Will minimum wage hikes lead to a huge boost in automation? Only if we're lucky - <AUTHOR> http://www.vox.com/2016/4/2/11348148/minimum-wage-robots <comment><USER3> Here is the critical section of the article:

> _What about the workers thrown out of jobs by the new robo-waiters? Many > would get new jobs, though the way this would work is often ignored._

> _Most restaurants would keep longer hours (they 're paying for the rent and > the robots anyway), meaning many workers would get a raise and change > shifts._

No, the workers are now fired. They don't get a raise.

> _The advanced robo-restaurant technology would itself be a valuable American > export good, and people would be employed in designing and selling it._

Yes, but not the people we just fired.

> _Some low-wage work would be reallocated out of the relatively low-social- > value restaurant sector and into things like child care and home health > assistance, for which there is ample demand._

If there is ample demand for such things, and those things pay better, and typical restaurant workers are qualified, then we should already see a mass exodus from restaurant work. We don't. Thus one of these things isn't true.

> _Since poor people are now making more money..._

You have not given any evidence to support this.

<comment><USER4> You are essentially making the luddite case. The counterargument usually goes like this: yes, people would be fired and there will be serious pain in the short run; however the machines will drastically improve productivity, therefore reduce prices, so real wages will go up along with demand and the extra income not spent on, say, buying feed stock for your horse, will go in creating other jobs and economic sectors that will make use of the available labor. The government can and should ease the transition by offering skill- training and incentives.

While economically sound, I'm skeptical this process can go on forever. The human biology and mind is clearly limited, while the progress of machines does not seem to be. So eventually you will hit a fundamental limit where larger and larger chunks of the workforce will simply be too old, uneducated or simply too human to keep up.

How close we are to this fundamental limit it's anyone's guess, but I would venture to say we are closer than most think. At the point where a serious part of the population is unable to participate in the labor market, this ceases to be an appropriate system to distribute the fruits of economic activity and some form of basic income is required to maintain social order.

<comment><USER5> > however the machines will drastically improve productivity, therefore reduce > prices

Except why would that ever happen? If you were a business owner selling widget X, and it suddenly cost you half as much to make that due to automation, you don't pass those savings on to your customers, you celebrate how much better your margins have gotten and how much more profit you're making.

<comment><USER6> True in a monopoly situation, but if you have competition and they can automate like you, there will be a race to the bottom.

<comment><USER7> Now suppose the automation technology is thoroughly patented and the inventor effectively has a government-granted monopoly on the right to use it or anything similar to it.

<comment><USER8> That might delay things, but (1) patents expire and (2) there are often ways around them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think the fundamental purpose of a business is to accomplish a task, not to employ people. For example, I don't care how many people are employed to keep hackernews running. I'm thankful for their efforts, but I don't care if it's one person, ten people, or one bot. Or how much any of them get paid. The only thing that consumers and businesses care about is the end result.

If a job can be done by a machine, that's fine. People will find new forms of employment. Or they won't. But we can't expect businesses or consumers to misallocate their resources for the sake of someone's job.

Fortunately, fully automating the process of driving or running a restaurant is decades away. We have time to implement a basic income. Or just come up with more ways to employ people. The number of available jobs is limited only by imagination. "Instagram Photo Producer", "Online Forum Discussion Facilitator", "3D Printed Object Finisher". Someone can pay someone else to do any given thing, and now that's an occupation. "Potential Job Titles" isn't a finite list, and we can't ever run out of them.

<comment><USER10> Business is a social construct and we can un-construct it if it proves no longer to be the socially valuable way to do things.

It's there to serve humans. if it doesn't do that, it's a parasite, drag it out behind the shed and shoot it.

<comment><USER11> The Marxists and communists have tried doing that thing many times and have failed spectacularly. Business based market economy is the only (till now) successful and socially most beneficial type of society that has ever existed. I upvoted the OP because he/she/it (it may be a bot) has put this thing in clear words.

<comment><USER10> Up until now, the possibility of having a group of people who lead a leisure life without an undercaste of slaves hasn't existed. Automation is a new thing under the sun.

<comment><USER12> That's funny because the "slaves" in America right now enjoy a higher standard of living than virtually every king and queen before our generation.

<comment><USER13> How is this not patently false? If you take someone living below the poverty line, earning minimum wage, renting their meager apartment, eating highly processed carbs and pseudo-meat, in debt to their bank and payday loan sharks, and under constant threat of homelessness brought on by unexpected illness or economic downturn, how is this situation in any way superior to a king or queen as they existed before "our generation" which I take to mean the modern era rather than literally our generation.

A monarch of the past would have obviously better access to food, more of it, higher quality, they might have slightly less variety available (dependent on the era and location) but they certainly weren't eating the prepackaged garbage that passes for low budget food today.

By law they owned not only their own vast properties, houses, palaces, etc. but also that of all of their subjects and nobility allowing them to give and take as they wished from anyone under their dominion. Even after reforms almost all royal families were still left with vast holdings that produce more than enough wealth to live absurdly opulent lifestyles. There have been many cases of indebted rulers but that is debt in the sense of illiquidity, they were still asset rich and able to melt the plate down to pay off the debts, so to speak.

This notion that everyone was universally worse off in the past and therefore even the lowest of the modern low are somehow better off in their current state and should be thankful for it is the crudest of fallacies. The trite example of modern healthcare being a shining example of why it's better to be poor today than wealthy 200 years ago is equally absurd considering that such care is often avoided by the poorest due to its cost right up until it's too late to do anything about it. You wind up with a situation where a person's only choice is to hope not to get sick since they can't afford the treatment or the missed work either of which could put them even further under water or on the street.

<comment><USER14> I think that image of monarchs comes from the movies? The famous inventory of Charlemagne's estate includes 2 cups, one chair and a towel. Their food back then was bad meat and oatmeal, no matter who you were.

Indeed, just the existence of cheap antibiotics are likely to make the most humble of today's citizens live decades longer than anyone from the past.

<comment><USER15> This has a good overview of a routine day in the life of a monarch. It's nothing like bad meat and oatmeal. [https://www.quora.com/What-was-daily-life- like-for-a-medieva...](https://www.quora.com/What-was-daily-life-like-for-a- medieval-king)

<comment><USER16> A poor person today has access to thousands of movies and music on Netflix and YouTube. A poor person today has a vast array of meals they can purchase with less than one hour of minimum wage work. A poor person today can buy tons of generic prescription pills whose formulas were nonexistent during yesteryear.

<comment><USER15> A poor person has no Netflix, and doesn't have time for YouTube, she is either clocked in on the job, sitting in traffic to pick up kids from school, or cooking dinner. Besides, that kind of mindless passive entertainment is vastly inferior to what monarch had access to -- hunting, horseback riding, live music and shows, sex, etc. See pharke's response above regarding cheap processed foods.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm all for raising the minimum wage, temporarily it may help people for several years. The truth is the automation wave is coming quickly regardless of what people are paid. And it's not for just minimum wage jobs. Think about jobs like truck driver where there's probably several million people who count this as their profession in the US. In 10-20 years, that number will probably approach 0.

There's a nasty new world order coming where a vast majority of jobs will be gone. There will be super wealthy 'robot owners' and peasant/slaves, and probably first in america.

The only hope is that the government completely changes the entire society through 'more than' basic income. Of course we know that won't happen. It is high unlikely that even a subsistent basic income will be put in place. The government is run by the super-rich, and really only does what ever it takes to protect their interests.

Hopefully my life span doesn't range long enough that i feel the devastating impact of these changes, but i fear the timespan where this occurs is so accelerating that it will be here in force way before we estimate it today. 30 years? I can see it being here in 30 years.

Even if you have a job that is 'automation-proof' or 'automation-resistent' but not an elite, your income will be paltry compared to the super rich class, and thus you will be relegated to the masses.

Yeah, I know, i sound hysterical. Hopefully i am. I doubt it.

<comment><USER18> >There's a nasty new world order coming where a vast majority of jobs will be gone

Want to know the biggest job killer in history? The tractor. Farm employment in the developed world went from 70% to 2%. We have been through this before. We can generate new jobs.

<comment><USER17> We do create new jobs. But you do recognize it's a Ponzi scheme right? Each iteration include a smaller set of highly educated jobs, which will be out of reach for a larger percentage of the population.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've never heard a good argument to justify having a minimum wage. A lot of the people who argue for minimum wages commit the fallacy of the false dichotomy: they think that the choice is between everyone having jobs and getting paid what they're paid now, and everyone having jobs and getting paid more -- they think they can somehow legislate the latter outcome.

In reality, what tends to happen when you increase minimum wage is that businesses lay off workers. They only have so many dollars to spend on wages at current profitability levels. Seattle's minimum wage for example has caused a massive loss of jobs compared to the rest of the state: [https://www.aei.org/publication/minimum-wage-effect-from- jan...](https://www.aei.org/publication/minimum-wage-effect-from-jan-to-sept- seattle-msa-restaurant-jobs-fell-700-vs-5800-food-jobs-in-rest-of-state/)

Minimum wage _directly_ causes unemployment by making it illegal to employ people at their fair market wage. [Edit: I'd be glad to read an argument for minimum wage if someone would like to link one. The articles that I see in the news tend to engage in moralizing and lack real explanation and justification.]

<comment><USER20> The "good argument" for having a minimum wage is that without it, wages will be pressured _down_ , because every business on the planet wants wages as low as possible, and they generally have the means to achieve this. It has nothing to do with job creation: it's about having jobs that are not basically slavery. It's for job quality, not quantity.

