The European Commission is polling if daylight savings should be abolished - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/5/17536400/european-union-polling-citizens-daylight-saving-time-necessary <comment><USER2> Try to get 3 kids out of bed still in the middle of the night in December, and you will know why daylight savings should be abolished.

DST is very taxing to children (and to adults also), and completely unnecessary in this day and age where electricity is ubiquitous.

There is simply no valid reason for using DST, it should have been abolished a very long time ago, maybe 30 years or more.

<comment><USER3> There is no DST in December, so abolishing it wouldn't make a difference.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> URL of the poll:

[https://ec.europa.eu/eusurvey/runner/2018-summertime- arrange...](https://ec.europa.eu/eusurvey/runner/2018-summertime- arrangements?surveylanguage=EN)

But it appears unexpected interest/traffic knocked it off the web.

</comment><comment><USER5> As a lifelong resident of the state of Arizona (which is the one state that doesn't do DST), I have never understood the practice. And I would say universally, my distributed co-workers complain about both shifts. When will we end this madness?

<comment><USER6> Well, Arizona is far south compared to Northern Germany or Scandinavia and the sun sets at approx. the same time in summer and winter. In my hometown it's bright till 11 pm in summer and dark at 3:30pm in winter. DST might make more sense in this case, though I'm still in favour of abolishing it.

<comment><USER7> It makes sense to pick a timezone that aligns winter daylight with working hours. Daylight is abundant during summer though, so switching is pure stupidity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I see how a world with out DST would be simpler, but I have no strong feelings on the subject. Regardless, it would take decades before other countries outside the EU gets rid of DST.

So I have to ask, is this really a fight worth having?

<comment><USER9> Yes, this is definitely a fight worth fighting.

It is completely nonsensical, not to mention unhealthy, both physically and mentally, to suddenly hard-reset the body clock plus/minus one hour on a permanent basis, especially if one lives up north.

One day you sleep an hour less and it is just as dark and cold outside. What for?

Actually, what are the arguments FOR "daylight saving time"?

I personally hope they will fast-track this and get rid of DST as fast as possible!

<comment><USER3> The argument for DST is that it keeps sunrise approximately the same time throughout the year. Take a look at the chart here for an example: [https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/san- francisco](https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/san-francisco)

Without DST, twilight would be about 430AM during the longest days of Summer, which harms sleep (at least it does for me).

<comment><USER9> Sunrise even with DST in Stockholm is now 0345 (AM). And the Sun sets at about 2200 (10 PM). DST is just an annoyance at best.

I don't know if people do that in US but around here one can buy light blocking curtains to make the room(s) completely dark. I have no trouble sleeping in general when it's brighter but do sleep much better with the curtains.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hopefully my country handles this right. Since, we have DST in the winter, instead of the summer, our standard time is other countries' summer time (DST) and vice-versa.

Right now, everything syncs up with Europe, but it mightn't after this.

<comment><USER11> If your DST is in the winter, if you are say 1 hour ahead of Europe in your summer, won't you be 3 hours ahead in your winter? Assuming you are in the southern hemisphere. I don't see how everything can "sync up".

<comment><USER10> Clocks go backward for DST.

It lines up with London time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Things like this should not be decided by referendum. I get it, this isn't an official vote. But still ... Waste of resources asking the populace. You'll only end up with Boaty McBoatface like outcomes...

<comment><USER13> I find if you treat people like adults they'll act like adults.

<comment><USER14> But that's exactly what Boaty McBoatface proved wrong. People are childish and want to waste your time for fun.

<comment><USER15> What's wrong about Boaty McBoatface? They should not have overruled that decision. People would probably be more engaged if their opinion was asked and respected more often, not like now where they sometimes get asked when it's convenient and often overruled anyway.

You also see that at the workplace. We often get asked by management how to do things better. Then people bring up proposals only to be ignored. No wonder people aren't engaged.

<comment><USER14> > What's wrong about Boaty McBoatface?

The other choices were about recognising people who had achieved something and contributed in order to inspire others. This name celebrates inanity and being stupid for the sake of it.

<comment><USER16> I think they missed a trick really, calling the ship Boaty McBoatface would have given the opportunity to keep people engaged with the work they're doing. Think of the children's animated series, books, duvet covers, so much marketing potential while reinforcing the value of scientists (think Captain Planet for the Antarctic). Whimsy isn't necessarily inane or stupid.

<comment><USER15> Very true. Personally I would have more fun working on Boaty McBoatface than on the RRS Sir David Attenborough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's nice to have light until late in summer, I'd vote to keep DST.

<comment><USER18> You can have that without changing the clocks twice a year.

<comment><USER17> Yep, permanently move to GMT+2.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> trying to vote gives me 404 in 28 languages

<comment><USER8> I guess the EU isn't used to people taking an interest :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Just great! I really hope it will happen.

</comment><comment><USER21> nah the farming lobby will stop this dead

<comment><USER22> Why does the farming lobby care? Is it because of wake up times tied to sunrise?

<comment><USER21> Yes and you really don't' know the power the farming lobby has in eu - Its not called the French and German garden for nothing.

<comment><USER16> That's garbage, a friend is a dairy farmer, the cows need milking when they need milking, they don't respect DST.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> My only problem is that it means getting up earlier for work in winter. (I doubt work times will adjusted)

<comment><USER24> Work without flex-time should be abolished as well.

<comment><USER25> A store is open from 08:00. You have the first shift as a cashier. How would flex-time work in that situation?

<comment><USER26> Our group has flex time, and we have a fixed time window where we provide support. We just talk to one another so there is always someone when there should be someone. I presume the general idea is, if we stop acting like adults, management would step in and write our schedules for us.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> We are used to consider time-zones due to the useful subdivision of the Longitude in 24 steps and with that we all (should) agree.

The disagree generally comes when we talk about DST based on our main location (and thus experience), but the problem is intrinsic in the elliptic, so it must be addressed from another point of view (IMO): the Latitude.

I think that we should consider a further subdivision of the coordinate space; not only Longitude by 24, but also Latitude by something reasonable (e.g. every ±30° from the Equator; maybe not even of equal size but based on regions of the climate system).

With "time", we may acquaintance with this new kind of grid-based time-zones (which are easy to memorize/map-to given a basic knowledge of the Earth).

Any (useful) opinion ? :)

<comment><USER28> > We are used to consider time-zones due to the useful subdivision of the > Longitude in 24 steps and with that we all (should) agree

Time zones don't actually form an even division of longitude into 24 zones, or even consistently follow lines of longitude at all.

<comment><USER29> Yeah and we got stuff like Newfoundland, which is in a half timezone. It's 30 minutes ahead of Eastern Time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> > all EU members must follow the same timetable to keep trade and travel > running smoothly

Maybe that's what should be abolished. No country sovereignty on something like DST? I don't believe a country choosing not to follow DST interrupts trade any more than a US state. I'm naive towards EU policies, but the more I hear the more I understand those against super-country federalism.

<comment><USER31> Switching DST at the same moment keeps the delta time the same.

I'm from one EU country, live in another, I know that the delta between the two is always 2 hours.

Because EU and US switch DST at different times, in the multi-national software companies I worked there is this two week period when the delta changes, and there are mails and mis-scheduled things all around.

It's not a huge thing, but what is the benefit of each country randomly switching times, just for the sake of sovereignty. Next people will advocate using true solar time and getting rid of full hour based deltas.

<comment><USER32> I wish everyone would just use UTC for coordination. Then I wouldn't schedule my time around a meeting at "3PM GMT" only to discover that the Brit who scheduled it didn't know it was summertime.

<comment><USER33> This wouldn't fix anything, because people would still have to convert UTC to their local time before agreeing to anything, and they'd make the same mistakes in that process ("Shit, are we +7 or +8 right now?")

<comment><USER32> Not so much, because they'd be more aware of their UTC offset. I usually get people not even knowing that their timezone changes with DST.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why the Fed is more likely to adopt bitcoin technology than kill it off - <AUTHOR> http://jpkoning.blogspot.tw/2013/04/why-fed-is-more-likely-to-adopt-bitcoin.html

<comment><USER2> What you are missing is that the Fed will never adopt a currency because it does not issue one. The Fed is a totally private entity that provides money at a rate to banks. They do not print money, they do not regulate it. They set the inter-bank rates.

