Let’s not demonize driving, just stop subsidizing it - chrismealy
http://cityobservatory.org/lets-not-demonize-driving/
======
frgtpsswrdlame
As much as the idea is nice I think it's just a political non-starter. Making
this about "personal responsibility" is a pretty see-through cover. This is a
stick and a stick wielded by "liberal elites who live in cities" against rural
drivers and mega-commuters won't work in this environment.

People will move to cities and use roads less if cities are affordable. If we
can lower rent in the city, automobile usage will go down on its own. This is
where the fight should be pointed I believe.

~~~
nnq
> People will move to cities

Why tf would you want this? As an European, what I _loved_ about US was that
people don't like being all crammed up in small, old and disgusting cities,
and they are OK with long commutes as the price for their "house with lawn"...

Population _dispersal_ should be _encouraged!_ It dramatically increases
quality of life, and if you take a look at google maps you'll see that the
Earth is full of unused space.

Yeah, energy and climate change and all that are serious problems... but let's
solve _so that_ having solved them _we can enjoy un-crammed living..._

Ideal world imho would one where cities and towns simply don't exist: it's
individual homes or small-group-homes sprinkled around the planet, with
"leisure centers" and "shopping centers" and "health centers" sprinkled
uniformly between them, and large chunks of forest here + agricultural land
here in-between them. It may sound extremely inefficient, but we have the
technolgy to make it work now, so let's do it. Find something else to
optimize, like making agriculture vertical instead, and let people live in the
wide open spaces they enjoy! _Why TF do we insist creating and optimizing
these Urban Hells and then complain that anxiety and depression are eating us
alive?!_

~~~
xtreme
This is something I don't get about the HN crowd. I grew up in India, where
overpopulation is a huge problem. However, if you look below the surface, it
is not overpopulation; it is uneven distribution. There are only a few cities,
and they are way too cramped with people. The decrease in quality of life is
real. And most Indians do not own cars, they rely on public transit. If there
were more smaller towns and good connectivity, people could live a lot more
comfortably.

One big issue with decentralization is that industries tend to congregate.
However, there is no solid reason why modern offices need to be all located in
the same downtown. Decentralization reduces density and discourages rent-
seeking behavior by existing residents.

I might be biased but I like suburbs. I think (without any data to support)
they approach the optimal density for most people. Of course, some people find
them bland and boring. Urban density is more efficient, no doubt, but I don't
get the hate for people enjoying large backyards and the peace and quiet
suburbs afford.

~~~
lmm
> there is no solid reason why modern offices need to be all located in the
> same downtown

My experience is that working in downtown is more productive - and,
fundamentally, much more _fun_ \- than working in an office park or at home in
the middle of nowhere. You can learn a lot from bouncing off people who work
in similar-but-not-quite-the-same fields, and just having good lunch options
is a huge win.

~~~
jschwartzi
Yeah, in my morning life I've developed a disgust with the modern office park
and its wide open fields of asphalt. There's never anywhere to walk to to buy
lunch, and they die after 6pm.

------
zaque1213
> Driving is a choice, and provided that drivers pay all the costs associated
> with making that choice, there’s little reason to object to that.

I mean, kind of. I'm not sure where the author lives, but in Houston, I don't
have much of a choice. I already pay tolls and taxes, gas prices and my car
note. I live as close to work as is affordable, and still have to drive.
There's no bus route from my apartment and I'm not about to ride my bike on
I-10. I ask this next question in seriousness, because I'd love to change my
habits without moving to a more expensive city with good public
transportation: what are my options here? I'd rather not be "disinsentivized"
from doing something I have no choice but to do.

~~~
Clubber
I live about 10 or so miles from work. I live in a hot state. If I rode a bike
or walked to work, I would stink and everyone near me would forget about the
planet while experiencing their olfactory assault. I'd probably get out of
meetings, but I wouldn't make any friends.

~~~
apsec112
Very likely, the major reason you live so far from work is that it's illegal
to build densely, and it's illegal to build houses, stores, and offices within
reasonable walking distance of each other. Of course, most people don't
realize that - they just look for houses near their work and don't find any,
or the handful they do find are super-expensive, so they live far away and
commute. But the underlying reason why these houses are super-expensive or
nonexistent is that it's illegal to build more of them.

~~~
gydfi
Or people don't like living on top of one another.

Give me a nice half-acre and a self-driving car to get me where I need to go.

~~~
dashundchen
The fact is not everyone can live on a half acre. The tax revenue isn't dense
enough to support the infrastructure people expect (ignoring the awful
environmental and land use effects that would have).

The US is seeing fiscal and infrastructure problems across the country from
municipalities who spread themselves too thin the past 60 years. They don't
have the funds to maintain, much less improve, their infrastructure. We need
to make it easier to build denser and start thinking about how to develop more
sustainably going forward.

~~~
osdiab
Exactly! People don't take into account how expensive it is to maintain long
roads, electrical lines, water pipes, and much more to remote places; higher
cost of maintenance on said infrastructure; and how most of that area doesn't
produce any revenue to fund itself. Like it or not, you're receiving enormous
subsidies to live that way, and if you had to pay the true costs of your
lifestyle, you might reconsider how idyllic it really is.

------
megablast
Why? It is not just about the cost. It is about over a million people dying
every year. It is about pollution. It is about noise. It is about ugly roads
taking up huge amounts of space. It is about entire cities messed up because
of urban sprawl.

~~~
closeparen
It's about people getting to work in a reasonable amount of time and comfort
from housing they can afford.

Rich urbanites having ugly roads in their field of vision is not remotely
comparable to middle and working class people having to move in with roommates
or triple their commute times.

~~~
dashundchen
When density is so low outside a city's relatively tiny core, like in most
American cities, it's no surprise areas with short commute times are so
expensive. Maybe if we densified our cities prices wouldn't be so out of
whack.

It doesn't have to be Manhattan like densities either. Many German cities, for
example, are full of 4, 5, 6 story buildings. Dense enough to support frequent
transit and common enough to not have astronomical rents.

~~~
obstinate
Much of Manhattan is not that dense either. I mean, it's denser than most
places, but a decent chunk of it is the exact type of thing you're describing
-- five to six story buildings.

------
renlo
This is going to make peoples lives worse. People who still need to drive are
going to drive, but will instead end up paying more.

> That’s because most people, correctly, can’t imagine any time soon when they
> won’t need to use a car for most—even all—of their daily trips. As a
> practical matter, the fact that for seven or eight decades the entire built
> environment and most transportation investments have been predicated on car
> travel means that we can’t quickly move away from auto dependence.

So, let's build better public transportation (light rail, subways, buses /
self-driving buses) or other solutions (bike lanes / roads, affordable housing
near commerce) before we start making life harder for people. Once we've
reached a state where there are convenient options then we should enact such
taxes and fees, not before.

~~~
hvidgaard
That sounds nice, but you will not get that movement going unless there is a
reason for people to give up their car.

The obvious suggestion would be to gradually make it more expensive to drive,
and then gradually improve transportation and housing to deal with less cars
pr household.

/Edit: I meant to say you do both simultaneously. LEaving the original text up
because the replies were made in that context.

~~~
ehnto
Our city made it more expensive to park in the city through taxation. The
result was people pay more for parking. Cars and buses are just as backed up,
and there are no new rail services.

The public transit system was already failing to deliver it's existing
customers. Infrastructure must come before taxation as a way to motivate
people. It just doesn't make sense to make people pay for a failing of public
infrastructure as a way of encouraging them to use said failing
infrastructure.

~~~
hvidgaard
I meant to say, do both simultaneously.

~~~
ehnto
Ah I see, in fact you said it well already I was just too quick to reply!

This is definitely an issue I am passionate about, mostly because I want to
live in the city that eventually gets this right.

------
kasey_junk
I worry that we are fighting the last war instead of the next one when we talk
about using cars less. The business models that led to centralized white
collar work forces in city cores are going away.

Automation means those work forces are smaller. More decentralized companies
and work from home means that there is less reason to have them all in one
place and its usually easier to provide modern utilities cheaper and easier
outside of the context skyscrapers and dense city centers.

As that happens, places that do have public transit infrastructure, largely
built on the commuter model, will find it ever less efficient as you aren't
shuttling people to the same places or in the same patterns. And places that
don't have existing transit will have to experiment with untried models in a
context where experimentation is very expensive.

------
cletus
Why not demonize driving? Roughly 1.3 _million_ people die in or from cars
every year worldwide [1]. In the US that's 37000 per year, roughly equivalent
to 10 9/11s. Yet we not only subsidize car ownership (roads, parking, etc) and
seem blasé to this carnage, we defend this practice as some kind of freedom.

It's utterly insane. Self-driving cars will imho be utterly transformative to
society that one day we will look back on this century of driving vehicle
ourselves as the barbaric hocum that it is.

