As Program Moves Poor to Suburbs, Tensions Follow - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/09/us/09housing.html?em <comment><USER2> This reminds of the anti-singularity thesis: increasing wealth from technology enables a decline in cultural values. ( [http://unqualified- reservations.blogspot.com/2007/05/antisin...](http://unqualified- reservations.blogspot.com/2007/05/antisingularity.html) ).

In 1910, inner city crime like we have today simply did not exist. Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, London - all these cities had homicide rates that today you can only find in Pleasantville suburbia. It was the age of stern Victorian values and law and order policing. People did not have the luxury of giving criminals the benefit of the doubt, nor of allowing any kind of public disorder, lest their neighborhoods turn unsafe.

The trouble is, law and order tactics are a blunt instrument, and they are likely to offend and hurt good people too. Today, we are generally wealthy enough that moving away from crime is a possibility for the middle and upper class. Running has become easier than coming together as a community to solve the crime program. This especially true when "coming together as a community" means navigating big city politics, and cracking down on crime can get you labeled as racist. Today, when a community suffers from high crime rates, decent folk move out. First it was moving from the inner cities to the suburbs. Now, in many cases, people are moving from the suburbs back to expensive neighborhoods in the city. High real estate prices have become a substitute for crime control.

I think at some point we're going to have to stop the running and figure out how to stop the ongoing warfare in our cities. Allowing the crime is not doing anyone any good. Inner city men have astounding deaths from homicide. And the middle class is spending ever increasing portions of their income on housing. Everyone loses.

<comment><USER3> " _In 1910, inner city crime like we have today simply did not exist._ "

Do you have any data to back up that claim? It's the exact opposite of any data I've ever seen ...

I've been told that violent death rates are ~ an order of magnitude lower now than a century ago. Take a look at [http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth...](http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violence.html), for example.

Hell, violent crime is down nearly 50% since the 70's (<http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/viort.htm>) when the gov. started keeping the numbers.

<comment><USER2> Murder rates by location:

Baltimore 1911: 5.8 Baltimore 2006: 43.3

Philadelphia 1911: 4.4 Philadelphia 2006: 27.7

New York 1911: 5.9 New York 1990: 30.7 New York 2006: 7.3

Newark 1911: 4.0 Newark 2006: 37.4

Chicago 1911: 9.0 Chicago 2006: 16.4

Washington DC 1911: 7.8 Washington DC 2006: 29.1

England & Wales 1910: 8.1 England & Wales 1997: 14.1

In many of our great cities, murders _increased by an order of magnitude_. Only in New York, where the finance boom priced out the poor are homicide rates down ( the crime all went to Newark and other ring cities, which is the phenomena I pointed out in my original post).

Pinker may be right about the middle ages to 1900. But he's dead wrong about the 20th century. The 20th century saw a millennium of progress get wiped away. Europe had two world wars that displayed levels of barbarism unseen since the Mongol invasion. Population explosions in Latin America, India, and Africa resulted in masses of people living in violent, malnourished, overpopulated slums. The great cities of the United States collapsed into burned out, dystopian ruins, which look like something out of the late Roman empire ( see The Ruins of Detroit for a small taste - <http://detroityes.com/home.htm> \- but it is the same story in many other cities). What the hell happened?

Source for 1911 stats: [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9F07E5D91E3FE...](http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9F07E5D91E3FE432A25754C0A9649D946395D6CF)

For 2006 stats: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_cities_by_crime_r...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_cities_by_crime_rate)

And stats from England: [http://www.parliament.uk/commons/lib/research/rp99/rp99-111....](http://www.parliament.uk/commons/lib/research/rp99/rp99-111.pdf)

<comment><USER3> My apologies - I was wrong.

Thanks for the info, learn something new every day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _"I know it sounds horrible, but they're scary. I'm sorry," said Ms. Reynolds, who like her two friends said she was conflicted about her newfound fear of black youths. "Sometimes I question myself, and I think, Would I feel this way if they were Mexican or white?"_

Nice tidy quote there. "Typical white person." Yep, when the government terrorizes your neighborhood, and animalistic thugs threaten your very life, the first impulse of polite people is to feel guilt, and question their own motivations. Let's see how this happens:

1\. You have a nice neighborhood, and suddenly there's a spike in the black population. If you've seen this happen, you know that going from 0 percent to 5 percent can result in an _astonishing_ increase in the frequency of ugly attitudes, bad behavior, noise, and general violence.

2\. The "racists" move out. They are attacked as "racists" and everyone agrees that they are "racists". However, they get out in time before housing prices collapse...

3\. As the population shifts, serious crime is high enough that, racist or not, everybody who can get out, including middle-class blacks, gets out.

4\. Property values drop to next to nothing. The neighborhood is basically a spread-out inner city.

5\. Eventually, given the super-cheap houses, adventurous young men and homosexuals (ie, people who don't have to worry about their wives being raped) move in and clean up the place. Gays are great because "ganstas" don't want any association with them. Gentrification occurs...

6\. The poor and violent people are still poor and violent, and so the government tries to "fix" them by introducing them into a new nice neighborhood.

The upshot is that there is constant churn in the real estate market. Continual soft ethnic cleansing from city to suburb to city moves literally 100s of billions of dollars of houses. It's a great marketing program.

There was some black writer who suggested that the _real_ problem with the black community was the move from southern farms to the cities. Rural blacks simply don't have the same problems, and never have...

<comment><USER5> I'm mildly curious about whether you have any actual data to back up some of this, because frankly it sounds like you are really overgeneralizing in an unreasonable and very emotional way. You could have more accurately noted that _poor people_ moving into an area drive property values down and bring crime, and are not created by the "spike in the black population."

Instead, your anecdotes focused on _black people_ as the culprit of all this evil. Why?

<comment><USER3> Because, statistically speaking, race is a good predictor of violent crime.

According to Bureau of Justice statistics, between 1976 and 2005, blacks, while 13 percent of the population, committed over 52 percent of the nation's homicides, or about 400% more than expected.

However, poor people (arbitrarily defining poor as a household income of under $25k) only account for ~double as many crimes as expected. (The government doesn't actually keep data on income of violent crime perpetrators - I used the household income of violent crime victims from <http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/abstract/cv05.htm> weighted by census data from <http://pubdb3.census.gov/macro/032007/hhinc/new06_000.htm> as a proxy)

Now, maybe income is a better predictor; I couldn't say conclusively with the data at hand. But you have to agree that race is pretty important.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Who is killing slightly controversial comments here? What's wrong with the following dead comment?

 _They have tried this extensively. Inner city block grants, subsidizing business, etc.

The idea that you can 'fix' another person's neighborhood is equally as racist as the policies that caused blacks to concentrate in those neighborhoods in the first place (they were chased out of the countryside in the KKK era and left with few alternatives to the city). What if the government started offering grants to 'fix' your neighborhood? How demeaning that is, and how absurd! As though subsidized bike shops and coffee shops are going to pressure crack dealers to go away.

As for the police patrols and condemned properties, do you think that there is a functioning local government in these areas? Look at DC and Detroit! The local city government is so corrupt that they can't even provide basic services, or basic levels of non corrupt policing, much less an effective attempt at crime reduction. On my way to work in DC a few years ago I would see the same police officer asleep under the same overpass every single day. This was right next to the highway, so maybe 2000 people would see him every morning, and yet he would sleep away, sometimes with his face pressed on the drivers side window. Do you think a bagel shop can fix that!?_

</comment><comment><USER7> I've been thinking about the whether opposite kind of program would work. These programs try to take the "good" poor people out of bad neighborhoods, making those neighborhoods even worse off. Why not do the opposite: subsidize and protect large "good" businesses and educational institutions that operate in poor neighborhoods. Provide the businesses with security in the form of dedicated, deputized, police-trained security guards and increased uniformed police patrols. Hire locals to work on demolition of condemned properties in their neighborhoods.

I don't have any concrete ideas for how it would work but it seems like there's some way to do it.

<comment><USER8> Like Columbia in Morningside Heights? I don't think it did much there. When the neighborhood was bad, all you had was Fort Columbia. Now the neighborhood is better, but so is the rest of NYC.

I think most of these programs miss the real problem: the people. The poor make bad choices and have bad life skills (e.g., don't always show up to work). Sticking them in a middle class neighborhood doesn't change this.

<comment><USER7> "Now the neighborhood is better, but so is the rest of NYC."

That sounds like a positive outcome to me.

"The poor make bad choices and have bad life skills (e.g., don't always show up to work)."

That is not true generally. If you are a hard-working person born and raised in a horrible place, it is hard to get out. And, there are people that are willing to work hard to turn their life around but could benefit greatly from some assistance. I personally know several people that benefited from government welfare/food stamps/WIC and who were able to raise their standards livings substantially because of it. It is true that there are people that won't work hard or who will abuse any help they get, but in my experience most people are pretty good.

Most importantly, children don't deserve to suffer because of their parents' stupidity. It isn't hard to see how children can benefit from moving from an inner-city school to a middle class one, if you've ever visited an inner-city school.