The fact that the central bank of a mega-economy would adopt a supply-limited, not peer-reviewed, federated "currency" is absurd.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's Bitcoin's distributed ledger which is the interesting technology from a central bank's point of view. Notes aren't necessarily supply-limited; a possible model would be that the central bank issues and signs new notes, which are then tracked on distributed ledgers.</comment></comment>


Is Productized Consulting *Really* a Good Fit for Your Business? - <AUTHOR> http://item-9.com/productized-consulting-good-fit-business/ <comment><AUTHOR> In the end, I think productized consulting is simply a way to charge less...for the same amount of work (out of guilt, maybe?)</comment>


How I became gaming's most popular and anonymous photographer - <AUTHOR> http://gamasutra.com/blogs/EvanAmos/20131029/202882/The_power_of_Wikipedia_How_I_became_gamings_most_popular_and_anonymous_photographer.php

<comment><USER2> Kickstarter: [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1699256938/the-vanamo- on...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1699256938/the-vanamo-online-game- museum)

</comment><comment><USER3> Awesome. I'm in. As a guy who restores old consoles as a small hobby, having detailed photos of the interiors, parts and circuit boards available will be huge.

The kickstarter's only got about two days left. He's met his goal but personally I'd like to see this get even more support.

</comment><comment><USER4> One of the best "advertorials" for a Kickstarter I've seen yet. Made total sense as the conclusion of the article. I backed.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is a great example of what kickstarter should be for - funding things that 'it would be nice if someone did'. Except the actual kickstarter project and rewards aren't exactly what's being pitched. I just like the idea of funding someone to go ahead and take decent pictures to donate to wikipedia. Not sure I like the idea of the separate 'museum'.

</comment><comment><USER6> What kind of a setup does one use to take a picture like the Playstation controller in the article?

<comment><USER7> Here you go - [http://digital-photography-school.com/how-to-make-a- inexpens...](http://digital-photography-school.com/how-to-make-a-inexpensive- light-tent)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Tell me about a time you hacked something other than a computer system

</comment><comment><USER9> Something like this is great. However, it leaves me wondering if it wouldn't be even better, if 3d scans couldn't also be made.

<comment><USER10> That would require lots of new hardware, which presumably he doesn't yet have. Maybe someone else who has access to 3D scanning equipment would be able to do it in a few years.

Or maybe the people at SIGGRAPH will come up with a crazy new algorithm to reconstruct 3D models of game console from 2D photos. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is cool. The pictures are great looking. Takes me back to the intellivision days.</comment>


Declarative Data Visualization - <AUTHOR> http://haifengl.github.io/vegalite.html <comment><USER2> Related since this is an example of things that can be done with Vega.

From what I can tell, the main article is about being able to generate Vega from Scala.

Altair is an python package for generating Vega using Python. Their documentation also has an excellent examples gallery, if you're looking to see what an be done with Vega and similar packages.

<comment><USER3> Altair is SO fantastic. For the Python side, I maintain a gallery of community visualisations built in Altair, Plotly, Bokeh, Folium etc [https://datapane.com/gallery/](https://datapane.com/gallery/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Not commenting on the content specifically, but that scrolling table of contents is horrific. Aside from the useless animation, it's impossible to click on items at the bottom of the list.

</comment><comment><USER5> I've been very pleased with VegaLite. My one complaint is the use of column for the grouped bar chart. Unfortunately as a result it's difficult to have such a chart in a FacetGrid.

</comment><comment><USER6> Very cool, I like how you click on the dots context menu and view each data directly in the editor. Also, the table of contents makes me extremely uncomfortable, it feels like I'm being followed!

</comment><comment><USER7> Some of the examples pass what appears to be a JSON string to a function called `jsan`, and some use a function called `json`. I would have put this down to a typo, but there are several examples of each.

I'm curious, now: can a Scala person (this is Scala, right?) explain what the difference is between these two things?

<comment><USER8> It looks to be a custom function for parsing JSON arrays: [https://github.com/haifengl/smile/blob/5bf4075b2978af68b31c7...](https://github.com/haifengl/smile/blob/5bf4075b2978af68b31c77f678de167a3e8a9036/json/src/main/scala/smile/json/package.scala#L45)

The benefit is that the type will be known to be JSArray without need for runtime casting (at least, outside the scope of the function). For comparison, `json` returns a JSObject.

I honestly haven't seen this before working with Scala, and it's defined just for the smile repository.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for looking into that :)</comment></comment></comment>


BioFabric: New way to visualize large interaction networks without any hairballs - <AUTHOR> http://www.biofabric.org/gallery/pages/SuperQuickBioFabric.html#HN <comment><USER2> These seems pretty cool. My worry is that you lose intuitions of centrality with this, with the exception of degree centrality, since nodes with the highest degree are sorted from left to right. How can we capture other measures of centrality? What about weak ties?

<comment><USER3> Sorry, newbie at commenting, so my replies are actually in separate comments below. Summary: you can create a layout that orders nodes, and edges, to fit what you are trying to look at.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Btw, if you want to play with some own data, you can run it with Java web start on [1].

As something simple to try out, I figured that I could create a file 'test.sif' (in SIF file format [2]) like this, just to get some example:

item1 conn item2

item1 conn item3

item2 conn item1

item2 conn item3

item3 conn item1

item3 conn item2

... (yea, you get the idea)

And then visualize it by going: "File > Import > Import from SIF"

Turns out there is more "demo SIF files" in [3] though.

Hey, this is kinda fun :)

[1] [http://www.biofabric.org/#launch](http://www.biofabric.org/#launch)

[2] "Simple Interaction Format" [http://wiki.cytoscape.org/Cytoscape_User_Manual/Network_Form...](http://wiki.cytoscape.org/Cytoscape_User_Manual/Network_Formats)

[3] [http://www.biofabric.org/#sif](http://www.biofabric.org/#sif) , [http://www.biofabric.org/sifFiles.html](http://www.biofabric.org/sifFiles.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> Compare this earlier genealogy visualization: [http://www.aviz.fr/geneaquilts/](http://www.aviz.fr/geneaquilts/)

</comment><comment><USER5> As a systems biologist and web developer, I say major thumbs up for the presentation of the idea, but a thumbs sideways for the actual visualization method.

I'm not sure this makes biology clearer. Seems like rearranging deck chairs.

<comment><USER6> This was my thought as well - I work with large contact networks for epidemiology, and while getting away from hairballs would be good in theory, I'm not seeing how a figure built using this technique will make me go "Oh! Yes, now I see it!"

<comment><USER3> Placing infected individuals in the top rows, ranking uninfected individuals by probability of infection, lay out the network. Overall shape of network might give clues to network structure? I find that with contact networks, dynamic networks (links appear and disappear) tend to have problems with force-directed layouts bouncing around a lot.

<comment><USER6> It's possible. My issue is I'm not sold that in networks of any size (the Le Mis network is pretty small) that this doesn't end up in a similarly difficult to interpret mess. I may try it out, but the initial demo didn't trigger much beyond "Neat".

But to be honest, I don't tend to work in .sif format networks, and I don't have time tonight to try to get something I actually use in that format.

<comment><USER3> Of course, YMMV, but the Stanford web network ([http://www.biofabric.org/gallery/index.html#Stanford](http://www.biofabric.org/gallery/index.html#Stanford)) has 2.3 million edges but you can glean structure from it. You can visually estimate things like the network radius and 90-percentile effective diameter from the global view.

There is a very simple R implementation that takes igraph networks as input. There is also a simple Python version from A. Mazurie at [https://github.com/ajmazurie/biofabric](https://github.com/ajmazurie/biofabric), though I have not tried it myself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is among the cooler (as in more useful) visualizations I've seen in a long time.

</comment><comment><USER3> BioFabric layouts are just a linear ordering of the nodes and edges, and you can specify those with input files. For example, you can break out clusters and show intra- and inter- cluster links separately. See [http://www.biofabric.org/gallery/index.html#LesMiz](http://www.biofabric.org/gallery/index.html#LesMiz)

</comment><comment><USER7> Dear Author of BioFabric: thank you. thank you for being willing to experiment with graph layouts when so many others just fail too soon. Great work, and keep going! It's vastly applicable work. visualizing graphs (and dags specifically) shows up all over the place)

<comment><USER3> You're welcome, and thanks! Anybody who wants to can play with different layouts, which are just linear orderings of nodes and edges, which you specify using node and edge attribute files. Features like that are discussed in the blog posts at [http://biofabric.blogspot.com/](http://biofabric.blogspot.com/) Unfortunately, the blog remains the best documentation at the moment for various features...

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Note that since the nodes-as-lines approach gives you a new degree of freedom to work with, you can organize edges into semantically useful groups by placing similar links next to each other. E.g. think about link communities instead of node communities.

