Why do buses bunch? - <AUTHOR> http://setosa.io/bus/ <comment><USER3> I commute in LA and observe (and am impacted) by this regularly; so much so, that I've been meaning to write the municipal operator about solving the issue, or at least reduce the tendency (attractor?).

My mitigation idea: When the buses become bunched; the forward bus should switch to 'Disembark Only' mode. (Most modern buses I've seen have a preset to post this on the LED signage). This way it can pass all the stops with folks waiting and (we hope) will make enough time up to get far enough down the line to remain un-bunched.

Then, by some condition (e.g.,"back to within 5 minutes of posted schedule") switch back to normal "pickup & drop-off" mode.

It's very cool to see someone else noticing and thinking about this phenomena.

To quote the great thinker Yogi Berra, "You can observe a lot just by watching."

<comment><USER4> I think this would work well, but my gut reaction is that a passenger who is already annoyed at a late bus watching that bus just go right on by would be unappreciative.

<comment><USER5> A couple of tweaks that might make it less problematic for you:

1\. Bus #1's signage updates so it doesn't show the bus route externally; it's no longer "your" bus, so you aren't upset when it passes by

2\. Bus #2 (which is ostensibly no more than half a block away) has an N% discount for passengers (where N increases according to demand).

3\. When Bus #1 gets "bumped" (metaphorically) by Bus #2, bus company regulations have it pull over and let Bus #2 pass it; therefore, the less- crowded Bus #2 can pick up more of the waiting passengers. [Edit: Oh; I see this has been covered in some other comments already.]

<comment><USER6> > it's no longer "your" bus, so you aren't upset when it passes by

It's not always so easy to trick people. For me, in SF, there are often bus stops with either only one bus line, or with multiple bus lines that will all take me to my destination.

<comment><USER7> "Out of Service" or "Charter".

<comment><USER8> Getting caught lying will make it even worse.

<comment><USER7> Technically, the signage is correct ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Note how this would all go away if the empty buses could pass the full buses. Which they usually can, since even on single-lane roads, the _bus stop_ is out of the way of traffic.

But then there are _trolleybuses_. When the busses are all hooked to a single overhead cable run, as is common in places like Vancouver, the driver of one trolleybus would have to de-latch and then re-latch their "rabbit ears" (i.e. get out of the bus twice) in order to pass another trolleybus. Needless to say, this is uncommon. (Someone on HN: _please_ , come up with a trolley pole design that can hot-pass another trolley pole pair while remaining on the line, and sell it to cities.)

<comment><USER10> >Note how this would all go away if the empty buses could pass the full buses.

It's more complicated than that and has to be managed carefully.

Here's what happens in the unmanaged case:

\- The empty bus passes the full bus

\- There are passengers waiting at the next stop

\- The empty bus stops to pick them up

\- There are no passengers waiting

\- The full bus typically doesn't have to stop

\- The full bus passes the empty bus

Now these buses are irrevocably bunched.

P.S. This site doesn't work for me at all.

<comment><USER11> Exactly. A method that _does_ work is to make the full bus exit-only: no new passengers are allowed to enter the bus. You keep that bus exit-only until it has caught up to its schedule. This also works fine with trolley buses. Unfortunately this is hard to match with human psychology of the people trying to enter a bus.

<comment><USER9> On routes that are heavily front-loaded (a connection from a metro line to a neighbourhood the metro doesn't reach, for example), this can result in the first five-to-ten stops on the route effectively being knocked out during rush hour. Anybody who actually wants to catch the bus has to walk ten blocks over to the first stop.

<comment><USER12> A display at the bus stop showing when the next 3-5 buses are going to stop approximately solves the problem

<comment><USER13> It really helps. In New York some subway lines have this and some do not. On the lines that do not, you sometimes hear the conductor announce "there is a train immediately behind this one" but it's not nearly as effective as when everyone waiting on the platform has been able to see that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> When I lived in London, and used buses fairly regularly, I started thinking about ways to improve the service and stop bunching. I considered the reason stated here, and some of the solutions, but later realised that the root cause was that the drivers liked to stop and chat and perhaps play cards with each other at the (presumably unsupervised) "bus station" at the far end of the route. Once I'd observed 3 of them waiting for each other, chatting, and then _all leaving at once on the same route_ , my interest in trying to think of ways to fix the problem waned.

<comment><USER15> I lived in London and used to ride the 9, which at the time was one of the last routemaster buses.

I also learned that the drivers are comfortable in their chair, and they get paid whether they are late or early, whether they take off smoothly or like a jackrabbit, and whether people are crammed in or left waiting on here stop because they weren't quick enough.

In other words, automation has to be a part of any solution, because the drivers do not care.

<comment><USER14> I'm sure there are several valuable lessons hidden away in there - <USER2> assumptions, human factors, jumping to "obvious" solutions without having verified the actual cause of a problem, unintended consequences etc. etc.

Would be interesting to look at a system where it does actually work well and see what's different.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Fwiw a relevant general concept is that of stable vs. unstable equilibria. In a stable equilibrium, small deviations will tend to correct back to the equilibrium, while in an unstable one, small deviations get magnified and the system drifts away from it (absent active intervention). Given some assumptions, such as those implemented by this simulation, evenly spaced buses represent an unstable equilibrium, since a bus slightly early or late will cause an asymmetry in passenger load that pushes things further in the "wrong" direction.

</comment><comment><USER17> It makes me sad that this doesn't seem to work in Firefox!

<comment><USER18> Yet another example of a lazy Chrome dev. This is getting too prevalent.

<comment><USER19> Google is turning into Microsoft 2000. It is the natural order of things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Where I live, if a bus gets late enough (or too full) and the driver knows there's another bus right behind, they'll start skipping stops. I don't think that would help in this simulation because people getting on seem to be equally likely to want to get off on each stop, but IME that's not really accurate for most bus routes. People want to get on the bus at all sorts of random places, but 90% of people are getting off at the same two or three stops (transfer point, city center, etc). It would be interesting to see these things would affect the bunching, I think.

</comment><comment><USER21> There's a bug in that simulator:

        00:12:07.824 "Error: Argument 1 of SVGPathElement.getPointAtLength is not a finite floating-point value.
        [6]</MapCtrl</MapCtrl.prototype.place_bus@http://setosa.io/bus/dist/bundle.js:380:10
        $parseFunctionCall@http://setosa.io/bus/dist/bundle.js:29490:15
        expressionInputWatch@http://setosa.io/bus/dist/bundle.js:29899:31
        $RootScopeProvider/this.$get</Scope.prototype.$digest@http://setosa.io/bus/dist/bundle.js:31386:34
        $RootScopeProvider/this.$get</Scope.prototype.$evalAsync/<@http://setosa.io/bus/dist/bundle.js:31591:15
        completeOutstandingRequest@http://setosa.io/bus/dist/bundle.js:22010:7
        Browser/self.defer/timeoutId<@http://setosa.io/bus/dist/bundle.js:22398:7
        "1 bundle.js:28741:17
        consoleLog/<() bundle.js:28741
        $ExceptionHandlerProvider/this.$get</<() bundle.js:25682
        $RootScopeProvider/this.$get</Scope.prototype.$digest() bundle.js:31412
        $RootScopeProvider/this.$get</Scope.prototype.$evalAsync/<() bundle.js:31591
        completeOutstandingRequest() bundle.js:22010
        Browser/self.defer/timeoutId<() bundle.js:22398

No buses are drawn.

</comment><comment><USER22> This site/group also did a fantastic visualization on gridlock vs. bottlenecks:

[http://setosa.io/blog/2014/09/02/gridlock/](http://setosa.io/blog/2014/09/02/gridlock/)

<comment><USER23> I've never heard of them before, but they have some really amazing things! I am thoroughly impressed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is interesting and I like the display.

However, in Firefox (Gentoo 35.0) the buses don't stick to the roads on the turns and seem to go a little slower than intended.

This therefore means that the buses don't bunch at all.

This is an amusing bug as it's pretty much impossible to notice (everything works) but ruins the effect on Firefox.

</comment><comment><USER25> Now how do we explain how buses seem to arrive and depart just before we arrive to the stop?

</comment><comment><USER26> This kills the firefox.

<comment><USER27> Does anyone know _why_ this doesn't work in Firefox?

<comment><USER28> Based on the tone of some other responses, I'm guessing because the author of this is literally hitler.

<comment><USER27> Does anyone have a technical means for Hitler to do this?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I believe that to solve this problem, metros in paris have two strategies:

-1 a train that has a train too close before it will idle between stations to restore a reasonable space between trains (problem: all trains go as slow as the "first" train)

-2 a train that has train too close after it will ask all travelers to step out at a station to wait for the next train, then skip a couple of stations to restore a good space between trains (problem: people in the "scarified" train get a big delay)

</comment><comment><USER30> Is it just me, or did it not actually explain why:

> Bus bunching happens because, if a bus gets delayed, then there will be more > people waiting at the next stop than anticipated. The extra passengers' > boarding time makes the bus even later, and so on in a vicious cycle.

OK, so I get that buses get delayed. And even more delayed. But why buses "bunch" up and arrive at the same time doesn't seem to be explained anywhere.

<comment><USER31> This doesn't even seem like an accurate simulation, if bus 1 is unloading/loading at a bus stop and bus 2 catches it, bus 2 waits for bus 1. This makes sense in the context of the website because buses always drop off/pick up passengers when they get to a bus stop. But that isn't how it works in real life, if bus 2 doesn't have to drop off someone while bus 1 is at the stop it will just leapfrog past it.

