Spotify is gaining leverage over record labels - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/18/dictate-top-40 <comment><USER2> Spotify is the one service I'm happy to pay for. Their weekly mixes keep blowing my mind because it's such a great way to discover new music tailored to my taste. Plus, Spotify connect is a genius way to play music on loudspeakers. It works incredibly well with my Bose speakers. My impression is that they will continue to innovate in all kinds of areas so I think they have a good chance of winning. I needed to write this because just yesterday I thought how happy I am with Spotify. In case it sounds too fanboy-ish.

<comment><USER3> While i have discovered a couple good songs in Spotify's Discover Weekly playlist, i do find it a common occurrence nowadays that songs which i have listened to in the past are included. Does anyone else have that experience? Perhaps Spotify is just having a really hard time finding music related to my tastes?

<comment><USER4> Discover weekly is the reason that I pay for Spotify. I'm an old guy that prefers vinyl to mp3s, misses the local record store terribly and hates radio, so modern music distribution sucks for me.

I first tried Spotify many years ago, back when playlists were quite new. At the time, I was living in the UK and a big user of last.fm but, out of curiosity, I spent an afternoon building one playlist out of the few tracks they had that I liked.

I was/am into house and techno but the tracks were not yet available on Spotify back then - but the originals which were heavily sampled sure were. So I ended up with a playlist of funk, disco, blues, hip-hop and jazz that was kinda familiar, lotta fun.

Fast-forward several years and I'm living in Australia, where last.fm is a paid service that had stagnated, so back to check out Spotify again...

It had millions more tracks.

It had learned from my playlist. Discover weekly is soooo good.

It had my attention and my credit card.

To the parent poster, I suggest you treat Spotify like a friendly muso willing to lend you her near infinite collection. I've you've ever wondered about $GENRE, go and play. I have no relationship with Spotify except as a very happy customer.

<comment><USER5> Funnily enough, Discover Weekly almost never works for me. I like the overall service Spotify provides, but the discovery features don't really cut it for me.

As an example, I usually don't really like most music that goes into the house, techno, electronica or even dubstep directions. Most songs I find to be horribly repetitive and lacking in good buildup/melodies. However, there are exceptions I can enjoy very well (say the Soundtrack to Tron Legacy[1] or a few tracks from Overwerk).

But after listening to stuff like this, Spotify keeps recommending the other kind to me, which I just find tiresome.

I've got the same problems with other music directions (Tool and Rishloo vs. countless rather dull prog rock tracks, or black metal recommendations after listening to In Flames/Dark Tranquility).

The whole artist radio does the same for me. If I start it up, it's because I'm interested in more similarities than "well, it's ordered in in the same genre _somewhere_ "...

[1]: Yes, I'm aware that has pretty much nothing to do with what Daft Punk usually do, but that's frankly the reason I like it.

 _Edit:_

An interesting thing, come to think of it, is that Spotify never recommends classical music to me in their "Discover Weekly" list, although I do listen quite a bit to such recordings. I wonder if this is because they realized that "Classical Music" as a genre is mostly not good at all (I don't know how many people who like Vivaldi's music would also like Arvo Pärt's works as much, but I doubt that they're in different internal genres in the Spotify database).

Other explanations could also be that such recordings don't make enough "buzz" or that the attribuition to specific composers is more difficult (since the performing musician/orchestra is usually included as "artist").

<comment><USER6> Im a bit opposite in that I love much of the "house, techno, electronica or even dubstep directions" (though much less dubstep these days) and Discover Weekly/Radio usually delivers some great stuff and is probably 95% of my new finds.

Im more inclined towards progressive trance/psy trance type stuff which I think aligns more with Classical music you mention (since I usually listen while I work). I love electronica remixes of Vivaldi and other classical pieces, for instance. I enjoy Tool as well, A Perfect Circle, and Puscifer and have a much more difficult time discovering in that direction, but I listen to them less frequently as well. I also listen to a lot of rap, and intermittently some other types (almost anything but country).

Im always finding good new electronica of the types I like and rap, but their algorithms definitely could use some improving. I would particularly like an unlike/thumbs down feature like Pandora had and may still have. Id like that so that it a) never show me that song again, and b)could potentially be used to further tailor the results.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Spotify is the only content provider i pay for gladly, due to their Family accounts and Discover Weekly.

I listen to music 5-6h a day now, all for dirt cheap (less than $2/month/person). I wish somebody would do the same for video content. Right now you have to subscribe to many different providers to get all the good content. So pirating is still more convenient and i still download rather than just pay a small, fixed amount.

Well, maybe music is just cheaper to make and easier to sell as a bundle.

<comment><USER8> I really hope the music industry isn't going that way as well...

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wonder what Apple, Google, and Amazon Music can do to compete. They have advantages that Spotify cannot duplicate (large war chests, existing device/platform control, etc.) and one of them (Apple) is really strong when it comes to playlists. Apple is also doing a fair number of exclusive deals with music publishers and artists, although Billboard says the industry is moving away from this trend (1) although that could be wishful thinking on Spotify's part.

Another issue that's worth bringing up: Artists are getting screwed by these models as well as YouTube (2, 3). Only the largest stars can hope to make a lot of money on scale or exclusives. Everyone else gets scraps. While platforms struggle for dominance, we as consumers benefit from low-cost subscriptions or "free" music but I feel the bands and musicians who make the music we love are getting seriously short-changed. It's not right.

1\. [http://www.billboard.com/articles/business/7625650/are- album...](http://www.billboard.com/articles/business/7625650/are-album- exclusives-dead-apple-music)

2\. [http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/7408970/taylor- swift-...](http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/7408970/taylor-swift-paul- mccartney-180-artists-signing-petition-digital)

3\. [http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2015/01/28/songs- got-151781-...](http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2015/01/28/songs- got-151781-plays-youtube-received-10/)

<comment><USER10> As a user of Apple Music and Spotify, I tell you, Apple is absolutely not strong when it comes to playlists. Just the fact that in Spotify you can have user created and shared playlists makes Spotify much stronger, for all the playlists their users have. Also, in Apple Music most of the playlists for genres other than Hip-hop and Pop are yearly "Hits" compilations.

I think that Apple is much worse than Spotify in this particular point.

<comment><USER9> I was thinking of Apple vs. Amazon Music, whose playlists are sometimes laughably bad. Amazon is trying hard to be a contender in this space with low- cost plans but if they don't figure out playlists it will be an uphill battle against Spotify, Apple and other services that do better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If anyone thinks Spotify has leverage over record labels, I would challenge you to compare Spotify's operating losses year over year VS. Apple Music's operating losses year over year.

<comment><USER12> Can you elaborate on that? What are their losses?

<comment><USER13> 184.5 MM € in 2015[0].

[0]: [http://www.businessinsider.com/r-spotify-revenues- grow-80-pe...](http://www.businessinsider.com/r-spotify-revenues- grow-80-percent-to-19-billion-euros-in-2015-operating-loss-widens-2016-5)

<comment><USER14> And what is Apple music's operating losses?

Spotify has always talked about losses being expected, they want user growth at any cost.

[http://www.recode.net/2016/5/23/11749122/spotify-losses- reve...](http://www.recode.net/2016/5/23/11749122/spotify-losses-revenue-2015)

<comment><USER15> It is certainly normal for startups to expect losses and only want to gain users, but it's not a sign of strength in themselves or their business model.

If you're trying to gain users at any cost then other businesses will take advantage of that desperation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I would rather pay slightly more per month (let's say $12 USD rather than the current $10) than pay the artists less, even if the effect is relatively small due to the labels taking so much cut out of the payout.

But in any case, I do believe that the way Spotify will be able to have real leverage is for it to start being their own label, not just getting exclusive content. I feel like it would be cheaper to just bring on either independent artists or artists that are kind of not "into" traditional labels but are popular, rather than pay for exclusive content since it is probably less work but more expensive to do the latter, while the former would take a by of work but cheaper in the long run. It's subscriber base being so large may be a bargaining chip but I would guess that a lot of its current subscribers would move to other services were it to shut down, so it can't be that big? Sheer volume in a market with competitors that would be basically the same but with a different UI and maybe some different content can't count for that much can it?

<comment><USER17> Yes. They should buy Soundcloud and set up a semi-automated publishing system for that pipeline. That's a new generation of artists that the corporate labels have no way of reaching, generally. Some of that IP will be enormously valuable, like seed equity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Can't justify Spotify as I'm paying for YouTube Red/Google Play Music as I can stand YouTube ads less than the difference between Spotify and Google Play Music.

I bet that'll come up more and more.

One important differentiator might be to get the Japanese record labels a bit more aligned, all streaming providers have been faring terribly on that front.

