The Tyranny of Taxi Medallions - <AUTHOR> http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/47636506327/the-tyranny-of-the-taxi-medallions <comment><USER3> Structurally this practice is a lot like the preindustrial precursor of taxation, when governments would sell monopolies on the import or production of things in exchange for a lump sum.

When obsolete government practices persist, they tend to be pretty sinister.

<comment><USER4> I've brought this up in another thread, but over in the UK, due to a lack of property taxes, its possible to purchase a home, yet stil have to pay a yearly ground rent to a private party. The cost to own land in nothing, so there's little incentive to ever sell it, and instead lease it out. People may complain about property taxes in the USA, but it prevents this very practice from happening. It would be better for everyone if the medallion system switched over to a yearly taxation/bidding system. You would lose all these middleman renters.

<comment><USER5> I don't understand .. why would you purchase a home without the land it rests on? In a free market, perhaps there is some lower price where you would do this, but there is also a higher price where you could purchase the land as well.

<comment><USER6> People buy Condo's all the time. Also, in the United States, you very often give up mineral rights. So you may own the "ground" your home is on, but you don't own whatever comes out of it.

<comment><USER7> Condominium owners usually own a proportional share of the land that the building rests upon and the common areas of the property.

<comment><USER8> That seems almost like a scam. Kind of like time shares.

<comment> mh- Not really.

Some more info: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_ownership>

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

<comment><USER7> Condos differ from time shares. In a condominium, you own 100% of a unit and everything inside the boundaries of that unit is your responsibility (repairs, damage, upgrades, etc). You also have exclusive access to that unit (nobody else can use it, unlike a time-share).

You own a fraction of the _land_ that the building sits on, and a fraction of the "common areas" (lobby, swimming pool, parking lot, etc). You are responsible for contributing for the maintenance of those areas, or paying assessment fees to a management company that will take care of those areas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Apart from all the obvious externalities of cab driving operations, the extremely high probability of fraud, and the fact that policing cabs is extraordinarily expensive, there's another problem a lot of these analyses miss about why cabs are regulated the way they are.

In many large cities, the taxi system is a fundamental component of the transport infrastructure. There are locations in most cities that are not efficiently or safely reachable via bus. Visitors to cities also tend to need point-to-point transit; it takes some know-how and a lot of flexibility to get from an airport to a business meeting in a near suburb, for instance. Taxicabs are effectively a privatized component of metro transport systems.

Cities therefore have a powerful interest in making sure that whatever else happens, there is a strata of taxi service available to all residents of the city at some predictable rate.

<comment><USER10> What you are saying is fine, but that's not why taxi's were regulated, at least in New York. The regulations go back to the depression and were put in place specifically to limit competition in order to keep prices high and protect employment of existing cab drivers. The history is right on the NYC gov page:

[http://www.nyc.gov/html/media/totweb/taxioftomorrow_history_...](http://www.nyc.gov/html/media/totweb/taxioftomorrow_history_regulationandprosperity.html)

\--

quoting from the NYC site:

"Widespread poverty prompted many New Yorkers to opt for less-expensive forms of transportation, decreasing the demand for taxis. This put many companies out of business and caused many cabdrivers to lose their jobs. The situation was made worse by the tactics of "wildcat" (unlicensed) taxis who used what some considered to be "underhanded tactics," such as drastically lowering fares, to get more business."

<comment><USER11> Regardless of origins, I think there's still an important role for city governments to manage the number of cars on the street. NPR Planet Money did a story about the effect of NYC's planned +2,000 cabs (in additional to the existing 13,200) will have on the city: shorter wait times, but longer drive times for everyone. If the story is correct, more deregulation with more cars on the street without other measures (such as congestion pricing) would be bad for the public. NYC traffic is already bad enough.

[http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/07/31/157477611/does- new...](http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/07/31/157477611/does-new-york- city-need-more-taxis)

<comment><USER12> It's far from obvious that demand has outstripped supply. The population of Manhattan was significantly higher in 1937 than it is now 1.9 million vs. 1.6 million. On a population basis it would seem that we would need fewer rather than more cabs.

What drives the demand for cabs is the the price of a ride versus the alternative. If the regulated fare is low relative to subways & buses and the overall price level, cabs will be in high demand. If the fare is high, demand for cabs will decline.

<comment><USER13> What I don't get is why a city as dense as NYC supports any transportation method that puts a few individuals above the public good. Cars in a dense urban area epitomize the tragedy of the commons. Buses and delivery trucks are the only vehicles that must have access to the street. Everyone else should be walking, taking public transportation, or bicycling.

Not having to wait on a street corner for a crosswalk signal or only doing so sparingly would save NYCs on average more time than the occasional taxi ride. On top of that, the absence of cabs would set many minds on the problem of moving all New Yorkers around the city as fast as possible. If you're rich and you think that your time is valuable, then vote for spending on public transportation innovations that benefit everyone equally.

If you eliminate cars and time truck deliveries well, you can engineer a transportation system that runs like a well engineered clock with many complications. Cars are responsible for most of the non-detrminism in a public transportation system.

<comment><USER12> Taxis are not the problem. Private cars are the problem, and the city does a pretty good job keeping them out of Manhattan as well, with tolls on many of the bridges (any bridge into Manhattan connected to a highway is tolled; local street bridges are not) and a 19% parking tax.

But there are certain situations where you need a taxi and the bus or subway won't do. Think the elderly, families with small children, etc.

<comment><USER13> I would love to see a city mandate something the size of the Lit Motors vehicle for the cases you mentioned. However for many of the cases you mentioned, taxis still aren't the solution. There are plenty of families and handicapped people that get by with public transportation. They can use things such as scooters, wheelchairs, motorized wheelchairs and strollers. Technology has advanced to the point where a motorized wheelchair or scooter is no longer a rare luxury.

While I can see the argument for taxies, I;m totally in agreement about private cars and especially parking. Parking has no business in the modern urban dense city.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Medallions exist for a very good reason: they prevent a tragedy of the commons from creating gridlock and pollution in major cities by limiting the number of cars circling around doing nothing on city streets.

Most of the time, cabs just drive around waiting for a fare. This is because cabs are often hailed when they are seen, but even if a cab is summoned by a phone call (or smartphone) the closet cab to the fare is chosen, and it's hard to get close to fares without driving around, because parking the cab downtown is expensive and slow.

So, cabs use the city's public streets as mobile parking lots, hovering close to potential fares, snarling traffic, and emitting greenhouse gasses until they snag one. Increase the number of medallions, and you have a corresponding increase in the amount of traffic in a city as cabs wander around fishing. Cab drivers don't care if they're slowing everyone else down. They just want to earn a living.

So it's better to have fewer cabs busy 100% of the time than more cabs which aren't always busy. Thus, medallions are scarce.

Recently NYC decided not to issue more medallions, because the increased availability of cabs would be more then offset by increased time to get from point A to point B due to more traffic congestion.

This is a strong argument for regulating this new breed of unlicensed cab services. They must not be permitted to loiter around in traffic hoping to be the car closest to the next fare. They must either have a medallion or be parked when not actively on a call.

<comment><USER15> "they prevent a tragedy of the commons from creating gridlock and pollution in major cities by limiting the number of cars circling around doing nothing on city streets."

Why would a free market not prevent this? if there are excess taxis, taxi- driving is not profitable. If taxi-driving is profitable and there is _still_ gridlock, that is a different problem. Avoiding gridlock by creating an artificial shortage of transport is not an appropriate solution IMO.

<comment><USER14> Simple: the number of cabs at which taxi driving is no longer profitable is far, far more than the optimal number of cabs.

The optimal number of cabs balances cab availability with traffic such that the time taken to go from point A to point B is minimal. This takes into account the time it takes to hail the cab (waiting around if there is none) and the time it takes for the cab to fight though traffic to point B. An additional constraint is that the number of cabs shouldn't prevent miserable gridlock for other drivers.

The number of cabs required before cab driving becomes unprofitable is a function of the number of people willing to work for meager wages, often less than minimum wage (in a big city, this number can be considered unlimited, especially if the job is part-time), the cost of gas, car, and insurance, and the market fare. Assuming the amortized cost of a car is fifty cents a mile, there is enough profit in cab driving for less privileged workers, even if the cab is idle most of the time.

Most importantly, traffic congestion in a big city is non-linear: it only takes a few extra cars on the road to create major gridlock.

<comment><USER16> > Simple: the number of cabs at which taxi driving is no longer profitable is > far, far more than the optimal number of cabs.

Do you have any evidence of this claim? As with anything, there isn't some magical shut-off point where everyone is selling something and then no one is after the price increases another dollar.

Your analysis strikes me as too simplistic. It ignores opportunity costs and the possibility that it might decrease personal car ownership outright if a viable taxi system were to exist.