<comment><USER8> The outcome for morningside heights is positive, but I see no reason to believe it is related to Columbia. Columbia didn't improve morningside, Rudy+good economy improved all of NYC.

As for the work skills of the poor, there are 7.7 million working poor, compared to 24.2 million poor adults. "Working poor" == "in the labor force (working or seeking work) 27 weeks/year or more".

So less than 1/3 of poor adults spent at even half the year working or trying to work.

As for children, it may or may not help. It's not obvious to me that a good school can overcome the effects of a bad parent.

Sources for my figures:

<http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2005.pdf>

[http://www.childrensdefense.org/site/DocServer/2006-SUM.pdf?...](http://www.childrensdefense.org/site/DocServer/2006-SUM.pdf?docID=7722)

(Yes, I subtracted 2006 numbers from 2005 numbers, but I expect they didn't change much between years.)

<comment><USER9> I actually live in Morningside Heights, and not the part that had always been good. IMHO, a lot of the progress in New York can be directly attributed to Rudy and his team. They really cleaned up this place. Nevertheless, Columbia should get a fare share of credit by pouring tons of money into the area.

When I moved here in 2000 the area was already on the up and up but really hit its stride when Columbia went on a building spree. They built three buildings within one block of my apartment which really raised the bar for this immediate area.

But wait, there's more! Soon Columbia will begin construction on an entire new campus on the far west edge of Harlem called Manhattanville. This will really push the entire area much higher and bring a lot of opportunity to those that live here now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If anyone wants a really good (non-fiction) book on stuff like this, check out The World We Created at Hamilton High. It's about a wealthy suburban school that gets integrated in the 60s. Scribd isn't displaying the document properly, but here is link to chapter one:

<http://www.alexkrupp.com/Hamilton1.pdf>

<comment><USER2> I heartily second the recommendation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> To me, this article is muddle-headed. It begins with a discussion on the movement of poor from the inner cities into the suburbs and then pivots to begin framing the discussion as one of race instead of poverty. Add in a few outspoken activists, and I'm not sure you have much of anything useful here.

It's a simple question, really. Are the chronic problems that people face _mostly_ a part of their own beliefs and lifestyles or is _mostly_ it something to do with luck, location, harassment, or policy? I'd entertain arguments on both sides of the issue, but this article implies the answer has something to do with race and policy. That seems to presume the to know the answer to the discussion before it even begins. (It's also lazy reporting and close to editorializing, but that's a comment for another day)

If you want to have a discussion about segregation and integration of various races into various neighborhoods, that'd be a cool story too. But that's not what this was either, unfortunately.

As for startup potential, the article obliquely mentions that foreclosure rates are associated with violent crime. I've also heard there's a close correlation with density of liquor stores and crime. I wonder if all of this crime data could be assimilated into a useful service? Perhaps something than runs on your phone? (hint, hint)

<comment><USER10> "I wonder if all of this crime data could be assimilated into a useful service?"

Kexter does a pretty good job at mashing up GIS data with Craigslist housing.</comment></comment>


HN User offering hacker-friendly office space in downtown Wash DC - <AUTHOR> http://desks.1410Q.com Hey HN, we're the creators of http://www.AppMakr.com and we just moved into an awesome new office at 14th & Q streets in NW Washington, DC.  We're renting out 12 desks (8 left) for $250/mo. each.  Includes wifi and conference room plus a great tech-entrepreneur vibe, tech classes and speaker events.  You must be a technology business to rent space.  Check out what we're doing w/ the space at http://vision.1410Q.com.  Lots of pics at www.1410Q.com<p>- DROdio Daniel R. Odio A loyal HN user :) <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN, we're the creators of <http://www.AppMakr.com> and we just moved into an awesome new office at 14th & Q streets in NW Washington, DC. We're renting out 12 desks (8 left) for $250/mo. each. Includes wifi and conference room plus a great tech-entrepreneur vibe, tech classes and speaker events. You must be a technology business to rent space. Check out what we're doing w/ the space at <http://vision.1410Q.com>. Lots of pics at www.1410Q.com

\- DROdio Daniel R. Odio A loyal HN user :)</comment>


If Facebook or Google create their own currency, they can control our lives - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jun/24/facebook-google-currency-libra-financial-transactions <comment><USER2> In spite of the numerous problems which have manifested themselves with cryptocurrency, I find have always found the idea of a monetary system not owned by the state to be interesting. A monetary system owned by corporations is downright horrifying.

<comment><USER3> People complain about account suspensions now. Imagine how upset they would be if their money were tied into this account.

Or, you're attempting to purchase from an unapproved vendor. This vendor was suspended for donating to a candidate who voted for breaking up Facebook.

You used unapproved language, that incurs an automatic deduction of $X from your account.

<comment><USER4> Still, if Facebook makes the currency interesting and convenient enough (discounts at stores when using ƒ!) a lot of people will lap it up.

The only hope is it will not become popular enough to become too big to fail.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This current trend of of "disrupting" the market by flouting or circumventing regulations may have worked for Uber, AirBnB and so on, but Libra might just be a step _too_ bold.

Unless Libra aims to uphold the same regulations that banks must, then at some point, I predict that there is a huge amount of trouble coming for them. Financial services can be both used and _abused_ , and regulators have forced banks to address the abuse (eg: AML/KYC practices) to protect participants. Circumventing these regulations is equivalent to rolling back these protections.

The same could be said about any other industry that might profit from using Libra, be it investment advisors to casinos to who knows what else.

<comment><USER6> > _there is a huge amount of trouble coming for them_

Apparently neither the House Financial Services committee nor Senate Banking Committee were given a heads up on this launch. From a government relations perspective, this is a whiff of fresh breeze for those of us advocating for a break-up.

<comment><USER5> Thinking about your comment, I've started to become skeptical of my own position:

Sure, financial regulators are probably extremely upset about this, and are probably going to fight it. However, the data Facebook would be collecting here would _extremely_ valuable to _other_ regulators; data they cannot currently access precisely because it is protected by financial regulation.

If Facebook were to offer access to this data (on National Security grounds, or 'think of the children' grounds, etc.), agencies could have immediate access to immense amounts of data from potentially every user, whereas currently, they'd probably need a court order (or National Security Letter, etc.) to access the data of just one.

Would any of the committees you listed prevail against these interests?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I sometimes wonder if Zuck, at some point realized he didn't have the charisma to become president, but then realized he didn't need it. Facebook could start using its ability to mint currency as a way to bring in the government policies not otherwise viable in today's world. Maybe they start a basic income. It could boost the currency's use... but also be a path to be a world government without checks and balances. As our government falters, there's an opportunity for someone else to pick up the responsiblity. Which is frightening. The unbanked just happen to have less functional governments than our own, so it's a good test bed.

<comment><USER8> Sounds like what happens in Mr Robot, where Zuck = Philip Price.

</comment></comment><comment> michael-ax Is this obvious only to Europeans?

<comment><USER9> European countries such as Sweden and the Netherlands are at the forefront of submitting themselves to a cashless economy, giving control of the payments infrastructure to Visa and MasterCard. So it's certainly not obvious to all Europeans.

<comment> the-dude In NL creditcards are not very popular, but paying 'by PIN' is.

The network is owned by the Dutch banks, which also provide the online payment platform iDeal.

The fees are low and fixed. Offline, between 15cts and a couple of cents ( I don't know how low for the big retailers, 5cts ? )

The online fees are a bit higher, starting at 29cts.

There are no variable fees. There is no 'refund' or 'insurance'. Lots of shops do not accept creditcards ( I know of no big retailer which does ).

<comment><USER10> The same is true for Germany. We have a vast number of different systems for cashless payment, with every bank trying to push its own system. It's not like Visa and Master Card are the two major players.

<comment> the-dude Except we don't have a vast number of systems. We have 1.

<comment><USER10> Talking about NL or DE?

<comment><USER11> NL of course. It's the same commenter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> How crazy is it that we allow companies to take a percentage cut of EVERY transaction we make? How often do you NOT use a credit card or some other payment system with a middleman? It's become so commonplace that the idea of replacing cash entirely seems normal to people. And yet this normal state of things involves a middleman taking a cut of EVERY transaction!

Jurisdictions literally have to enact laws today to prevent businesses from going completely cashless, which essentially means jurisdictions have to enact laws to prevent middlemen from taking a cut of EVERY transaction made.

The cash system does not require middlemen in order to transact. And people have historically not been denied the ability to handle cash, as they are denied credit cards or bank accounts today (yes, a sizable number of people are denied even bank accounts and/or are forced into bank accounts with high monthly fees in order to just get a debit card, which is arguably the most basic requirement for purchasing most things today). With cash, people who had some financial difficulty do not get extorted even more (in the form of having to pay for "subprime" services) on top of an already existing percentage cut of every transaction that the middlemen already take.

