Ask HN: What is your favorite non-generic or semi-obscure programming language? - <AUTHOR> Any programming language that someone might find useful but has likely not heard of like Nim, Elixer, D, etc <comment><USER3> I don't have any obscure favourites that I actually use. But I have a soft spot for a bunch of old, obsolete ones.

Niklaus Wirth's post-Pascal languages, including Modula-2 (and its offshoot Modula-3) and Oberon were fantastic. Their syntaxes fit on a single piece of paper. Modula-3 is an outlier, since it was developed without much involvement from Wirth, but it adds some nice stuff, such as generics. Oberon had a strong influence on Go.

As a kind of "lost language", Barbara Liskov's CLU (1974-75) is fascinating. Its syntax is Algol/Simula-like, but it comes with a lot of advanced features (iterators, generics, type parameters with constraints, exceptions, variant types, parallel assignments, inheritance-less classes, "everything is an object", garbage collection, no global variables) that eventually ended up in other languages, much later. CLU was never intended to be used, but as a testbed for ideas, and it never really was.

<comment> open-source-ux I have a soft spot for Modula-2 too. It was verbose (which I didn't mind) and used all-caps for some syntax which didn't look nice. It featured coroutines for concurrent programming with a very readable syntax.

Wirth felt the language was too large (although this is all relative since Modula-2 is smaller than many modern languages) and so Oberon, his next language, was deliberately pared down to the smallest number of keywords and features he could manage. I've always liked this philosophy and still think a smaller language is preferable to a larger language in many cases. There's something satisfying about knowing all the features of a language - <USER2> actually feel you might be able to master it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nim-lang. Its similar to Python in Syntax but runs at close to native speed. Nim has beautiful syntax.

[https://github.com/kostya/benchmarks](https://github.com/kostya/benchmarks) [https://nim-lang.org/](https://nim-lang.org/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Nial (and its interpreter QNial) is strangely unheard-of. It's an intruiging APL-like that uses English words and a simple, general syntax that permits nested parentheses, allowing lisp-like code. It extends APL to multidimensional arrays a la Numpy (which it well predates - 1981!), and throws in some interesting and exotic ideas for good measure such as arrays of point-free functions as a first-class structure. It's a lot of fun to do Project Euler type math problems in, and captures the essential spirit of APL/J/K etc but without the obfuscated syntax.

      isprime is op n {not ((n = 1) or (0 in (n mod (rest count (floor (sqrt n))))))}

[https://github.com/danlm/QNial7](https://github.com/danlm/QNial7)

[https://tangentstorm.github.io/nial/intro.ndf.html](https://tangentstorm.github.io/nial/intro.ndf.html)

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

</comment><comment> open-source-ux Icon [1] and Unicon [2] are very interesting languages. They both excel in string processing. Icon had some influence on Python. Unicon is a superset of Icon with many more features.

Unicon is still under development unlike Icon. I don't think Unicon has ever been discussed on Hacker News. Ever.

[1] [https://www2.cs.arizona.edu/icon/](https://www2.cs.arizona.edu/icon/)

[2] [https://unicon.sourceforge.io/](https://unicon.sourceforge.io/)

<comment><USER6> Yes icon is very interesting.

It has builtin backtracing, which can be quite useful for text parsing.

I also like TXR, which also has builtin backtracing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Inform is a language for creating text adventure games with an English like syntax. It's very expressive, powerful and highly domain specific.

As an example here is the complete source code for a very simple game:

"Prototype" by defaultcompany

The Lookout Point is a room. An old man is here.

The Outskirts is south from the Lookout Point. A campaign poster is here.

The Village is east from the Outskirts.

The Scumm Bar is inside from The Village.

</comment><comment><USER8> Definitely Haskell for introducing me to functional programming concepts (which I know use everywhere) and Erlang for introducing me to the actor model, embracing failure, and writing easily scalable and reliable code.

</comment><comment><USER9> Of all the languages I've experimented with, I was fond of Dan Winkler's _HyperTalk_ (the scripting language used by Apple's _Hypercard_ app) because it was so high-level. It enabled _a lot_ of people - particularly in education - to create app 'stacks' that might otherwise never have ventured into programming. And it was _fun_. I can't imagine a more noble goal for a language.

(The variant _Supertalk_ is still in use, in _SuperCard_ ).

</comment><comment><USER10> I have no idea how people live on windows without autohotkey.

<comment><USER11> can you tell me more about your use of autohotkey ?

<comment><USER10> Sure, sorry its kind of unstructured.

I have the following AHK enabled "features" for lack of a better term always running on windows.

Caps lock triggers a context sensitive - which app - screen overlay of relevant shortcuts (assembled by hand) as well as a menu which autofilters a long lsit of commands, other scripts or websearches, like yubnub.

I have commonly used actions assigned to mouse buttons: ``` WheelRight::Send !{Right} Wheelleft::Send !{Left} Xbutton1::Send ^{PgUp} Xbutton2::Send ^{PgDn} +MButton::Send ^w +WheelDown::WheelRight +WheelUp::WheelLeft ```

I have reassigned the function buttons I almost never used, along with some combinations to allow me to almost never use the mouse in certain use cases.

By highlighting text and hitting a hotkey, i get the evaluation of that as a math expression. With functions and memory

Small scripts that I use most days and call from caps menu include: global autocorrect, computer & network performance widgets, emoji/ascii art insert tool, rerun of apps that start on startup, on screen ruler, on screen color eye dropper, mouse wiggler to prevent screensaver, quake-style terminal emulator window for WSL bash, etc.

It also compiles into an exe easily and relaibly, so friends and family struggling with something can get a gui based app, usually a few hundred kbs, for something that is otherwise a big pain to do. A recent example was a mouse tracker for doing presentations, that always gave the mouses' current location.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Delphi was amazing. The best GUI builder I've ever seen, fast as blazes... then Borland went bust, and it got killed by being priced into obscurity.

</comment><comment><USER13> Professor Jack Schwartz's SETL is great for designing algorithms at a high level yet executable if you want it. SETL is dynamically typed with compilation, type inference, and 'reppers' to optionally declare type info as tools to trade verbosity/effort for runtime efficiency (Think typescript vs javascript) all this in the late 70's.

<comment><USER14> I believe Guido van Rossum was working on SETL 30ish years ago (which I know because I did a parallelizing version of it back then too).

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> CSound, which seems to have found a way to provide composers with a powerful and unparalleled tool for scoring computer music.

</comment><comment><USER16> Not really obscure, but I find old-school Windows batch lots of fun.

Some of the stuff I've messed around with is on my Github: [https://github.com/rahuldottech/](https://github.com/rahuldottech/)

</comment><comment><USER17> I saw a presentation on Forth and ever since then I've loved tinkering with it.

The language is old, fast and powerful. It isn't quite compiled or interpreted (or maybe it's both), it can run on teeny tiny microcontrollers or be used for scripting.

The best part is, it's a completely different paradigm of how to program from any of the other modern languages I've used. There are no function arguments, and everything is done in reverse polish notation. There's no concept of parentheses in the language (parens are used for comments)

</comment><comment><USER18> Idris lang seems awesome with the atom plugin. :)

Did not use it yet but I hope it will get more attention.

[https://youtu.be/mOtKD7ml0NU](https://youtu.be/mOtKD7ml0NU)

</comment><comment><USER19> Learning Prolog was one of the better decisions I have made. Not because Prolog jobs are plentiful. Rather, understanding logic programming by broadened my problem-solving skill set.

</comment><comment><USER20> I enjoy Clojure. It's a lisp that runs on the JVM. It really taught me a lot about the power of immutable data structures, code as data, and first class functions.

<comment><USER21> Clojure is not too esoteric. We use it heavily at a FANG

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I've started learning Erlang recently and I'm enjoying it. Ada and Forth have also intrigued me too, but idk if either of those are obscure

<comment><USER23> I did some Ada in college. It's incredibly powerful, but it can be pretty difficult to work with. I don't know where else is used other than aviation and the military.

<comment><USER24> +1 for Ada. Loved they way it made tasks and monitors etc explicit. Easy to work with low level hardware. Liked the subtyping too. Often compilation => correct.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Serpent![1] It's a Python-like language created by the guy who wrote Audacity, for operating on MIDI files mostly, and doing audio automation, like markov chain composition. It's super cool.

[1] [https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~music/serpent/doc/serpent.htm](https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~music/serpent/doc/serpent.htm)

</comment><comment><USER26> The E programming language [0] for secure distributed computing. A language that makes it very easy to reason about what permissions your code actually has, by implementing the object-capability security model.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_(programming_language)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_\(programming_language\))

</comment><comment><USER27> Picolisp ([https://picolisp.com/wiki/?home](https://picolisp.com/wiki/?home)) is one such lang not many know about but it brings a lot to the table (batteries included). It's super low on memory and it's (almost too) fast for most people.

