Walmart Pay - <AUTHOR> http://news.walmart.com/news-archive/2015/12/10/walmart-introduces-walmart-pay <comment><USER3> All these "Company"Pay systems are horrible for the consumer. Sure they may give a particular consumer a particular benefit at a particular point in time, but on balance they are the Facebook of currencies.

One of PayPal's initial strategies was to maximize transactions for which both the payer and payee were PayPal customers. This decreased PayPal's operating costs and reduced fraud by a large amount. Sounds like everyone wins, right?

That's simply not what currency is. Currency is an transferable i.o.u. worth whatever the creditor says it's worth. The most pervasive currency is currently the greenback. Every additional party or layer between you and the U.S. government increases credit risk and transaction costs everytime you make a transaction outside the pay network your currency is held in.

Visa is so convenient because they try to be everywhere, because that's their business. Apple is not a payment network. Walmart is not a payment network. Walmart Pay is simple one part of Walmart's portfolio. Since it's not their core product, they will by necessity make compromises that negatively affect their Walmart Pay from time to time in order to benefit some other part of their business. Look to GE Capital for a case study of what can go wrong there.

Just as Facebook is a walled garden for communities, these pay networks are walled gardens for currencies. Some are actually really great, just as Facebook is actually a really great community site. But at the end of the day it's not your garden. With other options such as Visa or cash, I find it difficult to justify turning over yet another critical apect of my daily life to a profit driven corporation according to the limiting and onerous terms and conditions they set.

Phew. Now I can go back to watching Wes Craven's "Shocker".

<comment><USER4> Apple Pay is just a nice frontend for Visa, AmEx, etc., with _better_ security - disposable credit card numbers to defeat merchant tracking and leaks.

<comment><USER5> Also faster.

Double-tap watch or iPhone button, wave device near register, done. Fast.

That vs Walmart Pay tap iPhone button, [swipe to find icon,] tap icon, wait for app, tap scan button, position camera for QR code, wait for focus & recognize, done. Too long.

I tried Walmart's Scan-and-Go app. Idea was you could scan all your stuff before reaching the register, scan one QR code, pay, and leave. Took an inordinately long time. Walmart dumped it.

Edit: actually there _has_ been a "tap to pay" available at many places. All too often it was turned off, and mildly confusing which cards had it (I had one that did, then its replacement card didn't, so there I was waving a non- tap card at a tap reader). The whole tech fizzled.

<comment><USER3> My AmEx card has had tap-to-pay functionality for years now. I keep it in my wallet where it is nearest the outside and can use without removing from my wallet. Easy. No buttons. No QR codes. And it's old tech. Still not seeing the obvious argument for throwing such an important piece of my public persona (personal finances and credit) into the same basket as my cell phone.

<comment><USER4> Your cell phone's data is protected by a fingerprint reader or arbitrary- length passcode, while your wallet's data is protected by the other person not having a knife.

<comment><USER6> Your wallet is protected by the other person not having a knife. Your cell phone's data is protected by the other person not being willing to use their knife to cut off one of your fingers. ;-)

<comment><USER4> Muggers are still stealing iOS devices, which people can just permanently brick via iCloud now, so I wouldn't expect that level of foresight!

<comment><USER7> Parts are parts and iOS devices have a lot of non-commodity parts that can't get "bricked".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Looks like Walmart doesn't take Apple Pay or Android pay after a quick Google search. After the whole CurrentC thing, I don't think I'd trust any store owned payment apps. I thought the whole goal of Apple Pay was to simplify things, then all these stores want to make their own versions. To much fragmentation in the mobile payment space, better to just carry a regular major credit card, at least it's accepted almost everywhere universally.

<comment><USER9> I have read more than one article that many don't use Apple pay either. I have it and honestly have no reason to use it because credit cards just work. It would be one thing if fraud was prevalent and using your credit card was difficult but that has never been the case.

I still don't understand the business case other than trying to open a new revenue stream because it certainly wasn't solving a problem

<comment><USER10> I think the long plan here is what Tim Cook specifically said when announcing Apple Pay - eventually, the iPhone will replace your wallet and keys. This in turn will make iPhone an essential part of life - a necessary goal for a product so successful to continue growing. Expect an identity product in the near to mid future.

<comment><USER11> Sounds awful. What happens when I lose it, I lose my entire life? Battery dies? Drop it in the toilet?

Having all the important aspects of your life a little distributed isn't the worst thing in the world.

<comment><USER12> The part of the iphone which includes "you" is stored in the cloud. You only lose/damage the hardware part, so get another one and backup from the cloud. Currently more expensive than when losing a set of keys or wallet but may not be in the future.

<comment><USER13> Meh - maybe. Imagine this scenario:

You're out at a restaurant, and you drove there. Your phone dies somehow, either dropped in toilet, or what have you. How do you do the following?

\- Pay for dinner

\- Drive your car, since your keys were in your phone

\- Pay for a cab since you can no longer drive

\- Pay for a phone replacement at an Apple Store

etc, etc.

<comment><USER14> Same if your wallet falls out of your pocket

<comment><USER11> But your wallet can't lose power or suffer water damage (to the cards at least).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> One few of my colleagues did some agency work for Walmart. A large web application for working in parts of their supply chain.

These guys are some of the best programmers I know and they had nothing but respect for Walmart tech teams.

The first time it came up that I made a casual assumption like "oh, they must be very 'enterprize-y' in their software development." and one of them corrected me by saying something to the effect of "You'd be surprised actually, they're not just surprisingly sophisticated technologically 'for an enterprise' but they're actually surprisingly sophisticated for anyone"

Anyways, small anecdote that stuck with me.

Walmart is apparently _VERY_ strong in the IT side of things.

<comment><USER16> They always have been, I took a tour of their facilities in college. I recall being told at the time that every transaction that goes through any of their stores anywhere in the world is saved to a HD and stored in a vault somewhere. Kind of insane when you think about it.

<comment><USER17> It can be very handy. Five or more years ago, when you returned an item, they'd manually mark the line in your receipt, which works well enough. Yesterday I had to return an item for the first time since then, and after they read the barcode on my receipt from 2 months ago, I saw the whole receipt, or at least the end of it, flash on a small user facing LCD, and they didn't have to do anything else with my paper receipt. For a product quality return like this I can see many ways in which this would be useful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Apple Pay seems to be more widely available and I find myself using it 6 out of 10 times here in the mid-Atlantic region. The majority of the times its easier as you don't have to endure as many button pushes/P.O.S. screens.

Walmart Pay is CurrentC all over again with a different name and still the same horrible user experience (download an app, open the app at the register.. give your phone to cashier to scan then go thru all this other POS motions?). As well the underlying fact why Walmart is pushing this to fatten their bottom lines vs. focusing on moving the needle forward for their consumers. Whether it's Apple Pay or another built in Pay service in one's phone no other downloadable app can provide the same world class user experience.

<comment><USER19> I believe it is CurrentC, at least Walmart was the leader in starting that in the first place. The whole point of this system is to know exactly who is buying what at Walmart. With Apple Pay (or similar) the store has no clue.

<comment><USER18> Also, they want to avoid paying the credit company fees.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> What would make this better is if you can buy the stuff without going to checkout.

Pick it up. Scan the barcode. Leave.

The digital receipt by its self makes this usefull for me.

Edit: added additional comment

<comment><USER21> A lot of items at Wal-Mart have anti-theft RFID tags on them, though, and it would be a pain to say "oh you can't buy this shirt or that video game through the app".

<comment><USER22> Are they just generic RFID tags or do they identify the items? If they identify the items there has to be an easy way to match the items in the cart vs what has been paid for, no?

<comment><USER23> The cheaper alarms are just two magnetic coils working in conjunction. There's a nice write by Hackaday on them - [http://hackaday.com/2015/12/03/how-store- anti-theft-alarms-w...](http://hackaday.com/2015/12/03/how-store-anti-theft- alarms-work-magnetostriction/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Thought this would address something in regards to their workers' wages. Guess I was too optimistic.

<comment><USER25> I thought the same thing from the title.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Thank goodness, another separate wallet to keep track of with non-linked data, another vector for potential theft, and no clear reward for me.

Starbucks app has a rewards play, Taco Bell app has customization... but without some compelling magic for non-frequent users, I don't see how this helps the company since it doesn't really seem to help the consumer (and so would have limited penetration).

</comment><comment><USER27> >> "at any checkout lane"

Oops, they forgot to rephrase this to be more clear:

"at any of the _open_ checkout lanes, meaning < 5% of them... because screw you, your time is worthless"

<comment><USER28> They still have to scan your items.

<comment><USER29> He's not talking about that. He's talking about the fact that, at any Wal-Mart you care to patronize, you'll find that while they have sixteen or twenty tills installed and ready to use, they have maybe three actually staffed and available for checkout, so you end up standing in line for five or ten minutes even when there's hardly anyone in the store, and when it's busy you get to choose between waiting half an hour and taking your business elsewhere.

<comment><USER30> "Taking your business elsewhere" from Walmart is hardly a decision that is ever made.

<comment><USER31> I never go to Walmart because of this. I most of my shopping at Kroger and if I need something they don't have, I go to Target or Amazon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Jim Walton (Sam Walton's son) owns 96% of Arvest Bank, which is exclusive to Walmart in the Midwest.

Arvest is a growing financial network of banks and related services, which Walmart has been connected to since 1961. It's not a stretch to think that Walmart would create it's own payment network by proxy.