The fact that busses don't overtake each other seems to be the reason the bunching happens, as soon as the front bus starts slowing down a little it's inevitable bus 2 will catch it and then the situation can't be fixed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Buses bunch as they move further along the route as a consequence of having a dwell time (the time spent at the stop) that increases as a result of the number of passengers boarding at each stop increases AND having passengers arrive at each stop randomly. You can reduce bunching effects by:

* loading passengers who have already paid through multiple doors like Curitiba which every transport engineer includes on their honeymoon :)

* having passengers use smart cards rather than cash which is slower

* running infrequent services so passengers read the timetable and do not arrive at the bus stop randomly as their is an incentive to be their at the timetabled time.

The last method is obviously not acceptable in running a service but it highlights the curse of running frequent services. As frequency increases, people's behaviour moves to "turn up and go" rather than read a timetable and the buses bunch. So you in effect trade waiting time, waiting for a timetabled service for bunch delay time. Hence one good reason to go for smart cards or bus platforms where you pay prior to boarding the platform like a train station to speed up loading.

</comment><comment><USER33> In Chicago, the CTA is rolling out new 2-way communication into buses to allow the dispatcher to try and help alleviate bunching

[http://chi.streetsblog.org/2015/05/14/heres-how-new-cta- tech...](http://chi.streetsblog.org/2015/05/14/heres-how-new-cta-technology- helps-reduce-bus-bunching/)

</comment><comment><USER34> NYC Metropolitan Transportation Authority posted a cute 8-bit video about the same problem, but for subways: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eShtZSx4kWc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eShtZSx4kWc)

</comment><comment><USER35> Nice explanation I just wish it went into more detail as to WHO causes the time delay. No bus stop line has stops where the exact amount of people get on every time. It's the fact that the first bus picks up more people (due to rush hour) and those people take more time to get on, request more stops and delay the bus. The time delay is caused by:

Asymmetrical passenger quantity. (usually rush hour)

Which the really nice demo doesn't show (because it wants to show the delay with the passengers as a control). Both bustops have the same number of passengers each in relation to each other. That's just not realistic. In the real world, the asymmetrical passenger quantity causes the delays, not traffic.

</comment><comment><USER36> But trains generally don't.

Trains are signalled so the waits and delays take place between stations and not at the platform: it takes a while for the delayed train to reach the next station so it won't just sit behind the first train and be of no use.

The stop times for commuter trains are quite consistent because there's no onboard ticketing: people just hop out and then on, and that's it. Tickets are prepurchased or sold by the conductor while the train is moving.

A good portion of the time spent at a stop is spent decelerating and accelerating and not only loading/unloading passenger. Even if there were no passengers, the stop time wouldn't necessarily be substantially shorter.

There's no other traffic which helps keep to the schedules: this cuts down the sources of unexpected delays. Barring track and switch failures, the only source of delay is a huge crowd of passengers leaving and boarding on a single station. Even there, station platforms are quite long and even if some venue were to ooze thousands of people out to the train station at the same time, there's a limit of how many people can realistically populate the whole platform in between trains. So there generally is always some space on the platform to which the existing passengers can still exit, and people waiting on the platform tend to saturate available free space instead of crowding into an unpenetrable flock.

Now, buses could use "soft signalling" to even out the distance between consecutive units. Using travel cards only (either with prepaid monthly periods or by having single-fare smartcard readers onboard) and allowing unloading/loading through all doors at the same time would help. Bus lanes and unconditional traffic light prioritization (bus always gets green light) for public transit are used in many countries. But there's very little to do about the capacity of a bus and the short length of a bus stop.

Even trams are much better: they can take in 3x-5x as many passengers and tram stops are generally much longer, allowing the tram to operate with 6-8 doors instead of 2-3 like a bus. Tram routes are often heavily isolated as well, and run with at least some basic level of traffic light priorities.

<comment><USER21> _" But trains generally don't._"

The London subway has real problems with this, because they have so much rolling stock on some lines that any delay cascades back through the chain of trains. On some lines, a 30 second delay will cause the train behind to stop between stations, which means it has to accelerate again, putting it about a minute behind. This can delay several following trains.

The Yamanote line in Tokyo, which is a big loop around the central city, has trains about every 2 minutes. If any train is delayed by 5 seconds, the schedule for all the trains in the loop is slipped back 5 seconds. This maintains spacing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> (Not trying the article's domain against the corporate firewall, sorry)

Sometimes it's because there's traffic going the opposite way. Many buses travel a circuit, so their route ends at its beginning. If your bus is late, maybe it was stuck in traffic an hour ago, and was late to every stop since that traffic.

Traffic itself becomes a travel-time multiplier - driving a car home from some offices, leaving at 3pm would get me home at 3:30. But leaving at 3:15 gets me home at 4. Leaving at 3:30 gets me home at 4:30. It seems to describe a bell curve that maximizes about 5:30 or 6pm.

<comment><USER19> Why are you afraid to _try_?

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Even cars "bunch" (cause traffic jams) without any apparent reason. It's due to instabilities in traffics caused by reaction times [1].

[1] [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167278905...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167278905003775)

Direct link: [http://www- personal.umich.edu/~orosz/articles/PhysicaDpublis...](http://www- personal.umich.edu/~orosz/articles/PhysicaDpublished.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER38> Over here in and around Philadelphia I think the main problem is the stoplights. In my commute home I literally have to stop at each and every one and they are sometimes no more than a few hundred feet apart. I always wonder why they can't be synchronized in some way to allow for a more fluid traffic flow, but never the less they seem to like stopping long lines of traffic to allow a single car or two to get out of a shopping center with the priority it seems being given to those in the shopping center.

</comment><comment><USER39> In the simulation, the back of the bus slides out like a race car in the "S" curve. Don't spill your coffee.

</comment><comment><USER40> I actually made a small tool to track bus bunching in Chicago.

[https://github.com/skatenerd/buses/blob/master/artifacts/hea...](https://github.com/skatenerd/buses/blob/master/artifacts/healthy_buses_for_once.png)

The results were largely depressing, but unsurprising.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> hey yall maybe you will like this short paper on dynamic control for bus bunching from my group [http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.153...](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.153.1664&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

</comment><comment><USER41> I must be missing the complexity here. Surely this is.simple, since buses run to a timetable. Hence they can only be on time or late, but never depart earlier than advertised. Hence over time the chances that it will be delayed increases the chances of bunching.

<comment><USER42> Buses here (Berlin) often depart as soon as they reach the station, which can be early (except on their very first station I guess).

You could argue that they shouldn't, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> If you ever played Minimetro, the trains always bunch when you put several of them on one line.

</comment><comment><USER44> Anyone else learn this from scheduling trains / switches in A-Train? =)

</comment><comment><USER45> Two words Toronto streetcar riders dread: short turn.

</comment><comment><USER46> Here in Portland I've often seen pairs of bunched busses leapfrogging each other at every stop so that at least they both move faster.

</comment><comment><USER47> In Lima Peru the bus drivers pay spotters on the street who report flow conditions by cell phone.

<comment><USER48> They do this in my city too (Bogotá, Colombia). It's actually illegal here, but they do it anyway.

<comment><USER47> It's bizarre that it would be illegal. For all I know, it might be illegal in Peru too, but it happens, and it works pretty well.

In Lima, the spotters are known as "dateros" (loosely, "data wrangler"). The bus drivers pay them roughly 20 centavos, I think per stop but I'm not certain.

One case where it doesn't work is when certain bus drivers ignore the system and aggressively jump ahead of other buses. Nevertheless, it's pretty smooth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Doesn't seem to work in my browser. Maybe my address bus bunches with the data bus.

</comment><comment><USER50> Damn, this is a beautiful site.

</comment><comment><USER51> Wow, this was the CS101 4th week assignment I had to do (without the graphics).

</comment><comment><USER52> Hi Lewis.

I really liked this page, but it is consuming too memory and CPU power.

</comment><comment><USER53> traffic lights...

</comment><comment><USER54> Where's the button to make the goldbricking union bus driver stop and get out for a smoke break in the middle of the run?

</comment><comment><USER55> Because bus drivers like to play poker together in the pus station.

</comment><comment><USER56> I haven't read the article, but I ride the bus a lot. Here is my subjective take: bus drivers get into a very distinct and slow pattern of their bus driving behavior. Slow to do everything, never not taking their break, never attempting to make up for lost time.

So in their daily routine, the traffic between stops is variable, but their little rituals and apathy to the travel plight of passengers is not.

They also like to take up time socializing between driver swaps, which aren't accounted for in bus schedules. Thus the largest factor is bus A may have no traffic, and bus B had a lot, but their stops at each place take the same amount of time, thus they end up clumping when traffic let's one drive between stops faster than the other, who will still be on his break at the Bart station.

<comment><USER57> The point of the article is that you can generate this behavior in an ideal system without taking into account differences in drivers.

Put simply, small stochastic differences in arrival rates of passengers or initial speed of buses will amplify themselves. If you take three buses and shift the center one in time, you'll end up with one longer gap and one shorter one. The bus with the longer gap will tend to find more people waiting at each stop, while the bus with the shorter gap will find fewer people and move faster. Ultimately, the faster bus will catch the one in front of it and follow it, with zero people getting on at each stop. There will then be a -huge- gap, followed by a very slow bus that has to pick up a ton of people at each stop.

<comment><USER56> Which pretty much maps to my comment.

<comment><USER58>
      I haven't read the article, but ...

it's an interactive and intuitive explanation of why this happens, and it has nothing to do with anything you mentioned.

"my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge"

<comment><USER59> Did you really just create a throwaway account to slag on someone else's comment? Please don't do that :/</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bitcoin's new record price means that Satoshi Nakamoto is worth $5.9B - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1107843/bitcoins-btc-new-record-price-of-6000-means-satoshi-nakamoto-is-worth-5-9-billion/ <comment><USER2> $6.2 billion when you consider he also owns the same amount of BCC which is worth ~$350 at the moment.