</comment><comment><USER28> i don't believe that the question is valid in the context of hn (after all people here are curious by design and have probably heard about most things out there).

that being said, I quite enjoy Elixir. It builds on top of Erlang and the language and the community around it are just amazing.

</comment><comment><USER29> Visual JavaScript. Only like 30 people have ever used it

</comment><comment><USER30> Q# no idea how to program anything in this "quantum" language though!

</comment><comment><USER31> Lingo was fun in the days of Macromedia Director.</comment>


Simple: 2 choices, 1 rule.  - <AUTHOR> http://philgo20.com/2011/10/2-choices-1-rule/

<comment><USER2> If only I knew what I really wanted to do.</comment>


How 75 Average Sports Fans Keep Beating the "Experts" at ESPN Picking NFL Games - <AUTHOR> http://unanimous.ai/perfectswarm/ <comment><USER2> Amazing the results of pooling people's brainpower. But this is NOT A SURVEY. Surveys don't pool brainpower, they just tally individual opinions. Artificial Swarm Intelligence is a totally different beast. I can't wait to see what happens when it gets out of Beta.

</comment><comment><USER3> The dude should have bet his FULL winnings from the first week on the second week. He would have turned $20 into $680. Instead he only turned $20 into about $300. Still amazing.

<comment><USER4> yep. Gotta have the balls to let it ride sometimes and he's clearly playing with house money.

Even if put half his winnings up, he'd have been in a no risk situation with a chance to win 400 total.</comment></comment>


$35 Quad Core ARMv7 PC - <AUTHOR> http://com.odroid.com/sigong/blog/blog_list.php?bid=173 <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8748658](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8748658)

</comment><comment><USER3> [0] looks like a nice article with a comparison to Raspberry Pi B+

[0] [http://linuxgizmos.com/35-dollar-quad-core-hacker-sbc- offers...](http://linuxgizmos.com/35-dollar-quad-core-hacker-sbc-offers-rpi- like-expansion/)

<comment><USER4> The RPi is already years old, it's really no comparison at this point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> What are people actually doing with tiny pcs that require much computing power? I use one to serve a dashboard on a monitor at work, but haven't done anything else with them.

<comment><USER6> HTPC has been the most common use I've seen. I use my Raspberry Pi to run XBMC. It gets the job done although the menu can be a little sluggish; I've been thinking of upgrading it for awhile.

<comment><USER7> what version? B+?

<comment><USER6> Just a regular B, actually. I bought it before the B+. The B especially is something of a struggle with its two sole USB ports. I use one for the wifi adapter, and the other to plug in my external hard-drive. I have to control the program entirely via my phone, since I can't plug in a keyboard or an IR adapter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I don't mind the odroid, but I would love it a lot more if there were some official Debian images for it. The software side of things is lacking a little bit.

</comment><comment><USER9> Would it work as a home server ? Uncompressing rar set, downloading from newsgroups etc?

</comment><comment><USER3> What are the shipping options for Europe?

<comment><USER10> They have a distributer in Germany here: [http://www.pollin.de/shop/suchergebnis.html?S_TEXT=odroid&lo...](http://www.pollin.de/shop/suchergebnis.html?S_TEXT=odroid&log=internal)

They also have a US based distributer as well: [http://ameridroid.com/](http://ameridroid.com/)

Back before they had the US and German distributers I ordered a different board and they shipped it to the US from South Korea with no problems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Where can I get one???

<comment><USER12> If you're in North America.

[http://ameridroid.com/](http://ameridroid.com/)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Help me to chose a mobile plattform for development - <AUTHOR>

Hi,
I am looking for more information, opinions, strategic analysis on which mobile plattform one should focus his attention and efforts.
While all the hype is around the iPhone and Android, Nokia, BlackBerry and Palm seem viable options as well. Of course it depends what you are planning to do, but let's assume that you want to start a company (a small Italian restaurant to use the words of DHH) working solely on mobile applications, what aspects should one keep in mind when deciding which plattform to develop for?
I am not looking for a definite answer but rather pointers to other sources and your opinions to better understand the current situation.
On which platform are you betting? <comment><USER2> You should probably check on the usual suspects: what apps do you want to make, who are you making apps for, what kind of mobiles does your target market usually have AND (maybe more important) what influences their decisions on acquiring phones (trends, utility/job, available apps..). Studying what your future users do is the way to know what they want. And of course, watch the competition in each platform, how many there are and how well are they doing.

But do you really have to focus in one single platform? Making apps in different formats could be a good move.

And, I don't own any of these super cool phones of late, so I don't know if any "cross-platform" apps exist, but I think it would be awesome if I could play with my Nokia against someone who has a shiny HTC or an iPhone :)</comment>


Frustrated with mod_python: is there any complete documentation out there? - <AUTHOR>

It me an hour to figure out that to not get 404 errors, you have to make the primary function called index. Now I'm trying to pass a variable in the URL and retrieve it. This is simple in PHP, and in Python I would think it would just be a dictionary.<p>The official documentation from mod_python is virtually useless. Even a list of classes and functions and how they work would be great. <comment><USER2> I think most people don't use mod_python directly, but instead use it as a means of running their web framework. So, for example, django comes with support for mod_python (<http://www.djangoproject.com/documentation/modpython/>).

mod_wsgi (<http://code.google.com/p/modwsgi/>) is rapidly becoming popular, it's an implementation of the python wsgi spec which has a plethora of toolkits and libraries available.

If you want to go low level I'd recommend mod_wsgi + a library like webob. Otherwise I recommend django on top of mod_python (or mod_wsgi).

<comment><USER3> I can also recommend mod_wsgi in daemon mode. The developer (Graham Dumpleton) is really great about supporting it on its mailing list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Oddly enough Django was actually originally written as an easy abstraction layer around mod_python - partly so we didn't have to work with the low-leveal mod_python constructs, but mostly because back in 2003 we weren't 100% sure mod_python would work for us, and having an abstraction layer would make it easy to move to something else if we needed to (this was before WSGI as well).

</comment><comment><USER5> Hi Josh.

Try Django? I think you'll be much happier.

</comment><comment><USER6> I suggest writing a WSGI app. Then you can deploy it in a variety of ways, one of which is mod_python. Another method, as others mentioned, is mod_wsgi, and the best method in my experience is mod_proxy reverse-proxying to paste.httpserver.</comment>


Explore how people in the U.S. aged 18 to 34 have changed over four decades - <AUTHOR> http://census.socialexplorer.com/young-adults/ <comment><USER2> These numbers are really grim, and considering the job market only gets more cruel a few years after the top end of this age bracket, it makes it hard for young people to have a lot of hope for the future.

Granted, maybe some of them are reflective of age-agnostic trends but still! Start in higher debt then make less than ever! As a young person looking at these numbers I realize I am squandering my blessings as a high paid tech worker.

We are setting up our future for failure while claiming we needed to make these sacrifices for today.

<comment><USER3> Welcome to "staying competitive".

Here at Spain (and generally Southern Europe) we've been told over and over again that we have to stay competitive, which is just an euphemism for working more and earning less (i.e. becoming Europe's China).

In a globalized market with a (still) steadily growing population, competition is growing and therefore salaries are shrinking.

It's happening in all industries (e.g. tech firms offshoring) but also at homes. I don't know about the USA but here in Spain housewives love hunting for sales, buying as cheap as they can, and proud about it. Why are they surprised later when their children can't find a decent salary? Buying Perú's asparagus cheaper than in our home country (including transportation across the Atlantic!) is only driving prices lower and lower, which hinders the whole economy in the long term.

And now the USA is going to sign a trade agreement with Europe which will further increase competition and will drive wages even lower than they're now for both parties.

On the other hand, isn't this just leveling the playing field for developing countries? After all, for them to grow, we have to shrink.

<comment><USER4> Seems to me it's the government which needs to stay competitive, not the workers, ie regulation and bureaucracy.

<comment><USER5> Thank you for submitting HN's most hackneyed comment.

<comment><USER6> Please try harder to follow the HN guidelines.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Relative to the year 2000 is the part that scares me the most. It seems that largely things have changed for the worse over the last decade.

For Massachusetts:

Lower employment by an entire %4. Lower wages by 4k/year (%10 less!!!), adjusted for inflation. More people living with parents, fewer people living alone (read: piled into group houses with their former college roommates/friends). More people in poverty. More people never married (can't afford a real wedding, or ring). More people with higher education, likely not being put to use. Student loan debt and credit card debt aren't even listed on here as statistics.

The bleakest part is that the damage has mostly already been done to this cohort of people who I am a part of. The low wages now cripple wage growth in the future, which is bound to be bearish for people who aren't already rich. The race to the bottom is a real thing.

Thankfully, many people are starting to refer to our period of time as "late capitalism" for increasingly obvious reasons. Things will have to bottom out and improve at some point.

<comment><USER8> > More people never married (can't afford a real wedding, or ring).

You cannot leap to the conclusion that people are not getting married because they cannot afford it. I seriously doubt that is correlated (of course I have no proof either).