<comment><USER33> It sounds more like they're integrating their stores with their online site. You scan the register you're at when paying for something, and then you can pay with the app -- you probably need your credit card info saved to your Walmart.com profile or something as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> All of these pay with your phone things are really pointless until we can also show ID with our phones. As long as we are required to carry physical government issued id's we'll still need a wallet, and since we are carrying a wallet anyway why not just keep your cards with you as well. Until using my phone for things means I wont have to carry my wallet, I just don't see the benefit.

</comment><comment><USER35> Some quick, deep analysis here (from an industry veteran): [http://blog.starpointllp.com/blog/?p=4391](http://blog.starpointllp.com/blog/?p=4391)

</comment><comment><USER36> >> The result is an innovation that will make the ease of mobile payments a reality for millions of Americans.

I don't think this is an innovation but more of an evolution of an already existing process.

>> "The Walmart app was built to make shopping faster and easier,"

I have to get wallet from pocket, open it, take out card and swipe - <USER2> actions.

OR

I have to take phone from pocket, unlock it by tapping the screen 6 times (dont mess up), opening the app(, maybe navigating to the scanner), then scanning - 4+ actions.

That is neither faster nor, in my opinion, easier.

Where's the benefit for me (as a consumer) with these electronic payment systems?

[edited formatting]

</comment><comment><USER37> If only there was some way to self-checkout with this. Scan your own barcode with the camera, bag your own goods. Set them on the scale, checkout!

I know security is a big risk with this, but stores DO have self-checkouts.

One step closer to making shopping at the store as easy as going into, picking out what I want and leaving.

PS How much of this was written in Clojure?

</comment><comment><USER38> The fastest way to pay is cash---how many times have you waited around a credit card machine waiting for the transaction to go through? Anyway, the big time sink is in the shopping experience, waiting in line, and checking out the items. Who cares how long it takes to pay? Focus on getting ride of waiting in line.

<comment><USER39> As someone who pays with credit card I get pretty upset with people who pay with cash. People fumbling around for exact change. The person working the register has to deal with bill or coin shortages: "oops we're out of quarters hey can someone bring some to my register?" Not to mention the overhead incurred by having to deal with all the cash at the end of the day and dealing with shortages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Given that I don't walk around with my phone in my hand, it takes about the same amount of effort to pull a card out of my wallet as it does to extract my phone from my front pocket and then find the app to pay with. No thanks.

<comment><USER30> You are not the average Walmart shopper that relies on market bottom prices that Walmart is best at. Neither are you probably the average Walmart shopper that is sticky to Walmart discounts, rebates, and weakly deals.

<comment><USER40> Most people don't have their phones in their hands when they shop, either, especially at a Walmart where you're more likely to be pushing a buggy than anything. The only time I usually see someone with something at Walmart other than their object of payment is if they found an ad at another store which is cheaper. Payment by phone is largely a solution looking for a problem.

<comment><USER30> Most people also don't have their wallet in their hands when they are walking around. This usability and natural action argument is sort of moot and non impactful to this a discussion. If I really wanted to keep arguing, I would say that people waiting in line to pay are probably browsing their phone while waiting, so the transition to paying is not cumbersome. It's still a terrible argument for Walmart Pay. But, not as bad as saying that folks won't use Walmart Pay because the buggy is occupying their hands.

The probability of finding most things that are cheaper elsewhere than Walmart is extremely small. Their margins and their entire business model depends on that. So your anecdotes of people finding something cheaper is not material.

And finally the good 'ole "solution looking for the problem." It seems it is more and more the default "I-cant-extrapolate-but-this-sounds-clever."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I think I've heard it on some podcast that they are using Clojure to process these requests. Is that the project? I know Walmart uses the language so I am thinking it's probably it. Which is kinda cool.

</comment><comment><USER42> I'd rather they just open Apple Pay instead of a less secure, more cumbersome alternative. I'm not scanning QR codes so far and I'm not planing to start anytime soon.

</comment><comment><USER43> One more place to have your PII stolen.

</comment><comment><USER44> Why does this utilize the phone's camera instead of RFID? Fiddling with the camera seems annoying.

</comment><comment><USER45> The irony here is, of course, that Walmart does NOT pay [its employees well]. :P

</comment><comment><USER46> Gross.</comment>


Zendesk will no longer support Internet Explorer 8, 9 or 10 from April 11th 2016 - <AUTHOR> https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/218072937-Zendesk-will-no-longer-support-Internet-Explorer-8-9-or-10-from-April-11th-2016 <comment><AUTHOR> Zendesk has a lot of corporate customers that almost certainly use these IE versions, so I think this announcement is a big deal.

My impression has been that most web apps that have killed support for IE10 and below are developer-friendly tools like GitHub[1], Bitbucket[2], etc.

[1] [https://help.github.com/articles/supported- browsers/](https://help.github.com/articles/supported-browsers/) [2] [https://confluence.atlassian.com/bitbucket/which-browsers- do...](https://confluence.atlassian.com/bitbucket/which-browsers-does- bitbucket-support-296092232.html)</comment>


It's systems, not smarts - <AUTHOR>

I should say it's systems, more than smarts, because smarts matter - alot. But, smarts alone won't get you there because smart people stuck in bad systems create lousy results.
Good systems + Smart people = SUCCESS
Good systems + Dumb people = Struggle
Bad systems + Smart people = Struggle
Bad systems + Dumb people = Catastrophe
I don't mean 'Dumb' pejoratively, but simply as a person who does not know alot about something in the problem domain.
I've spent 10 years on a team of very smart people.  When the good systems aren't in place, things don't go well.  People wonder why.  I'm telling you now why.  The systems are not in place.
What is a successful business?  A system.  Big companies and some smaller make alot of money.  They have each created a system and that system creates money.  You can have the most brilliant people in the world in-house, you still lose if you have the wrong systems. LTCM.
Being an inspiring leader and all the other things all you aspiring billionaires are told are important.  Many of them, not so important.  You need a system that works and scales.  It should be very easy to understand that. Finding the system is hard.  It has to be.  If it wasn't hard, finding it would have no value - and no reward.
Money being a scarce commodity (and necessarily so), your big system is guaranteed to be difficult to find.  When they say 'there is no free lunch', that is the reason why. <comment><USER2> One I think things are dynamic: people, processes, technology(platform), software. Seems usually in big companies its a few smart people doing most of the work, catching most of the mistakes. lot of avg people doing the rest of the work, others taking up space causing problems. Processes generally adaquate to not cuase lots of problems.</comment>


How Netflix came to pay Comcast for Internet traffic - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/256586/the-inside-story-of-how-netflix-came-to-pay-comcast-for-internet-traffic/

<comment><USER2> As a customer of both Netflix and an ISP that participates in Open Connect, I'm slightly annoyed that Netflix didn't turn around and immediately pass this charge on to their users that connect from Comcast. Why should _I_ have to subsidize that? I wonder if their agreement forbids that.

<comment><USER3> Because this would enable Comcast to then increase what fees it charges Netflix, higher and higher, until either Netflix says "that's enough", and don't pass on that increase, or Netflix starts losing customers to say, a cheaper competitor that Comcast prefers because it owns (part of) it. Better stop these games at the door. Most Comcast customers don't have a choice of provider anyway, so it's not like they can choose a different ISP to connect to Netflix. You don't want to penalize customers stuck buying from a monopoly.

Other customers paying $8/month to get this amazing Netflix service and are "forced" to "subsidize" Comcast customers, that won't elicit much tears from me. :P

<comment><USER4> That cheaper competitor by Comcast already exists: [http://www.comcast.com/streampix](http://www.comcast.com/streampix)

<comment><USER3> Oh dear. Thanks for the link. Hello anti-trust. Hollywood Studios were split up once for this.

      while history {
        history = true
      }

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What I don't understand is: if I am paying Comcast and Netflix is paying Comcast, then why does Netflix traffic count against me? Comcast is already getting paid twice!

<comment><USER6> On the other hand, if your entire business idea revolves around pumping several orders of magnitude more data than anyone else normally does, is it still reasonable to assume others will foot the bill building the infrastructure?

If someone told you in 2001 that they would start a service based on delivering millions of full HD video streams concurrently over the internet, would you be able to take them seriously?

<comment><USER7> > On the other hand, if your entire business idea revolves around pumping > several orders of magnitude more data than anyone else normally does, is it > still reasonable to assume others will foot the bill building the > infrastructure?

Except Netflix is not _pumping_ data anywhere. This data has already been paid for and is being requested by Comcast's network. They also are not asking anyone to "foot the bill" \- they've offered to pay for it entirely.

<comment><USER6> It's a reality that consumer internet is heavily oversubscribed, and sold with the assumption that the average load is much much lower than 100% per costumer. You can claim that the data is already paid for because you are paying for X mbps, but the real price for sustained X mbps 100% is much higher. The alternatives are charging a helluva lot more per customer to actually cover costs (business-level pricing) or a much much lower mbps limit.