</comment><comment><USER3> *presuming that you can sell 5.9x10^9 dollars worth of BTC

<comment><USER2> Or that he even has the private keys. Or that the markets don't freak out the second he moves a penny.</comment></comment>


Exploring the Limits of Weakly Supervised Pretraining - <AUTHOR> https://research.fb.com/publications/exploring-the-limits-of-weakly-supervised-pretraining/ <comment><AUTHOR> Quote: _" In our experiments, we train standard convolutional network architectures to predict hashtags on up to 3.5 billion public Instagram images."_</comment>


Wi-Fi Connected (NTP) Round-LED-Clock - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/leonvandenbeukel/Round-LED-Clock <comment><AUTHOR> What an cool idea! I've been wondering why no-one (that I've found) has made a cool NTP clock for home use... :)</comment>


EU's right to be forgotten: Guardian articles have been hidden by Google - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/02/eu-right-to-be-forgotten-guardian-google <comment><USER2> This article is pretty terrible. I think it's great that it's drawing attention to the problem, but it spends most of the time rallying an angry mob and pointing the pitchforks in the wrong direction:

> Guardian articles have been hidden by Google

> Editorial decisions belong with them, not Google

> But such editorial calls surely belong with publishers, not Google.

Google has done absolutely nothing wrong here. It is making zero editorial calls. It's removing links that were flagged for removal by someone outside of the company, and it _is compelled to do so by EU law_.

In fact, if you ignore the finger-pointing at Google, you'll see that Google actually tries really really hard to get around this: It informs you when results were blocked, notifies when results are blocked, blocks only the narrowest possible search terms, and helpfully points you to google.com which doesn't filter.

> Publishers can and should do more to fight back. One route may be legal > action.

No, legal action is the _only_ route. This is a matter of law.

<comment><USER3> Put down your Google pitchfork. The article is clearly not placing the blame on Google: "As for Google itself, it's clearly a reluctant participant in what effectively amounts to censorship." The second paragraph says this is the result of a court ruling.

If the most concerning thing to you about this article is that it doesn't spend enough time exonerating Google for their role in this, then I don't know what to tell you.

<comment><USER4> It was a poor article - casual reading of it leads one to believe that Google is engaging in Censorship. Careful reading of the entire article places the blame on where it's supposed to be - the Law - but the fact that the article kept calling out Google, when it should have been repeatedly mentioning the law that Google was complying with, was problematic.

<comment><USER5> Interesting, I have no such feeling of 'casual reading of it leads one to believe that Google is engaging in Censorship'.

<comment><USER4> Title, Introduction, First Paragraph read as follows:

 _EU 's right to be forgotten: Guardian articles have been hidden by Google

Publishers must fight back against this indirect challenge to press freedom, which allows articles to be 'disappeared'. Editorial decisions belong with them, not Google

When you Google someone from within the EU, you no longer see what the search giant thinks is the most important and relevant information about an individual. You see the most important information the target of your search is not trying to hide._

My Rewrite:

 _EU 's right to be forgotten: Guardian articles have been required removed by law.

Publishers must fight back against this indirect challenge to press freedom, which allows articles to be 'disappeared'. Editorial decisions belong with them, not the government.

When you search someone from within the EU, you no longer see what might be the most important and relevant information about an individual. You see the most important information the target of your search is not trying to hide._

<comment><USER5> Title: EU's right to be forgotten: Guardian articles have been hidden by Google

"EU's right to be forgotten", people with context understand this cause.

You are so good at political correctness... That does not matter if you use "search engine" to generalize google, Google is effectively the "search engine". You can say that Google has no fault in this incident, but you should not pretend that Google is not playing a crucial role in this incident...

Wording is just wording, truth is the truth...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This law is a very serious threat to freedom of the press, and freedom of speech in general. While it was (allegedly) introduced for reasons that seem quite reasonable - avoiding unfair reputations in search results - it could quite validly be termed as "Right to censor criticism or true facts about yourself".

Let's take high-profile person X who is found guilty of some serious crime, like sex offences. They have the money to hire a professional "reputation management" firm to find all stories in the press about them, and send takedown requests to Google, who is legally compelled to comply with those requests. The result is that information that is out there in the public domain, and that the public arguably has a right to know, is censored.

There's a balance here between an individual's right to be protected against defamation, and the public's right to know. I don't think this law strikes the right balance. Furthermore, it ignores the technical and social nature of how the Internet works - the so called "Streisand effect" that repeatedly gets invoked whenever someone tries to suppress information. And as technology evolves and there's even more ways for information to become replicated (think peer-to-peer search engines and the like), it's like trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube.

<comment><USER7> There's no threat at all to either freedom of speech or the press.

If the guardian publishes something, it will have its day in the sun.

It just will eventually get removed, years afterwards. No press freedoms impinged, years after you've had your expressive speech.

Whatever freedom that is, freedom of historical reports?, it's nothing to do with speech or press. If you want to re-report the information, you could, but it then would likely no longer be for the public good or interest, it would merely be vindictive.

Unless, of course, you don't believe in redemption or rehabilitation.

<comment><USER8> Today's BBC article thoroughly disproves your point: [http://www.bbc.com/news/business-28130581](http://www.bbc.com/news/business-28130581)

Freedom of press is about creating a public record. When you remove that record from the public, when you censor the _past_ of public discourse, you've infringed on free speech. Real discourse is full of [citation needed], and if you can preemptively remove those citations, there will be cheating.

<comment><USER9> And yet those [citation needed]s haven't disappeared. I can and do still find them using duck duck go and Bing. Information will be free. There's an agenda at play here because I can't imagine how the people behind this law couldn't have foreseen this. I wonder whether Google is being set up because of its market-dominating position. If not, why weren't the other search engines similarly constrained?

<comment><USER10> > _If not, why weren 't the other search engines similarly constrained?_

They are if they operate in the EU.

But there's no universal place to submit takedown requests. People would also have to send them to Bing (according to this article DDG doesn't operate at all in the EU so is not subject to the ruling).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Google is playing this ruling really cleverly. They will just blanket accept every single request for a "right to be forgotten" that they receive.

Once swathes of valid journalism disappears down the toilet, the shit is slowly going to hit the pan.

You could use this for some nefarious purposes I'm sure.

I have a client that wants a page removed because of a court case that painted them in a bad light. This ruling just made their year.

<comment><USER12> > the shit is slowly going to hit the pan

I can't tell whether that's less appealing than the usual idiom.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It won't take long before a UK search for Dougie McDonald shows the article talking about how the articles about Dougie McDonald have been removed from Google, and what those articles are about.

Google tells the media which articles are being expunged, the media writes about the articles Google expunged and then Google indexes these pages in their search results. Interesting process.

<comment><USER14> That process is happening right now, and it is interesting. But will it continue, aka is it a viable long term workaround? Articles being removed is new and in a sense exciting for the press, Google, and the public- that probably won't be so in a few months or years.

<comment><USER13> Maybe every media company should have a summary page for each of their articles that have been removed from Google. And Google should prioritize those summary pages in its searches.

<comment><USER14> That would be great. Can this easily be automated so companies don't have to do anything and the result is there, helping people?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't know it there is a good solution to this problem. I personally had an issue about 8 years ago, when at the time I started looking for a new job. I couldn't understand why recruiters weren't contacting me after I had applied to many jobs, most of which I was sure I was a good candidate, good enough to at least warrant a phone call or email in response. Eventually I rang one asking for feedback, and he told me off the record that he had googled me and my name had appeared on news group posting that associated me with hard drug use. I had posted something on a newsgroup in 1996 about a band I had seen in concert, and the thread descended into a discussion about the band's drug use. When googling my name, the search results certainly looked bad. You had to read the whole thread to realize the context.

Anyway, at the time google had an automated (or semi-automated) service where you could ask them to hide news group postings. You had to declare you were the author and give a reason and so forth. I went through the process, and actually lied because the post that caused me problems wasn't posted by me but it was just a stupid one liner by some idiot which just had my username buried in the header somewhere, asked for it to be deleted because it was causing me problems getting a job, and thankfully they did it.

It pretty much saved my career, at least for now because I do live in fear somehow it will resurface.

</comment><comment><USER16> The BBC also received notifications from Google today that some of their articles had been hidden from EU search results - [http://www.bbc.com/news/business-28130581](http://www.bbc.com/news/business-28130581)

<comment><USER17> Inevitably, searches for [stan o'neal] now return stories about this in the first few results. They should call this the Streisand law.

</comment></comment><comment> UVB-76 Bravo to the Guardian for instigating the Streisand effect in this instance.

By way of example, I knew nothing of the Dougie McDonald scandal until this article, which not only brought the scandal to my attention, but also suggests someone (presumably McDonald himself) doesn't want people to find out about the scandal.

<comment><USER18> The question is, how long will this effect last? These are the first cases, where the right to be forgotten is used against news sites and the outrage is of course big. But what about in a few months, a year? I doubt that every case will end up on the front of hn and similar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I once thought that I could tell my children that I was born in a world without the internet. But if governments and corporations keep on this path, my children won't have one either.

</comment><comment><USER20> It'd be interesting if the Guardian simply changed the URL to the articles slightly when they go the notice from Google. It'd turn the whole thing into a cat-and-mouse game.

</comment><comment><USER21> To focus on something else: I'm incredulous that people believe we have the "right" to be forgotten. Maybe it's just that I've grown up being told everything I do will be recorded forever and never forgotten, and my behavior has changed as a result? But I truly don't feel as if we have any kind of _right_ to be forgotten.

<comment><USER22> I actually disagree. We live in a world where so much of what we do is recorded permanently, and that's a very new thing. I absolutely support the idea that we have a right to be forgotten.