Besides, you're just assuming people should be employed at "fair market wage." The political process is part of the market, and the fair market wage is determined by what is _politically_ determined to be fair (AKA, minimum wage) just as much as it is by employers' demands. As a business, you are not entitled to a profit. Especially not at the expense of your employees welfare.

<comment><USER21> True, every business on the planet wants wages as low as possible. This is, of course, correct.

On the other hand, every employee on the planet wants her wage to be as high as possible. This is also obviously true.

This creates law of supply and demand. Google can't hire a decent software engineer for, say, $30000/year, because other companies will immediately offer more, and supply of talented software engineers is quite limited, even globally. But unskilled labor can be hired for much cheaper, as supply is nearly limitless.

I don't know, they don't teach this stuff anymore in high school / colleges, or what?

<comment><USER9> Why do you think minimum wage laws exist? It's because at one point in our nation's history, businesses implicitly colluded to set wages low. They have more power in wage negotiations than workers do, because there are generally people who can afford to do unskilled labor for very small amounts. Businesses got greedy and took that too far, offering people wages far beyond a minimum standard of living. So in response, the people voted to set a minimum that would prevent corporations from being outright exploitative.

The same thing could happen today. Google engineers will always be paid a lot of money, but the average McDonalds workers could see their income fall way below the national average cost of living. Whether the minimum should be $5/$10/$15 is up for debate, but without businesses would have an unfair amount of bargaining power.

<comment><USER22> Collusion to suppress wages is already illegal. All you're saying is that you don't have any faith in the government to prevent collusion. Which is a whole separate issue.

<comment><USER23> The other problem is that today we have labor gluts, particularly of the unskilled variety. Automation reduces the need for workers, those workers become economic outcasts with no influence to have their needs satisfied by capitalism, and the ownership class does not create demand for more unskilled labor - they want founders and professionals who can grow their wealth, that is what _they_ demand.

If you drop the minimum wage you do not need collusion to see real wages for jobs drop insanely low, ironically because those who can live off other income will work them when there is no other easy way to earn additional income - IE, those with wealth will work for less because their life does not depend on that income providing their base needs, which already are in many places more than what the minimum wage offers already (ie, living wage).

<comment><USER24> We don't have labor gluts at all. In the US working mothers struggle to find child care for their children, houses go uncleaned, and productive people drive themselves to work.

That's a situation of labor scarcity, not a labor glut.

<comment><USER23> If you offered sufficiently high wages to do those jobs, you would find plenty of people willing to do them.

A labor glut does not necessitate me being able to ask for someone to mow my lawn for one cent and having someone volunteer. You have a labor glut when the availability of living wage work declines below the working population who need to earn such a living.

<comment><USER24> That's fine - the point is that people aren't obsolete and work is available. People are just unwilling to do the work.

That's not an argument in favor of a basic income - a basic income just increases the incentives for laziness and makes the labor scarcity worse. (10% or so in the Canadian experiments.)

<comment><USER23> Basic income gives the poor bargaining power in wage negotiations. It would require cultural adaptation, but I know of few individuals whose whole needs can be satiated by just having food and shelter. People still want _things_. They take out insane loans, mismanage their money, and even sacrifice those base necessities to possess things. We have a strong consumer culture, and UBI can take advantage of that to reduce suffering and empower workers more to actually negotiate with employers rather than it being a one sided conversation with your only failsafe being an undesirable minimum wage.

I highly doubt making labor more scarce, when we are in such a glut (and continued automation will perpetuate and expand the glut) would actually cause any real harm to the economy. We already pad economics with millions of ghost jobs that exist solely because the marginal loss in productivity and efficiency having unnecessary workers is less than the cost of having mass destitution and social instability.

<comment><USER24> A glut is when the supply is available to anyone who wants it and additional supply goes unused.

We've already established that we have the exact opposite problem. Our national infrastructure is crumbling because no one is fixing it. Skilled women stay home with their children because child care is unavailable. Homes go uncleaned, nails go un-manicured, etc, because no one is available to do these things.

If we reduce the labor supply by 13% (what was done during the Mincome experiment) that only makes these problems worse. For comparison, the great recession cut labor supply by 5%.

[https://decorrespondent.nl/541/why-we-should-give-free- money...](https://decorrespondent.nl/541/why-we-should-give-free-money-to- everyone/31639050894-e44e2c00)

As you note, people want _things_ \- if we cut the labor supply we have _fewer things_ to go around.

<comment><USER23> The supply and demand of labor does not care what people _need_ \- it does not care at all that mothers _want_ childcare, or the citizens _want_ better roads. All that matters is if that mother or if the citizenry are willing to pay for it.

Predominantly most of that is due to the labor glut driving down median incomes and leaving people with less economic negotiating power to get the things they want done.

It isn't appropriate to talk in absolute figures of reducing labor supply. That is one side of an equation without considering the other. UBI would generate tremendous _real_ demand for cheap housing, cheap healthy food, and all manner of amenities that can fit in that universal budget. Those demands would be _met_ , because _everyone_ than has the economic negotiating power equal to their UBI as a minimum, rather than today where many people have no (unemployed) or negative (indebted) negotiating power at all and thus have no effective economic influence at all.

It is _always_ about supply and demand, and to only talk about economics in terms of one or the other is to argue for an intended outcome rather than seeking out the best possible one.

If there were _actual_ demand for childcare, the going rate of childcare workers would continuously rise as capital fought to be supplied by limited demand. The rising prices would create incentive for people to enter that labor force. That does not happen because _real_ economic demand does not exist at those levels - it is not an actual labor shortage if all you want is childcare workers _at_ minimum wage. If I want rocket scientists at minimum wage, I cannot claim there is a shortage of rocket scientists period if they are not willing to take the lowest possible payment I can give them.

There is a shortage of something when the real supply cannot meet demand at _sustainable_ price points. Are Nannies expensive? Yes. Is that not a sustainable cost? Absolutely not, Nannies are a valuable commodity, and those that can do a good job should be paid for the scarcity of their skillset. The reason there are not more Nannies is not because of some incredibly bullshit argument about how "nobody wants to do the job, we would pay them _anything_ , but people just refuse to act rationally economically" it is because nobody is willing to pay anyone sufficient wages to justify the career pivot into the discipline.

And that relates back to my central argument for UBI - our economy prioritizes the work "worth doing" as a central tenant of capitalism. All a UBI does is potentially drop out the labor force of the work being done now that is the least worth doing to begin with.

But TLDR, fundamentally, it is important to recognize that in capitalist economies, demand is not people wanting something (better roads), it is the money willing to be spent on the supply. So if nobody will supply the money to build better roads at rates construction workers are willing to take, you do not have a shortage of construction workers, you have a shortage of funds to pay for better roads and thus you are not generating enough demand for them.

We have a demand problem, not a supply problem, as long as major corporations are hoarding money and the stock market is at all time highs, capital is out there. There is just nothing the controllers of that capital actually want that anyone who isn't working now could supply.

<comment><USER24> Conversely, if there was an oversupply of labor prices would come down. Note that I said labor is scarce, not that there is a shortage.

The fact that prices remain high suggest people are choosing not to work, not that their labor is worthless and they can't find any job. Why do we need a BI if labor is valuable and people are merely lazy? Why do we want to make a scarce resource even scarcer?

<comment><USER23> What prices are high?

One important, central consideration must remain that labor is local. Surely some cities in the US have a labor shortage, and the worse it gets the more financial pressure it puts on the unemployed elsewhere to somehow manage the opportunity cost to immigrate. But the workforce participation rate is at a twenty year low, it is below 1960s levels before women even entered the workforce en masse, and it is continuing to decline.[1]

I'm also curious who is "lazily" not working, and somehow still eating and sleeping under a roof. And then I'd also argue that if you can find people that are refusing to work minimum wage and instead _prefer_ to be homeless, that is probably because they have no negotiating power in wage relations because... there is a glut of labor. If there is work to do, that is valuable, prices will rise to find supply. If the prices will not rise, then you do not have actual demand, you have desire. Money is the only thing that speaks in economics.

[1][http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/susan- jones/record-94610...](http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/susan- jones/record-94610000-americans-not-labor-force-participation-rate-lowest-38)

In the macrospective economy, I would like to see evidence of unsupplied demand at the minimum wage for child care or construction workers. My father works construction, and there is a tremendous glut of foreign laborers in our area (Eastern PA) that drive wages down straight to the minimum with no benefits. There is a shortage of skilled labor in the industry, but only because the hiring practices of firms has prioritized the unskilled cheap workers and thus drove talent westward. So _now_ there is a shortage of skilled workers, but _only_ at non-competitive pay rates that the skilled workers left because there was a labor glut, with firms simultaneously unwilling to raise rates back up to attract them back.

<comment><USER24> _But the workforce participation rate is at a twenty year low..._

This confirms what I said - people don't want to work. Workforce participation rate = (working + seeking work) / population.

 _I 'm also curious who is "lazily" not working, and somehow still eating and sleeping under a roof._

People on public assistance. Millions are exploiting lax standards in disability programs: [http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for- work/](http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/)

The vast majority of poor people (75% or so) don't work and are not seeking work yet have consumption of approximately $20k/year/consumer unit. Where do you get the idea that people will be homeless if they don't work?

 _In the macrospective economy, I would like to see evidence of unsupplied demand at the minimum wage for child care or construction workers._

It's pretty easy. Offer child care for $7.25/hour and see if anyone tries to hire you.

<comment><USER23> > This confirms what I said - people don't want to work. Workforce > participation rate = (working + seeking work) / population.