<comment><USER9> It's not that they can't afford the wedding. I think it's more of a refusal to settle down and commit with someone who doesn't have a stable career/future, or the inflexibility of a spouse whom you'll have to convince to move when the only job options you can find are in a different state.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Aside from the economic indicators, which are already being discussed here, the numbers for "never married" (up), "veteran" (way down), and "foreign born" (up) really jump out as trends. "Living with a parent" (up) is also a trend, but perhaps one more directly tied to the employment economy.

For better or worse, all these trends have had and will have important societal impacts. Why don't we see more discussions on this sort of thing? Other issues, like who's paying what in taxes, seem less important by comparison.

Note that I'm not making qualitative judgments on the people that fall into different categories. The numbers just jump out to me and I wonder why they aren't discussed more in conversations about who millenials are, what they think, and how they will approach the society, culture, and government.

<comment><USER11> >>Other issues, like who's paying what in taxes, seem less important by comparison.

There are many people who think this is exactly what the source of many of these trends. People have been ignoring "who is paying what" for far too long as the burden gets shifted from the wealthy who benefit disproportionately from our civil society to the middle and working classes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The Median Earnings for Full Time Workers page was quite sad for America.

Language Other than English Spoken at Home was quite surprising for me. I had no idea it was that high.

I don't understand how the employment numbers can be that bad. 35% unemployment - that is mostly impacted by people rearing children and college age folk, I hope.

<comment><USER13> A significant portion of that age group is still in school, hence not employed nor unemployed. They should really just show the unemployment rate, not the employment rate.

But yeah, the median income drop and poverty rate increase is pretty sad.

<comment><USER14> I wonder about the median income. Another statistic says that more people have at least a Bachelor degree. Consequently, more people start working at a later age, reducing the median income. On the other hand, new employees with a degree should earn more. It would be interesting to know the interaction between the two.

<comment><USER15> "On the other hand, new employees with a degree should earn more."

Its the other way around, if the jobs don't change but the number of degrees granted increases, then assuming degree holders cluster at the higher end, building downward would have to result in average salary of a degree holder decreasing over time.

Another interesting statistic is lifetime income. If you have a job that does not require a degree, and spend 10% of your working life earning a degree instead of earning income, your lifetime income will be about 10% lower. Its actually worse because starting wage for a coffee barista or waiter is the same, but presumably toward the end of your career you'll make more at a better job, but a degree holder will have retired for years 36-40 whereas a non-degree holder will continue to earn income for the full 40 years at the higher 36-40 yr rate. You'd see this a lot more in the trades, obviously 4 extra years of union master payscale is worth more than 4 extra years of journeyman.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> As a millennial these trends are frighting to see.

It's frustrating when I chat with friends who are a few years older than me about this (mid 30s), and they blame all of this on millennials just being lazy. Or stupid, for picking bad degrees. I think the issues are larger and more systemic than that.

<comment><USER17> What we're experiencing in Canada is pretty similar to the U.S.

Perhaps your friends should listen to this specific podcast regarding 'lazy millenials': [http://canadalandshow.com/podcast/geritocracy](http://canadalandshow.com/podcast/geritocracy)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is nice but I'm surprised at the bracket 18-34? (at least separating 18-24 and 25-34 would have been better.) The listed bracket 18-34 covers young adulthood where most eventual high earners would be earning near 0 in college, to late twenties with some people pursuing masters but most joining workforce, to _mid-thirties_ with some people fully educated and having 10-12 years of experience in their field. (e.g. a programmer graduating at 24 and earning $90K ($120K bay area) by 34 is not in any way unusual, but here gets averaged with others, maybe including his future peer, who are _just_ starting college and are showing very low earnings for a few years.)

Likewise, "living with a parent (18-34)"... "Bachelor's degree (18-34)"... Quite the bracket!

</comment><comment><USER19> Considering there has been an increasing larger percentage of the population going to college, the statistics might somehow get skewed by the population between age 18~23.

If one is in college, it is natural to assume that she or he is not fully employed, has low income, mostly not married, etc.

</comment><comment><USER20> I was surprised at the number who had a degree was less than the national average for California. I guess there's a lot of immigrant workers who don't achieve higher education levels which skews the perception living and working in the valley. States like Virginia and Kansas beat the national average, yet not california, that's really sad.

<comment><USER21> I almost guarantee that any HN reader lives in a section of California that is radically unrepresentative of the state as a whole.

<comment><USER22> I live in Fresno County, it's very representative sadly

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The age bracket doesn't really work out for certain categories, as for the below example it automatically excludes most people age 18-21 as with a standard 4 year degree will land you around the age of 22 minimum.

Bachelor's Degree or Higher, Age 18 to 34 Percent of total population age 18 to 34 years with bachelor's degree or higher

</comment><comment><USER24> Time for some personal experience.

Both my fiancé and I are employed. Most would consider our combined income to be very good. Considering the economic climate we are both doing well.

The problem here, and why I think trends like "never married" and "living at home" are up, is that even though we make a very good wage we still aren't middle class due to student debt. So instead of buying a house we pay over $3k each month on our student debt. Instead of purchasing new cars and a house (thus pumping money back into the economy) we have to pay rent.

The point of this post is that even if you are one of the lucky ones to get a well paying job right out of college you'll most likely have to put off purchases that used to be the norm for middle class.

</comment><comment><USER25> While interesting, it leaves me wanting to filter down and isolate different categories to see how they may impact other numbers. Its difficult to really understand what is driving these trends on its own.

</comment><comment><USER26> Interesting to see how even though % with bachelor degrees has grown since 1980, salaries have decreased and poverty has increased. Obviously, not all correlated, but still interesting.

<comment><USER27> As I've been saying for some time regarding the current employment / opportunity situation: we're not going to educate our way out of this mess.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Interesting how 'living in poverty' and 'not married' track.

</comment><comment><USER29> Shouldn't the title say something like "in the USA"?

<comment><USER6> We put that in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> *in the USA

<comment><USER31> Not needed... USA is the only place worth reporting on so it's implied.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> 35+ y/o here.

Every time I hear things like this I call up my mother and thank her for having me earlier than later. Also, I did not like the interface. I'd rather all the data was just <schplat!> there in one map.

<comment><USER33> I'm 41. My years of experience and getting two degrees when I was young and ambitious has helped greatly. I would NOT want to be 18-24 right now.

<comment><USER34> I'm 23, it's meh. I think most 18-24 kids browsing hackernews will be ok, but I have a lot of smarter classmates who are having trouble in other-than-CS fields.</comment></comment></comment>


If Tesla Would Stop Selling Cars, We'd All Save Some Money - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmichaels/2013/05/27/if-tesla-would-stop-selling-cars-wed-all-save-some-money/ <comment><USER2> The article is pretty much a hack-job. Logic 1: the state is funding 10% of your acquisition of a car, thus the state is subsidizing the car seller. Logic 2: the car cannot drive more than 200 miles, thus it is useless. I am amazed that Forbes published this.

</comment><comment><USER3> Old white guy doesn't like electric cars, news at 11.</comment>


Tangled Up in Entanglement - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/tangled-up-in-entanglement-quantum-mechanics?intcid=mod-latest <comment><USER2> Italics mine:

"If I measure one electron in my lab, the second electron is affected by the measurement of the first electron with no time delay—instantaneously— _even though a signal travelling at the speed of light would take millenia to cross the distance between them._ "

Yes, from our reference frame it takes millennia, but from a photon's reference frame (if that notion has any meaning) it is in fact instantaneous. Is this just a weird coincidence? I'm not sure how to even phrase it but is there some "quantum perspective" where the wave function collapse is synonymous with the speed of light reference frame?

<comment><USER3> Relatively is not fully compatible with quantum mechanics. This is the largest open problem in fundamental physics.

<comment><USER2> Sure but I'm just trying to making a general observation and making note of the curious symmetry.

It's interesting that an electron dropping to a lower energy state could be, in some sense, effectively connected to another electron millions of light years away via a photon whose reference frame would have no time pass or distance travelled.

Those two electrons are in a weird way as connected from the photon's perspective as two entangled electrons are from our perspective.

<comment><USER4> An interesting idea, but photons are limited to the speed of light, instantaneous is much faster.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There's an alternative to all this silly hub bub.

The alternative is that quantum physics encompasses a set of mathematical abstractions, which, while useful, are still abstractions, and just because an equation written on paper, using symbols, claims that a real world physical state is unknowable, doesn't mean that an unverified state is actually two things simultaneously, nor does it mean that human awareness of one state alters reality, in order to suit a change in human awareness.

Call this "Otaku's Rationale" why not?

<comment><USER3> Sure, you can explain any phenomena by saying "we don't know". How is that helpful?

Bell's Inequality shows that local hidden variables (with fixed values) are not compatible with the rest of what we know about physics.</comment></comment>


On starting over. Don't do it. - <AUTHOR> http://www.ewakened.com/2012/03/on-starting-over/

<comment><USER2> Where's the reasoning for this? Frequently starting over is a problem, but code refactoring can have immense benefits. Discovering a different framework or language may suit your work better, for instance.