[1] [http://asirt.org/initiatives/informing-road-users/road-
safet...](http://asirt.org/initiatives/informing-road-users/road-safety-
facts/road-crash-statistics)

~~~
xtreme
It's a rather recent phenomenon that we have enough computing power to make
self-driving cars a viable reality and not just science fiction.

------
nether
Would this disproportionately hurt lower income earners who live in the
cheaper suburbs and have longer commutes? Easy to ask for that pigovian tax
when you've got that sweet downtown loft.

~~~
lmm
The other stereotype is that the poorest people are crammed into high-crime
downtown areas while the middle class live out in the suburbs. I don't know
which way the statistics line up.

~~~
nether
A gas tax is basically regressive according to this paper (pdf page 9):

> The gasoline tax’s tendency to place a greater burden on low-income
> households is often stated as one of the strongest arguments against the tax
> [West, 2004a, 755]. Taxes on gasoline have been shown to be regressive in
> numerous economic studies. A 1989 study by Poterba concluded that gasoline
> taxes were about 15 percent of pre-tax income for the lowest income groups
> in the U.S., compared to 2.8 percent for the highest income groups [Poterba,
> 1989, 325].

[http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.554...](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.554.7122&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

~~~
lmm
Those stats could be true even if lower-income people drove a lot less than
wealthy people - it's talking about what proportion of income they spend on
gas on average.

------
gcatalfamo
You guys may all be right, but what if actually LIKE driving, and therefore
cherish finding moments to drive for pleasure and not just for the daily
commute?. Does this make me a dinosaur in the age of self-driving Teslas?

~~~
TulliusCicero
There's nothing wrong with driving, but since it takes up a ton of space,
there's no reason for it to be subsidized in urban areas; quite the opposite,
in fact.

~~~
exprA
Speaking as an European, can you really call driving subsidized (if it is in
one single area, such as building code) when much more cash is spent in social
services paid by fuel taxes?

~~~
TulliusCicero
I'm less familiar with the economics of it in Europe, where gas taxes are
much, much higher than in the US, and there's not nearly as much road and
highway sprawl.

------
_Codemonkeyism
Eye opener to me

"The High Cost of Free Parking", Donald Shoup (book not the paper)

~~~
nwah1
I second this recommendation. Car culture is hugely subsidized. It is arguably
the largest social engineering project in world history, buttressed by endless
amounts of regulation, zoning, and huge expenditure paid for by everyone,
including non-drivers. It is certainly not a spontaneous outgrowth of the free
market.

We waste enormous amounts of prime land on trivial things, such as curbside
parking. Mandatory minimum parking requirements impede new construction, and
are a hidden subsidy to car culture. And simple concepts to improve efficiency
and fairness, like smart parking meters and congestion pricing, are ignored.
People hate the concept of paying so much, even though they will ultimately
end up paying for it via queuing (congestion).

It is interesting that much of what people actually hate about our economic
system boils down to aspects of car culture. Atomization, sprawl, etc have
many causes, but certainly car culture is one of them.

------
Zomad
Wouldn't there also be an associated rise to the cost of living? As the cost
of transport rises, food produce etc. will all become more expensive as a
result? These costs typically impact the lower-income population more quickly
and heavily than the middle and upper income earners.

~~~
osdiab
Just because you prioritize transit in cities, doesn't mean that transport
costs in general rise. Transportation between cities can remain car driven as
those are inherently sparse areas anyway; you don't need to reduce use of all
types of cars in cities, industrial use / deliveries can still exist in those
systems anyway; and as a long term idea, self driving deliveries may also
drive some of these costs later on. Additionally, while cost of transport
rises for car commuters, it very well may fall for transit ones and especially
for those car commuters who switch to transit. So it's not a given that prices
would uniformly rise.

------
neumann
I can see where the argument is going, but it is too simplistic and so ignores
the plethora of reasons we have developed to use cars after this many decades
of IC. The problem is with public transport, and urban traffic, not cars. The
problem is with poor rail infrastructure and cheap fuel that has allowed a
nationwide and global distribution infrastructure that relies on trucks.

Also: [https://youtu.be/zcAqR-Hs9II](https://youtu.be/zcAqR-Hs9II)

~~~
osdiab
We get poor public transit in part because we disproportionately fund car
infrastructure, and car infrastructure often makes neighborhoods less walkable
in the first place. A sprawled out city means that you need a much more
extensive rail network than a dense one; massive roads make actions as simple
as crossing the street take a long time, intimidating, and dangerous; big
parking lots offer nothing for pedestrians who walk buy to do, and need to be
in the very places that people want to go in order to be useful.

This is a chicken and egg problem, where investing in cars harms ease of
transit, but reallocating investments into transit harms those car users. So
we as a society have to make choices about what we deem to be more important,
or be prepared to spend significantly more capital to make the two coexist (by
tunnels and subterranean parking structures, densification of cities, major
transit investment and what have you).

------
prklmn
Simply put - people like living in houses and having a yard. Until this
changes, much of the public will continue to drive.

~~~
uiri
There are plenty of neighborhoods in San Francisco where one can get a house
with a yard; take, for instance, Noe Valley. It is San Francisco so housing
prices are expensive but I am inclined to believe that it is cheaper to live
without a car in San Francisco than with a car in the suburban Bay Area. The
difference, of course, is in the square footage of your living space.

This isn't a phenomenon that is unique to SF either.

~~~
santaclaus
> it is cheaper to live without a car in San Francisco than with a car in the
> suburban Bay Area

East Oakland is pretty cheap!

------
coding123
With self driving looming, no policy changes should happen until the self
driving stuff shakes everything up. Far fewer people will be using their own
car when that happens. Also this identical argument can be said about
ANYTHING, replace cars and roads with police and protection. This feels like
there would be no end to this line of thinking. Just people wanting to be
involved in something "drastically different".

~~~
jkaptur
The fact that changes might be coming is no argument against changing policies
in the world that exists today.

------
bogomipz
I am interested in this idea posited in the post:

"We shouldn’t require third parties such as homebuilders or renters or local
businesses to subsidize car travel and parking. This isn’t about creating a
“disincentive for car use,” but, as a matter of fairness and practicality,
dropping what have essentially been subsidies for financially and socially
expensive and dangerous behavior."

They don't mention how how third parties are subsidizing car travel and
parking but I am assuming they are talking about taxes no? I agree with this,
if I live where I don't need to own a car then I understand not wanting to pay
the same taxes towards roads as someone who uses a car every day.

However part of my tax dollar that subsidizes those roads also goes to
commercial traffic that brings my food and essentials into the city where I
might live and shop. How do you implement this without increasing the costs of
goods even further in our cities? The delivery costs of goods into cities
already makes those same good more expensive in a city with the current
pricing scheme.

~~~
CalRobert
Parking minimums.

Forcing people to build off-street parking is a subsidy to everyone else who
enjoys their on-street parking welfare. It can add tens of thousands to the
cost of a unit.

This illustrates the problem well:
[https://www.portlandoregon.gov/bps/article/420062](https://www.portlandoregon.gov/bps/article/420062)

Consider - how many times have people complained about a lack of parking, but
really mean a lack of FREE parking? I mean, how ludicrous is that??? I don't
complain about a lack of free hotel rooms! We've decided the government (aka
taxpayers, including those who don't own a car) should pay for places for cars
to sleep, while making it challenging to even _build_ places - when there's a
market demand!- for humans to sleep.

"The delivery costs of goods into cities already makes those same good more
expensive in a city with the current pricing scheme." \- do you have a source
for this? The expense of land in a city must have a lot to do with it. The
expense of providing free parking to customers in a city with expensive land
might have even more to do with it. If a shop has free parking, everyone who
walks there is paying for the drivers' parking.

~~~
acdha
I live in DC and this came up on every development discussion because it was
so absurdly against good policy. You could be building a neighborhood bar next
to a metro station in a place where 80% of the residents walk, bike, or take
transit and still be required to pay for bunch of parking spaces.

In the neighborhood where I live there's a big development proposal literally
on the same property as a metro station. The design and image is squarely
aimed at a transit / bike / car-share lifestyle (why pay the premium if that's
not what you want?) but even the reduced city requirements are greater than
the number of spaces for which the developer anticipates renter demand and
there are a few vocal obstructionists demanding more because they still think
you need at least one car per resident. That attitude is so deeply entrenched
in our culture that they literally make excuses for why the older building a
block away has something like a 40% usage rate, because it's just
inconceivable that there won't be a big demand spike in the future.

------
panic
_We learned that higher gas prices, for example, had a large and sustained
impact on driving behavior. After growing steadily for decades, vehicle miles
traveled per person peaked and declined after 2005 (as gas prices shot up).
This produced knock-on changes in housing markets, and helped accelerate the
move back to cities._

It's too bad raising these prices intentionally using taxes is so difficult!

------
LordKano
Cities are growing again, don't kill them.

I get the feeling that this was the author's semi-intellectual tantrum because
he got cut off by a car when he was in the bike lane.

He comes in long on agenda and short on facts. For example, he says that
trucks should pay for the damage they do to roads but he is completely
ignoring the fact that they do. Diesel fuel is taxed so heavily specifically
to compensate for the amount of damage big trucks cause to the roads. It's
also why there are spot checks for un-taxed agricultural diesel.

I see formerly crime ridden, low income neighborhoods being gentrified and
young professionals are moving in. There are parts of the city where one could
have bought a house for less than $50,000 ten years ago where the same house
is going for over $200,000 today. You will ruin that trend and reverse that
growth if you make it too difficult, inconvenient and expensive for people.

I have chosen to live my life in such a way that car-free, urban living is
just not going to happen. I can easily put my three children into my vehicle
and go to the mall just to browse around and spend time together. I'm not
loading three children onto a bus.

I have a three bedroom house about 14 miles away from the center of the
nearest urban area and it sits on 1/6 to 1/8 of an acre of land where I'm free
to grow a garden, have a swimming pool and still pay less for my mortgage than
I'd pay in rent for a three bedroom apartment in the city.

There are a lot of people like me who will never live in the city and if you
make it too inconvenient to travel into the city, we'll stop going. You will
create more sprawl due to the fact that just because we don't go into the city
for goods and services doesn't mean that we won't require them. We'll still
need and want these things and someone will service those needs in a way that
works for us.

Automobiles are not going away. If you stop planning for and accommodating
them, you are going to cause many more problems than you resolve.

