" candidates to "bad" candidates.

In economics this is called "signaling". The degree may not endow the person with any particular skill necessary to do the job, but it indicates ("signals") to the employer that the person has certain characteristics that allowed them to earn their degree.

In this case, they can show up on time, complete assignments in a timely manner and use a computer (along with some other things, I'm sure). These are (in theory) qualities that are required to earn a college degree. They are also required for almost all jobs, including fairly menial ones.

The idea is that you can create a pool that is richer in the desired characteristics by limiting it based on the signal.

So, let's pretend 50% of the general population and 75% of the college- graduate population can, say, complete assignments on time (just an example, no "lazy college student" anecdotes please). If you allow anyone to apply for a given job, 50% of the people in your hiring pool will be able to complete assignments on time. But if you limit the applicant pool to just the college graduates, you get to choose (semi-randomly in the case of job interviews) from a pool in which 50% more of the people (75%) can complete assignments on time. This means you are more likely, all else being equal, to end up with a person who can complete assignments on time.

Of course the usefulness of this sort of signal is dependent on whether the assumed characteristics _are in fact_ required to earn a college degree, YMMV. But this is why employers require college degrees for jobs that don't seem like they should require one.

<comment><USER5> I know. My question was rhetorical, and mostly kvetching due to my fiance trying to find a job and being stymied by the fact that she doesn't have her degree yet.

The problem with those numbers is that we have no idea what % of the general population can complete an assignment in time, especially when you consider that as a hypothetical employer I don't care about the general population - <USER2> only care about the percentage of the population that's applying for my job. Again, this is all personal and highly biased, but if I had to pick a random person from my college classes and my fiance to complete some given office task, I'd give it to her, hands down. (But of course, not everyone is marrying her. Luckily for me!)

<comment><USER6> I agree that this sort of broad-strokes signalling is probably highly ineffective. However, given the difficulty of hiring, employers are likely to seize upon anything that can ease the process even slightly.

There have been interesting ideas in the tech sector, the StackOverflow jobs site for one. It would be interesting to see if anything can be done outside of tech to make hiring more effective.

Good luck to your fiance!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's important to note that this isn't a budget issue. The CS dept was cut by $1.7M, but the athletic department had their funding raised by $2M (total athletic budget is $99M).

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevensalzberg/2012/04/22/univer...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevensalzberg/2012/04/22/university- of-florida-eliminates-computer-science-department-increases-athletic-budgets- hmm/)

Interestingly, the state government seems very supportive of STEM and has thrown $49M at the creation of Florida Polytechnic University. It seems it's merely the university administration that wants to cut it.

[http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/state/scott-approves- state...](http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/state/scott-approves- states-12scott-approves-states-12th-university-florida-polytechnic- after-2317216.html)

<comment><USER8> The athletic department's budget comes out of the athletic department's revenue. This is very much a budget issue. The reason why UF needs to cut this money is precisely because of this creation of a new University. Even less state funding is now being divided among even more universities.

[http://chalkboard.blogs.gainesville.com/2012/04/blog- generat...](http://chalkboard.blogs.gainesville.com/2012/04/blog-generates- buzz-on-uf-cuts-wrongly-links-to-athletics/)

<comment><USER7> It's one pool of money under the control of the university. What prevents UF from funneling some of the athletic dept's revenue to subsidize the rest of the university?

I realize that the university might be motivated to implement budget cuts in ways that harm voters (in order to make voters angry about it), but it's hardly clear that UF doesn't have $1.7M worth of waste. Nor is it clear that the $2M increase in the athletic budget will result in a > $2M increase in revenue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Big discussion yesterday: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3876564>

</comment><comment><USER9> This article DOES NOT PROVIDE ENOUGH INFORMATION on why this restructuring has taken place. Is it really just a ham-fisted budget cutting move or is there something more subtle going on? It looks like the university also had an ECE department that it was able to consolidate into, at least to some extent. It also does not provide any information on the numbers related to the research of the Computer Science Department. How much money were they bringing in in grants? How many papers were they writing? How many students were moving through the department? If these numbers don't make enough sense, or they don't stack up to other departments when a cut has to be made, then it really just boils down to something like this.

It seems completely absurd that a thriving research department would be shuttered because of budget reasons, which is what the Forbes article (and I use that term loosely, "post" is probably a better word) seems to imply, and this may be the case, but I'm quite skeptical.

