The True Costs of Driving - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/10/driving-true-costs/412237/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> Not one mention in the article about the impact of trucks vs. cars on road wear and tear. The road damage from one 18-wheeler is equivalent to the damage by 9600 cars [1]. If you want to be serious about recouping the cost of transportation on road infrastructure, you have to tie the tax to the weight of the vehicle. But that would increase the cost of goods a fair amount due to the added transportation costs, so it's not popular.

[1] [http://archive.gao.gov/f0302/109884.pdf](http://archive.gao.gov/f0302/109884.pdf)

<comment><USER3> Is road damage from vehicles the main cause for road maintenance? In the midwest, I am 90% sure that the reason roads break apart is the freeze and thaw cycles in winter. I suspect deserts have something similar going on with hot summer days.

There are roads I know of that almost never see a car (say a few a month, weird dead-end roads).. and they wear down just as fast as main streets.

<comment><USER4> > In the midwest, I am 90% sure that the reason roads break apart is the > freeze and thaw cycles in winter.

On the other hand, the passenger lanes on freeways (where long-haul trucks generally cruise) sure wear out faster. I think it's more that freeze/thaw and snow plows exacerbate and accelerate ongoing wear and tear.

<comment><USER5> > the passenger lanes on freeways (where long-haul trucks generally cruise)

I'm not sure which lanes you mean by that. Or did you mean to say "passing lanes"?

<comment><USER4> It's entirely possible I used the wrong terminology, I'm talking about the "right" lane, the one next to the passing lane on a divided highway. You'll very often find that if the surface of the road is old at all, that lane (where the heavy long-haul trucks tend to travel most) is more worn. In the parts of the midwest that get a lot of snow, it's very noticeable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think the article deviously wraps up a whole host of issues and presents them as "if we didn't have these dang cars around, all these costs would go away."

First, without cars, keeping commute times reasonable requires that you either live very close to your job (which I admit is ideal anyway) or that you have a very, very robust intercity commuter transportation system. Something we're not even close to having.

Second, we can't move everyone and their brother to city center, or even within the city limits. A very large fraction of workers live outside city limits. Moving all these people with in a distance of rail stations that makes building lots of them cost effective would be very difficult from a city planning perspective.

Third, our economy has been operating on the notion (for quite sometime) that home ownership is ideal. Since people have a lot of their personal wealth wrapped up in their home, asking them to move is not really fair either. This affects "non-car users" too when that move is going to raise the prices of housing where the non-car users live.

Fourth, allowing people to move about easily from any city to any city means that there is liquidity in the job market. This is both for car owners and not. The fact that you can buy a car and go somewhere a train or bus doesn't means you can take a new job when the current one doesn't meet your needs.

There are also other costs that are saved (both monetary based and time based ones) for non-car users. Having fewer people in the city limits means that your wait times for services is lower than it could be. It's easier to get in and out of the city on a weekend.

That said, I'd be willing to pay a more direct tax for the convenience of owning a car if it made people feel better.

<comment><USER7> Pushing for expansion of remote working would do a world of good with regards to points 1,2 and 4.

<comment><USER6> I think it addresses number three too! If I can live anywhere I want, I can buy anyhouse I want, and sell it to someone who is looking for similar house- features instead of location, location, location.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Drivers will make use of roads, especially new ones, but only if the cost of > construction is subsidized by others.

Doesn't everyone benefit from the transportation system though? I like to get food and other goods on a regular basis like everyone else. My gut reaction says there are more drivers than non-drivers. We have 797 cars per 1000 people.

<comment><USER9> The governments isn't spending billions widening roads out to the exurbs because that's needed to get food and other goods around. If road construction was limited to what benefited everyone--instead of subsidizing particular lifestyle choices--there would be far less of it.

<comment><USER10> All the single-occupancy drivers out there that are causing jams are in fact hindering the flow of goods. Trucks stuck in that traffic waste fuel, pollute more and bring up the cost of goods.

<comment><USER6> I'd argue that we are way beyond this being a problem. In many cases the highways were designed with a much lower traffic count in mind. When the population was half what it is now.

The problem to me it seems is that highway planners did not design for continued growth. Or when they did, growth outstripped capacity.

Additionally, single car drivers is the absolute worst case - why not design for that?

Part of the problem with traffic is people go where the jobs are. There is a perverse incentive to house jobs where people aren't. This causes people to have to move a great distance everyday just to get to work.

What makes this all really laughable is that many people drive a great distance just to sit infront of a computer where most of their work is done on some sort of computer network or over the telephone. I think a nationwide telecommuting first policy would do more to reduce traffic than any of the other alternatives available.

<comment><USER11> > Part of the problem with traffic is people go where the jobs are. There is a > perverse incentive to house jobs where people aren't.

This! No city loves car entering their perimeter. But no city chooses to push enterprises/services/commerces out of their perimeter.

Talk about having your cake and eating it - or, as we say in Italy, having your wife drunk and the barrel full :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What a silly article. Is the only taxable value of somebody getting to work the money they spent on tolls and fuel? No, of course not, it's made up and beyond through gross product.

Direct taxes (at least here in the UK) are more of an influencing factor to try to push people towards other infrastructure.

Does this mean that non-drivers are paying for roads? Sure, but they're also getting value and indirect revenue from the system too.

<comment><USER13> I don't think your first line entirely invalidates the article. Yes, the transportation sector has all sorts of knock-on benefits to productivity, but they aren't free.

In the current system the direct tax revenue from transport doesn't cover its costs, so we're shuffling money around from other sectors. A lot of those other sectors probably benefit from the knock-on effects mentioned, so why not shift all the costs of transport into direct taxation?

Such a change would create a 1-1 mapping between the usage cost an individual/organization pays and the usage cost our entire economic system pays. Lining up selfish and collective interest usually improves efficiency.

Now, the price we pay for that efficiency coming from our current system is that the distribution of those costs changes. However, the cost is the same either way so now we're really just arguing redistributive policy.

I'm wary to advocate this position too strongly because if implemented in a vacuum it would be a very regressive tax (in the hurts poor people sense), but I would be very in favor of it with something counterbalancing that harm.

<comment><USER14> > I'm wary to advocate this position too strongly because if implemented in a > vacuum it would be a very regressive tax (in the hurts poor people sense), > but I would be very in favor of it with something counterbalancing that > harm.

Since this often comes up as a criticism of policies that eliminate subsidies, I want to emphasize your point that there are simple ways to counterbalance such a harm.

The easiest is you shave off some tax revenue from the wealthiest users/residents and redistribute exactly the amount back to the poor they would need to purchase the good as no-strings-attached cash. This makes poor people who choose to use the previously-subsidized good no worse off than before, but frees up those who never wanted to use it to find a different use of that money (e.g. public transit, or moving closer and paying higher rent but paying less in transportation).

<comment><USER12> So you'd remove an indirect tax, implement a new direct tax and then implement a welfare system to help people pay the new direct tax? Car stamps?

Just pulling on my reply to same, varying your tax on a person's earnings is a much better way of means testing life than by separately means testing every tax.

<comment><USER14> Not car stamps: the important distinction is that the welfare should not be earmarked for a specific use. This allows the market to behave naturally and no longer force non-users to pay the indirect tax while letting poor people who want to pay it not suffer material consequences vs. the indirect tax.

<comment><USER12> The welfare side of this is already handled quite effectively through income tax banding, though as you say, that does indirectly tax everybody for infrastructure.

But what's wrong with that? We all pay for national defence. We all pay for nationally funded arts and schooling and science. Even people without children or cancer or an interest in weird concept dance. We pay for this stuff because it makes our countries better, as a whole. Infrastructure is no different.

Even ignoring that, how do you issue this welfare to people who are paying this/these road use tax? Tax them less at the pump or the tolls? Who implements this?

And that still isn't fair. They're not paying for the roads they use. This money goes nationwide. Or does Tincanville (pop 30) have to shoulder the cost of their entire road network now?

Unless you're willing to take this to the absolute bureaucratic extreme, and make some people pay tons for low-use roads (which age naturally, regardless of use) an indirect tax of some description is the only way to keep the entire road network viable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is a great example of why taxes are so high in America. Instead of having one party be for lowering taxes and one for raising taxes, why not have both parties admit that we all want to make government more efficient with the money it does have?

Roads are surprisingly expensive to build and maintain, but sprawl requires more roads and it reduces the tax efficiency of the land. Here's a great article explaining how a classic main-street style road generates more property tax dollars than an equivalent sprawl street.

[http://www.theamericanconservative.com/urbs/traditional- deve...](http://www.theamericanconservative.com/urbs/traditional-development- is-a-municipal-gold-mine/)

Rail is expensive to build and maintain too, but maybe combined with ride hailing for the last mile, rail could be focused on just highly trafficked corridors that are also the most efficient people and dollar wise.

</comment><comment><USER16> In the US, and perhaps other places, the highway infrastructure is provided not just for personal use, but also for military logistics and civil response. There's are reasons I-185 runs to the front gate of Fort Benning beyond commuter convenience and civilian commerce.

</comment><comment><USER17> Taking only Gas Taxation as the only "user tax" is dubious at best

"User" Based taxation figures should include

1\. Gas Taxes

2\. Sales Taxes on vehicles

3\. Registrations and Inspection Fees

4\. Yearly Excise Taxation

5\. Environmental Fees

an several other kinds of taxes that directly apply to operation of motor vehicles,

Further this study (that I saw) did not seem to address the MASSIVE subsidy given to commercial operations on the Interstate system, the Gas taxes paid by Commercial Trucking companies is fraction of that charged to operators of non- commercial vehicles.