</comment><comment><USER8> I've made my fair share of hairball networks over the years. but I don't think this fixes the issue. The problem is that biological network diagrams of sufficient detail to be accurate, are far too complicated to be useful. Plus, biologists are often sloppy with their data model for these things: mixing genes and proteins for example. In those cases, what does a line between two nodes even mean?

<comment><USER3> If you have a complicated system, the best way to deal with the complexity is to organize it in some fashion. BioFabric provides a way to do that, since it allows the network to be arranged in a linear fashion. Kinda like the advantages of organized adjacency matrix views, but with the intuitive link- hopping model of node-link diagrams. I can't argue that if you put garbage data in, you get garbage out. But, over time, very large but high-quality biological networks will emerge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> If this was a bi directional graph you would need to keep the implied 2d grid column header row straight rather than dropping down the column headers to skip already listed people. Also all those lines are noisy why not just have a 2d grid drop the headers for locality as was done then just place colored squares at the intersection points. Hmm might be worth prototyping something in d3 later.

<comment><USER3> Not sure what you mean in first sentence? I have found the node lines to be useful for navigation, and the edge lines (drawn darker and in front) create "edge wedges" that make nodes with similar neighborhoods stand out. Without lines, you end up with just an incidence (as opposed to an adjacency) matrix.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I am currently trying to visualize the network of a moderately big forum: Users who post to threads. In Gephi I only managed to created blobby hairballs, any suggestions for other free tools? It's a couple of thousand users and a couple of thousand threads but pretty dense.

<comment><USER3> BioFabric should be able to handle that OK. Import as tab-delimited sif file. Default layout is breadth-first search, in order of decreasing degree, starting from highest degree node. If that is not what you want, can specify node order. See this post: [http://biofabric.blogspot.com/2013/05/banish- bipartite-blues...](http://biofabric.blogspot.com/2013/05/banish-bipartite- blues.html)</comment></comment>


Apple's 'Neural Engine' Infuses the iPhone with AI Smarts - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/apples-neural-engine-infuses-the-iphone-with-ai-smarts <comment><USER2> As much as I detest Apple products, having a neural engine on the phone is a step in right direction. Google is getting to big for it's britches and privacy aside, latency is a big plus. Now if only Apple was priced lower and were open source, I would buy their products</comment>


The "Almost" Billionaire's Blueprint for an Abundant Life - <AUTHOR> http://www.chrisbrisson.com/strategy/michael-masterson-blueprint How the heck do you accomplish so much in such a short period of time. This dude is an animal. <comment><USER2> I don't want to put this guy down or anything but

"He's a poet. (written over 1,000 poems and 350 in 07′ alone)"

made me laugh out loud. Is he planning to double his poetic output next year?

<comment><USER3> Yeah, you can smell the BS, can't you? He's a very prolific writer...and a scam artist.

[IIRC, his real name is Mark Ford. He's gotten in trouble in the past for laundering money, fraud, etc.]</comment></comment>


MIT's Introduction to Algorithms, Lecture 3: Divide and Conquer - <AUTHOR> http://www.catonmat.net/blog/mit-introduction-to-algorithms-part-two/ <comment><USER2> The killer concept to grok with divide-and-conquer is that it's only powerful if

      1) the smaller version of the problem is actually
         easier to solve and not just smaller
                      - or -
      2) the smaller version of the problem is just as
         hard to solve, but you can combine smaller versions into
         a bigger one with less work than doing the bigger itself.

Quicksort is an example of the former (partitioning a list of size 2 or less _is_ sorting it, even though partition is linear time). Merge sort is too (combining two sorted lists is linear time). Repeated squaring is an example of the latter, as is the Strassen matrix multiplication.

I took this class, and it took me a lot of just sitting around pondering before I got that stuff.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for your insightful comment! Can I use it in my post? (full credit to you)

<comment><USER2> Yeah, definitely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For the very interested the course website is [http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and- Compute...](http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Computer- Science/6-046JFall-2005/CourseHome/index.htm). It has the videos, lecture notes, problems sets and solutions. I missed the link on Peteris' review.

<comment><USER3> Oh, the link is in the 1st post of the review series! Didn't feel like including it in every post. Perhaps I should.

<comment><USER5> _The last topic covered in this lecture is VLSI (Very large Scale Integration) layout problem: given a number of various electronic gates an chips, how to position them on the circuit board._

You may want to state the objective here as well. I haven't seen the lecture, but from the still on the google video I presume it is "... how to position them to minimize area".

<comment><USER3> Oops, sure, how to minimize area. I had these words in mind when I was writing the post. Fixed now. Thanks! :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


TechShop has not filed for chapter 7 – despite announcement saying they had - <AUTHOR> http://www.eastvalleytribune.com/columns/money/techshop-chandler-rescue-in-the-works/article_07ce63ce-d223-11e7-bf1c-5393e7d0159a.html <comment><AUTHOR> Key part of article:

>Initially, TechShop stated that it was filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy and published an email address for a trustee for concerned parties to contact. However, the company has yet to actually file, Choi said at the meeting.</comment>


Worked at an ICO crypto company. Crazy how people still believe/invest in them - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/b24e4s/i_worked_at_an_ico_crypto_company_its_crazy_how/ <comment><USER2> Just before the ICO bubble went completely nuts, I read the white papers of the 10 highest market cap ERC20 tokens. None of them made any sense from an investor's perspective, from a consumer perspective, from a mechanism design perspective. With the exception of Augur (and I have other problems with Augur), they all relied on the Chuck E-Cheese model: requiring the customer to use of a novel internal currency for purchasing the services of the smart contract. This model is an absurd rent-seeking hack that basically assures your service will not grow at all.

As someone interested in mechanism design, cryptocurrency strikes me as a low- stakes method of testing out various mechanisms, such as Futarchy and quadratic voting. But pyramid schemes (both intentional and unintentional) seem to be the order of the day.

At this point for me to take a cryptocurrency seriously I would require it to have an inflationary monetary policy. And not "inflationary" in the sense Ethereum is. I mean, inflationary in the sense that the price does not go up over time. It doesn't have to be pegged to an existing currency, but it needs to manage its supply in such a fashion as to make a speculative bubble impossible.

There would be little financial incentive to work on such a project, but Linux had that problem too. The upside is I am pretty certain it would screen out most of the toxicity of Bitcoin and its ilk. And it would actually have a chance of being useful for someone.

In terms of prediction markets, the big problem with prediction markets is liquidity. There is no liquidity because it is provably irrational to participate in a non-subsidized prediction market. Subsidizing a prediction market with demurrage seems like a very good idea to me and isn't something a traditional prediction market can do.

Something like this seems like a worthy experiment.

<comment><AUTHOR> Another problem with prediction markets is issues with US law. There used to be a 'futures market' in Dublin where you could buy and sell futures on whether Osama Bin Laden would be caught by some date and all sorts of stuff but I think they ran into problems with US residents betting on politics I think which is illegal there. This was a decade or so ago using fiat.

I punted a bit in the bubble and have a friend still working for an ICO company so am curious to see if any of it pans out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The OP is [deleted], but a copy remains here: [https://www.removeddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/b24e4s/...](https://www.removeddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/b24e4s/i_worked_at_an_ico_crypto_company_its_crazy_how/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Archive: [http://archive.is/MK23e](http://archive.is/MK23e)</comment>


Facebook retires Nuclide Atom extension - <AUTHOR> https://blog.atom.io/2018/12/12/facebook-retires-nuclide-extension.html <comment><USER2> I went in for an interview recently for the react core team and the guy who interviewed me said Facebook was trying to edge away from open source. He mentioned it's not worth it to them as much as it was before. Too much to maintain.

<comment><USER3> I'm surprised to see an engineer admit this during _an interview_ (assuming it is true, sophiebits has mentioned that it she doesn't agree with this). Presumably this is the time when you talk about how much cool open source work you do?

<comment><USER4> An engineer at a big company is still just a dude or a gal. Not everyone in a multi-thousand person company will toe the company line or are in lock step.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I will really miss the remote development experience. It didn't get a lot of visibility because Nuclide's scope was much broader. It was also a pain to setup (compiling Watchman from source on Linux servers...) but after the initial setup it was way better than anything else out there (FUSE mounts, rmate, etc). Hopefully VSCode will get there soon.

</comment><comment><USER6> Wait, so with Github taking complete responsibility for Atom, that means Atom and VSCode are now ultimately run/sponsored by the same company (MS)?