Sometimes, if you have a bad set of faculty that create a stagnant department (no research, bad teaching, all tenured, and all resisting hiring good new faculty to maintain the status quo) you have to take dramatic steps to get rid of them so you can trim back on your budget (tenured faculty make a lot more than new faculty) and breath new life into a program. In some cases, the only option to reboot a department may be to scrap it entirely, offer zombie profs new spots in a similar department, and bin the rest you don't like or offer them much-less-cush teaching jobs where they have to work for dinner. Later on the department can be restarted and reconstructed from new and preexisting good faculty. I'm not saying this is the case here. What I am saying is that there can be real reasons to scrap an entire CS department this day in age when you have budget problems, or even if you DON'T have them. I don't know the particulars here, but it sure would be nice if people weren't so self- righteous with these postings and gave us more facts so we could understand how crazy the situation actually is instead of hearing about (unrelated) athletic budgets.

All the Forbes post is really doing is engaging in sensationalism by co-opting the notion of American decline via self-sabotage that's so popular right now. I wish we could hear some more about the real issues.

</comment><comment><USER10> I see a future where more and more Universities start doing this. The University of Florida had many more issues than this but Universities just can't keep up with how much the field of Computer Science changes. They were built around books and static resources that you come in and study and get a job after four to six years where that information is still relevant.

Four to six years in Computer Science is an insane amount of time, so much changes in the world of CS in this amount of time that basically your information is outdated by the time your graduate.

Most of my CS friends have dropped out after 2-3 years and gotten great jobs. (Albeit they all went in with a solid working knowledge of programming and work experience to begin with.) People who go to college to learn CS to get a good job in the field tend to leave getting a corporate Java programming job which just doesn't interest the majority of programmers/potential programmers anymore.

<comment><USER11> I agree the education system is completly broken more so for comp sci than anywhere. There is no need for 4 years of school. Why do you need bio and comunication. Before anyone say that grammer and english help you in a career look back at your college career did you honestly take those classes seriously. I have comp sci course I've past and haven't retain one word.

<comment><USER12> I don't know how to say this without being offensive, but your entire comment is evidence that people should be taking those courses seriously. You may be an extremely competent programmer, but when I see the spelling mistakes and inability to communicate effectively, I would be hard-pressed to take you seriously in any way.

<comment><USER13> I know it is not your intent and I have tried my best to not take offense to your comment but their are a lot of issues that can affects ones ability to communicate in a particular medium. In this particular one (written) dyslexia can be almost debilitating, if a person has dyslexia, the are no more or less incompetent than any given person they just strive to overcome a disability in the way they their mind works. If the parent poster happens to have dyslexia then your post is the equivalent of walking up to a person on the street with a speech impediment and telling them it is hard to take them serious because of how they talk. I know that was not you intent, which is why I do not take it personal, but I did want to draw the parallel. That being said, I do disagree with the contents of the original post. I think their is a lot of value in a good CS program.

<comment><USER14> The reason that his ability to communicate is relevant is that he specifically questioned the value of a _communications_ class.

<comment><USER13> From the grandparent post: _but when I see the spelling mistakes_ . I don't disagree with the conclusion that the original poster did not present a compelling argument, even if it where spelled correctly, but spelling has very little to do with ones ability to reason. All too often people use it as an indicator of intellect in other areas of reasoning, when doing the same thing in public to a person with speaking difficulties would be out of the question. It is roughly the same offense, but for some reason it is far more acceptable in written communication, this causes a lot of long harbored issues for those that suffer from the affliction.

<comment><USER12> I think it really comes down to two things: 1\. It is (generally) obvious if someone has a speech/language disability when you interact with them face to face. 2\. Sheer probability dictates that it would be ridiculous to ignore a metric (written communication skills) that I find useful in evaluating people for fear of offending a VAST minority of cases. What percent of the time do you think that someone exhibiting incorrect spelling or grammar online is doing so because of dyslexia or another disability, as opposed to simply being lazy or unprofessional?

I would never knowingly ridicule someone who suffered from dyslexia or a similar disability, but I think we have to be careful of becoming so politically correct that we are afraid to criticize or hold anyone accountable for anything.

<comment><USER13> It's pretty prevalent 1 in 10 people (at the top end) that you interact with has dyslexia of some form. Among people in the arts it is much much higher, I am making an assumption here, but I would assume it is significantly higher on HN given that their is a population of designers that frequent the site. It is far more prevalent that speech related disabilities, but less recognized because people are embarrasses about having it, some of that embarrassment comes from the fact that unlike a speech condition it is acceptable to highlight their disability, many times to discredit their argument.