At any rate, even if it's taken as fact it doesn't justify a fixed number of medallions revised once every few decades. A price set on them, adjusted regularly, would achieve the same cause and be less limiting and more responsive to growth (something cities tend to do a lot of between the issuance of new medallions).

Creating artificial scarcity does nothing but enable some people to profit with little risk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I drove a taxi as a summer job in college in my hometown (small city near Boston). I thought I would share a few observations.

In our city, there were three companies that owned the medallions. An unwritten rule: The city was divided into territories, and we weren't supposed to pick up in the other territories unless we were flagged down. If someone from another territory called our company, they were told to call one of the others and arrange for the pickup.

75% of our business was call-ins or pre-arranged pickups (students, travellers, sometimes people with revoked licenses). Another 20% was pickups at the taxi stands outside the subways stations or hotels. There were a very small number of people flagging us down on the street. In Boston, there are many more street pickups. Note that this was all before the cellphone era.

We also couldn't pick up in Boston, unless someone called us in advance. Even if we were flagged while driving through the city (for instance, coming back from a drop-off), we had to ignore. This was by law, to prevent cabs from Cambridge or other towns from taking business away from the Boston cabs (and Boston cabs from taking business from Cambridge and the 'burbs, etc.). It made airport runs a bit of a risk -- while the fare was higher, since it was almost impossible to be able to pick someone up after dropping off someone at Logan, we were basically losing the opportunity to take other passengers for 30 minutes (or longer, depending on the traffic).

I should also add that rates in Boston were cheaper than other nearby cities and towns. This would make some passengers angry -- "it only cost me $X to come from the airport. Why is it $X + $20 now?"

We got a cut of proceeds off the meter, plus tips. Part-timers had to take the worst shifts, and the worst cars -- old LTDs and Ford Fairmonts that often had major mechanical problems. It was a poor way to make extra money -- unless you had a busy shift (rush hour, or rainy days) there was lots of down-time, which meant fewer receipts.

</comment><comment><USER18> There is a flipside however, for those who think deregulation is the answer.

In Amsterdam, the taxi market has been completely deregulated. You do not want to get a taxi there unless you order it from a trusted source, and even then it's ridiculously expensive.

And you don't want to try to disrupt that market unless you have good organized crime connections...

<comment><USER19> That seems more like a failure with "regulating" organized crime than a call for regulating taxi cabs.

<comment><USER20> what it means is you changed one monopoly for another.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Taxi drivers significantly under report earnings for tax purposes. They always claim close to minimum wage. You'll find the same in every cash business.

<comment><USER22> Probably, but I can guarantee you that the vast majority don't make a lot of money.

<comment><USER23> I once asked a cab driver how much he made (in SF), and after humming and hawing, he implied that he made close to $90K/year, mostly tax-free.

Take it for what it's worth (sample size == 1), but there are a lot of people who would love to be driving a cab in SF. Cab drivers who rent the cabs pay $300 for an 8-hour shift on weekends (Friday evening - Saturday morning), and still manage to make enough money to make it worth their while.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> "In the last half decade, two trends conspired to end the taxi medallion regime. First, people are more comfortable with trusting strangers."

This isn't true. When I was growing up, hitch hiking was still very common.

I'd argue that people used to trust strangers to a radically higher degree before the prohibition based crime wave (the one that makes swaths of every city in the US more dangerous than Afghanistan) that began in the 1960s.

<comment><USER25> I agree. But as the article goes on to point out, we are not more trusting of complete strangers, but rather strangers who've been vetted by many AirBnb reviews, background checked by Uber, etc. Technology has changed the definition of a 'stranger'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> > _The reason taxi drivers have to pay for the right to work is that they need > access to a taxi medallion to do their job. A medallion is a permit issued > by the government that is required to drive a cab in most cities in America. > If you don't use the medallion yourself, you can rent it out to other > drivers on your own or, more commonly, through a taxi company. Taxi > companies that rent out access to the medallions have immense economic power > over the drivers. If you're not willing to basically become an indentured > servant to get medallion access, well, you're out of luck._

I don't see how the medallion itself (a permit issued by the government) is the problem here. The problem is that the taxi drivers are not allowed to get it directly for themselves, but have to rent it. And another problem is that this "indentured servant" renting is allowed to take place.

Fix that, not the requirement to have a permit to drive a cab (which is useful, as it acts as a filter for all kinds of scum drivers if enforced properly).

<comment><USER27> Taxi drivers are _allowed_ to get medallions. But since the supply is so low, they usually cost a few hundred thousand dollars. So people rent instead.

Fixing that by outlawing medallion-rental is like trying to make housing costs cheaper by outlawing apartments. A much better solution would be to eliminate medallions, which could be done without removing the licensing system filter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> People are bringing up "market forces", etc.

The solution that I think would work in SF is as follows. Charge a flat rate (say, $50K/year; though a Dutch Auction might be reasonable too) for leasing out a permit to qualified drivers. You qualify drivers by running background checks, and testing them on the knowledge of the city. Pass a law that makes illegally running a cab a serious offence. This will automatically solve the "tragedy of the commons" or "too many cabs" problem, because if there are too many cabs, they won't be able to make the $50K/year needed to break even. If 2000 cabs (a number 20% larger than the current fleet size) enroll in this, you're looking at an additional $100M/year.

To run the program, have a small enforcement wing of SFMTA (instead of the current gigantic bureaucracy that micromanages everything). Offer up an open API so people can build apps that track cabs, hail cabs, etc.

The medallion system is 19th century. We need a 21st century system.

</comment><comment><USER28> The medallion system is certainly far from optimal and a different regulatory regime that allows for innovation while still addressing concerns around impact on traffic (public roads=classic tragedy of the commons case) and passenger safety would be widely welcome. It could certainly improve the customer experience on many axes (quality, availability, timeliness, cost, etc) though I'm skeptical it would do much to improve the lot of the average driver. Taxi driving is a relatively low skill field, so there wouldn't be much incentive for these new ride sharing companies to treat drivers any more fairly than they are currently treated, since drivers will need to work for whichever companies have the largest market share of potential fares.

</comment><comment><USER13> This article makes one awesome point for regulation that would be beneficial: exchange of data on passengers and drivers. Even if opt-in (for privacy reasons) this would be awesome. As a customer, I would love for my reputation on Lyft to be usable on SideCar and vice versa. On top of that, I'd love to be able to call a car from both companies simultaneously and whichever company gets met a driver first wins my money.

Requesting a car needs to look more like the financial system where your broker puts out a buy order and a broker representing the driver takes that buy order.

</comment><comment><USER29> >After the customer leaves the car, there is no record of their behavior in the taxi.

Really? I haven't looked hard for them in NYC Yellow Cabs, but every livery car I've hired has had a security camera inside.

</comment><comment><USER30> By the time they get around to de-regulating the medallion system, self- driving cars will be available, which will put taxi drivers out of business. (Unless they block that too.)

<comment><USER31> Self-driving taxis will put themselves out of business once they either a) crash, killing/injuring someone, b) are regularly used for illegal activities, or c) deliver someone into a dangerous situation.

If that doesn't happen, the existing taxi industry will surely get into the game to make one of those happen, tout-de-suite.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Taxis seem to keep their status by being a very focused interest group. In NYC there are never enough. Why not just sell more medallions? I don't buy the "There's too much traffic" argument. Or why not sell regional ones? Try getting a taxi in Harlem. The city's approach has been to look the other way on private cars. I would rather see Bloomberg allow disrupters to break the system. What's he have to lose? He can't get elected anyway...

<comment><USER33> _In NYC there are never enough._

Depends very much on where you are in the city. Aside from shift changeover periods, I'd say that there are plenty of cabs in Manhattan. In the outer boroughs, less so- Bloomberg proposed a plan to allow 'green cabs' that could pick up passengers in the outer boroughs only. It was swiftly beaten in the courts by the taxi industry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I wish all the cab-alternative companies using unlicensed drivers would get together and form some kind of industry association. Standardize a background check, safety check on the vehicle, incident reporting, etc., through this independent non-profit. Essentially they could neutralize the moral argument for licensing ("safety! think of the children") at minimal cost, then get back to innovating.

</comment><comment><USER35> Does anyone here actually use Priceonomics to look up prices on things? I find it almost completely useless, is it just me?

</comment><comment><USER36> Great article. I'm interested as to what the effects would be on the taxi industry from these ride sharing apps combined with self driving cars. I think it would likely result in a further more efficient transport system - <USER2> people having to own cars, a decreased need for car parking.

</comment><comment><USER37> annoyingly this link goes to the home page, not the actual article -- otherwise a good read.