<comment><USER7> Despite claims to the contrary, I fully anticipate the (slow) death of Atom.

<comment><USER8> Is Electron maintained separately from the Atom team?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've been out of the React Native loop, but I seem to remember Nuclide was FB's canonical IDE for React Native and Hack - does that mean there's not an official way of using those environments any more?

<comment><USER10> In the past, a new platform required a new language which required a new IDE. Fortunately those days things less tied together. React Native is mostly using JavaScript which can be productively edited with a lot of editors and IDEs.

So the fact that Nuclide was there didn't mean that you had to use it (and the vast majority didn't) in order to write React Native.

<comment><USER11> I find this a little disingenuous, since React and React Native documentation rarely if ever feature code examples in any actual flavor of standard JavaScript and the 'blessed' way of writing React app involves quite a bit of embedded XML (JSX), which editors need to know how to deal with.

<comment><USER12> To be fair any modern IDE or text editor that supports JavaScript supports JSX

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Kill Flow while at it.

<comment><USER14> I'm a relatively happy user of flow. Is your objection to typed JavaScript or to the fact that flow is not Typescript?

<comment><USER15> I don't want Flow to exactly die, but I wish Facebook have since love to running Flow on Windows, especially things like making Flow run faster and improving the VSCode plugin. Yeah maybe FB doesn't use any Windows machines, but it's claimed that Flow has full support for Windows. The reality is that Flow runs very very slow on Windows.

So in a way, I do object that Flow is not Typescript - I wish it had as much cross-platform viability as Typescript.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> So, does this mean Facebook is adopting VS Code?

<comment><USER17> Apparently not: [https://mobile.twitter.com/amasad/status/1072930703065501696](https://mobile.twitter.com/amasad/status/1072930703065501696)

<comment><USER18> Nuclide replaced FBIDE, the internal pre-setup web IDE that Facebook used. Having a pre-setup environment is a huge productivity boost:

\- dev env onboarding takes a minute instead of a week

\- employees can code "on the go"

So predictably, if they get rid of Nuclide there needs to be an alternative and doubtful they've built something new because... why.

<comment><USER10> Nuclide has always had a ton of value for Facebook itself as we could build a lot of Facebook-specific integrations and ship a new version to all the developers every week. It's now the most used editor at Facebook.

This announcement is about the open source version of Nuclide, which has never received a lot of love and didn't have a lot of adoption.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> What are teams developing on flow recommended to use now at Facebook?

<comment><USER20> Hopefully they invest in flow-for-vscode, which has the potential to reach parity with VSCode's amazing TS support: [https://github.com/flowtype/flow- for-vscode](https://github.com/flowtype/flow-for-vscode)

<comment><USER21> This is much needed. The extension has been broken for our team for a couple months now. No clear resolution. The Flow suggestions in an editor are basically unusable right now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I guess it's finally time to switch to VS Code then.

</comment><comment><USER23> Ran horribly slow for me anyway, so no big loss.

</comment><comment><USER24> Can you update the title to add Atom IDE?

Perhaps more important than Nuclide itself are the Atom IDE extensions which are also being retired. [https://ide.atom.io/](https://ide.atom.io/)

<comment><USER25> It would seem that [https://github.com/atom/atom- languageclient](https://github.com/atom/atom-languageclient) is still under active development. Hopefully this means that the core Atom team will continue to work on language server features.

<comment><USER26> A fairly substantial PR was accepted recently to integrate the typescript server as the language client for atom-ide: [https://github.com/atom/ide- typescript](https://github.com/atom/ide-typescript)

It appears the project isn't dead, but there aren't any Facebook maintainers working on it (and there haven't been for nearly a year).

<comment><USER24> Ok sorry, the atom-ide-ui package is dead. I'm not sure how the IDE features are split between the ui and individual language server packages</comment></comment></comment></comment>


TheFacebook: Stunning Numbers (May 2005) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.softtechvc.com/2005/05/thefacebook_stu.html <comment><USER2> _Oh yeah, and they are already making gazillions of dollars and are profitable._

Didn't Facebook only achieve profitability a month or so ago? Or have I missed something?

<comment><USER3> This was pre-Photos app, which is what took off like a rocket and blew out their hosting and bandwidth costs. They were profitable before Photos.

<comment><USER4> Really? Did photos set them under? Almost all FB photos are low resolution compared with the 10MP ones I throw on Flickr and get much less traffic in my estimate.

I believe you, but its amazing that bandwidth costs for photos could set them under for such a long time.

<comment><USER5> Facebook has more users than Flickr; its users upload more photos than Flickr's.

[http://www.insidefacebook.com/2009/02/23/facebook- increases-...](http://www.insidefacebook.com/2009/02/23/facebook-increases- lead-as-top-photo-sharing-site/)

They get more than twice the photo traffic Flickr does. It's also interesting, looking at that second graph and realizing that Facebook hasn't peaked yet. Did you know that according to Compete Facebook is visited nearly as much as Yahoo and Google? Or that it's got 250% the traffic of MySpace?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The interesting thing about exponential growth is that the numbers are always stunning.

Ohh, and that is why the singularity doesn't exist.

<comment><USER5> _Ohh, and that is why the singularity doesn't exist._

Hm? How does that follow from your first statement?

<comment><USER6> You are always in the knee of an exp curve. There is no point in the future where the growth breaks down your models. That is a persistent state of the world right now.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Archbee – The Documentation App for Engineers - <AUTHOR> https://www.producthunt.com/posts/archbee-2 <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN, we just launched Archbee on ProductHunt. We hope to get juicy feedback from you guys :)

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://www.producthunt.com/posts/archbee-2](https://www.producthunt.com/posts/archbee-2)</comment></comment>


"God Help American Science": Engineering Theatre and Spectacle (2016) - <AUTHOR> http://www.patrickmccray.com/2016/09/07/god-help-american-science-engineering-theatre-and-spectacle/ <comment><USER3> In 2016 Seattle hosted a recreation (or maybe it was a memorial?) of 9 Evenings called 9e2. Organized by John Boylan, whose "Conversations" series is worth checking out, 9e2 was fun and intermittently thought-provoking but from what I understand not much more than an echo of the original NYC event which, as outlined in the McCray piece here, was itself an experimental shout into the dark that received many negative critical reverberations, but also some resonance that lasted.

There's a fine line where technical art - "new media" and beyond - <USER2> artworks made purposefully to reflect upon or expose specific topics, issues, or tools in science and engineering stop holding their own artistically and becomes either "gadget show-and-tell" (symptom: when it takes more time to put on the VR headset and wait for the creator to reboot the computer and scene than to view and interpret the 5-minutes-of-Unity-tutorials art within), the kitschy sculptural, musical, or whatever media equivalent of Popular Mechanics cover art, or interactive science museum displays.

That line is fine, and I wonder where each of the works and performances in the 9 Evenings program sat on the spectrum, but there are many artists currently and in the past who have adapted or interpreted science and engineering material successfully and to great effect (Refik Anadol comes to mind at the moment).</comment>


Reddit: IAmAn Astronaut who has been to space twice - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/gm8rh/iaman_astronaut_who_has_been_to_space_twice_and/

<comment><USER2> His response to a hopeful Aeronautical Engineer on becoming an Astronaut:

      "Be better than the competition."

Wisdom.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Epic circle jerk"

yup

</comment><comment><USER4> Flagged because AMA like these don't belong on HN.

<comment><USER5> <http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html></comment></comment>


Idea Validation: A side project management tool - <AUTHOR> Please help validate the following idea with your feedback. This will save me a lot of time. Thanks a lot in advance.
A toolkit that enables the customer to easily hire with confidence & stick with the best freelancer, get regular updates, track progress of the project, and replace freelancers if needed. Our typical customer is someone who needs assistance on his/her side project. The tool also helps the freelancer to find new leads and help with maintaining the customer relationship through purpose built tools. This is a SaaS product charging $10 per month per freelancer. Free for the customer. #idea-validation
Please comment both the positives and negatives about this approach. Thanks. <comment><USER2> That looks like to be a good idea, would'n that be something like a "Polished tech Fiverr"?

I just don't like the idea of "replace freelancers if needed", as you might know catching up with a ongoing tech project is not always easy, having the ability to replace the freelancer (if he is taking to long or something) might not be a good idea.

I would say that a normal/ignorant project manager using your site (those who understand tech as i understand oil platforms) will be always switching freelancers and he will lose interest in your service really quick.

Try to focus on giving both ends good reasons to be on your platform, not just for the guy that is hiring!