Unless a new platform can reliably offer a no-fee or at least an absolutely ridiculously low fee transaction platform that absolutely does not deny anyone access nor extort anyone for the ability to gain access, AND we can be reasonably assured that no central organization is using it as a tool to load people onto its platform for later extortion....essentially unless we can get almost exactly the same open access as cash...unless we can get that, I don't support it, and probably neither should you.

(Disclaimer: I admittedly haven't looked into the details of Libra yet)

<comment><USER13> cash is legal tender right now, so a business cannot refuse cash as payment.

<comment><USER14> > cash is legal tender right now,

True.

> a business cannot refuse cash as payment.

Or, rather, it cannot collect additional legal penalties for nonpayment of debt for the time period after a tender of payment in legal tender is made. A business may refuse payment offered in exchange for goods and services that have not yet been provided.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Imagine this situation: you sell online courses. FB says hey, users can pay directly via Libra thus streamlining checkout to a few clicks. Now Facebook takes a cut of every transaction. If I were PayPal I'd be very scared.

<comment><USER16> Paypal is also part of the libra foundation and they operate nodes - so they might also take a cut. FB has done something clever by coopting most of the bigincumbents - Paypal, VISA, Mastercard, PayU and even stripe!

edit: corrected typo

<comment><USER17> Exactly. I cannot recall the CNBC video right now. But one of the top guys of Libra was there and he said although the fee structure hasn't been worked out yet. Taking a cut on the partners side would be where fees are taken.

So imagine the current status quo is that either paypal or visa/mastercard are the principle payment methods and they charge the current rates.

But with libra, you still pay with paypal or visa/mastercard but using libra coin instead of fiat coin and % of the fee also goes to facebook.

What I can't wait for. Is the raft of people who will be denied creating wallets. How many people have had their accounts frozen by Paypal, kicked off using Visa/Mastercard and even Stripe! Quite a few I can tell you.

Think the situation will be different from Libra? Doubtful...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > Facebook will know the people and companies with whom its users have > financially interacted, and that is likely to only be the start

As if it wasn't already the case.

People simply don't care, they wouldn't be on any of these platforms otherwise, and governments don't understand, or chose not to understand for X reasons. They'd sell their soul for more (perceived) convenience or a better way to fill their narcissistic ego trips. It's like giving chocolate to 3 years old kids, they only stops when they gets sick, and so far "users" aren't sick.

<comment><USER2> I don't think it's fair to blame users. These corporations hire some of the smartest people in the world to design their products in such a way that they maximally retain and engage users. You can't expect a normal individual to stand against billions of dollars worth of investment in a system designed to make them act against their own self-interest.

<comment><USER18> At some point you have to own up your actions. I'm not a super human, I managed to quit facebook just fine, people are not tools, they know what they're doing.

You don't have to stand against it, simply don't use it. Just like most people don't do heroin or control their sexual urges.

<comment><USER2> That's fine for any given individual, but in aggregate you should not be surprised that systems which are designed to take advantage of human psychology to achieve a result perform exactly as intended.

You bring up heroin, but heroin is a heavily regulated controlled substance precisely because it's an example of something which people in general cannot be reliably trusted to control themselves with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I wonder would it make any better if Apple is the one which creates their own currency. As we know, the track record of Apple respecting privacy of its users is significantly better than Facebook/Google.

<comment><USER20> It's not exclusively about privacy. At the end of the day Apple is still a corporation beholden to its shareholders.

<comment><USER19> So if we cannot trust the company, we are left with two options.

1\. Nobody (decentralized), like Bitcoin.

2\. USD cryptocurrency, created by the US government.

<comment><USER21> USD (and all other currencies) are already a tokenised currencies

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> You do a one time exchange of your Government issued currency for Libra. Then you start exchanging Libra for goods and services in a p2p way == which means Governments can't tax these goods and services == which means Governments will no longer have the power == which means they will not allow it.

(I have not read the Libra papers fully. Im doing a far speculation here.)

<comment><USER23> You're forgetting that governments regulate the companies behind Libra, and can and will regulate it.

<comment><USER24> > You're forgetting that governments regulate the companies behind Libra, and > can and will regulate it.

Well... let's say you're a politician wanting to regulate Facebook, and let's say you have an affair with whom you communicate on Facebook or in Instagram DMs. If I were Facebook, I'd simply let an investigation team check if any dirt can be mined out of the troves of data - anything, even the dataset of GPS or other location pinpoints, can be enough to get a first hint. And now I discretely contact you and advise that there may be information around and that it would be a pity if that information were to get public.

This is the ultimate problem with the size and capabilities that companies such as Facebook have.

<comment><USER25> >> I'd simply let an investigation team check if any dirt can be mined out of the troves of data

That's Dark and Illegal

<comment><USER26> Yeah, Facebook would never do anything dark and illegal

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The idea of a corporate currency is pretty unpalatable.

The idea of a pegged cryptocurrency is interesting though, potentially. We really need a lot more/bigger/better institutions that aren't companies or governments.

<comment><USER28> > We really need a lot more/bigger/better institutions that aren't companies > or governments.

So...churches? What are you proposing?

<comment><USER29> Hopefully without the imaginary sky friends and child rape.

<comment><USER30> You've posted a lot of unsubstantive and even inflammatory (like this one) comments to HN. We ban accounts that do that. Would you mind reviewing [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and using this site as intended? We'd be grateful.

<comment><USER29> I wouldn't say a lot but I suppose I could try to be more civil. Thanks for your moderation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> States conquered each other and fight for currency supremacy, withness US dollars and oil. Crypto would end a lot of wars. It would however introduce a lot of instability for some time as people adjusted to the freedom.

<comment><USER32> This is incredibly naive. Using cryptocurrency changes none of the incentives nor the power structure. The very network and electricity supplies that cryptocurrency relies on are ultimately controlled by governments. If cryptocurrency becomes an actual important source of power, then governments will fight to control it. There is no freedom in money that relies on the Internet to exist and freely operate.</comment></comment>


Meet Ashton Kutcher, the next tech entrepreneur? - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/07/18/ooma-launches-free-consumer-phone-service/

<comment><USER2> Andrew Frame came to speak at one of my classes at Stanford. He's intense and it seemed like he knew exactly what he was doing and where he wanted Ooma to go in a very Steve Jobs kind of way.

I think this has the potential to be quite disruptive to the wireline market.

<comment><USER3> I talked to Andrew about Ashton Kutcher's involvement a few weeks ago. He pretty much said Ashton doesn't get credit for how smart he is because of the character he played in that 70's show. Ashton RAN punk'd and built up a ton of PR and buzz for that show; I expect he'll help do the same for ooma.

<comment><USER4> Ashton was an engineering student as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> daniel-cussen I read the ooma team's management page. This dude is at the very bottom. My guess is that he has a suitable understanding of the phone's workings. Of course, that barely matters; he is there to sell phones.

In this sense it's a pretty smart move to make a celebrity a plankowner. I'd even call it _innovative_. They'll probably do well.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Yes, I know he's just Creative Director, but Michael says he's "actively engaged in the business," which is pretty impressive in my opinion.

The company seems very promising so far, I love companies that push technology to the next level, or even just make better use of existing ones.

</comment><comment><USER5> Selling a $400 piece of harware will be extremely hard. SunRocket had a bit better model and they failed. These guys will need every bit of viral marketing that Ashton can produce.

[http://www.postchronicle.com/news/original/article_21292575....](http://www.postchronicle.com/news/original/article_21292575.shtml)

</comment><comment><USER6> [http://valleywag.com/tech/separated-at-birth/oomas- arrested-...](http://valleywag.com/tech/separated-at-birth/oomas-arrested- product-development-280563.php)

</comment><comment><USER7> Ashton sounds like a dolt when he speaks (from the podcast). Andrew should give him a script the next time he speaks for the company.</comment>


Dustin Moskovitz pours funds into high-risk research - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-08795-0 <comment><USER2> If a philanthropist wants to aim a lot of money at biomedical research, there's many good ways to do it, but I think the most high-impact, lowest-risk would be to fund clinical trials for non-patentable interventions. There are plenty of drugs and therapies that are well-known to work, but which can't be used (or can only be used through much-more-expensive variants) in clinical settings, due to the lack of anyone willing to fund the studies to formally prove their effectiveness to the FDA.

A notable example is recent efforts to fund a study on the use of corticosteroids and vitamin C to stabilize patients with sepsis [1]- this would be a _huge_ impact on mortality for patients with all sorts of diseases, since sepsis is a common consequence of lowered immune system functioning or post-surgical infections, but since neither corticosteroids or vitamin C are patentable, there's no commercial incentive to fund trials. Another example is the use of MDMA as a psychiatric drug- any highschool dropout can tell you that it _works_ as a powerful mood-elevating chemical with relatively rare and benign side effects (at least by the standards of psychopharmaceuticals,) but clinical trials were only recently begun after decades of agitating from psychiatrists.

The most potent benefits from philanthropic funding tend to be in areas that can't be reached by conventional for-profit commercial work. There's still much more low-hanging fruit out there.