 _as opposed to simply being lazy or unprofessional?_

I can't begin to help you understand how many times I have been called lazy for not being able to spell, and how frustrating that is. That is the problem, you assume the majority are lazy people that cannot spell and don't want to learn, so you immediately assume someone is in the majority, because well you set up the odds that they are. But if 1 in 10 suffer from it, and the prevalence of people on HN exhibit spelling mistakes at close to the same rate would in not be just as valid to assume that maybe those that do exhibit them, may be in that 1 in 10 population.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


According to RyanAir, "Don't Insure Me" is a country - <AUTHOR> http://liveatthewitchtrials.blogspot.com.au/2014/03/lets-all-move-to-no-insurance-land.html

<comment><AUTHOR> This is possibly one of the darkest of dark patterns I've seen.</comment>


Raildar – Tracking the UK Rail Network - 076ae80a-3c97-4 https://raildar.co.uk/radar.html <comment> 076ae80a-3c97-4 The junction map ([https://raildar.co.uk/map/MKC](https://raildar.co.uk/map/MKC)) is also really interesting to look at.</comment>


How to Raise a Genius: Lessons from a 45-Year Study of Supersmart Children - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-raise-a-genius-lessons-from-a-45-year-study-of-supersmart-children/ <comment><USER2> Massive discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12443629](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12443629)</comment>


L-Cysteine Containing Vitamin Supplement Prevents Hangover - <AUTHOR> https://academic.oup.com/alcalc/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/alcalc/agaa082/5893464?redirectedFrom=fulltext <comment><USER2> Same as drinking lots of water....:)</comment>


Steve Wozniak Explains the Biggest Difference Between Steve Jobs and Bill Gates - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-steve-wozniak-steve-jobs-bill-gates-2015-5?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+businessinsider+%28Business+Insider%29

<comment><USER2> The biggest difference between Steve Jobs and Bill Gates is Steve Jobs rejected modern medicine, science and technology, leading to his early and most likely avoidable death.[1]

> In spite of pleas from family and friends, he tried to cure himself through > acupuncture sessions, drinking special fruit juices, visiting > "spiritualists" and using other treatments he found on the internet.

[1] [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/8841347/Steve- Jo...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/8841347/Steve-Jobs- regretted-trying-to-beat-cancer-with-alternative-medicine-for-so-long.html)</comment>


Ask HN: Handling unsolicited technical recruiter calls - <AUTHOR>

tl;dr - Tech Recruiters keep calling me, how do I get them to stop?
I've been getting daily unsolicited calls from technical recruiters (mainly from various employees of 1 company). I've emailed them politely mentioning I'm not interested. This caused a brief pause in the calls but now they are back.
I'd imagine quite a few HN readers have dealt with this problem. Advice? <comment><USER2> Brainstorm a product idea for which recruiters are the core market segment. Every time a recruiter calls, treat the call as a free half hour customer development interview or usability study. As you continue to refine the idea, build some mocks/prototypes that you can have the recruiter walk through while you're on the phone.

Two possible outcomes:

\- The recruiters quickly learn you have no intention of talking about job opportunities, and stop calling.

\- You develop a very well validated product that you can effectively sell to recruiters, a space that is red hot right now.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's quite easy if it's one specific company. Call them and ask to speak to their regional manager. Once through, inform them that you don't want anymore unsolicited calls and they will take you off their system.

As for stopping calls from recruiters completely, well it's near impossible. That's part of the reason why the vast majority of people can't stand tech recruiters. I don't necessarily enjoy calling people I haven't previously spoken to before but I do try my best to ensure I have a valid reason for calling.

</comment><comment><USER4> Tell them you're dead. It's the only effective way I've seen of delaying them more than a few months.

</comment><comment><USER5> At first I tried to reason with them. When I brushed off one, another one from the same office would call back. I started hanging up as soon as they announced themselves and not saying e anything. If I had caller ID at that job I would have just answered and hung up before they could even announce themselves. After a few of those they stopped.

</comment><comment><USER6> Just tell them to remove you from their database or mention legal action. Always worked for me.</comment>


Ask HN: Do other Silicon Valley startups open back their office? - <AUTHOR> I am currently working at Tellus, a real estate fintech startup in silicon valley. I was wondering how other silicon valley startups will reintroduce employees to an shuttered office environment. With what's going on with COVID-19, i was wondering if your company has a reopening plan for your offices. I am curious to hear your thoughts on this. <comment><USER2> There are some metrics, and we are currently so far away from being close to the targets in SF that I can't imagine reopening until 2021 at the earliest. Even then, they'd probably have to adjust some of the goals.</comment>


Accenture Sued over Website Redesign - <AUTHOR> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/04/23/hertz_accenture_lawsuit/ <comment><USER2> I don't know what's worse: that they chose Accenture or that they expected a better outcome.

</comment><comment><USER3> It was more than just a web redesign, but yeah it does seem they botched the whole thing pretty hard.

</comment><comment><USER4> is this what they call 'tech strategy'?</comment>


The Birth of the Semicolon - <AUTHOR> https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/08/01/the-birth-of-the-semicolon/#.XUPtiop5fsk.twitter <comment><USER2> If we're speaking about punctuation, there really needs to be another mark in between a period and exclamation point, something that means what you said is sincere.