That's my 5 cents!

<comment><AUTHOR> Excellent suggestion. Will keep that in mind. Thanks for the detailed post !

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Also can this be called a Freelancer CRM ... as it looks more like a customer relationship management tool for a freelancer, than a freelancing platform ?

</comment><comment><USER3> That sounds a lot like upwork though. Or are you building the Uber of freelance work, in which you maintain a pool of vetted freelancers?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. Goal is to vet freelancers and at this point it looks similar to upwork. There is a difference though, that unlike Upwork, which sends unlimited proposal (which makes the user select one)... this tool would connect the best matching person based on past data on chat directly.

Not sure, if this is a good enough idea or there is room for improvement over Upwork. Hence, validating the idea here. Please let me know what you think.

<comment><USER3> I wouldn't know. Another thing to look at is worklist.net, which is a system in which developers are bidding to complete dev tasks for open source.

<comment><USER4> worklist.net was an internal scheduler used only by developers for one VR project, which stopped paying for gigs last year.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a great idea. Having multiple side projects, one can easily get lost on objectives.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the response. What ideal features would you like to see on such a platform as a customer who manages multiple side projects ?</comment></comment>


GOOG rolling out pagespeed to mobile Chrome users? - <AUTHOR> http://imgur.com/4hH8Xad

<comment><AUTHOR> It was double opt-in: I had to enable, then activate the "Bandwidth management" option.

[http://imgur.com/NoctiYu](http://imgur.com/NoctiYu)

</comment><comment><USER2> I was offered this option in June or July.</comment>


Official WhatsApp Desktop Clients - pow-tac https://www.whatsapp.com/download/ <comment><AUTHOR> Still no iPad client - I wonder what the rationale for this is given that people seem to be paying for an unofficial iPad client that just wraps the web interface with a different useragent.

<comment> pow-tac Yep, was expecting iPad client as well.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: can we have a standard quote format - <AUTHOR> When quoting other comments within a thread there is no agreed standard format which makes for a messy and less easily parsed display. Couldn't the markup here have a simple quote tag like ">" (used at Reddit)?<p>It may be of benefit to have a different tag for quoting external sources too. <comment><USER2> _there is no agreed standard format_

Most people here italicise quotes with asterisks. see <http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc>.

<comment><USER3> _Most people here italicise quotes with asterisks._

That's been my method as well. Easy enough to quote a block of text that way without having to manually format/indent and add >'s.

<comment><AUTHOR> _Most do use asterisks, but not all_ , some use simple quote marks others use >. Italics are also use just for emphasis.

 _without having to manually format/indent and add >'s._

You just add one > at the head of the para, it's quicker than adding asterisks at either end. Reddit's version also nests quotes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sorry to ask, but why is it a big deal? I think its usually pretty obvious when something is being quoted...

Just my two cents.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not a big deal.

I just find the reddit markup for this is better, makes for better scanability of threads and takes less keypresses. Also allows for easy use of a user stylesheet on quotes or for HN to change the quote style.

Generally if there's a better way I prefer to use it. Clearly others are happy with the current ad-hoc method.</comment></comment>


Big Coal Plants Begin to Close - <AUTHOR> https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/and-now-the-really-big-coal-plants-begin-to-close/ <comment><USER2> From the UK... "A decade ago, coal plants generated almost a third of the UK's electricity, but in the first half of this year they have provided only 3%."

[https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jun/21/zero- carbon...](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jun/21/zero-carbon- energy-overtakes-fossil-fuels-as-the-uks-largest-electricity-source)

[https://electricityproduction.uk/from/coal/?t=8y](https://electricityproduction.uk/from/coal/?t=8y)

<comment><USER3> Meanwhile in Poland it's been 78.2% in 2018, "down" from 78.4% in 2017. And the Polish government has made it clear that coal will remain the basis of energy production here.

I'm frustrated as I'm writing this on a train from Berlin to Warsaw. One of the reasons why I chose to travel by train rather than fly was the carbon footprint journey, and I'm cutting it down much less than I should be.

<comment><USER4> Different places change at different rates. One thing that will happen, however, is that as some of the big coal customers switch, the economies of scale for coal production change, and it becomes even more expensive. So, coal will eventually become too pricey even for places like Poland, even though "Poland" does not bring to mind "summer skies where solar would be competitive" (I may be biased as I've only ever visited Poland around Christmastime).

<comment><USER5> Poland's only local energy source is coal, which is why they're so set on using it. Natural gas comes mainly from Russia, and they don't have the capital for nuclear. Solar isn't a good option in Poland due to the long winter nights, and it's not a particularly windy country for wind generation.

<comment><USER6> >they don't have the capital for nuclear

I find that kind of hard to believe.

<comment><USER7> You find it hard to believe that one of Europe's poorer countries has trouble finding the €20bn over 10 years it will cost? The UK is having trouble affording that for Hinckley C.

<comment><USER8> Poland isn't "one of Europe's poorer countries" and many countries that operate nuclear power plants are poorer than Poland (such as: Argentina, Armenia, Bangladesh, Belarus, Brazil, Bulgaria, India, Iran, Mexico, Pakistan, Romania, South Africa, Turkey, Ukraine)

<comment><USER9> I wouldn't throw Brazil in there, Brazil has barely 2 functioning reactors (Angra I and Angra II) with the third one being stalled since 1984, restarted in 2007 and so far has no hope of being finished in time (announced for 2020 but now waiting investments to continue development).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Here in Ontario all coal plants were shut down over a decade ago. The difference in air quality seems to have been forgotten by many people, but it was a drastic and obvious improvement.

The power mix here is now 90% nuclear & hydro, so not emitting CO2 (directly), with the remainder being a mix of natural gas, wind, and solar.

<comment><USER11> I am happy these changes were pushed forward before a politician like Doug Ford got into power as I think we know these would have been reversed as we saw with the carbon tax.

<comment><USER12> A carbon tax to me seems like something designed to generate political blowback. The problem is a carbon tax punishes people for decisions they made previously where they didn't have a choice. With the hope that they'll suck it up and find a way out somehow. It's stupid to assume that 'somehow' isn't going to be toss those dicks out on their ear.

<comment><USER10> Ontario never had a carbon tax, it had cap&trade in the same market as California and Quebec. Most consumers never noticed its introduction. But the new idiots in power certainly made political hay about how they were going to drop gas prices by removing it. Turns out it had almost no effect on gas and utility prices but a huge effect on the province's budget, along with axing dozens of environmental initiatives in the province.

And the federal gov't has now imposed a carbon tax to replace it.

<comment><USER13> In fact I saw a big drop for a few months, since then the price keeps creeping up. Before DF, I saw $1.25 a liter, after he got in it fell to $0.98 a liter and since then it has slowly increased. Right now it is $1.19 where I am I expect it will be back to $1.25 before winter.

<comment><USER10> The drop was due to other factors, price of oil fell, again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Great to see coal phasing out but I feel like the risks of natural gas have not been well publicized, data regarding methane leaks from natural gas is sketchy at best and fracking has almost certainly caused more frequent earthquakes (albeit small on the Richter scale) at sites.

Big oil pushes natural gas as a bridge energy, and despite lots of skepticism towards them I think they're correct. The window where natural gas is a plurality of global energy consumption has to be as small as possible.

<comment><USER15> Has there been any earthquakes which are actually significant? No matter how bad fracking is, coal is much worse (the goal needs to be to get China and India onto Natural Gas and then renewables)

<comment><USER16> Oklahoma put restrictions in place after earthquakes threatened critical infrastructure.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009–19_Oklahoma_earthquake_sw...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009–19_Oklahoma_earthquake_swarms)

I believe the Netherlands is phasing out its industry because of concerns. I also recall reading about problems in China as they begin trying to frack.

<comment><USER17> In the north of the Netherlands (province of Groningen, location of Europe's largest gas field) earthquakes caused by gas extraction have caused widespread damage to homes and infrastructure. The government - pressured by inhabitants - decided to significantly cut back production of the field, and will close the field entirely in 2030.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Unfortunately it's not as big a win as it sounds like. Per the article much of the economic force can be attributed to natural gas, which is better but not much, and most of the really huge coal plants have just adapted to regulation and don't show signs of imminent closure.