<comment><USER3> Why fight one-by-one. The highest impact use of money would be lobbying to disolve the FDA or, failing that, eliminating the requirement to show efficacy (leaving only the requirement to show safety, which is relatively cheap).

Of course, I anticipate a number of replies telling me how wrong I am and that regulations are needed for safety; none of them will mention the trade offs involved.

<comment><USER4> For lack of a rebuttal to the FDA dissolution comment, which I'm sure others are more qualified to respond to, I wanted to address the efficacy/safety remark:

A growing number of people have voiced objections to the burdens of the FDA's efficacy testing requirements, but it's worth at least thinking about why they're in place. The main issue is that "safety" in the context of pharmaceuticals doesn't mean "perfectly safe" or even "non-lethal" — it really means, "safe enough, given the benefits". Side effects of a chemotherapy drug that can completely eliminate a tumor, for instance, could be acceptably substantial, because it cures an otherwise terminal illness. Side effects of a drug mildly lowering cholesterol levels, by contrast, must be strictly limited, because many Americans may take such a drug for much of their adult lives, sometimes in combination if the effects of a single drug are too weak.

It's hard to know if the benefits outweigh the risks if you don't know what the benefits are. Obviously, this efficacy testing carries a huge time and monetary burden, but without it, contextualizing acceptable risk would be difficult, if not impossible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Moskovitz, whose estimated net worth is more than $14 billion, and Tuna have said that they plan to give away most of their fortune during their lifetimes."

To get an idea of the money involved here, his life's fortune is about what is currently spent every 6 months on medical research that no one will ever double check (since it is impossible to do):

"Overall, the team found that poor materials made the largest contribution to reproducibility problems, at 36%, followed by study design at 28% and data analysis at 26%. The team estimates the overall rate of irreproducibility at 53%, but cautions that the true rate could be anywhere between 18% and 89%. That puts the potential economic cost of irreproducibility anywhere from $10 billion to $50 billion per year."

[http://www.nature.com/news/irreproducible-biology- research-c...](http://www.nature.com/news/irreproducible-biology-research- costs-put-at-28-billion-per-year-1.17711)

And irreproducible _in principle_ studies are just the tip of the iceberg. Beyond that there are many problems that can render research useless or misleading (p-hacking, bias due to unblinding, misinterpreting results, incorrect analysis, etc). Just pumping more money into this system rather than trying to change the incentives and practices seems wrong.

</comment><comment><USER6> For anyone else who was confused by the headline: it's "high-risk" research in the sense of "speculative" or likely to have null results, not in the sense of e.g. the lethal virus research that was on here a few days ago.

<comment><USER7> I read it as 'likely to produce nothing useful'; maybe I'm just not imaginative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm surprised the "identified 11 priority areas in science" did not include antibiotic research, given that we are rapidly running out of antibiotics as resistance develops, all while virtually nobody is researching or developing new antibiotics.

<comment><USER9> I know that antibiotic resistance is a problem but can you elaborate on how were rapidly running out right now? I got strep last week and they prescribed me amoxicillin (or penicillin if i was allergic) which are both quite old and established, and still prescribed today.

<comment><USER8> In short, it's evolution. Bacteria develop resistance when exposed to antibiotics. They lose their effectiveness.

This will give you a decent overview of antibiotic resistance:

[http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/antibiotic- resista...](http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/antibiotic- resistance/en/)

If you like to watch documentaries, Frontline has a few on the topic, though each show is several years old now which is an eon to pathogens

[https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/hunting-the- nightmar...](https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/hunting-the-nightmare- bacteria/)

(on youtube [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gE4VzFz9PPo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gE4VzFz9PPo) )

[https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/trouble-with- antibio...](https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/trouble-with-antibiotics/)

<comment><USER9> No i know how antibiotic resistance works, i just haven't seen it have any effect on me or anyone I know, which makes the statement "we're rapidly running out" seem distant

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Congratulations and thank you.

If you want to see concrete progress thanks to Dustin and Open Phil, read about Target Malaria, one of the research organizations.

I am seeing firsthand the need in Southeast Asia: an emerging drug-resistant "super-malaria" is spreading along the Mekong and is impossible to treat with standard medicine.

Big U.S. pharma has no answer for this, and the problem is accelerating. I believe Open Phil and similar independent science funding orgs can give us all a major avenue of research to help save many lives.

[http://time.com/4960649/super-malaria-southeast- asia/](http://time.com/4960649/super-malaria-southeast-asia/)

[https://targetmalaria.org/](https://targetmalaria.org/)

</comment><comment><USER11> Exciting to see more funds going to research, but cringe knowing the efficiency in how it is spent.

Due to procurement not having a research background, they often due poorly negotiating prices for basic scientific chemicals and supplies. The result makes it very difficult for researchers to buy from the open market such as Amazon, etc.

Here are 12 tweezers for nearly $700 list price: [https://us.vwr.com/store/catalog/product.jsp?catalog_number=...](https://us.vwr.com/store/catalog/product.jsp?catalog_number=89259-984)

Procurement feels good getting 45% off of list price across all products, but they do not compare the actual price.

<comment><USER12> I don't have a research background, and I know not to feel good paying $60 for a pair of tweezers. What prevents procurement from buying from Amazon?

[https://www.amazon.com/Tweezees-Precision-Stainless-Steel- Tw...](https://www.amazon.com/Tweezees-Precision-Stainless-Steel- Tweezers/dp/B00LYLJJO2)

<comment><USER13> I'm curious about this too. I can't imagine a procurement office not permitting Amazon! It's a crazy world.

<comment><USER11> The problem is creating many hurdles to purchase.

For example, a contract gives the scientific distributor the right to match a price [1]. Scientists need to make this request through their procurement office or to a sales rep. which takes a couple of days and additional paperwork to complete. These extra steps create enough friction that researchers will often by through contracted providers despite them being more expensive.

[1] examples: [https://procurement.fsu.edu/vendors/VWR](https://procurement.fsu.edu/vendors/VWR) [https://www.dfa.cornell.edu/procurement/news/improved- prefer...](https://www.dfa.cornell.edu/procurement/news/improved-preferred- supplier-agreements-laboratory-supplies-and-equipment)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Animal Welfare reminds me of David Duffield and Maddie's Fund. [http://www.maddiesfund.org/dave- duffield.htm](http://www.maddiesfund.org/dave-duffield.htm)

If you know anyone working in this field, it never hurts to contact this org.</comment>


Textreme – A text editor with situational effects (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://le-von.itch.io/textreme <comment><USER2> In the same vein as "rhythm mode", I created a VSCode plugin that changes your system volume based upon how fast you are typing: [https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=rubennic...](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=rubennic.codeflow).

</comment><comment><USER3> Just tried it with my toddler and she loved it :)

(I then opened her a tty with vim on an old laptop and she enjoyed it too.. until she managed to exit vim Oo)

<comment><USER4> > (I then opened her a tty with vim on an old laptop and she enjoyed it too.. > until she managed to exit vim Oo)

More than many adults can manage! :wq

<comment><USER5> I prefer :x to quit, but yeah, pretty cool.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Atom has a nice package similar to this

[https://atom.io/packages/activate-power- mode](https://atom.io/packages/activate-power-mode)

<comment><USER7> And a port for VS Code: [https://github.com/hoovercj/vscode-power- mode](https://github.com/hoovercj/vscode-power-mode)

<comment><USER8> The vscode plugin is pretty janky in comparison.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is nice but is there any practical use of these? I feel that the animations at some point become a bit overwhelming for the senses and you'd want to turn them off.

<comment><USER10> I may have an idea, for the sound at least.

I think this is essentially a way to "simulate" the loud keys of a mechanical keyboard on a silent/quieter keyboard. Most mechanical keyboard users would probably say the "click clack" sounds from their key switches are just a side effect and the real reason they use them is the "feel", but I'd argue that it's the entire sensory experience: the feel and sound, that they (and I) enjoy.

It'd be nice to have some low-latency "click clack" sounds on my MBP using Neovim...

<comment><USER11> The sound definitely helps but I think the reason most people like the mechanical switches is that you get a good feeling for when the key has actuated.

Lot of the time I have headphones and music on to drown out sounds so i'm not hearing the clicks anyways. The sound is really secondary but may make a difference the same way phone vibration on keyboard input makes a difference.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is amazing!

Also I don't think I've ever been a Godot GDScript application before.

</comment><comment><USER13> after downloading the source code, what do I do? I do not recognize the language it is written in, nor there are compilation instructions...

<comment><USER14> Open the project using Godot Engine ([https://godotengine.org/](https://godotengine.org/))

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It would be nice if it had CTRL+S shortcut

<comment><USER16> Saving work is for the weak.