~~~
soperj
If you've been anywhere with a half decent bus system, it's really easy to
bring three kids on the bus. My kids love the bus, it's an adventure.

Also there's no way that this would encourage more sprawl. Places that don't
rely on the car are not sprawled, they just have more compact town centers
that are close by. Look at Denmark or the Netherlands.

~~~
LordKano
I currently ride the bus to and from work. Our mass transit system is adequate
but it'll never replace my automobile.

------
driverdan
In economics these issues are called negative externalities and are well
known. If you're not familiar with the term I suggest reading the Wikipedia
article about it:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality)

There's even a page about the externalities of vehicles, although it's fairly
sparse:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externalities_of_automobiles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externalities_of_automobiles)

As a society we're better off by eliminating these externalities. They're a
market imbalance that harms people.

~~~
frogpelt
And I submit to you the Wikipedia article about Unintended consequences:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unintended_consequences](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unintended_consequences)

We can outlaw cars but what will be the consequences?

One reason Americans have a fascination with cars is because Americans have a
fascination with freedom.

When governments attempt to eliminate imbalances they usually take away
liberties. This is not necessarily an improvement.

------
strictnein
> "Every car driver ought to pay for their parking space they use—whether it’s
> in the public or the private realm."

I do pay for private parking spaces already. Stores and businesses provide
them and they're paid for by the money I pay them.

~~~
pseudonom-
You pay for private parking spaces, in part (i.e. in combination with other
customers). I also pay for parking spaces, in part, by my patronage but never
use them. Consequently, your share of the usage is higher than your share of
the payment. So again, even private parking of this sort is subsidized.

~~~
strictnein
The store didn't add parking spots in case you decided to buy a car.

~~~
pseudonom-
I don't follow. You're saying that the store didn't provide parking to help
some future, possible me-with-a-car? How is that relevant?

------
6d6b73
Why can't we have small cities where in the center we have libraries, medical
facilities and schools. Next let's build parks and recreational areas. Around
that we should have residential area. Next zone retail, and another one
industrial . This, or a similar setup would change how cities work. Kids could
walk to school, libraries and parks. Adults could walk/bike to stores and to
work. Medical facilities would be close to most of the population. The whole
area from retail to the center of the town could be car free, with just few
areas for transportation, but even that could be moved underground.

~~~
marcosdumay
Oh, Brasilia was designed that way.

People don't want to restrict themselves only to the nearby school, and the
nearby hospital, and the nearby groceries. And they want to compete for far
away jobs.

Good thing the city was also designed with a huge collection of streets going
around those neighborhoods, because everyone is on those, all the time.

~~~
kortex
> Oh, Brasilia was designed that way.

Hardly. A 3-lane highway plus frontage roads cuts straight through the center.
Then you have L4, which hugs the waterfront and cuts off much of the city in a
very Robert Moses-esqe fashion. Its metro/rail system is completely anemic.

> Good thing the city was also designed with a huge collection of streets
> going around those neighborhoods, because everyone is on those, all the
> time.

I'd say that is _precisely_ why it has more driving and less walking/public
transport.

(disclaimer: never actually visited it, but this much is apparent from maps
and such)

~~~
marcosdumay
Between the highways are blocks designed basically the same way the GP is
talking about. That were expected to provide everything, and completely
walkable.

Never worked as designed, because people don't work that way.

------
didibus
One size does not fit all. Each state, city, town should adopt local policies
that make sense. I think that was missed in the article, since the "city" they
talk about in question seems to be an abstract generalization.

~~~
osdiab
I think this stuff makes sense for somewhat dense and populous cities; that
said, I do think that the fragmentation of cities in places like the Bay Area
could use some generalization (way too many independent, disagreeing suburbs
that prevent rational coordinated action. Ridiculous numbers of transit
authorities and inconsistent coverage with existing rail make the experience
terrible).

------
dangjc
I did a road trip in New Zealand where petrol is $2 a liter, ie about $8 per
gallon. It made us much more conscious about how much we were driving. It's
the only place I've seen hitchhiking still socially acceptable and not creepy.
A gas tax that size would help pay for roads and encourage gradual
densification. Maybe everyone could receive a refundable credit during the
first few years of phase in to avoid sticker shock.

------
bougiefever
I think it's a wrong approach to focus on incentives or disencentives of
driving and car ownership. Why do people drive? A lot of it could be
eliminated. Shopping is one reason. If it becomes more feasible to order
things online and have them brought to us, that would cut down on driving. I
know, it would arrive by a vehicle, but it would be one vehicle instead of the
many it delivers to. Work - many jobs could easily be done from home. I work
remotely, and it cuts down on driving a lot for me. I think the culture needs
to catch up on this one. We absolutely need to travel to see our friends and
family, Skype notwithstanding, but if public transportation was better, we
wouldn't need cars for that either. I live in a rural area, so not having a
car for me would not work at all. I carefully plan my trips to the store
because it takes so much time to drive there and back. Another thing, why are
people saying street parking is free? Have you never received a ticket? That
quadruples in the amount you owe if you don't pay it in 5 days?

------
Shivetya
Self driving cars and EVs will just give people more freedom to live where
they want and the mobility they desire. So much of his belly aching is already
on the way out.

People won't give up driving and living where they want but they will change
to the EV/FC side provided it doesn't curtail either of those and in the next
dozen years or so that move will be well underway.

The one truth always ignored is that many cannot live where they want too.
Jobs change and married couples have the double limitation that one may end up
with a job further away than is desirable. they just cannot get up and move
when work is ten to twenty miles further out and some won't burden their
children with new schools and having to find new friends.

on a per mile case we spend more to subsidize mass transit than other forms of
people movement and sadly we aren't even paying the upkeep on what we already
have. you think the roads and such need work, just wait till the bills come
due to mass transit maintenance being skipped because of over priced
extensions and such.

------
jtokoph
In the current world of automated tolling with FastTrak, IPASS and EZ Pass I
feel like we should have already put tolls up all over the place.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
No, screw that.

Toll roads everywhere just creates another revenue stream that can never be
gotten rid of. Automating it makes price hiking easy and silent. By putting
tolls everywhere You've succeeded in raising costs and increasing congestion
everywhere tolls aren't

~~~
bryanlarsen
Just building a road creates a massive obligation on future taxpayers to pay
for maintenance for that road. It's even harder to get rid of a road than it
is to get rid of a toll.

------
impala454
As someone who lives in a giant spread out city (Houston) I have attempted to
bus in from the suburbs on occasion and it was fun, but hardly a reasonable
everyday occurrence. Our city is just too spread out. I've visited NYC and
it's large as well but everything is so compacted together you don't have to
go far from a train station to get where you want to go.

~~~
Consultant32452
I feel like this is a chicken and egg problem. Without the transportation
infrastructure you can't get the population/business density, but without the
population density you can't justify the infrastructure. Houston could
probably build decent rail transportation to get you where you needed to go,
but it won't happen. I live in a city like yours, our public transportation is
atrocious. It takes at least an hour to get anywhere.

------
krisroadruck
How the heck do people shop without a car? Do you hand lug 50+ lbs of
groceries several blocks on foot? What if you need to buy something larger
than will fit in a backpack? I'm absolutely mystified by people who live sans-
vehicular transport.

~~~
CaptSpify
When you live in a city that doesn't assume you have a car, they put grocery
stores in more logical places. Additionally, you end up only buying what you
need. I just have two bags that I fill with groceries, and I only walk a
couple of blocks. I generally only buy what I need for that day.

~~~
krisroadruck
Do you not find that buying in small batches drastically increases your
grocery bill vs buying in bulk?

~~~
CaptSpify
I wouldn't say it drastically increases the bill, but it probably does
increase it a little bit. However that increase is a joke compared to the
costs of owning a car.

EDIT: However no, I have not done an actual cost-difference analysis on
groceries.