Monkeypiling on top of old work is really advice out of the 90's.

These articles with a bunch of three word sentences and zero justification are becoming annoying.

<comment><USER3> Sometimes, it's just not a good idea. If you have a piece of software that has been battle tested and many of the bugs have been worked out over the course of several years, you will have an entire new set of bugs with a complete re- write (which could take lots of time to figure out).

I've also seen this as a solution to many problems because it was much easier for the developer to start over than to figure out the existing code and try to work with it.

But, there are some instances when a rewrite is the answer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have to disagree, sometimes it is a lot better to start over. For example, with legacy code with bad test or even worse, with no test at all.

<comment><USER5> If your legacy code has no tests, how do you know its replacement works correctly?

<comment><USER6> If your legacy code has no tests, how do you know it works correctly?

<comment><USER7> Because it's in production and people are using it. When you rewrite a new implementation from scratch and deploy it, you make their lives miserable, because so many things will break. This is nearly inevitable.

When talking about websites and web applications, client-side integration makes it nowadays very easy to add new modules to legacy codebases using a completely different technology. With a little bit of JavaScript, you can have some parts of webpages coming from an entirely different new server, using a new fresh framework and backend database. I think this is the best way to start migrating to new technologies, one step at a time.

<comment><USER6> _Because it's in production and people are using it._

I've run into more examples of broken code for which the above statement is true than I care to remember.

My original response was meant to be a rhetorical question, with the purpose of hinting that techniques for verifying the correctness of code might have existed existed prior to the 1990s. But "we haven't heard any complaints from users yet," while certainly a popular technique, is only slightly more reliable than prayer as a QA policy and I personally wouldn't recommend relying on it.

<comment><USER5> That's kind of the angle I was coming from as well. In order to effectively rewrite something you first need to know what the existing code _actually_ does. If you don't know that yet, then figuring it out is usually a lot harder than fixing whatever problems it has.

It's not that you should never rewrite, but it's always a lot more work than you think it's going to be.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: BuiltWithElixir.com – A place to discover projects built with  Elixir - <AUTHOR> https://builtwithelixir.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Feedback is highly appreciated. Also, please submit your projects and share the site if it's helpful.</comment>


Digg Redesigns, Loses More Than A Quarter of Audience - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/1690829/traffic-plummets-26-after-digg-redesign

<comment><USER2> "Are the site's users patient enough to wait for improvements and bug fixes?"

It is not about bugs or improvements. Diggv4 is a completely different site, that does not have a lot in common with the old Digg.

I am not negative per se about the new design, to me, it looks a lot cleaner, but thats about it. It is not the looks that bother me, it is the fact that the site completely changed its purpose. I have used Digg as a silent reader (non power-user) for a few years. I may have left some comments here and there, dugg a few articles, but most of the time, I just went there to get "what the community decided was the best of the internet right now".

This feature is the one that IMO has been left out in the new version, the site has no interest in providing that service anymore, it seems.

The new version is filled with stories I have no interest in, the amount of diggs a top-story gets is marginal at best compared to diggv3.

The site has completely lost its energy, it has degraded to a pretty looking collection of automatically aggregated stories that a lot of people no longer care about.

</comment><comment><USER3> The real question is, which quarter of the audience did they lose? If they lost the short attention span, ADHD, nextnextnext, downvote anything you don't agree with crowd. Then maybe they are doing the right thing for the long term health of the site.

<comment><USER4> I'm afraid they lost the quarter of the audience that was active in submitting and digging content.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> And this kids is why you don't couple a complete front-end makeover with a back-end overhaul. It's never going to be perfect and bug-less from day one, and users will always equate something wrong on one end with hating the entire redesign. Comments not loading because of some consistency issue? They'll associate it with your new layout and start hating it.

The roll-out of features and changes should be gradual and isolated from one another. Theme something different there, move that widget to the other side, change your navigation scheme, comments are now NoSQL, ok start moving stories to NoSQL, and finally this is our new front-page system of you following users with a customized My News.

If any of those individual pieces caused an issue, or there was too much backlash, it wouldn't be associated with the excellent work and effort you've placed into all the other parts of the new site. You get targeted feedback, can quickly squash bugs, and your user-base is now accustomed to what would otherwise be a jarring change. Instead you get Digg v4, with weeks of broken axle pages, entire parts of the site not working, huge features and functions of the old site just completely missing, and what I can imagine is an entire development staff running around like chickens with their heads cut off trying to figure out what part of their new system (or multiple parts) are the issue, and how to solve it.

Pains me to see them do so much right, yet still get so much terribly wrong.

</comment><comment><USER6> Change is jarring.

Given the almost radical nature of the redesign it's not surprising that people didn't want to put up with it.

But if it is something for the better. Then a better design will see an influx of new users. It'd be interesting to see their new subscription rate.

</comment><comment><USER7> I rather like the changes made to Digg. I got tired every day of going to the site and reading things that organizations obviously wanted to digg up for the sake of hitting a larger audience.

Essentially, it boiled down to kind of like trying to get to the top of Google Search rankings. And often times it kind of felt like if you go to Google and type "abortion", you end up finding the front page filled with religious, anti-abortion sites that paid their way to the top.

I prefer the new format since it lets me get news I'm interested in. Nobody can game the system to "reach me".

They re-added the "top news" section if you want something similar to the old Digg style, but the changes overall are for the better.

The only seemingly negative part of the change is the wealth of comments. Many articles now have very few comments. It's a fair trade off though since I was getting extremely tired of the dribble of interest groups trying to pay their way to shut me out of getting information I want to read.

It's a different Digg, and I think the execution and move could have gone better than dumping it on people without significantly announcing the change. They could have retained more users and gotten more support for it if they did just a tad bit of marketing first.

Either way, I like the change and will continue to use the site.</comment>


Why The Student Loan Market Is Insane - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-06-11/heres-why-the-student-loan-market-is-completely-insane <comment><USER3> Parts of this article bother me.

Let's say that banks could set rates based on risk and this did force lower quality colleges to reduce their tuition. Those colleges would bring in less revenue and program quality would likely suffer, possibly resulting in a feedback loop. Meanwhile, ivy league universities that are funded primarily by endowments would be able to raise their tuition without burdening their students, who would be able to afford larger loans given that they would be paying lower interest rates. In short, rich schools get negligibly richer while poor schools get significantly poorer. More importantly, Ivy league program quality would not improve significantly while lower tier college programs would spiral downwards.

If the goal is to promote quality education, the current system lets ivy league students subsidy lower tier college students to some extent. It makes more tuition dollars available to institutions that depend entirely on tuition at the price of restricting tuition dollars available to institutions that are less reliant on them. The status quo has significant advantages over what this article proposes. Higher default-rates are a problem, but the lesser of several evils (unless you happen to be a banker).

North of the border, university tuition is subsidied by provincial governments and regulated by them as well. It varies from province to province, but average tuition in Canada is far lower than it is in the U.S.. In most provinces, tuition is still expensive enough to be considered an investment, but cheap enough that thrifty living, summer jobs, and a minor scholarship or two can see you through undergrad without debt. It's a different approach that's worth considering.

<comment><USER4> And yet in much of Europe (or at least where I'm from), colleges where you pay tuition are considered substandard whereas colleges without tuition are considered high quality.

Mostly to do with the expectation that if you pay tuition they will make bloody certain you get that degree, whereas colleges without tuition fail some 50% of their students.

Hell, Universities don't even want to accept tuition-based colleges under their umbrella because the quality just isn't there.

<comment><USER5> This just seems bizarre to me. How can state funded schools compete for good professors with rich private schools?

<comment><USER6> Same here in Poland. Only the free universities are the good ones. Any paid- for private university is immediately considered worse and is very unlikely to result in a good job. All top 100 universities in the country are completely free.

And like the commenter above said - private universities will push through 90% of their students, so the degrees they get are worth close to nothing,no matter how much they paid. Meanwhile, the most prestigious schools in the country lose over 50% of the students in the first year because requirements are so high,and because they are not afraid of letting people go(they are not paying, so they are not entitled to anything). Out of 200 people signing up for an engineering course,only 20-30 people will actually graduate(and those engineers are sought after by every company in the country,because they are guaranteed to be good).

<comment><USER7> oh you must be joking, i'm graduating from top1 polish university and even the professors are saying the quality of education is piss poor -but well whan can you expect when the TA's are getting paid around 1500 zloty (500$) and the professors are grabbing ~4000zloty (a bit more than 1000$). But there are parts in which you are right - the graduation rate is 30% and the quality of education in paid unis is even worse. And no we're not sought after in the country because we tend to leave it.

<comment><USER8> The problem with leaving the country is that your very good degree is now almost worthless. I got mine (from a good technical uni) issued in English, I even wrote my thesis in English. Not a single employer wanted to look at it. Yet, I earn the same as my colleague with a PhD from a local uni. Turns out no one cares about degrees in software engineering. Maybe it's different in your industry.