<comment><USER8> _shrug_ that's business. You pays your money and takes your chances. Comcast (et al) gambled on some level of oversubscription and that's not working for them in reality. It's hard to argue that Netflix is somehow at fault for any of this and it's only the monopoly power of the last-mile ISPs in the US that's making this even a consideration.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This article assumes readers will have the background to understand all the jibberish it presents. Meanwhile, it does't paint anything close to a clear picture on the inside scoop of "How Netflix cam to pay Comcast for Internet traffic". That makes the article damn near worthless IMO

<comment><USER10> Perhaps the blog excerpted too little of the petition (it started at page 55, or PDF page 63). I recommend starting at section V.C on page 52, or PDF page 60 instead. I think the description of Comcast's actions since 2009 paints a pretty damning picture of Comcast's abuse of its monopoly on high-speed last- mile wire in many parts of the US.

Or, read the entire petition, which is a good read; it's 100 double-spaced pages. The PDF also includes other evidence: 22 pages of statement from Ken Florance, VP of Content Delivery (PDF page 110) and 100 pages from economist David Evans (PDF page 134).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wouldn't mind this if I knew that the money was actually going toward upgrading infrastructure and not just lining Comcast's pockets.

</comment><comment><USER12> I didn't know that Netflix is now also paying AT&T, Verizon, and TWCable too!</comment>


Ask HN: Recommend science experiments and videos for unfortunate school students - <AUTHOR>

I am in India and I got an opportunity to teach high school physics to kids in a government school here this saturday. I will also be teaching both the teachers and the kids on how to use computers on Sunday.
Good education in India at school level is mostly provided by private institutions which are generally expensive. Only kids from very poor families study in government schools. The reason is: Education is free till the age of 14 in these schools. So parents don't have to pay any fee. Most kids studying here are laborers and beggars (both are illegal but kids don't have any other way to survive). Lot of relief organizations have taken intiatives to get such children into government schools to improve their quality of life. The motivation for these kids to attend school is that they get free lunch, a roof over their head for a few hours each day, have fun with other kids and also escape from the harsh realities of their difficult life.
I studied in a good private school but only remember complaining about it when I was there. But after visiting the govt. school, I think I studied in heaven. I was told that the teaching staff hasn't been paid a salary for the past few months. The staff themselves are not very too great in terms of quality of knowledge but I appreciate them doing their best for these kids when they aren't being paid. They even take turns to come on weekends to take special classes for the kids.
I paid a visit to the school this morning and was shocked to see the facilities. The class I am to teach is a small 15ft by 15ft room cramped with 35 kids. Surprisingly, they managed to fit in benches and chairs for these kids. There is no table for the teacher. I was hoping to be able to do some practical experiements in the class to make the kids understand better (They do not have any labs and everything they learn is purely theoretical and driven from an exam point of view to score marks that will help them move to the next class). I was happy to see an electrical plug point to connect a laptop. I think I might able to arrange for some space to perform some experiments outside the class on the corridor.
Now, I need to figure out what experiments to perform and what videos to show these kids to help them understand physics better. I also need to figure out how to introduce computers to them in layman language.
This won't be an easy task for two reasons:
1) I am not fluent with the local language. Even though the medium of instruction is English, knowing the local language would have helped. For this reason, it is very important that the experiments teach the kids more than my language. Choosing the right experiments is very important.
2) Computer related explanations should be able to connect to these kids daily lives. This will need some good thinking.
I need HN to help me by suggesting simple experiments and the angle from which I could teach these kids the benefits of using computers and also what would be appropriate to teach. I was thinking I will visit a toy store today and look for ready-to-buy Physics and Electromagnetic Kits. However, I am not sure if I will find something good. If not, I need to come up with experiments on my own.
Chapters to be explained in physics by experiments and/or videos:
1) Electromagnetic Induction: Basics of induction, Fleming's and Faraday's rules/laws, AC/DC Dynamo, Motors (Mostly experiments and videos only if absolutely essential) 2) Electromagnetic Radiation: Electromagnetic spectrum, wavelength, frequency, photoelectric effect, LASER (Mostly experiments and videos only if absolutely essential) 3) Rockets and artificial satellites: Principles involved, basics of propellants, orbital and escape velocities, types of satellites, indian space programs (Mostly videos and few experiments) 4) Heat : Latent heat, engines and their functioning (Mostly experiments and videos only if absolutely essential) 5) The Universe: Sun, Stars, Milky Way, Galaxies, Evolution of Stars and Origin of the universe (Only videos)
I have about 2 hours on Saturday to do the physics and about the same time on Sunday. If I do not finish I intend to go to the weekend after and keep doing so until I finish. If I like the experience, I intend to keep doing this on a regular basis.
Thanks in advance for any suggestions. <comment> cool-RR I can think of two wicked experiments right now. I don't know if they're relevant to you, but I'll describe them and you can decide for yourself.

1\. You tie a string from the wall to a motor. Ideally you should be able to control the frequency of the motor, but if you don't have this equipment, it's okay. The string will vibrate rapidly. You then close the lights and put a stroboscope on the string. You tune it, by trial and error, to the same frequency of the motor. Then you see the string frozen in a wave form. You can change the freq slightly to make it move slowly. You can have the kids touch the string at the proper places to make standing waves.

2\. This one is really simple to do. You take a small object (like a soda can) and tie it with a string to the ceiling. (Let's say the string's length is about half the height of the ceiling.) You pull back the can and release it, making it swing from left to right (Without a circular swing.) Then you hand out "half-sunglasses" to the kids. It could just be a piece of dark film, or a partly opaque glass. As long as it's a bit dark and you can see through it. You put the film on one eye, you see the can going in a circle. You put it on the other eye, you see it going in a circle the opposite direction.

This happens because the eye with the dark film gets a lower refresh rate. The image on that eye is of the can in a slightly retarded position than the other eye. This messes with the 3D analysis that the brain does, and makes it look like the can is getting closer/farther from you.

<comment><USER2> Your second experiment is absolutely fantastic, and I have used it. I was disappointed to find that the kids actually seemed to learn nothing from it. The principles seem to be pretty deep, and there's actually a lot going on. Maybe I didn't explore it enough, but I think it's a difficult experiment to "get" until you're older.

Your first one is easiest done with a "slinky". You don't need a strobe, because it all happens really, really slowly.

Off-topic: Some people are like slinkies. Of no real use, but they still make you laugh when you see them tumble down stairs ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm in a similar position, but I'm in a Tibetan refugee camp. The children and teenagers here already get (limited but sufficient) food and shelter, so it's a good place for potential teaching.

Got an email address? Also, it'd be nice of you to tell us how it went afterwards.

</comment><comment><USER4> As a high school physics student, the experiments that I feel would be most educational/enlightening are: \- Measuring gravity using a pendulum (using T=2.pi.sqrt(l/g)) \- Measuring the resistivity of wire \- Measuring values for specific latent heats, specific heats of fusion etc

When doing experiments, I always found the ones where we were trying to calculate a known value experimentally (g, specific heats etc) to be the best.

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't have much more to add to the other comments. I just wanted to say THANK YOU for doing this.

</comment><comment><USER6> I always loved this guy, julius sumner mills. I still love him and his enthusiasm for physics. I would definitely check out his experiments.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCcZyW-6-5o>

Here's his one on heat energy: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhQEVR_Tsiw&feature=relat...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhQEVR_Tsiw&feature=related)

Also, physics for future presidents is a cool video lecture series at berkely. The first lecture is on heat: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ysbZ_j2xi0>

</comment><comment><USER7> You can do a lot for 2) with Slinkys or other long springs and a stopwatch to help understand waves, frequency, etc.

There's also a cool outdoor experiment you can do to measure the speed of sound by clapping pieces of wood/books together in a constant, even rhythm such that you hear an echo between each clap (so you hear clap - echo - clap - echo). By measuring the distance to the wall, and timing the sequence for a set number of claps/echoes, you can get a good estimate of the speed of sound. You can also make a game to see which "team" can get the best measurement. It's a very cheap demo, but it utilizes a lot of concepts of physics and physics experiments.

</comment><comment><USER2> Get them to play with toys that demonstrate scientific principles. It's amazing how much they absorb. Then you will have a solid basis from which to say "How does this work? What do these have in common?"

I found this link some time ago here on HN:

<http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/toys.html>

Pick two or three, make the toys, play, then ask "What did you see?" and "Why is it so?"

I don't know your experience in teaching, but your willingness and enthusiasm are fantastic.

Good Luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thats an awesome link! Exactly the kind of thing I was looking for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm not quite sure what you would want to do for experiments, but Walter Lewin has a pretty good set of introductory physics video lectures on Open Course Ware. He's somewhat famous for his physics demonstrations.

MIT link: [http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Physics/8-02Electricity-and- Magnet...](http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Physics/8-02Electricity-and- MagnetismSpring2002/VideoAndCaptions/index.htm)

Youtube Link for promo: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Zc9Nuoe2Ow>

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't know about India but in the states you can get model rockets or those pop-bottle water rocket kits. Maybe some creative rigging with a postage scale to measure forces and demonstrate the equal/opposite reaction of throwing matter (water) out the back of the rocket at high speed?

Electromagnetic stuff: here's instructions on making a motor out of some wire, a magnet and a double-A battery. <http://www.ehow.com/how_4422383_make- battery-motor.html>

Other thoughts would be to check out instructibles.com, it's not geared towards science but a lot of the projects outlined could easily be used to demonstrate principles.

</comment><comment><USER10> Awesome stuff. Thanks for doing this.

What age are these kids? What's the local language?

<comment><AUTHOR> Kids are between 12-15. Kannada is the local language.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Awesome initiative. If I had to teach physics on a shoestring budget I'd go back in time to the 1700's or so, take the methods and principles as discovered then and teach _science_ as a method instead of physics specifically.