<comment><AUTHOR> Fixed. Sorry about that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> In 20 years all taxi drivers will be unemployed due to self-driving cars. So who cares?

Robots don't need health insurance and never strike.

</comment><comment><USER39> An excellent current and historical comparison can be made to the ambulance medallion system. Oh wait, there isn't one...

</comment><comment><USER40> Odd, no mention of driverless cars, which are sure to wipe out the taxi industry entirely.

<comment><USER41> The last sentence of the article:

> Ride-sharing apps should be allowed to take over the market - until they too > are disrupted by self-driving cars. And so it goes.

There are a large number of technical and political hurdles before driverless taxis will be possible. We will need autonomous vehicles on the road for many years for legislation to adapt and for people to become comfortable with the driverless concept from a safety and liability standpoint. Still, I'm with you that it is inevitable, and very exciting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I'm cashing in all my bitcoins and investing in NY taxi medallions</comment>


WeWork could run out of cash by next month - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1726403/wework-is-running-out-of-cash/ <comment><USER2> I found this part of the article particularly entertaining:

> We raised $3.4 billion in cash and spent it mostly on investments that > included leasehold improvements, security deposits with landlords, and its > purchase of the flagship Lord & Taylor building.

And then when you click the linked investopedia article on leasehold improvements:

> Once the lease ends, the improvements generally belong to the landlord, > unless otherwise specified in the agreement. If the tenant is able to take > them, he or she must remove them without any damage to the property.

Commercial landlords must love WeWork!

<comment><USER3> There is a lot to criticize WeWork for, but this isn't one of those things. Those leasehold improvements are the reason that people are customers of WeWork (i.e. they take old staid buildings and make them great offices.) It's literally their only meaningful point of differentiation from competitors.</comment></comment>


Sean parker wants to pay more taxes - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfbg.com/politics/2011/10/26/sean-parker-i-am-paying-far-too-little-taxes

<comment><AUTHOR> Should you pay more taxes? If not go to the PHilippines. I heard they have huge tax rates there. Not just tax rates sometimes, more hidden rates :)

\--edit-- i dont know felt this was relevant to the hacker community. sean parker is a hacker of mp3's, so this must be relevant.</comment>


Burning Ship Fractal - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_Ship_fractal <comment><USER2> 7 minute zoom of the fractal. Incredible level of detail and that final mirrored inverted fractal at 6'38 took me by surprise.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CD9yNFmb2FE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CD9yNFmb2FE)

Are there any good fractal explorers in VR?

<comment><USER3> That is insane. How is it possible to zoom in that far? Looks like it would have to use some kind of big number library and then parallelize the heck out of it.

I like how the rest of the page seemed to zoom out when I glanced outside the video after watching a few minutes or so.

<comment><USER4> I remember seeing seemingly endless fractal zoom animations like these as long as 20 years ago. Basically, you're not calculating the entire original field of view to anything near the final level of depth. At any given frame, you're essentially doing the calculations only for what's in the current frame and only to the level of detail to support the current pixel count.

<comment><USER5> Well, yeah, but the mantissa alone on your numbers is going to get ridiculously long. That's going to take a bite out of your CPU even just for the ~1000x1000 pixels in the frame

<comment><USER6> > Well, yeah, but the mantissa alone on your numbers is going to get > ridiculously long. That's going to take a bite out of your CPU even just for > the ~1000x1000 pixels in the frame

Utterly devastate the computational ability of your CPU. I remember setting up my and k6 300mhz to compute stuff sometimes for days to get awesome fractal deep zooms like this. The computation is embarrassingly parallel but no hardware handles numbers that precise with any reasonable speed. Something like 1024 bit floating point in fractint back in the day. I'd love to see an efficient GPU implementation of that kind of stuff

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Fractals can be drawn by surprisingly small amounts of code. For example, this mandelbrot fractal is implemented in 122 characters of JavaScript: [https://www.dwitter.net/d/123](https://www.dwitter.net/d/123)

I wouldn't be surprised if the burning ship fractal could be coded on dwitter (i.e. with 140 characters or less) as well

<comment><USER8> Just need to add a Math.abs: [https://www.dwitter.net/d/457](https://www.dwitter.net/d/457)

<comment><USER9> Nice, but you don't need Math.abs to stay within the 140 chars limit:

      t?i++:i=0;for(j=1080;j--;){a=b=0;k=35;for(;k--&&a*a+b*b<4;)c=a*a-b*b+i/540-2,b=2*(a*b<0?-a*b:a*b)+j/540-1,a=c;x.fillRect(i,j,1,S(k/9))}

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I started working on a web based renderer for the burning ship fractal a little while ago. It's far from perfect, I still consider it a WIP, but it works well enough to play around with: [http://stevenmcdonald.github.io/fractals/burning_ship/](http://stevenmcdonald.github.io/fractals/burning_ship/)

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm always fascinated by how simple functions like this generate complex behavior when iterated.

<comment><USER12> I agree. It's very strange that extremely simple, very fundamental functions lead to such stochastic-looking nonsymnetric behavior. Where does all that "entropy" come from? It's certainly not hidden in any big numbers in the fractal definition.

<comment><USER13> "Where does all that 'entropy' come from?"

Your scare quote suggests you may already know this, but for the benefit of others, the answer is that there isn't any. Fractals may look visually complicated, but their information content is fully captured by the routines used to generate them, which include the formula and the coloring system being used.

This is one of the ways in which "information" is a highly counter-intuitive quantity for people. Very small numbers of bits in a given encoding scheme can produce incredibly complicated pictures, but there's still no more information that what was put in to start with. Simply looking at something and going "Yup, that's complicated" does not mean it has a lot of information in it.

<comment><USER12> Yes, that is what I mean. Why is there a disconnect between the complexity of the compact description and the naive description? Why are simple expressions not simple in all "natural" representations?

This is _not_ addressable with the contrived example of "you can create an encoding scheme that reduces an arbitrarily complex description to an arbitrarily short identifier". After all, this is not a constructed compression scheme. Why does nature expand simple expressions to _these_ particular complicated forms?

<comment><USER14> > Why are simple expressions not simple in all "natural" representations?

Another example might be the primes, which have a very simple description and very subtle structure in their distribution.

<comment><USER15> I don't really agree that the primes "have a very simple definition" in that the notion of 'primeness' is one of satisfiability and no constructive algorithm is known to exist.

<comment><USER13> I'm not sure what you mean by not having a constructive algorithm to produce primes. The Sieve of Eratosthenes will output any given prime, with the primes coming out in order, given enough time. There may not be an _efficient_ algorithm, but for most definitions of "information" that won't matter. The sequence of all primes is both so richly structured we've probably only scratched the surface _and_ almost entirely bereft of information.

<comment><USER15> Yup you're right and I'm wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> [http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=3379](http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=3379)

[http://www.fractalforums.com/index.php?action=gallery;sa=vie...](http://www.fractalforums.com/index.php?action=gallery;sa=view;id=4057)

</comment><comment><USER17> Anyone else thing that the Julia set diagram of this looks like a Nazca-line Image? Imagine you reverse engineered the Nazca Images on the ground and they described advanced Mathematics...Sci-Fi short story Idea there for sure :D

<comment><USER18> So a bunch of archaeologists are studying some markings found on the stones in a recent dig, when a computer nerd pops in and says, "hey, this looks familiar; I've played with those the other day". Everyone is stunned as she pulls out her laptop and shows them that little fractal demo she wrote...

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Hehe, by the guy who sued CERN, because of the possibility of a black hole emerging. (he didn't think it was likely, but not unlikely enough to him)

</comment><comment><USER9> I love the reference to the 1k demo "JenterErForetrukket". Here is its link on Pouet:

[http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=54663](http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=54663)

Unfortunately, that demo is not that portable, and I was unable to find a video of it.

</comment><comment><USER20> Hah. I would guess that this made its way here because someone posted one on ShaderToy recently. See: [https://www.shadertoy.com/view/XtKGDD](https://www.shadertoy.com/view/XtKGDD)

</comment><comment><USER21> Looks like a pareidolia fractal.

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

</comment><comment><USER22> here's a Google-maps style fractal explorer that does the Burning Ship fractal and others

[http://atleebrink.com/julia.html](http://atleebrink.com/julia.html)

</comment><comment><USER23> ....There's a fractal for that!</comment>


Japan: Nuclear crisis raised to Chernobyl level - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-13045341

<comment><USER2> Says something about the media that they mention in passing that 13,228 people have died, 14,529 are missing and over 150,000 people are homeless. All from the earthquake, not the nuclear plant. And yet the focus is on the nuclear plant, which fortunately has not yet been responsible for any deaths and if we consider Chernobyl the worst case scenario, will have a much lower death toll than the earthquake. I'm not saying it's not important, but what happened to reporting about the effects of the earthquake? Did that just become boring news?