<comment><USER9> Software engineering is probably one of the specialties better suited for an apprenticeship-style program rather than a degree-based one.

<comment><USER6> Yeah. I got my job in the games industry as an intern programmer before even graduating. When I finally did graduate, they were like "oh , cool", and that's it. I guess that even if I dropped out of uni they wouldn't care - <USER2> was doing my job and that's what was important.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is this surprising to anyone, structurally it is exactly the same as the mortgage issue in 2009 with Freddie and Fannie. The government finances the lending of money (by absorbing the risk) and gives banks money at a few percent which they loan out at 5 - 6% or more. You combine that with for profit universities which have discovered that the bank and their interests are aligned, they charge what ever they want for tuition, the banks make sure the students can get that in the form of guaranteed loans and non-dismissable loans, and the students play their part by putting themselves into indentured servitude. There is no other way for this to play out.

I've written my congress critters and suggested they notify the banks that they are going to make loans dischargable in bankruptcy in 4 years, they are going to change the guarantee to be 60 cents to the dollar. Its going to get very very painful.

<comment><USER11> That's not how the system works anymore. FFEL which was the government guaranteed but bank issued student loans was ended in 2010. Now almost all student loans are made directly by the government (Stafford, PLUS, & Perkins), with a small rump private student loan industry. Those loans are non- dischargeable but not government guaranteed.

If this had been an actual article rather than a puff piece for SoFi, presumably that would have been made that a lot clearer.

<comment><USER12> Translation: they're government guaranteed by making the students seel themselves into loan slavery instead of by taxpayer money.

Note the evolution of public finances since this started : expenses increased.

Same thing will happen : government will bow to public pressure to make these things dischargeable, and suddenly the loans aren't worth their interest rate anymore. The government's companies panic and try to get back their principal.

Why ? Because these companies weren't financed by the government, in true American style they loan on the public market, then reloan to the students. Right now they're rated AAA of course, and loan at very low interest to people who probably aren't even worth BBB rating. And they roll over debt. As soon as anyone finds a way to discharge large amounts of student loan debts, there's more than a trillion dollar of loans that go from AAA to < BBB. Then at the end of the month, these loans need to be rolled over ...

<comment><USER11> There are no seperate bond issues that back federal lending to students. They are funded out of general obligation debt (i.e. treasuries). Despite being warned over and over again that bond vigilantes are just around the corner, for the better part of a decade now investors have been willing to take near zero interest on them. There's no reason to believe that a few hundred billion in lost repayment over 10-30 years, would move the needle at all.

<comment><USER12> That's actually true. Greece demonstrated what happens after a default, and then Cyprus did. In both cases it didn't prevent them from reissuing bonds and selling out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> So kids that can't afford/qualify for a top school would also face much higher student loan interest rates. Humm... that doesn't seem that much different from "tax the poor" style of economics.

Perhaps schools with a lower default rate should get a higher interest rate... the banks are leaving money on the table. Students attending schools with a higher default rate should get the lowest rate and more government support (grants/bursaries/scholarships).

Or perhaps the student loan "industry" should not be focused on how to make the most money from students. It should be focused on higher graduation rates, higher paying employment for graduates, and perhaps even employment in strategic fields (i.e. increase the amount of loans available for engineering, compsci, whatever fields will be important in 10 to 20 years).

And private industry (aka the banks) should not be in the business of student loans at all. It should be 100% government funded and run, with the goal of being a non-profit. It's hard for me to see any added value that private industry brings to the table for it's "share of the profits" (do they help sell a student on getting a loan? is servicing/tracking a loan so complex that the gov't couldn't easily run a loan servicing application?).

Profit is the incorrect incentive for student loans (again it should be graduation rates, higher paying employment, perhaps even employment in strategic fields).

<comment><USER14> "(i.e. increase the amount of loans available for engineering, compsci, whatever fields will be important in 10 to 20 years)."

If fed govt tries to do this, it's "meddling in the market" (or "distorting the market"). If a private co does this, it's smart/fwd thinking. ?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Tuition rates don't reflect the cost or even the value of the education, in many senses of the word "value", but rather they have a strategic aspect to them which justifies the high rates.

Tuition rates are essentially "costly signals". Those who have a degree are so sure of themselves, and had other people believing in them so strongly, that they were able to finance even the highest cost. This system both guarantees the elite students go to elite schools and that employers can sort applicants by school and degree.

Problem is, this kind of equilibrium in the modern economical world tends to blow up in the faces of the "players" at some point.

</comment><comment><USER16> The missing link is insurance or a hedge with buyers/students opting for protection from the schools product or service if not delivered in spirit or letter of its premised promise (aka marriage of warranty/collision- comprehensive). Secondly insurance or hedge against themselves as students/buyers for when life happens or they otherwise screw up delaying, discontinuing, rerouting their pursuit (liability).

The fix for one sided finance is to add a second dimension in an equal and opposite direction.

</comment><comment><USER17> I think an important step to take would be allowing lenders to discriminate based on students' course of study, considering the massive effect it has on students' ability to pay back their debt. Such a change would, all other things being equal, reduce interest rates for STEM degrees and increase those for arts, thus potentially increasing the number of STEM students to the benefit of the wider economy.

</comment><comment><USER18> It should be in the public (government) interest to have Young adults date start and thus complete their degrees as early as possible in life.

It's also presumably in the public interest that as many as possible are included in the pool eligible for qualified jobs (you want the top students to be doctors, not the children of rich parents).

Social mobility is also a factor, if university studies are expensive that will severely limit social mobility.

The conclusion is this: higher education should be free, and governments should not only ensure that it is, but that the free education holds at least the same quality as non-free (perhaps surprisingly this is already the case in many countries with free higher education).

Even without tuition fees, housing, food and books are expensive, so grants or cheap loans are still necessary.

The solution in Sweden and many similar countries is to have state guaranteed (I.e subsidized) loans where there is no private entity wanting a premium for the risk of lending money. The result is that anyone can afford taking loans to study, and it usually pays off very quickly.

</comment><comment><USER19> I would love to know when this "why"-titles fashion finaly ends.

<comment><USER20> I like it. It sets out a format that I think works well. 'Why' means ' _This article is going to argue that xyz_ '

Much better than the 'is' titles which usually mean ' _This article is going to ramble vaguely about xyz and avoid even attempting to answer the question in the title (even though the answer is obviously no)_ '

<comment><USER19> To me it seems most of the times like the author had no idea how to make up a title that would describe the text in one sentence. It becomes even worse if the answer to the question is not really there in the end.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Gee cry me a river:

      'As a result, "the government has made it difficult for banks to price to default rates," says Mike Cagney, founder of Social Finance, a socially based student lending operation known informally as SoFi. "By accepting FDIC insurance, banks lose pricing flexibility and can't charge interest rates commensurate with the quality of schools—and default rates vary widely by schools."'

How about the banks just get out of the student loan business?

Banks are make _shitloads_ on the student loan program: all loans that default are insured.

<comment><USER20> The meat of the article is about the follow on effects from that. Higher default should mean higher interest rates is a higher cost which would push down enrollment in those underperforming schools (which also underperform for students) and/or push the the school's price down. To the extent that loans are insured, the banks profits aren't really affected by incorrectly priced risk.

I'm very skeptical of free market solutions to higher education affordability issues. I think it's nonsense. But, screaming your slogan (fuck banks!) at a sentence from an article making a point about a different point of view is basically youtube comments.

<comment><USER22> The "meat" of the article is PR hamburger for SoFi.

(Not that SoFi aren't doing something genuinely interesting. But this is a straight-up advertisement. I'd bet a nickel that SoFi's agency even made the graphs for it.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Only if Mr. Obama would stay out of education market half the problems would get solved automatically.

Few NBA players make million dollars a year. But that does not mean if government provides cheaper loans for basketball training it would produce more millionaires or even increase overall quality living.

If government meddles in education, forces banks to give cheaper loans it only means one thing. A big "Student Loan Bubble".

<comment><USER9> Half the problems would get solved by the President staying out of it? Why were they problems at all _before_ he started pushing for the reforms, then?

<comment><USER23> So the world has not solved any problems unless government wastes taxpayers money on solving them ?

<comment><USER9> The President was staying out of it. There are now reform proposals to fix issues. You argue that if he'd stay out of it - as he was - that the issues would go away, so why were they there in the first place prior to him getting involved?

<comment><USER23> He was not. He says everyone should afford a college degree. Nothing wrong with that. He wants to spend someone else's money to make it affordable which only means worthless degrees will be dozen a penny.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Logtrail – A Kibana plugin for logs that clones the Papertrail UI - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/sivasamyk/logtrail <comment><USER2> Cool plugin! If you are the author, would you be willing to share your experience of building the plugin to begin with? We don't have a publicly documented plugin API or anything, so I imagine you had to figure a lot of this out from reverse engineering and such.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed, there are not lots of tutorials out there explaining plugin development in Kibana. Mostly I used Timelion and Kibana source code as reference and also I kept the Kibana API dependency to minimal since it is not documented and may change anytime (and also I am new to Javascript, so had tough time in understanding the code :)).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Any upsides to using this over a Table view in default kibana?