<comment><USER18> There's also the positive externalities of infrastructure, and that winds up as land values. Like, my dad grew up in a house in what was, at the time, a rural area near Seattle. When we were driving down I-405, he'd point out a major commercial building that went up there after the freeway went up. The difference in property value between the two is almost entirely due to I-405 being there.

Basically, my point is that drivable places tend to be more valuable than non- drivable, so property taxes are an indirect way of capturing the value provided by infrastructure (particularly land-value taxes).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> > Drivers don't come close to paying for the costs of the roads they use.

Why should they? Roads are not there only for those actually using them: they are meant to be always available for everyone. Imagine a road that is used only from time to time, just by emergency vehicles: don't you agree that would be a reasonable way to spend tax money?

<comment><USER19> I would be fine with everyone paying for the roads and them being actually available for everyone. The problem is that many roads are made only for cars and do not have adequate side walks and protected bike lanes such that everyone can use them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The argument in the article is misleading given the data it presents. What it should have said is that drivers pay for roads both via the gas tax AND by other forms of tax. The portion paid by the gas tax is itself not enough to cover road maintenance.

Of course, this means that some non-drivers and non-car-owners also pay taxes used for road maintenance. It would have been worthwhile for the author to look up those numbers and tell how much non-drivers pay. Given that most Americans drive, this argument probably wouldn't have the same impact as the one presented in the article.

<comment><USER21> Plus the idea that non-car-owners do not benefit from a functioning road system is laughable on it's face. Busses and Ubers need roads too, and that's not even including the trucks that bring them their food and Amazon orders or the police that protect them and the fire fighters that may one day save their life.

That all being said, it is true that the gas tax (along with most other taxes) has not kept pace with the growth of our infrastructure or inflation in general. Going in on increasing the gas tax is the best way to insure you are not getting re-elected because many Americans apparently believe that they pay enough taxes (they don't.)

<comment><USER20> Right, it's obvious that non-drivers benefit from the roads too. You could still argue for higher gas taxes or other use fees if you wanted, for example to better align incentives (extra road usage leads to directly higher costs for the user). But this article certainly doesn't make that case.

<comment><USER22> I think the article proposition is exactly what you're saying. Raise the gas taxes to cover the real cost of the infrastructure.

<comment><USER21> Again though it's political suicide. People will bitch all day about having crummy roads but if you suggest a tax increase that would amount to 2 bucks extra for every tank you'll be run out of town metaphorically, and possibly literally.

<comment><USER22> In France the tax was raised right when oil prices where down. It eases the pain a little.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Does this mean, when politicians at the national level say "we need more fiscal stimulus to rebuild infrastructure," that they're wasting money?

Would it be better if those politicians said "we need higher taxes on cars and trucks to rebuild infrastructure?"

I mean, one of the messages we hear repeated ad nauseum from economists and politicians is that this sort of government subsidy is a good thing: it creates jobs and grows GDP. It's a win-win.

Now, are we supposed to believe it's some kind of perverse incentive and an unfair subsidy?

Which is it?

<comment><USER24> > Would it be better if those politicians said "we need higher taxes on cars > and trucks to rebuild infrastructure?"

I would be better if they did it. But, if they _said_ it they would immediately lose their office. So...

It's been known for a very long time in economic circles that the taxes we have are not the best taxes, or even good taxes; they are the taxes that politicians were able to get people to vote for. So, we have a staggeringly- low gas tax and make up for it with income, sales and property taxes.</comment></comment>


US Treasury Guidance on Virtual Currencies (aka Bitcoins) - <AUTHOR> http://fincen.gov/statutes_regs/guidance/html/FIN-2013-G001.html <comment><USER2> In other words, if you run a Bitcoin exchange in the United States and you don't have 47 money transmission licenses, you'd better call your lawyer.

If you own Bitcoins, you should prepare for the very real possibility that one day, depending on arbitrary state or USDOJ enforcement actions, you may never be able to convert your Bitcoins back to dollars.

For a sense of how backwards our financial regulators are, and how poorly they understand the issues at hand, take a look for yourself:

<https://www.facecash.com/legal/brown.html#document27>

Actual quotes: "We don't regulate technology," and "We don't treat every applicant exactly the same." —Teveia Barnes, Commissioner, California Department of Financial Institutions

(This was last week in Sacramento.)

Everyone should also familiarize themselves with 18 U.S.C § 1960:

<http://www.plainsite.org/laws/index.html?id=14426>

It's a federal crime to break your state's money transmission law that operates independently of, but is likely to be affected by, FinCEN's federal guidance.

<comment><USER3> I don't dispute any of that, but in an ideal Bitcoin economy people wouldn't _need_ to convert to USD. Obviously the Bitcoin economy isn't at that point yet and people need the USD to peg "value" to what a Bitcoin is. But eventually, if Bitcoin becomes more widely accepted, shouldn't the economy settle on to what 1BTC is "worth" regardless of what other currencies are doing?

<comment><USER4> "in an ideal Bitcoin economy people wouldn't need to convert to USD"

So how do you think they will pay their taxes? How do you think businesses will repay their loans? Do you really think the US government will accept Bitcoin tax payments, or that banks would be stupid enough to issue loans in a deflationary currency that conveys no legal protections?

Bitcoin's only real value in its ability to ultimately be sold for a fiat currency.

<comment><USER5> Its real value is being a medium of exchange. For example selling X widgets for Y bitcoins and exchange those for Z months use of a VPN.

There are many, many ways people who wish to deal in bitcoins can find a way to convert them into USD. Even if that means buying prooducts from overseas using bitcoin, importing them, then selling the products on ebay for USD.

<comment><USER4> "Its real value is being a medium of exchange"

Value is the result of supply and demand. What is the demand for a medium of exchange? Why not just use monopoly money, or acorns, or lumps of clay?

For that matter, why do US citizens not use CAN instead of USD? What drives the citizens of a country to use the currency issued or authorized by that country's government?

"For example selling X widgets for Y bitcoins and exchange those for Z months use of a VPN."

Yeah, and what do you think the VPN provider is paying its bills with? When the government says, "Pay us the tax on your energy use," what does the VPN provider reply with? "Here are some Bitcoins?" Unless the government is accepting Bitcoin for tax payments -- which would effectively turn Bitcoin into a fiat currency -- your service provider is either going to need a way to convert their Bitcoin currency into some other currency, or they will require that you pay them with something other than Bitcoin.

<comment><USER6> 1\. Your economics are wrong. Value is _not_ the market price. Value is subjective; the value of something to a given person is the maximum price the person is willing to pay. Value is not the same for each person.

2\. BTC's unique feature is the instantaneity and anonymity of transactions.

<comment><USER4> "Value is not the market price"

Who said it was?

"the value of something to a given person is the maximum price the person is willing to pay"

Which is dependent on the supply and demand of that "something."

"BTC's unique feature is the instantaneity and anonymity of transactions."

"Instant" in the "10-30 minutes" sense, and anonymous in the "you can be tracked" sense...

<comment><USER6> Endoself is correct.

That's the problem with HN. It is clear when someone's arguments have no foundation in modern economic theory _and_ practice, yet these arguments get thrown around with a false sense of certitude. I cited the _textbook definition_ for "value," and yet you argue that it's dependent on supply and demand, which ignored the fact that the definition of value that I cited is precisely what makes up demand.

Person A is willing to pay $200 for a watch. Yet the market price of that watch is $20. Just because that person saved $180 does not mean that value of the watch to person A suddenly and magically fell by $180. Clearly this person found $200 worth of utility in that watch, or else s/he wouldn't have been willing to pay for it at that price.

> "Instant" in the "10-30 minutes" sense, and anonymous in the "you can be > tracked" sense...

Now your arguments are focusing on semantics.

EDITS: clarity and less snark.

<comment><USER4> "I cited the textbook definition for "value," and yet you argue that it's dependent on supply and demand, which ignored the fact that the definition of value that I cited is precisely what makes up demand."

If your textbook is telling you that value is equivalent to demand, perhaps you need a new textbook. It is easy to illustrate the effect supply has on value with the following thought experiment:

      If I told you that I was charging $10 to step inside my house and breath some air, would you be willing to pay?  Now imagine a world where breathable air is a scarce resource, and there are no other sources of breathable air for miles around my house; would you be willing to pay in that case?

<comment><USER6> You cannot seriously bandy about the concepts of supply, demand, and market (equilibrium) price, concepts which form parts of basic economic theory, and then throw out the standard economic definition of value.

> perhaps you need a new textbook.

That clause is utterly devoid of any logical content.

Your thought experiment demonstrates nothing except the basic concept of "people will buy whatever is cheapest." Let's say fresh air is worth $1 million to me. If you were charging $10, I would not pay because I can get it for free and gain a "consumer surplus" of $1 million. That does not change the fact that I would be willing to pay $1 million if air were a scarce resource.

<comment><USER4> "You cannot seriously bandy about the concepts of supply, demand, and market (equilibrium) price, concepts which form parts of basic economic theory, and then throw out the standard economic definition of value."

There is no "standard" definition of "value:"

[http://www.ehow.com/info_7904133_difference-between- classica...](http://www.ehow.com/info_7904133_difference-between-classical- neoclassical-economics.html) [http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc1/NeoclassicalEconomics.ht...](http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc1/NeoclassicalEconomics.html)

Your claim that value is nothing more than "demand" is not universally accepted among economists. I did not throw out any definitions; all I did was point out that value is affected by both supply and demand, which is a straightforward neoclassical interpretation.