This execution, however, is absolutely awful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> It's shocking that this is being applied to articles from 2010. It shows how quickly a small crack in free speech is expanded way beyond its intent. I am sure no reasonable person would argue that the intent of the EU ruling was that something that happened 4 years ago is no longer "relevant". The reasonable intent was for things that are decades old, perhaps from a time and context either at the individual level or the societal level that are likely to cause a read to seriously misinterpret or misunderstand the material.

I don't think Google should escape criticism here. Yes they have to follow the law, but they should be aggressively pressing to the minimum boundary of what they have been asked to do. They should be declining cases like this and wearing the law suits that result until the real line and intent is hammered out. It sounds like they are taking a DMCA-like approach and taking things down by default, and that is very very worrying.

</comment><comment><USER24> The interesting part of this, for me, is that the Guardian believes that a) Google has the power to put the genie back in the bottle (dubious, but reflective of Google's _massive_ control of Internet navigation) and b) the Guardian would have the power to put the genie back in the bottle (absurd).

<comment><USER25> What do you mean by "putting the genie back into the bottle"?

<comment><USER24> The Guardian believes it has the capacity to make the editorial decision to unpublish an article (true) and by consequence make "the Internet" forget about facts in the article (false).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I really really do not like this. Who needs government to create an Orwellian future when we are more than willing to do it to ourselves.

I am especially distressed that people can remove all the wrong they do from sight. What is next? Deny the holocaust? (yes hyperbole)

</comment><comment><USER27> The fact that this law is going to be applied blindly as a technical solution to a human problem is the issue. There is one missing piece here : a judge. Add a judge , and this whole problem goes away.

</comment><comment><USER28> We should simply provide a searchable resource to add and record the 'removed' articles. Not a search engine. Simply a searchable list.

</comment><comment><USER29> Whats especially troubling is that this is spilling over to other countries now. I always felt that despite having relatively lax laws in regards to the internet, russia is starting to turn into a seriously unfriendly place for the internet. Being a expat in moscow makes it especially awkward as I have tasted the koolaid on the 'free' side.

</comment><comment><USER30> I wonder what the effect would be if everyone submitted removal requests for all articles on prominent politicians (let's take the UK Prime Minister David Cameron as an example).

Methinks the law would be quickly changed. Especially with an election coming up next year.

Of course I am in no way encouraging anyone to do this, or condoning such behaviour.

</comment><comment><USER31> This is, among other things, a terribly confusing situation. Who's to blame? The person who asks to have results expunged? The law that requires Google to comply? Google for complying? Or no one—is the right thing being done, the "pen" of the Internet being dulled back into a pencil?

<comment><USER2> > The person who asks to have results expunged?

Yes.

> The law that requires Google to comply?

Yes.

> Google for complying?

No! How can you blame a company for doing something they are _legally compelled_ to do?

> Or no one—is the right thing being done, the "pen" of the Internet being > dulled back into a pencil?

The Internet has always been written in pencil. Pages stop being served all the time. The only difference is that now the index of the Internet is written in pencil, and every EU citizen has been given an eraser.

<comment><USER32> > How can you blame a company for doing something they are legally compelled > to do?

They're not legally compelled to take action on every request they get. It's just that it's too expensive to look at each request individually.

<comment><USER33> How is that not compelling?

They have three choices. One leads to censorship, the other two lead to bankruptcy. Choose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I am from Czech Republic (part of EU) and I cannot replicate the described effect.

Plus, most results about those individuals are now the articles _about the censorship itself_. Which is funny. Will the mentioned folks block _those articles_ too?

</comment><comment><USER35> Buy the ticket, take the ride.

</comment><comment><USER36> Well I never thought it would take more than a few days for this to happen...

<comment><USER37> It is just annoying that google has to put in so much work just to prove an obvious point. So inefficient...

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Google's hiding Guardian articles? That's outrageous! The Guardian should stop paying Google to index their website and display their articles in search results!

Oh, wait...

<comment><USER39> so how long till the news papers run their own search engine or google buys news papers I bet the independent is for sale</comment></comment>


What BP Is Doing About the Gulf Gusher - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703561604575282643035177362.html

<comment><USER2> Summary: not enough.</comment>


The market has rejected Linux desktops. Get over it. - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/hiner/?p=3372

<comment><USER2> But people haven't.

Also worth noting, the last time I went in for an oil change for my car, the computer facing the car was running ubuntu with a terminal open on some type of curses based database app.

I suspect that the wider adoption of Macs by consumers will lead to greater acceptance of Linux.

And looking to the economic forecasts of the next few years, the need for extreme frugality and the availability of cheap IT labor will make Linux a more attractive choice for reasons other than technical merit.

</comment><comment><USER3> A different window manager is a different system to 90% of consumers. Is there any reason a company can't run a proprietary WM ontop of the linux kernel? If there isn't, are there or have there been any companies that do so?

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't believe linux desktops have hit their stride yet.

A few more years.</comment>


BrowserID: Logging in with BrowserID, Passport and NodeJS - <AUTHOR> http://blog.koostudios.com/?p=506

<comment><USER2> One quick correction: "an assertion is provided in the frontend and then the server sends it back to BrowserID to get the user information." isn't quite accurate.

All of the user information is available in the assertion. You can get at it locally, without having to talk back to us. We just have a web service that makes it easier to verify the cryptographic signatures on that blob. (And it is, of course, open source, so you can run your own if your language of choice doesn't have its own library for local verification.)

<comment><USER3> PyBrowserID supports local verification in Python: <https://github.com/mozilla/PyBrowserID>

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm looking forward to BrowserID becoming mainstream. I'm sick of trying to remember account numbers or usernames and passwords for websites that I use infrequently.

<comment><USER5> Well, I'm reasonably sure we'll be seeing more of it for Django, at least. Since integration takes about five minutes and I don't have to create and style all the login/signup/change password/forgot password/etc templates, it's all I use for authentication on new apps nowadays.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> What will happen to it when they will rename to 'Mozilla Personas'? Will the login screen suddenly show the Mozilla Persona logo instead of BrowserID as it currently does? I can't imagine this gaining any traction with bigger sites / brands if it is pushing the Mozilla brand.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is the first time I've heard of BrowserID, do any popular sites currently allow you to sign in using it?

</comment><comment><USER8> I hope people don't just schluff off BrowserID like OpenID or others. It has a lot of really cool potential and can be as secure as regular user/pass or as secure as certificates depending on how it's setup and used.</comment>


The best GitHub client is actually made of plastic - <AUTHOR> http://codicesoftware.blogspot.com/2012/04/using-plastic-scm-as-github-client.html

<comment><USER2> I totally agree. Have been using Plastic for two years now (small teams, so I could use it for free) - and I have not seen it's equal. I used many version control systems (from VSS to ClearCase,CVS to SVN, StarTeam and of course - GIT) - None is as powerful and user friendly both as a developer and as a "version manager" (a.k.a. team leader/project manager/integrator). Why isn't it better known? I think the reasons are: \- There is no "GitHub" - you have to install a server \- Above 15 people you need to start paying - open source people cannot accept this limitation. Startups could but feel uncomfortable \- Companies beyond startup stage are usually already entrenched with another source control. Even if they do replace - they want to go for something "safe" (which they equate with "popular" or "expensive")

Maybe it's just a matter of time, and Plastic SCM quality will get it a market share, but I am not sure...

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> To those who wonder, Plastic SCM is a relatively unknown yet loved by those who know it SCM platform.

I moved all my private repos to it after fighting with a friend who kept insisting me to try it out, it took him 2 months and after I tried, I stayed. even if you love command line, know Git inside and out, I think you'll appreciate it, I am not affiliated, and have nothing to earn, but really think it's possibly best SCM in the world.

Why? it just works, and doesn't get in your way, and it works well with dummies like me, the merge tool is one of the best I've seen in the world, handles conflicts in the most accurate, worry free visual merge tools I've yet to work with.

I wonder if anyone have heard of it, tried it, and how come it's so unknown if it's that good?</comment>


Dude, You Broke the Future [video] - <AUTHOR> https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9270-dude_you_broke_the_future <comment><USER2> (My comment will get buried because I'm flagged but whatever)

I had drinks with a bunch of Hugo award winners and candidates a couple of years back (2015?) and we started talking about near-future stuff. Mainly that I was looking for more of it. (Diamond Age fans out there?)

A funny thing came up: It's getting harder and harder to predict near-future stuff for some authors. I don't understand why. Is it that technology is becoming more and more obscured from the requirements of interacting with it?

Once upon a time, a person had to divine the landscape of network protocols and unix command line to understand the mystery of the internet. Nowadays that tech is just one click or swipe away -- perhaps there is less imagination required to figure out what's happening behind the scene, or perhaps no imagination is required anymore -- things just are.

Maybe we're just inundated with the next big trivial far future click-bait article that the future seems... well always right around the corner and less futur-y(?).

Or perhaps we're at the precipice of something entirely new and incomprehensible. I run a decentralized AI startup and we have an exercise where we try to imagine a world with particular capabilities but it (for a large part of my peers) seems out of reach -- as if it exists beyond a great divide.

It makes me think that whatever is next is either really beyond the scope of understanding, or just non-existent. It's fun (and exciting) to try and think about regardless.

<comment><USER3> Daniel Suarez fiction works are very on point with near future while also being fun.

<comment><USER2> Awesome. Which book would you recommend?

<comment><USER4> Daemon/Freedom, Change Agent

<comment><USER2> epic. thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Except for the Singularity trashing, this talk feels like a rehash of reading your average Reddit political thread. I really wanted more than that. I think the political left viewed dialectical materialism as their futurism and now that that's gone with the fall of communism there's just doom. Global warming doom. Hyper-capitalism doom. Race war doom. Overpopulation doom. Evil AI overlord doom. They can't see the future because they don't believe there's going to be one.