<comment><USER19> What does YouTube Red do better than uBlock Origin?

<comment><USER20> Supports content creators instead of making them work w/o compensation

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> As a paying Spotify member, practices like these only make me want to switch to DRM-free music more. Blackmailing artists with "we won't promote you if you don't lower your prices" and wasting half a million on 2 weeks of exclusivity. That's not what I'm paying them for; I pay them because I want to compensate artists.

<comment><USER22> If you want to compensate artists, buy their albums on Bandcamp. If they're not on Bandcamp, tell them to get on :)

<comment><USER21> It doesn't scale to seek them all out individually. I've tried this in the past but it just doesn't work. Usually they don't even have a proper contact method other than through the label or a public channel like Twitter.

<comment><USER23> If enough fans ask for it you can be sure that someone in their entourage will pick up the signals (and either act on or ignore them). For smaller acts you can usually find a direct way to contact them somewhere on their website.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Pretty remarkable how bad the writing is in this article.

</comment><comment><USER25> Now if only they'd bring back the ability to pause, play, skip, and go back when right-clicking the icon after the program is hidden from the start bar, like we could back in 0.9.7... and bring back the extension API...

</comment><comment><USER26> Spotify, Pandora, slacker, and all the rest will all get the same deal from the copyright holders. Google, Apple, Amazon will be the long term winners because they have ancillary revenues and music is a loss leader.

</comment><comment><USER27> I prefer DRM-free stores and musicians who release there.

<comment><USER28> I prefer the convenience of having access to an effectively unlimited music library, on demand, for a flat cost per month.

I can see how it would be a fun hobby to curate your own collection, but for me it's really hard to beat services like Spotify, Steam, Netflix - DRM or not.

<comment><USER27> I buy in stores like Bandcamp which sell FLAC, and then encode in Opus for playback. Also, prospects of your collection evaporating because DRMed service could suddenly close down tomorrow don't sound good. Convenience or not, I prefer to back up what I paid for.

<comment><USER28> > DRMed service could suddenly close down tomorrow don't sound good

I'm not worried about that - it's not my collection, it's Spotify's. I'm merely paying for the unlimited consumption of their collection on demand, not to purchase the songs and have them for life.

It'd be a different story if I expected the songs I listen to on Spotify to be available forever, but I don't, and that's not what I'm paying for.

<comment><USER21> You don't expect to be able to listen to the songs forever? Fair enough; I mean, you can always take another subscription service if Spotify would go out of business.

But I've been there.

When Grooveshark quit -- I was a paying member and had no up-front notice -- I lost my complete library. I've looked into making a back-up before and figured out some technical requirements for that (e.g. I cracked the "encrypted" cached files) but never really got around to it. A list of which songs were in my library and playlists would have been all I needed, but I had no such thing.

Spotify doesn't offer this either. Like with Grooveshark, you can find technical ways of getting around it, but they're not jumping at the opportunity to provide a JSON export that you can import into another music service.

The other side of the coin is that not all music is available. Even now on Spotify, if you enable "show unplayable songs" there are a lot that turn unavailable every month. I don't want to think of which part will not be available at a competitor's.

For all these reasons, I agree with the person you're replying to. But I made the same decision as you -- i.e. I use and pay for Spotify -- because those indie stores just don't have enough music by a long shot to make it worth the trouble. Ideally it would be that way, though.

<comment><USER29> There is actually a straightforward way to export data from your Spotify account, try this:

[https://developer.spotify.com/web-api/console/get-current- us...](https://developer.spotify.com/web-api/console/get-current-user-saved- albums/)

<comment><USER21> Tell that to my mother. I'm serious here: it's easy for you and me -- heck, I'd just collect it via DBus, reverse Spotify's local storage or scrape it from the web player. But that takes effort and expertise, something very few people on this planet are both capable of and willing to do, unless it's clear that the service is going out of business soon. Furthermore, hacky exports like this will not be importable on other services either.

<comment><USER29> So make a service that emails people their saved albums. Send monthly incremental updates. Their backup storage will be their inbox, and restoring the data to a new service will be a couple hours manual clicking and typing.

The hard part is explaining to our mothers that their music app might become unavailable, that they should care about this, and that they should take action to mitigate the effects.

But on the other hand, consumers get locked in all the time, and civilization hasn't collapsed yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This is nothing more than PR fluff. Spotify is in big trouble, as waging war with Apple is proving to be far more costly than they expected.

I want to know how much Techcrunch got paid for this advertisement.

<comment><USER31> My instincts feel that way, but Apple Music announced they crossed 20 million paid users in 12/2016, 40% of Spotify's 50+ million. Anecdotally, discover weekly is a tremendous hit.

Makes you wish for functional public capital markets so we knew the real story.

<comment><USER32> Spotify has partnered with telecoms, newspapers, and others to provide bundled subscriptions -- inflating their "paid" subscriber amount.

A good chunk of those 50m aren't paying $10/mo; they've expanded their partnerships (in part) to inflate that number.

<comment><USER33> Very interesting. Can you give me some pointers on what kind of partnerships they have?

<comment><USER34> Every Starbucks barista (who's worked at Starbucks for some number of months) receives a free Spotify subscription, for example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> This article is nonsense.

</comment><comment><USER36> Spotify will not win unless they find a way to materialize and dematerialize vinyl LPs on demand.

</comment><comment><USER37> _As we said above, their artists would suffer from the loss of distribution, but they'd also suffer a loss of revenue._

Not much revenue. Spotify is famously stingy in how much it pays artists, to the point where big names like Taylor Swift are keeping their releases off Spotify.

<comment><USER38> Isn't that because the artists are having shitty deals with the record labels though?

<comment> k-mcgrady If you are completely independent the amount you get per play (before your distributor - e.g. CDBaby - takes a cut) is $0.006 - $0.008. If we say you get the max per play and you're a one person act (not a band) you need about 250,000 streams to make $2000 (just about enough money to live on). Obviously you have other ways to generate income (merch, touring) but even getting anywhere near that number of monthly streams for an independent artist with no marketing power/skill/money is almost impossible regardless of how good your work is.

If not going to get into the usual debate about free market and value but I thought it was worth laying out some actual figures as 'labels are taking the money' is the go to argument here when in reality having no label isn't going to work for most artists either.

NB: To get your music on all of these digital services you need a distributor like CDBaby (many others are available). I left out their cut in the figures above but for digital services it is 9% of net income.

<comment><USER38> If I understood it correctly about 50% (old and perhaps quite obsolete figure) of the monthly fee goes to labels and artists. That sounds reasonable to me, and given that that means roughly $5 goes directly to labels and artists from my subscription.

A Spotify subscription is more than I have ever paid for music, even half of it is - and the moment I stop my subscription I loose access to all of it. To me it sounds like the labels are the ones dictating, one way or another, who get's paid and how much.

<comment> k-mcgrady I'm not sure I understand. The numbers I quoted were for someone not signed to a label. They get the stream rate that Spotify sets. Your original question was do artists not make much money because of bad deals with labels. The numbers clearly show that they don't make much money even if a label isn't involved because stream rates are less than 1¢ and subscription prices are very low.

<comment><USER38> It isn't hard to imagine that spotify needs to recoup the costs lost by having to please the labels. My point was that I'm paying a fair price and Spotify are relaying a fair share of that.

Now where the money actually ends up seems to be up to the labels.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I got 99 problems but Spotify ain't one! because I live outside their small map. I don't exist for them and they don't exist for me.

Edit: just joking, I am actually irritated I can't check out the Discover Weekly playlist, whenever it comes out in discussion. I just checked, my country is still not on their list.

<comment><USER40> Which country is that?

<comment><USER39> Romania. Spotfy-istan ends at Hungary, right at our border. We're part of that Europe that doesn't get into Spotify.</comment></comment></comment>


Start-up vs consulting vs corporate vs all three - tomh- http://swombat.com/2011/5/10/startup-consulting-corporate

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think it's necessarily 'going too far in any direction is wrong', so much as 'always remember you have these options'.

For some people, full blown corporate is everything they want and need. As long as they keep making that choice - as opposed to staying where they are out of routine - they can be happy. I'm doing the consultant thing, and always weighing this up versus the startup thing - happy with my choices to date, and those include regularly reaffirming that corporate isn't for me...right now.

One day, that all may change.

<comment><USER2> What I mean by going too far is when you start believing that your way is the one true way for everyone. I like to call this effect "Born Again Entrepreneurs" - where a newly entrepreneurial escapee becomes literally evangelical about the benefits of running your own business vs working in a corporation.

Different people have different life choices, and climbing up the ladder in MegaCorp Inc is not intrinsically worse or better than running a consultancy or startup. It may be worse _for me_ at this point, but for others it's exactly the right choice.