<comment><USER17> Ah, you symlink ~ to swap as well? I see you too a user who likes to live dangerously :P

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> whoah nifty

</comment><comment><USER19> nice</comment>


FutureMe.org: e-mail your future self - <AUTHOR> http://futureme.org/ <comment><AUTHOR> I thought it would be a nice tool for those who make new-years and holiday resolutions ;)

</comment><comment><USER2> Some of the public entries are hilarious</comment>


How does Amazon's Whispersync for Voice work? - <AUTHOR> http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000827761 Amazon (+Audible) has made it possible to sync audiobooks with ebooks. 24k of "whispersync-capable" books are now available.
Does anybody know if they do this alignment by hand (during the recording, for example)?
Did many people want to use this feature? <comment><AUTHOR> Oops, the question wasn't actually formed as a question, so I ask in the comment.

Amazon (+Audible) has made it possible to sync audiobooks with ebooks. 24k of "whispersync-capable" books are now available.

Does anybody know if they do this alignment by hand (during the recording, for example)?

Did many people want to use this feature?</comment>


Traffic-weary homeowners and Waze are at war, again. Guess who's winning? - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/traffic-weary-homeowners-and-waze-are-at-war-again-guess-whos-winning/2016/06/05/c466df46-299d-11e6-b989-4e5479715b54_story.html <comment><USER2> One could argue that Waze is virtually "adding lanes to the road" by finding all these alternate routes. Yet you'll see a lot of articles that claim that adding lanes just encourages more people to drive, which is nice for those people but does not improve congestion issues overall. Will this relationship also hold true with Waze over the long term?

If it does, Waze isn't really adding any long-term benefit to a city's traffic problem. It's playing a (arguably) zero-sum game with convenience, adding it to some people's lives and removing it from others. Waze users gain the convenience of driving in scenarios where they normally wouldn't, but the extra drivers are an inconvenience to residents of affected streets and city planners.

Measuring this effect sounds difficult because of extra distribution of the traffic, although I suppose you could come up with a "Waze factor" to estimate total traffic based solely on numbers from major roads. I'm going to guess that this work will fall on city planners and traffic engineers, not Waze.

</comment><comment><USER3> Nobody, is the answer. Waze is just looking for routes without paying attention to safety or community wishes. Drivers are blindly following directions without consideration. Calm neighbourhoods are resorting to data vandalism. Councils are resorting to reducing the serviceability of roads.

Nobody is looking like a winner in this scenario.

Perhaps if Waze wasn't trying to route peak hour traffic through single lane residential streets it would be a different story.

<comment><USER2> There's one winner - Waze/Google. They're collecting all sorts of juicy data from this app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Tough noogies, public roads are public roads.</comment>


How FlightCaster (YC S09) built multi-platform scalable apps on Heroku (YC W08) - <AUTHOR> http://infoq.com/articles/flightcaster-heroku-rails

<comment><USER2> I find the non-free options no Heroku to be vastly more expensive than hosting options elsewhere such as Slicehost, Dreamhost and Amazon ECS.

They provide a valuable service in terms of taking administration issues out of the picture and letting you just focus on developing your app.

But my feeling is this is not targeted at hackers who are surviving on rice and beans but rather those who are more likely to either have well-paying day jobs that can subsidize their startup hobby on the side or have enough VC capital to not bother with the mundane details of hosting administration and its associated time and financial burdens.

Not that there's anything wrong with that - Heroku has come up with an ingenious business model because it really does satisfy a need in the vanity hosting market where cost is not an issue - but belonging to the rice and beans category myself at the moment, I just find that I'm sadly not their target demographic - as much fun as it is to use Heroku's free option for little toy apps.

Deploying to Heroku really is a delight and I think we will see more services like them start up over the next few years.

<comment><USER3> If you are looking for a free tool for rails deployment, check out my project <http://wiki.github.com/wr0ngway/rubber> (The Quick Start section gives a good feel for it) - while the EC2 account isn't free, its not too bad, especially if you aren't running a full time instance. I've also done some abstracting out of the ec2 bits, so theoretically you could write a slicehost/other adapter if you were so inclined.

<comment><USER2> This is cool. How much tinkering would it take to use this for Sinatra deployments to EC2?

<comment><USER3> Not much, that was one of my focuses in the current release as we needed to deploy a sinatra app. I think the only thing that missed the release was generating a Rakefile into the project root for non-rails projects. Here's what ours looks like: <http://gist.github.com/189256>

Ping me on the rubber mailing list if you have any questions - I'd be interested in hearing how this works out for a non-rails app for someone other than myself :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Since I know the FlightCaster guys read HN, I'd like to make a suggestion of something I'd love to see.

When I take a flight that's not on Southwest and more than an hour in length, I like to do the first-class / business class upgrades when I check in because they aren't that much more expensive (usually $50 to $100 per leg). It's one of my few guilty pleasures.

Anyways, it would be pretty cool if there was a way for me to predict which flights have a higher likelihood of having those types of flight upgrades available (which is to say flights that are statistically less likely to have a full first or business class).

I have no idea if you guys even have access to that kind of data, but whenever I book travel now I guess as to the likelihood of being able to upgrade on the day.

<comment><USER5> Most airlines have a separate fare class for upgrades like this. For domestic flights on AA, for example, the fare class is "X". So you can use any tool that shows you fare inventory (like ExpertFlyer) to check this.

And of course, your chances of upgrading are greatly improved if you have status on the airline. This is very easy to get. (AA is doing a double EQM promotion right now, which means one transpacific flight gets you Gold status. With this, you check a box when making your reservation, and if there is availability in the next class of service, you are automatically upgraded 24 hours before the flight. Much better than gambling on the rare "LFBU" kiosk upgrade.)

Anyway, statistics are nice, but it's pretty easy to _ensure_ you get the upgrade. I fly about 50k miles a year, and have only missed one segment in the last two years. (And that was my fault; I checked in without enough "upgrade stickers" and was removed from the upgrade list. I got back on about an hour before the flight, and missed the upgrade by one spot. Oh well :) I have also been upgraded for free on a variety of generally non-upgradeable segments this year, too. A very nice undocumented bonus of having status.

<comment><USER4> I used to be able to do this when I was flying back and forth to London every 8 weeks; but I don't fly enough now for any carrier to really care about my business. I probably only fly about 3,000-4,000 miles a year anymore.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is anyone else bothered by the fact that InfoQ interviewed a team of really smart guys doing exciting and challenging (and computationally intensive) data analysis on a sparkly new-ish cloud host that's supposedly doing great things for scalability, and wasted so much time talking about HTML5 and mobile web UI? Aren't there a million web designers out there they can interview instead, or am I just missing something?

I know they had a "Part 1" (which my computer is utterly failing to access right now or I'd verify the following), but from what I remember, it was about how they use Clojure, and there's an entire scalability angle to get that I'd rather hear.

<comment><USER7> Sigh... just RTF part 1 before moaning: <http://www.infoq.com/articles/flightcaster-clojure-rails>

It goes extensively into detail about their use of Clojure. The fact that the 2nd part's title is "Building FlightCaster's Frontends for the Web and Smartphones" could've tipped you off about what's inside...

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> _We also found that Flightstats was reporting an imaginary airline (Oceanic Airlines)._

I guess someone at Flightstats is a Lost fan.</comment>


The widowhood effect: What it's like to lose a spouse in your 30s - <AUTHOR> http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/relationships/the-widowhood-effect/article33344335/ <comment><USER2> I've had to post this using a throwaway as I've had to hide this from my employer who only hangs onto me as they don't know the magnitude of the problems we are facing. They think it's a temporary dip in health.

That was throughly depressing and a little too close to home at the moment for me. I can't work out if it's better to burn out in 42 days or live for 7-10 years with a crippling immune disorder and constant care requirement which is what my wife faces.

In the space of a week you don't see a difference. In the space of a year, you realise the change. 2016 disappeared in a flash. We did nothing due to hospital appointments and illness. I have to work to pay the bills. You can't live on nothing. So it's work, care, work, care. She declines. We never get to live.

At the end we're left with nothing.

I implore anyone to enjoy life as soon as possible. Don't save it for a rainy day. It might never rain. We saved and planned and never got to fulfill our plans.

And I can't live without her.

<comment><USER3> My wife died from cancer in November. We were married over twenty years. Life became despair. I can hardly remember 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016. Photos serve only to realize the delta you don't realize week to week. What a cruel, cruel disease.

<comment><USER4> My sincerest and most heartfelt condolences, friend. I can't even begin to imagine the horror of such a loss.

From one internet stranger to another: I truly feel for you, and I wish you strength, courage, and ultimately peace.

I wish I could do more, but here's a poem in my native language [0]. Victor Hugo wrote this shortly after his daughter's death. I hope it brings you some comfort.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demain_d%C3%A8s_l'aube](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demain_d%C3%A8s_l'aube)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My wife was diagnosed with cancer in May/June 2015 and moved into the hospice last week. We have two young kids and I'm 33.

I have a lot to say, but for now two things. One, she organised health and life insurance for both of us, and increased them before each child. She's always been the sensible one. Two, having the kids to look after has made things incredibly difficult but I don't know where I'd be without them. Children constantly pull you into the here-and-now. It is so terribly sad that they'll miss out on their mother and she'll miss out on them.

<comment><USER6> My condolences, and I wish you and yours as well as you can be.