<comment><USER6> Firstly, that eHow article you cite is hardly reputable, and it basically contradicts itself. It states that in neoclassical economics, value is a function of supply AND demand, yet it goes on to state that value = utility. That value=utility argument is what is I am trying to say. Utility has nothing to do with supply.

The other article only prove my point. Neoclassical economics is the "mainstream," "standard" economic theory, for both conservative and liberal economists alike. It mentions classical economics only for the sake of historical context (it was prevalent in the 19th century but is now outdated).

You don't even properly state my argument. I never said value = demand. I said value is what makes up demand. That is an important distinction, and it is one that makes sense (if you don't value something, you don't demand it. If you value something, you do demand it.)

Lastly, you ignored my response to your thought experiment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Let's pop back to the big picture here. One of the functions of the Treasury Department is to prevent money laundering. And, by prevent, I mean make onerous for large amounts of money. Like millions or tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars. Think Mexican drug cartel money.

One way to do that is to log all exchange or transmission transactions above a certain size -- which is what licensed money changers and transmitters have to do. You're not prohibited from performing these transactions, you just have to give them your name and SSN or Taxpayer ID.

Sure, there are ways around this, like buying a million rubber duckies in China, then shipping them to the US and selling them at carnivals. But -again- try to import a million of anything, and US Customs will want to know your name and SSN.

If you're talking about changing $100 or even $1,000 into BTC, the government doesn't really care. You might think, can't the criminals just split their transactions into small enough chunks that they can avoid the law altogether? Sure, maybe they could (and certainly they do) -- but at some point, having to conduct a thousand individual exchange transactions to move a million bucks starts to get onerous, and is also likely to leave a data trail -- there will be correlations somewhere.

It's never going to be impossible to exchange BTC for USD untraceably. The point here, which should come as no surprise, is that the government intends to make it impossible to exchange large amounts of value anonymously without it being annoying, time-consuming and costly.

<comment><USER8> The US has not gone very far yet with their anti money laundering program. In Sweden, we have got to the point where one can only withdraw a maximum amount of $200/$1000 a day (it depend on the ATM, where common one is the $200 version). There is also a hard limit of $2000 a week.

Alternative, one can "request" a larger withdraw from the bank which means two consecutive physical visits to a designated bank office, with a week between, and during designated hours (10-14). At the bank, they may ask you questions regarding the nature of the money withdraw, and is allowed to deny you if they feel the answer is unsatisfactory.

As a side note, an ID is also always required for any money transfer no matter transaction size. They also removed the option for SMS payments (it was considered too anonymous). The effect from this have been that the most common form of donations to red-cross and the likes has dropped with 90%. Last, any transaction (all sizes) is logged and shared internationally with EU and US.

<comment><USER9> Please provide sources for these claims (and prove me wrong!). I'm quite sure none of them are actual law as compared to company policies. The ATM limit is surely because of personal security reasons (but it can be raised if you notice the bank), and the SMS payments being removed because the communications providers dont want to be scrutinised by the government under "financial service providers law".

<comment><USER8> Each bank differs slightly, through a good summery is a blog post from 2010 ([http://mfc.elmberg.net/2010/03/07/kontantuttag-vad-galler- fo...](http://mfc.elmberg.net/2010/03/07/kontantuttag-vad-galler-for-min- bank)). I am quite sure however that most is not law, but rather the banks trying to increase earnings by pushing customers to use credit cards over cash. However, if you ask the banks, they will say its to limit the number of robberies at banks. Given the speed that we are moving towards a cashless society, the truth is likely a mix of them all.

I picked Swedbanks number in my post above, mostly because they are focused on normal consumers and less so at businesses. The numbers are also fairly similar to other banks, with only a few hundred dollars in difference compared to other banks. Their exact numbers are written on their website ([http://www.swedbank.se/privat/kort-och- betalningar/kort/om-k...](http://www.swedbank.se/privat/kort-och- betalningar/kort/om-kort/kontantuttag-och-insattningar/index.htm)). However, I couldn't find a link for the procedure with larger transactions. The best I could find is this news paper article ([http://www.sydsvenskan.se/ekonomi/bankerna-stoppar-stora- utt...](http://www.sydsvenskan.se/ekonomi/bankerna-stoppar-stora-uttag/)). I learned personally the procedure by calling my bank and going through the process myself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Now this is getting interesting. For a _decentralized_ virtual currency:

 _A person that creates units of this convertible virtual currency and uses it to purchase real or virtual goods and services is a user of the convertible virtual currency and not subject to regulation as a money transmitter._

I would translate that to mean "no sales tax"... and that won't last long.

<comment><USER11> What that means is that people mining bitcoins don't need to adhere to the regulations for Money Servicing Businesses (MSBs): <http://www.fincen.gov/financial_institutions/msb/>

However bitcoin exchanges/wallets (i.e. Coinbase) will need to.

Edit: It's not so simple. See child/grandchild comments.

<comment><USER12> And also

> By contrast, a person that creates units of convertible virtual currency and > sells those units to another person for real currency or its equivalent is > engaged in transmission to another location and is a money transmitter.

This sounds like they want miners to register as money transmitters?

<comment><USER13> tl;dr No. IANAL.

If you mine Bitcoins, you hold them. If you want to exchange them, you can give them to someone in exchange for dollars (in which case the exchange is an MSB and is subject to the rules for money transmitters) or you can give them to someone in exchange for "real or virtual goods or services", in which case you're fine, or you can hold them, in which case they don't care.

On the other hand, if you happen to mine some coins and then set up a lemonade stand in front of your house where you sell those coins to somebody in exchange for real dollars, then you are a money transmitter according to the guidelines.

<comment><USER14> That would make sense, but doesn't appear to be what they actually said. They didn't mention that if the party buying your bitcoins for dollars is itself an exchange, the miner is exempt from regulation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> At first glance, it looks like it would require all miners and exchanges that convert between BTC and USD to register... However, I also found this:

[http://www.fincen.gov/financial_institutions/msb/definitions...](http://www.fincen.gov/financial_institutions/msb/definitions/msb.html)

Among other things, it states that there is an activity threshold of $1,000/day before you have to register.

Regarding miners, in current exchange rates, there is $180,000 in BTC being mined each day, so you'd have to be doing about 0.5% of the total BTC hashrate, which would currently be around 250Ghash/s, to one organization to qualify. Anyone with a rate that high is basically a for-profit business at this point, and with that income level, I'm not too worried about them having to register. The large pools also have rates well above that, but I'm not sure if they would qualify, depending on exactly how they distribute earnings.

As far as exchanges, at that level of business, they pretty much are a substantial financial institution, and I don't see a real problem with them having to register as such.

I see it as a net win for Bitcoin - a relatively reasonable amount of regulation, and in return, the implied assurance that there will not be a much more severe level of regulation or an attempt to criminalize anything involving Bitcoin. I think the market is reading it the same way, because BTC seems to be up against the USD on all of the exchanges I checked.

Of course, I could be reading this all wrong... I'm no lawyer and I don't really know much of anything about financial regulations.

<comment><USER16> The same page says,

> No activity threshold applies to the definition of money transmitter. Thus, > a person who engages as a business in the transfer of funds is an MSB as a > money transmitter, regardless of the amount of money transmission activity.

So, the $1000/day threshold appears not to apply to money transmitters.

(I'm not a lawyer)

<comment><USER15> Hadn't noticed that, could change things... There's a lot of wrinkles in how these laws are actually applied, though. I suppose it will take a while to sort out exactly what each type of entity needs to do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Does this guidance also apply to video game virtual currencies as well? My initial assumption was that "convertible" means it only applies to currencies that can be exchanged back and forth with fiat currency, but I don't explicitly see that stated.

<comment><USER18> I doubt the authors were smart enough to think of this, and I don't think most people here have really thought of this yet. The online gaming industry is going to be very interested in this once they realize the potential impacts.

In the case of Diablo III, you can sell your in-game virtual gold for real money in their Real Money Auction House, via PayPal. Other games have less official means of exchanging between currencies, but that's at least one official/built-in version that I can think of.

<comment><USER19> They're covered in the "centralized virtual currencies" section. Since Diablo gold only exists on Blizzard's servers, it is a centralized virtual currency.

Blizzard and gold selling sites are considered MSBs, but not users.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20>
      | Accepting and transmitting anything of value
      | that substitutes for currency makes a person a
      | money transmitter under the regulations
      | implementing the BSA

This makes it sound like anyone that anyone engaging in a financial transaction is a "money transmitter."

<comment><USER21> Along with facebook coins, diablo 3 gold, and linden dollars.

\+ any mobile game with "coins" that can be bought with dollars

<comment><USER22> Where can I convert that stuff to dollars? Yes, they have "value", but they aren't currency. Often there's a "market" you can find to convert real world currency _in to_ game junk. But there are no symmetrical markets for buying dollars with game current. That's a vitally important distinction, and part of the definition of a currency.

Bitcoin is a currency. It was designed that way, there is no attempt to hide that fact, and everyone involved knows what it is. Pretending that a currency exchange won't be regulated like other exchanges is just fantasy.

<comment><USER23> In the case of Diablo3 you can buy in game gold for money off the real money auction house.

Going the other way you can sell gold for money on the real money auction house and in return can receive the money into a PayPal account.