I think this is why China has risen so quickly. Their government and their society has a positive view of the future that they are implementing. The west has little in the way of a positive view of the future. It's almost all doom pretty much across the board these days.

<comment><USER6> > and now that that's gone with the fall of communism there's just doom.

The thing is, communism didn't really exist to fall in the first place, and the most advanced countries (Sweden, Norway, etc.) are all putting in place a mixed socialist/capitalist system.

Also, dialectical materialism didn't necessarily fail just because a set of predictions were made with it didn't come true, it just means that we didn't have the right data, or perhaps we need a new analysis. Not to mention the fact that much of communist writing with regards to capitalist failure is extremely "on point", even today. Indeed, much of it feels like it could have been written yesterday. Dialectical materialism remains a tool of science, however limited it may be, and so should be considered as one.

Also, I think you're mistaking "doom" for "actionable movements". People are actually mobilizing to fix the problem of race (mostly within America, I might add -- while racism _is_ a problem elsewhere, you don't tend to see as much violent resistance to fixing it as you do in the American systems). Just like people are mobilizing to fix Climate Change and much of the problems with uncontrolled late-stage capitalism.

<comment><USER7> _communism didn 't really exist to fall in the first place_

Come on, we can do better here than the tired old "not real communism" argument.

 _it just means that we didn 't have the right data, or perhaps we need a new analysis_

Ah yes, always followed by "it will be different next time". How many millions more have to die?

<comment><USER8> I think it's fair to call all attempts so far "not reall communism". But you don't have to conclude "real communism would work". You can also conclude "real communism seems unimplementable". It is, after all, a social order that was created purely on paper and from theoretical arguments, which is ridiculous. That activity gives you something to try, but certainly not a fixed solution that you just need to implement as prescribed.

<comment><USER9> Its a typical low blow, akin to throwing all right-wing under the guise of Franco, the Weimar republic, or some other right-wing system. Communism has been implemented on small scale. One notable example in Spain [1], problem is that any large political system eventually turns out to be either authoritarian or ineffective or sabotaged (I leave the guess by whom as an exercise to the reader). Its also been applied in part in West-Europe as well as USA, just not in full.

Capitalism is a race to the bottom where the poor countries in the world are being put under the thumb. You don't have to look very far. Just look at all the CIA ops the USA has conducted in the 20th century, e.g. Allende.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism_in_Spain#1936_Revolu...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism_in_Spain#1936_Revolution)

<comment><USER10> Capitalism is actually currently ending the world hunger because trickle-down effects actually exist. Living standards are rising globally incredibly quickly. Middle-class kids in Jordan are playing Diabolo 3 on their computers despite the region having almost no natural resources, almost no water and despite it being troubled by Syrian refugees. Yes, capitalism needs regulation, but it is a lie to say that the entire approach is doomed to be a race to the bottom.

<comment><USER11> This is an experiment with 1 trial. What evidence do you have that another system with the same technological advances would not produce the same or better living standards? (none!)

<comment><USER7> East vs West Germany, North vs South Korea, even Cuba vs Florida. There have been plenty of experiments.

<comment><USER12> China vs. Taiwan and Hong Kong.

<comment><USER7> Until China went state-capitalist Hong Kong's economy was one-sixth the size of China's for 1/200th of the population. Now it's 2-3%...

<comment><USER11> Another system != Statist communists, categorically

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Some comments as watching video...

Corporation as AI is good analogy. But as with many, he stops short and repeatedly just says corporations. Please, every large group entity - governmental bodies, unions, non-profits - is an AI. And with/in those groups (and corporations) are also competing AIs.

Comments about weaponized social media: It is odd that we in the West don't want to acknowledge / know / accept the US government and US tech firm roles in the Arab Spring and Ukraine. If we even go further back, really Wikileaks were the true pioneers in weaponizing social media.

<comment><USER14> But corporation collections as paperclip maximizers is a bad analogy. Corporations generally produce something large numbers of people want (be it solar panels or cars in his example), whereas a paperclip maximizer AI produces paperclips that _only it_ wants, destroying everything in its path.

<comment><USER15> The "paperclip" in Stross' talk is not the item being produced, but earnings. If a corporations could massively increase its quarterly earnings by starting a nuclear war, it may well decide to do so.

It is not that the item or service is useful or not in the short term, but that it will pursue a set goal with a single minded conviction.

Another analogy may well be the Sorcerer's Apprentice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> There is something interesting about the speed of things in regard to best practices. We've written a lot of code this year, that is likely going to be replaced rather than rewritten, because tech moves forward, which means all the time we've spent on doing it right, so it'll be easy to get into in five years, is essentially wasted.

Not that we're going to abandon best practices, because you never know, but it's somewhat hilarious to think about how much effort we've wasted doing something right that no one will ever notice.

<comment><USER17> If the problem isn't trivial doing it right saves time during first implementation as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Here's a automated transcript in case you want to skim through it.

[https://scribie.com/transcript/89ba55c337fb4bf6b8d75a1443e2d...](https://scribie.com/transcript/89ba55c337fb4bf6b8d75a1443e2d1aab375029c)

<comment><USER19> /u/cstross mentioned on Twitter that his script will appear on his blog in a few days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I often reflect on this these days. Seems like the future chasing is not the solution. Society just need a fundamental subsistance obligation layer, a leisure layer and a fictitious layer for imagination purpose only.

</comment><comment><USER20> Thanks for making me joyful about climate change induced collapse.

</comment><comment><USER21> It would not play for me, but the direct link to the video did: [https://mirror.netcologne.de/CCC/congress/2017/h264-hd/34c3-...](https://mirror.netcologne.de/CCC/congress/2017/h264-hd/34c3-9270-eng- deu-fra-Dude_you_broke_the_Future_hd.mp4)

</comment><comment><USER22> Great author; sadly another terrible keynote choice by the CCC.

<comment><USER23> Care to elaborate? I think the talk was on topic and a suitable kick-off for the rest of the congress. I found Stross' perspective on predicting the future and AI novel and interesting.

<comment><USER24> He's just a terrible speaker. The topic is well chosen and I'm certain the transcript will read very well. The presentation is bad though, Stross is not an engaging speaker, he's just reading what he prepared and that no a good way to keep people engaged and focused for an hour.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> "this time germans are the good guys", history will tell.

<comment><USER26> Ask southern europeans.

<comment><USER27> Southern European here. Could you elaborate ?

<comment><USER28> I think it's a reference to WW2

<comment><USER29> I think this is reference to Greece and its perceotion that Germany is somehow responsible for their irrespondible spending.

<comment><USER30> That's a tad bit oversimplified, not just in terms of what actually happened in Greece, mostly private banks being bailed out [0] but also how that whole situation came about.

There's been a big elephant in the room nobody really wants to talk about for quite a while now: EU's most successful economies running up massive export surpluses, which really hurt the weaker southern economies [1].

In that regard, it's in very bad taste, to just go "Them southern European countries are all just lazy and don't know how to handle money" because nothing about that whole situation is as simple as that. Just like it wasn't a coincidence that Greece crashed on the tails of the 2008 recession. In our globalized world, nothing of this scale happens in a vacuum, but it's just that much more convenient to put all the blame on the people of Greece supposedly just being too "lazy and clueless", as opposed to the "diligent and frugal Germans". As a German, I can assure you: Most Germans are pretty fed up with "being frugal" and not having seen any real wage gains in decades, for the sole purpose of driving this supposedly "economic miracle" of the Germany economy.

Greece was a gigantic shame for the European idea, left out to die, used for IMF austerity experiments while being framed as "lazy people just don't know how to money", even tho it was their misery which boosted Germanys economic standing even further [2].

[0] [http://www.dw.com/en/most-of-greek-bailout-money-went-to- ban...](http://www.dw.com/en/most-of-greek-bailout-money-went-to-banks- study/a-19234391)

[1] [https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21724810-country- save...](https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21724810-country-saves-too- much-and-spends-too-little-why-germanys-current-account-surplus-bad)

[2] [https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2015/08/11/despite-...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2015/08/11/despite- losing-tens-of-billions-of-e-germany-is-making-a-profit-out-of-the-greek- crisis/#6ac165d95409)

<comment><USER31> >> Just like it wasn't a coincidence that Greece crashed on the tails of the 2008 recession.

That's a very good point that is completely overlooked in most analyses I've read (and, being Greek, I've read quite a few).

On the other hand, let's not forget that it was _Greece_ that crashed after 2008. Not Spain, not Portugal, not Ireland or Cyprus. All these others, they swallowed the pill of austerity and their economies bounced back. Ours is still connected to the IMF and EU IV that's keeping it alive.

Not that I'm actually convinced that austerity would help us. And I do believe that the measures imposed on us ignored the reality of the Greek economy. But it was not the measures that brought us to our knees in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I predicted a future with flying cars and its not happening.

Was i wrong? no, its the future that is wrong! (sarcasm).</comment>


How the Bible and YouTube are fueling the next frontier of password cracking - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/10/how-the-bible-and-youtube-are-fueling-the-next-frontier-of-password-cracking/

<comment><USER2> If you're interested in this, you might like to read the HN discussion from a previous submission:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6521660](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6521660)</comment>


Do Androids Count Electric Sheep with DB2 or MySQL? - <AUTHOR> http://antoniocangiano.com/2009/06/05/do-androids-count-electric-sheep-with-db2-or-mysql/

<comment><USER3> He used the InnoDB storage engine in MySQL instead of the default MyISAM. InnoDB is a lot more fault-tolerant than MyISAM but it is a lot slower, _especially_ in COUNT operations.

That's one of the more interesting attributes of MySQL: pluggable storage engines let you choose the characteristics most suitable for your architecture. I've heard people criticising MyISAM as less reliable but I've been using it in production for at least five years with no data loss. It is in an architecture, though, where data is replicated to several servers so we don't care so much about reliability on any one box. The MyISAM full-text search and speed are very nice.