</comment><comment><USER3> Chernobyl cost several hundred thousand lives ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Assessing_th...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Assessing_the_disaster.27s_effects_on_human_health)). Let's hope and pray Fukushima will not exact a similar cost.</comment>


A 13M gender college degree gap since 1982 favoring women - <AUTHOR> https://www.aei.org/publication/chart-of-the-day-the-incredible-13m-gender-college-degree-gap-since-1982-favoring-women/ <comment><USER2> > how do we justify the continued gender favoritism for college women in terms > of female-only scholarships, awards, fellowships, programs and many other > campus resources

This article would be a lot more interesting if he actually talked about those things in some detail. Just saying that women are getting more degrees than men isn't very interesting, as it has been known for a long time.

It's great for a snappy headline, but not so good for helping to figure out how to make things better.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wish I could read this, but the site owner is using cloudflare to force visitors to solve Google's captchas.

Nota bene HNers claiming that one can simply "not use Google".

</comment><comment><USER4> I believe we should talk more about men's issues, but this article/stat doesn't look honest.

Here is a stat of absolute number of males/females with higher education in US. Only recently it evened out:

[https://www.statista.com/statistics/184272/educational- attai...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/184272/educational-attainment- of-college-diploma-or-higher-by-gender/)

Obviously, if the trend continues, we will have a real college degree gap soon, so this may be a good moment to warn against it. But let's not use twisted statistics for it.

<comment><USER5> The stats you posted are for the total US population though, so that includes people who graduated 30+ years ago. It's probably more useful to look at current graduation rates or degree holders of a younger age. If you do, the divide between men and women (in women's favor) is more extreme:

[https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/11/gender-...](https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/11/gender- education-gap/546677/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Its certainly interesting, but is also a perfectly acceptable outcome. Equality of opportunity does not mean equality of outcome.

Not directly related, but I wonder what a chart would look like if you compared the absolute value of a college degree with this same time span. Its anecdotal, but success doesn't seem tied to college degrees in my experience. At this point I'd only get a degree if absolutely required by some sort of perfect job opportunity, as there doesn't appear to be any value to me personally otherwise.

<comment><USER7> The whole point of the article is that the ostensible goal of equality of outcome was used to justify moving away from equality of opportunity.

"Given the phenomenal academic success of women in higher education over the last 35 years, reflected in an eye-popping cumulative gender college degree gap of 13 million more college degrees for women than men, how do we justify the continued gender favoritism for college women in terms of female-only scholarships, awards, fellowships, programs and many other campus resources?"

If we had true "equality of opportunity" there wouldn't be either male-only scholarships or female-only scholarships, etc. I totally agree with your point that equality of opportunity doesn't mean equality of outcome, but this isn't what equality of opportunity looks like either.

<comment><USER8> Exactly there is a festering double standard that needs highlighting and correction when the pendulum swings the other way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I suppose in 20 years from now we find out men were making less money this entire time too?

</comment><comment><USER10> we need to weight men's applications more to balance this. this is the same logic they use for all opposite cases

</comment><comment><USER11> If SJW were coherent, they would stop 13M women from getting degrees so that there was gender equality (equality of outcome as usual, of course).

</comment><comment><USER12> Who makes the payments on all of those student loans?

</comment><comment><USER13> So... women get more degrees than men, but men get paid more.

Therefore... American Higher Educashin is worthless.

<comment><USER14> "Men get paid more" is a hard argument to make, you need to factor in which job they take, how much they work, how aggressive they negotiate etc.

If you do that, the gender pay gap all but goes away.

That aside, there's a trend of women in urban areas out-earning men. However, that won't lead to every woman out-earning every man. A software engineer is still going to make more money than a teacher.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> How patriarchal.</comment>


Neural network learns to identify criminals by their faces - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602955/neural-network-learns-to-identify-criminals-by-their-faces <comment><USER2> Learned to distinguish criminals who got arrested and photographed from people who didn't.

<comment><USER3> I expect the network is observing a lack of facial symmetry.

It is fascinating to watch ML retread a hypothesis humans came up with.

<comment><USER2> What I mean is, those criminals who did not get caught and but did get photographed are happily smiling in the not-criminal training set.

So the label of "criminal" is over general.</comment></comment></comment>


A review of the D language by someone who has worked in it - <AUTHOR> http://timburrell.net/blog/programming/2008-06-22/d-postmortem/ <comment><USER2> I've also used D for various tiny scale projects over the last year and have found the documentation wanting - D ain't Robinson Crusoe here though.

Once you get past the Tango/Phobos dilemma, you'll find a great little language if you put some effort into it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Returning value types by value (structures) is a compiler bug? C++ and D both try to be binary-compatible with C, they MUST return a structure by copying it. An excellent article, but this little example was weird.

I haven't done any serious development in D, but I absolutely agree with his complaints about Walter's leadership, he needs to loosen up a little and let it go: I haven't checked if he changed his mind, but it used to be a case where you couldn't just host binaries of D compiler on your site, they had to be downloaded from Digital Mars page in a form of two confusing ZIP files with two intersecting directory trees.

<comment><USER4> " _C++ and D both try to be binary-compatible with C, they MUST return a structure by copying it._ "

Only for code that has C linkage. For normal C++ or D code the calling convention can be whatever the compiler wants, it's not restricted by the C calling convention.

(C linkage is specified in C++ with 'extern "C"', and with 'extern (C)' in D.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'd like to hear from D practitioners, what the real benefit they experienced by coding in D. Couldn't I just use related subset of C++ or C# to achieve the very similar effect?

<comment><USER4> No. C++ is too obtuse and doesn't have many of the features of D. C# is not a systems programming language (it runs in a sandboxed VM).

<comment><USER5> Too obtuse? I worked in C++ several years professionally, and didn't have that feeling. I was able to code anything I wanted.

I consider myself an average programmer, and from my experience it takes at least one year to understand C++ to reach the level of being proficient in it. I was asking my question above since in many cases, I found that the critique of C++ comes from people who didn't put enough effort to understand it thoroughly. (but I am not talking about anyone here, it's just a general observation of mine).

<comment><USER4> \- What is the destruction order of virtual base classes in C++?

\- Write a noncopyable class template that takes one typename argument.

These aren't just trivia questions. You actually need to know this stuff to be able to plan and design correct C++ code.

FWIW, I'm a recovering C++ Language Lawyer[1], and I still consider myself to have an "expert" level of proficiency at C++. The problem with C++ is that you need to be an "expert" or you'll make subtle and complicated errors. Errors that may not show up later until you have some sort of interoperability problem. Yes, you _can_ write great code in C++, but it shouldn't be as hard and complicated as C++ makes it. Tools should help, not hinder.

1\. <http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/L/language-lawyer.html></comment></comment></comment></comment>


LegoOS: Disseminated, Distributed OS for Hardware Resource Disaggregation [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.usenix.org/system/files/osdi18-shan.pdf <comment><USER2> I smell a lawsuit, or at least a C&D.

I used to work for LEGO. They have more lawyers than I've ever seen anywhere else.

<comment><USER3> I'll call your LEGO lawyers and raise you Disney lawyers.

<comment><USER4> Let's not forget IBM's Nazguls

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Adrian Colyer has an excellent write-up of this paper here: [https://blog.acolyer.org/2018/10/22/legoos-a-disseminated- di...](https://blog.acolyer.org/2018/10/22/legoos-a-disseminated-distributed- os-for-hardware-resource-disaggregation/)

</comment><comment><USER6> A cease and desist letter must be in the mail.

</comment><comment><USER7> It's unfortunate that so many are drinking the disaggregation koolaid.

FACT: you cannot disaggregate CPU from memory. Of course, that's the component you most want to do. Disaggregating IO devices is no big deal (and obviously doable with a monolithic kernel, since we have pcie hotplug today.)

Why? The fact that DRAM latency has been around 50ns for a decade is probably the most important performance limiter on any systems today. Exchanging 50ns local DRAM for 600-1000ns network access is profoundly stupid. Caches? Sure, they're great, but we already have very large caches that hardly ever take non-compulsory misses.

In other words: bandwidth is easy; latency is hard.

This is not news, but it's why your datacenter won't have racks of ram and a racks of memory-free cpus, and a racks of storage.

</comment><comment><USER8> Interesting, although I find it hard to get a good idea about performance from the few benchmarks presented. Especially since the tested working sets are quite small, whereas any serious usage of something like this would likely be with problems that are a lot larger: could the networking keep up if it has to handle a few hundred GB, not MB? Given the speeds modern networking hardware can reach it's possible I guess, especially since the local cache sizes also could grow appropriately.