Use physics as an illustration of what goes in to good science with the relatively simple devices of that age and you're laying the foundation for more education later on.

For example, your '4', heat: I'd use a simplified Stirling engine for that, it wouldn't take more than a bunch of clothes hangers and tin cans to make a working heat engine, which gives you all the hooks you need to go from Boyle to Carnot.

</comment><comment><USER12> The Exploratorium Cookbooks are expensive, but full of lots of great ideas: <http://store.exploratorium.edu/browse.cfm/4,19.html>

The Exploratorium Snackbooks are also very good.

The Exploratorium Quarterly magazine was also great. Although it is not published any more, I see that you can buy copies at abebooks. You should search for anything with Exploratorium in the title. It is probably worth buying.

</comment><comment><USER13> Google give some good results for "interactive physics" [http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=interactive+physics](http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=interactive+physics)

For example:

<http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/sci_edu/physites.html>

</comment><comment><USER14> Youtube has some really interesting material, let me know if you want me to make a course for 5) The Universe.

</comment><comment><USER15> What kinds of computer concepts will you be teaching to the kids (Word/Excel, basic programming, data structures and algorithms)? Do they have access to any computers outside of class, like in an Internet cafe, or even on a cell phone that can be hacked to accept code?

<comment><AUTHOR> I was thinking I will need to teach:

1) Importance and applications of computers 2) How it might be affecting the life of these kids without their own knowledge 3) How computers work in a very simplified way 4) Using computers for fun

A charity organization has donated about 6 computers which they have kept in a room. I guess the students will have access to these.

<comment><USER15> Just a thought in addition to the physics lectures (which are definitely important) - programming, or maybe even simple data entry, is probably the easiest way to earn money during spare time while still gaining knowledge and experience. If these kids could learn how to program and had access to computers with Internet access, I think there could be a way for them to earn some money and gain early job experience. And if the programming/computer lessons are related to physics, you could teach both at the same time.

I know some people would find this controversial since this is a high school classroom and not a vocational/trade school - that the kids need to focus on learning and building a strong educational foundation. But I'm from India and know how bad the situation can get... these kids are probably under a lot of pressure to earn for their families. Besides, I'm guessing there are people in the US with PhDs that are struggling to find jobs in this economy... if one benefit of a strong, pure educational foundation is some guarantee of job security in the future, it certainly isn't always the case.

Can anyone think of realistic ways that kids in this situation could make money by coding, or doing something computer related, on the Web? Amazon Mechanical Turk comes to mind, but I don't know much about it, or if the tasks involved will teach you anything significant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Which area of India does this school belong to? Your initiative looks interesting

<comment><AUTHOR> Bangalore. The state of govt. schools is pretty much the same in most parts of the country. You could always lend a helping hand irrespective of where you are. You could try approaching the school head master directly or you could go to the local rotary club and check if you can assist them in an way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Saturday morning science, experiments on the ISS

[http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/station/crew/exp6/spacechronicle...](http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/station/crew/exp6/spacechronicles_videos.html)</comment>


Emacs.js: Ready-to-use Emacs setup for JavaScript coders - <AUTHOR>

<comment> why-el You forgot to link this to the project. Here it is: <https://github.com/azer/emacs.js> (I assume)</comment>


Our Robot Sky - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/backchannel/our-robot-sky-4f9281b17233 <comment><USER2> This all seems nice in theory to think of it has some utopian future with robots flying all around. However, the economics of small UAVs carrying cargo do not make sense. It simply isn't worth the cost and it isn't efficient to lift small amounts of weight. Otherwise FedEx, UPS would be doing it.

It's more efficient to use a large winged craft that has immense economies of scale in a hub and spoke distribution architecture, just like FedEx and UPS do.

Things may change in the future but right now the overhead of UAV flight is too significant. Also, too complicated. And keeping in mind it's much harder to control a lightweight craft in 20 mph wind than a large jet.

<comment><USER3> From the article: "The technology is not disruptive, but supplementary. Cargo drone routes will never replace road or railway, but they can add choice for the rapid sharing of precious cargo over mountain ranges, across lakes, and up rivers."

FedEx and UPS use planes for long distances and trucks for the last few miles because the airports they need are large and expensive and we have good road networks. This article is talking about reaching places that don't have decent roads.

<comment><USER4> This is especially relevant internationally: people in the West often forget that i.e. China has tons of mountains and much more limited transport infrastructure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In what universe will it be more effective to use "cargo drone routes" than it is to use rivers?

Also, if this is so miraculous, why do the future images look like poor Africans living next to a robot building?

<comment><USER3> "The droneport is intended to save lives and build local economies through enabling the rapid repetition of flight of super-fast and super-cheap flying robots carrying precious cargo over mountains, across lakes, and up _unnavigable_ rivers."

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Earlier article by the same author:

[http://www.wired.com/2014/09/cargo-drones-in- africa/](http://www.wired.com/2014/09/cargo-drones-in-africa/)

"The continent's shortfall on annual public infrastructure spending is $50 billion and rising. There is no money for tunnels and not enough for bridges and bypasses, let alone simple road maintenance. Paving secondary roads is more expensive per kilometer than paving longer arterials and costs have risen sharply in the last decade, with frequent budget overruns of 100 percent or more. Economists have estimated that $1 spent on roads in Africa returns $4 in productivity. How much better value would $1 spent on cargo drone routes be?"

</comment><comment><USER6> Once again here we have a European with a "Good Idea" for Africa. I guess Africans are too stupid to do anything for themselves, eh?

The mobile phone revolution in Africa was African. Western networks did not believe it would be possible.

Perhaps Europeans could look to their own problems and instead of creating "solutions" for Africa they could stop bleeding the continent dry.</comment>


Disney, please sell the rights to Monkey Island back to its creator Ron Gilbert - <AUTHOR> https://www.change.org/p/disney-please-sell-the-rights-to-monkey-island-back-to-its-creator-ron-gilbert <comment><USER2> Has Disney ever sold rights to anything? Their business model is to accumulate vast amounts of IP with emotional attachments to consumers. The more people sign this petition the more Disney will value the Monkey Island IP.

<comment><USER3> Nice insight! I agree 100%. The more signatures, the less likely to sell it!

But more likely that they use it for something someday, at least...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is there a reason for why Ron Gilbert can't pull a Perfect Dark and make a game with the same sort of gameplay, but a new setting & new characters?

It wouldn't even have to be that far removed from the current characters. E.g. Spaceballs didn't need permission from Lucasarts, you're allowed to parody other works. He could make a game that would parody Monkey Island.

<comment><USER5> Doesn't Thimbleweed Park count. I guess rather than a parody it's more of a homage, but he has made another ironic point and click.

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

<comment><USER6> As someone who grew up with LucasArts games, I really enjoyed Thimbleweed Park.

However, I wonder how much it would resonate with kids today who might not be nostalgic for this genre of gaming.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This would be a nice thing for Disney to do, but they won't. Iron Man was a second rate Marvel character that they ignored for years, and they've subsequently made so much money from that. Monkey Island is an excellent storyline and world and Disney will happily ignore it until Pirates of the Carribean is forgotten they they will find the right treatment and throw some celebrities in there and make a bunch of money. Or not do anything and deprive someone else from doing the same thing. Not saying that's good or bad, just saying that's what will happen.

<comment><USER8> By the way, I'm getting increasingly worried about the sheer dominance that Disney is increasingly having in the children entertainment business. Looks like they're aiming at owning all the relevant franchises in that field...

<comment><USER9> Other franchises exist than Marvel and Star Wars, vote with you wallet rather than just wishing that Disney didn't own it.

<comment><USER10> On the one hand, I hate the fact that Disney owns so many franchises.

On the other hand, I trust them to make better Star Wars content than Lucas, and I enjoy the Marvel movies.

They may be evil incarnate but they do know how to tell (and sell) a good story.

<comment><USER11> Disney is able to creat tasteless childlike story arcs that challenge nothing.

There's a good guy, there's a bad guy, there's the struggle and sacrifice of the good guy, which eventually trumps the bad guy leading to a rich life.

They are selling you American mythology 101.

The fact that you enjoy these myths isn't a problem, they are literally manufactured to have as broad an appeal as possible.

What is a problem is you excusing the dilution of nuance in our culture that is used to perpetuate western hegemony which directly leads to our politicians doing literally whatever they want for themselves.

<comment><USER10> >There's a good guy, there's a bad guy, there's the struggle and sacrifice of the good guy, which eventually trumps the bad guy leading to a rich life.

These are tropes and elements common to almost all storytelling, and certainly to fairy tales and myths. Americans didn't invent any of that, and neither did Disney.

And as far as Star Wars goes, the Empire are the Bad Guys, basically Space Nazis who dress in black and white and hang around starkly brutalist technology which doesn't even have basic OSHA compliance because they're _just that evil._

The Jedi are the Good Guys. They dress in earth tones. Or, at least, the two we meet in the OT do. But they must be the Good Guys because they're fighting the Bad Guys.

And the Rebel Alliance are also the Good Guys. No one thinks twice about the morality of blowing up the Death Star and all of the hundreds of thousands or maybe millions of people on board, because those are Bad Guys. Luke Skywalker force chokes two Gammorean guards in Jabba's palace, but that's fine, because just look at how ugly they are. They're basically orcs, obviously Bad Guys.