<comment><USER19> I was under the impression that natural gas was twice as good as coal[1]? 50-60% less CO2. not perfect but far from "not much better" in my opinion

[1] [https://www.ucsusa.org/clean-energy/coal-and-other-fossil- fu...](https://www.ucsusa.org/clean-energy/coal-and-other-fossil- fuels/environmental-impacts-of-natural-gas)

<comment><USER20> Don't forget the heavy metals (lead, arsenic, mercury), radiation (coal ash is literally more radioactive than some nuclear waste) and particulate matter releases that come from burning coal. Natural gas isn't optimal but it is FAR better than coal.

<comment><USER21> > _coal ash is literally more radioactive than some nuclear waste_

Please do not repeat this nonsense. It either compares non-power-plant waste (lab gloves used in isotope labelling, for instance), or is so wrong as to be ludicrous.

Used nuclear fuel is billions of times more radioactive than coal ash.

<comment><USER13> Yes, but that nuclear waste is in storage pools. The waste from the coal plants is in the air we breath and the ash-spills effect the water we drink.

Or better yet, walk around an operating nuke plant with a radiation detector and then do the same walk around an operating coal plant. I am willing to bet the coal plant will spike higher.

<comment><USER21> If that's what you mean, then say "coal ash ponds emit more radiation than can be measured outside spent fuel cooling pools".

"Coal ash is more radioactive than nuclear (power) waste" is a completely difference factual statement and is untrue by many orders of magnitude.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> In other news, Australia just sank a climate treaty meeting by refusing give up coal mining: [https://www.bbc.com/news/world- australia-49365918](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-49365918)

And also on the BBC today, on a lighter note: [https://www.bbc.com/news/uk- england-oxfordshire-49165336](https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england- oxfordshire-49165336)

<comment><USER23> Why is Australia part of a Pacific Islands Forum? Did they include other Asian Island Nations? Was Hawaii included?

I think New Zealand also refused. NZ exports about two small trainloads a day from Christchurch I think.

<comment><USER24> Why is Australia part of a Pacific Islands Forum?

Some small Pacific Islands are part of Australia and Australia also provides aid to some of the Pacific island nations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Much of this is due to the fracking tech revolution of the early 2000s, which dropped the price of energy from natural gas below coal in the US.

Shale gas has been replacing coal: [https://images.app.goo.gl/zb2bBfkBuAvWePVU6](https://images.app.goo.gl/zb2bBfkBuAvWePVU6)

<comment><USER12> A friends dad who is a retired nuclear engineering professor said said as much, coal can't compete with natural gas on price. He said his former department and others were heavily dependent on grants from coal, oil, and the nuclear industry and those have all but disappeared. Quote: I got out at the right time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> On the topic of coal, as a more worrying counterpoint, the NY Times just published an article about the actions of the Adani Group in Australia under the clickbaity yet accurate title "How One Billionaire Could Keep Three Countries Hooked on Coal for Decades":

[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/15/climate/coal-adani- india-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/15/climate/coal-adani-india- australia.html)

</comment><comment><USER27> Keeping the coal plants online is just another way of paying welfare to the workers and the firms that own them. Taking money from everyone else and giving it to the outdated machines and workers with outdated skills.

Note that I'm not saying that there is anything _wrong_ with being on welfare. But as a society I think we should decouple our determination of who deserves to be on welfare from our decision about how rapidly we want to destroy our environment.

In other words, let's just pay them normal food stamps or welfare checks, not keep the polluting plants open for decades longer than necessary.

For some reason many American workers feel totally proud being the indirect recipients of corporate welfare, yet would feel ashamed simply getting food stamps every month. There is zero difference between the two, except that in this case the food stamps are a LOT better for the environment.

<comment><USER28> And instead of either keeping dying industries alive or giving out food stamps, why not employ the people to do something about ,e.g., US infrastructure. It's not there's a lack of work if you have the money to pay someone.

<comment><USER27> Even better, to the extent that the government can identity useful things that need to be done (it has a very poor track record so far)

<comment><USER28> Yes, government sometimes do stupid shit. But so do large corporations, and governments aren't particularly worse.

<comment><USER27> > governments aren't particularly worse

or particularly better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I've said it before and I'll say it again... market forces are accomplishing what regulation and public awareness never accomplished, in terms of reducing greenhouse emissions.

I am _so glad_ the market is on our side for once.

<comment><USER30> We wouldn't be at this point (this early) without large public investments, regulation, and advocacy. Simply saying "oh the market's got it, we cool" is misguided thinking.

<comment><USER29> Public awareness and advocacy matter more, I think. We're not regulating coal out of existence, or they'd be closing from regulation, not cost. And the public investment isn't what's driving the radical drop in wind/solar manufacturing and installation costs. That's regular economy of scale stuff.

<comment><USER31> They are closing because alternatives are cheaper, which has multiple reasons, some of which are policy (subsidies/penalties, publicly funded research in alternatives, stricter mining regulation driving resource prices up, stricter emissions regulations requiring expensive plant upgrades or more expensive new construction etc.)

<comment><USER29> I did a little googling, and new coal plants in the US are no more expensive - price/mwh held steady at $95-100 from 2010-1015 (after which no one built any more). Meanwhile, in 2010-1019, natural gas plants dropped in cost/mwh by about 50%, from around $80 to $40. And onshore wind dropped 71%, from $149 to around $43. Solar dropped even more (88%), from $396 to $49!

As an aside, new nuclear dropped from $119 to $90, and there are no new plants planned - small wonder, considering the massive cost and long time frame to build nuclear when wind and solar cost half as much and prices are still dropping like rocks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> It can be done, Ontario shut down Nanticoke (largest coal genrator in North AMerica) and repalced it with solar.. But something seems off with the capacity??

The Nanticoke Generating Station is a 44 MW solar power station which started operation in April 2019.[2] Previously from 1972 to 2013, it was the largest coal-fired power plant in North America. At full capacity, it could provide 3,964 MW of power into the southern Ontario power grid from its base in Nanticoke, Ontario, Canada,[3] and provided as much as 15% of Ontario's electricity.

</comment><comment><USER4> The coal industry is, over the next decade, going to go the way of Venezuela, and the parts of America still dependent on it economically will go with it. We are not ready.

<comment><USER33> It feels like it's already mostly gone this way; the vast majority of the coal-associated jobs (those involved in mining) are already gone. Automation plus large closures already gutted the industry.

<comment><USER25> Yeah.

There are only ~80,000 coal miners in the US now, which is 0.06% of the full- time employee population.

<comment><USER34> According to wikipedia [1], the figure is 50,000. The peak headcount was 883,000, but due to mechanization, those 50,000 way out-produce those 883,000. Looking at the graph on that page, coal production is down but is still higher than what it was 50 years ago.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining_in_the_United_Stat...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining_in_the_United_States)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Wouldn't it make sense to build a solar farm there instead. I mean the power lines etc are all there already

</comment><comment><USER36> Just look at the companies who provide maintance...they're leaving the business.

</comment><comment><USER37> Nice to feel a little hope and see this :)

</comment><comment><USER38> Yeah, not in Australia though.

</comment><comment><USER39> One of the great ironies of political life in the UK is that we are now celebrating generating electricity for "X days without Coal".

This is of course a positive thing, but it was arrived at by the politically motivated near-total destruction of UK's mining industry in the 1980s (the then right wing Tory government wanted to destroy the heartland support of its left wing Labour opponents).

What was a socially divisive, bitter class struggle for years and years, that nearly brought down the government, is now a strategic masterstroke of climate change planning.

Life is odd.

[#] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_miners%27_strike_(1984%E2%8...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_miners%27_strike_\(1984%E2%80%9385\))

<comment><USER40> The shift from coal in the UK wasn't caused by the miners strike.

Britain kept on using coal post strike and pit closures, it just bought foreign coal (not even necessarily cheaper) instead.

The Dash for Gas is what killed the use of coal for generation.

<comment><USER39> It's a lot easier to stop using imported foreign coal over the last decade than to stop using unionised voting coal mines in your home country - just ask Mr Trump.

The decline in home coal use was directly correlated to the strike - and the decline in imported coal use is as much old plant and expensive marginal costs as the shift to gas.

At some point replacing the coal fired infrastructure stopped making economic sense - and with no political leverage the whole thing collapsed really quickly.

Something we might be happy to learn when looking at oil and gas generation - once solar prices and volume are there the industry just vanishes.

<comment><USER41> Not really. The number of people employed in and around the coal industry in the US was pretty small by 2016. Also note, that Trump got a lot less votes that Mitt Romney in 2012, so that despite all the pandering - there wasn't some massive rush to vote for Trump.

Also, the union density in mining in the US is not as high as it used to be (don't know what the exact figures are).