------
norea-armozel
If only this desubsidzation was met with an offset on mass transit because
sadly many folks either have a home in town and have to commute to the burbs
because the company built their campus that way or vice versa. In the Midwest,
there's no real push to augment mass transit even with BRT and dedicated lanes
for it. All kinds of NIMBY complaints seem to be holding back any kind of
progress on such things. So odds are that it'll still be politically easier to
subsidize the roads and cars until the cities break apart under the pressure
of infrastructure maintenance costs and loss of tax revenues as working
populations move or age out.

------
george_ciobanu
Interstate roads and highways are also critical elements of national security
- they act as the internet for transportation (by providing multiple redundant
routes that can be easily patched, unlike railways)

------
gaius
In the UK taxes paid by drivers (e.g. on fuel) raise £50Bn/year and transport
spending in total is £25Bn. The idea that drivers are "subsidised" is
ludicrous.

~~~
lmm
What would be the annual rent on the public land that's currently dedicated to
roads?

~~~
gaius
Paid by whom to whom? Or aren't drivers "the public" in your worldview?

~~~
lmm
Drivers are a subset of the public; giving them almost-exclusive use of
valuable public land for free is a subsidy to them in the same way that
handing them them tax money would be. How much value would we get out of the
land that's currently used for roads if we used for other public purposes
(social housing, mass transit, government offices, police stations, parks and
museums, or even just renting it out commercially and returning those funds to
general taxation)? However much value that is, that's how much we're
subsidising drivers by by giving them free use of the road network.

~~~
gaius
How much value would any of those things be without access to them?

Even if you don't sit behind a wheel yourself, if you use shops, the post
office, or anything that involves goods being moved from A to B then you
benefit from the existence of the road network.

By all means build your "social housing" in long thin strips in the middle of
nowhere, if you think that will help or thats what anyone wants. But it isn't.

~~~
lmm
> Even if you don't sit behind a wheel yourself, if you use shops, the post
> office, or anything that involves goods being moved from A to B then you
> benefit from the existence of the road network.

Sure, and I can and should pay market rate for that. Yes a subsidy to drivers
is indirectly a subsidy to shops and post offices, and even more indirectly a
subsidy to parts of the wider population. So? It's certainly not an equal
subsidy to everyone.

> By all means build your "social housing" in long thin strips in the middle
> of nowhere, if you think that will help or thats what anyone wants. But it
> isn't.

Out in the middle of nowhere there probably isn't a better use for that land
(reflected in the fact that rent for it would be pretty cheap). In the city
centres is where the land is valuable, and that's where I'd look to reclaim
road space for more valuable uses (and perhaps introduce things like the
congestion charge if some road access is absolutely necessary, so that the
costs drivers pay reflect the land they're using up).

------
MrsPeaches
Slightly off topic but I've seen it repeated a few times that it is illegal to
build shops near houses in parts of the US.

To me this seems kinda crazy. What is the justification?

~~~
dec0dedab0de
To keep the neighborhood quiet.

~~~
AstralStorm
And a boring wasteland? It is not shops that generate the most noise.

~~~
CalRobert
There are people who agree with you in the US, but far too few of them are on
planning councils.

------
intopieces
Surprised this article missed the opportunity to point out that the fuel
taxes, both federal and state, have not been sufficiently raised in years to
decades in most states. To my mind, that's step 1: raise the fuel tax in each
state such that it adequately pays for the construction of roads. As it
stands, the fuel tax in most states only services the interest on road
projects, with the rest being siphoned from the general budget.

------
jackskell
Driving is a choice... Unless you're crippled...

Maybe you'd prefer I just vegetate at home (on whose dime?) instead of being
employed.

Remote work is a reasonable possibility to consider, but having to start a new
field, it makes sense to keep an office presence for training, mentoring, and
other intangibles that come with human contact.

I like drive-thrus at restaurants, too.

~~~
TheCoelacanth
Transportation subsidies for people who are crippled is a conversation worth
having (and some public transportation systems actually do this), but
subsidies for everyone just to benefit a small number of people who need it is
silly.

------
helthanatos
I don't understand what thought process was used to write this: driving is
necessary and will be until we decide to live as we did in the 1800s.
Subsidize driving? Gas tax, taxes, etc are not inexpensive by any means.
>>"When we experienced the epidemic of drunk driving, we didn’t go back to
prohibition. Instead, we raised penalties to make drivers more responsible,
set tougher limits on blood alcohol content, and put more money into
enforcement. People still drink—but there’s a different level of understanding
of responsibility and consequences, and fewer people drive drunk." I have to
disagree. The fact they were drunk is just hidden from the public. The
penalties for drunk driving are not nearly harsh enough to expect people to
not do it. The past 3 accidents involving death I've seen have involved people
that were certainly drunk, but the toxicology reports were never released and
will never be. The public should know. I drive 25 miles to school each day.
Being forced to live on campus because of the dangerous pollution would be
insane. There should be no penalty for driving besides the costs of
infrastructure, which are, in fact, well covered by taxes or would be if it
didn't take 2 years to do something that should take a month, cities didn't
randomly decide they need to change intersections or randomly add them. 4 deer
ran in front of my car this morning. Nothing would have helped besides
insurance if I would have hit them. Driving is dangerous but there is no
reason to penalize it or hinder it. Yes, I support walking to work if you live
in a city and you're near it, but that is purely logical. The pollution caused
by cars is one factor of many in climate change. It will not magically stop or
even drastically decrease by penalizing driving. Gas is usually $2.40 - that
is expensive enough.

~~~
soperj
If driving was more expensive there'd be more options than driving 25 miles.
You could take a bike to the nearest train station which would arrive fairly
frequently and take that to campus.

~~~
hnal943
That's great unless you are anything but a commuter, carrying little and
traveling by yourself.

~~~
soperj
And yet people in Europe do it every day. They just have different kinds of
bicycles, like a bakfiets. Which you can put pretty well anything in. I've
done 2 kids and a stroller easily.

------
niftich
As others have said, driving really isn't a choice in much of the US, but
rather an artifact of finding a residence with desirable attributes (price,
size, form-factor, noise level, green space, school zone) in the same metro as
one's workplace. Just as the article notes that framing driving with
moralistic terms is a recipe for ruin, so is framing it as a conscious choice
on parts of perfectly average people who "decide" to _drive_ to work that day.
So quit focusing on driving -- driving isn't the problem, despite the
pollution deaths, despite car crashes, despite whatever evil cars and trucks
bring upon the world -- they're tools, like just like fossil fuel power plants
and oil refineries and other terribly unpleasant things that enable a modern,
globalized, distributed, and hyper-specialized society.

As this and other articles find, driving is a symptom of land use, but car-
centric suburbia was not build _because_ of cars, but merely enabled by them.
Greenfield land has many perks, not the least the lack of pre-existing baggage
like badly configured buildings, under-sized streets, and aging underground
infrastructure. In the US, this wave was helped by white flight and the
increased demand after WWII, but demographically homogeneous countries in
Central and Eastern Europe are going through a wave of suburbanization right
now, driven solely by income inequality. I've said it before [1], as car
suburbs are aging themselves, they're becoming worse places to live, which
makes it harder to pay for their upkeep, and those who can afford to move move
either further out to brand new exurbs that have a better balance of
commercial vs. residential, or back to revitalizing urban cores, leaving only
those who can't afford to leave.

Capitalism works within the same metro too; local governments compete against
each other for businesses and residents. The low-populated outskirts are often
at risk for annexation by a nearby town, so they can instead incorporate
themselves to capture local tax base and keep it from paying for "somebody
else". There is no free lunch and income is redistributed either way: either
the city annexes a far-flung reach of greenfield land to build some high-
profit industrial park to help pay for the city's aging infrastructure or its
attempts to gentrify, or the local residents organize into smaller and smaller
independent municipalities that focus on fostering the character of the
particular neighborhood while keeping the tax income closer to the site, but
fragmenting the metro into entities that compete for the same dollars. This is
fundamentally an economic problem, one that's not _driven_ by regulation and
NIMBY, but mostly by average people looking to maximize their self-interest
for 5-to-15-years at a time, but much longer if they're unlucky.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11880084#11880937](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11880084#11880937)

------
aanm1988
> Many people—transit boosters, cyclists, planners, environmentalists, safety
> advocates—look at the end result of all this, and understandably reach the
> conclusion that cars are the enemy. The overriding policy question, then,
> becomes: “How do we get people out of their cars?”

Many people live in their own version of reality. One where no one lives with
kids in the suburbs. Where stores just get their products airdropped or
something. Where it's not cold and snowing large chunks of the year.

I'm all for more walkable/bikeable cities, and public transit is good too. I
just feel like so many of these people arguing just live in a totally
different world.

------
Hermel
> Travel monitoring firm Inrix reported that in 2008, the 3 percent decline in
> vehicle miles traveled led to a 30 percent decline in traffic congestion.