</comment><comment><USER9> _" InfiniBand will soon reach 200Gbps and sub-600 nanosecond speed [66], being only 2× to 4× slower than main memory bus in bandwidth."_

that's absolutely incredible!

<comment><USER9> LOL InfiniBand was so ahead of its time. Such an old yet amazing technology that made a comeback thanks to cloud computing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Can anyone summarise how this is different from Barrelfish?

<comment><USER11> It is written on the paper:

> "Section 7 > Multi-Kernel and Multi-Instance OSes. > > Multi-kernel OSes > like Barrelfish, Helios, Hive, and fos run a small kernel on each core or > programmable device in a monolithic server, and they use message passing to > communicate across their internal kernels. Similarly, multi-instance OSes > like Popcorn and Pisces run multiple Linux kernel instances on different > cores in a machine. Different from these OSes, LegoOS runs on and manages a > distributed set of hardware devices; it manages distributed hardware > resources using a two-level approach and handles device failures (currently > only mComponent). In addition, LegoOS differs from these OSes in how it > splits OS functionalities, where it executes the split kernels, and how it > performs message passing across components. Different from multikernels' > message passing mechanisms which are performed over buses or using shared > memory in a server, LegoOS' message passing is performed using a customized > RDMA-based RPC stack over InfiniBand or RoCE network. Like LegoOS, fos > separates OS functionalities and run them on different processor cores that > share main memory. Helios runs satellite kernels on heterogeneous cores and > programmable NICs that are not cache-coherent. We took a step further by > disseminating OS functionalities to run on individual, network-attached > hardware devices. Moreover, LegoOS is the first OS that separates memory and > process management and runs virtual memory system completely at network- > attached memory devices."

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Reminds me of Plan 9.</comment>


Ask News.YC: What am I missing? - <AUTHOR> What am I missing? I see new companies create products that are basically the same as existing products and succeed. I'm sure I will see a new innovative software company that built a new bug tracking system and has a great cash flow. Is there still really room in these markets for new companies? <comment><USER2> The main reason there are so many look-alike startups is that they keep getting funded. Several possible explanations that would explain the phenomenon:

1) Investors are hoping that the first company to do something will not always be the most successful one. Their company could have the late-mover advantage (e.g., Facebook vs Friendster). Or they could just get lucky. YouTube was not the first video startup, but to a large extent they got lucky with timing, technology (video support in Flash), etc.

2) Investors are wary of completely new markets. Imagine Twitter going to VCs back in the day and pitching a service that's kinda like a blog, but you can only use 140 characters. Nobody would take it seriously. At some point in time, Twitter was already hot and had proven the market, but investors would still risk funding a startup that could out-Twitter Twitter. Worked for Jaiku.

3) If you look outside of Silicon Valley, many of the startups have very very tiny market share. In SV, Google Docs has already won, but a survey I read showed that only 0.5% of the US population uses an online office suite regularly. So, investors think, the game is far from over. Add Europe and Asia, and things look even worse.

4) Investors expect to have 80% of their investments fail, but have a 10x return on the other 20%.

5) More and more Web 2.0 companies rely on marketing rather than impressive technology and new solutions. People that started companies like PayPal are now making Flash slide shows (no offense). It's ridiculously hard to start a PayPal clone, but it's very easy to start a slide show site, so more people are trying. The Facebook widget 'economy' exacerbated the problem. Undoubtedly some of those will make a lot of money, but I think it is bad for the startup ecosystem in general.

6) There's a bubble. Stop asking questions, get the money, and run. :)

</comment><comment><USER3> I often see the same idea start up over and over again. If the entire market for that area is growing, I guess there is room for a couple players in the space.

An example would be HotOrNot clones on facebook or any embeddable site, (Friends For Sale, AddHer). These apps seem to be taking off even though they are really similiar to the existing hot or not.

Sometimes innovation isn't everything, good viral ideas can go pretty far.

</comment><comment><USER4> There is no limit to the number of companies that can be started. There is a Darwinian process at work that culls the old and dying, and new and ineffective companies from the herd. It is only a matter of time before someone does make a better bug tracking system with a great cash flow.

Young lions challenge the old alpha males for dominance of the lion pride. Startups challenge and overtake the old companies for dominance in the business. Startups often win unless they get acquired by the old, and there are many other startups that die. That's the way the business works. There are precious few companies that have been able to stay on top for more than 10-20 years. Natural selection is a very powerful force in the startup economy.

</comment><comment><USER5> There are always weaknesses in existing products which allow nimble startups to gain a foothold and launch a company. It's also much easier to build a product when you don't have 10,000 users pinging you with feature requests and bug fixes.

Do the existing products in your industry have great reporting engines? If not, make that the highlight of your product. The 10% of the industry that needs more reporting functionality will flock to you.

</comment><comment><USER6> The devil is in the details.

</comment><comment><USER7> Personally I'm not sure what I think, but your question is the exact reason why so many newspapers proclaim this as a "Tech Bubble" -- too many companies making similar projects. The market isn't running out of room perhaps, just it needs to shake off the incompetent or repetitive services in order to keep moving.

The other thing to keep in mind is that at one point or another, most startups end up being unsuccessful. Very few actually end up to be profitable enough for an entrepreneur to retire on, which is usually the goal of a Web 2.0 entrepreneur.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm not sure I get your question. Is there room for a better bug tracking system? You bet. I haven't found one with an awesome UI, powerful reporting mechanism and support to adapt to the workflow of big companies.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting. My question was more in general. I read things about how you need to differentiate yourself but I see no obvious differentiation in many new software companies. But, it is interesting that you mention you haven't found any really good bug tracking packages. I know there are a ton of players in the game, are they just incrementally better than the last?

<comment><USER9> I actually used to develop on a bug tracking system. I've used dozens.

I've never found one that was any good, and the majority of engineers and managers always complained about them. Either they're slow, unwieldy, complicated, feature light, bad at reporting, don't integrate with source control, integrate too much with source control, etc.

I have a cynical view about them now and pretty much put-up with whatever I have. Since I know they're all pretty bad and it's impossible to please everyone, my expectations have been lowered.

Someone who used to also develop on bug tracking software told me to check out JIRA, but I'm skeptical as always:

<http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/>

<comment><USER10> I like Jira. We use it to track pre-release software defects and it is quick to do commonly used functions like searching, screenshots, commenting on issues (no, it doesn't integrate with our CVS but we don't need it to). Once the software is released, per protocol, an issue with the software has to be tracked through our Siebel CRM solution (ugh, ugh). Jira compared to Siebel in terms of developer friendliness/usability - no contest.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Many Amazon S3 cloud storage users are exposing sensitive company secrets - <AUTHOR> http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/03/29/amazon-s3-cloud-storage-data-leak/

<comment><USER2> Like Slashdot commenters pointed out, it's really an RTFM situation...</comment>


Contact your representatives about the 50+ active cryptocurrency bills - <AUTHOR> https://www.supportcrypto.org/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey I'm a crypto enthusiast and engineer at FiscalNote, and I've seen a lot of buzz about policy relating to crypto on this subreddit. I did a quick search on our platform, and saw that right now there are already over 50 bills and regulations related to cryptocurrency around the US[0]. A lot of these bills would affect the average individual because they relate to taxes and payments.

We sell our platform to organizations that want to create tailored campaigns about advocacy topics (like net neutrality), but I talked to some people in the company and got this page set up for free. We're not going to be able to offer the level of support that we give to our clients, but I'm happy to answer any questions.

Even if there isn't an active bill in your state right now, you'd help the broader crypto community if you tell your representative that crypto matters to you. It's a lot easier to get this policy written properly than to amend it after it already exists. In the CFTC/SEC hearing a few weeks ago, Chairman Giancarlo and Sen. Mark Warner have shown that they read up on crypto, but I doubt that's the case with everyone.

I've already submitted my own message, and I've gotten a lot of my telegram groups to participate as well. I'd appreciate if you also shared the campaign with your friends, forums, communities, etc. Thanks!

[0]: [https://i.imgur.com/wMKt2Tx.png](https://i.imgur.com/wMKt2Tx.png)</comment>


Slack vs. Hipchat - <AUTHOR> http://slackvshipchat.com/ <comment><USER2> The lack of sorting discussions is a constant annoyance in HipChat.

Add that they have been debating the issue since March 2016 makes it worse: [https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/HCPUB-363](https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/HCPUB-363)</comment>


Planetes à énigmes - <AUTHOR> http://download.abandonware.org/magazines/Jeux%20et%20Strategie/jeuxetstrategie_numero001/Jeux%26strategie%201%20%2890%29.JPG <comment><USER2> Hi from Argentina! I can barely read French to understand the text, but I still don't understand the story. Can you give more context? I was traying to find something in Wikipedia but I was not successful.