<comment><AUTHOR> Then we agree. I've met plenty of entrepreneurs who know _they_ can't work for MegaCorp, and therefore assume that nobody sensible could ever work for a big company.

You can guess how their recruitment strategies work out as the business grows.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> From the closing piece of advice:

 _No matter where you are, make sure you're always growing on a personal level. Never sacrifice your personal growth for some "I'll make it if I only throw everything into it" martyrdom delusion. Successful people start successful businesses, and successful people are always growing._

As someone who is nearly 30, and still ridiculously confused about what I want out of life - does the above hold even if you abandon one form of personal growth for another?

<comment><USER2> I am 30, and still fairly confused about what I want out of life. This advice is not prescriptive about what kind of growth you need. The point is, if you're not growing in some way, you're less likely to be successful. It's easy to fall into the fallacy of thinking that you can put your personal growth on hold to meet objective X, but objective X always takes 3x longer than you think, and if you put your life on hold for it, you probably won't meet objective X anyway.

A saying comes to mind:

Live as if you were going to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were going to live forever.

<comment><USER3> I hope you're coming to the London HN meetup - would love to discuss this further!

<comment><USER2> I believe I am!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The many selves of Sylvia Plath: the poet's early letters - <AUTHOR> https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2017/10/many-selves-sylvia-plath-poet-s-early-letters-show-writer-training <comment><USER2> After being accused of 'manspaling' a few weeks ago which in this case is ridiculous because I was explicitly asked by the woman to explain something, I started thinking about what it means to be a man and feminist in 2017. Women do not have a monopoly on stupid people, men, women, and, perhaps, non binary persons, explaining stuff they already know to them. Cry bullying is extremely toxic.

I adore Alice Walker, E. Annie Proulx, and Margaret Atwood. I've read the Feminine Mystique and the Second Sex. I, however, have yet to read Sylvia Plath.

While ruminating about feminism, my thoughts eventually after a few days lead me to my 10th grade English teacher, Mrs. Debra Schmitt, whose mission in life was to get both young women and young men to speak up and be heard. I remember her saying no one should be insecure about their writing.

I did a search for Mrs. Schmitt which returned several news stories about her suicide by a stream. [0] We read in her class a book by Marianne Wiggins, John Dollar, which starts with the heroine being denied burial rights by the town priest. This made me think of Sylvia Plath. C. S. Lewis said he would never have to cross the room to meet Hamlet because Hamlet is always by his side. I sometimes joke I would never have to cross the room to meet C. S. Lewis because Hamlet is always by my side. I don't have time to read now. Nonetheless, the next person I read will be Sylvia Plath. Maybe she has some answers to my current big question. What happened to poor poor Ophelia?

[0] [https://90swoman.wordpress.com/2011/03/11/r-i-p-feminist- lit...](https://90swoman.wordpress.com/2011/03/11/r-i-p-feminist-literature- teacher-debra-schmitt/)</comment>


Google Brain super-resolution image tech makes "zoom, enhance" real - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/02/google-brain-super-resolution-zoom-enhance/ <comment><USER2> I'm curious on how well it would work in real-life. I mean, celebrity faces were used in the tests, how well it would perform with normal-people faces?</comment>


Is it possible to design a better stop sign?  - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/id/2254863

<comment><USER2> The better stop sign would be no stop sign.

The preponderance of stop signs on US roads is one of the most infuriating parts about American road engineering. (Along with such a large number of signs that it is not humanly possible to process them all when traveling at vehicle speeds.)

It really does condition drivers to look for signs instead of other people. If you run a stop sign, you'll get fined even if nothing happens. If you stop at a stop sign and then in blissful ignorance ram someone who didn't, no harm comes to you (unlike to the other person).

The book "Traffic" by Tom Vanderbilt is an interesting read about some counterintuitive things about how traffic works and about how differently engineers in different countries approach safety. I can highly recommend it.

EDIT: One of the most fascinating stories in the book is about how they redesigned some big 5-way intersection with a traffic light in some central square of a Dutch city by just removing everything and leaving a big empty square with some lines painted indicating the roundabout. Crashes went down, and traffic flow improved, because drivers were _forced_ to pay attention to figure out how the whole thing worked.

Experience seems to indicate that the "safety" measures usually taken in the US (widening roads, removing pedestrians, etc) are totally counterproductive because they send subconscious signals to the drivers that this is a speedway which causes everyone to drive faster and pay less attention, which makes crashes more severe (not to mention relegates pedestrians, bicycles and other alternative means of transport to second-hand status.)

<comment><USER3> Completely anecdotal: a friend of mine moved here (US) from Germany ~ 5 weeks ago, and she was driving my car with me in the passenger seat. Just as I was thinking "she is a safe defensive driver," she approached a stop sign and to my shock did not stop, but slowed down only to continue on her way much like a yield sign. I freaked out a little in the vein of "Stop signs here are not suggestions!" She responded with points simiar to yours (and the articles'): there are way too many stop signs in the US, it is the most expensive part of driving (fuel-wise), and it essentially teaches people not to be thoughtful, cautious drivers. Now while driving I'm constantly thinking "what a wasteful stop sign."

<comment><USER4> I stop at signs because of people like her.

<comment><USER5> And she stops on green lights because of people like her.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> When I drive I look as much for shape and color as the actual words.

To sell me on the idea of a new stop sign, you'd have to demonstrate that not only was the new design objectively better, but it is objectively better by a large enough margin to offset all the _additional_ errors caused by drivers who aren't trained to look for a different design.

</comment><comment><USER7> Wow, I didn't know that roundabouts are more efficient than other intersection types. That's really cool. (Now I want to build a traffic simulator that can simulate that effect...)

<comment><USER5> Hm. We have one in town - 3 roads, 2 lanes, one of which doesn't go all the way around. A "map" posted 100 yards in front listing all the options. I've seen people stop to look at the map before going on. This is not more efficient.

<comment><USER8> Take down the map and it probably would be. We had an intersection in my city with three roads/six entrances. Originally it was a 6-way stop, but it had very poor visibility and there were numerous accidents. Now, it's a roundabout, and traffic flows much more smoothly (I've never seen more than three cars waiting to enter, and it usually takes about 5-10 seconds per car). Multi-lane roundabouts are probably more confusing than single-lane, as well, but if the street is primarily traveled by locals, give them some time to learn it and speed should pick back up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm curious. Stop signs are red. A lot of the environment around them is green. And about 10% of men have difficulty telling red from green.

Would a different color work better?

<comment><USER10> _And about 10% of men have difficulty telling red from green._

No.

"Red-green colorblindness" is an inaccurate and misleading name; "green weakness" is a better description, and is what every doctor I've talked to uses as a casual name for the condition.

The best explanation I know of is to imagine the following: you're looking at a screen onto which is projected a square of pure red. Then, gradually, green is added, which will eventually cause the square to appear yellow (yes, red and green make yellow). When a person with "normal" color vision sees it as yellow, a person with the common forms of green weakness would still see it as a bit orange-ish.

In other words, the common form of "red-green colorblindness" doesn't cause a red sign to look green, or a green light to look red, or grass to look red, or any of that stuff. It mostly causes problems in the yellow part of the spectrum (one reason why I tend to avoid earth tones).

<comment><USER11> It might have been a different condition, but I could swear I saw a page of a guy who made a side by side comparison of images that for him looked the same.

I clearly remember two pictures, one depicting very bright red berries on a bush and other with the berries colored green, almost invisible now.

<comment><USER12> Maybe this page: <http://critiquewall.com/2007/12/10/blindness>

<comment><USER11> Exactly that one. Thanks.

So, is that a different condition?

<comment><USER12> Hmm. I'm not sure. I am R/G colorblind myself, and I don't confuse red and green traffic lights; they look completely different to me. On the other hand, some devices use LEDs that can be red or green (like the Nintendo DS; red means it's time to charge the battery), and I can't tell them apart at all.

Also, for what it's worth, on my MacBook the images in the aforementioned blog post look almost the same to me. But I looked at them on a different computer as well, a netbook where I tweaked the color settings, and there they don't look the same at all. (I still can't pass the Ishihara test on that one though... :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Keep designing and we'll end up in a hole. Look at brake lights. First just two little lights. Then big, reflective lights. Then another light in the rear window. Then one on the mirror. Soon every car will look like the Vegas strip. Why all this inflation? Because we get lazy the more obvious the light becomes? How about one tiny bulb, that you have to really strain to see. Cheaper, keep us all "in the drivers seat" instead of making our way to work in a zombie state.