Responding to a text by saying "Thanks." or "Thanks!" is so different. If I was talking to someone and they gave a compliment, I'd want to say a sincere "thanks", but there isn't a way to do that in a text that doesn't come off as weird.

<comment><USER3> > something that means what you said is sincere

Ideally, everything one says should be sincere, so your idea sounds weird to me. I think I understand you want more options in the communication medium of text since we can't have body language and voice tone here.

Personally, I just try to be consistent with my expressions. If my "Thanks." is always used in situations where I'm "sincere" or "deeply appreciative" or otherwise, then that's what it means from me.

There are people that express themselves with absurd amounts of exclamation points and all sorts of hearts and blushing emojis, and I understand that they haven't gone absolutely crazy for me because of that. I just keep tabs in the different expressions different people have for the same things.

The meanings of expressions are determined by those who use them.

<comment><USER4> > Ideally, everything one says should be sincere, so your idea sounds weird to > me.

This is an extremely characteristic HN/engineer comment.

People use irony in communication. It's part of the human repertoire. Saying "oh great" in response to bad news, for example. The notion that ideally there would be no irony in textual communication isn't a practical or desirable possibility. It's in the same Zuckerbergian category as beliefs in the transparency of communication or the sacred integrity of having a single online identity.

The thing that really kills the "sincerity mark" is that there's no reason why it can't be abused and lose its meaning, as has happened with the word "literally".

<comment><USER3> > The thing that really kills the "sincerity mark" is that there's no reason > why it can't be abused and lose its meaning, as has happened with the word > "literally".

Yeah, I was thinking that too. I forgot to mention.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "'cultural rebirth' after the gloomy Middle Ages"

Not the point of the article, but that slanderous characterization of the Middle Ages for some reason refuses to die even centuries following the fanaticism of the Reformation and the Enlightenment. It is well understood that the Middle Ages were a remarkeable period, culturally speaking. The Renaissance frankly grew out of the Middle Ages.

</comment><comment> king-rat Interesting that the semicolon was born out of a need for a longer pause in spoken language, rather than as a means to connect two independent clauses as is taught today

<comment><USER6> Virtually all punctuation marks started as prosody hints, indicating intonation and pauses, suggesting how the text is to be read aloud. In fact you can argue that this is still the case: it was only later that we invented grammatical structure rules for them, and even those are applied only in certain contexts like professional writing. In casual writing, we tend fall back to using punctuation as prosody markers, for example: "Worst. Episode. Ever."

<comment><USER7> Yes, reading a transcript without punctuation can give one a visceral sense of what drove its introduction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > The semicolon was born in Venice in 1494

Again! Ten years ago I met my (now) wife in Venezia (Venice), and since then I've become really interested in Venezia's history, inventions, etc.

It's incredible how many ideas, inventions, trends, important people are inextricably linked with Venezia between the 14th and 17th century. It was never a huge city, but it has been deeply influential, in a way similar to today's concept of "alpha city" [0], but not just limited to economic importance.

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

</comment><comment><USER9> The typography on the scanned 1494 page is beautiful. I also remember seeing the ancient Roman grave stones with the very nice letters, but I admire how they developed the types for printing.

<comment><USER10> Aldus Manutius and his workshop assistants had an incredible eye for design. Not just the typography but the layouts as well tend to be more elegant (to my eyes) than what we have today. One of my favorite examples: [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Hypnerotomachia_...](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Hypnerotomachia_Poliphili)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is there a reason why programming languages use semicolons instead of dots as terminators?

<comment><USER12> A lot of programming languages are descendants of ALGOL [1], where the ; is the separator, not a terminator (you don't have to use it on the last statement of a block of code).

Pascal (being based on algol) is the same, and the final "end." statement of the program, which is the main program, has a period/full stop. See end of this sample: [2] A begin / end block is one statement so they end like so "end;" unless it's the last one in a procedure, in which case you don't need the semi-colon.

C was similar, except they made ; a terminator instead of separator, but you don't have to put it at the end of being/end blocks. C just uses { } to make it clear. But then, in C++ I always forget to put ; at the end of a class definition. I get why it's there, but it looks more like a function definition to me which doesn't need a semicolon at the end.

Many languages are also from C or at least the Algol family tree (but usually C), like C++, Java, Javascript, etc.

More about ALGOL: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL)

[1] Algol sample: [http://sandbox.mc.edu/~bennet/cs404/doc/primes_alg.html](http://sandbox.mc.edu/~bennet/cs404/doc/primes_alg.html)

[2] Pascal sample: [http://courses.washington.edu/css448/zander/Code/array.p](http://courses.washington.edu/css448/zander/Code/array.p)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The author's description of the various typefaces and their semicolons is just exquisite. What a fucking writer.