Does that also mean that increasing street capacity by 3% would lead to a 30%
reduction in congestion? That would sound like a worthwhile investment to me.

~~~
overlordalex
Interestingly the opposite occurs: increasing street capacity tends to lead to
more congestion.

Here is a Wired article that explains the problem:
[https://www.wired.com/2014/06/wuwt-traffic-induced-
demand/](https://www.wired.com/2014/06/wuwt-traffic-induced-demand/)

------
marcrosoft
Let's remove ourself from government dependence first please.

------
andy-x
Good roads are incentive to drive, let's destroy all roads then.

------
jasonmp85
<zoidberg>Why not both?</zoidberg>

~~~
wtallis
People who feel like they're being attacked won't listen to reasonable
arguments and explanations.

------
SFJulie
American drivers used to be demonized for 3 years, and it gave outstanding
results: it seems that without moral incentive and ethic considerations the
driving problem does not find a solution magically without frictions.

PS most efficient ways of using cars that "worked" in USA (WWII) were about
demonizing the privatization of cars and make it a common.

When you ride alone you ride with Hitler:
[http://www.learnnc.org/lp/multimedia/13293](http://www.learnnc.org/lp/multimedia/13293)

Patriotic "saving gas" poster [http://gonzalocamacho.com/wp-
content/uploads/2015/09/ww2ride...](http://gonzalocamacho.com/wp-
content/uploads/2015/09/ww2rideshare-14.jpg)

Help with the war squeeze one more [http://gonzalocamacho.com/wp-
content/uploads/2015/09/ww2ride...](http://gonzalocamacho.com/wp-
content/uploads/2015/09/ww2rideshare-15.jpg)

Another propaganda poster on cars [http://gonzalocamacho.com/wp-
content/uploads/2015/09/ww2ride...](http://gonzalocamacho.com/wp-
content/uploads/2015/09/ww2rideshare-11.jpg)

Save the food [http://gonzalocamacho.com/wp-
content/uploads/2015/09/ww2ride...](http://gonzalocamacho.com/wp-
content/uploads/2015/09/ww2rideshare-20.jpg)

List of WWII USA poster for conservation
[http://gonzalocamacho.com/2015/09/](http://gonzalocamacho.com/2015/09/)

WWII was won partly due to the USA production effort and notably thanks to the
change of behaviour of citizens accepting to (temporally) adopt a more
conservating and frugal way of life.

So, the point is: american citizens can do it, because they already did it.
What is lacking is for them to reproduce this is their own government to
literally shame them into correct behaviours like kids. Which is depressing.

Is a new war required for USA to stop being the biggest contributor per capita
to the global warming effect? [http://www.english-
online.at/environment/copenhagen-climate-...](http://www.english-
online.at/environment/copenhagen-climate-
summit/co2%20emissions%20per%20country.gif)

------
gydfi
No actual numbers. After registration fees, fuel taxes, et cetera, to what
extent are drivers actually being subsidised?

Let us assume that roads need to exist anyway.

~~~
apsec112
False equivalence fallacy. Every country has roads, but Tokyo-style roads are
a hell of a lot cheaper to build and maintain than American roads, where every
city is a maze of six-lane highways intersecting ten-lane highways.

------
JohanGB
What viable alternatives are there to cars in large countries like the United
States, where it is not feasible to create the infrastructure for public
transportation?

~~~
wtallis
What does size have to do with anything? This is a discussion of _density_.
It's a foregone conclusion in discussions like this that the proposed changes
probably won't apply to places like Wyoming, but that's not the kind of
environment that most Americans live in.

~~~
JohanGB
I understand that this is mainly a discussion about density, but the US is
super diverse in its population densities. I was just curious because I happen
to live in a very rural area, but if you travel 30 minutes you would be in the
most densely populated area of my state. Correct me if I'm wrong, but most of
these increased fees would be implemented at the state level and could
seriously impact those that live _close_ to dense population centers, but have
no available transportation other than cars.

~~~
wtallis
If you live _close_ to the population center but not actually in it, then
you're probably highly reliant on its services. How far do you drive to buy
groceries? Aren't you contributing to the congestion and pollution of the city
every time you make the trip into town? Why _shouldn 't_ you have to bear some
of their infrastructure costs, instead of just leeching off the city's tax
base?

Where I live (East coast) the counties are too small to cover the whole region
of people who make daily use of the city. We don't really have an
appropriately sized regional government to fully address the matter with any
methods other than toll roads.

~~~
ars
> Aren't you contributing to the congestion and pollution of the city

Obviously it would be better if no one came to the city, right? They should be
deserted with no people?

> Why shouldn't you have to bear some of their infrastructure costs, instead
> of just leeching off the city's tax base?

You keep acting like people going to the city are hurting it, they are not.
They are helping it - cities should do all they can to attract people from all
over, not just those inside the city.

To the city, the roads they build to make it possible are well worth the
investment.

~~~
wtallis
> You keep acting like people going to the city are hurting it, they are not.
> They are helping it - cities should do all they can to attract people from
> all over, not just those inside the city.

Take a look at a typical suburban shopping center. The stores are single-story
buildings and yet there's still significantly more acreage devoted to parking
than to the store itself. Yes, it's good for the economy of a city when people
from outlying areas commute in for work and shopping. But there's a huge
opportunity cost when you size all your infrastructure to accommodate a car
for every commuter and then render the city so inaccessible to pedestrians
that most of the city's residents also need to get cars and the roads and
parking lots need to be expanded even more to accommodate that. If those
commuters were coming in to the city by public transit or driving their cars
to a parking deck and carrying out their business mostly on foot, they'd
provide the same economic benefit to the city as a whole without making the
urban lifestyle impossible and requiring even the minimum-wage shop employees
to own a car.

The commuters aren't the problem. Their cars are.

~~~
ars
The stores geared for pedestrians are usually much much smaller, and people
buy a lot less at a time and have less selection.

I personally never shop in such stores, I hate them for being overpriced and
never having what I want. They have them in my area - a whole street of them,
and I could walk to them, but I never do. I prefer to drive to the larger
stores that I find FAR more useful. I fill up my car with FAR FAR FAR more
groceries than I could possibly carry by any other method, except perhaps
taxi.

> But there's a huge opportunity cost

Hardly. The stores are not interchangeable. I find the stores you like to be
useless, and I would never live in a place where that's all they had.

> they'd provide the same economic benefit to the city as a whole

They would not. Typical purchase amounts are not even close. And you would
need a lot more stores to cover the same amount of merchandise as those large
stores, but of course a lot of small stores is far less efficient than a few
larger ones.

I would have to shop every day in your world (no thank you), and I would spend
more since I could not buy in bulk. I would probably have a smaller house, so
I could not store in bulk either.

> Their cars are.

So your plan is for people to take public transit for 2 hours, every day, to
buy small amounts of groceries, only what they could carry home on public
transit?

And what kind of public transit could serve rural areas anyway?

~~~
Rapzid
I hear you. I think places like Phoenix, Dallas/Fort Worth, Houston, San
Antonio.. Well, just about most of the US would absolutely blow the minds of a
lot of the commenters here. The way a lot are talking is like they have no
concept of the massive suburban sprawl of the DFW metroplex with very few
"downtown" areas to speak of.


Is URL submission via bookmarklet broken? - joshwa

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitlink?u=http%3A%2F%2Fbrockerhoff.net%2Fbb%2Fviewtopic.php%3Fp%3D2417%232417&t=Solipsism%20Gradient
The title keeps going into the URL field, and then when I submit, I keep getting redirected to news.ycombinator.com/mismatch, with the message:
"Dead link: users don't match."
Submission via http://news.ycombinator.com/submit works fine.
======
pg
Oops, something does look broken. Will fix.

~~~
pg
Fixed; sorry.

~~~
joshwa
Thanks!

------
nreece
Yeah it seems to be broken.


Guide to Programming Clojure For Beginners - swannodette
http://blackstag.com/blog.posting?id=5

======
jcromartie
There's a need for good Clojure tutorials for beginners. I have a whole lot of
technical nitpicks with the content, but this is a good start and a good thing
for the Clojure community. Great work.

~~~
mark_l_watson
I hope that you give the author a list of things to fix, etc. I write a lot
and I can tell you that authors really appreciate feedback and corrections.

~~~
blackstag
Agreed. ;)

I am no expert by any means, so feedback is always welcome and I am always
looking to improve.

~~~
hoprocker
Do I get an hexidecimal dollar? ;)

------
sramsay
So, I wanted to start a blog. But then I discovered that all blogging
platforms suck, so I decided to write my own. Then I decided that all
programming languages suck, so I had to learn a new one to write my blog.

I would say Lisp's world domination plan is coming along swimmingly.

~~~
rfrey
C'mon, be gentle - he said a big reason to write a new blogging platform was
to learn the new language. That's legit - dunno how many file system browsers
I have lurking around my archives for the same reason.

~~~
sramsay
Yeah, just kidding. It struck me as funny, because it's exactly the kind of
thing hackers do (including me -- and I'm also a big Lisp/Clojure nut).

As far as I can tell, this is more-or-less exactly how TAOCP was written.

------
jrheard
In Chrome, zooming in on this website makes the layout wider, but the text
stays the same size. This is slightly inconvenient.

Thanks for the guide, though! Bookmarked.