Luke Skywalker and the entire Skywalker clan are an elite bloodline more or less chosen by "God" (The Force) and morality in their universe is based on divine law and destiny. That only changes and really begins to be examined and deconstructed after the franchise leaves Lucas' hands. The whole story is a pastiche of the Hero's Journey.

Does Disney assimilate, homogenize, ruthlessly brand and churn out artifacts of myth and storytelling? Yes.

Are they also capable of telling a good story? Also yes.

Perhaps _you_ need to find a bit more nuance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I would love a new Monkey Island made by Ron Gilbert! But I think it is more likely that Disney hires Ron Gilbert to do it than selling the rights.

</comment><comment><USER12> Just make a spiritual successor, it's not like Disney is going to give anything away :)

<comment><USER13> Isn't this what he already did with Thimbleweed Park?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I wonder if there is any other complexity involved by Disney also owning the rights to "On Stranger Tides" by Tim Powers, which also inspired Monkey Island.

</comment><comment><USER15> This thing has been floating around for years--and I see it in some classic gamer group on FB or Reddit a couple of times a month.

Can anyone point me to a change.org petition that made any difference whatsoever?

</comment><comment><USER16> You fight like a Dairy Farmer!

<comment><USER17> First you better stop waving it about like a feather duster.

..damnit.</comment></comment>


Copyright isn't working, says European Commission - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.co.uk/blogs/communication-breakdown-10000030/copyright-isnt-working-says-european-commission-10024835/

<comment><USER2> Be very careful when reading this article.

The only actual quotes from it are things like _Sadly, many see the current system as a tool to punish and withhold, not a tool to recognise and reward_ and _She added that the existing copyright system was not rewarding the vast majority of artists_

There is a very common copyright meme in Europe (mostly it seems from France and Belgium) that goes something like this: _Google is making a lot of money, and they steal (aka spider) our work. Therefor Google should pay us_.

There are examples of this viewpoint in various court cases, for example: [http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/07/google- versu...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/07/google-versus- belgium-who-is-winning-nobody.ars)

In the ZdNet article the columnist added a lot of words about things like _Rights-holders have long complained about the damage done to their industry by online copyright infringement. Governments and courts in countries including the UK have responded by blocking access to websites that help people unlawfully share music, videos, games and software._

I think that Kroes is arguing for _stronger_ copyright, not less.

Here's a final quote. I hope I'm wrong about it being a "let's tax Google" argument again: _In times of change, we need creativity, out-of-the-box thinking: creative art to overcome this difficult period and creative business models to monetise the art_

<comment><USER3> What she's arguing for, and this is no secret in Brussels and even -dare I say- common sense, is better _enforcement_ of copyright. The problem isn't with copyright itself, it's with the difficulties that those who want to use it to monetize content encounter when it comes to making sure people abide by it. Working DRM is impossible with current technology, I think everybody reading this agrees with that; so there are two ways forward: change technology so that it becomes prohibitively difficult for the average customer to copy content without a rights holder's consent, of a whole different business model all together that separates payment from copying. Both are very hard problems for which there are no real solutions in sight. In the short and medium term, the only realistic trend I see is a more active stance from the rights holders themselves in defending those rights - i.e. more lawsuits, without government involvement. (Criminal law is not the right tool for this issue anyway, it's a shame that we've wasted 15 years on going down that route now).

<comment><USER4> The downside of civil lawsuits is that the threshold for costing someone who is innocent a lot of money is a lot lower: The copyright holder has an incentive to sue or threaten to sue on the basis of enough information that they _on average_ make the most money through settlements and judgement, largely without much thought to the collateral damage along the way from people who end up settling on the basis of the risk of _being sued_ regardless of whether or not they've done anything wrong.

Conversely, if it's done under criminal law, while the end result for someone who faces prosecution may be higher, so are the standards required for evidence _and_ the prosecutor does not see monetary gain from going after people on shaky grounds.

If one is to keep doing this via civil lawsuits, the consequences of suing without real evidence need to be much higher, and the cost of taking the risk of a lawsuit if you're innocent needs to be much lower.

<comment><USER3> Why? Why is copyright different from any other area of the law? Anybody can sue anybody else right now, for example claiming that some sort of service has been performed, and the situation would be the exact same. The use of criminal law would be a gigantic drain on already scarce public resources, why waste them on something trivial? If anything, suing for IP infringement should be _easier_ \- so that everybody can do it, and not just those with 10k cash up front and several months or years time to wait out the result.

The key to an effective copyright regime is a way to enforce rights. That way needs to be cost-effective, fast, accessible to any sort of rights holder, and needs to put control into the hands of such rights holders. Leaving enforcement up to a prosecutor (who will need to weight such cases with e.g. murder and rape cases!) is or does neither of those.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> loup-vaillant > _Sadly, many see the current system as a tool to punish and withhold, not a > tool to recognise and reward_ (Neelie Kroes)

As far as I know, copyright's primary goal originally wasn't to "recognize and reward", but to increase the output in creative works. And even if it _is_ recognition and reward, it is done through punishment and withholding (state granted monopoly that if infringed, causes fines).

I'd rather judge legislation by its actual consequences rather than by its professed intentions. And my impression is that copyright causes much more punishment and withholding than it does recognition and reward.

</comment><comment><USER5> I see a lot more common sense coming from EU lately than from US.

<comment><USER6> EU bans claim that water can prevent dehydration:

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/8897662/...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/8897662/EU- bans-claim-that-water-can-prevent-dehydration.html)

<comment><USER2> Untrue: [http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/the-lay- scientist/2011/nov...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/the-lay- scientist/2011/nov/18/1)

<comment><USER7> That counters different articles on the same topic, not the telegraph article. Nowhere did the telegraph article say that water itself was called bad, just that the dehydration statement could not be made.

Also part of that article is logically unsound in the opposite direction. A _significant_ amount of water is well more than a measuring cup full. Eating a pork pie does help prevent starvation, how could you disagree? It's a nitpick to complain that water only helps hypertonic and isotonic dehydration, _the most common kinds_.

Edit: just read the linked pdf and t-winsnes's comment. I'm astounded that none on the articles reporting on this, especially the guardian article specifically written to debunk the drama, noticed that this is a rejection of the statement as a _disease_ claim. Dehydration not counting as a disease means labels don't _need_ approval under this regulation.

Edit 2: huh, a downvote. I don't mind it but would you kindly give me a sentence why, whoever voted so? I'm not sure what I've done wrong.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Where have all the MySQL DBAs gone? - <AUTHOR> http://www.jonathanlevin.co.uk/2010/07/where-have-all-mysql-dbas-gone.html

<comment><USER2> Is this really just a problem with MySQL DBAs? The article mentioned that companies 'can find MS SQL and Oracle DBAs easy enough (they just have to pay a lot)' but I suspect this isn't the case entirely.

My network certainly isn't the largest, but I do have contacts in pretty much all major web/tech fields. When I'm hit up for a position (I'm contacted probably once a week, give or take) I'm often hard pressed to think of anyone who's a) qualified and b) interested in switching jobs, regardless of the technology. The market seems to be pretty tight across the board. At least, that's how it seems to me.

As for companies 'just paying more', perhaps some are doing that, but more seem to be content to just sit some projects out if they can't find someone to meet their budget.</comment>


Reconstruction of Bologna in the early Middle Ages about 12th century - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Medieval_Bologna.jpg

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Towers_of_Bologna](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Towers_of_Bologna)</comment>


Dell's affordable Ubuntu-powered Inspiron laptops take aim at Chromebooks - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2931974/dells-affordable-ubuntu-powered-inspiron-laptops-take-aim-at-chromebooks.html

<comment><USER2> As far as I'm concerned, if they don't have SSDs they aren't in the same class as chromebooks. SSDs are what have made cheap, low-powered laptops feel fast for basic, non-CPU intensive use. The chromebook model is to make up for the limited capacity with online storage, which has only recently become workable for many uses.

The cloud model also lets chromebooks be literally disposable in a way that most computers can't; if it fries you can just grab another, sign in, and it's just as if you were using the old one since all your data is stored remotely anyway.</comment>


The 'Save the American Inventor' Campaign - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9YpIHkZF1s <comment><AUTHOR> Seems TPP related. A little hokey to my eye, but I am just one person.</comment>


Humanizing Peer Reviews (2002) - <AUTHOR> http://www.processimpact.com/articles/humanizing_reviews.html <comment><USER2> I've been reading different articles about code reviews lately and I found it strange that so many of them focus on the best ways to identify your teammates' mistakes, but say very little about the exact means of communicating that feedback. Having worked for several large software companies, I think developers struggle much more with the latter than the former.

I think this article describes what's important about code reviews better than any other article I've seen.

A couple very nice quotes I think are worth highlighting:

>The best software engineers I have known actively sought out reviewers, having learned early on how much they can help. Indeed, the input from many reviewers over their careers was part of what made these developers the best at what they do.

I've definitely found this to be true as well. I'm generally known on my teams as a tough reviewer, so my favorite people to work with are people that seek me out for reviews because they see it as an opportunity to learn.

>Egoless programming enables an author to step back and let others point out places where improvement is needed... Similarly, the egoless reviewer should have compassion and sensitivity for his colleagues, if only because their roles will be reversed one day.

I liked this point as well. So many articles about code reviews completely miss how significant a factor your relationship with your teammate is to a code review. If you sour that relationship with accusatory, tactless feedback, it doesn't matter how great a developer you are because your future code reviews and interactions with that teammate will be tremendously weakened.

