No 'carmageddon' on auto-free Market Street: study shows bikes and buses benefit - <AUTHOR> https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Results-of-car-free-Market-Street-so-so-for-SF-15087210.php <comment><USER3> The linked article (1) says the redesign will have "sidewalk level bike lanes".

If there's a way for local people to comment on this, please encourage these to be changed to in-between-road-and-sidewalk level. (Or road level with a continuous kerb in between).

This makes it much, much easier for pedestrians not to accidentally wander into the lane. (2)

1 [https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Car-free- Market-...](https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Car-free-Market-What- happens-to-the-side-14999923.php)

2 [https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/copenhagen- denmark-...](https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/copenhagen-denmark- april-28-2015-people-273751205?src=r5lx0IqAiK-ujRzrOcMg6Q-1-1)

<comment><USER4> As a Dutchie blunders like the one you mention are so stupifying... Takes you a ten minute visit to NL to figure out why you need to separate modalities consistently, yet even as close as Germany and France cities are designed so obviously by people who never ever bike.

<comment><USER5> Same in Austria, we simply grew accustomed to bikes sharing the road with cars, busses and trams which I'm sure would be terrifying to someone from NL.

The problem is, after the post war boom, the cities were planned for cars and now there's simply no space left for cycling lanes unless we ban cars which as much as I wish for will never happen in my lifetime.

<comment><USER6> I live in Graz and I'm hard of hearing. Hearing aids make locating where some kinds of sounds come from difficult, so I miss a lot of acoustic cues that pedestrians use to navigate their way through busy places.

I've been run down once by a bicyclist and once by a skateboarder while I was walking on mixed use pathways. The skateboarder took a harder fall than I did, still helped me up, and sincerely apologized. I fractured my wrist in my fall when the bicyclist hit me and not only did they not stop, they yelled at me as they cycled away.

Anyway, I too would support limiting the use of cars as well as on street parking in city centres and other similar zones.

<comment><USER7> Bikes shouldn't share the lane with pedestrians any more than they should share it with cars. In an ideal world they would look more like Danish ones, with all 3 separated by at least a small kerb. This helps pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers alike. Cycling in Denmark was the best cycling experience I ever had relative to the way bike lanes are designed (definitely not related to the cyclists that were sometimes falling like bowling pins when the huge crowd was starting to move at a green light).

Getting used to some bad compromise hardly makes it good.

<comment><USER8> Bikes can certainly share pedestrian areas, they just need to ride slower, the walkways need to be wide, and the walkways should be easy to enter and exit in the case you need to ride around groups of people (shallow curbs you ride up and down). Look at Osaka, you have almost free reign on a bicycle there. Bikes are slow, cars are slow, but it all flows. Bikes even join foot traffic in shopping precints. But when it's too busy people are no longer on their bikes anyway, because the whole place is walkable.

It takes a level of empathy and cooperation I think doesn't exist in the bike versus car debate, because it has become an "us versus them" debate and everyone is trying to win not collaborate.

<comment><USER9> Cars can certainly share cycle paths, they just need to ride slower, the paths need to be wide, and they should be easy to enter and exit in the case you need to ride around groups of cyclists.

Pedestrian areas, yes - people usually don't commute through there. Sidewalks vs. cycle paths vs. car lanes - not a good idea.

When people propose path sharing among pedestrians and cyclists, they often mean cyclists slowing down to speeds (e.g. 10km/h, or even 5-7km/h), which they would find unacceptable for cars, even if multiplied x3 (try telling drivers to go 30km/h so they share with cyclists going 15-30 km/h).

<comment><USER8> I want to be clear, I'm talking about the city metro areas. Not commuting from suburbia. We should have fully separated bike paths for longer distance commute bike traffic, because mixed speed traffic with cars just doesn't work when cars are going faster, and unprotected bike lanes are just a bandaid solution to that problem.

But once you're in the metro area, everyone should slow right down. The dominant traffic in the city is foot traffic.

Cars go at 50km/h through my city, meaning they need to be separated really strictly. Slow them down to 20km/h with narrower roads, and you can reclaim the area for mixed pedestrian traffic, allowing more free movement for everyone in the city. Something as simple as crossing the road shouldn't take 10 minutes for 200 people just so five cars can cross the road.

With narrower streets and slower traffic, you can reasonably cross the road anywhere you want. That also allows bikes to move reasonably along the road but slowly on the footpaths, you open the whole area up for the people using the city.

It's all a balance, not everywhere in a city should be like that. I'm just advocating to move away from the heavy car-oriented lean many places currently have for their city centers.

<comment><USER4> There is no difference between city centers and suburbia in much of Europe. Apart from that, the Netherlands has a few bike highways now to cater to faster intercity transport.

What you want to do is enable fast biking everywhere (so a bike first infra) and seperate modalities for safety and comfort. Any urban transport research will show that bikes in foot traffic is a Very Bad Idea(tm).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Just the fact that riding a bicycle got more attractive and 25% more people are using their bicycles now means that there will be less people left stuck in traffic in their cars.

Not to mention the people who are exercising by using their bicycles will have health benefits as well.

<comment><USER11> Will 25% more cyclists have much of an impact on the number of cars on the road?

25% more of a small number is still a small number.

<comment><USER12> It will have an impact on congestion. For instance in Brussels, a 10% reduction in number of cars on the road translates to a 40% percent reduction in traffic jams.

<comment><USER13> Which seems like it would translate to at least 10% more people being willing to drive...

<comment><USER14> And yet, even more will discover than riding a bike is more pleasant than driving a car once the city has been designed that way.

I'm one of them, and many of my friends are just waiting for the infrastructure to be further improved to make the switch. More space, better markings (…), just more reasons to drop the expensive, polluting, stressing space-taking cars and take a breath of fresh air while commuting.

<comment><USER15> > And yet, even more will discover than riding a bike is more pleasant than > driving a car once the city has been designed that way.

Most people aren't going to find cycling more pleasant than driving in inclement weather, cold weather, hot weather, low traction conditions, uphill, or carrying cargo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> There was a world wide meeting on transportation similar to the Paris climate change one, same result, almost everyone but USA committing to better standards for future - [https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/02/1057721](https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/02/1057721) The USA response that the market and self driving cars will fix this was pretty delusional.

<comment><USER17> Any responses from the US from about 3 years ago to between 1 and 4+ years from now are going to be delusional.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Studies? Just check out how we do this in the Netherlands. It works great here in most bigger cities.

<comment><USER19> You live in a flat country, were cities are quite densely populated and you don't have to travel a lot.

Mine is not.

<comment> re-actor The flatness is almost entirely canceled out by the relentless 20km/h+ wind

<comment><USER20> You get pretty strong winds in southern Europe as well, without the flatness

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I thought it would be mayhem but traffic overall didn't change at all. It's exactly the same.

<comment><USER22> That's because most cars were taken off Market St in 2015: [https://www.sfmta.com/project-updates/turn-restrictions- mark...](https://www.sfmta.com/project-updates/turn-restrictions-market- street-going-effect-aug-11-2015)

Since then most cars on Market St north of Van Ness seem to have been Uber and Lyft. Now they're finally banned. If buses are actually running faster--not just a consequence of less traffic during the winter months--it goes to show how much Uber and Lyft have contributed to traffic in the city. They drive slow, erratically, and stop in the middle of the road on main arteries to pick people up and drop them off.

<comment><USER23> It still doesn't make sense that they let the "yellow" taxis continue driving on market. They are on average much worse drivers

<comment><USER24> There are fewer of them and they are more efficient, running at higher passenger utilization.

<comment><USER25> This can't be true. Taxis often run with zero passengers, whereas a private car never does.

<comment><USER22> I could only find two studies on capacity utilization:

* Judd Cramer, Alan B. Krueger, "Disruptive Change in the Taxi Business: The Case of Uber", 2016, [https://www.nber.org/papers/w22083](https://www.nber.org/papers/w22083)

and

* Y.M. Nie, "How can the taxi industry survive the tide of ridesourcing? Evidence from Shenzhen, China", 2017 [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0968090X1...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0968090X17301018)

Both seem to confirm that ride-hailing has better utilization rates, though Nie qualifies that--e.g. sometimes too many private cars might turn out. However, at least in San Francisco all the licensed taxi cabs also use ride- hailing apps, so their utilization should be at least as good as unlicensed cars.

The real issue with ride-hailing is induced demand. In places like San Francisco public transit took a huge dip, and ride-hailing simply isn't anywhere as efficient as mass transit. Studies have shown that ride-hailing has contributed to a _substantial_ increase in traffic and traffic delay: [https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/5/eaau2670](https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/5/eaau2670)

Ride-hailing can even be worse than personal cars because a personal car has a 100% utilization rate at minimum, whereas the average utilization rate for ride-hailing, even accounting for multiple riders (e.g. >100% for any particular trip) is <100%.