~~~
blackstag
I hadn't noticed this. Thank you - I'll need to take a look.

~~~
roryokane
The culprit seems to be “-webkit-text-size-adjust:none” set for all elements
at the top of blog.css.

~~~
blackstag
Fixed & Thanks. I put that in for viewing on the iPad, but forgot to target
the iPad only. ^_^

------
dusklight
I don't know if this is the right time to be introducing clojure to beginners
yet. The language is still undergoing some basic fundamental changes. If you
look at 1.3 there is so much that is different and breaks stuff from 1.2 and
before. Right now the main strength of clojure is that the only people using
it are the people who are good enough at shipping real software to understand
why it's worth the trouble. I would hate for it to become the next fashionable
"me too" language like Ruby and get punished by being stuck with supporting
too many newbies.

Ruby got stuck at 1.8.6 for so long because it was really difficult to
introduce code breaking changes in new versions, due to the number of people
who were already using it. It would be better to evangelize clojure after the
clojure/core team is closer to finalizing the language design and has shifted
focus to performance and growing the ecosystem.

~~~
swannodette
Having survived the transitions from pre-1.0 -> 1.0 -> 1.1 -> 1.2 -> 1.3,
there's been surprisingly little in the way of breakage, usually just a bit of
search and replace.

~~~
technomancy
The changes in 1.3 (which honestly should have been called 2.0) have caused a
lot of upheval to people using the alpha releases. Even things as basic as
ring-devel were broken. But new users should have enough sense to stick with
the stable releases. Now that 1.3 has entered beta the number of libraries
that remain unpatched are few and far between. It's the folks who are using
git master in the middle of the release cycle who are feeling the pain, not
the newbies.

------
praptak
A possible improvement to the tutorial would be a part of how to work with
code stored in files. If I haven't missed anything, the current version seems
solely REPL-based.

On the other hand this would into the IDE territory which maybe something that
the author intentionally avoided.


Healthcare.gov will soon be hosted by HP rather than Verizon - sgloutnikov
http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/27/5153226/hp-takes-over-healthcare-gov-web-hosting-duties

======
benologist
Rewrite of
[http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230356290...](http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303562904579224491970912988)

------
us0r
$38 million contract.

TripAdvisor spends $1.3 million per year on hosting.


Show HN: Paid, an API for invoicing - ryanwjackson
https://www.paidapi.com

======
Animats
It's just an invoicing program. There are lots of those. Intuit's is widely
used. Oracle is also in that business. There's "Anytime Collect", "Zencash",
"Esker", "Celtrino". and many others.

The more advanced players support electronic data interchange (EDI), where
your accounts receivable system connects to the buyer's accounts payable
system. Many large companies require EDI for suppliers who generate a lot of
invoices, so they aren't re-entering invoice data into their own systems.[1]
Any new system should have EDI interchange with at least all Fortune 1000
companies.

There are "gateway" companies which handle talking to large numbers of other
companies.[2] Once you get this all working, your invoice goes out to the
gateway, the gateway formats it and sends it to the paying company, the paying
company's systems validate the bill, and they do a funds transfer to your bank
account, which is matched to another EDI transaction indicating payment. For
most routine transactions, there's no human intervention.

Make that all work for small/medium businesses, and you have a unique product.

The API is "dead simple" because it doesn't handle any of the hard cases. Like
"We ordered 1000 but 200 didn't arrive. We're paying for only 800".

[1] [http://www.aepedi.com/apay.htm](http://www.aepedi.com/apay.htm) [2]
[http://www.b2bgateway.net/](http://www.b2bgateway.net/)

~~~
sleepyhead
"Paid is a simple API" and you are comparing to Oracle?

"Paid is a simple API" but yet you "Many large companies require EDI"?

"It's just an invoicing program." aka "Instagram is just a photo sharing app".
Btw invoicing programs aren't trivial (speaking of experience). Even when
looking at basic features it is still about actual money.

------
xrstf
I really like the clean API docs, well done! Did you build it on your own or
is that some REST doc framework?

The only thing I was missing from the API (maybe those are there but left out
in the docs, which would be totally fine) are links between your resources (to
make it a bit more actual REST). You already more promimently documented the
usecase ("create an invoice") instead of listing URL endpoints, but with links
between the resources, the API becomes even more discoverable for new
developers.

Oh, one more minor thing: "Paid uses UTC unix timestamps for all dates and
times." \-- I was under the impression that unix timestamps are always UTC
anyway (i.e. it's defined as "seconds since 1970-01-01 UTC")? If I'm wrong,
please correct me :)

~~~
ryanwjackson
The docs are an awesome repo by TripIt
([https://github.com/tripit/slate](https://github.com/tripit/slate)). They
aren't perfect, but they get you pretty far pretty quickly.

Not sure what you mean by "links between your resources." Have an example? May
be there (or we can build it if not).

Correct on Unix time. Just being extra redundant.

~~~
xrstf
Roy says[1] that to be truly RESTful, your resources (documents) need to be
linked between each other, just like HTML pages. There are no definite
standards yet (that I'm aware of), but JSON HAL[1] seems to be on the IETF
standards track to be the one solution we settle on (just like we "settled on"
<a href> in HTML). See also [3] for a broader overview on links in JSON and
[4] for more information on resource linking and stuff in general.

[1] [http://roy.gbiv.com/untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-
hyperte...](http://roy.gbiv.com/untangled/2008/rest-apis-must-be-hypertext-
driven)

[2]
[http://stateless.co/hal_specification.html](http://stateless.co/hal_specification.html)

[3]
[https://www.mnot.net/blog/2011/11/25/linking_in_json](https://www.mnot.net/blog/2011/11/25/linking_in_json)

[4]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HATEOAS](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HATEOAS)

~~~
jerven
What about JSON-LD and linked data platform. At least JSON-LD comes from the
W3C Web payement workgroup

~~~
xrstf
I haven't looked into the available techniques for a few months. JSON HAL
works fine for me for now. ;)

------
tarr11
This is pretty cool. So, I am using Stripe, which is great, but has a few
drawbacks right now. I'm also using churnbuster, which is nice (does your
"chase" feature do what they do?)

Here's my problems:

1\. Some of my customers pay by check

2\. Sometimes my customers have an out of date credit card, or haven't given
it to me yet, and Stripe won't let me change their subscription to one that
charges them.

3\. I occasionally do both charges, credits and invoiceitems for in Stripe

4\. I have written a lot of Stripe specific code, and would prefer to
gradually try out your solution (it might not work, no offense) Can I try it
out without moving completely over?

~~~
ryanwjackson
1\. Many of our customers get paid by checks. We receive checks for some of
them, and our goal is to make as easy as possible to reconcile those payments.

2\. If your customer's card is out of date, we prompt the customer to update
their card and store it back to Stripe for you.

3\. You aren't alone. Some customers use us for pieces of their transaction
volume (i.e. only the invoiced customers or only customer paying via ACH)

4\. A la #3, you can send us a portion or all. We're also happy to help you
get started. It's free to get set up, so you can try it out. We also provide a
test environment so you can play around with it as much as you want.

Feel free to always shoot us an email at hello@paidapi.com.!

------
minimaxir
It should be noted that this is a pivot of a failed YC startup:
[http://blog.shoptheorem.com/post/109312542795/an-end-and-
a-b...](http://blog.shoptheorem.com/post/109312542795/an-end-and-a-beginning)

~~~
oh_sigh
Why should that be noted?

~~~
minimaxir
There's no About page or any context to the team and qualifications for
running a high-responsibility service, so this is the only information
available about the quality of the platform.

~~~
oh_sigh
Before reading that comment, it should be noted that minimaxir has been
rejected from Stanford.

------
brettcvz
Are there any companies who are using this currently? Can anyone speak to how
it's working for them?

~~~
joncalhoun
We (nomadbits.com) have been using it and everything has been great so far.

We help companies with APIs improve their developer onboarding process, which
means we invoice both monthly services (like creating and maintaining high
quality API libraries), as well as one-off consulting (like updating
documentation and creating "Getting Started" guides), and Paid has been great
for both use cases.

Do you have any specific questions?

 __Full Disclosure __\- Paid is a customer of ours as well, so we may be
slightly biased :D

------
marquis
How does this compare with something like Xero?

~~~
edmack
It's really quick to start using. It's like a mashup of Segment and Stripe,
you just start pinging events and it starts getting you money.

~~~
marquis
Could you integrate it with Xero? (Rather than relying on Zapier)

~~~
mikeknoop
I'd love to hear why you don't want to rely on Zapier for this, any feedback?

~~~
marquis
Some of the APIs we use break often with Zapier (not Zapier's fault). It's
easier to have direct integration and let the vendor deal with it.

------
rpedela
I don't see a "security" page. Did I miss it?