The majority of the decline in participation is not some magical "nobody _wants_ to work anymore" because people are on average poorer than they were 30 years ago. If...

> People on public assistance.

This is true, then losing workforce participation of millions would cripple our economy if productivity were actually related to peak utilization of human labor. I do recognize the increase in social security disability participation, but 9 million does not make a near 20% drop in participation rates. It is certainly a contributing factor, though.

> It's pretty easy. Offer child care for $7.25/hour and see if anyone tries to > hire you.

If there were unfilled positions I would find them online on job sites, but I'm not finding examples. Additionally, remember that 7.25 is not a living wage in many areas, and people have to make the moment to moment decisions whether working at or near minimum wage is worth it if you are still insolvent doing it versus seeking more lucrative income with that time.

> Where do you get the idea that people will be homeless if they don't work?

My mother was effectively days away from homelessness last year, she quit her job in 2012, did not seek additional employment for two years, by being a property owner was ineligible for most welfare, and was being forclosed on for property tax collection. We got to experience the real options she had on where to live - there was no public housing available for at least 18 months, she might have been eligible for subsidized rent but she was not going to get free money for living and the process to get social security disability is not as easy as people on HN like to make it sound.

Here is another thought - if people are dropping out of the labor force and using welfare as a substitute, UBI is in every possible way superior. Social security disability is a disincentive to work, because you lose benefits if you do. The same thing happens at every welfare cliff in the current broken system. I argue personally for UBI because of the negotiating power it gives workers, the capacity for it to normalize the cost of labor against the human cost it incurs rather than exclusively the rarity of the skills necessary to perform it, the normalization of economic stability enabling people to be more entrepreneurial, the extreme amount of social stability it would create to correct for growing wealth inequality, and the extreme simplification of an out of control welfare state bureaucracy.

But obviously valuable work is not going undone. If there were valuable work to be done that nobody were doing, _I_ or any other active market participant would weigh whether pivoting to in demand jobs were out there was economically worth it, and capital really wanted it done, it would raise the price to find someone to do it.

If the marginal value of labor is as low as it _must_ be to prevent the rapid expansion of wage offerings for work done, it means the work not being done as little or no marginal value according to the wills of capital, and we aren't actually losing any economic efficiency having people drop out of participation because the work they would have done, if any, would have been of negligible significance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Anyone claiming to definitively know the results of increasing minimum wage is talking out their ass. The economic effects of minimum wage increases are complicated and situation dependent. I think the people making 'back of the envelope' economic' here are being intellectually irresponsible.

I personally think that the minimum wage is a bad solution to the problem of providing a minimum income to our citizens.

By requiring people to hold a job to receive an minimum income, we create a glut of 'un-skilled' workers and we drive the price of that 'un-skilled' work down to the price floor created by the minimum wage. This means that jobs people don't want to do aren't being automated because there is so much cheap labor.

By creating a minimum wage price floor, we also eliminate the ability to offer jobs that don't produce enough capture-able value. (E.G. investigative journalism or child-care for low income workers). This means we are forced to automate jobs that people do want to do, but that are unfeasible due to the minimum wage price floor.

By gradually switching from a minimum wage to a minimum income, we can fix the current inefficiencies in the job market while solving the same problem.

</comment><comment><USER26> A hike in the cost of labour _was_ the reason why the industrial revolution happened in Britain vs India.

Even today, the cost of labour is so little in India that there is no need to innovate in robotics,AI etc.

To me the question should be framed as - do we want minimum wage workers to be slaves ? This is essentially the argument being made.

If robots are actually cheaper then why haven't they being deployed yet ? Having done research in robotics when I was younger - there are more productive use of roboticist's time then to go after minimum wage service workers. Its non-trivial to exchange a waiter with a robot, and we already have "ready made" food - so why do people still go restaurant ?

The only thing a hike in minimum wage is going to do is cut into the profits of restaurant owners, landlords and big chain corporations.

<comment><USER27> > A hike in the cost of labour was the reason why the industrial revolution > happened in Britain vs India

There was also the forced de-industrialization of one of those nations by the other one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> The article makes a number of arguments as if stating accepted facts, when much of it doesn't even logically follow.

> _Some low-wage work would be reallocated out of the relatively low-social- > value restaurant sector and into things like child care and home health > assistance, for which there is ample demand._

If this is true, then what is preventing it from happening now?

> _we are able to produce everything we need with less labor, we can afford to > let people work less._

The tired old utopia argument. Robots will do everything while we all sun on the beach.

Firstly, this ignores the fact that people spend their time working because they need money, not because there is work to be done.

Secondly, If we are making things with less labor, then there is less demand for labor and, thus, lower wages. Yet, the producers realize higher profits. The actual result is not utopia for all, but the wealth divide that we see now.

> _Most restaurants would keep longer hours (they 're paying for the rent and > the robots anyway), meaning many workers would get a raise and change > shifts._

Not sure where any of the leaps of logic packed in there originate. The entire statement is completely irrational.

> _advanced robo-restaurant technology would itself be a valuable American > export good, and people would be employed in designing and selling it_

Complete sleight of hand. We're talking about the effect on low wage workers, not highly skilled robotics designers and sales engineers. The people who are displaced are very unlikely to gain employment designing the robots that are replacing them.

</comment><comment><USER29> I own several franchised fast food restaurants.

This article ignores several key points. Robots are expensive and would need to be custom made for each restaurant to replace humans. Also, there would be missing the human touch, making a restaurant visit cold and automated. No more "service" and personal touches. You get what you get.

The immediate issue is, who pays for the increased labor cost? You do. And, no, it won't just add a dime to your bill. My labor cost has gone up 150% since I started in this 30 years ago as an investment. All my material costs are also up at least that same amount. The unit cost to you of one of our products was $4 back then. Today it is $8.

I now feel I hire better people but I hire fewer of those people and, currently, won't hire teenagers cause they're unreliable but the quality of person I need to run with this light crew is hard to find, more due to the stigma of working fast food than the actual pay (though that's part of it).

The customer is price sensitive. The customer likes the human touch. If restaurants go robotic, the most popular restaurants will be those without one, and while the idea of raising pay to $15/hour is great, someone has to pay for that, and that someone is you.

<comment><USER17> This is a very sane point of course, and you are right that the consumer, and perhaps the low wage earner (in cases of the McDonald's type restaurants) now loses his extra wage to extra meal costs, so it is self defeating.

The problem though is that your costs are not driven up just by wage costs, but by many other things that are not helping the low wage earner. So the self defeating part of the "rising cost past to the consumer" is only a fraction of what makes life miserable for those who are at the bottom. Increasing there pay directly helps them 100%. And so it is still a net win.

<comment><USER29> Those "other things" mean the cost of food, paper, cleaning supplies, etc. that make a restaurant run. Those same materials are made by low wage earners who, if given $15/hour, will drive up the cost of the supplies I use, thus increasing my operating costs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I don't want employment, and _hell no_ I definitely don't want full employment, just the opposite. I want us as a species to transition to a leisure society with the ick automated away, and the only jobs humans do being ones humans would love to do for the sheer fun of it.

Because a minimum wage has a loophole for "not employed at all", it isn't good enough. A Basic Income has no such loophole, and will allow poor people to reject awful jobs, forcing them to be automated.

<comment><USER30> I'm curious about this. In your ideal above, how would one go about pursuing their dreams without an ability to earn excess capital through labor?

For example, my goal is to have a nice house on 50-100 acres. I also really enjoy jet skiing and boating with my family - especially from a nice lakefront rental with a private dock.

I can't fathom how I would pursue those goals in a 'leisure society'... Or as a prole would I be expected to just accept my assigned housing, only use public transportation, and put my name in an annual lottery for one of the state run vacation compounds?

<comment><USER10> An approach I've considered is, that the living allocation by default is just comfortable. You'd be able to get allocated a city apartment or a rural house. But this is coupled to a delegation based "liquid" direct world democracy where you can either direct your surplus yourself, or delegate it to someone (or some organization). And recursively they can delegate it too.

So suppose you were Elon Musk and you said, I want to build a colony on Mars, you'd probably be able to draw the interest of large delegating entities who would grant resource priority to the program so it could make rockets, and other entities would have projects that needed launching, and so forth.

Or compare a smaller project, if you were a marine biologist and you wanted to equip a boat and go study penguins, there would be some delegating entity that would care about penguins, and you'd get your boat.

Perhaps even if you just wanted a particularly beautiful house, you'd be able to draw enough aesthetes to your cause.

But if you were just a jerk who wanted a mansion, well, probably not.

[Edit: for clarity, you could conceptualize this system as something like crowdfunding, except global, recursively delegated, and directing resources directly instead of money.]

<comment><USER30> So that doesn't really answer any of the scenarios I posed. You do manage to imply that I'm a jerk for wanting a nicer house/vacation/recreational vehicle than I'm allocated by the state, so that tells me something...

Sounds to me like if I wanted to buy a jet-ski in your world, I'd have to find a bunch of people to 'delegate' their 'surplus' to me. Perhaps I could perform some function for them in return? Say, that sounds a lot like labor... So I could work for money. Got it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Minimum wage hikes are tough pills to swallow, but they are a reaction to lack of wage increases over time.

If the lowest wages had followed the s&p or management comp. over the last decades then this would be a non-issue. Weak labor/low organization and the fact that many bought the myth of "trickle down economics" has kept the lowest wages where the 1% wants them.

As for automation: if there are gains from automation they are likely there already. I Mercedes builds cars much differently in the US compared to Germany despite big differences in labor costs.