<comment><USER4> Yes, the live tail portion. With Kibana you'd have to refresh the page to see new logs come in. This is more like Papertrail. Looks like they pretty much copied the UI of papertrailapp.com as well from the screenshot, although it doesn't have the alerting functionality that Papertrail does. This looks like a cool alternative though to get live tailing if you're already on ELK.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes the whole view inspired by PapertrailApp ( as mentioned in the first line of README ) . I liked the Papertrail App UI, but didn't want to use cloud based solution.

<comment><USER5> We've received a complaint that your project isn't just inspired by Papertrail but copies its UI wholesale. This seems to me a borderline case: your project seems legit in that it isn't just a ripoff of someone else's work, but the complaint seems legit too, because cloning their UI (including copying some CSS) is taking a lot more than inspiration.

We've edited the title above to clarify this in a way that attempts to be fair and neutral. (The submitted title was 'Show HN: Logtrail – A Kibana plugin to view, search and tail logs and events'.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Fair enough. The CSS file was not copied, but I tried to get the same style.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Graylog has this out of the box since v2.0 and integrated with the authentication layer: [https://www.graylog.org/blog/55-announcing- graylog-v2-0-ga](https://www.graylog.org/blog/55-announcing-graylog-v2-0-ga)

<comment><AUTHOR> Graylog is awesome!. I have developed few plugins for Graylog too. I miss the console-like interface of Papertrail to view logs in Graylog.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> On first look, it looks great. Wish there were an easier to try it out. Would love to help with that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you mean hosting a demo of the plugin? Send me a mail ( email is in my github profile)

<comment><USER7> Yes

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!. Please PM me via email (email is in my github profile )</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask YC: Greasemonkey script to hilight "friends" on News.YC - <AUTHOR> http://www.broadersheet.com/yc.friends/

<comment><AUTHOR> I made a little greasemonkey script that hilights users that you specify, it's probably more useful if you download it and upload it to your own environment, then add the users you want to track.

It isn't anything major, just something I needed and thought you guys might appreciate it.</comment>


Where is Hubble now? - <AUTHOR> http://www.satview.org/?sat_id=20580U <comment><USER2> This is cool, but the "next re-entry" scroll is cooler. I wish it would tell you where it was going to re-enter, though: [http://www.satview.org/?sat_id=43090U#](http://www.satview.org/?sat_id=43090U#)

</comment><comment><USER3> I miss NASA's J-Track 3D. It looks like [http://stuffin.space/](http://stuffin.space/) is turning out to be a similar replacement.</comment>


Show HN: Auto Formatter for File Structures - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/benawad/butler-cli <comment><USER3> Interesting experiment! I read the README and I get the basics of the idea, but it might help if you could provide more examples in the README - <USER2> example video that shows how you improved the file structure, explains how does your formatter decide how to transform files into fractal structure?</comment>


The Case Against ISP Tolls - <AUTHOR> http://blog.netflix.com/2014/04/the-case-against-isp-tolls.html <comment><USER2> Netflix and Google and Amazon and Apple should join forces to let Comcast customers know when they're being throttled.

"Your video is buffering because Comcast is slowing your connection down. Click here to contact Comcast customer support. Click here to find Netflix Certified providers in your area."

Netflix and Google and Amazon and Apple all have great brands with high customer satisfaction. They should utilize all those eyeballs to funnel even more hate toward Comcast.

<comment><USER3> > "Click here to find Netflix Certified providers in your area."

Followed by:

"I'm sorry, there are no Netflix Certified providers in your area."

When Comcast is rated as one of the worst companies for customer satisfaction, customers aren't staying with them because they are ignorant when it comes to the alternatives. They are staying with them because there are no alternatives.

<comment><USER4> "I'm sorry, there are no Netflix Certified providers in your area."

Seems like a natural place to put "click here to contact your state/federal representative"

While I grant that cynisim is definitely warranted, at the end of the day, these companies have monopoly jurisdiction because we the people allow them to.

<comment><USER5> Because there are laws on the books explicitly preventing anyone else from competing with Comcast.

<comment><USER6> [http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/02/isp-lobby-has- alr...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/02/isp-lobby-has-already-won- limits-on-public-broadband-in-20-states/)

<comment><USER5> Can anyone tell me what would be the problem with just having a law "no law is allowed to be passed preventing any individual or entity from providing broadband service to any other individual or entity"? And how said problem would be worse than the current dismal arrangements?

<comment><USER7> "Look I'm sorry mate but I'm just running this wire through your house to give your neighbor internet, if you don't let me you're in the wrong"

"Sorry but we need to tear up this highway and disrupt traffic for the next couple of weeks to lay some fibre. I know someone else did the same thing last week but they were another company and it's illegal for the local government body to stop any of us laying stuff on public land when we want"

Obviously that extreme is untenable. You may be after something a bit more useful like unbundling, but in the US you have to explain how forcing a private company to let competitors use it's cable is not outright stalinistic communism.

<comment><USER5> There's a difference between not allowing ISPs access to public lands and outright prohibiting them from offering their services.

Obviously if they wanted to run wire through a house they'd have to get the owner's permission, or the local government's permission to dig up a road. The thing is, as the law currently stands they're forbidden from doing so; even if every household in they city signed a contract saying "sure, let company X run cable through our yard", company X still wouldn't be allowed to sell them internet over that cable.

Maybe a company could innovate and develop some form of fast wireless mesh network. But even if they had the technology and finances to do so, local laws stating "the only company allowed to sell fast internet here is Comcast" or equivalent prevent them from doing so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Comcast can do what it does because Democrats portray the company as a problem with capitalism, while Republicans portray it as a problem with regulation.

In truth, it's both. It's a problem where a company has co-opted well-meaning regulation to snuff out competition, which is a thing capitalist companies do. Meanwhile, citizens point the finger at each other instead of removing Comcast's ability to monopolize.

Either the regulations that make competing as an ISP difficult need to be stripped out (my personal favorite), or the last mile needs to be public property. Either way, Comcast getting to be the only one sitting on that last- mile connection is what has given rise to its stranglehold on the internet.

We need to support fixing this on a local/state level. Support smaller ISPs in their attempts to disrupt the incumbents, and support legislation that actually encourages innovation in the marketplace (even if that means striking policies from the law books).

<comment><USER9> As someone who's trying to bootstrap a small, local, last-mile ISP right now, my only wish is that there were _many_ more people that held your opinion on this matter, and were willing to back that opinion with their dollars.

<comment><USER10> Best of luck. May I ask for a high level overview of what is involved with bootstrapping a small ISP?

<comment><USER9> Sure, you can ask me anything :)

The process so far has involved :

\- Figure out how to get access to right of ways [Completed] \- Figure out how to get internet access to sell [Completed] \- Figure out how much it will cost to start a CO [Mostly Completed] \- Acquire a place to put a CO [Completed] \- Acquire high quality, redundant backhaul [Under Construction Now]

\- Figure out who's willing to pay to switch away from Comcast [I have some names, but this is definitely not completed] \- Beg them for money [Some have subscribed, but definitely not enough yet]

There's a couple of big things that work against me:

City + State taxes for right of ways are pricy. We're talking multiple thousands of dollars per mile per year, on every single mile, just in taxes. (And I'm lucky, my city still owns a lot of their own right of ways. A lot of cities just wholesale gave them away to AT&T/Comcast).

Backhaul is expensive. Most ISP's are monopolies, so they can safely buy in scale. I have zero scale, so I pay full retail for everything. This is obviously very pricy. (I'm guessing I pay at least 3 times more, per Mbps, than Charter pays for backhaul, and probably 4 - 6+ times more than Comcast pays)

Fiber lines are dirt cheap. Install is expensive. Easily 95% of the cost of the network is that initial installation, and it can run into past the million dollar mark even in the smallest of neighborhoods.

If you want more info, let me know. I'd happily talk more about this, and provide solid numbers.

<comment><USER11> Is backhaul more expensive than getting a big Cogent connection for like $1/Mbps? Or do places like Charter/etc pay even less than that for their paid peering connections?

<comment><USER9> Yes. I've never seen a quote at $1/Mbps regardless of scale.

It wouldn't surprise me if speed/pricing like that existed around major network hubs (like Chicago).

I'm paying $8/Mbps. If I were to afford five times more backhaul than I have now, that price eventually drops to about $3.8/Mbps.

Places like Charter and Comcast pay less for their backhaul, in part because they _are_ their backhaul, in part because they are large enough to negotiate their own peering agreements.

Recently, that's swung even more in their favour. Netflix, for instance, pays Comcast money for the "privilege" of paying the costs for all of the backhaul Netflix uses over Comcasts lines.