</comment><comment><USER14> anyone knows what "ufq" means in the latin page?

<comment><USER15> It's "usq"; that's a medial S (ſ) rather than an f. It's short for "usque", meaning "up to" or "as far as".

A rough translation of the sentence would be "The experience teaches you as far as it can; the author can't say beyond what they've been given to speak."</comment></comment>


Amazon Preparing a Wearable That 'Reads Human Emotions' - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/5/23/18636839/amazon-wearable-emotions-report <comment><USER2> So, a mood ring?

<comment><AUTHOR> That reports to advertisers, of course!</comment></comment>


A Gumballer Goes Down - <AUTHOR> http://www.thesmokingtire.com/2012/a-gumballer-goes-down/

<comment><USER2> Ok guys, stop it already:

> _I know he's a genius but the border between cocky and stupid is often paper > thin._

Kimble is no genius, he's just very, very greedy and has less ethics than most of us. He's completely succeeded in convincing people that he has, say, hacker skills, which he doesn't.

Unless, of course, you think that convincing authorities all over the world that your a dangerous hacker, is genius.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The scenes of him in the TV3 clip are interesting insights into his personality.

</comment><comment><USER3> Gumball 3000 is in the US this year. I wonder if it's fun to watch it go by.

<comment><USER4> I went years ago to watch it start in SF, and it was very cool. Most of the cars were out on display, and the drivers floated around.

Got to take pics with Tony Hawk and Jesse James, see other famous people, and chat with some regular folks too.

They did a parade lap down Lombard St with the mayor, and then started the rally. This of course included a Lamborghini being pulled over for a burnout, and a (ticket or warning) being given 10 ft from the start with a crowd of people watching/jeering.

Good times for a high school kid who hadn't seen most of those cars in persn yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Jabba the Hut just got arrested.</comment>


Partying over Internet: Technological Aspects - <AUTHOR> http://250bpm.com/blog:158 <comment><USER2> I've been thinking about this too. In fact I've started hacking on an app to solve this for my group of friends. To me the two primary issues are:

1\. Sub groups without losing the context of the full group. I want to focus on a set of people and chat with them while also aware of what other groups are around. I want to be able to bring people into these groups at will. This also adds a gamification aspect where you can adjust groups, i.e. randomly mix, mix people who haven't talked to each other yet etc.

2\. Multi monitor. I want to see everyone and real estate is limited on a single screen. I should be able to add multiple windows or computers to my chat and have everyone spread across those windows. Only one window / computer will submit video and audio for me though.

<comment><USER3> There was a jit.si post on here where someone made a 2d map. If you were standing close to them on the map you heard the if voice. Further away people were ignored.

<comment><USER4> If I remember right there was an app from the early 2000s that did something kind of like this. It would be cool to combine the 2D map with a speech-to- text word cloud over clusters of people so you could see if you wanted to join another conversation.

<comment><USER5> Mumble has positional audio for game stuff - [https://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/Positional- Audio](https://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/Positional-Audio) its also extremely low resource usage and you can install/manage it yourself.

I really prefer it to discord/whatever other voice client because you can also do stuff like hierarchical broadcasting, a parent channel can broadcast to children without children broadcasting back.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> We've been running "dial up dance parties" in Phoenix for the last few weeks. A DJ streams music to a zoom hangout, and people dance in front of their camera. The magic bit is that there is a new curation job beyond djing: curating who is be "spotlighted" at the current time. So my and my wife's job (we have been organizing and promoting these parties) is to watch all of the participants and pick out who should get spotlighted.

It's been a LOT of fun and has been growing quickly. Our last party had about 40 people in it and every time we do it we know fewer of the people who show up.

<comment><USER7> Cool idea! I am fascinated that this is growing. I wouldn't have guessed so in the first place.

Is there interaction happening between the participants?

> every time we do it we know fewer of the people who show up.

This sounds like the retention rate is low, or is this a wrong conclusion?

Also I would be interested to learn for whom this is fun, and why.

<comment><USER8> > This sounds like the retention rate is low, or is this a wrong conclusion?

I think they mean that the percentage of their close friends goes down each time, as more people are invited. Network effect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There are two types of partying: raving and clubbing.

Clubbing, is for extroverts who enjoy socializing and being on the spotlight. Clubs have lots of lights, people dress in shiny colors and seek to bring attention to themselves. Camera sharing is the ideal format for this.

Raving, is for introverts. The setting is dark, people wear black and usually prefer to be left on their own and focus internally and in the music. It's a way to enjoy a social situation without being overwhelmed by the crowd. Avatars and virtual worlds is the ideal format for this.