<comment><USER13> The big, reflective lights are there partially due to the fact that we're using LEDs for brake lights instead of bulbs. The advantage here is that LEDs respond _much_ faster than bulbs, which have a significant delay between power applied vs. light generated.</comment></comment>


Night owls have more grey matter in their brains than early birds - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2020-06-night-owls-grey-brains-early.html <comment><USER3> I'm certifiably a night-owl and definitely not a morning-person (to the point where I employ licensed caregivers to yell at me in the morning - <USER2> psychologist recommended it!) - but I wouldn't attribute it in any way to being "social" - for some reason I just find it significantly easier to be focused, motivated, and productive after 6pm than any time before.

I used to attribute it to my horrible procrastination and how only in the night before a school or uni homework deadline I'd crank something out out of desperation, but it's still an ongoing habit with my current day-job (er... night-job?) where deadlines aren't really a thing (I love my boss) but I still feel most-productive in the evenings.

I'm ASD+ADHD[1] too - and I see similar things with other people I know with similar diagnoses. I believe they're all related.

[1]: I really dislike the "ADHD" label because I'm not hyperactive in any way - or resemble stereotypical symptoms - if I could rename whatever it is I've got I'd call it "Motivation deficit" or similar.

<comment><USER4> I fit the same attributes. ADHD (with hyperactivity in this case) and can't really get anything done before 8pm usually. There isn't a force I've found that will actually wake me up and get me to start my day, and I naturally slip into a 4-6am bedtime to 3pm wake time. Lost my job recently in large part because of this (not the first time). I'm kind of lost atm for the nth time and probably burned out. Could you elaborate or your circumstances or whatever you care to? Any misc advice is always welcome as well.

Edit: Read the rest of your replies about caregivers

<comment><USER5> Diagnosed with ADHD 10+ years ago in my 20s. Can be very impulsive in behavior and hyperactive when it's bad. Since about 28 or 29, I flipped from being a night owl to being a morning person. I usually wake up between 5 and 6, depending on when I went to bed the night before. Haven't used an alarm in about 8 or 9 years. I just wake up when I'm done sleeping.

I started lifting weights 2-3 times a week and I changed my diet from being carb-based to being protein based. In my 20s, I'd eat a bowl or two of spaghetti, or a pizza for a meal. Now, a meal is generally a protein source, a carb source, and a lot of vegetables (e.g. chicken and rice and a lot of kale, or steak and potatoes and a lot of broccoli). I think the most significant change was the diet, because in periods when I was injured or couldn't lift weights, I still sleep well.

I also started getting a bit more on a schedule. Eating breakfast between 7:30 and 8:30, lunch between 12:00 and 1:30, and dinner around 7:30, etc. has really helped my focus and attention and poise. It feels like the volume is turned down on the ADHD and it's much easier to remain calm and in control throughout the day.

Edit: I think I also have a mindset about this. I refuse to give myself permission to use ADHD as an excuse for not being the person I want to be. I think the thing I'm most scared of is looking back on my life with regret at the things I failed to do because I used some diagnosis as an excuse to not put in the work necessary to be the person I wanted to.

<comment><USER4> Great to hear you managed to put yourself in a good place. I'm 28 now, diagnosed last year (in so much as I was prescribed medication based on an official evaluation). These are pretty common sentiments from people who have managed to wrangle their lives, and I'd say that I've already adopted them for the most part. A big contributor to why I lost my job was that I didn't have anything else to do, and I couldn't just get up and do the job that wasn't that stimulating and have that be the day. I'm a skateboarder, I go to the gym, I hike, and do some calisthenics, my diet is mostly fruits and proteins, but aside from not eating 1kg of pasta in one sitting, I haven't seen any profound changes. These are all things that everyone should do, but most people also wake up on time for work. So while these are important aspects of your life now, what was the path you adopted that helped you get there?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It is to be noted that they found "evening types" people had greater grey matter volume in an area of the brain called the precuneus, NOT in the whole brain.

Also it is not clear whether more grey matter makes the individuals "evening types" or the other way around. This study does not discuss that. So jumping to theories about personality traits seems quite far fetched.

Evening types were younger than morning types in their sample of studied people. It is known that there is a decrease in grey matter volume between adulthood and old age, whereas white matter volume was found to increase from age 19-40, and decline after this age (Bartzokis et al.). So it is not surprising that their data showed evening types (younger people) had higher grey matter than morning types (older people).

<comment><USER7> All of this seems fair, so an interesting note off of this:

I find the causality/correlative arrow here interesting as no matter the direction, there is interesting insight.

<comment><USER6> That would be interesting but I am not sure if this study is solid to even show existence of this arrow. That assumes that there are no confounding variables but just a one directional arrow either way. However several confounding variables likely exist (maybe age, maybe more things we haven't thought about) that could give rise to reduction in gray matter, change in sleeping patterns, so on and so forth.

Since this is not a behavioral study where experimentalists can actually control for confounding factors (like in animal studies), this correlation/causation arrow likely is a spurious observable effect. An ideal experiment would involve studying say lab animals in a controlled setting where "everything else being equal" one group sleeps during day and other during night and then observe their gray matter. Perhaps similar studies already exist but this paper doesn't refer to anything.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I thought it was a study about birds and I was confused why they were trying to apply all these human traits in the article. I then came over here and downvoted two commentors for also confusingly talking about birds.

I much prefer the original title of the study: Diurnal Preference and Grey Matter Volume in a Large Population of Older Adults: Data from the UK Biobank

<comment><USER9> The (IMO) bizarre re-titling that this site does boggles me.

[https://hackernewstitles.netlify.app/](https://hackernewstitles.netlify.app/)

<comment><USER10> That's an interesting page. Perhaps off-topic, but I'm never sure where meta _can_ be discussed so I guess a subthread of a subthread might be reasonably out of the way / collapsable.

Some of the changes are clearly good: "Article: Learning how to learn (with 20 study references)" was changed into "Learning how to learn" which is indeed what it's about (the article prefix is useless, the "with 20 references" sounds a bit like WikiHow's "with pictures!"). The "google relentlessly continues to attack on X" title was changed to just "google add experimental flag to do X" to make it more objective, also good.

But those are the minority: another titles was first edited to change "54" into "fifty four" (how's that useful?) and then edited again to omit the number altogether (how is that more helpful to the reader?). The "CDC denies tribes" title was changed to not mention the CDC at all, now the tribes are simply "thwarted" (hiding info, why? AFAICT nobody else was involved in the thwarting). The interview date "May 2020" was removed (helpful how?). "My daughter and I made a site to explore the ~3.5M photos from the ISS" was edited to remove the 3.5M number (just why?)...

Not even the author can edit a title iirc, this is all needless moderation at best or harmful at worst.

<comment><USER11> How many of those 'useless' edits were changing the title back to whatever the actual page title was? Keep in mind that sometimes site owners change or A/B test page titles.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Not all of it is without choice. I used to be a night owl. I woke around 10am, worked from 11am until 1am or sometimes later. The invariant was that I generally slept between 9-10 hours.

I also suffered from seasonal affective disorder and winter time depression with short days in Canada. To help with this I started spending time outside during the early part of the day and generally ate my lunch outside if possible. This helped somewhat. This switch to prioritizing sunlight exposure also made me consider that sleeping while the sun was up and working in the dark was a strange choice.

For more than the last 25 years I've intentionally time shifted to ensure that I don't waste daylight hours sleeping. If I'd follow my natural sleep rhythms I'd almost surely drift later, I'd we waking several hours after sunrise and working in to the evening. Even though I have to have some discipline about using an alarm clock and only allowing myself 1 day a week to wake naturally it is not actually that hard because I do it consistently. I could also easily stay up late one night, but getting up at the same time every day makes staying up harder.

My intentional time shifting isn't that dramatic of a "hacking" of my natural inclination. It has made a difference with seasonal depression and I've found that social activity works better with a time schedule aligned to daylight hours. It is easy to read a study like this and conclude that personal choice plays no part in determining your "fate". You have some flexibility and choice to do what you need to do. An inclination is not an outcome.

<comment><USER13> Your experience is not the same as many other people's. There are tons of cases of people who perform markedly worse when they have to get up earlier, even if they're getting enough sleep.

This is a choice for some people. It's not for others.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> so they say that having little grey matter (like early birds) correlates with "empathy, agreeableness and cooperation." But maybe early birds are only so empathatic and agreeable because their day/night cycle is not always disrupted by how the world is set up? Whereas us grumpy night owls having a case of a bad monday morning is maybe just because we have to stand up early and don't want to?

<comment><USER15> I find it counterintuitive. I would've thought that a night owl is more compatible with being a social person. Much of our social exchange happens in the evening (you rarely meet friends before work). Getting up at 5am as an early bird doesn't really give you any more time with other people compared to getting up later. So why night owls should be less sociable confuses me.