Ride-hailing only pencils out for the last mile--to and from transit hubs in a local vicinity. But too many people take it to cross town. It's hard to blame ride-hailing companies, though. Cities need to be build more subways. Perhaps companies like Uber, if they were allowed to build subways as cheaply as The Boring Company can do (i.e. small diameter tunnel, though still larger than London and Budapest; no red tape; no extravagant stations) and to capture the revenue, would invest the money. They'd finally be able to ditch drivers, too, because driverless cars will probably only ever work, if they work at all, in moderately dense residential areas.

<comment><USER26> Personal car usage doesn't have a 100% utilization: lots of time is spent cruising for parking and coming back from some out of the way parking. You can't really count that as being productively utilized. It's the opposite.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Market St. has never been a significant thoroughfare for private cars. Of course there's no traffic impact.

Try the same thing on Mission, Howard, Folsom, Harrison, Geary, Van Ness, etc. and you'll see a very different story.

<comment><USER28> Can you clarify your point? I read the article but don't see any mention of trying this on any of the streets you listed. It looks like the city of SF made a good call here and the first part of your comment supports that.

<comment><USER27> Doing this for Market St. is basically free. There are no real risks or tradeoffs. Of course it's a good call.

But to frame this as a triumph against critics predicting doom is just weird. No one was seriously predicting doom on this one. The only people driving on Market are confused tourists. But then it's going to be held up as an example for other streets that actually _do_ have risks and tradeoffs.

<comment><USER29> The news media kept hammering the potential for cArmageddon.. which was weird. It was a non-story, and it still is, but I guess someone needs content to promote.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> There are numbers on speed, but are there any on throughput?

<comment><USER25> Throughput doesn't change with speed, just like with cars the rate is the same at 5 or 75MPH because the spacing in terms of time stays constant. What improves is the latency for individual riders, and the reliability of the bus arriving on schedule.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I take the 5R nearly every week day. Anecdotally, it seems like it's been better lately (though it's always been adequate), but I didn't connect that with the market street car ban until now.

</comment><comment><USER32> Great for buses, bikes, taxis, cars that accidentally make a wrong turn, and bikes running red lights to slice through crossing pedestrians (sometimes avoiding collisions sometimes not).

</comment><comment><USER33> Chicago tried this decades ago with the State Street Mall project [1]. It turned out to be an overall flop, with stores seeing reduced traffic, and by 1993 it was gone and good riddance. As a pedestrian, I hated it when I worked downtown.

Maybe they'll do something on Market Street that will work better, or perhaps it might be a better fit there than in Chicago, but I wish them luck, because they're going to need it.

[1] [https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct- opinion...](https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-opinion- flashback-state-street-pedestrian-mall-20191025-cos5svz7w5dvzgznqouu2xqimu- story.html)

<comment><USER34> The weather in Chicago is markedly worse for being outside for half the year.

<comment><USER35> Probably more like 10 months. I imagine there's a shoulder season in the spring and fall where Chicago is more desirable, from a weather standpoint, than cool and windy SF, before it gets too hot and humid in Chicago's summer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> The main problem with Market Street for pedestrians is the heroin and poop, not cars.

</comment><comment><USER37> There is an impact for some retail businesses. I tried shopping near market street for items that require a car to transport. I gave up trying to get through traffic, and instead did my shopping online. This is an acceptable trade off for me, and demonstrates how some retail businesses may need to adjust.

</comment><comment><USER38> The only redeeming feature of that part of Market Street remains the subway.

</comment><comment><USER39> I don't notice any difference on Market from before the car ban. I also see cars driving on the street all the time.

</comment><comment><USER40> >His conclusion: When cities shut streets off to cars, people drive less. The myth of a "carmageddon"-style traffic jam is apparently overblown.

This seems to completely ignore the fact that what actually has occured here is that the reduction of drivers is a negative for those drivers. Those drivers now either have to cycle or use public transport instead of their cars or have to move. That might seem positive to the people who don't have to make those sacrifices, but it's a massive negative impact on the people effected by this.

<comment><USER41> Well, and the externalities of the driver's carbon emissions are a massive negative impact on all of us. In a city as dense as San Francisco, transit, walking, or biking can easily cover most people's transportation needs. The more we build safe and effective infrastructure for those modes, the more people will use them. And that will be good - in the end - for the remaining few who do absolutely need to drive (though I believe that if we get creative, with things like bike rikshaws, we can even cover that segment with out cars).

If we don't change these sorts of habits, the climate will change them for us.

<comment><USER40> I'm not advocating for designing life around increasing car ownership. I'm pointing out that re-designing existing systems to disadvantage a specific group of commuters is more than a little problematic. Let's put it this way - how would you feel if we shut down your nearest train station and used the money saved to give everyone a tax break.

We can also decrease carbon emissions by just shutting down every power station in China, but targetting a single group of people to take the vast majority of the cost of fixing climate change is not reasonable.

<comment><USER42> Your point is that changes can be bad for some people while being good for others? I'm pretty sure everybody knows that.

Given that they spent 10 years planning this, and given the enormous infrastructural support cars get, I'm quite sure the city was aware.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Am I the only one disappointed that the author was NOT referring to the PC game Carmageddon in the title.

Expected summary: "Well, we were pleasantly surprised that shutting down the streets didn't lead to a rage-induced, car-killing-spree murder rampage."

</comment><comment><USER44> Translation of the first couple paragraphs: "SF street traffic is already abysmal, and yet we still managed to make it a little bit worse."

Market Street was already pretty devoid of non-bus/taxi traffic before "a month ago". If you want a better test, try closing off Van Ness or Embarcadero and see how well that goes for y'all.

"No carmageddon"? SF is _already_ a carmageddon.

</comment><comment><USER45> A big traffic jam would be nothing like 'Carmageddon'

An extremely popular series of computer games starting in 1997, where u race around smashing into other vehicles and running over pedestrians.

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

Why do they keep saying carmageddon????

<comment><USER42> I think you could call that moderately popular at best. 20+ years ago.

They keep calling it that for the same reason the game got that name: it's a cute term that quickly conveys "giant automotive disaster".

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I'm always wondering what about people with disabilities, older people with problems with walking, pregnant women, families with four kids, etc.

Sometimes the public transport for such people is problematic and using taxi all the time is too expensive. Total banning cars makes a great space for the healthy ones, the rest is happily ignored. And this is sad.

I like decreasing the number of cars, not forbidding them at all.

<comment><USER47> >people with disabilities, older people with problems with walking, pregnant women

Are precisely the kinds of people _less_ likely to be able to drive. Accessible and convenient public transit is a better option for them, provided of course that it's accessible and convenient throughout their journey - <USER2> means sidewalks, intersections, transit stops, building access, etc.

If families with 4 kids don't need a vehicle at all, it's a huge financial benefit for them. Here in Canada a mini-boat on wheels large enough to accommodate such a family is friggin' expensive. Cities tend to have free or very cheap tickets for kids, so if you can get away with doing commutes by transit and have a Corolla for weekend errands and groceries that you don't have to shove all 4 into, you win $1000s every year.

<comment><USER48> I'd like to add another thing to consider: good urbanism, specifically mixed- use development, which reduce the distances immensely.

I live in Montreal and I use my old used "mini-boat on wheels" maybe twice a month to see my family outside the city. I intend to sell it actually. I travel to work on public transport because most of the city is covered 24/7 with a pretty acceptable bus and metro.

Everything is close enough that I can simply walk, even in winter. There are 5 schools, 4 parks, 3 pharmacies, 2 grocery stores, a bunch of shops and restaurants, two medical clinics, two metro entrances, several of my friends, etc, all within 15 minutes on foot.

And I don't even live in a "dense" area. It's actually considered a food desert compared to the rest of the city.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> It would be awesome if you had something like a bicycle, only more comfortable that could hold you, a friend, and some of your things. You could enclose it to protect you from the weather, too. For longer distances, or people with disabilities, you could add some mechanical contraption in case you can't pedal that far.

That'll be the day.

<comment><USER50> Some of those already exist! At increasing levels of car-like-ness:

* [https://www.wired.com/gallery/best-electric-cargo-bikes/](https://www.wired.com/gallery/best-electric-cargo-bikes/)

* [https://www.contemporist.com/5-examples-of-enclosed-bike-des...](https://www.contemporist.com/5-examples-of-enclosed-bike-designs-that-are-taking-over-the-roads/)

* [https://www.arcimoto.com/](https://www.arcimoto.com/)

(Studiously ignoring parent's intended snark)

In all seriousness, I'm expecting an explosion of these new light vehicle body types in the coming decades, as global trends of cheap electric drive + batteries, increasing urban congestion, and less car-oriented urban planning trends converge

<comment><USER51> "I'm expecting an explosion of these new light vehicle body types in the coming decades, as global trends of cheap electric drive + batteries, increasing urban congestion, and less car-oriented urban planning trends converge"

Don't motorcycles already serve that purpose? Its already the chief form of personal transportation in most of the Earth's population.