Of course, I am generalizing here but I'm simply trying to make a point. An extrovert will not enjoy a setting where they can't draw attention to themselves. An introvert will not enjoy a setting where being in the spotlight is the default mode.

Speaking only by my own experience as being an introvert-extrovert and attending both clubs and raves I can tell you that there is minimal overlap in the crowds. A different type of people is in clubs and a different type of people is in raves. Generalizing both as "partying" is confusing, at least.

<comment><USER10> Well yes, and actually the OP is about even another kind. The article references a birthday party, which is more of a general social event vs a music or participatory/thematic event which is what you're talking about. Interestingly, the dance club environment seems easier to elicit online than the birthday party. The birthday party is all about the social chit chat dynamics whereas the club environments have a primary focus on the music (even tho there's plenty of other interactions as well). Online if you have faces + music, you have a dance party, or a decent facsimile.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Super interesting, thanks!

I've been doing zoom teleparties for a few weeks now and they're really kind of magical. I started when I had to cancel one of my IRL dance parties and we thought we'd give it a go. As a meatspace party promoter and DJ i was really surprised at how successful these are, and how much of the real life party vibe translates. At our peak we had 160 or so zoom guests and you really felt that presence!

With the apps we have now social interactions are limited to chat and physical communication (lots of people will mirror folks' movements, which is always a joy). There's so much you can do.

I've got a ton of ideas and sketches for a real online party and event app — a kind of perfect blend of my UX life and my party life. I'd love to work on it if I could find some folks with web conferencing experience.

</comment><comment><USER11> Consider using avatar chat, which has been shown to be able to deliver social presence, esp w VR.

[https://extendedmind.io/blog/2020/3/20/video-conferencing- wo...](https://extendedmind.io/blog/2020/3/20/video-conferencing-wont-cure- loneliness-avatar-chat-apps-can-help)

Example of a house party thrown in hubs: [https://www.facebook.com/1365390312/posts/10216647011272117/...](https://www.facebook.com/1365390312/posts/10216647011272117/?d=n)

<comment><USER12> I'm not familiar with avatar chat, but it does seem VR would solve some of the problems mentioned in the article (seeing the whole body, meaningful interactions, side conversations). The problem with VR is it's not widely used at the moment. Maybe this will change as a result?

<comment><USER11> Yep many of the benefits can be delivered without a VR headset (that's part of the gist of my post) - worth checking out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> A lot of in-person interaction for groups is just not possible with most (all?) conferencing solutions, e.g., sidebar discussions. Some of this can be handled through texts (which are an occasional solution in in-person meetings as well—in grad school, I was occasionally in group texts mocking the person speaking to our class), although there's the danger that messages might pop up inopportunely while screen sharing (this happened to a co-worker of my wife's during a presentation once).

And of course, there's always this: "Leaving your mic on is the new reply- all."

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting problem. It would be partly solved by the look-and-look-back protocol, because then it's obvious that you are speaking to a single person. But then, it could still happen that you accidentally avert your gaze and drop back to the common chatroom, making what you are saying audible to everyone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I enjoyed this a lot! It identified a problem and explored a couple of aspects of the solution. It's really fun to think about designing such a product. Even though there seem to be some technical roadblocks in the way, I would love to use an app like this!

</comment><comment><USER15> I recently stumbled upon Airmeet[1]. It's not really for birthday parties, more like networking events. Still, I find the concept intriguing.

They offer a kind of socializing space. It is organized by virtual tables. Each table holds up to 4 participants via webcam. That way you do not have the typical issue of large zoom calls where only a few people can talk at a time. You get a lot smaller conversations much like a real networking event.

They seem to be still starting out, so there are a few issues. But I hope they iron them out. The concept seems really promising.

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

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm really surprised no one has brought up VRChat. Though the hardware requirement may be a steeper barrier to entry, the software is free (non libre) and the experience is unlike any other

</comment><comment><USER17> What I'd like in an online party platform is a shared social area divided into conversations you can join. This is for both social bandwidth and network bandwidth. In real life conversations naturally form and fork off into new ones.

This needs to be more than just separate channels for it to work well. There should be some bleeding of audio between adjacent conversations, and maybe some limited video. I'm thinking perhaps "avatars" of people that get updated once a minute with their current video feed so you can look around the shared social area and get an idea of what is going on and have some sort of shared atmosphere. Maybe a shared background music track?

</comment><comment><USER18> Zoom's gallery view and pin video solves some of the problems with Hangouts discussed in the article. I like the idea of somehow building cabaceo into the app, although I think something simpler might be preferable (E.g. right-click on person, request to create breakout room.) I think Zoom kind of has this but it seems like only hosts can create break-out rooms, and they have to turn it on or something.