Nonetheless, he did present a very interesting case for DB2.

<comment><AUTHOR> > He used the InnoDB storage engine in MySQL instead of the default MyISAM.

Just to clarify this point, InnoDB was used because it's the default - <USER2> most widely used - engine for ActiveRecord/Rails.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Had to search for 'limits' to find this page:

<http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/db2/express/about.html>

Limited to 2 cores, 2 GB, no replication.

I like to read the observations here: <http://drcoddwasright.blogspot.com/></comment>


Hack.summit() - <AUTHOR> https://hacksummit.org/

<comment><USER2> This looks pretty cool; I just registered.

However, I will be that guy that points out that only four of the 33 speakers are women and over two-thirds of the speakers are white men.

While I do appreciate that a good number of the non-profits are ones that help women code, having a low number of women/minority speakers certainly doesn't help and could even be counterproductive to those causes.

<comment><USER3> White males were the most encouraged demographic to go into tech when their age group was young. The fact that there are a lot more white males in that group just demonstrates what society was like in the past.

If I was throwing a convention, I would want the best and the brightest 30+ year olds for wisdom/experience reasons. And since everyone agrees that males dominated the space in the last 15 years, why would it even make sense for there to be a higher percentage of females presenting?

Should we punish these brilliant people (it's quite the collection of intelligence) because they were born in a certain era? I mean we could, but that would just bring us in another equally bad direction.

<comment><USER4> >most encouraged demographic

I used to mentor college students in a biology lab. I tried to get the students to learn basic programming and data analysis for biological data. All but one of the girls turned down the opportunity. All the males at least tried it out, some got very deep into programming.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Just so that this doesn't get buried in the comments, here's a repost: We have a special code for HN users to get a free ticket and bypass the registration process. We want to seed the audience with great developers who can help spread the word. Just put this code in: HACKERNEWS at [http://hacksummit.org](http://hacksummit.org)

<comment><USER6> I saw this, but decided to donate anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Here's a special code for HN users to get a free ticket and bypass the registration process. We want to seed the audience with great developers who can help spread the word. Just put this code in: HACKERNEWS at hacksummit.org

</comment><comment><USER8> It would be really nice to have some info about each programming non-profit. E.G. Why they are in your donation list. What they do. Why you like them. Why I should donate to them.

They all sound really interesting, and I want to pick a good one to give too, but unfortunately I don't really know anything about any of them.

As it is now there is a huge cognitive barrier to completing registration. I want to give, but I don't know whom to give to. I could complete the registration by facebook/twitter, but I can afford to give a little bit and don't want to go the free route.

I came close to closing the tab, thinking I would come back later, but I also know I might forget and I don't want to miss out on what looks like a great con!

<comment><USER8> I went ahead and registered by posting to facebook using [http://www.paywithapost.de/](http://www.paywithapost.de/) and received a ticket code.

After doing so I received an email saying my registration was incomplete and the email gave a link to complete my registration.

Clicking back through to pay with a post it looks like they still have my registration.

Maybe the email is going out prematurely before you have a chance to receive a webhook from pay with a post?

<comment><USER7> Thanks for the feedback. Everything was processed fine, but looks like their was a delay more than 5 minutes before submitting the donation info. Please ignore this email, we are extending the time period to prevent this email from being sent prematurely.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Speakers include:

Tom Chi (co-creator Google Glass) \- Grady Booch (creator the Unified Modeling Language) \- David Heinemeier Hansson (inventor of Ruby on Rails) \- Brian Fox (invented the GNU Bash shell) \- Rebecca Parsons (CTO, Thoughtworks) \- Hakon Wium Lie (inventor of CSS) \- Alex Gaynor (Director, Python Software Foundation, and core committer to Django) \- Sarah Allen (Presidential Innovation Fellow, led development for many Adobe products) \- Gilad Bracha (co-author of the Java Language Specification) \- Kent Beck (creator of Extreme Programming, created Test Driven Development, co-created Agile, author of 9 books) \- Ward Cunningham (inventor of the wiki, contributed to Extreme Programming, co-author of Design Patterns) \- Bram Cohen (inventor of Bittorrent) \- Hampton Catlin (creator of Sass, Haml, m.wikipedia.org, book author) \- Matei Zaharia (creator of Apache Spark) \- Melody Meckfessel (Google Director of Engineering) \- Jon Skeet (the top answerer on StackOverflow) \- Scott Hanselman (author of multiple books) \- Jeff Haynie (founder of Appcelerator) \- Ryan Bubinski (founder of Codecademy) \- Aaron Skonnard (founder of Pluralsight) \- Floyd Marinescu (founder of InfoQ) \- Steve Newcomb (founder of Famo.us) \- Orion Henry (founder of Heroku) \- Janet Wiener (Engineering at Facebook, big data expert) \- Scott Chacon (CIO, Github) \- Chad Fowler (CTO, Wunderlist, well-known programming educator and blogger) \- Salil Deshpande (open source investor titan) \- Hadi Partovi (founder of Code.org, was in charge of Internet Explorer, advisor to Dropbox and Facebook) \- Qi Lu (EVP, Microsoft)

<comment><USER9> Easier to read:

      - Tom Chi (co-creator Google Glass)
      - Grady Booch (creator the Unified Modeling Language)
      - David Heinemeier Hansson (inventor of Ruby on Rails)
      - Brian Fox (invented the GNU Bash shell)
      - Rebecca Parsons (CTO, Thoughtworks)
      - Hakon Wium Lie (inventor of CSS)
      - Alex Gaynor (Director, Python Software Foundation, and core committer to Django)
      - Sarah Allen (Presidential Innovation Fellow, led development for many Adobe products)
      - Gilad Bracha (co-author of the Java Language Specification)
      - Kent Beck (creator of Extreme Programming, created Test Driven Development, co-created Agile, author of 9 books)
      - Ward Cunningham (inventor of the wiki, contributed to Extreme Programming, co-author of Design Patterns)
      - Bram Cohen (inventor of Bittorrent)
      - Hampton Catlin (creator of Sass, Haml, m.wikipedia.org, book author)
      - Matei Zaharia (creator of Apache Spark)
      - Melody Meckfessel (Google Director of Engineering)
      - Jon Skeet (the top answerer on StackOverflow)
      - Scott Hanselman (author of multiple books)
      - Jeff Haynie (founder of Appcelerator)
      - Ryan Bubinski (founder of Codecademy)
      - Aaron Skonnard (founder of Pluralsight)
      - Floyd Marinescu (founder of InfoQ)
      - Steve Newcomb (founder of Famo.us)
      - Orion Henry (founder of Heroku)
      - Janet Wiener (Engineering at Facebook, big data expert)
      - Scott Chacon (CIO, Github)
      - Chad Fowler (CTO, Wunderlist, well-known programming educator and blogger)
      - Salil Deshpande (open source investor titan)
      - Hadi Partovi (founder of Code.org, was in charge of Internet Explorer, advisor to Dropbox and Facebook)
      - Qi Lu (EVP, Microsoft)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> (First off, yes, this is very cool :-))

This strikes me as an ingenious way to promote a service like Crowdcast. Even if the speakers are being paid for their time, the thousands (potentially?) of developers who will get to know about the product through what is essentially a _live demo_ will be very valuable. And it raises money for charity. Assuming the technology holds up, this really does seem like a win-win :-)

<comment><USER5> Thanks Peter. We are working closely with the founder of Crowdcast. He's an incredible programmer and we're lucky to have him helping us. He benefits tangentially from this exposure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The "Favorite Languages" need a little updating. I wanted to pick OCaml, Rust and Hack.

<comment><USER5> Haha.. we've got "Other" as a catch-all. Not quite as cool as listing more languages :)

<comment><USER12> Also, maybe split "C, C++"? C is one of my favorite languages, C++ not so much.

Not serious, but I think it would produce interesting results.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Given the title of the page, I'm kind of disappointed that this wasn't defined. [http://i.imgur.com/zKu6byK.png](http://i.imgur.com/zKu6byK.png)

<comment><USER7> Give us 24 hours to come up with something cool :)

<comment><USER14> Just saw it – nice! :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Very cool, I registered with the HN code with no problems.

Will these hangout videos be recorded for viewing later? I did not see that listed in the FAQ.

<comment><USER5> Yes, it will be recorded for those who registered. Note: by attending the live event, you will be able to ask Q&A with the speakers too :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> What a fantastic line-up! Is there an agenda yet - I couldn't find one?

<comment><USER5> Full agenda coming soon :)

BTW, here is a special code for HN users to get a free ticket and bypass the registration process. We want to seed the audience with great developers who can help spread the word. Just put this code in: HACKERNEWS at [http://hacksummit.org](http://hacksummit.org)

<comment><USER17> Note to self: read the comments first. Oh well, I'm very happy making a donation to any of these great nonprofits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Any chance you could accept bitcoin? Seems like a really cool event otherwise.

<comment><USER5> I think that's a great idea. We really wanted to accept bitcoin but ran out of engineering bandwidth. We were looking at dogecoin too. I hope developers who are unable to pay in cash will still join us through sharing on social media (or if you're a hackernews member, using the free promotion code mentioned elsewhere in these comments).

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I just wanna say: awesome job on the UX. That alone makes me want to sign up.

</comment><comment><USER20> Any clue what timezone?

</comment><comment><USER21> OMG! Best lineup EVER!