The problem I see with all the concepts you posted is that they have all the drawbacks of a car and a motorcycle. They would fare as well as a motorcycle in a crash, and have almost the same footprint as a small car. Also, a motorcycle will handle much better than a trike with narrow tracks and short wheelbase at higher speeds.

Then, there are electric assist bicycle. They have two main problems that small motorcycles/scooters don't suffer from. A 350lb scooter/motorcycle is much harder to steal than a 50lb electric bicycle. I own a rather expensive electric assist mountain bike that I don't feel comfortable parking it out of my sight. You can't travel on the highway with electric bicycle unlike motorcycles.

<comment><USER52> I think you might be underestimating the size of a modern car -- they're _huge_!

<comment><USER51> By small car I meant Smart ForTwo, or Fiat 500. These not-a-car trikes/quads have comparable footprint to these cars. Which isn't small enough to fit in- between 2 lanes.

<comment><USER52> Sure, but those are exceptions to the modern car size, and the median car size on the street is far bigger than that. If everyone would switch to Fiat 500 sized cars, that would be an amazing start.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Docracy Terms of Service Tracker - <AUTHOR> https://www.docracy.com/tos/changes <comment><USER2> Buy.com is now Rakuten.com? Talk about choosing the wrong domain name to consolidate under!

<comment><USER3> Indeed. Having recently sat in an Executive style naming competition meeting, I can confirm the state of multinational corporate decisions involving brands and names is so intensely bureaucratic and complex that the rational behind the decision is far removed from common sense. I imagine the process involved dozens of executives and at least two outsourced firms, marketing managers, and brand evangelists. Charts were produced and powerpoints created, showing naming relevance and cultural sensitivities. SEO experts formulated brand uniqueness prospects for virality and search, self declared linguists gauged locality based pronunciation effectiveness. Translators estimated ease of use and consistencies globally. In the end its obvious to them that they made the correct decision.

<comment><USER4> "We need to ditch this short, easily typed, prescriptive domain name into something that sounds like a combo move in Street Fighter."

<comment><USER5> More like 'Rakuten means "positive spirit." The name Rakuten Ichiba literally means a "market of positive spirit," where shopping is entertainment. You see?'

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> While documenting small changes probably is OK, I would think that reproducing long passages of a site's TOS, even in the context of documenting changes as a public service, could run into copyright-infringement problems.

<comment><USER7> Yes, some of these TOS have clear copyright notices. Are these valid?

<comment><USER8> The copyright notices are valid, but fair-use exceptions still apply, and fair-use tends to be read fairly broadly with this kind of document, compared to, say, lengthy excerpts from a novel. I'm not aware if there's any solid caselaw specifically on quoting excerpts from contracts or licenses, though.

<comment><USER9> IANAL, but I think a big factor would be whether it acts as a substitute. Since they aren't being used as a TOS on docracy, then it shouldn't be an issue. If you copy a TOS and use it on your own site, then it could be a problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Looks nice, but slightly buggy

1\. <https://www.docracy.com/doc/versions?docId=0b0kbmmpoon>

version 1 looks pretty wrong ([https://www.docracy.com/0b0kbmmpoon/local-com- privacy-policy...](https://www.docracy.com/0b0kbmmpoon/local-com-privacy- policy-tos?version=1)).

Wayback has versions from Jan 15th and Jan 16th (<http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.local.com/privacy/>) around the same time downloaded, and they look more normal.

2\. Edit and download seems to pull the wrong version in some cases:

[http://www.docracy.com/0xk2nizy6sk/fidelity-com-privacy- poli...](http://www.docracy.com/0xk2nizy6sk/fidelity-com-privacy-policy- tos?version=1)

(It says version 1, displays version 1, Click edit and download, you get version 2)

3\. The diff engine doesn't seem to try very hard in certain cases:

[http://www.docracy.com/doc/diff?revisedId=0razhem25wh&or...](http://www.docracy.com/doc/diff?revisedId=0razhem25wh&originalId=0sr8cku71j2#tab_summary)

(The first paragraphs of these documents are a lot closer than it makes seem). It seems to have a bunch of stream alignment issues, which makes me think you are using a line based diff here, and post-processing the result.

Anyway, besides the above just found playing around, it looks otherwise nice.

</comment><comment><USER11> Really rad implementation of a diff system. I've recently been working on a service for diff/versioning. If you're interested in checking it out, it's <http://imnosy.com>

<comment><USER12> Cool service. I've always used ChangeDetection, but wished they offered more- control (better scheduling, frequency of polling, etc.). Are these features you'd thinking about including?

<comment><USER11> Hey uptown, Long term I'd really love to make this service as robust and feature-complete as possible, while also maintaining an approachable and welcoming user experience.

Being able to schedule when you are sent notifications, batch them together (eg. if you're watching to web pages, you get one email each day at a specified time), as well as increasing the frequency of polling (goal is 1/hour) is on the list.

I'm working on a feature I see as unique in that it will allow you to choose which part of the page counts as a change, thus minimizing false-positives.

Can you think of anything else that would be useful? Something frustrating you of ChangeDetection?

<comment><USER12> I think those are the big things. ChangeDetection doesn't tell you when it'll poll. I think it's driven by the setup-time, and their queue, but ideally I'd like the ability to setup a specific time to check a given page, with a recurring-check frequency, and a way to show the diff between the two in an intuitive way.

If-this-then-that integration might be cool - but that's probably an edge-case not useful to most of your potential clients.

<comment><USER11> Agreed. Frequency control would be really great, and an even more intuitive interface for distinguishing what changes, really quickly, is all on my list :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is there a way to subscribe to change notifications on ToS docs from a specific company?

<comment><USER14> [I work at Docracy] There isn't, although you may be able to filter the main RSS feed. That's a good idea, though, we should add a feed to every document... something I will probably do... right now.

<comment><USER15> Would you guys be willing to submit the diffs to the Internet Archive in WARC format?

[http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/formats/fdd/fdd000236.sht...](http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/formats/fdd/fdd000236.shtml)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is great, though there are loads of spurious differences caused by what looks like encoding problems. e.g. the blogspot privacy policy [https://www.docracy.com/0rl3vthb6b7/blogspot-com-privacy- pol...](https://www.docracy.com/0rl3vthb6b7/blogspot-com-privacy-policy- tos?version=2) has the classic "WTF UTF?" †symbols in there. Previously they were long dashes or quote marks.

<comment><USER14> [I work at Docracy] C'mon, I wouldn't say "loads"! We are still working on a few lingering encoding problems, and we usually filter them out when we spot them. Other spurious changes are from the sites themselves. For example, every couple of days the IRS changes the date format in their privacy policy for some mysterious reason: [https://www.docracy.com/doc/diff?originalId=1frr1ml4lt&r...](https://www.docracy.com/doc/diff?originalId=1frr1ml4lt&revisedId=0p9iqzn4re3#tab_summary)

<comment><USER16> heh, weasel words are weasely. sorry. Skype had a lot of changes due to quote marks changing too. don't take it the wrong way though, diffs are tricky i guess. (mobile typing, forgive brevity)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I was thinking one day to build a similar kind of service, but rather per-user (you upload a URL of your thing and we'll track it). But I've never started after some analysis. It's not trivial to do it in a general automated manner on a massive scale due to the problems with diffing PDFs, changing URLs etc. (I was considering primarily the tables of banking fees & provisions). Maybe one day... ;)

<comment><USER18> Let's say I have a url of a certain file, how would I go about to compare and highlight the changes (in an automated way)?

<comment><USER17> There are known command line tools for that [0] since many years. While it's easy to do it on purely text (ASCII) files, it's a bit more work on HTML files or binary files. For them you would probably extract the textual context first (e.g. stripping HTML tags) and then compare the clear text. Alternatively you may render the HTML/PDF file and do visual comparison, then extract the diff text from images.

By default diff programs create a line-based output, but you can change it to minimum per-word highlighting via options (e.g. 'git diff --color-words').

The thing with PDF is that often even when you re-save the same PDF file in the same editor, you would probably get entirely different files. I'm not a PDF expert but from what I've learned, PDF is the type of file that saves kind of vector representation of glyphs and their placements and is often unaware of what that glyph represents (depends perhaps on the program used to create the PDF and options). Importing PDF back to e.g. OpenOffice is an ugly work for the plugings.

There are some exiting solutions for diffing PDFs [1] however I haven't played with them really.

[0] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diff> [1] [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/887186/java-pdf-diff- libr...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/887186/java-pdf-diff-library)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Oh look, another inferior change to a thread title.

I really wish you guys would knock that off.