There is a transaction fee of 15% of the total sale price for converting to real money. This is on top of the transaction fee for selling the item on the real money auction house which is either $1 (items) or 15% (consumables including gold).

[http://us.battle.net/d3/en/game/guide/items/auction- house#fe...](http://us.battle.net/d3/en/game/guide/items/auction-house#fees)

So sending money from one person to another via diablo3 gold would cost 30% or possibly less if you buy items with the gold you buy and sell them on the real money auction house, though that's probably slower and more time consuming.

Alternatively you can transfer the money to a Blizzard account, which can be used to buy items on Blizzard's own store. This avoids the 15% fee for the transfer of real money (but not the listing fee). However, laundering money with Blizzard merchandise is probably a risky business. That said, if you bought enough of a game right around it's release that was popular it might be worthwhile.

PayPal itself is a registered MSB. So that may avoid the issue for Blizzard in the case of the route of converting to real money via PayPal. However, I'm not clear if the regulation applies in the case of buying goods and services from a Blizzard account.

I'd say the fact that you can trade gold in game between players is itself another problem for Blizzard.

I'm not a lawyer, this isn't legal advice, etc...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Bitcoin Magazine's take - [http://bitcoinmagazine.com/fincen-bitcoin-users- not-regulate...](http://bitcoinmagazine.com/fincen-bitcoin-users-not- regulated-exchanges-are/)

</comment><comment><USER25> An important point to realise here, that some seem to be missing, is bitcoin is a global currency and these rules only apply inside the United States.

</comment><comment><USER26> This is driving the price up, and is great news. I know of two businesses with _FinCEN registration IDs_ :

<http://howdoyoubuybitcoins.com/from/ziggap/> <http://howdoyoubuybitcoins.com/from/bitinstant/>

Digital cash isn't going away anytime soon.

<comment><USER4> I am not sure it is accurate to call Bitcoin "digital cash," given that it does not actually meet the formal definition of a secure digital cash system -- Bitcoin is not secure against a polynomial time adversary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This seems a bit of a landgrab or an exploitable (regulation-sense) ambiguity:

 _In addition, a person is an exchanger and a money transmitter if the person accepts such de-centralized convertible virtual currency from one person and transmits it to another person as part of the acceptance and transfer of currency, funds, or other value that substitutes for currency._

So, if you only exchange virtual currency, do you now fall under US FinCEN rules or does, say, virtual currency not count as a "substitute" for currency?

<comment><USER28> Not really a land- _grab_. Just the landlord walking up to some folks picnicking and mentioning, "by the way, you are on my land". Or equivalently - "Hi, I just wanted to mention that your leash is exactly this long. Thanks for listening"

It's not like the government isn't always thinking about the importance of its control over the currency.

<comment><USER27> Control of currency in the form of _legal tender_ , yes that would be fully understandable. But I'm talking specifically about the passage on "decentralized virtual currency" _and_ all that is being exchanged is virtual currency.

For example, you charge a fee in the virtual currency itself (or some other virtual currency) for exchanging it in some way that does not involve legal tender of any jurisdiction.

<comment><USER7> _For example, you charge a fee in the virtual currency itself (or some other virtual currency) for exchanging it in some way that does not involve legal tender of any jurisdiction._

What would you be exchanging it for, then?

All the Treasury is trying to regulate is the exchange of dollar-denominated wealth into another currency, whether actual (fiat currency of some jurisdiction) or virtual. They don't care about transactions that don't involve dollars on one side (at least not as addressed by this letter).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I see that the prepaid accounts for cellular and game access can be sanitized. I expect at least one shady MVNO to offer prepaid SIM cards that can be recharged with BTC as that's a very easy way to move cash across national borders; and I expect that telco's are treated with pretty much the same _laissez faire_ attitude as HSBC was with respect to money laundering.

<comment><USER30> How would money laundering via prepaid SIMs work?

Every time I've gotten a prepaid card, I've had to show identification (usually a passport outside the US). From what I recall the ostensible reason for this is to track people who might use a cell phone as a remote bomb trigger. Nevertheless, if there is an ID associated with each prepaid SIM, I'd think that would be the hook that could be used to penetrate a money- laundering scheme. Am I missing something?

<comment><USER29> It's not the end-user who's likely to be doing money laundering, although that might happen any how.

Here's a sketch of how it might work, an entity with a large amount of USD in bank accounts in the US, that wishes to move the money elsewhere without triggering SARs pays USD for prepaid wireless service which they use to provision prepaid wireless cards, which loudly advertise that they can be funded using BTC. Millions of people who are locked out of the "real" economy in one way or another start using BTC to buy wireless minutes, or electricity, or nights in capsule motels; whatever fungible commodity the prepaid service provider can get a good deal on. Those BTC are perhaps transferred back into TND, ISK, CHF or some other local currency, or kept as an offshore BTC fund.

Connoisseurs of global financial crime will recognize that this is basically a souped up internet speed version of the Peso Exchange that doesn't rely on shipping goods to overseas locations.

Now if a player with enough legitimate cover were to run this playbook, they could do it as a branded card and basically own the public perception of prepaid card good for all kinds of things that can get paid for by the internet...

Not to say that there aren't issues with this model, and this is not a game one could get into with less than 30 Million USD in liquid assets. But there are a surprisingly large number of organisations that could field both the front businesses and the free cash flow to run this. And a slightly smaller number that could do it in a way that wouldn't wind up with their executive team on the Interpol watchlists.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> How does this affect bitcoin startups like CoinBase? Do they have a money transmission license? Can you even get one for Bitcoin?

</comment><comment><USER32> This faintly gives me nightmares remembering the difficulties the US government caused converting poker winnings back into US dollar payouts. If something doesn't outright break current laws, we have a tendency to just legislate it out of existence. I want bit coins to succeed but this seems like a real possibility.

</comment><comment><USER33> Slight tangent:

What is the status on the tax implications and the legality of online gambling with bitcoin? There are a few places online that let you play poker etc. with bitcoins. Is that legal in the US? How are winnings taxed?

The wiki([https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Tax_compliance#Are_my_bitcoins_ta...](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Tax_compliance#Are_my_bitcoins_taxed_as_income.2C_or_as_capital_gains.3F)) talks about "Income that is earned through the exchange of services with another person, whether in the form of bitcoins, dollars, or barter;". Would income through gambling fall in that category?

</comment><comment><USER34> Coincidentally, the largest Bitcoin exchange is moving from Japan to the US in less than two weeks. <http://coinlab.com/transition>

<comment><USER35> Not moving entirely, just 'outsourcing' their US business to Coinlab, I believe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> After my initial post, which caused a lot of discussion - <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5398686> , I have another question for Y'all:

Let's imagine situation where program is created, which uses bitcoins as a payment to automatically buy computing resources and launch more instances of itself.

And to get bitcoin to pay for these resources this program provides proxy/VPN service.

Does program owe taxes? From what amount? To whom? In what currency?

</comment><comment><USER37> As long as you can convert bitcoin to some relatively stable currency somewhere in the world, the US government will have a tough time getting a handle on it.

There is no reason bitcoin needs to be converted to USD on US soil. If you have to exchange your bitcoin for HKD in Hong Kong, easy methods can arise for this, and it may not be a big issue.

</comment><comment><USER38> TL;DR

If you only buy or mine bitcoins - you are safe. Once you'll try to exchange them for real money - you must be regulated.

<comment><USER39> "By contrast, a person that creates units of convertible virtual currency and sells those units to another person for real currency or its equivalent is engaged in transmission to another location and is a money transmitter."

If you mine bitcoins and then convert them to real money (i.e. not buy goods or services with them) then you will be regulated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> My goodness, so many bytes spilled.

I wonder what would happen if we took the time and energy we invest in picking apart and analyzing unjust and immoral laws/policies (or playing armchair economist), and directed it at safely circumventing them, and helping others to do the same?

<comment><USER41> It is not as easy and much, much more expensive to "safely" circumvent an unjust/immoral law as it is to critique the problems in any legal system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> BTC seems to like that announcement. It's still climbing.

</comment><comment><USER11> Can somebody translate that into English please?

<comment><USER43> The gist I got from it is that the US government is aware of bitcoin, has some casual ruleset surrounding it and will not (for now) take action against anyone using it, or if they do, it'll only be the exchanges, not individuals. Looks like Bitcoin is safer than a Cyprian bank.

<comment><USER44> It would be safer than a Cyprian bank if BTC prices were as stable as the Euros. For all the criticisms it received, the EUR is more stable than most of the currencies it replaced, and it did not see a single crash in prices as bad as BTC has seen several times. So really, you shouldn't worry about the possibility of the government taking 7% of your money if the alternative is a virtual currency that seen losses of more than 75% in a single day.

<comment><USER25> Except for the fact that we don't yet know the full extent of the Cypriot haircut, but it looks that some will be paying way more than 7%. Closer to 15% for some [1]. They've now extended the "bank holiday" to "Thursday" [2]. And at least BTC is convertible in a crisis without a central authority. If you can't get your money from the bank _at all_ (which is the case with Bank Holidays) then it's not much good to you.

In a systemic financial collapse, between having BTC on my local computer [3] and having numbers on a computer in a failed financial institution, I know which one I'd rather have. You may feel differently, and that's fine.

[1: [http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-03-18/worst-case-big- depo...](http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-03-18/worst-case-big-depositors- cyprus-1526-haircut) ] [2: [http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-03-18/cyprus- bank-holiday...](http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-03-18/cyprus-bank-holiday- gets-another-extension-bank-reopening-now-set-thursday) ] [3: Well, the private key assosciated with the BTC blockchain that those BTC are assigned to ]

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> We should probably realize that the government will find a way to either:

1) Embed itself firmly into the bitcoin process and siphon cash for the bankers who run the government or 2) destroy bitcoin if it's so secure it can run without a government.