One difference that is immediately noticeable with high labor costs is not in industry but in services 1) more self-service such as self checkout at grocery store, self-checkin at airport 2) no non-essential services such as greeters, bag-packers, 3) DIY is common

</comment><comment><USER32> It's amazing how pushing technical boundaries is seen as worthy challenge, but helping the those who are struggling with basic needs is seen as impossible and an irritating overstep by the government.

</comment><comment><USER33> What happens when automation displaces a sufficient portion of the unskilled workforce that their value is less than 'minimum wage'?

In an increasingly technical and automated society, what do we do about those who cannot adapt or become skilled enough to work in the increasingly technical workspace? We can either manufacture menial, useless jobs or admit to ourselves that HAVING to work is not necessary. We NEED to begin exploring Universal Basic Income to learn how to accommodate this in the future. It's either that or we let those who can't join the workforce suffer.

I don't know that we're there yet, but we will someday. Sooner than we think.

<comment><USER34> we already are exploring it in the form of food stamps, tax credits, guaranteed student loans, etc. I agree, we should be pushing more though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> > Even better, to the extent that we are able to produce everything we need > with less labor, we can afford to let people work less.

I'm doubtful. From what I've seen it just means that those who do have full time jobs are expected to work more. Why employ two people for 20 hours a week when you can have one person for 40hrs a week? For most industries the managerial and administrative overheads are less with fewer staff who work longer hours.

> but has not really succeeded in shedding much light on where innovation > comes from or what policies support it.

Deirdre N. McCloskey might have something to say about that in her tomb 'Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World'[1][2]. tl;dr her argument is that the ability to bring innovation to market, profit, and be dignified in doing so is _the_ factor that brought about the modern world.

And besides, we only have to look at other developed nations with liveable minimum wages to see that it hasn't caused an automation revolution. Where I live, Australia, has an adult minimum full-time wage of $17.29[3] and has an unemployment rate of 5.8%[4] (for some definitions of 'unemployed').

A liveable minimum wage isn't going to cause an automation revolution. The Automation Revolution is going to be what causes the automation revolution, and for that to happen we're going to need cheap general purpose robots trickling in to the second hand market.

When a business can buy a general purpose robot for less than 5x the annual salary of a full-time employee, and it can learn new skills as easily as a human, we'll be close. It's looking like that's a way off yet.

1\. [http://www.deirdremccloskey.com/](http://www.deirdremccloskey.com/) 2\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deirdre_McCloskey](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deirdre_McCloskey) 3\. [https://www.fairwork.gov.au/how-we-will-help/templates- and-g...](https://www.fairwork.gov.au/how-we-will-help/templates-and- guides/fact-sheets/minimum-workplace-entitlements/minimum-wages#current- national-minimum-wage) 4\. [http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs%40.nsf/mf/6202.0](http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs%40.nsf/mf/6202.0)

<comment><USER36> Australia is being fueled by huge external stimulus from China, which won't last forever. It's not the best example to use. Some of the mature European democracies provide much more useful data.

<comment><USER35> That's definitely true, to some extent at least.

This[1] says "The mining sector represents 7%[31] of GDP; including services to mining, the total value of the Mining Industry in 2009-10 was 8.4% of GDP.", and "Despite the recent decline of the mining boom in the country, the Australian economy has remained resilient and stable." \- We'll see how long that lasts. It's certainly given me pause when considering to take out a home loan. Am I going to have a job in 5 years time?

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

<comment><USER36> From my friends in Australia (academic economists) I hear that China's impact on housing now exceeds the impact on any other sector. Australia has effectively become mainland China's money laundering hub.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> It seems like with regards to restaurants, this would only mostly apply to fast-food restaurants. Raising the minimum wage doesn't really appear to have an effect on servers given that the majority of their pay is from tips and they are effectively legally paid less than minimum wage anyway.

Furthermore, it isn't supposed to be a living wage. You're not supposed to be a single mother of 3 supporting yourself working at McDonald's. The minimum wage is supposed to be for those new to the work force and then you're supposed to better yourself and get a higher wage job. Where's the incentive to invest in yourself to earn more if you're making $15/hr for menial work?

<comment><USER14> That is an old dead horse. What job folks are 'supposed' to have according to middle-class morality is irrelevant. Today only about one minimum-wage worker in 10 are teens. A third are over 35. They haven't had a raise in 7 years. We're talking 25 million people who can't pay basic bills.

And we're not going to make them into 25 million more engineers or programmers or anything else really. There aren't enough jobs in the entire rest of the economy for these folks to fill.

It isn't going to get better by itself. Now Carl's wants to automate the counter. Banks are automating, expected to reduce head count by 30%. These things happen across the industry, those folks aren't earning minimum wage, they're out of a job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Before computerized elevators, there were manually operated elevators. Before automatic telephone switchboards there were manually operated telephone switchboards... Those things were relatively modern.

Future people will say: before automated kitchens there were manually operated kitchens, before automated cleaners there were janitors, before self-driving cars there were manual cars... and so on.

The domain of tasks that can only be done reliably by humans is shrinking. Humans are being pushed to do more complex things. But that doesn't scale infinitely. Robots eventually will be able to do better.

<comment><USER17> Agreed. It's interesting that this thread is almost entirely about low wage earners. Truck drivers were added to the conversation, but the truth is it's not about low wage earning, but about rote working.

In 10-20 years, i'd expect

The job of accountant being pretty much wiped off the map for humans. Turbo Tax, et. al, was a nascent first step.

Doctors, Nurses, Hospital Administrators, Staff will be significantly pared down, and given much more commoner positions, as I can go down to Walgreens, sit in the gene therapy booth and cure my own cancer, hiv, leukemia, als, etc. etc. Perhaps Baby docs will survive the longest... that's kind of icky even for a robot.

Dentists? Higentists? I'd expect in that period of time, we will be able to regrow teeth beyond the first set of adult teeth... so, really what's the point of your job function.

Middle Management? Various surveys suggest people actually would prefer to report to a computer, rather than a human, and really, will it be that hard to believe that middle management can't be done via robot? That's a good number of people without jobs.

Bus/Train/Plane Drivers, gone soon as well.

Almost all manufacturing jobs will be gone.

As automated surveillance reaches its crescendo, surely police forces can be significantly trimmed, even without the introduction of robocop.

And on and on...

If you want a job in the near future, start planning for one that is highly chaotic. But with everyone fighting for those jobs, don't expect much in pay.

<comment><USER38> Well the truck driver's work is not only to drive. Also to do maintenance on the truck, inventory and such. How do you change a flat tire on a self driving truck? You will still need some alternative. That alternative can be automated, sure... but it's a problem yet to be solved.

<comment><USER39> Whats the cost of run flat tires vs the cost of a human mechanic ten years out?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Thought experiment. If the government will start forcing your employer to pay you, lets say 70% more than you currently make beginning next month (if they want to keep you), would you be worried about losing your job? Oh, and let's not forget, nobody else will be allowed to hire you from that point on if they don't pay you at least that amount that your current employer will be forced to pay you from now on.

<comment><USER41> And the other thought experiment: you're currently making 70% more than somebody who holds significantly less responsibility than you do, and has significantly less skill than you.

If the salary their position pays is increased to match your salary, what are you going to do?

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I think what you're going to see with any minimum wage hike is that businesses who have thin margins, namely restaurants and small stores, will be forced to go out of business or be forced to degrade their quality of service. Labor costs are for any business the biggest line-item expense. Spending on "robo waiters" or what have you is a big upfront capital expenditure, and I doubt many restaurants will be able to finance it. But it's not just small establishments: even Walmart is very exposed to these wage hikes. While it appears like they have lots of money, a lot of how they do what they do is based on cheap labor.

In SF, after they boosted the minimum wage, I observed a few stores go out of business. I'm all for people being paid more, but I doubt people losing their jobs altogether was the intended consequence.

Another thing I observed was the price of eating out in SF rose considerably. I remember feeling shocked that for a simple lunch (certainly not a luxury), I paid over $30. Things like that hurt people on the lower end of the economic spectrum, especially since poorer people are very sensitive to food prices.

The sad thing is: after taxes, if somebody is working the maximum hours they can without being a full-time employee (which very few minimum wage earners are), this would only net them an extra $450/mo. at most, which doesn't seem like it would be enough to have a big impact on somebody's life.

Perhaps I am cynical, but I don't see these wage hikes as having a net positive impact. What drives up wages is a shortage in the labor supply and businesses that need more skilled employees who they are willing to train and keep for awhile. A minimum wage hike just gives businesses more reasons not to hire people.

<comment><USER43> > this would only net them an extra $450/mo. at most, which doesn't seem like > it would be enough to have a big impact on somebody's life.

It absolutely would have a big impact. You are talking food for a money, a monthly bus pass and cell phone cost.

<comment><USER42> Yeah admittedly that judgement largely depends on where you live and the cost base. In my opinion, that wouldn't buy you much in SF or NY. For somebody located outside of a city, it could have a much bigger impact.

<comment><USER44> 3% of the country live in SF or NYC.

<comment><USER42> 80% of the country lives in urban areas and this number is increasing.

<comment><USER39> So you are assuming that all urban areas have a similar cost of living to san francisco?

<comment><USER42> No. Is that what you want me to be saying so that you can tell me I have no idea what I'm talking about? :-P

Let me make a few assertions:

\- The greatest benefits from a rise in minimum wage will go to those with the lowest cost of living.

\- Living in an urban area (dollar for dollar) is more expensive than living in a non-urban area.