</comment><comment><USER20> This is a great use of technology and programming/diffs to both cool and useful ends. I wish all my agreements, insurance policies, etc had something like this cleanly through one place. Maybe a policy standard for just that so companies make it public that way and no copyright problems. Also, companies eventually not doing it would be seen as devious.

<comment><USER14> [I work at Docracy, prepare for a plug!] Well note that we have a great negotiation and e-signing service that uses these same diff tools, try it out! <http://www.docracy.com/supersigning>

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This service is really cool. I think all companies should host diffs of their terms. Stripe, for example, has both the previous versions and diffs of their terms (<https://stripe.com/us/terms>) available at <https://github.com/stripe/terms>.

</comment><comment><USER22> this is great, glad someone did this. i've often wanted such a diff instead of "dig through 27 pages and see what possibly changed" with iTunes' TOS for example.

that said some of these terms look scary.

</comment><comment><USER23> Wow. I was just thinking of making something like this yesterday. Guess great ideas don't last long. I was also interested in seeing how similar terms of services are. I've been working on a paper studying how boilerplate terms seem to be growing more dense over time, and one of the things I've noticed looking at a lot of TOSes is how similar they all are. For example, there are really only two or three variations on the wordings of choice of law clauses, and almost all arbitration clauses look the same. Wonder if you can run a comparison on your database across various TOSes to see how similar they are (a la turnitin for essays).

I have a striking suspicion that the lawyers (or webmasters) are just copying and pasting a lot of these terms from standard repositories or otherwise from other services.

</comment><comment><USER24> Awesome idea!! Any chance someone could curate it and highlight the changes that were meaningful? For example, Geico just took out the following:

"We do not save this data nor disclose it to any third parties."

(anything but comforting...)

</comment><comment><USER25> Very nice, this is very much needed. I had the exact same idea, which I worked on for a while about a year ago, as with lots of projects, it didnt get finished. :)

As other have commented, a discussion area for each change would be very interesting, especially if there are multiple changes happening at the same time.

I can imagine not everyone want this focus on changed tos, but its very good the user can easily get the information.

</comment><comment><USER26> Would you add a "top 20" list of the sites with the most words or characters changed/month? I'd like to see which sites like to churn their terms.

</comment><comment><USER27> _Using Docracy's unique document change analysis,_ etc.

I'm really curious to know what's so unique about this as compared to classic diff plus colours?

<comment><USER14> [I work at Docracy] What is unique is how we handle diffing within a hierarchical HTML structure and how our algorithm is tuned to display sensible diffs for written language text, which requires some more nuance than what is typically used to diff code lines. It's our own, homespun algorithm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Please license this to the IRS and lobby for all civil and criminal laws to be subject to obvious revision history markup.

</comment><comment><USER29> A similar service is run by the EFF:

<http://www.tosback.org/timeline.php>

Source code is available at:

<https://github.com/pde/tosback2>

Historical crawl data is available at:

<https://github.com/pde/tosback2-data>

</comment><comment><USER30> The Amazon TOS notes it was `Last updated: January 28th, 2013` and includes the recent Elastic Transcoder terms. This precedes its announcement, and journalists may try to use this for scoops.

However, the timestamp on it is January 29. How often do you check for updates?

<comment><USER14> [I work at Docracy] We check once a day. We've seen some strange stuff going on with "Last updated:" though. For example, if you check out the history of Skype's ToS, they changed it in mid-January, but with a last-updated date of "February 2013"! Then, just a couple of days ago, they reverted it. Here's the first change: [http://www.docracy.com/doc/diff?revisedId=0xgv5wfb72v&or...](http://www.docracy.com/doc/diff?revisedId=0xgv5wfb72v&originalId=0am1glu0a0q#tab_summary), then they changed it back: [http://www.docracy.com/doc/diff?revisedId=0jxg6uxmx4d&or...](http://www.docracy.com/doc/diff?revisedId=0jxg6uxmx4d&originalId=0xgv5wfb72v#tab_summary)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Really excellent idea. Thanks for doing this.</comment>


Anonymous – War on Pedaphiles - <AUTHOR> http://pastebin.com/rXYfrTKf

<comment><USER2> "pedaphiles"? What have you got against lovers of Indian sweets?</comment>


Argonne researchers posit way to locally circumvent Second Law of Thermodynamics - <AUTHOR> https://www.anl.gov/articles/argonne-researchers-posit-way-locally-circumvent-second-law-thermodynamics <comment><USER2> The second law of thermodynamics isn't really a fundamental physical law, but rather a promise based on statistics that says "disorder will increase or stay constant in a closed physical system".

That said, it's entirely possible for entropy to spontaneously decrease in a closed system, the probability of this happening is just astronomically small for typical macroscopic systems.

Example:

If you have a system consisting of two compartments that are separated by a wall, where one of the compartments contains N particles. The system has low entropy because all the particles are on one side of it. Now, if you remove the barrier between the two compartments, particles will distribute evenly on both sides, increasing the entropy of the system. If we assume that the position of the particles is random, the probability of finding all of them on one side of the system is (1/2)^N, which quickly converges to zero for most macroscopic systems, which often contain > 10^23 particles.

<comment><USER3> The second law of thermodynamics is as fundamental as the uncertainty principle: The former is a result from markov chains and information theory, the latter is a result from fourier analysis of conjugate variables.

What would you consider a "fundamental physical law"?

<comment><USER4> Any law that's not based on a stochastic process, since stochastic processes can be gamed with a little bit of cleverness. If you don't believe me, just look at HFT.

<comment><USER5> What is HFT?

<comment><USER6> High-Frequency Trading, I'd think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Countdown to a sci-fi movie where this idea is only half understood and the "proof of concept" device opens a portal to hell, where we meet the real Maxwell's demon...

Now that I've typed this, I want to see it happen.

<comment><USER8> And the portal is in some guys fridge.

<comment><USER9> "There is no Dana, only Zuul."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> From the publication itself:

> Note that in the discussed example the reservoir acts as some quantum > analogue of the classical Maxwell demon. Namely, having been prepared in a > special state, the reservoir is able to decrease the entropy of the system > without the energy exchange with it, and can be referred to as a 'quantum > Maxwell demon' […] In what was discussed above, an electron interaction with > the quantum spin does not induce any correlations between the electron and > the spin and, therefore, no classical correlations are present. Hence an > important distinction between how do quantum and classical Maxwell's demons > operate.

So, it sounds like the "refrigerator-at-a-distance" (and thus energy transmission, when combined with a heat engine) actually (1) is more of a battery, and (2) doesn't interact with classical systems.

Is my reading correct?

<comment><USER11> I don't think so. There is no energy transmission involved at all. I suspect that there is some entropy transmission, but I didn't see an analysis of that, and the amount is negligible compared to what is already in the quantum mechanical system.

Of much greater surprise to me was the claim that an isolated quantum mechanical system neither gains nor loses entropy. I'm almost as astonished at this as I am at the fact that there are no chaotic quantum mechanical systems because quantum mechanical systems evolve linearly, while chaotic ones evolve exponentially.

If the latter astonishes you, I recommend reading [https://michaelberryphysics.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/berr...](https://michaelberryphysics.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/berry337.pdf).

<comment><USER12> _> Of much greater surprise to me was the claim that an isolated quantum mechanical system neither gains nor loses entropy._

Why is this surprising? It's a simple consequence of unitarity.

<comment><USER11> It surprises me because the universe is an isolated quantum mechanical system that certainly appears to be gaining entropy.

<comment><USER12> The apparent contradiction here should not make you doubt the statement that an isolated quantum system can't gain entropy. It should make you doubt the statement that the universe, or at least the "universe" that appears to us to be gaining entropy, is an isolated quantum mechanical system. In other words, it should make you consider the possibility that we observe an apparent entropy gain because we can only observe a portion of the universe, and that portion is entangled with portions that we can't observe (and might never observe given that the expansion of the universe is accelerating). We never actually observe the pure state of the universe as a whole.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Could have sworn that one of the tricky things about that law was that while it may appear that you are decreasing entropy locally, you are just increasing it somewhere else, thus entropy still increased in aggregate.

<comment><USER14> Why do you have to swear? We (lifeforms) are living, breathing examples of that concept.

<comment><USER11> Ironically someone downvoted you for this comment. I guess that they didn't understand how exactly true your statement is.

In essence the entire biosphere is a giant heat engine, mainly fed off of the flow of energy from the Sun to Earth to outer space, and in some extreme environments fed by the radiation of heat out from the core of the Earth. Shut off those flows of energy, and the second law would shortly catch up to us and we'd all perish.

<comment><USER15> Shut off the flow of energy and the cold would catch up to us a long time before the second law of thermodynamics.

(our frozen, desiccated corpses would probably retain their organization _longer_ under such conditions)

<comment><USER9> I'm no physicist, but isn't the cold a result of the second law? Or is the second law a consequence of the dissipation of heat?