</comment><comment><USER3> The last section about cross-border reviews hits home, though curiously my biggest problems came with rather aggressive eastern Europeans in a UK environment, having happily worked with US and Japanese and Hong Kong teams before!</comment>


Play store listing post mortem - <AUTHOR> https://corepox.net/devlog/corepox-early-access-release-post-mortem <comment><AUTHOR> The really cool thing about the firebase -> bigquery -> datastudio visualisation path is that the results are nearly live, I think the lag is in the order of 15 minutes, which is amazing when you roll something new out.</comment>


3 Major Data Dumps (Tumblr,LinkedIn,MySpace) Downloadable - <AUTHOR> http://www.weknowyouremail.com <comment><AUTHOR> It has changed for some reason it no longer has myspace on there but has tumblr, linkedin and nulled.io data dumps. The only one I can see that doesn't work is the linkedin one, the other two do so what exactly is fake about it? It's already up on two paste sites and I clicked on all three of the buttons and was able to download tumblr and nulled.io data dumps.

</comment><comment><USER2> I believe this is a fake.</comment>


EPA to Limit Science Used to Write Public Health Rules - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/11/climate/epa-science-trump.html <comment><AUTHOR> From the article:

A new draft of the Environmental Protection Agency proposal, titled Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science, would require that scientists disclose all of their raw data, including confidential medical records, before the agency could consider an academic study's conclusions. E.P.A. officials called the plan a step toward transparency and said the disclosure of raw data would allow conclusions to be verified independently.

...

The measure would make it more difficult to enact new clean air and water rules because many studies detailing the links between pollution and disease rely on personal health information gathered under confidentiality agreements. And, unlike a version of the proposal that surfaced in early 2018, this one could apply retroactively to public health regulations already in place.</comment>


What should we do about network-effect monopolies - <AUTHOR> https://www.benkuhn.net/nwe/ <comment><USER2> Standarization sometimes is tied to regulation. E.g. Google could be forced to offer Search API without ads at a reasonable price.

<comment><USER3> The problem with search in particular is that it gets better as more people use it, because click behavior feeds into the search ranking algorithms. So if you force Google to expose such an API, you effectively degrade the quality of search results for everyone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> $2.99/month for Facebook isn't unreasonable. Could be rolled into your phone or Internet bill. Then we can start looking into social media sales taxes.</comment>


Why we don't hire "rockstars","gurus","Jedi Knights" or "ninjas" at dailymotion - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/dailymotion/why-we-dont-hire-rockstars-gurus-jedi-knights-or-ninjas-at-dailymotion-14e78fc10e <comment><USER2> What about unicorns? Do you hire them?

Do you ask them to work for less than scale, because you don't pay any of your people at the going rate in your area?</comment>


Google quietly backs away from encrypting new Lollipop devices by default - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/03/02/google-quietly-backs-away-from-encrypting-new-lollipop-devices-by-default/

<comment><USER2> TL;DR for others

Encryption hurts battery life and performance of tasks. You can still enable encryption on your device, it just isn't default. It's planned to be default for future devices when it doesn't hurt performance as much.

This is also really old news.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's bizarre that they launched the Nexus 6 without someone flagging that up. I'd love to know what internal discussions were had about this.

</comment><comment><USER4> Most vendors did not release phones and tablets based on 5 because the performance just sucked.</comment>


Fun with Toilet - <AUTHOR> http://sequoia.github.com/blog/fun-with-toilet/

<comment><USER2> I like the idea of adding a little more style to the enlarged text.

I think the name of the app could use some work. (The Other Implementation's + let => TOIlet makes logical sense after having it explained. But I would never have guessed it was a replacement for FIGlet on first read.)

<comment><USER3> But then, it would miss the joke... All caca labs projects are of the same kind: libcaca, libpipi, toilet, etc...

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'd love to hear how people are using toilet!

<comment><USER4> That's just so wrong...

(Looks like a really cool tool though, ssh login welcome messages spring to mind :)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This may not have been clear from the post, but I did not actually write toilet. I just think it's neat and wanted to write a post show what it does and help people get people started using it.

</comment><comment><USER5> 'gay' filter? really?

<comment><USER6> Rainbows and rainbow-colored text are frequently used as symbols of the LGBT community. I don't consider this a pejorative use of the word.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> That image at the end reminds me of ZZT.</comment>


1988 TV News Report on the Morris Worm - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2i_6j55bS0

<comment><USER2> I don't understand the point of the ET footage in there.

<comment><USER3> for future laughs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> HOW DID YOU FIND THIS?</comment>


PostgreSQL 9.2 beta adds JSON - <AUTHOR> http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/PostgreSQL-9-2-beta-improves-scalability-adds-JSON-1573815.html <comment><USER2> Wow, range types with non-overlapping constraints:

<http://www.postgresql.org/docs/devel/static/rangetypes.html>

CREATE TABLE room_reservation ( room TEXT, during TSRANGE, EXCLUDE USING gist (room WITH =, during WITH &&) );

INSERT INTO room_reservation VALUES ('123A', '[2010-01-01 14:00, 2010-01-01 15:00)');

INSERT INTO room_reservation VALUES ('123A', '[2010-01-01 14:30, 2010-01-01 15:30)'); ERROR: conflicting key value violates exclusion constraint "room_reservation_room_during_excl" DETAIL: Key (room, during)=(123A, [ 2010-01-01 14:30:00, 2010-01-01 15:30:00 )) conflicts with existing key (room, during)=(123A, [ 2010-01-01 14:00:00, 2010-01-01 15:00:00 )).

Used to have to rely on the application to do these sorts of constraints.

<comment> j-kidd Yeah, this is another big one. I first came across the temporal project [1] in year 2008. Glad to see that it finally makes it to release.

[1] <http://pgfoundry.org/projects/temporal/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think the bigger deal (at least for most existing deployments) are the index-only scans. This is one of the only features of Oracle that I missed after switching to Postgres.

<comment><USER4> Can you please explain index-only scans, and what the advantages are (or why this isn't the default already)?

<comment><USER3> Sure. It's not the default already because the functionality did not exist at all in previous versions.

Say you have a table with a bunch of columns: (column1...column15) and you have an index on (column3, column4) and you run a query like:

      select column4 from table where column3 = x;

the DB will only read from the index (and not look at the table at all.) This is much faster as the index is much smaller in size than the table.

<comment><USER4> Thanks, that's interesting. So it only kicks in when your index covers all the columns in the "what" (select) clause. That tends not to be true for tables I've designed/worked with. I guess you could index differently to take advantage of this though.

<comment><USER5> Yes, databases which support index-only scans tend to encourage this pattern of adding extra columns in your indexes. In some cases this can be a big gain, but larger indexes means that the indexes are slower for queries which do not need the extra columns or need to read the entire row anyway.

Another set of queries which benefit from index only scans are those with EXISTS or JOINs just used for filtering the result set. In PostgreSQL 9.1 they always needed to read part of the actual row to check the visibility information. In 9.2 it will for VACUUMED pages only need to check the index and the visibility map.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Will the JSON type have document indexing or is it just a text store that will validate that it's JSON.

<comment><USER7> You don't necessarily need special support for that. There's no special XML indexing support, but you can use the XPath and XSLT functions to extract the data of interest and index that:

        CREATE TABLE foo (a_doc xml);
        CREATE INDEX doc_title ON foo ((xpath('/root@title', a_doc));

I don't see any JSON functions for extracting data in the devel documentation, but that's what you would be waiting on, and it could probably be added by an extension without having to wait for built-in support.

<comment><USER8> There's no native function, but it can easily be implemented. See sickpig's answer (sibling to your post) for a Javascript-based solution.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's kind of annoying to read so much good about PostgreSQL when you have hundreds of gigabytes of data in MySQL and no real reason to migrate to another database because of the expenses. I loved postgres in my previous project when I needed spatial indexing and I started to like its interface a lot.

It seems to be that Postgres is solving the problem of having different databases for your app. I would love to see the Redis datatypes built into it and Postgres might then become the strongest choice when selecting tools for my next app.

<comment><USER10> Which Redis types specifically?

Have you seen?: <https://github.com/dpage/redis_fdw>

<comment><USER9> Seems pretty experiemental. But just for a key-value store and using the json datatype, how good is the support for all these features in libraries like ActiveRecord pg adapter? I remember that two years ago features like bounding box selects required plain sql, although some quite bad libraries existed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> More discussion at <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3472177>

</comment><comment><USER12> I was suddenly excited for a JSON API support directly from PostgreSQL, been too naive. But I am still certain about the future.

</comment><comment><USER13> Covering indexes is really good news!</comment>


AT&T's Troubling Plan to Change HBO - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/07/att-changing-hbo/564635/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> I don't buy the logic here, and I'm not sure David Sims does either; this strikes me as one of those headlines that was written by an editor, independently of the article.

For as much as anybody here likes HBO, the diagnosis Stankey (and, I think, Sims) has of it seems apt. HBO has a sterling reputation. But so what? Even today, they're no longer distinctively good; in fact, there are basic cable channels (AMC and FX) that have given HBO a run for its money.