People sometimes call this "double dipping". But it's actually "triple dipping". Comcast charges subscribers money, Comcast makes Netflix buy the backhaul to Comcast, and Comcast charges Netflix again, to allow them to connect the backhaul they already bought, to Comcast's network.

<comment><USER11> Yeah I'm not sure the cost for the infrastructure but I've seen quotes of $1-$2/Mbps for Cogent in various datacenters (assuming a 1-2Gbps commit I think).

Makes sense though, I'm sure if you had to get the fiber to your location that would easily push the price up a ton.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> When you think about it, Comcast NBC Universal is doing the same stuff with Aereo.

Broadcasters get a government monopoly on a finite resource. Broadcasters don't provide a good signal to all customers. Some customers want to use Aereo (that's not the _only_ reason, but a _real_ reason) instead of paying for cable.

But no, the broadcasters want to be paid for not-providing a signal to those customers. Instead of investing to improve their infrastructure, they want to be paid for _not_ improving it. With a straight face.

Of course it's especially ridiculous in the case where it's Comcast NBC, and they are also an ISP. If Aereo wins at SCOTUS, and grows big enough, Comcast NBC can get their pound of flesh as an ISP like they do with Netflix.

It is all well and truly fscked.

<comment><USER13> > But no, the broadcasters want to be paid for not-providing a signal to those > customers. Instead of investing to improve their infrastructure, they want > to be paid for not improving it.

This is the best one paragraph summary of the Aereo case I've heard. Certainly makes it absolutely plain why it needs to be allowed to continue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This image [http://www.willchatham.com/wp- content/uploads/2014/01/net.pn...](http://www.willchatham.com/wp- content/uploads/2014/01/net.png) has been making the rounds on reddit, surprised it hasn't appeared here yet. This is the most visceral/succinct explanation of the consequences of allowing the ISPs to have a "fast lane"...

<comment><USER15> The clever thing about Comcast's intentional congestion extortion loophole is that the customer never sees it, so it _doesn 't_ look like that image.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This could be the right time for Netflix to move to P2P, so then most of the bandwidth isn't consumed by them, but by their users.

[http://finance.yahoo.com/news/netflix-switched-p2p-video- str...](http://finance.yahoo.com/news/netflix-switched-p2p-video- streaming-180229987.html)

It's going to take a lot to fight the likes of Comcast in this one, which means Netflix will also need support from the community - so Netflix, please stop it with the boneheaded DRM push on the web. Guess what, if you _are_ going to use P2P, you're going to need a plugin or native app _anyway_. So just stop trying to corrupt W3C already in a pointless move that can't and won't stop piracy anyway (which I'm sure you already know).

<comment><USER15> P2P would shift the congestion from transit links to shared upstream last mile links which will probably make ISPs even more unhappy.

<comment><USER17> it would also shift the cost to consumers.. at least once you use up your data cap.

<comment><USER18> "Though Comcast doesn't disclose it specifically, analysts have estimated that Comcast's profit margins on broadband service are 80 percent or higher. In 2008, Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. analyst Craig Moffett estimated Comcast's data margins at 80 percent, and Credit Suisse reported in fall 2010 that Comcast's gross margins on high-speed data were 93 percent."

[https://www.freepress.net/sites/default/files/resources/Comc...](https://www.freepress.net/sites/default/files/resources/Comcast%20New%20Caps%20Factsheet_FINAL.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> You only need two or three major website who blackout their services to the Comcast user and redirect them to a page explaining that situation. Imagine if their subscriber can't access to Google and Facebook, and on that redirection page they target ads for alternative provider in your area. Would be nice to see how long Comcast would take to change their mind.

<comment><USER20> That is incredibly user-hostile. Google and Facebook would end up looking like the bad guys, and nothing would change.

<comment><USER21> No it is not. ISP throttling their paying customers because of their internal nonsense is user-hostile. Informing consumers that they're being undermined by their ISP is quite possibly the most pro-consumer act you could do. If it gets us one step closer to treating the bandwidth like electricity or water, it's a good thing.

<comment><USER20> Two possibilities from the user's point of view:

"Facebook is a little slow because my ISP might be throttling, but I'm not sure, it could also be my computer"

"I cannot access Facebook at all because Facebook blocked my ISP"

Getting users pissed off at web services is not a good way to effect change. We need users on our side, so we can't have them think of us as crybabies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This:

>> "In this way, Comcast is double dipping by getting both its subscribers and Internet content providers to pay for access to each other."

..and this:

>> "Put simply, there is one and only one way to reach Comcast's subscribers at the last mile: Comcast."

...should be illegal. This really torques me. This smacks of how AT&T acted in the 80's when I was in my 20's and starting out on my own and how Microsoft acted in the 90's before they got busted, which is what lead me to Linux.

<comment><USER23> > ...should be illegal.

And Facebook is the only way to reach Facebook's customers. Should that be illegal?

<comment><USER24> Except Facebook's customers use Facebook to access Facebook's data. Comcast's customers use Comcast to access the internet's data, not Comcast's data. At least until the definition of Internet Service Provider is changed.

<comment><USER23> Not to the extent that Facebook is a platform for other services (Zynga, etc).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Same problem exists in France with the "Free" (actual business name) ISP.

It's a large ISP here, and it throttles access to youtube (and probably other content providers). It has been so for years. For some reason, there is no public awareness about that, people just say "my internet is not working well".

It's an act of aggression against their customers, to me, since all ISPs are marketing their offers around connection speed. And it's violating net neutrality, too. I don't get how it does not become a major PR problem for ISPs doing that.

<comment><USER26> Not just Iliad's Free - I know first hand that others admit internally that they are doing it too... But they choose to let Free be publicly vocal about it while they are just as violent behind closed doors.

<comment><USER25> Yes, I've heard some vague reports from others ISP users too, but not anything I have measured of even just experienced first hand.

That's the reason why I've switched to the new ISP services from ovh, though, as they made net neutrality their first marketing point (but for the same price, you don't have tv, if that matters).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Has there been discussion of passing this fee on to customers who access from Comcast in the form of a surcharge? If Netflix hiked prices for customers who were connecting from Comcast networks, it would encourage news of this business practice to spread.

</comment><comment><USER28> Netflix presumably was paying Cogent a lot of money for all those 10Gbit uplinks. Now a few cross-connects and BGP tweaks later, a traceroute shows Netflix packets leaving a Netflix server and going more directly onto Comcast's network. I can only speculate that they turned on some dark fiber to build cross-connects between their cages and Comcast cages. Maybe they were already in the same building...

How much did Netflix's Cogent bill go down? How much of the "work" that Cogent was doing is Netflix now doing themselves? How many hops of the traceroute are owned by Netflix, and how many hops by Comcast?

When I rent a rack in One Wilshire in LA, CA, it comes with power, cooling, and a network link. When I pay let's say $1000/mo for that 1Gbps link, it's not just the link from my rack to their router that I'm paying for. And when I send 1Gbps of packets up through that link, it's not just CoreSite at One Wilshire carrying the cost of delivering those packets.

At some point, yes, I do expect Comcast to get their "fair share" of that $1k/mo. If Comcast is PAID zero dollars for delivering that 1Gbps, then I want this free bandwidth gravy train to propagate all the way back to me. Comcast, please sign me up for 10 of those free 10Gbe links you're giving out, ok? Just tell me where to rent space where I can get those free 10Gbe cross connects to your network.

But then, you can also flip the perspective and ask the question, why doesn't Comcast have to pay for all their bandwidth? Shouldn't they be paying $1,000/mo for their Gbe's?

So why does bandwidth cost money, or more specifically _when_ should bandwidth cost money? Price, as always, is just a means of efficiently allocating scarce resources. Price can _only possibly be zero_ if there is no scarcity. Is it possible there's no scarcity of bandwidth on Comcast's network? Now that would be comical!

I think the answer lies partially in another development. Ask Netflix to chart the cost in terms of Watts and Rack Units to deliver 1Gbps of video streams. My theory would be the cost in terms of space and electricity to generate 10Gbe of video streams has dropped orders of magnitude. This means bandwidth will be an increasing portion of your bill no matter what. It also puts more pressure on scarcity of bandwidth when the ease of which you can generate 10Gbps of useful traffic is down to just a few servers.

<comment><USER29> > If comcast is PAID zero dollars...

Comcast gets paid $50/month per subscriber for that bandwidth. It costs Comcast less money to peer with Netflix than to get it from cogent. Comcast wants Netflix to pay to solve a problem that Comcast's customers have.

> Is it possible there's no scarcity of bandwidth on Comcast's network?

Absolutely! In fact, that's part of what the chart shows; when Netflix peered with Comcast, the video quality (which is a proxy for bitrate to the consumer) went up significantly, which indicates that there was no bottleneck on the Comcast network.

> Price ... is just a means of efficiently allocating scarce resources.

Not in the case of a monopoly. Comcast has a monopoly on a large fraction of the broadband market. They also compete directly with Netflix, so they will leverage that monopoly to make it as expensive as possible for Netflix to continue to compete with them. This is Comcast creating an artificial scarcity of paths from Netflix to Comcast's customers.