Also, is thermodynamic entropy applicable to organized matter?

<comment><USER16> It is applicable to _everything_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > if a small theoretical being sat at the door between the hot and cold rooms > and only let through particles traveling at a certain speed. This > theoretical imp is called "Maxwell's demon."

Maxwell's demon is considered a slight of hand because it requires energy to perform its task. But if a passive energy-free equivalent can be found with a novel quantum substrate then any liquid could be separated into hot and cold pools. I am highly sceptical of such a claim. The difference in temperature between these hypothetical pools would likely be too small to create any useful energy.

See also:

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

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

</comment><comment><USER18> > "Although the violation is only on the local scale, the implications are > far-reaching," Vinokur said. "This provides us a platform for the practical > realization of a quantum Maxwell's demon, which could make possible a local > quantum perpetual motion machine."

> For example, he said, the principle could be designed into a "refrigerator" > which could be cooled remotely — that is, the energy expended to cool it > could take place anywhere.

Perhaps there's another definition, but as far as I'm aware, a PPM has net negative/zero energy input from anywhere, be it local or remote.

That said, apart from hyperbolic misapplication of terminology (not a PPM, no circumventing Second Law), this does sound like interesting research.

</comment><comment><USER19> This article seems a little light on details, and the original paper (not behind a paywall!) is quite dense, but some of my favorite paper's on Maxwell's demon are:

[http://www2.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/papers/ExorcistXIV/Exorcist1....](http://www2.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/papers/ExorcistXIV/Exorcist1.pdf)

[http://www2.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/papers/ExorcistXIV/Exorcist2....](http://www2.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/papers/ExorcistXIV/Exorcist2.pdf)

...and to ease into things, an article by one of the authors:

"The Simplest Exorcism of Maxwell's Demon -- No Information Needed"

[https://web.archive.org/web/20140309110028/http://www.pitt.e...](https://web.archive.org/web/20140309110028/http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/Goodies/exorcism_phase_vol/exorcism_phase_vol.html)

</comment><comment><USER20> It seems as though the authors are confusing Boltzmann's H-theorem and its cousins expressed in more complicated formalisms with the Second law of thermodynamics. That's a very common misconception, often resulting in announces of apparently great discoveries, while the sober account would be more akin to "we derived a theorem where this special expression, similar to Boltzmann's H-function, does not behave as one would expect based on the H-theorem, which in turn is proven to be valid only for a simplified model of ideal gas in special condition." Not so interesting. Second law is an experimental law that concerns macroscopic systems. So far, this law was not shown to be violated based on any broadly accepted theory.

</comment><comment><USER21> So this article does the Maxwell Demon some injustice. There is a key point about the demon that when he is 'sorting' the particles into two bulbs or rooms, that the gate he is working on is frictionless. In this way, you can can see that there is no energy entering the system, yet the entropy is decreasing. Now, this is where things get interesting to me (please correct me if I'm wrong here). What the demon is adding is information to the system. It decreases entropy. Natural selection is a sort of maxwell demon in it's selection process. I have a theory though that it all evens out. The more complex/evolved the organism, the more entropy the organisms generate themselves.

<comment><USER22> > There is a key point about the demon that when he is 'sorting' the particles > into two bulbs or rooms, that the gate he is working on is frictionless.

Exactly. Maxwell's Demon is a magical construct. In reality, any active device that sorts molecules into high and low energy bins would take power to run, and would generate more heat (or other entropy) than it removed by doing the sorting.

<comment><USER21> While what you said is true, it sort of misses the point. The thought experiment demonstrates that there is some quantity being added to a system each time the demon opens or closes the gate, and that quantity is information. Now we have a relationship between information and entropy.

Edit: I think you might be speaking to my point that in the end it evens out, and that natural selection in turn does create entropy even as its generating information.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Someone smarter than me: why is this totally bullshit and will never work?

<comment><USER24> The second law of thermodynamics just follows from statistics and a large number of interacting particles. It's not actually inviolable as the article says. There are whole books written about far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics, and the fluctuation theorem quantifies the probability of entropy increasing [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluctuation_theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluctuation_theorem)

<comment><USER25> Right, the second law simply is a result of selecting a result from a probability distribution that increases entropy, but drawing from tails of the distribution aren't impossible, only highly improbable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> A quick read of the paper shows it's mostly focused on systems with discrete levels; IIRC there's already plenty of thermodynamic weirdness in those, like "negative temperature" states in the Ising model and so forth. They touch on a continuous system in the final section, but that also includes a system with a finite upper bound to its energy (phonons). Wonder if that's related to the potential for 2nd Law violations.

</comment><comment><USER27> There is a free PDF on the nature site, but the paper is also available on arxiv ([https://arxiv.org/abs/1407.4437](https://arxiv.org/abs/1407.4437)), the first version on the arxiv dates back to 2014. It's strange, but I find the arxiv version much more readable in terms of typesetting than the polished version in nature. Also there are additional appendices in the arxiv version.

</comment><comment><USER28> You lost me at "locally". Of course if you take a closed system A and make it a subsistem of some bigger closed system B you are going to be able to diminish entropy at A by increasing entropy even further at (B + !A).

My grandmother's freezer was doing this 50 years ago, and I am pretty sure the engineers who designed it did not think their work was fundamental research in any way or form.

</comment><comment><USER29> This doesn't actually violate the law. This just goes on to prove it.

The reduce the entropy locally but in the process of doing so, increase it globally. It strictly follows the 2nd law of thermodynamics.

</comment><comment><USER30> The best thing with local and short-term effects is that eventually someone finds the way to extend the space and time boundaries a bit, then a bit more and then we are talking about astronomical scale.

Can be a nice story plot for a sci-fi book, in which science finds the way to defer the rise of enthropy to some almost infinitely distant moment in future (that end of time, we've always being expecting) and move the boundaries of locality to the observable universe. What a world that would be.

</comment><comment><USER31> By "locally" I think they mean something like "entropy will decrease within what looks like a closed system, and it might not be immediately obvious where else in the universe the corresponding increase in entropy is occurring".

So not actually "free energy", but perhaps it could be used to stage a convincing demo to potential investors.

</comment><comment><USER32> I don't see what the big deal is. Let's try the ideal gas. For starters __temperature ∝ Kinetic energy __

We have two rooms. One were molecules all travel at speed A and other room molecules travel at speed B and we open a small window.

Eventually, over a long period of time the temerature in both rooms will settle at a temperature between that of B and of A.

Let's try to formule this mathematically. This is something like the mean value theorem in calculus that f'(C)(B-A) = f(B) - f(A) for some intermediate value C. And here are function f(C) is the equilibrium temperature.

In statistical mechanics we imagine we could count the number of particles -- 10^23 or 10^25 -- something very large. And some fraction M travel at speed A and N-M of them travel at speed B. And we count the probabilities of various mixtures occurring.

Feynman Lectures on Computation is a great book [https://www.amazon.com/Feynman-Lectures-Computation- Richard-...](https://www.amazon.com/Feynman-Lectures-Computation- Richard-P/dp/0738202967)

</comment><comment><USER33> "The authors are planning to work closely with a team of experimentalists to design a proof-of-concept system, they said." \- Pardon if I'm mistaken, but this seems like a fancy way of saying they have no evidence at all so far.

<comment><USER34> Quantum Mechanics is pretty damn solid. I expect they'll find their evidence, and figuring out that something is possible in QM is more than good enough reason to try it.

If that turns out to be false then QM will have been disproven, which is even bigger news!

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> arxiv preprint of original paper here: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1407.4437](https://arxiv.org/abs/1407.4437)

</comment><comment><USER36> I just knew it! Soon it won't be that local after all. ;)

</comment><comment><USER16> Original article[1].

[1] [http://www.nature.com/articles/srep32815](http://www.nature.com/articles/srep32815)

</comment><comment><USER37> Is not the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics always circumvented on Earth? We absorb more energy in the form of light from the sun than we emit.

<comment><USER11> The second law is not violated because the Earth is not a closed system.

Also to a very good approximation, we emit what we absorb. When averaged over a long period, that approximation gets better. (It has been somewhat worse over the last century though.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I wonder if we're going to read titles like "Global warming solved? We're going to send heat to Mars?".

</comment><comment><USER39> Maxwell's demon is probably laughing his head off.

</comment><comment><USER40> I recall having an idea at least a bit similar to this years ago when I was heavily studying evolutionary informatics.

Some particularly avant garde types in that field have posited that the universe rather than having two constituents -- matter and energy -- has _three_ primary first-order constituents. The third is information. Information is not merely an epiphenomena of matter and energy but a primary "thing."

If that is the case then there should be an E=mc^2 type equation that relates matter to information and energy to information and all three should be interconvertible. It would then further follow that energy can be converted into information and vice versa in the same way that matter can.