\- Most minimum wage jobs exist in cities (according to Pew Research): [http://www.pewresearch.org/files/2014/09/FT_14.09.08_Minimum...](http://www.pewresearch.org/files/2014/09/FT_14.09.08_MinimumWage_table.png)

\- To work in a city, it has become increasingly beneficial to live in close proximity or inside a city.

Therefore, an increase in minimum wage, while certainly helpful, is going to have less of an impact than one would hope, simply because those who work minimum wage jobs have a higher cost of living by needing to be close to cities in order to work those same jobs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> FYI, large minimum wage increases in the San Francisco Bay Area in the last few years have been accompanied by drops in unemployment.

<comment><USER46> But of course, San Francisco is hardly a good representative of the state. What happens when the Dairy Queen in Fresno is required to pay the local teenagers $15 an hour, or around $30K a year, to sell ice-cream cones? My guess is that there's going to be one less Dairy Queen in California and those teenagers will be out of a job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> My response, as a minimum-wage hike supporter, to those CEOs who say "if you raise minimum wage, we'll automate":

"Good! get off your lazy ass and make some technological progress!"

That also means we should raise minimum-wage more often.

<comment><USER48> Yes, if humans are only being used in place of machines because human labor is cheaper, then we should make human labor more expensive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Automation will change the job market structure, i.e. what jobs and wages are available, which will have two major effects:

1\. Change in income distribution and therefore inequality (not necessarily for the worse, but it seems likely). People often say that automation will result in unemployment, but that's only true if the minimum wage is fairly high. The real danger is rising income inequality.

2\. Change of the fraction of GDP that goes to labour (as opposed to capital). Again, seems like it will be a change for the worse. The share of labour has been slowly decreasing for some time.

</comment><comment><USER50> Automation unless the becomes the norm will never complete replace humans. For example, number of places allow you to place an order via an app, but customer with the awareness and ability to do so will just stand in line waiting. Plentiful amount of additional explains, but the point is customer, not business decide what they want, and customers often herd or group think.

</comment><comment><USER51> How did someone come to this conclusion?

"Right now the retirement age is rising from 65 to 67, and most people think it will have to go up to 70. If robots can do a lot of the work instead, we could put it back down to 65 or even to 62 while still growing the economy. "

Robots are going to pay the social security tax.

<comment><USER52> Assuming everything else stays the same, if a swarm of robots enters the economy and starts doing a shit-ton of everyone's work at a tiny cost, then productivity skyrockets and we all start collecting unlimited social security checks starting at age 62.

But everything else won't stay the same.

Consumers will start to demand more from the businesses and governments that use these robots. Businesses that don't get more robots -- or more expensive robots -- will be left behind. Pretty soon the productivity miracle disappears and we all have to work until we're 70, just like before.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Robotic fast food restaurants have been built. Check out AMFare, from American Machine and Foundry, deployed in 1964.[1][2] Automatically produced a range of meals (burgers, hot dogs, chicken, fries, shakes) comparable to most of McDonalds' business. This worked, and served real customers for a year, but was never deployed beyond one test location. Apparently it wasn't cost- effective. AMF returned to their more successful product, automated bowling alleys, which they still make and operate.

There's a startup trying to do a burger machine now.[3] Typical pretty web site, no installations. Last updated in 2014. McDonalds deployed a robotic kitchen in Phoenix AZ last year, and it hasn't been heard from since.[4]

Looking at the trade magazine of fast food, QSR ([https://www.qsrmagazine.com](https://www.qsrmagazine.com)), there's not much talk about kitchen automation. Even when they discuss a higher minimum wage, they barely mention automation[5]

Most of the newer systems look less effective than the AMF system from 1964. What's happened instead is movement of more processing upstream. The AMF system took in potatoes and bulk ground beef to make french fries and hamburger patties. Today, french fries are cut in a big plant elsewhere, and patties are pre-formed and shipped refrigerated. A fast food operation today is a final assembly plant.

One idea that did not catch on was automating fast food managers out of a job. Hyperactive Bob [6] is a system from a decade ago which watched images of customers lined up and lines at the drive-through, then decided how much food should be cooked ahead of orders. (That's the definition of fast food in the industry - is food cooked for inventory?) The company is still in business, but they mostly sell outdoor displays for drive-throughs.

So robots are not a threat to restaurant employment in the near term. Maybe 10 years out, but not yet.

[1] [http://archives.chicagotribune.com/1964/05/28/page/81/articl...](http://archives.chicagotribune.com/1964/05/28/page/81/article/a-m- f-automates-drive-in-chef) [2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmXLqImT1wE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmXLqImT1wE) [3] [http://momentummachines.com/](http://momentummachines.com/) [4] [http://newsexaminer.net/food/mcdonalds-to-open-restaurant- ru...](http://newsexaminer.net/food/mcdonalds-to-open-restaurant-run-by- robots/) [5] [https://www.qsrmagazine.com/outside-insights/ten-tips- surviv...](https://www.qsrmagazine.com/outside-insights/ten-tips-survive- minimum-wage-increases) [6] [http://www.post-gazette.com/business/tech- news/2006/06/16/Fa...](http://www.post-gazette.com/business/tech- news/2006/06/16/Fast-food-assistant-Hyperactive-Bob-example-of-robots-growing- role/stories/200606160187)

<comment><USER54> I think that's roughly right. The big-picture trajectory of automation is also, from where I see things in AI, not that sensitive to minimum wage levels, at least if we're talking anything near the levels that have been proposed so far.

California, for example, is proposing to raise the minimum wage from $10 to $15 by 2022. That annualizes out to 7% a year, or probably around 5% in real terms, assuming current ~2% inflation rates persist. That's just fiddling at the margins with the economics of automation, not a revolutionary change. Tech improvements are looking for orders of magnitude cost and productivity improvements, not +/\- 5%. A wage floor going up 5% a year will, at most, move up projects which were already a sure thing, making them economically feasible a few years earlier than they would have otherwise been. But it's not going to make things feasible that are currently an order of magnitude on the wrong side of economic feasibility, or that are currently too unreliable to deploy at all. And those are the kinds of changes that major progress in automation is driven by.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Risking to be simplist, the political dialectic will be soon resumed to:

 _the right to be supported by society_ VS _the right to work for society_

</comment><comment><USER34> Good article, but he neglected to mention that it makes way for guaranteed minimum incomes.

</comment><comment><USER56> stagflation

<comment><USER57> We are going to get both - mass redundancy on top of stagflation - <USER2> cum arm-chair economists notwithstanding.</comment></comment>


Can A.I. usher in a new era of hyper-personalized food? - <AUTHOR> https://newfoodeconomy.org/artificial-intelligence-personalized-food-beverage/ <comment><USER2> Hello HN. I'm Jason, the CEO of AFS.

Happy to answer any questions!</comment>


Ask HN: Our site just got onto Mashable - HELP - <AUTHOR>

Hey Everyone, For the past few weeks my friends and I have been hacking together small projects from our dorm rooms trying to find something that would stick.
Two days ago we released WhereMyFriends.Be, and last night we were fortunate enough to have been posted on Mashable! We immediately were forced to migrate to Rackspace to make sure our site stayed up: http://wheremyfriends.be
We have been up all night maintaining the site, catching any bugs from users, and just making sure things go smoothly.<p>We have noticed the site slowing down over the course of the night and have been on phone with Rackspace. They think the problem may be a piling queue of requests to our MySQL data tables (which are currently using MyISAM).
We really want to get the site back up to speed as soon as possible but we are honestly at a loss for what to do. We've never experienced a traffic surge like this before. We are on the verge of putting up a landing page and stopping the flow of Mashable traffic.
Does anyone have any suggestions for what we can do to get ourselves back up and running?
Thanks for any suggestions!
(Note: we are using PHP, MySQL, Javascript) <comment><USER2> Also, as discussed in one of your previous threads, in case the current Geolocation API you're using is slowing things down (at least in part), you might want to try this:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2255089>

Edit: Or, directly: <http://IPLoc.info/api>

(Partly inspired by your thread from which, I sent you an email, but never heard back from you.)

If you wish to try this, I'll be happy to work with you to get our (free) geolocation API setup on your site _quickly_.

<comment><USER3> Thanks so much I really appreciate your help, and sorry for my delayed response to your email. Hopefully we can get your API running with our setup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Without being familiar with your service, do you implement caching? memcached[1] may lighten your load if you do not.

What web server do you use, apache? Perhaps nginx or lighttpd would be a better fit if you do use apache.

Check out this post[2] for more details on decreasing load.

and try not to knock your server offline at your peak time ;)

HTH.

[1] <http://memcached.org/>

[2] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2220273>

<comment><USER3> Do you know if we would be able to implement on Rackspace's Managed Cloud hosting? Considering we haven't slept in forever it seems like it would be hard for us to learn how to set up a new server manually at this point :)

<comment><USER4> I'm not familiar with that service, sorry.

However, looking at their FAQ from [1]:

"Totally customizable, each Cloud Server gives you full root access"

so I would imagine you can make any changes you'd like. However, every host is different and YMMV.

[1] [http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/cloud_hosting_products/server...](http://www.rackspace.com/cloud/cloud_hosting_products/servers/faq/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I would:

* Change the landing page you have up there. Focus on the product (not your current predicament). A few screeshots. Make people want to comeback later today or tomorrow.

* Eliminate any non-essential database calls. Convert php files to static html (or copy and paste the output of the page and just echo it).

* Check your slow query logs in mysql and index. Definitely make sure you have any primary keys set and foreign keys (used in joins) indexed. Then look at your queries and add index on your slowest queries.

If you aren't sure it's MySql, copy all of your images onto Rackspace cloud files/amazon s3. This will lower traffic through your machine/disk access.