<comment><USER16> " Much of our social exchange happens in the evening (you rarely meet friends before work)."

Socialization is not 'friends' it's 'everyone'.

<comment><USER15> Good point but at all places I've worked, it's more likely to have meetings or other social exchanges after 5pm than before 8am.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Based on my own night-owl life, I'd suggest that might be because people might be more sensitive to social interaction (thus these interactions being more disruptive), and thus need the calm of the night to pursue their hobbies and readings. Edit: that does not resist deeper analysis: one can as well evade social interactions by studying in the very early morning after getting up.

<comment><USER18> Inertia usually means it's easier to stay up late than to get up early.

<comment><USER17> Could even just be that night owls are "people with more inertia".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Correlation or causation? Do people that get up earlier have to work more? Possibly live in more difficult conditions? Maybe are more addicted to caffeine? Just kinda spitballing here.

<comment><USER20> Cheap beds increase grey matter

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> "We also know that reduced volume in this area has been associated with empathy, agreeableness and cooperation, so it ties nicely with behavioural data that suggests early chronotypes tend to engage in more pro-social behaviours than evening types."

As a night owl, I hate when generic observations are made about us. I hate it even more when they're backed by scientific research and fit perfectly.

<comment><USER22> Even though I am also a late chronotype too (I don't like calling it "night owl" if you are not a owl though, because I am not a owl), I don't hate it when stuff is backed by scientific research; I think is better that way, rather than making accusations which have not ben scientifically tested.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> > Eveningness, meanwhile, has previously been shown to be associated with an > increased risk of psychiatric disorders and personality traits such a > neuroticism.

Hey, I resemble that remark. I think it's also interesting that it's _more_ grey matter that causes it, usually I think I hear of many brain issues coming from a lack of matter or deterioration in an area.

</comment><comment><USER24> Just woke up. Totally _agree_ with this article, even though it was published 4 hours ago in the early hours of the morning!

</comment><comment><USER25> Here is an interesting point for discussion that I hope others may chime in on. What is the difference between being a night owl and experiencing jet lag? With enough discipline, one can recover from jet lag in a matter of days. Why then do some people believe themselves condemned to be a night owl or early bird?

<comment><USER26> For me at least I can train myself to go to bed at 10PM with discipline, but if I miss one day I find myself back into the natural groove of going to bed at 2AM. I do not expend effort to sleep at 2AM, I expend effort to sleep at 10PM. When I am jet lagged my body is confused and does not quite know when 2AM is, but eventually it figures it out and we're back to square one (Google "zeitgeber" for how it figures this out, but subjectively I assure you my body does the adjusting, not me).

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I have been taking my temperature every day, maybe a few times a day for over a month. I was just curious to see how helpful this is related to COVID-19. Anyway, what I did see, for what it is worth, was my temperature change by a lot over the course of a day, by over a degree. And I can guess what my temperature will be based on how energetic I feel. I am not a morning person and the temperature is higher later in the day, peaking from around 3:00 PM to 7:00 PM. It returns to around the wakeup temperature at maybe 11:00 PM or midnight. I am guess the temperature profile for a morning person would look different.

</comment><comment><USER28> Checks out. I stay up all night and don't like talking to people. Guess my brain is fat.

</comment><comment><USER29> I sort of suspect the way to become a night owl is to get enough sleep.

</comment><comment><USER30> Cue lots of self congratulatory facebook posts.

</comment><comment><USER31> Not a fan of Voxel Based Morphometry, personally.</comment>


How to fix the US economy in one week* - <AUTHOR> http://kswizz.com/post/9977686483/how-to-fix-the-us-economy-in-one-week

<comment><AUTHOR> The health care model envisioned is essentially a replica of the swiss health care system—one of the best in the world.

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

It solves both the problems of free-market insurance by regulating and making insurance mandatory, and the problems of universal healthcare inefficiency and abuse by employing 10% copays on top of deductibles and competition between private insurers.

</comment><comment><USER2> wow, those suggestions are a great way to screw over so many people, all over the world. bravo

<comment><USER3> maybe, but what we are doing now is screwing over of so many more people all over the world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> GREAT!</comment>


The Final Answer For What To Do To Prevent Piracy [of Indie Games] - <AUTHOR> http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2011/05/final-answer-for-what-to-do-to-prevent.html <comment><USER2> The other important point:

Every minute you waste on the specter of piracy is a minute you're not spending making something useful. Given the choice between spending time on people who are paying you versus the people who never will, the choice seems obvious.

No one is going to crow to their friends about your awesome anti-piracy mechanism. Make their life better? That would be something worth sharing.

Piracy is inevitable, loyal users aren't. Put effort into the fight you can win.

<comment><USER3> The author makes the quote:

> _Whenever you find yourself starting a sentence with, "I don't want people > to pirate my game, so I am going to ..." you are very close to making a big > mistake._

Which is absolutely 100% correct. Because your goal shouldn't be preventing people from pirating your game. The number of people pirating your game is basically irrelevant. What matters is the number of people _buying_ your game. Reducing piracy is only relevant if you're converting those pirates into paying customers - if you're not, then you haven't actually achieved anything.

<comment><USER4> You can't reduce piracy per se. You can just make your product more worth buying and as a _side-effect_ piracy may go down a little, i.e. some who used to pirate it will instead buy it. Or then more people are buying and more people are also pirating it: that'd still be an improvement.

Trying to reduce piracy will just give you a void and you still have to fill that void with buying customers. So starting from the latter part in the first place makes more sense.

<comment><USER2> Quite so – my view has always been that making something so valuable that people will steal it is a great problem to have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have not heard of a single protection scheme that could not be broken. Not from the laziest homebrew 'protection' to the schemes used to protect 5- or 6-digit sale price engineering software, passign through every game in between.

If you plan on implementing a protection scheme, here's what I would want you to do. Think of the best and worst things it could do to these two classes of people: legitimate customers and pirates.

Pirates. Worst [for you] case: it inconveniences them for an hour. Best case: it inconveniences them up until two weeks after your release [two weeks is the usual goal for a game, Spyro was legendary in a way, and lasted two months [http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3030/keeping_the_pirat...](http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3030/keeping_the_pirates_at_bay.php) ]

Customers. Best case: it inconveniences them for five seconds. Worst case: Depends on your scheme. Make it one where worst case is a one-day support e-mail away. Not where they lose all their files, are left cursing your name and treated like trash because they just wanted to move to a new computer.

<comment><USER6> There are more than two types of people though. Back when I wrote about the subject I came up with four shade, though there might be more.

[http://www.kalzumeus.com/2006/09/05/everything-you-need- to-k...](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2006/09/05/everything-you-need-to-know- about-registration-systems/)

To misquote a Chris Rock line, there exist at least some people who are as honest as their options.

I love online software over downloadable software for many reasons. One is it makes piracy virtually impossible. Another is that the conversion rates are much higher. Those might be totally unrelated, but hey, accounts in my DB means I don't even have to care. (Gamers are voting for this future with their wallets.)

<comment><USER7> Games are slightly different, for example with WoW there are plenty of people playing for free on private servers people have setup, you don't see this at all with SaaS apps. Although if your game is an MMO and popular enough the network effects mean the vast majority of players are going to want to be on the legit servers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Steve Jackson Games has a similar approach to protecting their ebooks:

<http://e23.sjgames.com/faq.html#protected>

> Q. Are the files in e23 copy protected?

> A. No. That would interfere with your use of them.

</comment><comment><USER9> Anyone knows Company of Heroes? It's not an indie game but a game from THQ. The developers decided that adding mechanism to it to prevent piracy is wasted money. And they were right because everybody I know bought it and the is/was a huge success.

Mechanism to prevent piracy are so expensive that it is not worth the money. Plus in the and the game will get cracked anyway and that means all the money you put into it was just useful for a short time.

Another thing about preventing piracy methods is that in most cases the paying customer are losing. I buy a game for 50 bucks from Capcom and can't play it cause they wanted to prevent piracy with a phone-home DRM. This is ridiculous.

</comment><comment><USER10> Please tell this to big game developers that make you have a persistent internet connection to play, or only allow the key to be used 3 times etc.

Things like that only punish legitimate players, if it's pirated, those safeguards are removed and aren't a problem.

<comment><USER11> Having frequented large amounts of game forums over the past 10 years, I can assure you: _The big game developers get told exactly this hundreds of times a day._

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I disagree a bit:

"Whenever you find yourself starting a sentence with, "I don't want people to pirate my game, so I am going to ..." you are very close to making a big mistake."

There's one way to end that sentence that isn't a mistake:

I don't want people to pirate my game, so I am going to... Make it such a good game that they want to pay for it.