On another note, I have referred to Comcast subscribers as "customers" above; if agreements like the above continue, then Comcast subscribers are no longer customers, but rather the product that Comcast charges for efficient access to.

<comment><USER28> Lets assume Comcast honestly thinks that Netflix owes them money for the bandwidth. I know it's highly generous, but it's a fair starting point.

How does it costs Comcast less money to peer with Netflix than to get it from Cogent? Does Comcast pay Cogent too?

Of course the whole confrontation was manufactured, I don't think Netflix was ever arguing that Comcast needed to boost its entire buildout just to support their video streams, and by the way they shouldn't pay a cent. Comcast doesn't have to wait till its pipe are full before controlling traffic flows.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> They should use classic Cable TV vs. Local Broadcasters tactics: Block all IPs from Comcast and force them to pay access to your content...which happens to be the exact amount they want for the Tolls.

If we consumers have to pay to access to content why shouldn't ISPs?

<comment><USER31> That might work if Netflix had compelling content. Maybe they do, I don't know. But it is not helping Netflix that Comcast is ranked near the top for ISP market share and also owns a ton of its own content (NBC Universal).

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> This makes me so mad. I kind of wish all of the Big Internet providers like Level3, and Sprint would team up and block all traffic in and out of Comcast. Maybe redirect all http traffic to a page listing alternative ISPs.

<comment><USER33> There aren't really alternate ISP's. It is Comcast or Centurylink here. And I live in a relatively big city of 200K people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Reading this actually makes me hope that Facebook gets their wifi-beaming balloons up and running quickly. I'd like to support Comcast as little as humanly possible.

<comment><USER15> Neither balloons or drones are going to be fast enough to watch Netflix.

<comment><USER35> I wish there was a service that would just let me rent discs through the mail.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I see all these people saying Comcast was feuding with cogent... that is just not the case. For anyone in the hosting business we all know cogent is the cheapest option, and a pretty spotty service as a whole. What do we do when our customers complain and complain? Well, we seek out more reliable options and spend the money needed better serve our customers.

So why does Netflix get to complain? They have already spent the money for the ridiculously one sided peering(Netflix sending tons of traffic and Comcast sending close to none). You would think Netflix would be happy to spend this money to better their service! Right? Or is it so detrimental to their cash flow that they would rather complain? They should have just told their customers "hey, we heard you were having some problems with our service, look what we did for you!"

In the end this is just a smear campaign to distract Netflix customers from the price hike that is coming. It is obvious Netflix was going to raise its subscription prices eventually. So why not point the blame to a company who is already disliked. The majority of HN seems to be pretty smart people, it would be a shame if you fell for this rather underhanded ploy.

<comment><USER37> Who sends traffic is just easier to measure, the person receiving it may want it more and in the Netflix case they are requesting the traffic.

In any case all Comcast's traffic is for their customers, when peering needs to be balanced to be free is when to parties are offering transit to other networks beyond themselves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I really hope Netflix has what it takes to do what is necessary if it comes to that point. And what it is going to take is for Netflix to simply blackout Comcast.

But actions like that can be easily spun out in the media (media of which has very close ties to Comcast) to make Netflix look bad.

What would make it better is for all of the major players (Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple) to collectively blackout Comcast, whilst educating the public on how they are being used and screwed at the same time.

</comment><comment><USER37> If Netflix are right an Comcast are providing insufficient connectivity through to all of the major transit networks (rather than just Cogent) it feels to me as if Comcast are not providing the internet connection speeds that they are selling. It would be interesting to see what would happen if Netflix bought from all the many transit providers and spread the load across them, would all of Comcasts general service grind to a halt.

</comment><comment><USER39> The problem is sufficiently complex and boring to favor Comcast. What I would like to know is this: It is already a regional monopoly in high speed internet because no on can touch their speeds, why would anyone consider extending their monopoly nation-wide?

</comment><comment><USER40> I dropped Netflix about a month ago when I first heard they made this agreement with Comcast. They are part of the problem.

</comment><comment><USER41> I think the real problem is unlimited internet connections.

If ISP customers paid per-GB and/or per-Mbps, then the ISP shouldn't care if it's Netflix or Hulu or YouTube being consumed.

The issue is that today, it's difficult to get a good feel for how much bandwidth is being used at any given moment. Unlike a water faucet, our devices don't really have a knob we can adjust the speed with.

<comment><USER42> I think the real problem is poor infrastructure.

None of this has been a problem here in Sweden, where the infrastructure is solid and easily supports end users with 100 Mbit home connections without me hearing any complaints.

<comment><USER43> The quality of infrastructure is the result of political and cultural factors, which are therefore the more underlying/real problem.

Do you have a choice of multiple ISPs? If yes, then _that 's_ the critical difference vs the U.S., not the infrastructure. If no, then _why_ has your monopoly ISP built such good infrastructure?

<comment><USER44> France's situation: national public telecom company (France Telecom, now Orange) built the network, private competitors appeared, Orange got privatized, competitors didn't have the network to be everywhere and allow proper competition so the law forced Orange to allow other ISPs to use Orange's network for a fee (so I could be a client of, say, Bouygue Telecom, but using Orange network to join Bouygue's).

A huge and easy justification for that is that Orange's network had mostly been built using public funds since it was a public company at the time.

Since then, several competitors have built their own network, but most still use Orange's sharing for remote place, small villages etc where it's not worth it for them to deploy their own.

So your question is hard to answer. Why has the monopoly ISP built the infrastructure ? Because it was a public company, and if you wanted your house to be connected to the network they had to do it. Why have the others built their own ? Because it was much cheaper for them long term, especially since they also use it for their cellphone network.

And from what I see, it seems to be the same in a lot of Europe, the national companies made the original network, and competitors piggy backed on it until they had their own.

(I've oversimplified of course, but that's the gist of it)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Is that "tata" from India ? How do they play role here ?

<comment><USER15> Yes, Tata Group from India owns an Internet backbone (formerly VSNL & Teleglobe). Netflix traffic used to go through Tata to get to Comcast until Comcast deliberately congested it.

<comment><USER46> Could you provide a link for that story? I hadn't heard of it til now.

<comment><USER15> [http://www.merit.edu/mail.archives/nanog/msg15911.html](http://www.merit.edu/mail.archives/nanog/msg15911.html)

[http://www.internap.com/2010/12/02/peering-disputes- comcast-...](http://www.internap.com/2010/12/02/peering-disputes-comcast- level-3-and-you/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> This is a very public battle between two companies about who should shoulder the cost of delivering video to your home.

Comcast's argument is that they have built a network at great expense for carrying content that others make a profit from, and they want to capture at least some of that value.

Netflix's argument is that they have built a CDN to deliver that content to Comcast's doorstep, and that Comcast won't accept it.

In my mind, Netflix charges money for their service and is not entitled to a free ride. The fact remains that running an ISP is not free, and you can't scale out a network faster than the cash flows (of which, yes, profits are a part) allow. But think about this: Netflix has a 36% gross profit margin, and Comcast's cable/Internet business has an 11% gross profit margin. Netflix's cost structure is lower in large part because Comcast does a lot of the expensive work for them (i.e. last-mile network maintenance and distribution.)

Netflix drives significantly increased Internet traffic usage, and Comcast's investors should not have to accept lower profit margins so that Netflix's investors can enjoy larger margins because of investments that Comcast's investors have made.

I would have a lot more sympathy for Netflix if their margins weren't so high. It just comes off as greedy when they have a 36% gross margin.

<comment><USER48> Comcast's customers are paying Comcast to deliver Netflix's bits to them. Why does Comcast need to be paid for those bits twice?

If we're going to throw out some numbers, Netflix's net income was just $112M on $4.3B in revenue last year (2.6%). Comcast's net income was $6.82B on $64.66B in revenue (10.5%). Netflix's spend on content acquisition and production is increasing, which means that 2.6% is shrinking; they're already cash flow negative IIRC. Not much room to start doubling up on bandwidth fees they already pay.

<comment><USER47> Because Comcast does not incur cost per-bit, they incur cost based on the maximum required capacity of their network. Netflix significantly increases those costs on a per-customer basis.

<comment><USER49> No, _customers who want to watch Netflix_ increase those costs. Which really means, _customers who want HD video streaming bandwidth_ increase those costs. To which the right answer is, _build more bandwidth and charge the customers for it_. Customers who want to watch Netflix, or any other HD video streaming service, can pay Comcast for "HD streaming" bandwidth; customers who don't can pay for the bandwidth they need. None of this should have anything to do with Netflix.

I understand that Comcast doesn't like this because it makes them a simple seller of bandwidth instead of a "provider of premium services", or whatever marketing mantra they're using this week. But if customers do not _want_ their "premium services", but just want bandwidth, the solution to that is to _build better premium services_ , not to try to get paid twice for one stream of bits.</comment></comment></comment></comment>