I then imagined a Dyson swarm of solar power satellites that produce a data stream encoding the energy they collect. This stream can be subscribed to and decoded to reconstitute this energy remotely. To globally conserve energy there would have to be a two-way aspect to this -- I imagined the receiver of energy transmitting "challenges" to the swarm that are then "solved" to yield energy stored in the form of the solution. The receiver then receives these solutions and executes them to generate what in effect would look like local perpetual motion. (But in reality energy is still being conserved.) It would look like a cryptographic hashcash-style challenge-response system with proof of work, but the energy input of the POW function can be reversibly extracted elsewhere.

If such a thing were possible and sufficiently efficient and could function in the presence of high latency, this could power a starship among many other things. If it were latency-tolerant it might also be a way to store energy. Save your laptop's power to its hard drive.

It reminds me a little bit of the "telematter stream" propulsion system from Peter Watts' Blindsight.

<comment><USER41> > Information is not merely an epiphenomena of matter and energy but a primary > "thing." If that is the case then there should be an E=mc^2 type equation > that relates matter to information and energy to information and all three > should be interconvertible.

I'm not sure I agree with this premise, but one thing I've been musing about is that there's probably an information-theoretic lower bound for the amount of energy it takes to transmit a given quantity of data a given distance. You can pick different points along a curve (higher bandwidth/higher frequency signals need higher power to produce a given SNR, and lower-bandwidth/lower- frequency signals can produce the same SNR at a lower power) but there is some asymptotic energy limit there that you cannot beat unless you have an infinitely sensitive receiver.

Anyway, what I'm going for here is that your unifying theorem there would probably be Shannon-Hartley, since that deals with the _transfer_ (derivative) of information. The "noise" is whatever natural equilibrium opposes the transformation process, and your SNR dB is the equivalent of the rate constant in chemistry.

It's all fairly useless without some idea of how we convert hashes back into energy of course. Without that, there is insufficient data for a meaningful answer.

<comment><USER11> There is a minimum amount of energy required to flip a bit. See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle) for details.

This corresponds to a minimum amount of energy needed to transmit a given number of bits.

We are nowhere near this limit. However it is an upper bound that guarantees that Moore's Law can't possibly continue for classical computing to the end of this century.

(Part of the interest in quantum computing is that it has no theoretical upper limits at all. However this comes with some very weird restrictions.)</comment></comment></comment>


Failing to Plan is Planning to Fail - <AUTHOR> http://blog.acrowire.com/cloud-computing/failing-to-plan-is-planning-to-fail/

<comment><USER2> I really like the way the article frames the fact that data center outages happen. AWS isn't magic, plan for failures.

This is the best line: "Blaming the Cloud for these outages would be like blaming your hard drive manufacturer for lost data when it fails." =)</comment>


How Juul became worth $38B - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/12/22/juul-me-twice-shame-on-you/ <comment><USER2> The big attraction of Juul is delivering cannabinols via vaping.

That is why Phillip Morris (aka Altria) put 18 billion into it.

They plan to combine Juul their vape acquisition and Cronos their cannabis acquisition.

Big cannabis is coming and will dwarf big tobacco...

<comment><USER3> I don't think Cannabis would be as big a market as nicotine. Cannabis slows you down and makes you tired. That's great for recreation, but it's not something most people would want to consume every day.

Nicotine is different. It feels good, but you can still go to work after you had your dose.

<comment><USER4> American pop culture is in an uppers swing right now. Cars, computers, etc are increasingly faster, more powerful.

Appalachia is having a downers problem, and it'll probably spread as people get burnt out and the economy contracts some in the near future.

Time is a flat disk.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I am against making any drugs illegal but shit like this is why we can't have nice things.

<comment><USER6> Strongly against making drugs with very low potential for harm illegal, but that's definitely not tobacco related products.

I feel it undermines the logic based argument to legalize recreational drugs. As well, smoking costs 3x the tax revenue from society, coming from single payer, I don't love paying for people picking up smoking / vaping since the dangers were known.

<comment><USER7> > I don't love paying for people picking up smoking / vaping since the dangers > were known

Are the dangers of vaping known tho? Is there any study that shows it causes physical damage like inhaling smoke from a burning cigarette? Is seems fairly obvious to me that inhaling vegetable glycerin and nicotine does not cause any harm. The only "problem" is the nicotine addiction, but that one does not cause any physical harm, it just costs money to buy refills.

<comment><USER8> > Is seems fairly obvious to me that inhaling vegetable glycerin and nicotine > does not cause any harm.

Why is that obvious? Lungs evolved to absorb oxygen not vegetable glycerin or propylene glycol. In fact there is some evidence that it may be harmful to protective cells in the lung walls, potentially increasing the risk of lung inflammation[1]. Obviously we'll have to wait 30 years to know of any long- term effects, but maybe common sense would be a better life decision if you don't want to be a test subject.

I would also suggest that there is a risk of cheap e-cigarettes causing even more serious harm because they might have contaminants in the fluid being inhaled.

[1]: [https://thorax.bmj.com/content/73/12/1161](https://thorax.bmj.com/content/73/12/1161)

<comment><USER7> > > [https://thorax.bmj.com/content/73/12/1161](https://thorax.bmj.com/content/73/12/1161)

Thank you I didn't know about this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I bought my first e-cigarette the other day from a local smoke shop. I am switching to vaping as a way to quit smoking after 10 years. Anyways, I saw the juul cigarette for more than double the price of all the other normal e-cigarettes on the shelf and the capsules themselves weren't cheap. I obviously went with the less flashy eco vaporizer and bought the liquid in the bottle. Cost me $30 in total and still using it 3 months later.

My point is that I didn't any reason to buy the juul other than brand. The competitors are significantly cheaper and more customizable(i guess). I believe much like gopro, juul going to tank at some point. They are very overvalued here.

<comment><USER4> Let me try:

"[Apple's] competitors are significantly cheaper and more customizable(i guess). I believe much like [the iPhone], juul going to tank at some point. They are very overvalued here."

I wouldn't say you're incorrect about them tanking, but I would argue that they're more Apple (sleek, sexy, status symbols) than some other segment leader.

<comment><USER9> The difference is that apple makes a arguably different product than its competitors; android marketplace is still lacking in quality in comparison to apple store, ios is more seamless, the apple ecosystem is the strongest out there etc.

Juul is simply packaging e-vap in a fancy wrapper and charging double of what their competitors are charging. It's silly to make the comparison.

<comment><USER4> "Juul's competitors pod selection and ease of use is vastly inferior to their own. The experience of not having to fiddle around with settings to get the vape to work is refreshing when compared to the competition."

The article specifically mentions network affects like being able to plug your pods into someone else's stick if yours is out of battery.

Google Play (Android Market was renamed in 2012) has pretty much the same selection as the App store.

"Apple is simply packaging Samsung components in a fancy wrapper and charging double what the competitors are charging."

Apple makes cellphones. So does everyone else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> How is it we allow people to make money from hacking human brains...

It isn't going to end well. Society will pay, just like it did and continues to do for tobacco.

<comment><USER11> >How is it we allow people to make money from hacking human brains...

Sugar.

<comment><USER12> Advertising. Loot crates. Social media.

<comment><USER13> Yeah, we barely allow people to make money on anything else than hacking brains.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Um, by marketing an extremely addictive drug to children and young people?

That's what tobacco did in the past, and are doing again now.

<comment><USER11> Eh. Not quite the same. And it wasn't marketed to children. Apparently there's just something about blowing smoke and age restriction that is cool to teens. It is almost as if Juul was sought after by them.

Also, it isn't tobacco that is the big driver of juul sales. Weed is. And we've had a multi-decade marketing campaign about how weed carries no negative side-effects by large swaths of the population. I got shellacked on this forum when I tried to argue that it isn't normal for kids to smoke weed (apparently it is perfectly normal for kids to 'experiment'). Juul didn't do that.

<comment><USER15> Tobacco is an industrial product. It's only amenable to industrial cultivation at scale, because of the biology of the tobacco plant. It's not feasible to grow and process enough tobacco yourself to sustain a habit. This is why big tobacco made such a gigantic pile of money in the last 100 years. But now Americans don't smoke cigarettes anymore.

The thing about weed is that it's not an industrial product. A 15 year old can easily grow enough weed in his bedroom to keep himself constantly high. This is Really Bad for profits.

So Juul is valuable because big tobacco sees an opportunity to revive tobacco sales aka nicotine Juul cartridges, while also replacing soon-to-be-legalized ordinary marijuana with weed-themed Juul cartridges. It's a two-pronged strategy.

<comment><USER16> > A 15 year old can easily grow enough weed in his bedroom to keep himself > constantly high. This is Really Bad for profits.