<comment><AUTHOR> _We wanted to really focus on our story since we are hoping people will continue to use the apps we create and they will know us for being people the love. Rather than just focusing on the product.

_ We have combed through the code and believe we have eliminatd non-essential database calls but will look again. Also I guess we could always use static html for header/footer rather than including/requireing it.

*What is a slow query log?

<comment><USER6> | What is a slow query log?

It's basically a log kept of queries that are running slower than a set threshold.

Read through this for the details to set it up and access it: <http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/slow-query-log.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hey guys, first off, congrats!

You'll get many snippets of advice here, and tons of web resources to chase down and read.

If you want to revert back to a live site quickly, may I recommend direct help? I'll step in first and offer my services. Or ask here and I'm sure other HNers will step up as well.

I've troubleshooted MySQL slow queries. I've done memcaching and static file hosting on CDNs.

If it takes a ton of effort, we can figure out compensation once the site is back up and running like a charm. If you don't have any money, list my name somewhere and help me build my personal reputation. :)

HTH. I've also sent an email to Dan.

<comment><USER3> Thanks so much for all of your help so far!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> At the risk of stating the obvious, you might want to check the query plans on your most common mySql queries, to make sure that all the appropriate indexes are in place and in use. I've not done this with mySql myself, but this looks like it _might_ be useful:

<http://www.learn-mysql-tutorial.com/OptimizeQueries.cfm>

</comment><comment><USER9> If you are writing frequent updates to your MyISAM tables, you should switch to a database backend that allows concurrent updates. MyISAM is only useful for read-mostly or single writer scenarios. See also [http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2006/06/17/using- myisam-...](http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2006/06/17/using-myisam-in- production/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I think we have switched over to InnoDB, you think that may be sufficient?

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Congrats!

You might want to check this (and possibly also the parent thread), quick:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2235994>

God speed. :-)

</comment><comment><USER10> How much traffic was Mashable throwing at you?

<comment><AUTHOR> We got about 20,000 hits just form last night! It was huge and very exciting for all of us. You can't imagine all the girl-like screaming going on in our dorms and our freaked our roommates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> What technologies are you using?

<comment><USER3> We are using PHP, Javascript and MySQL</comment></comment>


For-Profit College Chain Closes, Shutting Out Nearly 20k Students - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/06/business/education-corporation-of-america-closing.html <comment><USER2> There is a great documentary about for-profit colleges and how the US education system got to the position it's in:

[https://failstatemovie.com](https://failstatemovie.com)

These companies target people who dream of a better life and then convince them to take-out massive loans. Kind of like if payday lenders were being propped-up by the federal government.

<comment><USER3> It is a pity that many of the not-for-profit colleges are not any better - instead of profit the money goes to keeping an ever increasing number of parasites (sometimes called administrators) in cushy jobs.

<comment><USER4> For what it's worth, it's 23:30 here, and I'm on my laptop working on making sure that our internal ikiwiki is up-to-date with notes on the labs that I support. I'm going in for surgery on Thursday, and I've got Wednesday off (it's bowel surgery, so I'm doing all the annoying prep the day before). I also need to post on the appropriate Slack channels, so that my co-workers (who will be covering for me) know the docs are up-to-date. I also need to note anything things that might pop up, that don't justify wiki entries (like, tickets of note that are still open).

I'll probably work until Midnight or 00:30, and then pick right up at it tomorrow morning, because _I want the docs to be up-to-date_. I was working on all that today and yesterday, but there was also the regular support load from my labs. Plus, one of my co-workers was stuck in a project to reverse-engineer a binary file format, and I was helping her through using the Python `struct` module for the first time. It would be nice if we had an extra employee to help shoulder the load, but he's out right now (his wife was in labor).

My clients don't want to spend time managing technology. They just want to do the stuff they love, to do their research. But things like broken servers, laws, hackers, and the threat of negative PR, get in the way. I try to deal with all of that for them.

I'm a staffer at a university. I already knew that some portion of the student body thought of us as parasites[1], but I didn't know that the outside world held the same view.

[1]: [https://stanfordreview.org/stanfords-administrative-bloat- is...](https://stanfordreview.org/stanfords-administrative-bloat-is-out-of- control/)

<comment><USER5> I don't think anyone considers IT support staff to be "administrators". They're thinking of Deans, Provosts, Vice Provosts, ____ Coordinators. These positions frequently pay hundreds of thousands of dollars, and they've multiplied significantly over the last 30 years.

<comment><USER6> IT project bloat is definitely an issue though. It's just not the support staff that are causing the problem. Plus more admins are brought in either to manage the projects or make them more 'efficient' when the projects fail or are poorly implemented. You start to get coordinators whose job it is to hand key from one system to another so that professors or what not don't have to do it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hmmmmm, this is a difficult one to think on. I think there is an implicit contract made, where you put in enough time, effort, and money; and in return you get a corresponding credential, or other record of your work (i.e. a transcript). Each quarter/semester may be thought of as a contract, but that doesn't tell the whole story, because it takes a series of these contracts to get a credential. That's where the implicit part comes in.

As much as people don't like added government regulation, I think the best way to address this may be to have a body similar to the FDIC (and the NCUSIF, for credit unions).

Member educational institutions would provide the actual cost charged to each student, including costs paid in cash and costs paid by loans, and including actual room & board costs (if the institution charges for that). Each institution would also survey the student body to determine average amount spent on supplies, as well as the average cost for room & board for those who live outside.

Through the accrediting agencies, the insuring body would be able to work out about how long students would spent in-school for a particular degree.

The idea would be, should an institution 'fail' (for whatever definition you want), the insuring body would step in and provide some immediate compensation to students, to keep them in housing. Then, assess if they can transfer to another institution. If not, then they are refunded all costs for the time spent at the failed institution.

The body's actuaries can work out the general risk of institutional failures, and figure out how much money each participating institution would have to contribute to fund and maintain the insurance (which would likely be invested in things like Treasury bonds).

<comment><USER7> "As much as people don't like added government regulation"

Most people like regulation, but corporations and the wealthy don't, and they are the only ones with a voice in US government.

<comment><USER8> I like that I can trust the food in the supermarket. I like that my water is drinkable.

I don't like the straight, clear highway with no exits that drops from 70 mph to 55mph for the sole purpose of generating revenue for the police department. I don't like that books written by authors who died years ago, and are no longer in print, may be lost forever because no one one can legally make a new copy until a very long time in the future.

There are good regulations and bad ones. The generalized "regulation is good/bad" debate is a waste of time. And FYI, there are plenty of wealthy people abusing regulations to get richer, see the patent system for more info.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Although I generally err on the side of less regulation, I applaud the shutdown of these schools that prey upon unsuspecting students who think they are getting something of value but aren't. I have read so many negative stories about these schools. Students take on a ton of debt for useless certificates.

<comment><USER10> Unfortunately, those rules have just been relaxed to allow chools that prey upon unsuspecting students to carry on doing so.

<comment><USER11> The reason for these recent decisions is that the secretary of education runs for-profit schools and is simply feasting in the henhouse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> While I think most for-profit colleges are predatory, I also believe the ones that provide a technical skill such as nursing or dental hygienist can be beneficial to the students and society.

</comment><comment><USER13> A couple solutions:

1\. tuition money goes in escrow. It's refunded if the college goes under. It's paid out otherwise.

2\. buy insurance. You get a payout of your tuition if the college fails.

<comment><USER14> > 2\. buy insurance. You get a payout of your tuition if the college fails.

This is madness. Should you have to buy individual insurance in case your bank fails? Your city goes bankrupt? Your police department goes on strike? Regulating and maintaining institutions is the job of the government, not an expense to be passed on to private citizens.

<comment><USER13> People buy insurance to mitigate financial risk all the time. There's nothing offensive about it.

And a private business is fundamentally not a police department or a city government. We don't pay taxes to a private business, for example, and a private business doesn't make laws we have to follow.

<comment><USER15> buy insurance to make sure the food you bought at a restaurant tastes good

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is really horrible for those students who are left with unfinished courses! I know first hand how hard it is to find self-funding for education. I hope those enterprising folks find ways to prosper despite this :(

<comment><USER17> Funding ie loans, isn't the problem the students have with this. It is the transfer of current credits to another school that will allow them to continue education. In my previous years, I went to a for profit college catering to US armed forces members. I did not graduate with a degree, but a total of 52 credits. I still have a ton of student loan debt for this. Currently I am 1 semester away from completing my BS at a different school. More loans. Exactly 0 credits transferred from my first attempt to the current college.

<comment><USER18> > a for profit college catering to US armed forces members

The government expects army candidates to cover military education experience by themselves, did I read correctly? Or, is this aimed for active service members?

<comment><USER17> When I say catering to, I mean they college advertises heavily to the active duty armed forces and works with a deployment schedule a lot better than some other traditional colleges. There are certain use cases where using GI Bill or Post 9/11 bill makes since WHILE on active duty, but generally you would use those after discharge. I did not use either.

<comment><USER19> Is there any reason you decided to take loans instead of using the GI Bill? Genuinely curious.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


When will average people be able to afford commercial space flight? - <AUTHOR> http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/840/when-will-average-people-be-able-to-afford-commercial-space-flight <comment><USER2> Not to sound like a grump, but if you don't get at least one full orbit, it's a carnival ride. Decades from now, people will look back at this introductory phase of civilian spaceflight, and the prices, and laugh at what people called "going into space."</comment>


Instagram Engineer Challenge solved with Javascript - <AUTHOR> http://feval.info/instagram/canvas.html Image processing challenge solved using javascript and HTML5 canvas. <comment><USER2> This challenge is the first real life program I wrote with Haskell.