------
lostsock
Is there support for multiple currencies? Could I use this from Australia to
invoice clients in multiple currencies (e.g. USD, AUD, CAD GBP)?

~~~
AdamRoberts
Not yet. Started with USD, but hoping to expand that offering soon.

------
deluvas
I'm curious, on the technical side, what stack/technologies have you used?
Also, did you scaffold the typical crud endpoints or manually wrote them, for
each resource?

I'm trying to gain experience in building APIs and yours seems like a good
model for doing so :)

------
pehaada
Do they actually process charges? I can't find a cost / transaction and a %
taken.

~~~
AdamRoberts
We use whatever payment processor you us. So, for example, you'd connect your
Stripe account and we process all credit cards using that account. Our pricing
is at www.paidapi.com/pricing and based of the revenue tracked/invoiced.

~~~
BallinBige
are u the gateway?

------
cannikin
Does the laptop in the splash photo bother anyone else? It looks like they
photoshopped the keyboard to be much shorter. Look how tall the screen is,
then imagine you folded that down to meet the keyboard. That's no laptop I've
ever seen!

~~~
clogston
The whole image is being stretched vertically in CSS ("background-size: 104%
160%;"). You can see the same distortion on the man's arm, the phone, and the
pencil holder.

Definitely a "once seen, can't unsee" type of thing but I'll admit I didn't
notice it initially. :)

------
javiramos
Useful useful!


DIY, Outsource, Partner... How should I approach creation? - jaypreneur

Hi all. I come here for some advice. Like plenty of others, I have an idea for an internet business. I know that an idea isn't worth much though if you don't act on it and execute. So, I've been trying my hardest to do what I can. I'm not technical, but I've been been working in all the ways I know how and learning what I don't.
I've developed the idea, asked potential customers questions, got feedback. I know it has potential. So, I designed the website wireframe, business model, marketing model, logo...
But now comes the time where something useable needs to be created. I can show potential customers a wireframe and ask them questions, but until they actually show they are willing to use (and pay) for it, I know I don't have any real traction.
I come here asking for advice on how I should approach creation. There seem to be three approaches:
1. Do it yourself
2. Outsource
3. Find a co-founder
Now, I am determined to learn to the technical side regardless. I've started on that journey, tackling HTML, CSS, and Javascript. I'm no expert, but I understand. I want to go after PHP as well. However, I know I don't have time to be professionally proficient in a reasonable time. It won't stop me from learning, but I'm not sure if it's the smartest way to approach this. But please, tell me if I'm wrong. I don't underestimate the amount of work/experience needed to be a great coder though... so I don't expect to be good enough in a few months.
In regards to outsourcing, I have a good amount of money saved, enough to hopefully create something. However, that something might not even be close to the end goal... and then what? What about when customers ask for more? What about maintenance? What if I do go to investors and it's just me... sure, I consider myself valuable on both the business and design end of things, but with no one to cover the technical aspects, who will want to invest? Which brings me to...
Finding a technical co-founder. I'm from NYC and plan on going to some startup meetings I've found out about. However, I know this is a scary proposition as well. For one, I have nothing created, so will anyone want to even come on board? Then I guess I need to assess options 1 & 2.
I just am looking for some guidance here. I'm at this standstill and I feel overwhelmed with all the options and just pick a direction and go. If that's outsource and then find a technical co-founder once something is implemented, then I'll tackle outsourcing now. If it's DIY, then pick up my pace (hell, quit my job, live at home and make studying and creating my new job) so I can get things going. If it's find a technical co-founder, than go out there and prove myself.
Anyway, I apologize for the length of this post, but I guess I have a lot on my mind here. But any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
======
dlf
Check out this blog from one of the founders of Yipit, starting here:
[http://viniciusvacanti.com/2010/09/07/guide-to-finding-a-
tec...](http://viniciusvacanti.com/2010/09/07/guide-to-finding-a-technical-co-
founder/)

Also, hack! Not just code, but think of ways to validate product-market fit
without actually having to build the whole damn thing. Set up a landing page
with a button or two that mimics the feature you want to test. If someone
clicks on it, at least you'll know there's interest. If not, no big deal.
Assuming they click on it, instead of sending a 404 error, put something like
"We're building [description of awesome, world changing web app]. If you want
to be one of the very first users and brag to all your friends about how in
the know you are, sign up below." Then just put a nice tidy email field with a
big ole' submit button. Done. You've proven people want what you're building
and you have a list of emails of people you know will use your product once
you've built it. Use that to convince some superstar to become your technical
cofounder.

Startup Weekends and that sort of thing are a great way to meet potential
cofounders as well, where people share their idea for a startup, form teams
and hack all weekend. Whatever you do, don't waste your money on outsourcing,
especially at this point. Startups are a long road. Get out to events, get to
know people, and share what you're working on (no one is going to steal your
idea). Good luck!

~~~
jaypreneur
Thanks! That's a great link.

I will take that idea regarding a landing page heart. Especially considering
it's something I can manage to put together myself. Perhaps even throw a
"comments" field for suggestions on what features customers would want? I
could even respond to said customers personally in regards to their
comments/suggestions. Let me know if you think going that far would be
beneficial or bothersome to potential customers (I personally would like that
type of attention as a customer).

Anyway, sounds good about not outsourcing. I won't bother with that,
especially since my website cannot be implemented properly without a
significant amount of time and effort... and therefore, money. I feel as if
just a landing page with email and suggestion form would be 100 times more
useful than some minimally featured, half-assed version of a website I paid
for. Since that website might actually end up turning people away.

Any advice in regards to startup events? For instance, there is one in NYC on
October 11. I will go, but I won't know anyone. Now, I'm decently outgoing, so
I'll try to introduce myself, but should I try to contact people before
attending? Then at least I'll have someone to meet and it won't be as
difficult. I don't know.

I understand it's a long road. But it's exciting.

Thanks for the luck. I'll be trying my hardest to ensure success. We'll see
what happens.

~~~
dlf
No problem. Regarding the landing page, just keep it dead simple. The more
stuff you add, the higher your bounce rate (people will leave). Just test some
minimum feature. You can always follow up with an email with a link to a
survey, which you can build on Survey Monkey or something (there may be
better/cheaper tools).

For startup events, I would say just go and strike up some conversations.
People are generally helpful and will share their experiences. It's a good way
to learn. Speaking of, when I was first learning about startups I listened to
the podcasts at the Stanford E- Corner basically non-stop:
<http://ecorner.stanford.edu/>

I would consider studying Eric Ries and Steve Blank as well regarding "lean
startups". "Four Steps to the Epiphany" and "The Lean Startup" are books worth
spending the money on.

It's good that you're in NYC. There's a strong community there.

Cheers!

~~~
jaypreneur
Another great resource with that ecorner link and book recommendations,
thanks. I've already got the books on my kindle now.

I will keep the landing page simple. Although, I'm not testing a feature with
the landing page, but more the concept... to see the interest and perhaps even
get suggestions based on what potential customers want.

Quick question in regards to the landing page for you (or anyone else reading
this thread):

Would it work to have successive landing pages?

Essentially, the first is signing up to show interest for those who want to
get notifications, be part of future testing and perhaps give suggestions.

Once you have submitted your email address, there will be a confirmation page.
For those willing to go a step further, I'd have an additional CTA, linking
you to a short survey.

I know that having both on the first landing page would probably deter people
from signing up in the first place. Yet is having the survey on the
confirmation page going to guarantee no one will answer the survey?

Just looking for some conventional wisdom on landing pages. That's the best
approach I could think of, but I'm open to advice/suggestions. Thanks!

~~~
dlf
Hey. I tried to respond yesterday but it didn't post for some reason.
Successive landing pages is a decent idea. Try to get out and do some surveys
in person too. The response rate is higher in person. My cofounder and I
gathered 30 responses in the space of two hours by getting out with pen and
paper. Our online survey, shared on Facebook and Twitter, got 20 responses in
4 days... not too good. Now, people who actually submit their email address
are probably fairly likely to go ahead and do a survey, but there's nothing
better than getting out and talking to people. Users stop being anonymous and
you can put faces, ages and occupations on those you're building a product
for. It's strangely motivating.

Don't say anything on the first landing page about future testing and giving
suggestions. I would use that email list solely for the purposes of notifying
once the product is launched. Don't send anything to those emails until after
the product is launched. It's sort of "the boy who cried wolf" thing. People
only want to hear from you when there's actually something they can use. Also,
people hate spam and you don't want them to start blocking and deleting your
emails without reading them because then they'll never know when you actually
launched.