It actually works! Some pirates aren't convertible because they are complete jerks, or don't have money, or any number of other reasons that make conversion impossible. But quite a few are actually decent people who have needs that aren't being met. They -will- pay for a product that has value and meets their needs.

This article is a good example of failing to meet those needs. His piracy prevention tactics actually make it easier to pirate the game than buy it!

True story: I have a friend who bought some software and liked it. Then he reinstalled Windows and it wouldn't install. He contacted tech support and tried for 2 weeks to get them to fix the problem. He gave up, pirated it, and then emailed them telling him that he pirated it instead. Yes, a product he already owned. The next day they sent him a new registration code that fixed the problem. Ridiculous.

</comment><comment><USER13> Valves approach is best- Try to make the multiplayer experience worth paying for.

Unfortunately, The market is being forced by execs to move to a platform that is "internet connection required" for playing single player games and the tools to do this without piracy being a issue are going to be here soon ( onlive ) - Yes, occasionally a source will leak to the public but for the most part this new system is going to be worse across the board for the consumers.

Sometimes 'progress' sucks.

<comment><USER14> I'd also say that steam's more convenient than piracy. And the drm is usually painless. And you throw in their sales, and games will go for 5 or 10 dollars. To me the convenience alone is worth the money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I actually had a similar situation more recently (but with mobile apps, not games). Also asked a user to enter program-generated key when making a purchase. I don't think it's a huge problem if you explain where this key is shown inside the app. Speaking of distraction-free "buy now" webpage a reasonable solution I came up with the following solution: just ask for user e-mail (it's already provided by systems like PayPal anyway). Generate a random "user id" (better make it numeric) and send it to the user's e-mail along with activation instructions. Then user must go to another webpage on your site and enter 3 pieces of information: e-mail, id and the program key (the last one must be shown by the application). This page, if all goes well (the info is checked against the database records), generates an activation key to be entered to activate the program, which is also e-mailed (not just displayed on the webpage). This way you can control the piracy issue (because everything goes via e-mail, and also know/conrtol # of activations per user, since last step can be performed multiple times).

</comment><comment><USER16> I kind of agree with this philosophy, to a point. However would you leave your house without locking the front door?

<comment><USER17> He still has a serial key system, so he has a lock. He's just not bothering with the bear traps, electric fences and guard dogs.

<comment><USER16> Fair enough, and agreed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Why the [of Indie Games]?

<comment><USER19> I don't think corporates rely on "loyal costumers". I can't imagine a manager at some big company agreeing to this line of thinking.

I mean yea, theoretically this applies to everything (games, music, movies, etc), but .. I have a hard time believing that big companies will someday realize this.

<comment><USER12> I disagree. When they make XYZ 7, they are counting on loyal XYZ customers to buy it just because it's the next one. I'm sure they also try to make a great game, but the budget for development and marketing were based on the sales of XYZ 6 and that many of those customers will be back for the next one.

Brand loyalty is real and companies do count on it.</comment></comment></comment>


How To Set Up Your Own BBS – Be The King of 1989… Today - <AUTHOR> http://lunduke.com/?p=2156

<comment><USER2> That is so funny. I saw BTJunkie shut down yesterday and I said to myself, "Time to fire up the old BBS"

<comment><USER3> I can imagine a world in which we go back to direct dial-up connections to avoid being spied on.

Then again, I imagine that it's trivial to monitor those connections as well; although just like with SSL, they may not be able to snoop on the actual contents.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Now I'm wondering if I can/should set one up using my seldom-used office extension.</comment>


Ask HN: Job application tracking featured on Show HN a few months ago? - <AUTHOR> I'd like to find the URL but I can't remember the name of the application.
IIRC, someone made it while they were job hunting to keep their sanity.
Does anyone remember the name? It was posted on Show HN a few months ago. <comment><AUTHOR> I found it: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16912546](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16912546)

jobhound.io</comment>


Moving the Needle on Gun Violence - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdziarski.com/blog/?p=7290 <comment><USER2> I like the framing of the opening paragraph: "like other complex problems, the success metric shouldn't be reducing gun violence to zero, but rather how much we can move the needle down from the 33,000 lives lost to gun violence each year." But I'm not sure that any the suggested actions would really "move the needle" on the number of deaths.

Let's start by considering the first proposal "Federal Grants for School Resource Officers". How people are killed in schools each year in the US, and how many would be saved if we had additional resource officers? 2018 is considered the worst year ever for school shootings, and 35 people were killed ([https://www.bbc.com/news/business-46507514](https://www.bbc.com/news/business-46507514)).

It can easily argued that this is 35 people too many, but if the stated goal is to reduce the 33,000 deaths per year, this seems like an poor solution to lead with. Even if adding federally funded resource officers got this number to zero (which I think we agree that it wouldn't?) this only leads to a .1% reduction in shooting deaths --- which doesn't qualify as "moving the needle"!

The other proposals seem to follow the same theme --- they might be reasonable ideas on their own, but they seem unlikely to actually reduce the number of shooting deaths in the US by any significant amount. I guess the change to HIPAA might --- 2/3 of the shooting deaths in the US are suicides. Is there a good estimate of how many suicides might be prevented by making it more difficult for the mentally ill to purchase firearms? I'm sure it could be a real reduction, but I'm doubtful that it would be anything close to a majority.

Since this is Hacker News, let's tie things back to computer programming. The key to optimizing a program is to measure first, to find out where the program spends the majority of its time. A program doesn't get much faster if you reduce the time spent on a rarely called subroutine from .1% to 0%, even if you make that subroutine much faster. Instead, if your goal is making the program faster (reducing the number of gun deaths) you need to figure out where the program is spending all its time (which guns are used to kill people in the US). I'll focus on homicides, since even though they are only 1/3 of the gun deaths in the US per year, they strike me as more preventable.

It turns out that the vast majority of gun homicides in the US are done with pistols. The FBI's data says that in about 90% of the cases were the weapon is known, the perpetrator was using a handgun: [https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in- the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-...](https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in- the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-2016/tables/expanded-homicide-data- table-4.xls). The remainder are split about evenly between rifles and shotguns. It's possible that these numbers might be off by a bit, since in about 30% of cases the type of weapon is not stated, but it seems likely that pistols are the majority of the unknowns as well. I can't find up to date numbers for suicides, but the numbers I did find ([https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/pdf/10.2105/AJPH.78.7....](https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/pdf/10.2105/AJPH.78.7.824)) suggested that handguns are used in the majority of suicides as well.

So if I were trying to "move the needle" on gun homicides in the US, I would probably put all my emphasis on reducing the number of pistols in the hands of people who are likely to kill themselves or murder others. If your goal is reducing the number of gun deaths per year in the US, wouldn't this be a better place to start than increasing the number of school support officers? And if your goal isn't to reduce the number of deaths by guns in the US (and I agree that there are lots of other worthy goals), why start with such a solid lead paragraph asking this question?</comment>


How should one learn real world C and C++? - <AUTHOR>

I recently got my bachelor's degree and I'm feeling like I really need to get to do something useful in the real world.
Reading books doesn't help. Sure, you learn the syntax, how the language works and that's about it. There might be some useful tips in the book, but that's not how I seem to learn. This is why I consider myself an absolute beginner.
I need something which actually helps me learn how to write useful code. I really want to start with C as I will need both C and C++ in the future.
What methods should one use to move from writing "toy projects" to real world coding? Which projects would be recommended to start with?
Any help would be appreciated. Thank you! <comment><USER2> You just graduated, and you want to write something you feel is worthwhile, understandable.

You want to write it in a language that has "staying power", understandable.

You will not learn to code C (or any other language) by writing a library out of whole cloth.

Write a small program (in any language) that fixes a problem that you have with computers.

Then, find out what you did wrong with that program. Fix it. Then, profile it. Figure out what your program is spending time on, and make that time more efficient,

Refactor that code, and profile it again. Realize that you are not constrained by hardware, and your JIT interpreter is missing some obvious optimizations.

If you can call that, then you shouldn't worry about getting a job.

( ps. C and C++ are different things. C++ is not the next step after C. Be wary of positions that say they are the same. )

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the advice.

I am aware that the two aren't the same thing. I just want to use them for various tasks (C for unix system programming and C++ for cross platform apps).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The most 'whole' answer you'll find, by the director of Google's R+D, Peter Norvig, if you aren't already familiar with him:

<http://norvig.com/21-days.html>

<comment><AUTHOR> I had forgotten about that programming in 10 years thing completely. However, he's right, thank you for reminding me.