[https://github.com/Mgccl/mgccl- haskell/blob/master/random/un...](https://github.com/Mgccl/mgccl- haskell/blob/master/random/unshredder.hs) (so it seems I don't like to specify the type of my functions...)

Explanation is here: [http://chaoxuprime.com/2011/11/a-solution-to-Instagram- engin...](http://chaoxuprime.com/2011/11/a-solution-to-Instagram-engineering- challenge-the-unshredder-in-haskell)

<comment><USER3> Very nice.

Care for some unsolicited hlint-like suggestions?

Why not simply this:

        img <- readImage "file.png"
        -- instead of this?
        t <- readImage "file.png"
        let img = t

Why not this:

        map (y!!) x
        foldr ((:).(y!!)) [] x -- instead of this?

Note that a way of reading _fold g []_ is that replaces the list constructor (:) (aka _cons_ ) with g. So (:) as argument of fold is probably not idiomatic, since _foldr (:) []_ is the same as _id_.

<comment><USER2> Thanks. hlint-like suggestions are always welcome.

I have no idea what was in my mind when I wrote

      foldr ((:).(y!!)) [] x

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Mine from the weekend here: <http://ronilan.com/instagram-unshredder/>

<comment><USER5> I preferred yours. You at least gave some comments about the solution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Note that image 3 and 5 are slightly NSFW.

<comment><USER7> The source code is also NSFW: "_analizeColumn"

<comment><USER8> That's probably a mispelling of _analyseColumn.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I (kind of) solved it with CoffeeScript but thought it wasn't a good idea to publish… if you do it's not a challenge anymore, is it?

<https://github.com/ricardobeat/instagram-challenge>

</comment><comment><USER10> Very neat. Makes me kind of embarrassed that I never got around to actually solving this challenge. I've had the web page open on my laptop since it first showed up on HN.

</comment><comment><USER11> Me too, and no response. I really wanted that T-Shirt... <http://www.solesavoria.com/instagram/v2/>

</comment><comment><USER12> You might also be interested in DARPA's similar challenge: <http://www.shredderchallenge.com/>

<comment><USER13> Or for a similar, easier task, problem 3 "life" from this year's FARIO: <http://orac.amt.edu.au/fario/11/problems_en.pdf>

Here's case 8 to give you an idea: <http://i.imgur.com/1fFzO.png> :P

Test data here: <http://dl.dropbox.com/u/76985/life-all-linux.zip>

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Here's mine <https://github.com/rjenkins/instagram-html5-unshredder>

demo here <http://memoization.com/unshred.html>

</comment><comment><USER15> So is this challenge over? I submitted an entry using Canvas as well but allowed users to drop image in from their desktop (only works in Chrome/Firefox though). Haven't heard from anyone at Instagram.

<comment><USER14> funny, that's exactly how mine works. Haven't heard anything either

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I solved it in ocaml, I only had this development environment this week end but it was fun. I didn't posted it on my blog but if someone wants it, just ask ;)

</comment><comment><USER17> Another one <http://vidoss.github.com/>

</comment><comment><USER18> Great job! Excellent coding style btw.

</comment><comment><USER19> so can someone actually explain how this works?

<comment> the-cakeboss While I didn't look at how he did it, if I were to write something to do this, I would first locate each slice of the image. This could be accomplished using a rudimentary edge detection algorithm ( ie starting from the left, compare each column of pixels with the next, any large differences of course means an edge ). After that I might assign a weighted value to each edge of a slice, and then sort based upon those values.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Nice work!

</comment><comment><USER21> Really impressive work, great job.</comment>


The Architecture of Schemaless, Uber Engineering's Trip Datastore Using MySQL - <AUTHOR> https://eng.uber.com/schemaless-part-two/ <comment><USER2> Color me skeptical, that looks like a pretty strange design to me, a database on top of a database [1].

[1] [http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?GodTable](http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?GodTable)

<comment><USER3> Agreed, the design immediately reminded me of the following ancient DailyWTF article, one of the few ones that stuck in my head ever since I read it. They called it the "Inner-Platform Effect" \- might apply here.

[http://thedailywtf.com/articles/The_Inner- Platform_Effect](http://thedailywtf.com/articles/The_Inner-Platform_Effect)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've been following these Uber engineering articles, and I think this is a very neat architecture. Append only + boring technology = solid stuff.

I'm curious to know how many shards per storage cluster they use and how this mapping is done. Is it fixed or can it change? I imagine a startup trying to use a similar setup could start with a few storage clusters, but then add more clusters as needs grow...

They say they use 4096 shards (presumably generated based on some part of `row_key` which is the trip id), but I'm not sure this is a generally- applicable strategy. e.g. if sharding in a social netowrk website is performed based on `user_id` then won't be able to do joins across `user_id`s.

</comment><comment><USER5> Anyone want to weigh in on whether or not Postgres is a viable option for this?

<comment><USER6> Only semi-related, I've discerned a Postgres > MySQL/MariaDB sentiment on HN for the last year or so. Is that just my imagination? If not, why is that? MySQL in my experience is a very powerful RDBMS, maybe I just haven't run up against its limitations.

<comment><USER7> There's probably a couple reasons, but I'll summarize my experiences with them.

I haven't dug into MySQL for a few years (last I really worked with it was 5.5), but out of the box, it does a lot of things that are pretty unsafe or encourage bad practices, such as truncating data when it's longer than the column size, inserting the zero-value for a NOT NULL column rather than erroring when a NULL is inserted, confusing timestamp column behavior, no DDL- level transactionality, etc. Additionally, and not necessarily a bad thing, but it has made some odd implementation and feature decisions that can be (IMHO) counter-intuitive or have a large impact, particularly with regards to how foreign keys get implemented, but also with things like not having schemas (database > tables, rather than database > schemas > tables), not having a boolean type, its datatype specification (int(1) means an integer that displays only a single digit, rather than denoting storage sizes), or the fact that every ALTER TABLE causes a complete on-disk table rewrite.

PostgreSQL, on the other hand, makes every attempt to keep 100% data integrity at all times, has a lot of killer features (probably the best date/time math implementation I've ever used, typesafe operators, etc), is generally very extensible, and most importantly, is extremely predictable. True, it doesn't have the same scalability features out of the box that MySQL does, but that's getting better every release, and as mentioned elsewhere, there's plenty of adequate third-party tooling available (e.g. Slony).

I think MySQL is very much so the PHP of the RDBMS world - it does a lot of silly stupid stuff - mostly for historical reasons - but in the hands of someone who knows how to use it properly, it can be an extremely useful tool. Postgres just defaults to being an extremely useful tool out of the box without needing to know all the gotchas that come with it.

<comment><USER8> > I haven't dug into MySQL for a few years (last I really worked with it was > 5.5), but out of the box, it does a lot of things that are pretty unsafe or > encourage bad practices, such as truncating data when it's longer than the > column size, inserting the zero-value for a NOT NULL column rather than > erroring when a NULL is inserted, [..]

This is no longer the default in MySQL 5.7.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10894047](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10894047)

<comment><USER10> Apologies if you're just linking that for reference, but this is a 2nd article in the series.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Read that as a drunk saying shemales...

<comment><USER12> sober and i read the same</comment></comment>


Developers Can Now Issue Free "Promotional" Copies of iPhone Apps - <AUTHOR> http://www.macrumors.com/2008/12/02/developers-can-now-issue-free-promotional-copies-of-iphone-apps/

<comment><USER2> Wonder why the limit is set at just 50 and not letting developers give out as many as they want. Apple shouldn't give a shit. If it's a revenue problem with not getting cuts, then make those developers who use up a gargantuan amount of promo codes (i.e. 500+) apps free.

<comment><USER3> 50 is fine (it's for each release, not just total).

That's many hundreds over time, which should be plenty for reviews/bloggers/etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This would have been good for the person asking us to review his app yesterday.The limit of 50 seems pretty arbitrary though. Having a secret free iTunes link would seem to make more sense to me.

<comment><USER3> The free link info would spread like wildfile.

<comment><USER4> But isn't that the choice of the App developer. It just seems really arbitrary of Apple to pick a set number.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is this true? Could some of you with awesome but expensive apps send me a promotional code to try it out? I promise to return the favor when my apps are ready.

<comment><USER3> Sure, sent one for Grafly (<http://grafly.com>) as a test via email.

(Well, it's only $5 right now, but we think it's awesome. ;-)

<comment><USER6> Literally a graphing (only) calculator, or do you plan on expanding functionality?

I would be willing to help implement features that emulate my TI-89. Carrying something that useful in my pocket would be absolutely amazing.

(integration, differentiation, solving systems of equations, polynomials, etc etc etc)

<comment><USER7> I completely agree. I don't own an iPhone, but this would practically be a killer app for me.

A relatively simple concept, but I think the iPhones user interface could be excellent at it, and I think it could be extremely popular within a niche. There's a lot of scope for features and development, and you could certainly charge more than $5 considering the real cost of a graphics calculator.

It could also be better than current graphics calculators in some ways despite the lack of physical buttons - every graphics calculator I've ever used has seriously struggled with making a decent UI.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Neat. Now I don't have to give out iTMS gift certificates anymore.</comment>


How Henry Cavendish Used a Wire to Measure a Tiny Force of Gravity - <AUTHOR> http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-henry-cavendish-used-a-wire-to-measure-a-tiny-force-of-gravity/

<comment><USER2> Our physics research group performs modern precision experimental tests of the theories of gravity and particle physics. Our workhorse technology remains the torsion balance.