I see this repeated a lot, but I have a very hard time believing it matters at all. It's just as easy to grow tomatoes and the result is significantly cheaper and tastier than what you can buy in stores, yet I doubt anyone would say tomatoes are significantly less profitable because of it. Even in my own state where growing weed is legal I've heard of exactly one friend who grew their own, and that was a one time novelty rather than a real supply.

The reality is that the vast majority of customers prefer the convience of pre-packaged and pre-portioned weed products over the cost savings of growing. In fact, if anything the trend is towards more convenice (edibles, single dose vapes, delivery services) rather than away from it. The profit impact of those who do choose to grow will be extremely tiny.

<comment><USER17> I've had several friends that grow weed, from pretty sophisticated (albeit <5 plant) hydroponic setups to "guerrilla grows" (tossing seeds into areas unlikely to be discovered and later coming back to check/harvest). It's a lot easier than most home garden produce by a long shot, in my opinion. There is even a book called "The $64 Tomato" that details how difficult that particular fruit is to grow.

<comment><USER16> Even if the actual growing isn't hard, you need to plan it months in advance and there's work involved in setup and harvesting. That's far more inconvenient than just opening an app or driving to the store. It can also be risky (there are still plenty of confusing rules around growing for personal use, and guerrila growing is illegal) and even meticulously attended plants have variable yields. The only way for it to substantially affect profits is if a non-trival portion of customers prefer the cost savings to inconvenience, and, imo, the evidence points strongly against this. Heck, at my local despensery _pre-rolls_ far outsell flower and the only work involved there is grinding and rolling!

Also, I haven't read that particular book, but the growing difficulty depends on the variety. I can personally attest that growing cherry tomatoes is extremely easy (they're commonly recommended as a "beginner" plant.)

<comment><USER17> That's a really good point about pre-rolls. I agree that homegrown weed is no more of a threat to dispensaries than homebrewed beers are to Budweiser.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> "How drug dealers are getting rich"

</comment><comment><USER19> I tried nicotine toothpicks and they just made me feel sleepy and didn't give any neurological benefits. I don't really see why nicotine is popular at all.

Caffeine, P5P, D-Ribose, Astragalus, Turmeric... etc. are way better natural stimulants/nootropics. I guess people don't smoke for the same reasons that I take supplements.

<comment><USER20> Nicotine is biologically addictive.

<comment><USER3> I've quit smoking a couple of times. The hardest part is the first few days: I get really irritated and angry, and I know that I would just need one cigarette to feel alright again. After a few days, the effect wears off, and I feel normal again.

In the long run, the hard part is resisting the urge to start smoking again. There is always some situation where it's so tempting to light a cigarette...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> They really misuse the phrase "virality" over and over here. There's nothing beyond word of mouth spreading it from one user to another. It's more UX that's impressive.

<comment><USER22> Ok, we've reduced the title above to the salient point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Flagged for just being native advertising, considering how often the brand is mentioned (most of the article applies to all e cigarettes)

<comment><USER24> A profile of a successful company by an independent journalist is not advertising.

It's actually an entire category of journalism, and happens to be the genre TechCrunch is known for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> But seriously though, JUUL is the rocket ship I wish I could put my money in.</comment>


Wikipedia co-founder slams the 'appalling' internet - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/05/wikipedia-co-founder-larry-sanger-slams-facebook-twitter-social-media.html <comment><USER2> I agree with Larry about abuse by Facebook and Twitter.

I also strongly encourage him to look at state of wikipedia moderations. Specially in a country like India. Lot of pages related to political content is moderated by people who are deeply partisan and have no respect for facts.

<comment><USER3> > state of wikipedia moderations

I'm glad others are keeping an eye on this issue. It is incredibly ironic to me that anyone in a leadership role at Wikipedia would criticize Zuckerberg or Dorsey. It's not even just political content, it's getting to the point where history is being actively re-written and re-interpreted to match a radical narrative.

In some sort of temporal example of humour, I've gone back to recommending people use Britannica as a starting point and for surface level reading.

<comment><USER4> > It is incredibly ironic to me that anyone in a leadership role at Wikipedia > would criticize Zuckerberg or Dorsey.

According to (ironically) Wikipedia[1], Sanger left the project in 2006^W the early 2000s:

> Frustrated by sustained content battles and feeling he had a lack of support > from Wales, Sanger eventually left the project.

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

<comment><USER2> Thanks. My bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The internet was much nicer before most people were using it. We usually focus on the technology problems here at HN: filter bubbles, skinner box addictive UIs and content feeds, algorithmic and centralized control. Has anyone simply wondered if the problem with the internet is fundamentally that everyone's on it? It used to be an escape from the problems of the real world. Now it's just a new way for the problems of the real world to reach you.

<comment> rolha-capoeira I hear you. But this teeters dangerously close to gatekeeping, elitism, or something along those lines. I'm sure you didn't mean it that way, but I think how others feel after reading our comments does matter.

Better put, because everyone is on the internet now, the real world's problems are now the internet's problems. It used to serve as an escape, true. It has made the world a smaller place, where problems from a distant state or country can reach me and I can't help but be aware of them. I may even be affected by them.

Is that good or bad, for us as individuals or as global citizens? That's heavy stuff.

<comment><USER6> Gatekeeping is the only way communities can keep themselves healthy. There is no such thing as a universal 'community'.

From day one, life has been about letting in certain elements, and keeping out others. Without this selection, development and differentiation are impossible. Similarly we don't (and shouldn't) let every person into our homes, or our countries, or our servers. Why is it seen as an obvious truth that we should allow every single person onto the Internet, without ever being able to remove them?

<comment><USER7> >Why is it seen as an obvious truth that we should allow every single person onto the Internet, without ever being able to remove them?

For the same reason it's seen as an obvious truth that everyone should be allowed to use a telephone, or send a letter in the mail. The internet is a communications platform, by definition it belongs to anyone who wants to use it.

The internet being used by everyone no more makes the development or differentiation between cultures impossible than the planet Earth being used by everyone does.

Also, because the anarchist hacker ethos that led to the internet was about liberating _humanity_ from the constraints of gatekeepers - the systems of governance and proprietary control over access to information and freedom of expression that divided the world between the elite and the serf.

What we're seeing now is not that model breaking down, but only beginning to come into its true potential.

Yes, there may be negative effects to the ability of the internet to remove the barriers between cultures and communities, even states, but the world would be a lot worse still if it had never left the confines of a few universities simply to keep the normies out. The value of the transformative nature of the internet on civilization itself is greater than the value of the internet monoculture whose relevance it no longer recognizes.

<comment><USER8> The ethos that led to the Internet belonged to the military-industrial complex, not the anarchist hackers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Avoid the mainstream media, advertising-centric sites, social media, et al, and the Internet is mostly fine. Stick to the niche sites and services that have always been there and it's a much more pleasant place.

<comment><USER10> Any particular niche sites that you have in mind and could recommend to others?

<comment><USER11> Isn't this antithesis to the issue at hand?

These niche places are great exactly because they're hard to find, and the community there grows organically.

I'm on HN now because slashdot was flailing years ago, and a friend I knew IRL mentioned it ....

<comment><USER12> Most of the niche sites I've seen aren't great because they're exclusive but because they're built around a specific interest. Anybody can join, but if they don't share that interest, they'll get bored and leave.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm going to take a cynical stand and claim that the internet as the greybeards envisioned decades ago is just not going to happen. Or perhaps happened for a short window in the early 2000s. I don't see how we can just turn things around.

Something new will pop up in a few years, limited within hacker circles, perhaps in a medium beyond computers/phones. It'll have all the nice qualities that we seek such as privacy, encryption, anonymity, pro-free-speech etc, except that none of those things will last for very long. It too will have it's own eternal September, followed up ad-tech/media/government screwing things up. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Any new kind of "internet" that depends on traditional infrastructure that is under the control of states/corporations will end up being exactly like the one we have now.

<comment><USER14> This kind of repetition is inevitable because there's no technological solution to systemic social problems. An internet like the greybeards envisioned would require changes to our political and economic systems to remove (or at least lessen) the incentives to muck it all up in service of money or power.

<comment><USER15> There's also just human nature in general, like our penchant for outrage and world-view confirmation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> A lot of people keep declaring the web needs to be more decentralized. I don't think they really have a plan for making things better, though, because decentralized doesn't really mean anything except 'not centralized'.

It doesn't mean 'privacy-focused', because the internet is decentralized, and your privacy isn't inherently guaranteed by it. It doesn't addess how to fund online products, which is what drove the systems we have today. It doesn't describe how we're supposed to convince the world to build products that don't exploit people, and aren't used by the powerful against us.

Saying we need the web to be more decentralized is like saying we need more transparency in politics. Sounds great, but even if it's more transparent, that doesn't mean more legislation is going to get done, or done better. We need more concrete goals, and to focus less on the means of getting there.

</comment><comment><USER17> Is a decentralized social network really the solution?

I'd rather enjoy having a social platform managed for the greater good, by a not-for-profit organization. The Mozilla or Wikimedia of social networks.