<comment><USER7> My condolences. I know there's not much I could say that would help. Hang in there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Lost my wife seven years ago suddenly at the age of 34 [1]. My first relationship after her passing was with someone who herself had become widowed a couple of years before. We'd started out as friends, but ended up dating for about three months.

It was incredibly healing for both of us to be able to tell stories about those who had passed, without someone going "WILL YOU SHUT UP ABOUT YOUR DEAD SPOUSE?"

She's still one of my best friends, seven years later.

[1] [http://ask.metafilter.com/125445/How-do-you-deal-with-the- un...](http://ask.metafilter.com/125445/How-do-you-deal-with-the-unexpected- death-of-a-spouse)

<comment><USER7> I posted this to Reddit a few years ago and still get messages about it every few days.

"June 16, 2009: my wife suddenly passed away at home, at the age of 34.

I was the one who found her, and she'd been gone for at least an hour if not more when I did.

We'd been together for eleven years. It wasn't perfect - what marriage is? - but things had been worse, and were in the process of finally getting better. Being best friends can help you get through the worst of times. I felt guilty that one of my thoughts was "at least now we won't fight over stupid crap that doesn't really matter".

For at least six months, I was on autopilot. I went to work, did what I had to do to get paid, and just. didn't. care. Ate a lot of fast food because I didn't want to expend the energy to go to the grocery store. I bought my cats food from Amazon because they'd deliver it to my front door.

Depression is a horrible thing; only now can I look back and realize just how bad it was.

It's not every day, but there are times when I think about joining my wife, but then that would just mean an end result of other people having to deal with the aftermath of my problems.

There are days when I get home from work and unlock the front door and walk into a quiet house, where I would give up everything I own to have someone there to give me a hug and sincerely ask how my day went and honestly care about my answer.

Something so simple as human touch, compassion, and companionship is worth more than anything else in the world. If you've got it, if you have someone that loves you - don't give that up. Don't waste it. Don't be petty or throw it away because of other little things that don't really matter in the grand scheme of life.

Some of us wonder if we'll ever get to experience it again."

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> As a young widower myself, I can relate to many of the emotions and grief expressed in the article.

It's actually no surprise that I ended up meeting, connecting with, and eventually marrying someone who was widowed in her 30s. From the day we met, on the loss of a spouse (to cancer in both cases), we understood each other on a level that others could not.

</comment><comment><USER9> > But there are no traditions

> for how a North American woman

> in the 21st century mourns her partner.

In many Asian cultures, we mourn for those who have passed for about 2 weeks. Then again 49 days later, and after that at least 3 a year (once on the anniversary of their death, another during the Tomb Sweeping Day [1], and another during the Lunar New Year.)

I feel with all these rituals, where family and friends will get together several times a year, it really does help the grieving process.

I also think this might be the biggest difference between collectivist vs individualistic societies. Where in collectivist societies, family and friends might sometimes feel overbearing because they involve themselves even in the tiniest details of your lives can be a lifesaver during times of extreme grief.

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

<comment><USER10> Jewish Shiva[0] (not to be confused with the Hindu Shiva) is very effective at giving mourners a tradition to follow on one hand, and helping/forcing them to stay on their feet during the first few days. It is observed by the most secular of Jews, I assume because it fills the need of "what do we do now?" which is especially prevalent at those times.

Additionally, there are traditional longer term mourning customs not cut hair/shave for 30 days, no celebrations for 3 months or 12 months depending whether the lost one is child/sibling or brother, erecting a tombstone no less than 30 days but no later than 1 year after passing, and additional prayers for those who pray. These, however, are practiced to much more varying degrees - none or almost none by the anti-religious secular, to lesser degree by most people, and religiously by religious people.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiva_%28Judaism%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiva_%28Judaism%29)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's no easier to lose a spouse when you're older. One thing is if you have a grieving kid it is harder to get stuck in a hole because you're forced to get up, help your kid with his grief, and keep food on the table. Astonishingly, the dog and cat make a huge difference too

<comment><USER7> This. I had no choice but to keep going, even if it was just for my cats.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Having lost my child six years ago, I am stricken by the similarities in the ways of grieving, the feelings expressed, the unbearable absence, the disappearing friends... If the past matches, maybe the future will too, and you can hope for the return of laughing, even day-long happiness and peace of mind. One year ago, that wouldn't have been possible.

Many things will still bring you down, a tactless word by an unknowing personn, a movie where suffering is used as a plot twist to make it more real by some damned scenarist who doesn't know what he/she is speaking about, the rage when friends/familly keep forgeting your suffering...

What helped me and may help you: \- knowing there can be light at the end of tunnel. Grieving can be kept in check, even if you cannot right now.

\- sleeping is vital, everything is uglier when exhausted.

\- not expecting non-grieving people to sympathize with you for a long time, even for short period, even in your family. There're very rare exceptions, but try to avoid fighting for sustained awareness, that's a lost bitter battle. Aim for "one shot compassion".

\- linking with people who are grieving for the same reasons as you, through forums, non profit, etc. They will understand you and for once you won't need to retreint yourself. Having a free speech place is instrumental !

I am sorry for your loss. I truly am

</comment><comment><USER13> I found myself crying multiple times while reading this. I got a taste for her helpless and sorrow and I couldn't deal with it. I cannot imagine what it actually feels like to lose someone that you love as dearly as a spouse.

</comment><comment><USER14> Thanks to the people who have shared their stories here. I, for one, am going to use this opportunity as a reminder to make sure I have my and my wife's affairs in order. Sufficient life insurance, living will, that sort of thing. I have two small children, and I owe it to them.

I can't imagine living through losing my wife, but if I had to, or if she has to lose me, I hope the loss and grief aren't commingled with financial troubles, legal battles, etc.

</comment><comment><USER15> I had to read it in two times as I started crying uncontrollably half way through, powerful writing.

<comment><USER16> You're not alone there, one of the most difficult things I've read this year.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This resonated with me, thank you for posting it.

I lost my partner of 6 years about 15 months ago when she was 26 and I was 29, completely unexpectedly. Many of the stages the OP touched on are things I see reflected through my experience, both over that period and even in the present day. The part that struck me most of all is the dissonance of having life move on, somewhat without you. Parts of your life keep progressing - your career chugs along, you get older, family events still occur, friends reach their milestones in life - but despite being involved in all that, a big part of you stays trapped in this stasis of time from the death.

I have barely cleaned my house and just sort of live around our collective belongings. I still do routines in my life that are completely unnecessary now but that make me feel like a little less of my life has been completely inverted and dropped on its head. I haven't dared wipe clean the bathroom mirror where she wrote a message to me in whiteboard marker wishing me a fantastic day and telling me how much she loved me a couple of weeks before her death. I don't quite know how I'm supposed to ever wipe that off, but I will have to one day because others will eventually need to use that mirror.

Another part that resonated was the need for an alone space during familial celebrations. Doubly so for me, my partner's birthday was Christmas Day. So Christmas has now gone from a celebration of family to a weird dual-day of trying to do that whilst also mourning her life. I find myself sneaking off for private quiet time now, and I suspect I'll always need that now.

There's so many changes I never would've imagined had you somehow been able to talk to more than a robotic shell of me just after her death. I'm sure there's many things I'll still have to face yet. I just hope I can keep clinging to the progress of life forwards because it takes a tonne of effort not to just lapse back into that purgatory of constantly wallowing in it. Equally, you have to give yourself time to grieve when you need it, which is unpredictable even still. The most effective method I've found for me so far is to remind myself that I have time to grieve but I must also not waste the life I'm lucky to have that she was denied, and to live it equal to her expectations she held of me. Anything less would be the waste of a second life.

Thanks again for the great article. It articulated so many feelings I've not been able to.

<comment><USER18> You could buy a glass cutter and a picture frame and cut your message out of the mirror. Might be useful to help move on without feeling like the past is destroyed.

<comment><USER17> Yeh I've considered something like that, it's a good idea. It's a pretty shitty mirror too so replacing it would be nice anyway. It was as much an example of the sort of sentimental hurdles you have to overcome - there's many more than just that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This was a very moving yet difficult read. One of the things I value most in my relationship is always having someone there to listen to all the minutia of my day and to hear about theirs. There's always someone there who will be glad when you have good news and will get pissed off when you do too. In in a way it feels like living two lives. I can't imagine the shock of that kind of connection just completely ending one day. She really captured that well in the writing.

Also, it seems like she purposely cut off the ending how she did so it feels like there should be something more - just like one or two paragraphs missing.

</comment><comment><USER20> "I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round, as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys."

(dialogue from Fred, nephew of Scrooge, in Dickens' _A Christmas Carol_)

</comment><comment><USER21> Recently on HN there was a story on complicated grief

[https://mosaicscience.com/story/complicated-grief- bereavemen...](https://mosaicscience.com/story/complicated-grief-bereavement- death-loss-CBT)

Maybe someone will find it helpful.