[spoiler alert] Let's try: The main link and the first link of the list in your comment are one stories. Two astronaut re in an empty planet and they find 6 abandoned starships. They must choose one to escape form the planet. All of them look fine, but for some reason they must select one because the other are secretly broken. So the riddle is to guess which one is the correct ship. How good is my understanding? Here is where my French (or logic) fails and I can't guess the answer to save my life. It would be nice if you can link a version of the comic in English (or Spanish :) ), or in other case explain the solution (with a [spoiler alert] warning).

Edit: Abusing my lack of knowledge of French, what about this solution: They pick the starship number five, because the computer in each ships says "The five subsystem out of the five subsystems in this ship are operational." but it actually means "In this fleet, the starships from number five to number five are operational.".

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> [http://download.abandonware.org/magazines/Jeux%20et%20Strate...](http://download.abandonware.org/magazines/Jeux%20et%20Strategie/jeuxetstrategie_numero001/Jeux%26strategie%201%20%2891%29.JPG)

[http://download.abandonware.org/magazines/Jeux%20et%20Strate...](http://download.abandonware.org/magazines/Jeux%20et%20Strategie/jeuxetstrategie_numero002/Jeux_et_Strategie%20002%20-%20p030%20%281980-04-05%29.jpg)

[http://download.abandonware.org/magazines/Jeux%20et%20Strate...](http://download.abandonware.org/magazines/Jeux%20et%20Strategie/jeuxetstrategie_numero003/J%26S%2003%20-%20Page%20024%20%281980%2007-08%29.jpg)

[http://download.abandonware.org/magazines/Jeux%20et%20Strate...](http://download.abandonware.org/magazines/Jeux%20et%20Strategie/jeuxetstrategie_numero003/J%26S%2003%20-%20Page%20025%20%281980%2007-08%29.jpg)

[http://download.abandonware.org/magazines/Jeux%20et%20Strate...](http://download.abandonware.org/magazines/Jeux%20et%20Strategie/jeuxetstrategie_numero004/Jeux_et_Strategie%20004%20-%20p034%20%281980-08-09%29.jpg)

[http://download.abandonware.org/magazines/Jeux%20et%20Strate...](http://download.abandonware.org/magazines/Jeux%20et%20Strategie/jeuxetstrategie_numero004/Jeux_et_Strategie%20004%20-%20p034%20%281980-08-09%29.jpg)

[http://download.abandonware.org/magazines/Jeux%20et%20Strate...](http://download.abandonware.org/magazines/Jeux%20et%20Strategie/jeuxetstrategie_numero005/Jeux_et_Strategie%20005%20-%20p076%20%281980-10-11%29.jpg)</comment>


Show HN: Map for programmers: Explore tech neighbourhood -- feedback please - <AUTHOR> http://technology-map.xiv.in/

<comment><USER2> Nice! That looks like viz.js. I've been having a lot of fun with that library.

<comment><AUTHOR> yes it is vis js (visjs.org), really nice library

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It is not obvious to click on node, add hover highlighting

<comment><AUTHOR> sure, will have to check vis js to highlight on mouse over

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> it is mainly based on stackoverflow tag data, please share any comments ideas for feature

click on nodes to expand and explore.</comment>


Cybertek: The Cyberpunk Technical Journal - <AUTHOR> http://mail.blockyourid.com/~gbpprorg/2600/TAP/cybertek/index.html <comment><USER2> " Cybertek is published for educational purposes only under The First Amendment of The United States Constitution. "

Now that's a license.

<comment><AUTHOR> libertarians! -_-</comment></comment>


Deploy BareMetal SSD cloud server in seconds - <AUTHOR> https://www.scaleway.com/ <comment><USER2> Is "BareMetal" two words accidentally posted as a single word, or is it a trademark? The capitalization kind of makes it look like the phrase "bare metal", but I cannot tell which it is.</comment>


Ask HN: Your favorite learning resource, that you pay for? - <AUTHOR> Front End Masters seems good - any others you can recommend, any others you pay for? <comment><USER2> Pluralsight is also good. currently I have a monthly subscription and I have improved a lot.

</comment><comment><USER3> Treehouse - for 9$ it's a very good bang for buck ratio.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just checked, it says 25$ per month?</comment></comment>


Alameda County agrees to let Tesla reopen if certain conditions are met - <AUTHOR> https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Alameda-County-orders-Tesla-s-Fremont-plant-to-15264761.php <comment><USER2> I was really looking forward to the court challenges on this one, and am a bit disappointed the county caved.

Bottom line, we have local officials making decrees and proclamations with no legislative basis -- often the legislature is not even in session as one proclamation is made after another -- and they are curtailing things like right to assemble, right to hold religious services, and interstate commerce.

This needs court challenges all across the country, and unfortunately only the wealthy can afford a big legal fight. Most of them can easily hide in luxurious compounds and aren't impacted nearly as much as those dependent on a regular income, so Elon Musk was doing a public service by openly challenging these decrees and daring someone to arrest him for a crime that doesn't actually exist in any state legal code.

<comment><USER3> > Most of them can easily hide in luxurious compounds and aren't impacted > nearly as much as those dependent on a regular income

So they want other people to risk their lives to make more billions for them.

<comment><USER4> You know they could walk out any day and start earning the billions if they really have the ability? We are not talking about low income people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There's an amazing amount of emphasis in these comments on strict adhesion to the law and not enough on the actual risk of harm if the site continues to go about reopening.

Honestly, if a company wants to disobey a government edict that's for the good of the people when there's no law to back it up, so be it; I hope the people and estates of those who are injured or killed can use the judiciary to sufficient ends to become somewhat close to whole again.

<comment><USER6> There are processes to follow. If Alameda County is at fault then the courts can decide. They can issue restraining orders to suspend the quarantine if they felt the county overstepped its bounds too.

What can't happen is letting a company bully a local government because they don't want to make less money. This is just another example of our democracy crumbling into an oligarchy. Musk is not above the law because he has money and employs people.

<comment><USER7> What exact 'bullying' are you talking about? As far as I know all Musk did was post a few tweets. Not hire a gang of armed men.

<comment><USER8> Threatening to move his factory unless the county caved and made an exception to its public health rules.

<comment><USER7> How is that 'bullying'? If he thinks the factory will be better somewhere else, why shouldn't he move it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nothing like letting a billionaire throw a temper-tantrum to dictate public health policy.

</comment><comment><USER10> It's asinine for factories to be kept closed while big box stores are open. I know some people who work in the latter and they've had customers refusing to wear masks, spitting on employees (cops called), etc. Factories have the ability to strictly regulate distancing and mask use and are heavily monitored places, so they are much safer.

</comment><comment><USER11> Is there a risk that Tesla's factory opening will spark a COVID outbreak? Is there any personal or financial risk for Elon in the case of such an outbreak? How would the answers to these questions influence your decisions if you were Elon?

<comment><USER12> There are several other Tesla factories that were already open and SpaceX never closed. Their claim that manufacturing is relatively low risk seems credible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Everyone else should just go ahead and reopen as well.</comment>


Meeteor.com Has Shut Down - Post Mortem - <AUTHOR> http://www.meeteor.com

<comment><USER2> Yes

Here's a lesson, (learned personally BTW).

When you hear '90% of startups fail', failing usually means they _wane_.

It's like flying a kite (by someone bad at it). You can run with your kite and make it 'fly' but then you get tired and it falls to the ground. It can be a hundred reasons, it is either a bad/defective kite, it may not be windy enough, or you have to run faster for it to fly.

<comment><USER3> I knew I had heard the names before (I live in Seattle), and I have nothing but nice things to say about this team. It seems they shut down their other venture at the same time:

<https://spokely.com/> (there is cert issure your browser will rightly complain about)

Found it referenced on this personal brand page: <http://brandonhilkert.com/>

Best of luck to them and onwards indeed!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Yajoe!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The write up does not address anything interesting. It doesn't even say why the company failed. Not enough users? Not enough revenue? Failures of technology? Not worth reading.

A thank you letter to users is not a post mortem.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. Not hoping to have to write one of these again anytime soon - but I'll keep that in mind.

<comment><USER5> Even if you don't publish, please do write these up for yourself.

Just sit down and fill up a document with "next time I would do Y instead of X". You can also explain why, or what experience inspired the lesson. But definitely write them down. Keep the document handy. Over the next few months you'll keep having retroactive facepalm moments; you might as well get something out of them.

Right now it feels like you will never forget the whole crazy ride. But next time or the time after you'll read through a lessons-learned document and be very glad you have it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for that advice. Was thinking of writing a weekly column, or a small book about mistakes I wouldn't repeat in my next venture. Like you said, it would make it easier to remember the lessons over time - completely agree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The problem here wasn't the premise really. I mean from a premise standpoint (when it launched) Twitter seemed pretty silly. They got over it by simply adapting from status updates to brain dumps and then it really took off.