Does anyone really believe that HBO is going to outcompete Netflix on original programming over the long run? Netflix introduces new programs like Google introduces new chat programs. It's not even an event for them. They just randomly drop them in the middle of the week, as if they don't have time even to promote them. Have you ever started an episode of Jessica Jones and had to wait 2 minutes for them to promo the next season of Mindhunter?

And that's just Netflix. Amazon will eventually figure TV out. Disney controls Hulu now. Apple is making a move into online video.

Meanwhile, after Game of Thrones ends, what's HBO got for tentpole series? Westworld? Besides the fact that it won't be airing again for 2-3 years, its renewal was not even a certainty.

I think Stankey is right. If HBO is going to be a factor long-term, a thing people pay substantial amounts of money to retain access to, it is going to have to look more like Netflix and less like a thing you pay your cable company extra for. HBO could afford lulls of a year or two taking flyers on just 1-2 new prestige series (Carnivale; Newsroom; Vinyl). But premium cable is over, everything is going to be disintermediated, and HBO will need to justify demanding $15/mo directly from people. I'm not sure it's worth that today.

<comment><USER3> I wouldn't say that premium cable is over. Rather before you used to pay $60 + premium channels a month to have cable tv. Now you pay $15+15+15+15+15+15+15 ... + 75 for internet connection that doesn't have data caps.

Personally I think the de-bundling of cable TV and the getting rid of ads (i seriously never understood how we can pay for cable tv and still be forced to watch ads) is a great way for the market to move forward. It shows you that the consumer does ultimately get the final say so.

However, I do not believe that costs are getting cheaper. If anything they are just going to keep going up and up.

Also the crazy level of competition going on right now to produce "service selling" original content, is in my views creating a situation where we keep getting a sub par product out of the deal.

<comment><USER4> I agree though I think in short term price normalization is going to create lots of situations where demand exists but customers are unwilling to pay for all they want. The forced choice is going to create a really competitive market but in short term I won't sign up for 2+ services at ~$15/month.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> They should tap HBO's expertise and connections to build a Netflix competitor while keeping the HBO brand premium. Flogging a racehorse to make it pull a wagon train will just end in tears for everyone. I bet the champagne came out in Los Gatos.

<comment><USER6> Developing hit shows like "Game of Thrones" is extremely hard, and the competition for streaming content is cuthroat.

Meanwhile AT&T essentially only competes with Verizon, and does that primarily by offering the exact same services -- not exactly revolutionary, Harvard Business School Case Study stuff.

What has AT&T done in the last 20 years that was original? Mainly its operating business strategy is to raise prices as a regional, quasi-monopoly.

But sure, it's the (not highly paid) HBO employees that have to work harder, emulate those brilliant AT&T execs and their super original business growth strategies.

<comment><USER2> What is it that you think the prestige networks do to develop shows? They're not writing them themselves; they buy them from writers and production companies. Nobody is suggesting that AT&T is going to pull the next Sopranos out of a conference room meeting.

<comment><USER6> If it were just a matter of buying ready-made TV, anybody could do it.

Showrunners come to them with raw ideas and the first step is to filter out most of the bad ones. Then there's writing, casting, budgeting, filming, editing, marketing...you make it sound like HBO is a bunch of cardboard cutouts and they just order up completed shows from Amazon.

My point is AT&T has done practically zero creative or truly innovative in the last 20-25 years, it's comical to listen to a career AT&T suit lecture HBO staffers (who excel in a field far more difficult than his) about how they need to work harder.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So, basically day 1 of owning HBO, they tell the employees that they aren't making enough money (even though they are quite profitable) and that they are going to have to work harder. I'm speculating here, but I'm guessing there was probably no talk about compensating them more.

Its hard to imagine a better way of convincing all your best employees to start thinking about switching jobs.

<comment><USER8> Yeah but think of all the money you'll save in salaries!

<comment><USER9> "Nice Golden Goose you got there..."

<comment><USER10> "...be real shame if someone was to acquire it, force it to produce twice as many eggs on half the feed, create a half-baked digital platform on which you could watch it lay eggs in real-time, watch as its health slowly declined in the face of insurmountable odds, notice the new Platinum-producing Pig making headlines in town, acquire _that_ animal too, then sell what's left of the goose to a local French bistro to make gold-encrusted foie gras for the same someone to enjoy while watching House of Cards for the 3rd time on Netflix."

<comment><USER9> That was oddly specific and disturbing. Well done!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This was already HBOs plan before the merger was finalized (I interviewed there a year ago)

</comment><comment><USER12> They don't necessarily have to ruin HBO in order to compete with Netflix. They can expand HBO Now as a platform while allowing HBO to continue doing what they do best.

</comment><comment><USER13> HBO is too great to be ruined by AT&T.

Wiki says "HBO is the oldest and longest continuously operating pay television service (basic or premium) in the United States".

I'm not under estimating HBO. like the rest of the fear mongering I hear from my friends :)

AT&T doesn't' have what it takes to ruin it.

<comment><USER14> I dunno man. The Russians impoverished East Germany.

<comment> barry-cotter East Germany was the richest Soviet conquest and the richest ex-Soviet bloc state at the dissolution of the Soviet empire. Coming close to keeping up with West Germany is pretty good for a Communist state.

<comment><USER15> Richest ex-Soviet Bloc state is like healthiest terminally ill patient. Comparing East Germany to West seems more "germane."

<comment><USER16> You're both right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> AT&T owns a ton of content through owning Warner Media [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assets_owned_by_Warner...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assets_owned_by_WarnerMedia) and my guess is that they will be able to show that content on netflix. At least from my perspective, netflix has become a less desirable place to spend time on, given that they have taken down a lot of their third party content, something that AT&T and HBO will likely be able to resurface.

</comment><comment><USER18> I get HBO, binge on the new show, then cancel after a month. They have some good content, but not enough to keep me paying $10+ or whatever each month.

</comment><comment><USER19> This was discussed by my friends and myself earlier today. The general sentiment is it's going to be interesting watching how AT&T burns HBO to the ground and ruins it. The attitude and what came out of that meeting made none of us feel good about the acquisition, and pretty much hands down people are ready to just unsubscribe once it seems like quality drops.

</comment><comment><USER20> HBO is incredible. Sharp objects with Amy Adams just premiered last night. AT&T is going to ruin it.

<comment><USER21> I subscribed recently and watched silicon valley, entourage, ballers, veep and watching the wire now. What do you recommend, as most of the other series I haven't heard much about them and hbo shows for some reason seem a little bit harder to get started with.

<comment><USER22> Sopranos, Westworld, Six Feet Under, Curb Your Enthusiasm

<comment><USER23> Sopranos, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Six Feet Under, Sex And the City and The Wire are currently "free" in Amazon Prime.

At some point those licenses will expire but this illustrates the "innovator's dilemma" as applied to HBO.

They have a good business of selling cable subscriptions for new stuff, licensing their past shows to Amazon, Hulu and other willing buyers and selling on-demand access via Apple, Amazon etc.

Now they need to compete with Netlifx, which has a large catalog of licensed, popular shows from all over and their own exclusive content.

To compete with that HBO would have to drop revenue from licensing (there's less reasons to pay for HBO if I can get a lot of their good stuff elsewhere)

Their cable subscriptions are probably going to decline no matter what. Cable subscriber count is on a steady, 6 year decline ([http://www.businessinsider.com/cable-tv-subscriber- losses-q2...](http://www.businessinsider.com/cable-tv-subscriber- losses-q2-chart-2017-6)) despite being propped by internet + cable bundles.

That decline is accelerating i.e. every year more people are cancelling cable as a percentage. If that continues, it'll be a bloodbath. If the decline stops accelerating, it'll still be bloodbath, just later. I don't see a scenario in which cable starts growing again.

Netlifx model is easy to explain but almost impossible to replicate.

The model is: get so many subscribers from all over the world paying you relatively small amount that you'll be able to outspend any other company in quantity of TV/movie exclusive content, thus making it even more likely to get new subscribers.

This is "rich get richer" model and Netflix is already the richest.

People will be willing to buy 2-3 such subscriptions so that's how many winning slots there are.

So HBO better fight hard for that 2nd or 3rd position, but unfortunately just like BlockBuster or Borders had a good business until they didn't, HBO might not do enough to compete.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Funny it seems Netflix has been doing everything it can to be HBO! (And that's a good thing!)

<comment><USER25> It needs to try harder. I'm still waiting for anything coming close to The Wire or The Sopranos.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Interesting that neither the article nor a single comment mentioned AT&T's efforts to undermine net neutrality. That would be their ace up the sleeve. And they can get away with it because this administration is corrupt to the core.

<comment><USER27> With its position as ISP, AT&T can make trouble for Netflix content delivery.

And they know how. Remember all those independent DSL providers, back around the millennium? I had one for years, then intermittent failures set in. After months of debugging, the cause was traced to misconfigured AT&T equipment in the local office.

It's as easy and untraceable as deprioritizing Netflix-sensitive operations tasks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I think George Carlin's death hurt HBO more than anything. That is to say if they were still the home of stand-up comedy they might still be cool. They really dropped the ball on that.

</comment><comment><USER29> > HBO NOW is only supported in the U.S. and select U.S. territories.

Oh yeah, I still have to pirate the HBO shows I want to watch. Even the Netflix catalogue seems to be shrinking rather than growing here outside of the US. Apparently you can get Netflix to show more stuff here by changing the language on the web interface because they only show me stuff that has dubs for my language. Can't do that in-app though.