<comment><USER46> 1) They're already in as deep as they can get. Bank transfers (the way most BTC is traded) already leave an audit trail. The problem is that they can't control the transactions themselves, but they will never be able to, so they're already in as deep as they can get.

2) How would it destroy it? There is quite a lot of distribution already, I think it's not much longer before Bitcoin could survive without official exchanges. They'd also need to outlaw cash if they want to stop Bitcoin from being bought.</comment></comment>


Predicting the Next Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://www.telecoms.com/10511/predicting-the-next-twitter

<comment><USER2> An interesting viewpoint on what it takes to "predict" such influential events (including the adoption of a particular product/service) is the _black swan theory_. Nassim Nicholas Taleb seems to be very closely associated with it.

Basically, Taleb says the event must be:

1\. Quite difficult to predict

2\. Have an significant impact

3\. Be able to be explained rationally, after the fact

Examples include September 11th attacks, the personal computer, Google and others.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment>-----

Read more about at your desired level of interest:

wiki: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory>

video: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDbuJtAiABA>

pdf: <http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/ARTE.pdf>

book: [http://www.amazon.com/Black-Swan-Impact-Highly- Improbable/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Black-Swan-Impact-Highly- Improbable/dp/1400063515)

\</comment><comment></comment><comment>-----

Note: I found the writing style of the author to be a little quirky. You may want to read a sample chapter at local bookstore before going all in.</comment>


Ask HN: I've users + growing who want more. I need capitol, what do I do? - <AUTHOR>

I am running a free site, that could do ads at some point. But my users are asking for an iOS app. They say they would pay for it as well. The problem is the website is easy, well I mean all it took was sweat capitol.
The iOS app would require investment in some more serious hardware. I don't need alot, I just need cover server cost.
I haven't ever worked on something that needed capitol investment, and I don't know where the best place is to ask, or even start looking. <comment><USER2> Don't spend 10,000$ on a server for 2 years, spend 300$ on an AWS server (the big one) for the first month, and from then on you're getting cash in (as you mentioned), thus paying for future months. Solved.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you can't get a loan for $1000 (as mentioned in comments elsewhere), what makes you think that an investor is willing to give you $10000+? Even as a poor college student with little job history and no paying job I could easily apply for and get credit cards with $500 available. If you can't get even $1000 then I'm assuming there is negative information on your credit report then. If that's the case, it will follow you to investment as well (most likely).

And as for wanting an investor who will give you advice, let me just suggest that you not do any of this. Your questions/comments sound very naive right now. Getting involved with investors is serious business. There are lots of people who will take a piece of your business in exchange for advice. That doesn't mean that it is smart for you to do that.

My suggestion is that you research more about what is involved in taking on and seeking investors. There are many dangers in these waters, not the least of which is spending so much time learning/seeking investment that you let your business slide.

</comment><comment><USER4> You don't need a capital infusion.

Commodity servers are very easy to lease/finance. I know Dell and HP make credit very widely available. The server hardware lease will probably cost you less than than the lease on the colo/rackspace it occupies!

That said, at your scale, no one is going to give you credit on a business account. You will need to apply for credit in your own name.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have no credit history, not even student loans. I can't even get $1000 dollar car loan.

<comment><USER5> Well, that's something you may want to work on fixing, but probably not for this project. (Secured credit card is pretty much where you have to start for that)

As for the website, how much capital are you talking about and why do you need it for the iPhone app specifically?

<comment><AUTHOR> Roughly $10,000 would get the server I need for 2 years barring any major surge in users or traffic. The reason why I need a server is because I'm going to be transcoding video. If it is a commodity server then it still needs to be a big one.

<comment><USER6> I make it about $6000 to run an extra large high CPU (8 virtual core) EC2 instance 24/7 for a year, and you won't need a large capital outlay. Would this work for you?

Alternatively with a $2000 up-front payment Amazon will give you the same thing for $4000 total.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's interesting, I haven't done the math for all the different VPS providers / EC2, but yea that is what I am looking for just a beefy box to do some transcoding.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Can you go into a little more detail on the "The iOS app would require investment in some more serious hardware. I don't need alot, I just need cover server cost." part. I am a little unsure about the server <-> iOS app connection.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you look at a previous comment, I'm transcoding video for iOS devices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can't you use credit cards?

<comment><AUTHOR> Nope, can't get a credit card. I would also like to work with an investor who has advice to give, not just money.</comment></comment>


Akamai blocks unordered HTTP request headers - <AUTHOR> http://gwillem.gitlab.io/2017/05/02/http-header-order-is-important/ <comment><USER2> In the second example the author does the following:

      $ ACCEPT="text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,*/*;q=0.8"
      $ curl -v -H "$UA" -H "$ACCEPT" $URL |& grep '< HTTP'

The author fails to prefix $ACCEPT with the actual header key. It should be:

      $ curl -v -H "$UA" -H "Accept: $ACCEPT" $URL |& grep '< HTTP'

<comment><USER3> From personal experience I'd be willing to give him the benefit of the doubt (i.e. he did it right, but wrote it up wrong). Good spot though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is just the configuration for a single site. The author did not even try it against www.akamai.com:

$ URL=[http://www.akamai.com](http://www.akamai.com)

$ UA="User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 My API Client"

$ ACCEPT="Accept: _/_ "

$ curl -v -H "$UA" -H "$ACCEPT" $URL

< HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently

< Content-Length: 0

< Location: [https://www.akamai.com](https://www.akamai.com)

< Date: Tue, 02 May 2017 14:46:59 GMT

< Connection: keep-alive

</comment><comment><USER5> Is it Akamai? Or is it a single site on Akamai? CDN customers can configure their sites in a million ways.

My guess is a single site that was getting DDoS'd added this as an attack signature and forgot about it.

<comment><USER4> This is just a single sites configuration.

<comment><USER6> Well, everybody knows that in statistics, a sample size of 1 gives you a 0 margin of error ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > most libraries use random order

Most libraries use an _undefined_ order. This is not the same as random.

</comment><comment><USER8> Did Akamai recently just make this change?

I'm asking because I've been running a web crawler for years now, and in the past week, I have noticed that the crawler is being rejected in more websites then usual.

</comment><comment><USER9> I disagree with the author's title (and I see it was submitted with a different title).

This is actually a report of two bugs:

1- the standard doesn't require an order

2 - the IETF's admonition that you be liberal in what you accept.</comment>


UN says US must stop separating migrant children from parents - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jun/05/un-says-us-must-stop-separating-migrant-children-from-parents <comment><USER2> >"The spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani said the policy had "led to people caught entering the country irregularly being subjected to criminal prosecution and having their children – including extremely young children – taken away from them as a result"."

"Irregularly"...

The contortions which some go through in order to avoid using the word "illegal" are amusing.

By not describing the migrants as illegal, we minimize the damage done to rule of law by tolerating them. I recognize they are in plight, but they are fleeing nations where rule of law has broken down. We should do everything we can to avoid that path.</comment>


Idea to profitable site in 7 weeks for $470 - <AUTHOR> http://jessekatz.tumblr.com/post/10730749003/idea-to-profitable-site-in-7-weeks-for-470

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's a good video from Eric Ries on the lean startups - <http://lab.blossom.io/blog/2011/09/23/eric-ries-on-lean.html></comment>


Earth Day and the Hockey Stick: A Singular Message - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/earth-day-and-the-hockey-stick-a-singular-message/ <comment><USER3> A good thing would be to see the graph up to today - am I right that the article only shows the graph from 20 years ago and then some affirmation of the validity of that artefact? If so does anyone have a link to the picture up to 2018?

<comment><USER4> NASA has one up to 2017. It does not look pretty.

[https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global- temperature/](https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/)

<comment><USER5> My first question, looking at that graph, is "how does that graph calculate a global temperature for an entire year?" Do you know the actual source of the global temperature readings going back to 1880? Sure, the webpage says the dataset came from [https://climate.nasa.gov/system/internal_resources/details/o...](https://climate.nasa.gov/system/internal_resources/details/original/647_Global_Temperature_Data_File.txt), but where did they come _from?_

These are the first 10 lines of the linked dataset, showing land and sea temperatures for the entire earth from 1880 to 1889.

      1880	-0.19	-0.11
      1881	-0.1	-0.14
      1882	-0.1	-0.17
      1883	-0.19	-0.21
      1884	-0.28	-0.24
      1885	-0.31	-0.26
      1886	-0.32	-0.27
      1887	-0.35	-0.27
      1888	-0.18	-0.27
      1889	-0.11	-0.26

I'm curious where this data originated - and that curiosity has nothing to do with belief in or disbelief of climate change.

<comment><USER6> To be precise, these are global _averages_ , so from this alone it is clear the numbers aren't measurements but rather the output of some analysis.

The linked file is simply the analysis output, the source is the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, presumably their GISTEMP dataset (since that's the one about global average surface temperature).

The original GISTEMP analysis is documented here: [https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/ha00700d.html](https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/ha00700d.html)

with later refinements found elsewhere on the GISS site.

In brief they simply use weather station data, and build their global average from that. They also talk about change in the average rather than the absolute value, which makes sense since you are then much less sensitive to the absolute calibration error of each station.