I am still looking for various little projects to code.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do you use OpenSUSE as a web server? Why or why not? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I'm using Ubuntu because it has nice Docker support</comment>


Gentoo: "We're Not Dead" - <AUTHOR> http://www.linux-mag.com/cache/7570/1.html <comment><USER2> I suspect that Arch has displaced a lot of their potential market anyway. Gentoo always seemed to be made up of two groups, the people that wanted a rolling distribution, and the people that bought into the whole CFLAGS optimisation thing.

Arch pretty much rules the market, atm at least, on the first group, and provides a reasonable approach for the second group, taking away probably some of the more casual 'gotta build everything from source' users.

<comment><AUTHOR> I use Ubuntu here, but still, I can see a certain elegance in building everything from source.

<comment><USER2> I use Ubuntu on my web servers, and archlinux on my general purpose servers... Ubuntu is just so easy to get apache setup right for multi-hosting and general web app setups, the converse is that archlinux is surprisingly difficult to get apache working right (how I want, anyway) on. But that's mostly a function of apache being a pain, and the arch apache setup being largely 'whatever upstream distributes'.

Personally tho, I go with binary packages for the most part, I have no real need for compiling everything from source.

I did try to install gentoo once, it was annoying and difficult, the installer was hideously out of date compared to the things being installed, and the whole thing fell apart from dependancy problems long before I got a working desktop... And to think I went with a LFS setup a few years ago, and was happy with it for ages (about 2-3 years on my primary desktop).</comment></comment></comment>


Young graduates struggle for Silicon Valley jobs - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSTRE4B801L20081209

<comment><USER2> _"... I feel like I put in all the work (in school) to not have a job... I'm going to have to be a little more flexible now and take what I can get ..."_

Welcome to the world of the recessions. Where a job, any job is better than none. The good thing is, recessions do not last forever.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not sure what to make of this article. It doesn't get into much detail.

Two people are quoted. One is an honors graduate looking for a job in marketing. I'm not sure what her major was, but I'd bet it wasn't in computer science, engineering, physics, or math. The other was a contractor for AT&T - she says she wants to "user my degree", but no information was provided about her major.

The article gives a few general numbers about employment for young people and recent college grads, but again, nothing about specific majors.

I'm interested in knowing what's going on out there, but this article is pretty much useless, in my opinion.</comment>


Rackspace Launches OpenStack - Open Source Cloud Computing Software - <AUTHOR> http://www.openstack.org/ <comment><USER2> This is already being discussed on <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1527572>

_(I thought HN was able to tell that<http://www.openstack.org> == <http://openstack.org> \- which hasn't occured here which is why we have two entries on the front page)_</comment>


A phpunit BDD Alternative - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/p/phpconform/ I wrote a bdd extension for phpunit a few years back and have been leveraging it recently for some greatnonprofits.org API work. It provides some nice output and plays pretty nice with phpunit + testdox.  Give it a shot and log any bugs for issues that need to be fixed! I'd love the community support. <comment><AUTHOR> I wrote this framework a few years back and have been extending and utilizing it a bit recently for validating greatnonprofits.org's new bidirectional review api.

It's a nice tool although it needs more eyes on it to identify lurking issues with misc phpunit features.

Please give it a spin. It is only verified to run against phpunit 3.6.7 but should work around similiar versions.</comment>


How to Build a CSS3 Sliding Menu with 3D Page Effect - <AUTHOR> http://www.sitepoint.com/css3-sliding-menu/

<comment><USER2> A pretty impressive effect, especially when considering this is just HTML+CSS! I'm still stunned about what those two can do in combination.

</comment><comment><USER3> Not a very subtle jack of Hakim's work - <http://lab.hakim.se/meny/></comment>


Juliane Koepcke - survived a 10K foot freefall from an airliner - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juliane_Koepcke

<comment><AUTHOR> You can listen to her tell the story in this American Public Media podcast: <http://thestory.org/archive/20121012_The_Story.mp3/view>

</comment><comment><USER2> It's amazing some of the situations people have survived. I once owned a book that collected documented cases of people surviving situations that should have been certain death.

Perhaps even more amazing, just for the sheer improbability, are cases where someone fell out of an airplane, and was saved by falling into another airplane. There is even at least one case where someone fell out of their open-cockpit plane, and the plane went into a dive and ended up below them, and they were able to get back into their own plane.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is one of those situations where one is not sure if the subject of the story is incredibly lucky or incredibly unlucky.

</comment><comment><USER4> Werner Herzog's documentary about this story, Wings of Hope, is fantastic.

</comment><comment><USER5> if you think 10K foot freefall is cool, what about 33K foot: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vesna_Vulovi%C4%87></comment>


The 10 Emerging Technologies of 2008 (TR10) - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20249/ <comment><USER2> "off-line Web Apps" ... hmm, isn't that another way to say a desktop app that's also a special purpose client?</comment>


A Guy Named Craig May Soon Have Control over a Large Swath of Utah - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/a-guy-named-craig-may-soon-have-control-over-a-large-swath-of-utah <comment><USER2> Hey cool! Something I have first hand experience with as an oil and gas accountant.

The Federal Government, as you can imagine, controls vast amounts of mineral acreage and the nomination process is how these plots of mineral rights are brought up to auction. The auctions used to be done in person, but now they are done online at www.energynet.com.

Federal Oil and Gas leases are all standardized. Like the article states, the term is for 10 years. You pay an initial bonus consideration payment up front (whose price is determined by auction), and then afterwards you pay an annual rental payment. Any production on a Federal lease is subject to a 12.5% royalty rate, which generally is very cheap compared to a lease from a private mineral owner.

The article doesn't make the distinction very clear, but this is for the leasing of the mineral rights only; surface rights are separate and distinct and might not even be owned by the Federal Government. If a well was to be drilled, there would be a separate surface use agreement between the oil and gas company and the surface owner.

If anyone has any questions about the general process of Federal leasing I can try to answer them as best as I can!

<comment><USER3> Very interesting! How does this work from an average citizen's perspective? If I had a spare $10k, could I simply go bid on some parcels, and (assuming I won the auction), simply let it sit for 10 years, thereby denying other companies the ability to exploit it?

<comment><USER4> Environmentalists do things like this sometimes for specifically that reason.

Another way of simply buying more environmental protection from the federal government is to purchase SO2 allowances at auction. The US government runs a "cap and trade" system for sulphur dioxide emissions where prospective SO2 emitters have to buy allowances at auction for the tonnage of SO2 they will emit. Environmentalists frequently buy a chunk of allowances and refuse to resell them, reducing emissions even more while raising costs for polluters.

<comment><USER5> Is this one of the strategies used by the Nature Conservancy?

<comment><USER4> I don't know. The Acid Rain Retirement Fund is a nonprofit that primarily bids in the SO2 allowance market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Some guy Craig may soon have a 10 year mineral rights lease on some small lot in Utah…

The author of this ad "is a founder of the grassroots climate campaign", doesn't even mention the size of this "large swath", so I'm left to wonder if it is even similar in size to the 1,100 acre example he gives, which itself would be 0.002% of Utah; that's not a large swath. I have multiple friends with larger farms than this in a single town.

If I stake a claim to pan for gold in Montana, I wonder if he will write an article about me.

<comment><USER7> Further, the author wants us to be outraged of "how entirely simple and legal this is".

However, why should the Federal government get this land at all? We used to have allodial title many years ago...but then it became common-law precedent that we effectively "rent" our land from the government and pay perpetual property taxes for that right.

The lack of allodial title is what ultimately creates an inescapable "head tax" on every citizen.

<comment><USER8> Unless "we" are the people who were here before the Europeans came in looking for plunder and land, why should "we" lay claim to it at all?

<comment><USER9> How far back do we go? First humans were african? Earth is theirs?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The title makes it sound like an individual will get control of a couple percent of the land in Utah.

Reading the article, it seems more like an oil & gas company is purchasing (EDIT: leasing) some land in Utah, and the article doesn't even make it clear how much (unless I missed it).

How is this really different from what we already know? There's a lot of cheap land out there, the country is big, and the federal government makes various kinds of deals with people who want to develop it. The article says that it's $2 an acre, which sounds like little, but it doesn't provide a point of comparison.

<comment><USER11> > How is this really different from what we already know?

I actually didn't know that public land could pass into private ownership so easily.

As it says in the article: "The law itself is the crime — a gift to the oil and gas businesses."

<comment><USER10> As someone else pointed out, it's not ownership, it's a 10-year lease.

This all sounds pretty routine; "a feature, not a bug", designed to promote economic development and be accommodating in general.

If you don't like development in general, or Oil & Gas development in particular, you won't be happy with this arrangement. But I would think there would be more outrageous examples than this one.

<comment><USER12> It's not ownership, but it does permanently alters the land and permanently removes value in both terms of both recreation and mineral value. So while they technically don't own it, they get to forever change it and extract a lot of money from our public land at rock bottom rates.