Uh, hello, I understand English well enough to be able to watch your fucking show in English, why does my room mate have to call your support to figure this out?

So now they want to turn HBO which is even worse than Netflix into Netflix? Cool, I'll still be pirating.

 _yawn_

</comment><comment><USER30> Can someone explain why it's obviously doomed?

<comment><USER31> They bought a niche diamond mine and want it to be a giant aluminum recycling company.

HBO makes a few REALLY good series. That's what they do. They are not setup to produce 10x as much content. If they do they may not have the people who can do that with reasonable quality. They're used to polishing gems.

You wouldn't buy Nintendo and order them to make a console more powerful than the XBox One X. That's not what they do.

This probably won't go well.

<comment><USER2> HBO doesn't make money by producing _really good series_. They make money by producing series that get people attached, to pay them for years at a time. Bored To Death might have been a fine show, but to a first approximation nobody signed up for HBO just to see it. They can churn out Vice Principals and Barry's and Young Popes, but if they can't reliably keep a Game Of Thrones or (bleh) True Blood in the pipeline, they'll have a hard time justifying their cost.

<comment><USER32> Silicon Valley and Curb Your Enthusiasm aren't mentioned enough and a big reason I subscribe.

HBO used to be the pinnacle of stand-up shows, but Netflix has taken that torch now it seems.

For comedy series they do well though. Curb, Silicon Valley, VEEP, Last Week Tonight, Eastbound & Down, and back in the day Larry Sanders, Mr. Show, Ali G and more.

They always deliver with great shows non-comedy as well: Band of Brothers, Boardwalk Empire, The Wire, Sopranos, The Night Of, GoT, Big Little Lies, True Detective and on and on, hard to find this level of quality and creator freedom that allows that. Netflix definitely giving HBO a run for their money in quality and creator freedom, hard to imagine AT&T even giving creators the level of control HBO and Netflix have.

<comment><USER2> They might be why _you_ subscribe (and I like Silicon Valley, too) but they're not why customers in general subscribe. True Blood had something like 6x as many viewers as Silicon Valley (this is what I mean when I say HBO's business isn't really "quality" so much as stickiness); for Game of Thrones, it's more like 12x.

But also, you can't look at those shows in isolation. Compare them to Netflix's properties. Stranger Things is as big a deal as literally anything HBO has launched in the last decade, including Game of Thrones (I really want to believe that HBO is kicking themselves for not buying the script for that; it was shopped to them). For any given HBO 30 minute comedy, Netflix has probably launched 3 equally credible comedies.

The very best, most important 60-minute scripted dramas in the past decade have not as a rule, with the exception of Game of Thrones, been on HBO. If AMC can do Mad Men and FX can do The Americans, there is no reason to believe that Netflix can't do equally well just by pouring investor dollars into acquiring shows. At the end of the day, that's what these businesses do: pick production companies to fund, fund them, and then distribute the results.

<comment><USER33> The Wire. Arguably one of the best dramas ever created. The Sopranos. Deadwood. Carnivale.

You're avoiding some incredible shows.

<comment><USER2> OITNB is a Netflix show, which makes my point for me.

Season 5 of The Wire was just about a decade ago, and it was abbreviated because it didn't get great ratings.

Carnivale was cancelled for low ratings after its second season. I'm not saying it's bad (it was a mess, though). I'm saying that HBO has to do _more things like Carnivale_ , on a much faster schedule, if it's going to keep up with Netflix.

<comment><USER34> If you say another single bad thing about Carnivale we go to war...

<comment><USER2> It's _fine_. It's much better than John from Cincinnati or Luck or Vinyl was. I enjoyed it more than I enjoyed Boardwalk Empire.

<comment><USER34> War I say.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> And then HBO makes a show like Westworld, i.e. low quality of shows and low amount, what a winning strategy :)

</comment><comment><USER36> Netflix is as agile as they come.

AT&T needs a crooked FCC to pass laws in order to make their exiting business model viable, and they have something everyone needs Internet and Cell phone, and they are basically only 1 of 4 players.

</comment><comment><USER37> I've wondered about HBO's future. I see a few problems:

First, it used to be the only source for intelligent programming. Now I can get as good or better content from Netflix, Amazon, and smaller arthouse- oriented channels. HBO doesn't stand out to me.

Second, streaming channels are a la carte, not bundled, and I'd have to pay cable TV-sized bills to subscribe to 100 channels. HBO doesn't seem to offer enough to be worth a separate subscription.

Finally, the lack of an integrated listing UI means that I have to open the HBO channel to see what's playing there. It's rarely worth the effort with so many other options that have more content.

<comment><USER38> I guess this is a matter of opinion, but I'll bite anyway. What content do you watch from Netflix or Amazon that you find to be comparable to HBO's tentpole programming?

To be honest with you, I find Amazon's content to be...well, bad. On the other hand Netflix has a few good shows, but the company is clearly prioritizing quantity over quality. Not only does its content not have the awards or acclaim HBO's garners, but it just churns out forgettable movie after forgettable movie. A lot of Netflix's content is becoming the new "direct to TV" movie.

HBO's approach is to produce character-driven and thought-provoking programming which is ahead of the curve. That's not everyone's cup of tea when it comes to entertainment, but they naturally achieve greater critical acclaim and cult status. It's hard to think of a way most of Netflix or Amazon's content can be compared to HBO's except, "It's entertaining." In what way do you see Netflix or Amazon innovating? For what definition of "good" do you find your favorite Netflix and Amazon shows comparing favorably with HBO's?

For a while I held high hopes of Netflix becoming a new HBO because _House of Cards_ was exceptional. But they didn't exactly make that a trend. And while we're on the subject of UI, Netflix is so hellbent on having me binge watch the day away that I can't hover over a title for more than 1 second without it blaring a crappy trailer at me. The native Netflix experience (LG TV, AppleTV) has me scurrying from title to title like a mad squirrel hoping to read a description without triggering the trailer.

<comment><USER39> House of Cards (First 2 seasons at least), Stranger Things, Orange is the New Black, Marco Polo, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Dear White People, Bojack Horseman, and to a lesser extent some of the Marvel shows (Jessica Jones, Daredevil, Luke Cage, Punisher), not to mention how much amazing standup comedy Netflix puts out. Sure, there's a lot of junk, but Netflix is succeeding in becoming HBO faster than HBO is becoming Netflix.

<comment><USER38> I'll give you the standup comedy selection because I agree it's really quite good. I also like Stranger Things but can't comment on the others. But I actively dislike the Marvel content on Netflix. I find its characters one- dimensional and its plot unmotivated. Some of this is probably the transition from comic books to TV, but on the other hand I love almost everything from the cinematic universe.

I think the biggest problem is that the Marvel cinematic universe seems to have better acting, better writing, superior interconnectedness overall and stakes that are well calibrated to its cast of heroes. In contrast, I find most of the characters' hyperfocus on specific neighborhoods in Marvel's Netflix shows to be frankly ridiculous and annoying. I also find myself wishing the main characters would just kill the villains a few episodes into each series. It boggles my mind how much waffling and angst goes on.

As a followup to your last comment though, my point had nothing to do with HBO becoming Netflix. I don't even think HBO should try to become Netflix at all. I would prefer for HBO to remain the curated content space that it is, precisely because I'm concerned with the quality of content. Strictly speaking, the ratio of quality content to junk on HBO is far, far higher than Netflix's. It's not really about HBO or Netflix being more successful in becoming the other, it's about quality. Regardless of whether or not HBO is close to becoming Netflix, Netflix is so far from becoming HBO I don't even think they could recognize an interstate map outlining the route.

<comment><USER40> HBO and Netflix both produce a couple of dozen shows a year. HBO seems like it has a better hit ratio because you have to go back every week to get an update on the one or two current shows you enjoy. HBO has a better presentation for appearing prestige.

<comment><USER38> No, I disagree strongly. I don't binge Netflix and I still feel the same way.

<comment><USER40> Do you watch 24 different HBO shows a year, or do you watch 4 or 5?

<comment><USER38> Four or five, but I don't really follow what you mean. I sit through maybe 10 pilots on Netflix that don't motivate me to watch the entire season. The last time I tried and failed to get into an HBO show was with _Succession_ (in my opinion that show is exceptionally bad). Before that I can't recall. But on Amazon I churned off of literally everything, and on Netflix it takes me at least five duds (that are apparently a strong match for me) to find something I'll commit to. The only thing I think Netflix has really nailed is comedy, and that's because their selection of comedy is actually _diverse and comprehensive._ Conversely, a lot of their selection for traditional drama is formulaic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I gave up on HBO 15+ years ago after every single new show they made was nothing but a non stop stream of cuss words. Their only way to stand out just seems to be by bringing new levels of raunchiness to the viewer, and that gets old.

<comment><USER42> How do you make a show like The Sopranos without cuss words? Not too many mobsters earn an Eagle Scout medal.

And if you tell me that The Sopranos wasn't realistic, I'd say you weren't paying attention to the news in the NYC metropolitan area. Many/most of the show's plots were, at the least, "inspired by actual events".

You can always watch the Hallmark Channel on basic cable. Not too many cuss words there.

<comment><USER43> Eh, I dont know what the OP had in mind, but I've watched all the big HBO shows and the only one that was unwatchable specifically due to profanity was Deadwood.

Whatever story it had was absolutely drowned out by dialogue written by prepubescent boys who just learned the word "fuck" for the first time.</comment></comment></comment>