Then they do a lot of statistics on it to compensate for lack of coverage etc etc, read it yourself if 30 year old statistics papers are interesting to you.

<comment><USER5> Thank you for that, but if you look once more, you will see that you didn't answer my question.

<comment><USER7> They did. As they said, they use (weather) station data + statistics to compensate for missing data. We have temperature records from weather stations going back to the 18th century.

Just quickly googling I found this paper that works to make historical records usable for today:

[https://rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/gdj3....](https://rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/gdj3.11)

"Daily observations of weather and climate for the province of Québec, Canada, start in the 18th century and continue to the present day. Daily temperature observations from 12 observers ranging from 1742 to 1873 are described here."

That's why the 1880 forward data is different from other reconstructions going further back. These are measurement instruments by scientists recording temperature.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Much as I agree that fossil fuel burning is a horrendous thing that has sent us on a life-threatening trajectory, I also think this narrative is overly simplified. The fight to minimize fossil fuel would benefit from a more realistic (i.e. humble) approach IMO. Doubting if Thomas Mann will be the person to do that though.

To be clear, climate science has come a long way and has shown beyond any reasonable doubt that fossil fuel burning is changing our climate in ways that already is causing damage to the livelihood of millions if not billions of people, something which will accelerate in the short term and put our capacity for adaption and human compassion to a severe test, that we will probably fail miserably.

So the core issue is not up for debate. But there are still claims that rubs me the wrong way, for example that is that this is "a fight between science and self-interested industry". Yes, to some extent. But climate science is not a mature science like (some parts of) physics. As a science it is still struggling to explain why things like ice-ages were (are?) a recurring phenomenon.

The reason is that climate science is in essence a historical science. What this means: while we can tell that the climate has behaved in a certain way historically, and many times (not always) understand why, we have no way to determine the accumulated future effects of warming beyond a certain, in geological terms, fairly short horizon. It may well, through the combination of various tipping point effects, planetary, intergalactic or even hitherto unknown extra-galactic phenomenon have the exact opposite effect, as far as we know.

So part of the drama is in my view caused by climate science trying to establish itself as a mature science with a predictability powers comparable to sciences that can perform reproducible experiments, downplaying its own nature as a historical science. The fossil burning industry (and all the other interests tied in with them) is handed a gift in a way, since they can appeal to the natural intelligence of the average person, and get an agreement that the climate science is making hyperbolic claims.

We don't know everything, and it would serve the sane discussion well to delimit what we can and can not predict.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#/m...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#/media/File:65_Myr_Climate_Change.png)

<comment><USER7> The science isn't over. There are plenty of things we don't know.

But likewise there are things we do know. I know of no serious climate scientist who claims we understand the climate. But we still know that human activity is warming the globe at an unprecedented rate.

The fossil burning industry has been handed a gift not by scientists overreaching but by systematically discrediting solid science. This is no different than decades of subterfuge by tobacco to sow doubt about the health effects of smoking, and similar things with asbestos. Further peoples "natural intelligence" being really really bad at dealing with uncertainty and slow multi generational global phenomena. If you predict something to happen with 90% chance, and it doesn't happen, people naturally tend to think you were wrong. Further, the language of careful uncertainty analysis has often been twisted by parties who are interested in maximizing the profit from their historical investments.

Of course you will find individual scientists who disagree over how certain or uncertain particular results are (and who are more alarmist than others), but please, since they seem to be so irritating to you, could you actually point out cases of this supposed overreach?

Because in all honesty it sounds to me like you're more irked by scientists also being advocates.

In which case you should ask yourself, if your research shows that there is a considerable risk (which is a criterion well short of scientific certainty) of dramatic negative consequences, what is your ethical obligation as a scientist in society? Is it sufficient to publish this result in an academic journal, or do you have an obligation to ring the alarm bells?

<comment><USER8> We're in agreement regarding the utter seriousness of global warming, glad to hear. I do believe the main tasks are: adapting to the changes that are coming, taking care of those of us that will get displaced (which may mean moving to a green Sahara), and making sure we don't further worsen the problem. But in light of the prospecting that takes place all over (for example in Greenland and other areas made exploitable by receding glaciers) I'm rather pessimistic about the last point. Even with the fairly rapid development of alternative energy sources (solar, wind, geothermal) it does not seem that these will replace fossil or nuclear fuels any time soon, only supplement it.

As for examples of overreach, I was amiss in not citing anything in support, but the comment was already too long. I'll cite one such example here which I believe supports my point: The so called 'Climategate' affair, which, while scientists involved were exonerated from any direct wrong-doing, revealed a team of distinguished scientists "so focused on winning the public-relations war that they exaggerate their certitude — and ultimately undermine their own cause" [0]

I'll skip your questions based on the straw-man reading if you don't mind.

[0] [https://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/01/science/01tier.html?_r=3&...](https://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/01/science/01tier.html?_r=3&n=Top/News/Science/Columns/Findings)

<comment><USER7> No but climategate is exactly the type of pseudo-controversy that I was getting at. Read the reports: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_c...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_controversy#Inquiries_and_reports)

No scientific misconduct. No fraud. But yes, concern over the public relations battle that scientists have been forced into. Would you rather scientists just concede that battle?

And again, they have been fighting that battle _without scientific misconduct_. There was no hiding of uncertainties, it's all there in the papers. There are very few fields of science where uncertainties are so well studied. The sentence in the NYT article you quote is simply not backed by the facts, and it is mistaking consensus for group-think.

Opposing requests for transparency (looking at raw code and data) is unfortunately all to common in science. The culture is shifting, but it's a result of things being generally messy. Often it takes considerable experience to reliably reach judgements on what the data/code outputs mean. And that's typically not well documented. I advocate for open science at my institute wherever I can. We're getting there.

One perfect example is the "hide the decline". Anyone with statistics training knows that "the decline" is perfectly consistent with the previous trend + fluctuations + data problems. It didn't challenge anything. It's also right there in the published papers. But of course if you want to put out press releases you can't assume your audience knows that, you need to communicate that fact. The part of the audience that understands that can read the papers just fine to figure out the details (they are not hard to read).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So the history of climate change goes something like: confusion about overall sign in the 1960's, mounting evidence for warming due to CO_2 in 1970's, consensus about overall warming caused by human CO_2 emission in the eighties, and then clarifying in the details since then.

The fact that there still isn't mainstream discussion about how society must change, but rather eternal growth society is still the default target across the globe is depressing and gives confidence that we are going to see substantial civilisation collapse in the future.

<comment><USER9> I think that alarmism has hurt climate science ever since the 1960s. Past mistakes matter because people generally won't trust the naysayers when they've been proven wrong so obviously that grade school children won't trust them.

From [https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/04/21/18-examples-of-the- sp...](https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/04/21/18-examples-of-the- spectacularly-wrong-predictions-made-around-the-first-earth-day-in-1970/) >Here are 18 examples of the spectacularly wrong predictions made around 1970 when the "green holy day" (aka Earth Day) started:

1\. Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that "civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind."

2\. "We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation," wrote Washington University biologist Barry Commoner in the Earth Day issue of the scholarly journal Environment.

3\. The day after the first Earth Day, the New York Times editorial page warned, "Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction."

4\. "Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make," Paul Ehrlich confidently declared in the April 1970 issue of Mademoiselle. "The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years."

5\. "Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born," wrote Paul Ehrlich in a 1969 essay titled "Eco-Catastrophe! "By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s."

6\. Ehrlich sketched out his most alarmist scenario for the 1970 Earth Day issue of The Progressive, assuring readers that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the "Great Die-Off."

7\. "It is already too late to avoid mass starvation," declared Denis Hayes, the chief organizer for Earth Day, in the Spring 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness.

8\. Peter Gunter, a North Texas State University professor, wrote in 1970, "Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine."

9\. In January 1970, Life reported, "Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half…."

10\. Ecologist Kenneth Watt told Time that, "At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it's only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable."

11\. Barry Commoner predicted that decaying organic pollutants would use up all of the oxygen in America's rivers, causing freshwater fish to suffocate.

12\. Paul Ehrlich chimed in, predicting in 1970 that "air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone." Ehrlich sketched a scenario in which 200,000 Americans would die in 1973 during "smog disasters" in New York and Los Angeles.

13\. Paul Ehrlich warned in the May 1970 issue of Audubon that DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons "may have substantially reduced the life expectancy of people born since 1945." Ehrlich warned that Americans born since 1946…now had a life expectancy of only 49 years, and he predicted that if current patterns continued this expectancy would reach 42 years by 1980, when it might level out. (Note: According to the most recent CDC report, life expectancy in the US is 78.8 years).

14\. Ecologist Kenneth Watt declared, "By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won't be any more crude oil. You'll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill 'er up, buddy,' and he'll say, `I am very sorry, there isn't any.'"

15\. Harrison Brown, a scientist at the National Academy of Sciences, published a chart in Scientific American that looked at metal reserves and estimated the humanity would totally run out of copper shortly after 2000. Lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver would be gone before 1990.

16\. Sen. Gaylord Nelson wrote in Look that, "Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct."

17\. In 1975, Paul Ehrlich predicted that "since more than nine-tenths of the original tropical rainforests will be removed in most areas within the next 30 years or so, it is expected that half of the organisms in these areas will vanish with it."

18\. Kenneth Watt warned about a pending Ice Age in a speech. "The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years," he declared. "If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age."