<comment><USER39> Some industries have political impacts way beyond their numerical size would suggest. Farming is one such. Coal was in the UK and seems to have been for the US - Trump won votes appealing to people who had never even seen a mine let alone been down one. But they will vote to support the miners in the same way Idaho is won by supporting farmers.

Yes Clinton won the popular vote. No unions are ridiculously under represented in the States (you need to fix that BTW)

But in the end seem from this side of the pond this was a political message - coal mining was a proxy for "proper American jobs for proper Americans without all this economics and climate change nonsense"

And that has a fairly sizeable base.

Whether trump will find that same base happy to swallow a similar message now he is the incumbent remains to be seen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> this is great news -- proud of USA and Americans! Americans truly teach the World when it comes to technology and advancement.

Also, it is great to see more and more usage of coal in products ranging from toothpaste all the way to food products.

<comment><USER43> Such a cynical take. Things need to start somewhere. It can't be all or nothing.</comment></comment>


Trying to Live on 500K in New York City - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/08/fashion/08halfmill.html?_r=1&ref=business <comment><USER2> > Nanny: $45,000 a year.

Of course, no banker would dream of paying his nanny less than $500,000 a year, considering the difficulty of surviving on such a salary in NYC.

<comment><USER3> Amen. Every time I hear the "waily waily waily you can't live for less than $90k in California" I think "for God's sake you've interacted with several people today who are doing it -- think back to the last ten times you physically handed money to anyone, they're not making $90k".

This problem is not unique to California or Manhattan. I get the same from people who choose to live in Nagoya apartments which cost about my monthly salary, then whine how impossible it is to get ahead in this city. Hey, I work five minutes from where you work yet my rent is $450... considered a lifestyle change, maybe?

<comment><USER4> I lived on $50k/year in SF with no problem. Do people really complain about making less than $90k?

<comment><USER5> to be honest, i think minimum "comfortable" wage in SF is about 200k. i make in the 6figs (as most senior engineers around here), and why I live comfortably as bachelor, I still don't think I make enough for me to afford having a family in SF.

I rent and have a roomate, cook often at home (drink lot of coffee though), but still, when you substract taxes, 401k, medical stuff for the parents, when you add everything up the savings are about 2k a month at best.

Think about it, 24k a year, where the cheapest comfortable place to live go for about 700k+. If you are conservative, and want to put 20% down, (that's about 140k) of savings you need in the bank.

To live in SF, you will have to have at least 200k, as a family to live comfortably. About 100k if you are a bachelor.

Sure you can live with a lot less, but you are probably not saving much for your future.

<comment><USER3> It seems to me that the problem isn't so much that you're "not saving much for your future" as you're "not saving enough to buy a comfortable house located in San Fransisco". Which might be indicative of a problem in one's expectations more than indicative of the necessity to make six figures as a bachelor.

(Incidentally, in many other places, socking away $2k a month would be considered pretty damn good. The starting salary for an engineer in my neck of the woods is $2.2k a month. You look pretty darn rich compared to him, even considering his vastly lower cost of living.)

<comment><USER6> You don't really need a $100K salary to be comfortable as a bachelor in SF, but it helps. Raising a family here is a mixed bag. It helps to have a lot of money because the school system sucks. You'll either need the extra $100K for private school or drug rehab if you send your kids to public school. I love SF but if I had kids I'd move somewhere else. Oh, and buying a house here is insane unless you're mega loaded or you buy and sell houses professionally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _If a person is married with two children, the weekly deductions on a $500,000 salary are: federal taxes, $2,645; Social Security, $596; Medicare, $139; state taxes, $682; and city, $372, bringing the weekly take-home to $5,180, or about $269,000 a year, said Martin Cohen, a Manhattan accountant._

Martin needs to check his figures. Social security, for example, is 6.2% for the first 106k of income, which is a weekly deduction of about $127, not $596. This is a difference of almost $25k / year.

It's also highly unlikely that a person in this scenario wouldn't have a range of tax mitigation strategies, from retirement investments to real estate.

EDIT: Here's another one:

 _The total costs here...are $790,750, which would require about a $1.6-million salary to compensate for taxes._

By and large, people making millions of dollars per year in income do _not_ end up paying effective tax rates of greater than 50%. The highest marginal tax rate is currently 35%, so even once you account for SS/Medicare, city, and state taxes, you're still not above 50%, especially once all deductions are taken into account. Additionally, many of these folks are probably subject to AMT, which is a flat rate of 26-28%.

<comment><USER8> And you're not even factoring in that most of their income comes in the form of grants or options that pay the capital gains tax rate.

<comment><USER7> Agreed, though the article specifically said "salary", so I gave them the benefit of the doubt there ;)

<comment><USER8> It did, I'm just assuming Obama was including incentive based compensation or otherwise it's just too trivial to game.

<comment><USER9> Actually he is fine with incentive based compensation, but the government needs to be paid back before they can collect the incentive's. What he is trying to avoid is news story's where the government lost money and the bankers got million+ dollar compensation.

<comment><USER8> I'm sure in the long run he is also fine with >$500k salaries. I would sure hope so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> As I was going through the list I still don't feel any sympathy for these bankers.

The whole idea of budgeting for the majority of people is to make do with seemingly limited resources. It's what everyone does to manage their own money.

Why can't someone who is supposed to manage everyones money practice a little self restraint?

<comment><USER11> I don't think the article was trying to make you feel sympathy; I think it was playing with subtext.

<comment><USER12> It's hard to tell, because I've seen a lot of "lifestyle" articles in the Times that seem pitched to appeal to people with seven-figure incomes.

E.g., there was a cover story in the NYT Magazine a few months back about surrogate motherhood, by a woman who was married to an investment banker, and not only dropped $25K to have another woman gestate her baby but hired a nanny --excuse me, a "baby nurse"--to care for the kid. Not that there's anything wrong with either one, but I'd be embarrassed to have my face in the foreground of this picture:

[http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/11/30/magazine/30su...](http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/11/30/magazine/30surrogate.2-500.jpg)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I love how two vacations a year, at a total of $16,000, is considered a "living expense."

</comment><comment><USER14> I feel silly reposting a very recent comment but it's relevant:

Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities" (Going broke on a million a year), p.137

"One breath of scandal, and not only would the Giscard scheme collapse but his very career would be finished! And what would he do then? I'm already going broke on a million a year!

The appalling figures came popping up into his brain. Last year his income had been $980,000. But he had to pay out $21,000 a month for the $1.8 million loan he had to take out to buy the apartment…

Of the $560,000 remaining of his income last year, $44,400 was required for the apartment's monthly maintenance fee… $18,000 for heat, utilities, insurance and repairs, $6,000 for lawn and hedge cutting, $8,000 for taxes. Entertaining at home and in restaurants had come to $37,000. This was a modest sum compared to what other people spent."

Also UrbanBaby: UrbanBaby is an anonymous message board frequented by some typical New York UES/UWS mothers. Here they talk about not being afford private school on $400k/yr (DC = dear child, DH = dear husband) <http://www.urbanbaby.com/talk/posts/50368448>

</comment><comment><USER3> _The total costs here... are $790,750, which would require about a $1.6-million salary to compensate for taxes._

Wait a second, 50% taxes? Not the marginal rate, the effective total rate? That is truly gobsmacking if it is accurate.

I did a little math, too, and it doesn't seem impossible, particularly if you're actually spending most of that money (and thus hitting the 8%+ NYC consumption tax). 35% federal bracket, 7% state bracket, 3% city bracket, plus property and consumption taxes, and you'd be paying more than fifty cents out of every dollar in taxes. And since your total tax rate approaches your marginal rate as your income increases, their total tax rate may well be in excess of 50 cents on the dollar.

Glad I don't live there. I don't make anywhere NEAR $1.6 million a year but if I ever do, I will live somewhere that values having me around.

<comment><USER9> Only stupid people making that much money pay anywhere near that much in taxes. Get an interest only mortgage and suddenly your rent is "tax free". Also options can be counted as capital gains which is 15% etc. There are a lot of tricks you can play with that level of income. Consumption taxes only apply to a smaller subset of spending because so much of your money is spent on services and out of state.

PS: The worst income bracket is single and making ~100k because they are in a high tax bracket and need to pay 15% in SS taxes on all of it.

<comment><USER15> > Get an interest only mortgage and suddenly your rent is "tax free".

The mortgage interest deduction only applies to the first $1M of the loan.