<comment><USER18> Doesn't most of the money supporting both Mozilla and Wikimedia come from search engine companies?

<comment><USER17> Mozilla yes. Wikimedia gets most of its income from donations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I find these rants about social media patronizing, people are aware, they just don't care. It's not whistle blowing, it's self congratulatory yipping at this point. If you want to make a better solution that happens to be decentralized and works with just as little effort, then do it if you actually care _rant over_

<comment><USER20> Well, he did it is called Everipedia witch is a decentralized version of Wikipedia, it is a work in progress still but it getting better by the day.

<comment><USER21> It's on EOS though, a network prone to cartels. Yeah, no thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think a big part of the problem is lock-in! How easy is to migrate all your data from one service/app to another? We actually have alternatives across different products, it's just people are lazy or even worse, it's not possible. Facebook exported my data and then what? With an easy way how to move your account data, the best products would win.

</comment><comment><USER23> > "A decentralized internet, a freer internet, that's what led to the internet > being created in the place,"

What Facebook did to MySpace, may happen to Facebook soon when a good decentralized social network pops up.

<comment><USER24> No, that can't happen to Facebook now the way it happened to MySpace. Facebook has too much money. At this point Facebook and Google essentially own the advertising business on the Internet. With that kind of money, they can just buy competitors.

<comment><USER25> That is true. Which is why the alternative needs to be grass-roots, good enough, and not for profit. It has to be a mission, rather than a corporation. I am curious to see if this can happen....

<comment><USER26> It will also have to be something cool and exclusive for a while, and not something your dad is allowed to use. That's the thing these "new social networking platforms" are missing: the original cachet of Facebook was that you could only get on it if you had a .edu email address like you would if you were in college. It was cool because college students were on it, sharing their very similar college experiences with each other and basically using it to hook up.

Tinder worked very well for 20-somethings as well because they had figured out that 20-somethings are usually not looking for a deep, meaningful relationship right out of the gate. So they required you to tell your story in pictures, and they eliminated the 3000-word deep and meaningful profiles that people still dating in their 30s and 40s are using. So it almost immediately excluded your dad from using it. And it had a lot of cachet because of that exclusivity.

The thing that made Google+ not cool was that its major enthusiasts were the kind of insufferable tech dweebs that would take pictures of themselves wearing Google Glass in the shower with their Pixel phone. That's very much a dad thing to do, and it's the wrong kind of exclusivity.

So if we want a really good social network to replace Facebook, it has to A) not be full of insufferable tech dweebs, and B) be exclusive by way of not being full of parents on day 1. I'm certainly too old to start something meeting those requirements.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I have really, really soured on Wikipedia over time. I find the site has gotten worse and less compelling, and contributing to it is a massive slough that nobody sane would undertake at this point.

This is a decent writeup of some of the issues:

[https://www.gwern.net/In-Defense-Of-Inclusionism](https://www.gwern.net/In- Defense-Of-Inclusionism)

</comment><comment><USER28> I like twitter. I'm in the minority here, but I genuinely do. I keep my timeline curated, I am very very liberal with blocks and mutes of anyone who vaguely annoys me, and I enjoy using it.

<comment><USER29> I liked Twitter before it was popular. Being liberal with blocks works but eventually you realise you are spending more time curating your experience than actually enjoying the website.

<comment><USER28> Hardly. I only follow ~50ish people, of which I only interact regularly with ~9ish. I only block a few people a day max.

<comment><USER30> I liked Twitter before Twitter decided that advertisers and "trending topics" and virality were more important than personal curation. The out-of-order timeline with forced ads and both Likes and Replies becoming less deterministic retweets were some of the last straws for me.

<comment><USER28> My timeline is completely in-order and I don't see ads.

<comment><USER30> It's good that ad blockers exist and they added an in-order option back after I left, but the problem remains that the defaults are still anti-curative/pro- advertiser/pro-"engagement metrics". Having such terrible defaults makes the whole social network less trustworthy, because while you might curate your feed, do the people you follow still do? Do the people they follow?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Thanks for sharing, nothing groundbreaking, but the general principle is there. Modern internet is all about freedom, and sharing, access to info and so own, Wikipedia is a great example of how progressive internet could be. Then there's Facebook that will go miles to access users data, and Trump is tweeting nonsense. I get why people are angry with the state of internet atm.

<comment><USER32> You mean the wikipedia where a few super users dominate the discussion and delete the rest?</comment></comment>


How Airbnb Is Pushing Locals Out of New Orleans' Coolest Neighborhoods - <AUTHOR> https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/airbnb-new-orleans-housing_us_59f33054e4b03cd20b811699 <comment><USER2> How has Airbnb not been sanctioned by more local governments seeking to curb this behavior? Just like Napster, Uber, and all of the other "sharing economy" apps that have popped up in the past 20 years, Airbnb's profit model hinges on the ability of its users to skirt local laws and operate in this very gray area.

It seems like very short-sighted planning by city councils who impose some nominal license/approval fee in exchange for the long-term health of their own communities. I don't see how this is sustainable.</comment>


I'm giving away my time to you - <AUTHOR> http://morganwilde.svbtle.com/orbiterco

<comment><USER2> I think this could be cool. Just signed up. Cheers</comment>


Understanding Blockchain in plain English (~3500 words) - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@mohitmamoria/wtf-is-the-blockchain-1da89ba19348 <comment><USER2> Few questions: The people that are "mining" are using their computing power to seal other people's transactions?

Also, what happens when there are no more bitcoins to be rewarded. (When mining is no longer profitable by any means)

Thanks

<comment><USER3> To your first question: yes, that is exactly what they're doing.

To your second: there is a fee associated with every transaction. You can set the fee to something incredibly small (like 0.00001 cent), but miners will take the higher-fee transactions first, so you'll be waiting a long time.

So even after the block reward drops to zero, theoretically miners will still have an incentive to keep processing transactions.

<comment><USER2> I would imagine that at some point, maybe in 100 years, mining may not reward you more than the cost of electricity to mine. Miners won't bother continue-- how will bitcoins continue to be hashed? thanks apeace!

<comment><USER4> The invisible hand of the market. In 100 years, if bitcoin transactions are still of value, then miners and people making transactions will come to an agreed upon transaction fee that will be suitable for both parties. And If miners drop out, transaction fees will go up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How is the order of transactions finalized in a block before the block has been mined?

<comment><AUTHOR> Every transaction is added in the block in the order they happened. Every transaction has a timestamp associated with it.

<comment><USER6> This is completely untrue. "Transactions are added to the new block, prioritized by the highest-fee transactions first and a few other criteria."

You can read more about this [https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/35697/what-is- cr...](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/35697/what-is-criteria-of- mining-priority-except-for-transaction-fee), but the TL;DR is when the txs are broadcast by various nodes, the highest fee txs are included first (for the most part) by the miners.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Are there really over 150,000 SaaS companies? - <AUTHOR> By this article, there are over 150k unique apps connected to the cloud.<p>https://www.cloudlock.com/blog/the-explosion-of-apps-27-are-risky/ <comment><USER2> I'm running 3 on the side. Each could easily sell for $5M down the line.

I have another 3 well researched ideas that can have similar outcomes.

SaaS is super easy when you go niche and aim for the 50k-100k MRR. You don't have to sell into enterprises to do that. Just have 1k customers paying $100 each. Solve some stupid problem in marketing and you've got yourself a viable SaaS.

There's no reason why there wouldn't be 100k engineers running a small SaaS on the side.

<comment><USER3> >> I'm running 3 on the side. Each could easily sell for $5M down the line.

That is cool!

what are your cloud/infrastructure costs vs number of users ? And which cloud provider are you using ?

<comment><USER2> All those businesses combined could easily fit on one $40 digitalocean instance. They are split for business reasons, but the costs are essentially $0.

<comment><USER3> Cool, $40 is really nothing - what about database servers ? How many max concurrent queries are made by users.

<comment><USER2> without saying too much, the businesses all revolve around the fact that certain ad networks report data in such a way that its not usable by people.

i pull the data once a day and create reports with a cronjob. the server is idle 99.999993% of the time and peak concurrent queries is 1.

once people buy that service, they quickly realize that although the data is now presented in such a way that you can gain insights from it, they still can't do anything with it, because they don't really get math. because of that, i upsell some data analytics consulting where they basically get my skype and can ask questions.

there are millions of super low hanging fruit services like that to be written, if youre willing to allow your TAM to be 1M ARR.

on the consulting side of things, i spend about 5 minutes a day talking to people, which means that my hourly on that is ridiculous.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I believe this to be true. There's a large number of products which are used by small groups of people. For example, [https://breederoo.com/](https://breederoo.com/)

</comment><comment><USER5> [http://fieldzipper.com](http://fieldzipper.com) another SaaS company</comment>