<comment><USER13> It permanently alters the land, but often all that means is travel infrastructure like roads or trails. These end up increasing the potential recreation value in a place that would be otherwise inaccessible.

Whether humanity ought to recreate in these areas or not is another question (we are currently experiencing numerous wildfires in Arizona and the Southwest in general). But it's not necessarily a clear case of destroying the land permanently. Rain alters land permanently as well, but few are motivated to stop that process on this type of land.

<comment><USER12> Please See this other thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23553446](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23553446)

And please look up the Converse Basic Grove of Sequoias. The whole place was destroyed to make fence posts. Oh, my bad I suppose "lease" is the current euphemism for destroying the land like that. But hey! cutting down all those giant sequoias improved the recreation opportunities, right?

That's an extreme example but any natural resource extraction irreparably damages land. Even grazing or roads have significant impacts that take hundreds or thousands of years to recover.

Roads dramatically change the landscape and cause huge impacts. And the roads usually serve some purpose, i.e. more damaging activities. Crisscrossing the landscape with roads has a huge impact on the land and does not enhance the recreational opportunities other than the ability to take instagram pics from your car.

<comment><USER13> I don't think you're arguing in good faith. There are obviously numerous activities that take place via wilderness access. Given my chosen username on here I'm quite familiar with the concept. Implying that Instagram photos are the goal is a strawman, and not even a good one. My hope was to suggest that the world is a complex place and nuance is warranted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Well there is probably more to the story then just this. For example there are places in France where you can buy a house and a small piece of land for 1 euro. While this may sound strange the reason the government does this is because those houses where left abandoned. So when you buy it you sign a contract with special rules that say that you need to refurbish it or rebuild it within a few years.

<comment><USER15> Source? I'd be willing to fix up house in Europe.

<comment><USER16> Googling "france acheter maison 1 eur" find for example this: [https://www.18h39.fr/articles/maison-a-1-euro-vraiment- une-b...](https://www.18h39.fr/articles/maison-a-1-euro-vraiment-une-bonne- affaire.html)) (use Google Translate etc.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The federal government owns a ton of land in the west when compared to the rest of the United States. The federal government owns 64.9% of Utah, but owns 0.3% of New York, 4.4% of South Carolina, and 13.2% of Florida.[0] We should auction off more land in the west, instead of leasing it.

[0] [https://ballotpedia.org/Federal_land_ownership_by_state](https://ballotpedia.org/Federal_land_ownership_by_state)

<comment><USER18> I'm not sure why that's wanted?

If the goal is to equalize the amount of land owned by the federal government in each state, why not do the opposite and have the government gain control of more land in the east?

<comment><USER19> Who said that was the goal? That doesn't make any sense. It would cost billions to buy up land on the east coast and only inflate the value of the remaining land.

Outside of monuments and parks most of the land the gov owns in western states is undesirable. You can already buy very cheap land in the middle of nowhere UT, NM, NV, and AZ. The market for off grid desert land with no water is small.

<comment><USER20> And this is exactly why the federal government still owns so much land. Through laws like the Taylor Grazing Act they sold almost all lands which had water in the west.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> An unknown amount of otherwise unwanted land is being leased by Craig for what is, at this point, an unknown reason? Neat.

</comment><comment><USER22> Why assume oil? Isn't it more likely, given the oil economics right now, that it is gold, or something else?

<comment><USER23> The leases mentioned in the article as specifically for oil and gas development as are handled by the "National Fluids Lease Sale System": [https://nflss.blm.gov/](https://nflss.blm.gov/)

Mining gold on federal lands seems to go through a different (and easier) process (involving staking a mining claim as opposed to nominating land and then bidding on it in an auction): [https://www.blm.gov/programs/energy-and- minerals/mining-and-...](https://www.blm.gov/programs/energy-and- minerals/mining-and-minerals/locatable-minerals/mining-claims/staking-a-claim)

<comment><USER24> Yes! I worked in precious metals exploration and the staking process seemed kinda crazy to me---racing up and down the hills in prospective areas, carrying the paperwork and bottles to put it them in (you can't use regular glass because the sun will eventually set the paper on fire). Guess it still is, at least in some states.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This seems like such a preposterous idea to me. You can buy an acre of land for $2 and just... just own it? I don't mean land ownership in general but rather a situation like this. So some company can just buy up the prairie and then anyone who'd want to use this for something productive (personally wouldn't consider drilling for oil productive) has to go and deal with them. That seems a bit backward, I'd rather see that land in the hands of Native Americans or, since the other option is a pipe dream, controlled by the government.

<comment><USER10> It's a lease: "The lease has a term of ten years, and, after the gavel comes down, the annual rental fee per acre would be a dollar and a half for the first five years, and two dollars for the second."

<comment><USER26> That's so ridiculously insanely cheap....is the land really that worthless?

<comment><USER27> Over $1000 per square mile per year is a lot of money if there aren't any minerals worth exploiting on that square mile.

<comment><USER26> The year 2020, when land is worthless unless you can exploit it...

<comment><USER28> All the lease gets you is limited mineral rights, so yes - the value is in extracting those minerals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Am I the only one who read the headline and thought this was going to be something about Craigslist?

</comment><comment><USER30> Spent a few minutes trying to figure out why Black Lives Matter owned so much of Utah...

</comment><comment><USER31> Alas! Its a different Craig.

</comment><comment><USER32> May have control... Over mineral exploration licences. And.. it looks like guys like Craig bid in to prevent exploration by determining not to explore. So they are bidding to preserve federal land against the predations of exploration in a time of declining markets for oil and gas

<comment><USER23> I don't think this is a correct reading of the article. Craig Larson is the owner of Prairie Hills Oil & Gas. Nothing in the article suggests that he nominated the land in order to prevent oil and gas exploration.

I think you are confusing Larson with Terry Tempest Williams, who is mentioned later in the article as trying to lease land in order to prevent it from being leased by oil and gas companies. The article doesn't suggest that Williams and her husband plan to bid on rights in the upcoming auction, so it seems likely that Larson (or another oil and gas company) will win that auction.

<comment><USER33> In particular, Larsen is the one who nominated the land for being able to be leased. If he wanted to protect the land from being leased, the obvious way to do so was to simply _not nominate it_ , so it wouldn't be up for auction, so nobody could bid on it. The fact that he nominated it at all means that he wants to bid on it.

(I should say it means he means to bid on at least some of it. I could see wanting to bid on something specific, and nominating much more than that, so that anybody who wants to swipe the piece you're interested in doesn't know which piece to bid on.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Gotta raise those royalty rates!</comment>


Ask HN: How to create a on site version of my SaaS? - <AUTHOR>

I have a SaaS built on open source software.
I want to provide a package that they can install on their servers.
Some customers want to run the entire infrastructure inside their own company.
What is the best way to do this? Create a virtualbox image? <comment><USER2> .ova container that the client can load in their virtualization environment. A way to install it in a fresh VM or a on physical box. Nothing to fancy, stick to stuff your clients likely can deploy easily. (As in, requiring virtualBox or vagrant or ... which is uncommon for production environments creates unnecessary work for them, and you don't want that)

</comment><comment><USER3> I have had to think about the same issue. The best idea I got was to use a Docker image. The database can be created and maintained external to the Docker VM.

<comment><AUTHOR> that's a very good idea.

is it possible to encrypt/secure it somehow from being pried open?

<comment><USER3> The database or the Docker file? Depends on the software, but locking down the database system is probably easy. I'll bet that is all you need. Locking down Docker is harder and makes less sense to me.

My application uses a secure HTTPS connection and does the decryption on its own. What this means is that the executable is useless to anybody else but that one enterprise customer.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm worried customer will poke around in it, and decide to steal whatever is in it.

Mind you that I am literally handing over the engine wrapped in plastic.

Last thing I want is customer becoming a competitor.

<comment><USER3> I suppose it depends on the application. Mine is in a compiled language. Hard to reverse engineer. If yours is in an interpreted language like Python, there might be a source code obfuscator that you can apply.

Do not underestimate the value of your expertise. Even if they had the source code, the chances of a paying customer becoming a competitor is low. Again, I suppose it depends on the application.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Continuous Integration of a Dockerized Rails Application - <AUTHOR> http://chrisstump.online/2016/03/03/continuous-integration-docker-rails/ <comment><AUTHOR> This article discusses how to run your test suite in the same containers you develop in on CircleCI</comment>


The H&K G11 [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGKcvM2Hh4g <comment><AUTHOR> Possibly the most complex and mechanically beautiful action in a gun, with a chamber that rotates from vertical to horizontal, coupled with caseless ammunition.

Sadly, after a couple of decades of development, it was never quite enough of an advancement to make it into military service anywhere.</comment>