The problem here was planning.

No one seems to have sat down there and thought it through with: What are we doing? How do we do it? Do we have the means? Do we have the capability? _Are we going about this the right way?_

"The landing page didn't work in IE. It was buggy." Did no one open up the page in IE before launch? See what I mean about planning. It's unfortunate because these guys seemed to have cared about their product.

      ...chef Anthony Bourdain, who wrote our epitaph in Kitchen Confidential: "The most dangerous species of owner ... is the one who gets into the business for love."

I lifted that from the end of this page: [http://www.slate.com/articles/life/a_fine_whine/2005/12/bitt...](http://www.slate.com/articles/life/a_fine_whine/2005/12/bitter_brew.html)

In a way, that too is an example of poor planning.

<comment><AUTHOR> Follow up question: Could it be the exact opposite of what you're saying that did us in? Could it be that we spent TOO much time planning, and not enough time actually DOING (which leads to learning?)

I'll leave this here: <http://marshmallowchallenge.com/TED_Talk.html>

<comment><USER6> I saw that talk and yes, there could have been too much planning.

There's a big difference between correct planning and too much planning and I wish I could point out the big glaring wall that divides the two. The honest answer is that I don't know until I've walked in your shoes.

Most startups always go with : Idea > Platform > Tinkering > Launch

Between Idea and Tinkering is a feedback loop with improvements. But most importantly, there has to be someone outside the loop to tell you when too much planning is going on. When you're in it, you don't see it.

<comment><USER5> I mentor at startup events and advise a few startups, and too much planning is definitely the most common problem.

The loop you talk about is known among Lean Startup people as the build- measure-learn loop: <http://lean.st/principles/build-measure-learn>

The folks I see doing best are the ones with a clear vision who iterate as frequently as possible, testing their assumptions in order of risk. The right amount of planning is the smallest amount to let them learn frequently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _How cool would it be if I could recommend a new friend for you to go skiing or golfing with, based on how much overlap you had in common (Friends, Schools, Hobbies, etc). Pretty cool, right?_

Doesn't sound cool to me. The most interesting relationships I have are the ones where there is not a huge overlap. They are more interesting.

<comment><USER8> Really? I lose interest with those I have nothing in common with. For me, there is nothing quite as exhilarating like meeting someone whom you feel is wired the same way you are, whether they are a friend or romantic partner.

I was a Meeteor user, albeit an inactive one -- I don't remember receiving emails engaging me or asking me to come back, so I forgot about it over time. That said, I signed up in the first place because this is indeed a pain point for me and many others I know. At the time, I had just moved to a new city and was having a hard time making friends (basically, I didn't have the balls to attend classes, meetups, etc. by myself) so I saw products like Meeteor as providing a great solution. Even now, I would love to expand my circle of girlfriends but in an industry filled with men, it's been hard to find like- minded females who happen to share similar interests.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> There's no relation to meteor.com as far as I can tell if anyone else also misread the title.

</comment><comment><USER10> Not trying to be douchy, but am I the only one that doesn't understand why there are so many people trying to redefine social networking and the next big photo sharing app?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not douchy at all - I sometimes very much feel the same way you do. The vision, as I saw it in 2008, was this:

Social Networkin 1.0 was about connecting with people online, that you had already met in real life. (You added a friend on Facebook, because you already knew them).

The next evolution of Social Networking was about people discovery. IT was about leveraging all that data we had online about ourselves, and our friend graph, to connect with new people based on our needs. Need to connect with someone at Amazon? Need to find a date for next week? Need a new cycling buddy?

Chances are that your new professional contact/date/cycling partner are just a friend away. Manufacturing the serendipity to make you connect with them is what we envisioned.

It's really powerful if you think about it - life comes down to relationships (and I don't mean that in a pure network-y sense).

It's also extremely monetizeable. Dating websites and LinkedIn make their money off of being the gatekeeprs to new relationships. If you can build the platform that is used for all of those contexts - you have the next big thing. (And Facebook just rolled out their attempt at this, which is stumbling with problems of identity and intent, but they'll figure it out hopefully)

<comment><USER11> when i was reading this i got the same impression, isn't this the graph search

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Did you get any funding at all?

Did you make at least $1 of profit? Gross?

The "meeting people" problem is asymmetrical. You have a bunch of people who want to meet new people. Unfortunately the type of people they want to meet already know so many people they are not looking to meet new people. Lots of people want to meet Katy Perry; She's probably a bit tired of people wanting to talk to her. How did you go about addressing this issue?

</comment><comment><USER13> I met Phil at a chance encounter at Think Coffee in NYC and Mark Cuban happened to be there. In an awkward situation in which everyone was trying to impress Cuban, Phil came off as a genuine and nice guy. Good luck to you on the next thing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the kind words. It was great meeting you!

That was a lot fun - don't get to do that often in your life. Learned a lot from Mark that day, his composure and fluidity in conversation (holding court against three overly eager entrepreneurs) was unbelievable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Some lessons learned & stats would have been nice but it looks more like a rip post , maybe the poster has not closed the chapter yet

<comment><AUTHOR> Stats were horrible, and happy to share them (vanity metrics, and not):

8,000 Registered Users (Growth was horrible) +1M people in our database total (after importing friends/connections)

Peak Engagement: 30% MAU 10% WAU Around 0.5% DAU (I think, this last one I'm less sure about)

Our SXSW Service was the most successful, but still not good enough : Signed up 3% of conference goers (As much as Glancee, Highlight signed up 5% of SXSW) 25% of our SXSW users logged in 3 or more times 20% of our users reached out to their matches.

I'll keep thinking through what other stats I can share.

<comment><USER15> I am absolutely enthralled with genuine analysis and numbers. All too often when talking with startup founders, you get this fake show of "everything is great" or them trying to sell you. Makes attempts at genuine discussion hard.

It is interesting where you get some of these genuine reflections and numbers. You see them a lot on post mortems, but every now and then you will hit up a meetup or conference where it happens. Example: Attended the conference of world affairs at CU Boulder last year. It was the end of the day in a relatively empty auditorium. Both Tom Preston-Werner and Eric Wilhelm were giving some great insight into early business operations successes/failures.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I thought it was Meteor and was scared for a moment. Whew!

Sorry founder(s) but no-one apparently cared much about your site. It happens to the best of us.

<comment><USER17> Exactly what I got scared of :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> When working on new concepts of human interactions, may be we need to rely more on social science than technology. Having a ton of information on people, may not be enough to predict with whom they want to hangout. I wonder if big companies like Google and Facebook, used focus group and social science before launching g+ and "Graph Search". I hope they did.

</comment><comment><USER19> Never heard of it.

<comment><USER20> That's a pretty good post-mortem for any startup.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hold on, let me get us some nails and a hammer. We'll get this coffin shut tight if we work together

<comment><USER21> Philip - well done for retaining a sense of humour in the face of such outstandingly helpful feedback from the HN armchair critic brigade.

Stay foolish :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I think branding an idea as '2.0' was your first mistake. Pretty much meeteor was ambitious to innovate a new feature to social networking, but since that ideology is more in my opinion a 'soft' science, I think funding would have been difficult to make it sustainable.

</comment><comment><USER23> You guys definitely gave it a good run. What are your plans now?

</comment><comment><USER24> They didn't solve a pain I either knew or did not know I had.

</comment><comment><USER25> I am surprised they lasted this long.

</comment><comment><USER26> Did you make any money at all?

<comment><AUTHOR> Nope.</comment></comment>


Ask YC: HeclBuilder.com - <AUTHOR>

ATTENTION: Java plugin required.  Sorry, but it wouldn't be possible to build this otherwise.
I have hacked up http://www.heclbuilder.com recently.  It's not complete, but I thought I'd ask for comments and opinions about what people would like to see in it.
I know the design is quite simple - I am just not very good at that so I kept it simple.  Very specific advice appreciated, "I don't like the design" is a bit useless, unless you want to volunteer to fix it:-) <comment><USER2> Link: <http://heclbuilder.com>

</comment><comment><USER3> I like what I see. A short demo video of how to create a small script and test it out might be helpful.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm a bit ambivalent about videos. I personally loathe them and won't watch them, but realize that some people might like to sit there watching a video instead of clicking on 'create script' and trying it out.

What would you want to see in one?

<comment><USER3> A video that is less than 5 mins which shows how to create a simple hello world script. I don't like longer tutorial videos either, but a demo helps anyone with starting trouble.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There is a big difference between "If you have trouble with applets..." and "If these applets rape your browser with a rusty pole..." -- I would have preferred a... heartier warning.