</comment><comment><USER22> Don't have anything insightful to add to the excellent OP, except that its theme of the unspoken grief of young windows reminded me of the best op-ed I read in the Washington Post last year, titled: "The condolences end. Being a widow doesn't"

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/11/04/...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/11/04/when- the-second-year-of-widowhood-is-harder/)

</comment><comment><USER23> Once thing that is difficult is to ever consider is being one with someone else. You find pretty, like, lust, but there's a chair that is still filled.

</comment><comment><USER24> I am interested into why losing a spouse at 30 after 5 years of marriage is considered more difficult than losing one ate 60 after 30 years. is it the unexpected? is it cause if you children there is some continuation?

just seeking discussion

<comment><USER25> My parents just celebrated their 48th anniversary and were high school sweethearts before that and are in their early 70s. They retired at 55, have taken months long vacations and Christmas they were still dancing together and are in pretty good health. I'm sure when one passes they will be devasted but when I talk to them, they seem at peace with their mortality and they've enjoyed a good long life together. They've crossed off their bucket list. I never hear them say that there is anything they wish they could have done together that they haven't. When my parents talk they sound like they have a sense of completeness.

On the other hand, my wife and I are in our early 40s on our second marriages and have only been married five years. There are a lot of things that we still want to do together and memories we want to build. After reading this article, I just wanted to turn over and hold my wife but stopped myself because I have a cold.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> My sister-in-law is going through this right now. Her husband passed away a little over a year ago.

So much of this resonates with her own experience and what she's told me... it's as if the article was written by her.

</comment><comment><USER27> At least in your 30's, you're still quite marketable from a re-dating standpoint (not that that alleviates the present existential pain). Losing someone in the 50's might arguably be worse

<comment><USER28> That's just not true, perhaps before the internet you couldn't exactly walk into every bar and meet as many interested people as you could when you are 30. Now you find just as many 50 year old on dating sites as you do as 30 year old's.</comment></comment>


Scala Native - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/scala-native/scala-native <comment><USER2> Is this a "true" Scala? As in, if I write a Scala program that only uses the scala stdlib, will it run on both the JVM and Scala native with no modifications to the source? Or, is it more like "a Scala" in the same way you would say "a Lisp"? I think a lot of the design decisions for Scala were made so that Scala would work on the JVM and easily inter-op with Java. It might make more sense to modify the language slightly to better suit the native environment. I'm seeing some hints to that on the page with the "@struct" and "@extern" decorators.

<comment><USER3> Clearly they added a bunch of new stuff that the JVM can't understand.

So it is either "Scala like LISP"

or

It is a superset of the Scala language. Meaning all existing stuff will work with it, but if you use new secret keywords it will work "better".

Which seems not quite ideal, because that means most Scala libraries will not be "tuned", and you will need all new libraries.. just like ScalaJS made you need entirely new Scala libraries that did not use reflection.

Worried the Scala ecosystem is turning into a nightmare ;)

<comment><USER4> The language is already a nightmare compared to a nearly syntaxless lisp so I'm not surprised that the ecosystem follows suit.

<comment><USER5> It's funny to me to see "syntaxless" used as a good thing :)

For me, syntax--good syntax, anyway--makes code far more readable.

<comment><USER6> Maybe. Syntax imposes structural rules on your code. If your domain doesn't fit the syntax, then you'll end up with far _less_ readable code. The draw towards "syntaxless" lisp-y languages is that you can build the syntax to fit your domain, rather than vice versa. The result is a DSL that naturally models the domain, rather than an unintuitive mess of data transformations to force your domain model to fit the structure imposed by the syntax and type constraints.

<comment><USER7> This thing that each Lisp developer writes its own DSL library is one of the reasons why the enterprise isn't so found of Lisp.

It is always a steep curve to dive into other developers code.

<comment><USER8> Wouldn't LISP become more popular if students started with LISP at school/university rather than C/C++, Java or Python? How can a young developer compare or choose if he/she had never been exposed to LISP?

<comment><USER7> It would help, but it isn't sufficient.

I had a very good CS degree in the mid-90's.

We got to use Pascal, C, C++, Prolog, Caml Light, Smalltalk, Oberon(-2), Component Pascal, Lisp, SQL, PL/SQL, x86 ASM, MIPS ASM, Java, across the 5 years it used to take (nowadays thanks to Bologna is no longer the case).

It doesn't mean we got to use many of those languages afterwards.

But Lisp is a special case, if Lisp Workstations hadn't failed in the market or if Sun and others hadn't picked UNIX as their Workstation OS, maybe it would be different IT world, in spite of all DSLs I was referring to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Hi all, I'm the author of the project and would gladly answer any questions.

<comment><USER10> Do you see any possibilities to undo/mitigate JVM-specific design decision which handicap the language? For example could you not erase generics or would that cause too much problems incompatibilities?

<comment><USER11> Idiomatic Scala doesn't care at all about erased generics. With implicits and macros and libraries built upon them like shapeless, you can do everything you'd want to do with reified generics and more __and __it 'll be done and statically checked at compile time instead of dynamically at run time.

<comment><USER10> I know there are ways like typetags to work around it, but on the JVM this is never going to run without extra work:

        def erased[T](xs: List[T]) : String = {
          xs match {
            case ns : List[Int] =>"Natural numbers"
            case fs : List[Double] => "Floating point numbers"
            case _ : List[T] => "Something else"
          }
        }
        System.out.println(erased(List(1,2,3)))
        System.out.println(erased(List(1.0,2.0,3.0)))

Which is purely because of a JVM runtime limitation. Will native scala behave identically to JVM scala in this case or will you be able to improve?

<comment><USER12> The part that you're missing is that code like this in Scala is totally unnecessary and it never happens:

        case ns : List[Int] =>

Worst case scenario, you can always do the following and it would be more idiomatic, no type erasure standing in the way:

        val listInt = listAny.collect { case x:Int => x }
        val listDouble = listAny.collect { case x:Double => x }

But even that is totally unnecessary. You know why? Because your function does not make sense. What could you possibly do with a function that takes a List[T] and returns a String?

The only way this would make sense would be if you are talking about a List[Any] deserialized from somewhere (like some shitty JSON library). But then in Scala we don't really work with Any, that should never happen and if you see libraries that use Any in their API, drop them like they are hot ;-)

> _Which is purely because of a JVM runtime limitation_

No it's not. Talk to compiler authors. This is actually a _freedom_ , because by introducing reified generics in the runtime, then language designers either have to deal with inefficiencies due to boxing because of extra conversions, or to limit their type system, so for example you can say goodbye to higher- kinded types. A runtime that has reified generics is not a multi-language runtime. In fact many languages are doing type erasure. Haskell is doing type erasure. And why shouldn't it, I mean, type casting and isInstanceOf checks make no sense in Haskell.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Really excited about this. This is another reason why Scala is an extremely valuable tool these days. With Scala JVM, Scala.js with React Native and now with Scala Native (LLVM), there'll be literally nothing you can't do well with it.

<comment><USER14> Does Scala.js with React Native work well? I avoided it because I didn't want to complicate my stack or have to jump through hoops when reading the react docs. If it all works well I might make the jump to scala front & back...

<comment><USER15> Reportedly, it works really well. Have a look at [https://github.com/chandu0101/sri](https://github.com/chandu0101/sri)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Just saw this on twitter. Scala, you have my attention. There were a lot of talks about "the tools of yesterday" and "the tools of the future" lately. Scala getting closer to the metal, without the JVM is a significant step toward "the tools of the future".

<comment><USER17> I've heard a lot of the early adopters of Scala are moving away, including LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.

<comment><USER18> No, not really.

Some people from losing ecosystems like to spin it that way¹, but the truth is people are happy, adoption is great, and companies see that pain-points get addressed.

Of course there are companies which drop Scala, but often like in LinkedIn's case it's not caused by a dissatisfaction with Scala, but new leaders making different decisions like "we are using 10 different languages, we should consolidate on X and Y!".

The last unhappy company which is commonly mentioned is this social-network company Yammer. That was half a decade ago, and most of the issues mentioned have been addressed in the mean time. (Yammer has been bought by Microsoft, so it also made some sense to use a language that makes getting bought out easier.)

¹ I remember there was some very very bitter Groovy evangelist a while ago.

<comment><USER17> I know for a fact LinkedIn dropped Scala because of dissatisfaction over Scala. Things like maintainability, the fact it was just a single company developing Scala, etc that caused them to switch away.

Kafka is deprecating their Scala clients because of maintainability issues as well. Scala keeps making breaking changes on dot releases, making it impossible to maintain long term.

<comment><USER19> That's funny, when I talked to Neha (ex-Linkedin, cofounder of Confluent) she explicitly denied this meme about moving away from Scala.

The new Kafka client library is in Java just to reduce the number of dependencies, the server is still written in Scala. Strangely, using Java hasn't stopped Confluent from making breaking changes on dot release of the client... which really puts the lie to your explanation.

<comment><USER17> I specifically said the Scala clients are being deprecated. Go ask Neha to confirm this.

<comment><USER19> No, you specifically said they're being deprecated because of maintainability issues inherent to scala, which is not true.