<comment><USER19> [https://support.zoom.us/hc/en- us/articles/206476093-Getting-...](https://support.zoom.us/hc/en- us/articles/206476093-Getting-Started-with-Video-Breakout-Rooms)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> There's always Second Life

<comment><USER21> Or the open source equivalent, Open Simulator.

[https://opensimworld.com/dir](https://opensimworld.com/dir)

[http://opensimulator.org](http://opensimulator.org)

<comment><USER20> I should have mentioned that. How is that project going? I wrote the first physics engine 10 years ago.

<comment><USER21> It's under active development, including adding features to stay mostly compatible with Second Life. Bakes on mesh will probably be the next big feature. Firestorm is probably the most popular viewer. I think BulletSim is now the default physics engine. There are two grid-independent currency systems, Podex and Gloebits.

I heard somewhere that there are around 300 public grids, most of which are on the hypergrid. There are a few significant forks, most notably Halcyon (created by the late InWorldz LLC) but there are only a handful of grids running those.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> [https://catch.social](https://catch.social)

We've been building this ;) will launch soon.

<comment><USER2> Your form didn't work for me :(

<comment><USER22> [https://apps.apple.com/us/app/catch- social/id1482148299](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/catch-social/id1482148299)

Here we go :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> TurnTable Live was out briefly (after TurnTable.fm closed).

I always thought it had a really cool party atmosphere for concerts. Here's a video of a concert that I took. No audio, unfortunately.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08SvwB9S53U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08SvwB9S53U)

<comment><USER9> TurnTable was awesome! Forgotten about it, thanks!

Edit: didn't know about Live, but the original[0] one, TurnTable.fm with the avatars was really a fantastic place to be in the Internet. So sad to see it end, but maybe someone can revive it?

[0]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPCWSL52uVU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPCWSL52uVU)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> A party app to fight the virus. [https://ba.net/screen-share- party](https://ba.net/screen-share-party)

</comment><comment><USER25> Imagine if everybody wore head cams. You could end up with complex strange loops reflecting intimacy and eye contact of an inverted kind.</comment>


The Art of Minimalism shown at HN - <AUTHOR>

The following lines are the entire JS stack HN is using to handle user votes. That includes DOM traversing, Event Handling and even AJAX-like posting without XHR.
In fact, these 18 lines are the only JavaScript code in the entire HN site.

    function byId(id) {
      return document.getElementById(id);
    }

    function vote(node) {
      var v = node.id.split(/_/);   // {'up', '123'}
      var item = v[1];

      // hide arrows
      byId('up_'   + item).style.visibility = 'hidden';
      byId('down_' + item).style.visibility = 'hidden';

      // ping server
      var ping = new Image();
      ping.src = node.href;

      return false; // cancel browser nav
    }

 If I was assigned to a task of building a social site like this one, in other words, reddit/digg/hn clone, perhaps site was serving jQuery, JQueryUI, backbone and underscore combined into a minified file, all in all to have a "nice and elegant cross browser MVC model which let users vote up/down/flag posts and updating the UI asynchronously".
Now, do not get me wrong, I am not anti modernism or fancy/slick UI. I do want my products to produce a polished and smooth experience, yet, we can learn a lot from this, as we aim to build something people want, release early, and often, etc. <comment><USER2> Hardly, there is a lot of arc that you are not seeing that really powers the voting and other features of the site like spam detection and voting ring detection. It's similar to the code at <http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc3.tar> but there are significant modifications as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's true, surely, work is done at server side.

I loved the really thin client we are observing in here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> On the other hand the HTML markup is not that minimalistic at all. A bit of CSS would've gone a long way in lightening it up.</comment>


My startup: Simplified Cloud Cost Management (pre-launch)  - <AUTHOR> http://cloudability.com/ojznq

<comment><USER2> The website looks really nice and I'm guessing those who are using many vendors will find this helpful.

Will you be able to provide as detailed information about the EC2 billing as Amazon? (as an example)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, absolutely. This is where the product started, tracking EC2 billing. You have to pull down the raw usage data too as the daily Amazon bill updates can be a bit out of sync.</comment></comment>


In Defense of Friction - Automated Trust Undermines Trust - <AUTHOR> http://socialmediacollective.org/2011/11/28/in-defense-of-friction/

<comment><AUTHOR> To see some more thoughts on this, you might want to look at:

<http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/12/the-end-of-social.html>

(discus) <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3338839></comment>


Open-source mapping stack - <AUTHOR> http://geosprocket.blogspot.com/2012/05/browser-cartography-some-safehouses-for.html

<comment><USER2> If you're interested in providing a web-based map without locking in a mapping vendor, try the Mapstraction library (<http://mapstraction.com/>).</comment>


Show HN: Send your items worldwide with travelers or make money while traveling - <AUTHOR> https://cargo2share.com/ <comment><USER2> And then you go to Prison in $COUNTRY.