Firefox froze so bad it didn't even know it was frozen. It was actually kind of interesting.

</comment><comment><USER5> I clicked the first script in the list (the 2d rotator thingy) and it froze up my browser and maxed my cpu when I hit run script. Not too cool. Glad I have the Session Restore addon. Running the latest Firefox on Mac OS X.

<comment><USER5> BTW, I think that comment sounded a little nastier than I meant it to. Just trying to give some helpfule feedback :-) Cool concept though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about that, but it's the Java plugin. Not a lot I can do about that:-(

<comment><USER6> I got the same failure with a WebKit nightly. I run Java applets and JWS apps from the browser all the time, so the Java Plugin doesn't seem to be broken on my system.

Could it be because I'm still stuck on Java 1.5?

<comment><AUTHOR> I checked on it, and it's giving me errors even with the latest Java from here:

<http://download.java.net/jdk6/>

 _Sigh_... I wish the Java guys would get it together.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Neat little application! And Hecl is a great up-and-coming programming language.</comment>


Apple: Samsung's iPhone 5 demand is harassment - <AUTHOR> http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/news/hardware/Apple-Samsungs-iPhone-5-demand-is-harassment/articleshow/8862765.cms

<comment><USER2> They should've thought of that before they asked the same thing from Samsung.</comment>


Beards Give You Superpowers - <AUTHOR> https://email@example.com/beards-give-you-superpowers-da69a64575ee#.nra0hu24d <comment><USER2> I've been reading Cryptonomicon recently. There's an entertaining bit where one of the characters asserts that beards are "totems of the white male patriarchal privilege".

It's a bit silly. But it is interesting to note that every bearded person mentioned in this article is white.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, I never thought about it. Of the top of my head, I know LeBron James has a pretty outstanding bead! :]</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Good code to read for Python and C beginner? - <AUTHOR>

I've been working on both Python and C for almost a year now, and am getting to the point where I can start actual projects that do actual things. I've never really looked at other people's code though, outside of books or small examples that is, and was hoping for some suggestions of small to medium size Python and C projects that are written clean to dig into. <comment><USER2> The Python interpreter is some pretty clean and educational C code, IMHO. Why don't you join python-dev, find some bugs in the issue tracker and start hacking? <http://www.python.org/dev/contributing/>

<comment><AUTHOR> I will do just that. First glance at the issue tracker gives me the impression that most of it's over my head, but this post has me inspired: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1048202> . Time to learn! Thank you!</comment></comment>


Phil Zimmerman's post-PGP Silent Circle: Privacy for $20 - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-57451057-83/phil-zimmermanns-post-pgp-project-privacy-for-a-price/ <comment><USER2> This is Zimmermann's third attempt at encrypted phone calls, at roughly 9 year intervals: PGPfone (1995) and Zfone (~2004/5).

I'll assume that this will be a lot easier to use than the earlier programs, and I'll also grant that smartphones are a much bigger market than VOIP software for desktops.

I want to see Zimmermann's product to succeed, and I'd love to see all phone calls have unbreakable end-to-end encryption by default.

However, as the article points out, it is difficult to persuade consumers to spend their own money on privacy.

The only way I can see consumers starting to care is if we get a massive wikileaks-style dump of millions of private phone calls that some malware or government has intercepted and recorded.

<comment><USER3> From the article it seems that Zimmermann is reusing ZRTP, which was/is also part of Zfone.

<comment><USER4> The transport is probably the easiest part of the whole system; the hardest part is convincing people of the need, followed by "we're the central point of secure to insecure" not itself being a massive monitoring target. UI/UX, key management (and directory management, kind of the same thing), and running the gateways themselves are kind of a problem too.

I hope they support multiple providers (including setting it up yourself) for Circle -> PSTN/SIP/etc., to avoid this problem. (I know Jon Callas, I guess I should ask him)

They could probably charge $500/mo for 10 users for secure email/voice/sms/etc. for groups, vs. $20/mo for individuals, if there was zero security exposure to the central servers for the groups, and if the groups could locally connect to their own/existing infrastructure. Add some trivial Mobile Device Management (MDM) functionality (forcing passcodes, remote wipe, etc. -- trivial stuff, not the huge monstrosity of corporate MDM products).

Basically, BES + VoIP for non-dead (iOS+Android, vs. BB) platforms.

<comment><USER5> Are you familiar with the milkfsh project? I use it to talk with my brother, but getting anyone else I know to set it up has been impossible.

<http://www2.milkfish.org.sipwerk.com/?page_id=2>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The $20/mo price is kind of misleading since it includes PSTN termination (99% of calls will probably be encrypted from the mobile device to a gateway to call non-users of the application, at least initially). There are not a lot of great SIP clients for iOS which connect to reasonable inbound and outbound termination providers, so for a US user internationally, the "free roaming" aspect will more than save $20/mo.

</comment><comment><USER6> >> We're going after target markets that have a special need for this," Zimmermann said. "For example, U.S. military serving overseas that wish to speak to their families."

An interesting example. "See, government? There's an upside for you in citizens having encryption tools."

<comment><USER7> Interesting pitch. Even better solution to that problem would be not starting idiotic foreign wars.

<comment><USER8> _not starting idiotic foreign wars._

Don't be tedious. Even if the US didn't start wars there are a whole lot of guys deployed overseas who don't go to war. Peacekeeping missions, humanitarian aid, operations other than war, etc.

<comment><USER7> Tedious? There wouldn't be nearly so many, and operational security wouldn't be as critical.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The problem with privacy and security is that it's considered a "nice to have" but not a "must have".

It's extremely difficult to sell "nice to have".

<comment><USER10> The dichotomy is not "nice to have" vs. "must have" -- it is whether the threat is "visible" vs. "invisible" when it concerns privacy and security for consumers.

Phone calls being massively scanned by a national security organization are an invisible threat. Consumers don't worry about it.

But consumers will pay for anti-virus software because it's in their face.

Another great example is personal shredders. I remember a skit, perhaps it was on Saturday Night Live, where the kids had to throw dad's incriminating papers into the "family shredder", portrayed as a ridiculous appliance for a family to own.

In the years since we started to hear a lot about identity theft, and then Fellowes created a billion dollar market for personal shredders. Is a personal shredder a "must have"? No way. The risk is very low, and there are so many better ways for thieves to get ID info in bulk. But ID theft is highly visible; you hear about constantly.

While I agree that it is hard sell for the consumer market, if it should somehow became highly visible (like a wikileaks dump of millions of recorded calls as another person suggested here), then sales could fly out the door.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have so many technical questions about his software. How does he plan on implementing this in iOS? It is difficult to modify the Phone app, and impossible without a jailbreak. Is this going to be a separate app for phone calls and emails?

And on top of all these technical limitation imposed by Apple, will this service only work if both parties (you and the recipient) have this software installed? This will prevent widespread adoption.

<comment><USER12> You don't modify the Phone app. You build a custom VoIP app like Skype did.

And yes, it can _only_ work if both parties have the app installed. Otherwise, someone along the way (at the tower (your mobile provider) or in the OS (Apple)) will have to decrypt the data for you and that sorta defeats the purpose.

<comment><USER13> Actually, no, it can work when only one person has the app installed, albeit without end-to-end encryption.

> If only one person has the app, the connection will be scrambled only to > Silent Circle's servers, which could still be valuable for overseas users > worried less about the FBI and more about their own government > eavesdroppers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I _love_ this quote from the article:

       "I'm not going to apologize for the cost," Zimmermann told
       CNET, adding that the final price has not been set. "This is
       not Facebook. Our customers are customers. They're not
       products. They're not part of the inventory."

I need to pull this out every time some wanker is whinging on about how awful free, ad supported services are for doing their best to target ads and make more money.</comment>


Strangers with Similar Names Meet Through Emails Sent to the Wrong Address - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/telecom/internet/strangers-with-similar-names-meet-through-emails-sent-to-the-wrong-address <comment><USER2> My email is firstname at firstname lastname dot org. I always read that to people very carefully, sometimes spelling it out, and over the phone I generally have someone read it back to me to make sure. And despite that, I've had regular conversations with the person who has firstname at lastname dot org and is forwarding me a bit of misdirected mail.</comment>


How Caller ID Works - <AUTHOR> http://www.rdegges.com/how-caller-id-works/

<comment><USER2> This doesn't go into any detail about how 'caller ID' works. It just goes over how the information is stored…

<comment><USER3> "I'll get into these points more later on, but it's important to understand what is happening."

I assume the author will be adding and updating this over time. This may just be a start.

<comment><USER2> Yes, I read the continuation… the title's just completely misleading. "How Caller ID works" … "oh, I'll tell you in another post please subscribe lolz also see OpenCNAM my paid caller id project"</comment></comment></comment>