[http://www.npl.washington.edu/eotwash/experiments](http://www.npl.washington.edu/eotwash/experiments)

There's no other method that can suspend so much material on such a weak spring with such tiny susceptibility to outside disturbances. Our experiments benefit from other technical developments from the last 300 years of experimental science, but it's like comparing modern aircraft to the Wright Brothers' first flight. The core ideas remain the same.

</comment><comment><USER3> I did a similar experiment in second year: We had an enclosed case with two small balls on either end of a rod which was suspended by a thin wire; outside the case were two large balls on a rod that pivoted about a bolt in the bottom centre of the case.

On the wire in the case was a mirror on which we shined a laser, which reflected to the far wall where we had placed metresticks from one wall to the other.

Place the big balls against glass, leave, come back after a week when things had settled down.

Observe where the laser was pointed.

Very quickly pivot the big-ball-rod so that the balls went from front-left- and-back-right to front-right-and-back-left.

This causes the small balls, which were also front-left-and-back-right, to swing to front-right-and-back-left, moving the mirror.

Observe where the laser ends up (maximum deflection).

From this, determine G, the gravitational constant. (We knew the masses of the balls, etc.).

Hardest part of the experiment? Eliminating electrical effects: Grounding the balls, the glass, etc.

I took weeks to get reliable measurements....

<comment><USER4> Yeah I did that experiment too, on a Saturday. it blows super hard. you can see the effects of People running up and down the stairs. if you stand within a meter too long at the right position, you can distort the gravitational force. If you bump the case too hard readjusting the balls, you blow it. It took something like 1 hour for a full cycle? You don't realize all of your mistakes until 4 hours later.</comment></comment>


An Update on Fast Transit Routing with Transfer Patterns - <AUTHOR> http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2016/03/an-update-on-fast-transit-routing-with.html <comment><USER2> For anyone who's curious about an example implementation of transfer patterns: [https://github.com/eamsen/transit-planner](https://github.com/eamsen/transit- planner)

Transfer patterns also behave robustly given real-time updates on the network, which we have shown here: [http://stromboli.informatik.uni- freiburg.de/student-projects...](http://stromboli.informatik.uni- freiburg.de/student-projects/philip+jonas+eugen/results.html)

On top of being an excellent researcher, Hannah Bast is one of the best professors I've had pleasure of studying under and working with, so I'm happy to see her getting credit for this.

<comment><USER3> I'd love to play around with this. Do you have an estimate for the RAM and CPU requirements for the Toronto dataset? I skimmed the project site and didn't see this discussed.

<comment><USER2> The robustness experiments are highly parallelized and maintain a copy of the (modified) network per thread. I vaguely remember the NYC test would take around a day on 16? cores and use up to 64GB of RAM.

You can find query time evaluation in the performance recap on the results page I linked. For NYC it's around 2.2s for the Dijkstra (baseline) and 27ms for the TP-based search.

For single-threaded pre-computation and shortest-path queries, I would expect you to need around 8GB for NYC, less for Toronto and you can get the Honolulu feeds to run on <2GB (which was my local test set).

Sorry for not being more specific or inaccurate.

You can find some GTFS feeds here: [http://www.gtfs-data- exchange.com](http://www.gtfs-data-exchange.com)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> That's really cool. I've always been interested in pathfinding, but I'd naiveley assumed that the restricted world of mass transit would be simpler than free-form pathfinding.

Relatedly but somewhat off topic, I wonder why Google doesn't provide route maps too? While the transit route planning is neat, I often want a larger view of the route or system, and many municipalities just feed you a PDF from Hell.

<comment><USER5> Google has the rapid transit lines in many cities, see for example London. In some of the Bay Area, they hint bus lines as well, but it's a bit of a mess ([https://goo.gl/maps/rVPgGSBRD7G2](https://goo.gl/maps/rVPgGSBRD7G2)). These maps are auto-generated it seems, so there are some issues - check out LA Union station ([https://goo.gl/maps/GeW28w9MPpQ2](https://goo.gl/maps/GeW28w9MPpQ2)).

Where the underlying transit data does not contain the exact shapes of routes, they interpolate the data with something that looks like Splines. You can see that in London, especially for the Docklands Light Railway ([https://goo.gl/maps/uGmyBZZwDhy](https://goo.gl/maps/uGmyBZZwDhy)).

Apple maps makes much prettier transit maps, although I hear rumors they create them by hand.

<comment><USER6> Creating them by hand isn't necessarily a bad thing.

The post describes that there are on the order of 20,000 cities and towns covered; I expect that many of these are municipalities that are a part of a larger group of cities. WolframAlpha says that the 20,000th largest city coincidentally has a population of about 20,000 people, barely large enough to have its own public transit. And many states, companies, and countries will have common infrastructure for getting maps of all the public transit within the country. Taking a wild guess, there are probably significantly less than 500 separate transit systems to be mapped; a team of just 10 people could cover them in a year with a full person-week given to each location.

A mix of automation and manual entry is ideal for many tasks.

<comment> nevi-me Yes, it's not a bad thing. You get more accurate data (crucial for estimating fares for distance-based services).

We're a team of 2 people at Moving Gauteng [0], and we maintain transit data of 7 and growing transit services. We have 1100 routes mapped, with detailed schedules and other info.

The problem with drawing simple lines to approximate what route the service takes is that you become limited by the inaccuracy of your data.

There are many fare calculating rules, and a good deal are based on distance covered. Having a polyline that's > 95% accurate helps greatly in calculating the correct result for the user.

I agree on your point that a mix of automation and manual entry's good. In some instances it's better to track the bus by GPS and snap the GPS points to a route using GIS software like ArcGIS (or even Mapbox as they have such an API).

[0] [https://movinggauteng.co.za](https://movinggauteng.co.za)

<comment><USER5> We at Transit App have about 15000 routes, which were managed by one or two people or so until relatively recently. Manual mapping, an extra task, would not be feasible.

You also have to consider that just having good shapes for routes (which is often in the data anyway) doesn't mean you automagically get good transit maps. You have to decide when lines are travelling together, which Google apparently does by considering the stops that lines travel on. You can see lines stay together as long as they travel the same stops, and immediately branch at a stop when they branch, even though the physical branch happens later.

<comment> nevi-me I presume you get data from GTFS feeds. If so, it'd be more feasible to build a service that converts a 'poorly mapped' route into something better almost automatically. Manual involvement would be necessary to only correct defects from the process.

Although we manually map, we reuse most route segments, especially trains where 2 similar lines could travel 80-90% on the same tracks. We just chop and screw where necessary. The whole thing takes a few minutes to draw a new route based on existing ones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder if they consider how reliable the official schedule is. For example if a bus is supposed to come once an hour on the hour. It would be a bad plan to arrive just 1 minute before the top if the hour since the schedule is probably an approximation.

<comment><USER8> In my city the transit authority considers five minutes early to 1 minute late to be on-time. I don't know how normal this is, but it's actually pretty infuriating to have transit apps seem to treat it as the inverse.

A lot of issues like this tend to get glossed over in transit planning apps. Another issue is transfer timings, where the more transfers you do getting to your destination the more likely one of the transfers goes awry and throws off the whole schedule. For that reason I, as a person who exclusively uses transit in a city where it's not terribly good, almost always avoid a trip with 2 or more transfers if there's a 1 or less transfer option with more walking. Convincing transit apps to give you these kinds of options can be difficult (though google does have some knobs for controlling these things).

<comment><USER9> What city is that? That is a rider-hostile definition of "on-time". In my city if the bus arrives at a stop early it will just stand there until the scheduled time.

<comment><USER8> Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

There are stops (outside transit centres) where the bus will wait for the scheduled time, called "timing stops". There tend to be maybe 5 or 6 of them on a given cross-city route, but there's no public information about where they are. It's pretty easy to figure them out, though.

Note that at non-timing stops they don't even wait if they're five minutes ahead of schedule most of the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> In the "Frequency-Based Search for Public Transit" paper they compare their algo's preprocessing time with RAPTOR - but RAPTOR doesn't require preprocessing AFAIK.

</comment><comment><USER11> Am I the only one who hoped for a google POV on BGP Transit when reading the title?</comment>


Ex-Facebook security chief calls out Tim Cook and Apple's practices in China - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/24/ex-facebook-exec-alex-stamos-calls-out-apple-practices-in-china.html <comment><USER2> Popcorn worthy. I like that Cook called them and others out, and I also like this response. Both seem valid.</comment>


Ticket Tailor has gone free for selling tickets to online events - <AUTHOR> https://www.tickettailor.com/blog/free-for-online-events <comment><USER2> Great way to help out event organisers in this difficult time!

<comment><AUTHOR> Cheers Abs!</comment></comment>


An API Worm in the Making: Thousands of Secrets Found in Open S3 Buckets - <AUTHOR> https://trufflesecurity.com/blog/an-s3-bucket-worm-in-the-making-thousands-of-secrets-found-in-open-s3-buckets <comment><AUTHOR> Also, news article based on this at:

[https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/03/leaky_s3_buckets/](https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/03/leaky_s3_buckets/)

> "...automated search tools were able to stumble across some 4,000 open > Amazon S3 buckets ..."

> "In some cases, more than 10 secrets were found in a single file. These > included SQL Server passwords, Coinbase API keys, MongoDB credentials, and > logins for other AWS buckets that actually were configured to ask for a > password."

> "... the Truffle crew believes that the real danger is that the exposed > 'secrets' would have a cascading effect where an attacker could use the > exposed keys and credentials to get into other, more secure accounts and > services."</comment>