<comment><USER10> Can you give me a citation for your first quote (from George Ward). Although it seems to show up on a lot of self-described "climate skeptic" pages, I can't seem to find any legitimate source for it. It shows up in wikipedia as well, but the citation there just leads to the same tangled mess of "climate skeptic" pages that all seem to cite each other.

I'm really curious if George Wald said this at all, and if he did, what specifically he was talking about. Nuclear proliferation was another of his areas of activism, for example.

<comment><USER11> Maybe someone with access to Ward's papers at the Harvard campus can help you out here. See the following; search for "Earth Day".

[http://oasis.lib.harvard.edu/oasis/deliver/~hua02000](http://oasis.lib.harvard.edu/oasis/deliver/~hua02000)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If only the senate could have waited a couple of more days before confirming an AGW "skeptic" to head NASA [1], we could've had some really nice contrast between this essay and the current government.

1: [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/19/science/jim- bridenstine-n...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/19/science/jim-bridenstine- nasa.html)

</comment><comment><USER13> We should start talking about actions that contribute to global warming in a significant/active/systemic way as crimes against humanity. That is what they are. Executives and politicians need to know that that is how we will judge them in the future.

<comment><USER11> So every time you get in your car and start personally spewing excess CO2, that's a crime against humanity? Or you fire up your oil or gas furnace? Or you eat a burger or pretty much anything else produced by Big Ag? Or you build a concrete structure? And so on and so forth.

As the old saying goes: "Those who live in glass houses should not throw stones."

<comment><USER14> Is there a recognized name for the fallacy southern_cross is using here?

<comment><USER12> It could be "Argument of the Beard", "Causal Reductionism", or "Fallacy of Composition" ([http://www.don-lindsay- archive.org/skeptic/arguments.html](http://www.don-lindsay- archive.org/skeptic/arguments.html)).

In any case, you're right to point out that it's troll behavior to dump all of the effects of industrial pollution and the resultant politics on a single individual's shoulders, as though one person would have a measurable impact on global climate.

~southern_cross is just framing their argument as, "if you haven't killed yourself yet, then you can't care about the environment", and that's an easy argument to ignore.

<comment><USER11> It seems you're doing some serious trolling there yourself - putting words in my mouth and all. And as to your "one person" argument, then by that logic none of us should be particularly concerned about making any changes to our own lifestyle, because it probably won't make any difference anyway - <USER2> insignificant. Amirite?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Regarding ice on Arctic and Antarctic, the extent as we speak extremely low compared to our historical records:

[https://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_iq...](https://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_iqr_timeseries.png)

[https://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/S_iq...](https://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/S_iqr_timeseries.png)

(from National Snow and Ice Data Center, University of Colorado)

</comment><comment><USER16> I was always confused about what people meant by 'hockey stick growth'... until I worked out they mean _ice_ hockey stick growth. A normal hockey stick wouldn't be very impressive growth!

<comment><USER17> What kind of hockey stick were you referring to?

<comment><USER16> Normal hockey sticks have a little curl that goes back on itself - not great growth!

[https://www.hockeydirect.com/Catalogue/Hockey- Sticks/Grays-H...](https://www.hockeydirect.com/Catalogue/Hockey-Sticks/Grays- Hockey-Sticks)

Hockey sticks that you use to play ice hockey have a long straight line that goes up and to the right, like strong linear growth.

[https://puckstop.com/product/true-xc9-acf-youth-hockey- stick](https://puckstop.com/product/true-xc9-acf-youth-hockey-stick)</comment></comment></comment>


Six professionals review the Mac Pro [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKrzHtWYQpg&feature=emb_title <comment><AUTHOR> tl;dr: It's underwhelming. A similarly-priced PC (expectedly) outperforms it, and more surprisingly, several professional Mac tools don't take advantage of the extra hardware making them run around the same speed they do on cheaper Macs. Also the display is largely unfit for the use-cases those $43k displays it was compared against are designed for, though it's also much cheaper so it lives in an awkward middle-ground.</comment>


Alibaba Has a Computing Cloud, and It's Growing, Too - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/08/04/alibaba-has-a-computing-cloud-and-its-growing-too/

<comment><USER2> I wonder how the economics of the cloud industry will eventually play out. Right now, it's enormously profitable, because Amazon is the clear market leader and there're some fairly significant switching costs.

However, building out the cloud infrastructure is a side-effect of being any Internet business that achieves reasonable scale. And once you do that, it's both relatively inexpensive and quite profitable to enter the IaaS market and resell some of that additional computing capacity to other smaller firms. Cloud computing is almost totally undifferentiated; you're selling basic computing resources (CPU, RAM, disk) for money.

My hunch is that cloud is going to become like the airline industry. An oligopoly with periodic price wars. It has the same "high fixed cost, low marginal cost" economics as airlines, the same need for _some_ baseline technical knowledge but not enough that you can differentiate on product quality, and the same price-sensitivity. It's possible that the switching costs of migrating your data between cloud providers might put a barrier on competition and preserve some profit margins, but I suspect that any well-used service will be able to migrate their data out for a small fraction of their monthly bandwidth costs.

The airline industry is wonderfully beneficial to consumers, but it's been a dud for investors and operators over its 100-year history.

<comment><USER3> Or it could end up being more like cereal.

 _Yet, in other fields—like cereals, for example—almost all the big boys make out. If you 're some kind of a medium grade cereal maker, you might make 15% on your capital. And if you're really good, you might make 40%. But why are cereals so profitable—despite the fact that it looks to me like they're competing like crazy with promotions, coupons and everything else? I don't fully understand it._

[http://old.ycombinator.com/munger.html](http://old.ycombinator.com/munger.html)</comment></comment>


Learn MongoDB Interactive Tutorial - <AUTHOR> http://mongly.com/

<comment><USER2> I loved this tutorial ! This how all tutorials should be: quick, with interaction and fun.</comment>


"Enterprise software" is a social, not technical, phenomenon - <AUTHOR> https://firstname.lastname@example.com/msg00109.html <comment><USER2> Though I wouldn't necessarily take the same cynical route, I would reach the same conclusion: that enterprise software lives in a world dictated by budgets, administrative costs, and politics. This shouldn't be so surprising though as IMHO the cost of a system failure increases exponentially with the size of the business. Bob & Brenda's online pet store going down won't make much difference to anyone. RBS's systems going down was top item on the main BBC evening news here in the UK. Bad PR and loss of goodwill in a major company can take years to recover.

As a result, the costs of running enterprise software massively outweighs the cost of buying it. Data centers are huge expensive beasts to run. Access to the systems & software is strictly controlled. Upgrades are deliberately made difficult to minimise the chance of untested changes going in. You are normally required to submit a timescale for how long it will take for you to (a) do the upgrade, and (b) rollback if the upgrade fails. Your slot will be (a) + (b) with no leeway. Failure to rollback correctly has serious employment ramifications.

You will also need to demonstrate how many FTEs are required to run your system, since the staff costs are the single largest cost in the ongoing cost of the system. This is partly why J2EE servers became popular. All typical enterprise services are normally in place already and administering one J2EE application is much like administering any other.

Ease of backups/restarts/hot failovers etc must be considered. Can you just get away with moving a transaction log or are there some convoluted and proprietary steps that must be taken?

Software development is my main job role, but I spent a year as a system architect for an oil major. It really was an eye-opener and I recommend it to anyone who wants to become well-versed in all the pressures and tensions involved in running enterprise software.

</comment><comment><USER3> The article is from 2005, but still very relevant and true.

The quality of enterprise software is often lower than one would expect from the price tag.</comment>


Sprintly Is Not Shutting Down - <AUTHOR> https://support.sprint.ly/hc/en-us/articles/360005769833-Sprintly-Shutting-down-August-1st-2018 <comment><USER2> The title above originally said "is shutting down" but we've since received an email saying that was reversed, so I changed the title to reflect that.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wish there were a sort of gentlemen's agreement that cool projects like this that don't make it as businesses would be open sourced.

Almost every project is based on open source stuff somewhere in the stack, whether it's the OS, the main programming languages, frameworks, or whatever. And most people don't have the time to contribute a ton to the tools we all use.

It would be really neat if companies that don't make it could give a bequest to the various communities and help build a massive library of stuff that, at least at one point in time, ran successfully in production, delivered a certain level of scale, and was able to make some money. If for anthropological or historical or research purposes if nothing else.

</comment><comment><USER4> Always a shame to see a company shut down that many people have poured years of effort and belief into.

Maybe a lesson here - I have engineering and PM responsibilities and couldn't be more squarely in the target market - still I have never heard of this product, I wonder how they marketed it…

<comment><USER5> Indeed, I'd never heard of this, which is unfortunate as I've previously tried to find something - anything! - in the void between "not so complex as to be unusable" JIRA and "perfectly simple - too simple" Trello.

<comment><USER6> (Disclosure: Zoho CEO here) Have you looked at Zoho Sprints? [https://www.zoho.com/sprints/](https://www.zoho.com/sprints/)

<comment><USER7> TIL Zoho has an Agile tool. I've been using you guys for mail for years. Awesome products, but too many to count these days.

edit: Suggestion, compile that, the bug tracker and a Git repo service into one bundle. It'd definitely sell.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've used sprintly in the past and overall quite liked it, but there were bugs and feature requests in their tracker, untouched for _years_ , with comments like "yes, soon". Besides the odd few reporting features, it just felt to me that development stopped and stagnated. This is a large reason why I didn't go back to using it.