</comment><comment><USER22> Wow! i cannot wait.</comment>


Show HN: Show Me Your Startup - 100-xyz What startup project have you been working on recently?  What does it do?  What stage is at?
Also, startupschool starts on Jan 20, so an excellent time and place to get involved.
For me:
https://toonclip.com
Its a place where creatives can produce and share simple Flash like animation with drag and drop and no programming.  Sandbox here https://toonclip.com/editor
MVP released after considerable feedback from folks at YN. <comment><AUTHOR> Voice editor for machine generated and cloned voices. Launching soon for [https://auditus.cc](https://auditus.cc)

Here's a sneak preview:

[https://imgur.com/a/m2etIIb](https://imgur.com/a/m2etIIb)</comment>


A Google employee's critique of the Ars Technica Android unforkable article - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/02/neither-microsoft-nokia-nor-anyone-else-should-fork-android-its-unforkable/?comments=1&post=26199423 <comment><USER2> I'm going to freely admit, this is a biased comment, which probably doesn't belong here, but I think it has to be said.

This isn't the first time that Ars Technica, an otherwise reasonable source of information, has published an utter crap article written by Peter Bright.

If Ars wants to maintain any shred of credibility (and a technically intelligent readership) in the future, they need to can this author, or label all of his articles as "op-ed", because that's the best that can be said of them. These articles contain no facts, no intelligent reasoning; just a spewing of one man's ill-formed opinions. Ars has already lost my paid subscription (and my ad revenue) due to other crap articles by this author, and I can't imagine them not losing more as a result of this article.

Get rid of him, Ars. You'll be better off for it.

<comment><USER3> I'd love to think they would be better off, but I assume their analytics are telling them right now that cheap trolling increases ad impressions more than journalistic hard work.

<comment><USER2> I would hope that Ars' editorial staff realizes that short term gains at the cost of long term losses is not worth it.

Then again, this is hardly the first P.B. story that's caused controversy and caused Ars readership/legitimacy, so I am probably wrong.

<comment><USER4> Sometimes I feel like the whole internet will eventually turn into Gawker clones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> While differing in nitty-gritty details, the googler basically confirms what I interpreted to be the main thrust of the Ars article.

AOSP is the carrot, the compliance necessary for google's value add software is the stick.

The last paragraph concludes saying that Android with google apps is the least bad offering out there. That's why I both use it personally, and why I'm not super pumped about the future of any mobile platform these days.

<comment><USER6> > AOSP is the carrot, the compliance necessary for google's value add software > is the stick.

"Because cloud!" seems to be the answer to most of the points raised in the original article, which kinda sounds ok on the face of it; but why can't those backend services be abstracted out as well? Why shouldn't I be able to choose some other provider for all these services, like location?

It reminds me of a commonly suggested solution to the browser wars in the 90s, when the reasoning for Microsoft's integration of IE directly into the OS was all the new possibilities from such deep integration: why not just allow different browsers/engines (e.g. mozilla) to be swapped in? Well, because then you wouldn't be using MS products anymore!

And I think a lot of that is repeating itself here.

<comment><USER7> > Why shouldn't I be able to choose some other provider for all these > services, like location?

You can, just provide an implementation of LocationProvider: [http://developer.android.com/reference/android/location/pack...](http://developer.android.com/reference/android/location/package- summary.html)

<comment><USER8> The problem is Google wrapping those in such a way that sends them the data of the underlying sensors before reporting up the stack to the requesting app. They (rightly) point out this enables different sorts of location stuff, like the network parts, but it doesn't allow you to say to the Google Services I only want you using GPS, and no you can't report back without that whole layer becoming completely unusable, unless the app developer wrote it for the lower level stuff before and manually bypasses it in the case they detect Google's service is disabled.

<comment><USER7> Why do you want to skip the sensor fusion step? The entire point is it gives you more accurate data.

<comment><USER8> Because I don't trust Google with this data, and will sacrifice battery life and accuracy to prevent them having it. Frankly the weather is the same for a few hundred metres around me in each direction!

They proved with the WiFi slurping on Street View cars they can't be trusted with this stuff at all.

<comment><USER7> Settings > Location > Mode > Select "Device Only"

and

Settings > WiFi > Advanced > Uncheck "Scanning always available" (which asked for permission on first boot)

These are user settings, not app settings.

<comment><USER8> On my devices doing the first causes apps using the Google Play Services to report that you've disabled the location service completely, while the direct GPS based apps continue just fine.

The broader point here is wanting to be able to remove Google's service software from the equation, and run only code you can actually inspect the contents of for this kind of data. To be honest those apps having direct GPS access isn't ideal either and this should all be proxied through a standardised open source app on the device.

<comment><USER7> On a Nexus 5 doing the first doesn't change anything for me; it's just less accurate (I did so, then opened up Google Maps to double check).

But you're going to have to define what you mean by "Google code", because ostensibly all of Android is "Google code". Doing what I outlined above will stop it from going through any form of sensor fusion. If you want to remove Google's service software then just create a build without Play Services on it, it's that simple. AOSP boots, on the Nexus devices at least, without it, so it's easy to do and gets you exactly what you want.

So really I guess I'm saying: What else do you want? Remove Play Services, the Google Apps, etc, using an AOSP based build and you get a Google free phone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've said it before, but it really strikes me that Ars simply don't understand the universe outside of Wintel at all, and this deconstruction is merely one of many you can do whenever they start commenting about stuff outside of that sphere. You could get away with being a tech commentator like that for a long time, but not anymore.

<comment><USER9> > but it really strikes me that Ars simply don't understand the universe > outside of Wintel at all

Doesn't Ars publish the most detailed review of every new Mac OS? I also notice quite a lot of the technical articles I submit to HN from Ars are quite detailed and truthful.

<comment><USER10> Ars is not one voice. Imho Peter Bright's articles esp. related to OSS and MS should always be read with an "open mind".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't understand how this is even a discussion.

Not only is AOSP completely open and forkable, _THERE IS A COMMERCIALLY SUCCESSFUL ANDROID FORK OUT THERE_ \- and it's called Kindle Fire OS.

The existence of this conversation, this "controversy," is confusing to me.

</comment><comment><USER11> Peter Bright gives a very good comeback to the statements that the google employee made.

With Android 4.4 I felt disappointed that it was just an excuse to integrate more the platform to google services, so, google become the real an unquestionable controller of Android.

The "Android is an open platform" is just a fallacy.

<comment><USER12> > The "Android is an open platform" is just a fallacy.

No it isn't, you're just lying. The response lays out in detail how Android (ie AOSP) is more open than any alternative.

Stop talking crap.

<comment><USER13> > AOSP ... is more open

AOSP is not an Android, stop lying, googleboy.

<comment><USER14> Oh, it is ironic that the troll making wrong claims is the one calling others liars.

Are you more than 10?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The real issue is that the open source world doesn't have an answer to the rise of the cloud. As the integration of the phone and the cloud becomes more central, it becomes impossible for open source to provide a matching experience. The open source movement was born when the pendulum was swinging from the centralized mainframe to the PC revolution. But now as the pendulum is swinging back to centralized computing there will be fewer chances for small individualistic rebels to make an impact.

<comment><USER16> > The real issue is that the open source world doesn't have an answer to the > rise of the cloud.

Nonsense. you're speaking as though open-source and cloud storage are somehow related or in competition. But they're orthogonal -- one can obviously make open-source applications available from the cloud, and you can construct the cloud's infrastructure out of open-source elements.

> The open source movement was born when the pendulum was swinging from the > centralized mainframe to the PC revolution.

That's true, but the two were coincidental and unrelated. Correlation doesn't prove causation.

> But now as the pendulum is swinging back to centralized computing there will > be fewer chances for small individualistic rebels to make an impact.

Wait, what? How does open-source relate to centralized computing? For that matter, how does cloud storage relate to centralized computing? It's not as though cloud storage requires a central repository, any more than the Internet must be a central repository in order to function.

Just one example: Linux (a) dominates the Internet's servers and (b) is open- source.

<comment><USER17> "Just one example: Linux (a) dominates the Internet's servers and (b) is open- source."

...and untold millions of lines of changes to the Linux kernel are kept secret and are not at all available to other Linux users or even to Linux contributors. That is exactly the sort of the thing the GPL was meant to prevent.

Furthermore, while it is true that quite a bit of web services and "cloud computing" was built with free software, the effect is very different than distributing free software on desktops. If you do not like some new feature of the Linux kernel, you can just not use it -- nobody forces you to upgrade, and in extreme cases it is possible to fork the project. On the other hand, if you do not like a new feature in Facebook...tough luck, you have no authority. Similarly, if you want a new feature in the Linux kernel, you can add it -- maybe Linus won't merge it with the official source, but you can still have the feature and distribute it to others. Your next great idea for a GMail feature is irrelevant, because you cannot add features to GMail.

<comment><USER16> > ...and untold millions of lines of changes to the Linux kernel are kept > secret ...

Are you serious? The entire Linux kernel is open-source and public (and it is available here: [https://www.kernel.org/](https://www.kernel.org/)). Most programs delivered along with the kernel are also open-source. Many Linux distributors of large assemblages of code refuse to include anything that isn't open-source.

<comment><USER17> You are ignoring the long list of companies that modify the Linux kernel for their own purposes, never releasing their changes, and sometimes using their modified kernel on a web server that runs web apps for their users. As long as they are not distributing their modified kernel to anyone they can keep their changes secret.

<comment><USER18> If the GPL was, as you claim, meant to keep that from happening, why is it totally permissible by the GPL?

<comment><USER17> For the same reason the GPLv2 has nothing to say about patents, even though patents are used to do the kinds of things the GPL was meant to prevent.

The thing to keep in mind is that the changes that web companies make to free software are not usually for internal consumption. The changes are user-facing -- but the software is delivered via the web, rather than distributed to the users, and so the web company never triggers any requirement to make their changes available. The GPL _does_ allow this, but it is not in the spirit of the GPL, and the Affero GPL was created to deal with this problem.