And, the mortgage interest deduction goes away under AMT.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> wait! so in a time when many are without jobs and struggling to survive, the bankers whose salaries are coming largely from taxpayer money might have to keep wearing their old $1k suits, cut back to _1_ $8k vacation per year, take public transit, take their children out of elementary schools that cost more than instate college without even giving room and board, and have their personal trainer come only once a week?!

Those poor, suffering souls. I'm sure that someone will form a charity where ordinary people donate small things they don't need anymore, like their old $15k dresses, so that the bankers don't have to risk being starved of their luxuries.

</comment><comment><USER17> Columbia and NYU grad students make about 25K/year.

<comment><USER18> ...and live like shit! I should know, I'm a grad student just across the river, and I work a second job and live in Harlem just to make ends meet.

Anyone who hasn't lived in NYC will have a hard time understanding. Living in the city definitely has its perks, and even having to work the second job, I wouldn't trade it for the world...

...that said, I don't have a PS3, or an Xbox, or a Wii, or a Plasma/LCD, or a stereo, or a car less than 7 years old, or more than 7 changes of clothes, and I only just got cable last year. Life in the city is about trade-offs.

If you're coming from the suburbs, and expect the same sort of lifestyle in the city, don't take a job that pays less than $80k/yr!

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> and the costs being prohibitively high have _nothing to do_ with the fact that there are so many people receiving these ridiculous salaries and driving up the costs of services? give me a fucking break. hello supply, meet demand. when salaries go down these ridiculously inflated prices will come down or these houses will be empty and these services going bankrupt.

</comment><comment><USER20> I really like it. What would be a reward to most of us is a bitter punishment to them. They've created a life as artificial as their balance sheets and then bid it up to an absurd level.

This is a perfect punishment for the epic fail they have foisted on the world. Make them live like the merely rich. The sardonic nature of it all makes me damn near gleeful.

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm sure there are Indian or Chinese bankers who would be happy to take over the reins at these companies for $400K or even $250K. Viva globalization!

<comment><USER21> Oh give me $100K and I would build a whole business out of India. $100K is enough gas for at least 2 years for most startups out of here and hopefully start making profit by then.

edit: people as much as it applies to businesses need to learn to live lean, at least when necessary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> There's nothing special about New York City. There are huge financial firms in Omaha, and Goldman Sachs et al can simply move there or other places. Problem solved.

</comment><comment><USER23> All they have to do is get jobs at profitable companies.

<comment><USER24> Or get by without the bailout money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> What is a co-op maintenance fee and why does it equal the mortgage payment?

(sorry, I'm from Oregon, never heard of a 96k co-op)

<comment><USER26> A co-op is (usually) a non-profit that owns an operates a building. When you buy a co-op apartment you effectively buy a share(s) in the co-op which entitles you to occupy a particular apartment. As a shareholder in the co-op you are required to pay maintenance to cover your share of the operating costs of the building: energy and utilities, maintenance, doorman etc. Some co-ops also generate revenue from flip taxes.

Maintenance doesn't have to equal the mortgage payment - our Brooklyn co-op costs around $650pcm in mortgage, and $800 in maintenance.

<comment><USER27> Even that is insane!!

I have a share in the freehold of my flat in the UK, my maintenance comes in at £480 per annum, this includes buildings insurance, cleaning, heating and general building maintenance.

Thats pretty damn steep over there!

<comment><USER26> A good whack of it goes towards fuel oil to run the steam heat system, then you've got a surgeon sized insurance premium in case some litigious oaf slips on the sidewalk, and finally a couple of full time staff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Looking at those numbers, Obama has done NYC out of an awful lot of taxes. I wonder how much schadenfreude will be left once that trickles down to services that ordinary people take for granted - or who will make up the shortfall.

<comment><USER29> The 500k limit is only on executives of banks that receive future extraordinary assistance from the government--the execs are free to find jobs elsewhere if they don't want the restrictions. The banks are free to not take the assistance if they can maintain a healthy capital level without it. With fractional-reserve banking that is the condition they implicitly agreed to in exchange for the ability to conjure money from the (almost) ether.

<comment><USER11> It also only applies to the top N executives at those firms, where last I checked N was 5.

<comment><USER30> Seems like there's a glaring loophole there. Let's say they want to pay their top five people ten million dollars each. And let's say they can think of five VP-level people who should be earning around $500K each. Why not say "Oh, these VPs are crucial to our survival. They're worth $20 million a year. Sadly, we can only pay them $500K of that." At that point, the VPs get about what they would normally get, and the traders can safely be paid $10 million a year.

Or am I misunderstanding the cap?

<comment><USER31> I guess it depends on the final drafting. Drafting the cap as "top 5 highest paid people can't make more than $500k" should solve the loophole you just wrote about.

<comment><USER11> Drafting the cap as "the top 5 highest paid people can't make more than $500k" isn't the same as a $500k cap on the top 100,000 employees?

<comment><USER31> If you sort employees by pay it is the same. But if you sort employees by power it might not be.

For example, some sales people at tech companies make much more money than mid-level managers taking home a couple hundred thousand dollars per year. Some of those sales people will make more than the senior level executives. Which one is more important and is higher rank is up for debate.

In my comment above I tried to explain a way to fix the loophole that byrneseyeview listed. Saying nobody makes more than $500k is a way to fix that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> > co-op maintenance fee of $8,000 a month

seriously, how on earth can co-op maintenance for apartment amount to 8k a month unless you are building it from scratch?

<comment><USER33> For one thing, taxes are high in New York City, which makes everything expensive. The "maintenance fees" can include more than what might normally be considered "maintenance": salaries for doormen and superintendants, utilities, building mortgage, and real-estate taxes. [http://www.wallfly.com/review/manhattan_ny/faqs/faqs_co- ops....](http://www.wallfly.com/review/manhattan_ny/faqs/faqs_co-ops.php#014)

<comment><USER32> ah yes, I forgot about property taxes. We don't have them here where I live, taxation is mostly through income and consumption taxes. Property taxation always seemed stupid and somewhat evil to me. What if you happen to lost your income source for awhile or something along that line? You would loose your property you own because you cannot pay legal racketeering on something that is yours.

<comment><USER33> _Property taxation always seemed stupid and somewhat evil to me._

Given a choice of income-, consumption-, or property- taxation, it seems to me that property-taxation would provide the least perverse incentive. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive> Consumption taxation perversely punishes consumption, and income taxation perversely punishes productivity. The economic effect of either of those, therefore, is harmful. Property taxation, on the other hand, is simply rent on property that is also latently owned by various layers of government. If one wishes to pay less rent to the government, one is free to move to a less-desirable (e.g. smaller; less-conveniently located) property.

 _What if you happen to lost your income [...] You would loose your property_

One could sell, and move to a less-expensive property. Then, the original property would be available to one who is more-productive. The economy, therefore, gains when low-productivity individuals sell expensive properties.

 _legal racketeering on something that is yours._

Actually, nothing within a governmental jurisdiction can be outright privately owned. Therefore, said property cannot be said to be outright "yours". A government always retains ultimate ownership of properties "privately owned" within its jurisdiction. If one wants to truly own his own property outright, he either needs to found it from scratch (and provide for all of the maintenance and defense needs), or buy it from some existing government. Buying a condo in Manhattan is usually not the same thing as buying it from its true latent owners: the borough of Manhattan, the city of New York, the state of New York, the nation of the United States of America, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the United Nations.

<comment><USER32> > One could sell, and move to a less-expensive property. Then, the original > property would be available to one who is more-productive. The economy, > therefore, gains when low-productivity individuals sell expensive > properties.

that is the evil part I was refering to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> How about a $500K salary cap for presidents of universities that accept federal grants and loan subsidies? Heh heh.

<comment><USER35> Its actually football coaches at big universities that make all the money. Median salary is over a million dollars last I saw. The academic salaries are _much_ more reasonable. Mostly in the 100-200K range for upper level profs and administrators.

<comment><USER36> If you want to win at football, you most definitely need a good football coach, and the markets for pro football coaches and college football coaches are hardly separate. So you have to pay college football coaches somewhere in the ballpark of pro football coaches.

What has never been properly explained to me is the utility of winning football teams to universities. I really would like to hear about that.

<comment><USER37> Top football programs basically fund entire athletic departments. So in order to maintain a top brand, paying an excellent coach 10% of your budget doesn't seem to be a bad investment.

See [http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122853304793584959.html?mod=...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122853304793584959.html?mod=googlenews_wsj)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> They should just do what Steve Jobs does. Get a wardrobe of nothing but jeans and black turtle necks, and subsist on cancer-fighting carrots and peas.</comment>