This idea:

1: Only makes sense in the first place as a way to avoid VAT and other tariffs, and so eventually you will get shut down and prosecuted, this is literally smuggling.

2: Certainly going to be used to move around _very bad things_.

3: In the extremely unlikely chance that people don't go to prison for the various crimes this either requires or encourages, and this idea takes off, Airlines will respond by finding ways to prevent it from working. That 'extra space' in your bag is currently being sold, or the airline is saving money on fuel. They have a huge financial interest in shutting this down.

If I were a country with people smuggling in, say, macbooks in this way, I would just confiscate any unopened macbook that came through the airport. In most cases people would appeal the confiscation and the macbook would be returned, but how many macbooks have to be held for good before it is foolish to use this service?

This will never work and it is a very stupid thing to try. Even attempting this requires the people carrying items to lie to airport security and customs, every single time (did you pack everything yourself? Were you given any packages to carry for another person?)

OMG this is dumb.

<comment><USER3> Wow.. how did this idea get so far? From initially thinking of it.. to purchasing a domain name, building a functional website, creating a video to advertising/creating awareness (all of which were done very well)

<comment><USER4> > Our project is a result of more than 7 years of industrial and consulting > experience in different sectors

[https://cargo2share.com/about-us](https://cargo2share.com/about-us)

<comment><USER2> >> Our project is a result of more than 7 years of industrial and consulting experience in different sectors, including transportation, automotive industry, retail and finance.

While technically the careful wording leaves open that Retail could mean 'sat on the board of Walmart' we all know it really means 'worked at a BestBuy'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There is an established business model for doing this. I think it was more viable 20 years ago than it is today.

Here's a summary of how it works/doesn't work: [http://wikitravel.org/en/Air_courier](http://wikitravel.org/en/Air_courier)

</comment><comment><USER6> Good idea but: traveller will need to know what he/she will be carrying. Will they deliver in person? Airport could be miles away from the receiver's house.

</comment><comment><USER7> I thought about this idea myself, so let me point out the flaws in it (from my perspective):

\- There is very little incentive for carriers to carry the goods and this company to turn a profit as well

\- Global shipping will not be that much more expensive. Customs is what makes imports expensive

\- ^^ customs. You will be skirting them a lot. What happens during a random luggage stop-and-check when the carrier is found with a $1,000 Apple laptop? Who goes to jail or is held accountable?

\- What stops nefarious carriers from keeping the goods for themselves? Most carriers won't carry unknown items and when they become known (and their value) - and because the receiver won't go reporting about their Apple laptop they were expecting - theft becomes very real and likely

\- Traveler logistics: Airports aren't 5/10 minutes away from most folks. Getting the goods from the sender -> carrier -> receiver can and will be a major headache

There's plenty of issues, but I'd like to see where you guys go with this, as it will be an interesting experiment.

<comment><USER8> And at last, when someone discover that this is a good risk-free idea to drug trafficking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is actually how DHL got their start in the late 60s. They paid _the entire_ flight ticket for people on select routes (initially SF to Honolulu), in exchange for those people giving over their luggage allowance to DHL to courier valuable documents (such as bills of lading). [1]

Two points: 1) they were more innocent times and 2) DHL restricted itself to asking third parties to only carry paper documents

[1] [https://www.flexport.com/blog/dhl-bills-of- lading/](https://www.flexport.com/blog/dhl-bills-of-lading/)

</comment><comment><USER10> Another risk: there are various small rules for individual countries on what you can't carry in and a person carrying somebody else's luggage may not know those specific rules. (For example, flying into the Middle East with certain types of religious literature is a no-no). Huge risk for the guys carrying somebody else's personal items, even if they appear to be safe and innocent. International courier services handle a lot of risk, offer insurance, and have really improved the past few decades globally since every ships online these days.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey folks, thank you very much for the insightful comments. To our supporters: we will keep in touch ;)

</comment><comment><USER11> This may just be a hackathon project. Doesnt seem to give much away and is just a lead gen. May not be serious at all. Almost an unintended early April fools for HN?

</comment><comment><USER12> Besides the obvious risks involved I find the presentation a big turn off. Highly subjective of course.

</comment><comment><USER13> The perfect way to ship narcotics ?

</comment><comment><USER14> Man, the gold rush really is over.

</comment><comment><USER15> I think you should pitch this idea to the Cartels.

</comment><comment><USER11> Do i need bitcoins and a tor client?

</comment><comment><USER16> this venture will not takeoff

<comment><USER11> And they wont have enough runway</comment></comment>