<comment><USER18> I'm not sure that's true (I'm not the most knowledgeable person when it comes to the exact specifics of the GPL). Without institutions protecting IP (like patents, trademarks, copyright) the GPL couldn't exist, it's just a hack on top of IP.

I agree that it's not in the spirit of the GPL, but they did explicitly _not_ add in sections about that in the GPLv3. The v2 FAQ mentioned that they were considering adding in web-based applications, but the v3 FAQ says it's still okay, but if you're writing software and want to make it not okay, use the AGPL.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "how would you propose that in-app purchasing not go through GMS? Some general platform API to allow the app to do an in-app purchase with whoever wants to be a "purchase provider?""

Actually, yes. That is how I would propose that an in-app purchasing system not go through GMS.

<comment><USER20> That was my first thought too, but there's big problems with that if you think about it for a while.

Say they did something like that. Now, I am going to build my own "purchase provider" that just says I paid without ever charging anything. How are you going to stop me from doing that? Somebody would have to authenticate "purchase providers" as actually charging money and paying it to the developer. Either you'd have to manually embed keys for authorized providers in your app, or trust some third-party to authenticate providers. Either way puts you pretty much where you are now.

Then there's the matter of developer authentication. Now I build a "purchase provider", but I'm an honest one who wants to actually bill the customer and pay the developer. How do I know who to pay? No developer has signed up in my system yet, so I have to use some kind of universal token to identify the developer of an app that somebody is making purchases from and tell them they have money to claim from me. It would have to be email, since what else would work? And we all have seen how secure email is lately. Anybody who managed to put a different address into the app or somehow intercept email to your address could claim the money.

Then we have payment splits. The Google app store has a published payment split between themselves and the developer that you implicitly agree to by publishing there. If you had universal "purchase providers" that anybody could implement, who decides what their payment split is? If I wanted my payment provider to split 90% to me and 10% to you, how do you stop that? If we have a third-party doing provider authentication, what are their standards for what payment splits are acceptable?

There's probably even more issues that I haven't thought of yet. If you want to do purchasing like this, you pretty much have to make your own app store and define a proprietary API for it that app developers must explicitly implement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Is it really the least bad offering?

Tizen has potential and is more open: [https://www.tizen.org/](https://www.tizen.org/)

The problem is no one uses it on a large scale yet...

<comment><USER22> Tizen has it's own large set of problems according to rasterman (EFL guy who works for Samsung).

[https://www.tizen.org/irclogs/%23tizen.2013-01-20.log.html](https://www.tizen.org/irclogs/%23tizen.2013-01-20.log.html)

In addition to those issues, the SDK is not open-source and is instead a proprietary Samsung license that severely restricts and takes control of a programmers applications (despite the software being supported by the linux foundation).

Overall, open webOS or sailfish/mer are much better projects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> "Critique."

</comment><comment><USER24> ART is in AOSP. Had Google intended to create a two-speed Android, that would have been the place to turn AOSP into a second class citizen.

Kindle Fire will run on ART. Heck of a technology to give to an ecosystem competitor.

</comment><comment><USER25> He's not wrong though - competing with Google on Android is definitely possible. I think the best step would be to create an OSS (GNU?) distribution of Android in the same way we have Linux. While Linux doesn't have all the same proprietary apps and services that Windows does, OSS devs have stepped up and provided some really great alternatives. We need to do the same for Android.

The only thing we are really missing is a large OSS project to serve as a base.

<comment><USER26> Cyanogen?

<comment><USER3> What I was gong to suggest, with F-Droid as the repository/app store.</comment></comment></comment>


Bad habit that loses entrepreneurs' money. - <AUTHOR> http://www.ruleyourrealm.com/my-bad-habit-that-cost-me-thousands#more-535

<comment><USER2> Full Text:

It amazes me how many different ways you can lose money in business. When you are trying to Rule Your Realm, losing money in not a very good way to do it! As an entrepreneur, it's important to know what your strengths and weakness are. This way you can either work on those weaknesses or hire someone else to do those things. Believe me, I know!…

There was a bad habit that I had to fight for years that literally has cost me thousands upon thousands of dollars. What was that habit? It was doing things for free and not liking to charging my customers and clients. Although, I did like getting paid, I didn't like quoting prices or asking for money. That may sound weird to some of you, but there you have it, that was my struggle! See, I'm not a greedy person and I enjoy helping people, which are great qualities to have as an entrepreneur, but when it's all said and done, you have to get paid! You have bills to pay just like everyone else!

It wasn't until I came to the realization that every time I did something for free, or I did a free coaching session, or quoted a very low price on a job, I was really robbing my family!! I was making it harder on my family, all because I didn't like charging people! I realized not only am I making it harder on my family, but I am not Ruling My Realm in my business or finances..

So here is what I did…

First, I decided I was going to charge people what I am worth. I think it's very important to know how much your time is worth. Because most of us start out by having jobs, we can get used to others dictating how much we are worth. But, not anymore!! We get to choose now! I do recommend doing some research first and finding out what the standard rate is for someone in your Industry, that way you have an idea of what people are used to paying for your products or services. You have to value what you offer, because if you don't… No one else will either!

Next, I put an end to allowing people to "Pick My Brain" for free. It absolutely amazes me the mindset of the masses. Now this is not a put down, but it is true and you need to be aware of what you are up against. I am always amazed by that amount of people that want to pick my brain about this Social Media strategy or that Facebook ad tactic, plus the ones that want me to do a whole job for them for free! I don't know about you, but I don't think I could get away with that if I walked up to a doctor, a surgeon or even a mechanic and expected them to give me free advice or a free service! I guess it could be worth a shot, but it normally just doesn't work that way. But, because we are dealing with more intellectual property and online stuff, people's mentality seem to skip over the fact that this is how we make our living! Don't you think your expertise you have worked so hard for is worth more than a cup of coffee!?

I am all about offering value for free, but whatever that value is that you are giving away for free needs to be done strategically. That way you can still give out good stuff and pay your bills!

The third thing I did which really helped was, I setup a proposal and billing system that forced people to see how much I charge and when their payment was due. There are a lot of cool billing systems out there, you can check out Freshbooks and Ballpark just to name a couple.

Implementing just those three things really helped me get over my discomfort of quoting and billing people. If we are going to Rule Our Realm and make a difference on this planet, we need money to do it!… Otherwise, it's just a hobby.

Keep on Ruling! Paul Cooley

</comment><comment><USER3> Charge more. If you charge enough, coffee dates and other customer acquisition activities are a cost of doing business. If your hit rate from coffee dates into customers is low, either improve your prospecting, lead qualification, or sales processes. Contra the article, this is _exactly_ how actual professionals (accountants, lawyers, medical professionals selling elective services, etc) sell services.

(P.S. If you have a number on your rate card for Coffee Date the rest of your rate card is almost certainly underpriced by a factor of _lots_.)

</comment><comment><USER4> Comparing social media gurus to doctors or surgeons is a bit of a stretch.

People ask you for free advice because they don't understand the value of "social media advice"... most likely because that value is highly subjective and 9 times out of 10 given by some self-proclaimed expert who doesn't have a clue what they are talking about.

However, asking a doctor for advice about a sickness - you can expect a much less subjective answer, from a certified professional (around which there are official regulatory bodies etc). It's easy to understand the value in that and therefore much less likely that the layperson would expect that kind of advice for free.

<comment><USER5> "asking a doctor for advice about a sickness". Odd example given the poor objective performance exhibited by a significant percentage of medical professionals. I remember a study done evaluating the ability of medical professionals to identify spinal injuries in a CAT scan. Very high false positive rates. Scans of normal uninjured people were labeled as herniated discs, etc. Same story with financial professionals, too much subjective judgement involved. Pick a profession that is more objective, eg: civil engineering, will this bridge stand or not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Working link: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:KgbmD-Q...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:KgbmD- Qgp08J:www.ruleyourrealm.com/my-bad-habit-that-cost-me- thousands+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

As a college student who likes to pick the brains of entrepreneurs, this post made me feel guilty. I can't really afford their advice, but I need it and value it. How can I provide value to the entrepreneurs that are so generous as to meet with me?

<comment><USER3> 1) "Pick the brains" suggests useless parasitism which is unlikely to turn into a meaningful change for the world on the basis of that advice. Stop asking to pick brains. Start exercising discretion and coming to people having done your homework and being ready to diligently apply the specific advice you are seeking.

2) Many people whose advice you want _are not primarily motivated by money_. They _already have_ money. Give them something they didn't _wake up with_ , like an intellectually engaging conversation, a sincere thank-you, and/or the opportunity to have someone take their advice and report a win.

<comment><USER7> _"Many people whose advice you want are not primarily motivated by money."_

Yes, yes, yes. I've gotten useful advice even from direct competitors simply by offering them the _chance to give advice_. People like to give advice. It makes most people feel respected, of importance and value, and generally good.

Indeed, it is worth bearing in mind, throughout life and business in particular, that there are a lot of motivations beyond money. I see far too many filmmakers and other entrepreneurs fall into the trap of believing that in a negotiation, the guy with more money has all the power.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The simple solution is to make sure you have a good reason to offer for free, gratis.

For example, for consulting clients, I have a cutoff of 10-15 min before the bill starts. That is enough time for me to talk with the customer, scope out a problem, give them quick, simple advice, and prepare a quote. It is a good idea because it keeps lines of communication open and it makes sure I am in the loop when something goes wrong. At the same time 10-15 min is also enough time I can get informed consent for paid work and it's a nice value add.

It works well for me, actually. It also allows a little bit of leeway without allowing a lot of sliding.

</comment><comment><USER9> Internal Server Errors tend to be big money losers.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is really an issue for entrepreneurs. I see it happen a lot with female entrepreneurs too.

</comment><comment><USER11> 500's are really bad for entrepreneur's...</comment>