<comment><USER17> Nope. They were getting sick of having to maintain different versions of the Scala clients because of breaking changes, as per a Kafka committer.

<comment><USER19> Even if some random kafka committer that you can't source believes that, the reasoning doesn't add up:

SBT makes it fairly straightforward to cross publish for different dot releases of Scala, and libraries in the Scala ecosystem do it all the time.

Scala dot releases are far apart. It's been over 2 years since 2.11, and 2.10 released in 2012.

By contrast, the JAVA client that the Kafka project published in November is already undergoing breaking changes for the current release candidate. It's pretty clear that avoiding breaking changes is not an overriding concern for them, and even if it is, it's equally clear that Scala was not the inherent problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Hi, Some questions

\- Can this reuse existing Scala code?

\- How does it compare against Rust/GO/Swift? Why use this over them?

\- How about libraries?

<comment><USER21> A difference is that Scala can run on the JVM, the browser (and other JS ecosystems) via ScalaJS, and now native. It doesn't get more universal than that!

<comment><USER7> Native is all that it takes. Bytecodes are great for optimization passes and interactive development sessions.

Java should have gone the native route for deployment, instead of having a few architects at Sun being religious against AOT compilation.

<comment><USER21> The other two are important too: the JVM lets you leverage lots of existing libraries. The browser lets you reach more users.

<comment><USER7> Yes, but many of the use cases those libraries cover are also covered by other libraries.

The browser, well personally I am not a big fan for anything besides interactive hypertext documents. Even though I worked several years as web developer, I tend to favor native + network protocols instead.

Many researchers jumped into the JVM because it provided a fertile ground for language research, without having to build their own.

Apparently LLVM brought a change to that and now everyone is using it instead of the JVM for language research, with the benefit of always having JIT and AOT toolchains, with GCC trying to follow up on that.

What I dislike in the JVM was the religion against AOT compilation (only third party commercial JVMs offer it) and missing out on value types, even though Eiffel, Oberon and Modula-3 where all having them.

Personally I think all language toolchains should offer JIT/AOT, with the developers using the best one for each deployment use case. Although for dynamic languages, AOT is probably not a good use case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> So, is this "released" yet? There are no downloadable installers or even instructions to compile.

<comment><USER23> Looks like its based on dotty so Java 8 is a requirement.

<comment><USER9> It's currently based on Scala 2.11 with 2.12 and Dotty support coming in the future.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Given that Apache harmony is no longer being developed, you might want to coordinate with the Avian people, since they also reuse harmony.

</comment><comment><USER25> Another thread covers in hands-on way Getting Started: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11699897](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11699897)

</comment><comment><USER26> What about GC?

<comment><USER9> In a first release we're going to use Boehm GC. That's just a stepping stone, not a long-term strategy. Stay tuned for news on this front.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> In a way, simple Scala code resembles Swift, as commented by this person: [https://leverich.github.io/swiftislikescala/](https://leverich.github.io/swiftislikescala/)

Now the type system of course is entirely different.

<comment><USER28>
        val label = "The width is "
        val width = 94
        val widthLabel = label + width

I really wish more languages would distinguish concatenation from addition, _especially_ when they do type coercion. There's a very specific reason Perl opted for '.' to concatenate strings instead of +, which is that it disambiguates the following:

        val first = "2"
        val second = 3
        val together1 = first + second
        val together2 = second + first

Not to mention, addition is commutative and concatenation is not (1+2 == 2+1, but "one" \+ "two" != "two" \+ "one")

Hopefully Scala at least has some very well defined and _easy_ rules for exactly how string concatenation works, but I think it's an uphill battle to argue that '+' is a good concatenation operator.

<comment><USER29> '+' works great as a concatenation operator, so long as you don't ever try to implicitly convert the values. Case in point - Python:

      >>> 1+2
      3
      >>> "1"+"2"
      '12'
      >>> "1"+2
      Traceback (most recent call last):
        File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
      TypeError: Can't convert 'int' object to str implicitly

<comment><USER28> Those are literals, not variables. My whole argument is about the ambiguity introduced when you are implicitly coercing variables. But yes, if the language does not coerce between string and numeric types, it's a non-issue. I'm specifically talking about supporting coercion but continuing to use '+' for concatenation of strings (and ==/!= for equivalence testing of strings as well).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Otherwise known as "Haskell"?

<comment><USER31> Much to the Scalaz crowd's dismay, Scala always was an ML first and foremost. Any similarity to Haskell is incidental to Haskell/ML's shared background in strongly typed functional programming.

<comment><USER30> Incidental? It's pretty well known that Scala was heavily influenced by Haskell. In particular, do notation (for comprehensions), pattern matching, lots of standard lib classes (ex Maybe (Option)), many of the methods in the collections library (map, fold, take, etc)

Anyway, I wasn't trying to disparage either of them (or this project). Just poking fun at the seemingly common "I want to use Haskell but I'm forced to deploy on the JVM" use case for Scala.

<comment><USER31> > It's pretty well known that Scala was heavily influenced by Haskell.

Except that Martin Odersky himself has explicitly said that the primary influences were SML/OCaml and Java.

> In particular, do notation (for comprehensions),

I'll give you that one

> pattern matching

Which pre-date Haskell by nearly 2 decades in ML

> lots of standard lib classes (ex Maybe (Option)),

Also pre-date Haskell by nearly 2 decades, in addition to be named exactly the same as ML.

> many of the methods in the collections library (map, fold, take, etc)

Which pre-date Haskell by almost 4 decades with origins in LISP.

> Just poking fun at the seemingly common "I want to use Haskell but I'm > forced to deploy on the JVM" use case for Scala.

Which is where the Scalaz folks come in. They want to piggy back off of something successful, as opposed to Frege, which is closer to what they actually want (avoiding success at all costs?). Who knows, maybe they actually like the strict-evaluation by default of Scala/ML, which is quite pragmatic, but definitely more in line with ML than Haskell.

<comment><USER32> Given the fact that OCaml seems to be adding type class support and has support for monadic comprehension (do/for), it seems like these ideas are getting adopted in multiple places.

As a Scalaz committer and as a developer working at one of the largest scala shops (that makes heavy use of Scalaz), we don't try to write Haskell on the JVM. We do try to write pure, functional code as much as we can, and so what we end up with falls somewhere in the middle between an OCaml and Haskell.

<comment><USER31> > OCaml seems to be adding type class support

Funnily enough, Scala's implicit-based type classes were the inspiration for the coming modular implicits type classes in OCaml (as opposed to the Haskell approach). It wouldn't be the first time that two languages have mutually inspired each other (The Rust and Swift teams have both acknowledged certain design decisions inspired by the counterpart).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Wow, they're even planning to provide a native version of the runtime library? That will be more than nice.

</comment><comment><USER18> Not the author:

> \- Can this reuse existing Scala code?

I think that's the plan. Would be a pretty pointless exercise without that, right? :-)

> \- How does it compare against Rust/GO/Swift? Why use this over them?

Rust: Scala and Rust have different niches. Rust is more focused on low runtime overhead, while Scala is more focused on low development overhead. This means Rust can be potentially faster to run, but Scala is faster to develop.

Go: Go is utter shit that only survives due to the devs name-dropping "Google" every 5 minutes.

Swift: Scala is more mature, simpler, better designed. Not a knock against Swift, but there is a difference between a language where changes have been tried experimentally for years before either adopting or removing them, and Swift where things get added at a frightening rate.

> \- How about libraries?

Libraries without Java dependencies should work, libraries with Java dependencies depend on whether their Java dependency is provided by Scala- Native (just like on Scala.js).

<comment><USER34> A small side note: Scala has several great features, but "low development overhead" just isn't one of them. Also why so harsh on Go?

<comment><USER19> If by low development overhead you mean amount of crap you need to type in order to get things done, Scala absolutely does have low development overhead.

As for Go, I'd say that's the most honest description of the language I've seen in a while.

<comment><USER35> If your limiting factor is how fast you can type you are either an amazing person that should be studied or you need to take a typing class.

<comment><USER36> My limiting factor is usually how fast I can comprehend other people's code, and the extraneous crap some languages require can often be the biggest contributor to that.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Netflix angers film-makers with 'insulting' speed-up function - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-50220575 <comment><AUTHOR> Using the increased speed features of mpv and my mp3 player have absolutely revolutionized my viewing and listening process. I can get so much more viewing and listening in in the same amout of time. It's absolutely fantastic, and it depresses me to think about how many hours (or probably days and weeks) of my life I wasted when I was listening and watching everything at only 1x speed.

That said, I don't speed up fictional movies nearly as much as I do everything else. But I agree with the person quoted in the article that with a 10% speedup you really won't notice, but it'll still save you time. On nearly everything else I listen and watch at about 2x or 3x speed and save a lot of time.

Also, often listening at a faster speed makes some otherwise slow media more interesting, as I have to concentrate more, drift away less, and there's more information per second to digest.

</comment><comment><USER2> This will be awesome for documentaries</comment>