Overall, I liked sprintly and am sad to see it shut down, but I'm surprised it survived this long given how it started to feel a bit abandoned. (Sure you could argue if it's not broken don't fix it and sprintly mostly worked great, despite some issues being untouched so long, so I don't think that's what happened here. I do think it was perhaps a marketing problem not a feature/product problem, but it just gave a very abandoned impression)

I found out about it on recommendation by one of their advisers. I would never have heard about it otherwise so definitely think that it could have been better marketed. Although, with that said, it's teue that sprintly was opinionated and that most teams have their own opinions that may not match up. For example, I wanted a way of having a pool of tasks that people could choose from rather than strict ordering (eg maybe a priority system where any equal- priority task at the top can be taken, not just the top task) but sprintly didn't have any way of marking priorities or groups and they didn't want to add the feature because it went against their strict top task next workflow. I'm not at all saying they should have supported that feature, of course, just how even small differences in opinion on workflow can make the tool less of a fit.

JIRA is the opposite in that it lets you customise it to fit whatever workflow you like, but in the process becomes a complex beast that I dislike using. I at least enjoyed using sprintly even if it didn't always fit perfectly.

In any case, good luck on future ventures!

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't use sprint.ly, although I've been aware of it for a while, but this does slightly worry me, and certainly it's sad to hear of something that's been a very personal investment for somebody failing.

We use Clubhouse, another project management system cut from the "more than Trello, less than JIRA, and somewhat opinionated about how you should work" mould. I don't love it in some ways but, y'know, it's pretty good. Our tech team, plus a number of people outside the team use it and, in the last 12 months, we've added getting on for 16,000 stories.

If Clubhouse failed I'm not sure exactly what we'd do: possibly use GitHub projects given that these are starting to get close to good enough (they've been good enough for my side-projects for a while). Hell if I'll go back to JIRA, but the thought of migrating all that data makes me feel slightly unwell no matter the eventual destination.

</comment><comment><USER10> a swing-and-a-miss is still a swing...something few people are willing risk! best of luck on the next leg of the journey

</comment><comment><USER11> My company used sprintly a few years back and our experience ranged from not- good to god-awful. It seemed like all feature requests were either ignored or met with the attitude of "We know better than you do", which was unhelpful at best.

<comment><USER12> I mean, this is also reflected in their ethos:

> we offered an opinionated way of managing teams and it turned out not enough > people shared our opinion. In hindsight this is pretty obvious since > workflows are kinda like opinions in that everyone has one. I think this is > why tools like JIRA and Trello are so successful. They let you decide how to > manage your workflow.

It's not a bad thing, it's just a thing.

<comment><USER11> It's a thing for a company to do that internally. It's a bad thing, as evidenced by sprintly's failure, for a company offering a SaaS product in this space.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> That's too bad. It seemed to be going strong for more than half a decade. I was bummed when SimpleGeo, also cofounded by Joe Stump, got shut down after being acquired by Urban Airship [1] and glad to see Sprintly thriving. I think both can be counted as successes, but it's too bad that both no longer exist. I look forward to see what Joe Stump does next!

1: [https://techcrunch.com/2012/01/13/with-simplegeos- shutdown-i...](https://techcrunch.com/2012/01/13/with-simplegeos-shutdown- imminent-parse-swoops-in-with-a-life-preserver/)

</comment><comment><USER14> I read this blog post while simultaneously entering stories into our Pivotal Tracker (PT) sprint backlog.

There is certainly market demand for good, agile PM tools. Hope this Founder does a reboot after retrospective.

<comment><USER15> I have this feeling you are implying Pivotal Tracker is lacking some things? (Excuse me if I'm wrong.) If so, what sort of things would you like to see improved? (I've no relation to Pivotal Tracker, I'm just curious.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> My experience with Sprintly was that it was god-awful slow and had a user interface straight out of 2008.

</comment><comment><USER17> When I closed my CRM system I put it on cheap hosting and left it up for all the users who are currently using it let them drop off on their own.

<comment><USER18> What about support, uptime, etc? I believe that even if the users aren't paying they will pester you with demands and support requests.

<comment><USER17> At first but then I spent a lot of time making help videos that walked through each feature I was able to get tech support near zero with 30 new signups a day and about 1,200 daily users.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> > Something that wasn't quite as complicated as JIRA, but offered more > powerful features than a Trello.

Clubhouse.io fits this perfectly for my team.

</comment><comment><USER20> That's too bad. I wanted to work on the product a few years back but I could tell they really just wanted me to work on consulting projects, and the Sprintly work (if it ever came around) would be a "reward". Too many aspects of it made my Spidey senses tingle to accept.

</comment><comment><USER21> Courageous decision. I tip my hat to you. Best Wishes!

</comment><comment><USER22> Congratulations on getting up to bat and giving it your all. Consider the loss tuition.

</comment><comment><USER23> Are there any .ly companies that are just killing it?

<comment><USER24> musical.ly did okay</comment></comment>


A new syntax definition format for Sublime - <AUTHOR> http://www.sublimetext.com/docs/3/syntax.html

<comment><USER2> This looks great. A lot of Sublime Text syntax definitions are buggy and/or out of date, in part due to the awfully tedious task of maintaining tmLanguage syntax files.

Hopefully this will be combined with putting all the official sublime text syntax definitions on github so there can be more continuous improvements coming from the large community.

Or just stop including syntax definitions with the editor entirely, make people use packages/plugins (though this is less likely to happen, Sublime is popular in part because it works so well out of the box).

</comment><comment><USER3> Gave it 30 seconds (this is not something I use currently.)

Seems easy to understand.

And most of all I came to say glad to see Sublime Text moving forward again.

</comment><comment><USER4> I am very happy with Sublime. The only thing I really wish for is AST based autocomplete and code jumps. I know it's slow and won't really work for JavaScript but other editors did something about it. Specially with ES6, it's easier to resolve module imports.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is much much better than the hassle I had to go through building Sublime syntax support for a language a few months ago. Glad to see the Sublime team are making themselves competitive!

<comment><USER6> Team? I think it's just one dude.

<comment><USER7> One entire dude? It seems like he works on it for about an hour a week.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Nice! I just returned to Sublime after getting fed up with Atom's performance and stability issues, and I can't believe it took me this long to switch back.

One thing that bothers me, maybe more than it should-- On OS X, I like opening directories for editing by using the open command:

open [folder] -a Sublime\ Text

This is great, but I hate that Sublime Text has a long, two-word name, requiring me to escape the space or use quotes (it was even worse when I had to type Sublime\ Text\ 2).

I've tried aliasing and symlinking "sublime" as a shortcut, but since the open command uses Launch Services to find the application name, none of that shell trickery works. This is the only thing preventing complete text editor zen :(

<comment><USER9> Have you tried this? [https://www.sublimetext.com/docs/2/osx_command_line.html](https://www.sublimetext.com/docs/2/osx_command_line.html) Works flawlessly here on Sublime 3 on OS X 10.10.

And then

        $ subl .

to open the current folder.

<comment><USER8> Ha! After complaining I figured I'd give one more shot at solving this and I came across that same technique. Then I came back here to update my post and of course people were already giving me that advice.

Zen achieved.

<comment><USER10> Further zen can be achieved by aliasing `e` to `subl`.

<comment><USER11> I have a personal setup like that:

* e is aliased to `emacs` (I use Emacs on command line and Sublime Text using a GUI and projects, so I use `subl` command rarely). * g is aliased to `git`. * z is a glorious cd command: [https://github.com/rupa/z](https://github.com/rupa/z)

Besides them I use `rsub` command when editing files on a remote server, which is `rmate` for Sublime Text.

Tip for zsh users: With zsh's history-beginning-search-* commands I can write only a prefix to find a command in history. E.g. If I already typed `rsub user_management/forms.py` before and want to open that file, I type `rsub u` and press up arrow a few times till I get to the result I want.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Nice. Respect is likely due to Guillermo; this looks derived from his PackageDev project. The push/pop context action looks better than the begin/end region system, though maybe only a bit in convenience.

</comment><comment><USER13> This looks awesome. But is there a technical reason why it's using YAML when virtually every other sublime specific config file is using JSON?

</comment><comment><USER14> How does atom handle this, just textmate language files?

</comment><comment><USER15> So pretty much the same thing we had before, except instead of writing JSON you write YAML

<comment><USER16> previously language syntax used TextMates xml based tmLanguage files for syntax highlighting.

Example: [https://github.com/Benvie/JavaScriptNext.tmLanguage/blob/mas...](https://github.com/Benvie/JavaScriptNext.tmLanguage/blob/master/Regular%20Expressions%20\(JavaScriptNext\).tmLanguage)

<comment><USER15> Well, sure it 'uses" xml bases representation, but you can actually write the syntax in JSON and Sublime Text will compile it down to XML.

Example: [https://github.com/Nessphoro/sublimeassembly/blob/master/Ass...](https://github.com/Nessphoro/sublimeassembly/blob/master/Assembly%20x86.JSON- tmLanguage)

Output: [https://github.com/Nessphoro/sublimeassembly/blob/master/Ass...](https://github.com/Nessphoro/sublimeassembly/blob/master/Assembly%20x86.tmLanguage)

<comment><USER17> [https://github.com/SublimeText/AAAPackageDev](https://github.com/SublimeText/AAAPackageDev) lets you create it with YAML. If nothing else, not having to escape and quote your regular expressions seems like a winning proposition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is Sublime back in active development? Last I had heard, it basically hadn't been updated since 2013.

<comment><USER19> There have been a bunch of new builds recently: [http://www.sublimetext.com/3dev](http://www.sublimetext.com/3dev)</comment></comment>