Give your survey takers the option to sign up for future surveys by having an
email field at the end of the survey.

~~~
jaypreneur
Thanks for the suggestions on in-person surveys. I will definitely do that.
I've asked various people (family, friends, friends of friends, and others I
feel are potential customers), but I think it'd be a good idea to get a formal
survey out there. I'll be doing that soon for sure.

Also, I really like the idea of putting another email input to sign up for
future surveys. So that I can get the emails of those who are interested for
launch and those who want to be a part of the process.

Seriously, thanks for the help!


Things people would still buy even if the price doubled - jkuria
https://capitalandgrowth.org/answers/2981212/What-are-some-things-you-would-keep-buying-even-if-the-price-doubled
======
ta17711771
FTA: Water.

Whether its the Bush family in Central and/or S America, Harvard with
California vineyards, or the Walton family in Colorado, everyone with money
(read: with advisors/paid insight) is buying land with water rights.

Fury Road.


Google cannibalizing their assets? Isn’t it a bit early for that? - joop
http://thenextweb.com/2008/12/02/google-cannibalizing-their-assets-isnt-it-a-bit-early-for-that/

======
jerf
They know that only a fraction of the user base will ever use it (because they
certainly won't ship with it, anymore than Firefox does). They know people
shutting off ads aren't clicking anyhow. They know that the people savvy
enough to use the ad blocker are also the leading edge people who recommend
browsers to other people.

Finally... how would they block ad blockers, even if they wanted to? Ad-
blocking proxies are just as feasible as ever. And Chrome is supposed to be
open source.

Conclusion: Instead of fighting what you can't fight, roll with it, get the
leading edge people on your side, then cash in on the marketshare of the
masses who don't block ads.

It's not really that mysterious... unless you're trapped in first-order
thinking.

------
jrockway
_a few months ago we visited an Internet start-up where the CEO told us a
funny story of how one of his developers used an Ad Blocker. He took the
developer aside and explained to him that their whole business, his company
and his salary depended on income on ads. He explained to the developer that
if he wanted to work in this business it would be odd to fight the economic
systems that pay for your food. The developer ended up removing the ad
blocker._

This is some of the worst writing I've read in a while. Good work. (What
exactly is funny about this story? Employee does something, boss says no,
employee complies. I guess the funny part is that the employee is wiling to
work for a micro-manager like this "CEO"?)

Anyway, I used to work for an ad company. We all blocked ads. Ads are annoying
and ugly, and we were not our company's revenue source, so it didn't matter.

I am looking forward to an IE release that blocks Google ads, and a Chrome
release the blocks non-Google ads. That will be very fun to watch.

------
BenS
I think Google knows the success of Chrome depends on the plugin community.
The open support of AdBlock is a signal that Google will prioritize user
interests over everything else.

Seems like a smart move to me -- getting Chrome out is strategically important
-- browser diversification mitigates bigger risks, such as MS pushing a
default ad blocker through ie; and helps them raise the bar on all browsers
(esp. js rendering) to make their web apps run better.

~~~
smwhreyebelong
Well, I would think it's safe to assume that most people who have Google
Chrome are trailblazers in the online world and probably don't click on a lot
of ads and make them money anyway. Also, looking at the browser statistics
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers>) Google Chrome is
just about 0.74% of the browser market.

Right now it's important for them to get Chrome on more computers. It will be
interesting to see if this strategy changes when Chrome starts getting more
traction.

------
ntoshev
What are some examples of companies cannibalizing their own business and
suffering because of that? Has it ever happened?

~~~
nostrademons
Sun, perhaps, with Java. Business-wise, it makes very little sense for a
company that makes expensive proprietary hardware to develop a programming
language that lets you write once and run anywhere.

The connection is pretty tenuous though - Linux may've eaten Sun's lunch
anyway. But it would've been a little harder if we had to port all our
#ifdef'd C++ software from Sun servers to commodity Linux Dell boxes, instead
of just moving a few JAR files over.

~~~
teej
I'm still not seeing that connection, as it lowered the barriers to entry of
using their product and gave them the platform to say "we have the best
hardware for running Java".

~~~
nostrademons
It lowered the barriers to entry for using everybody else's product too,
though. I think it probably helped other people more than Sun, though. IIRC,
the Sparc had a pretty advanced development environment in the mid-90s, yet
developing on/for a Linux system in the same time period was pretty painful.

And they said "we have the best hardware for running Java", but the average
business doesn't care. They just want their software to run, cheaply and fast.
Everybody I know runs their Java apps on commodity Dell servers. Maybe it was
different in the first dot-com boom; IIRC, Sun servers were the big thing back
then.

------
josefresco
What's the install base for AdBlock on Firefox?

I don't think Google has anything to worry about, only the geeky are going to
block ads (and invite all the headaches involved in doing so)

As a web designer, I need to see the web as my customer does, which means I
don't use AdBlock or Greasemonkey etc.

------
TrevorJ
Makes perfect sense. Somebody will be providing an ad blocker no matter what.
If it is Google then they get to control how it works, why it works and when
it works.

~~~
justindz
I instead thought "Other browsers will have ad blockers, so there are people
who won't use Chrome if it doesn't have one." Implying that Google might
consider that market segment and the browser strategy pretty darn important.
Just a different take.

~~~
gills
I think I agree with you. As an outsider Chrome looks like an application
platform/sandbox for Google apps ('Google's AIR') that is just disguised as a
browser. With their own platform they can move features more quickly than by
fitting the apps into whatever box Apple/MS/Mozilla build. It could be the
early MS playbook all over again. So...

Build whichever browser components remove barriers to entry for users (ad
block, compatibility with many existing web apps, better
performance/stability/ease of use, etc.) => build widespread adoption =>
commoditize desktop operating systems.

------
alexandros
products of large companies traditionally suffer by having to strategically
support other products of the same company. This is a major reason why
products of large companies often get beaten by products of smaller uncommited
ones. If Google has truly decided not to go this route with Chrome (or any of
its products), I think is pretty great.

------
redorb
The next big step for chrome would be if it could use any firefox plugin ;) I
know its almost an oxymoron.

~~~
jrockway
Firefox extensions use too much of Firefox's internals to be portable to
another browser. That's why extensions often break between minor releases of
Firefox.

If you want portability, write a user script (greasemonkey), not an extension.

------
llimllib
I think, people who write, should perhaps, and want, read just the basics
about grammar, and how to use, commas.


Show HN: A startup idea in your inbox, every day - jonnygoodwin
https://www.startupsfromthebottom.com/
======
jonnygoodwin
Thanks for checking out Startups From The Bottom, a free newsletter where
you'll receive a startup idea every day. This is a side project that a friend
and I started.

Just a little disclaimer about this service: Creating a startup is not just a
matter of implementing some fabulous initial idea. An initial idea is just a
starting point. That's it. It should not be an assertion of the final product.
After testing and iterating, most startups don't end up anything like the
initial idea. The point of this newsletter is to get you thinking. To
encourage you to start. Don't get hung up on the idea. Pick one and start.

------
jessiebbs
I couldn't find a privacy policy. What do I agree to if I submit my email?


Ask HN: 84 cents per month? - ParameterOne
If your favorite free app started to charge you $.84 a month would you get rid of it?
======
19eightyfour
Not necessarily get rid of. But I would wonder how they could afford the
transaction fees on 84c monthly transactions instead of fewer larger
transactions.

~~~
ParameterOne
probably something like paypal micro-payments

~~~
19eightyfour
Interesting had not heard of that.


Show HN: Extract main ideas in your texts with SummarizeBot - postagger
https://www.summarizebot.com/
======
michaelmior
> Hi, I am AI and Blockchain-Powered SummarizeBot!

I assume the expected reaction is "Cool! They use blockchain." My reaction is
moreso, "What on earth does this have to do with blockchain?"

> We apply decentralized architecture to train and test our AI models. Using
> blockchain technology helps us not only to get more training data but also
> to improve the trustworthiness of our algorithms.

I still don't understand what this has to do with blockchain.

~~~
libdjml
> I still don't understand what this has to do with blockchain.

Funding from VCs?

~~~
codegeek
True story. I met a guy who was looking for a tech co-founder and had an idea
that will use blockchain. I challenged him on the reason behind the use of
blockchain and he literally said "Investors like to hear buzzwords and at this
time, I am looking to raise funding". His idea wasn't bad but he couldn't
justify using blockchain to implement it. I pressed him further and asked if
he was willing to implement the idea without blockchain and he just wasn't
interested. he said "blockchain is the hot thing right now and I want to build
this using blockchain". So in other words, it was more important for him that
blockchain was used than focussing on the actual idea.

~~~
adtac
Honestly, that's hysterical even for HBO's Silicon Valley. As someone who has
never lived in or experienced Silicon Valley, I always assumed the show was a
bit of an exaggeration. But people like this are proof that it's not. It's a
documentary with a comedic element.

~~~
miketery
Assume not, many of the moments in the show have been lived by myself and
others. More so - I think the reality is that the truth goes even further than
the fictional works we see.

------
txcwpalpha
A couple thoughts:

1\. Summarizing entire bodies of text down into "bite-sized" chunks isn't
inherently a good thing. It seems the main use case (and at least the one
suggested in the demo) is to be used for news articles. Now, I'm totally
understanding of the fact that not everyone has the time to read every news
article, but as it is, only reading part of the article (or more commonly,
only reading the headline) is a _huge_ issue with current consumption of
content. This attempt to further summarize articles into small, context-less
bites seems to be going in the wrong direction.

2\. On the demo page, there is a "Fake News Detection" feature. I threw a
couple of articles at it and it left me with so many questions I don't even
know where to begin. For a few articles, it just gave me a binary "Real:1 ,
Fake:0" output. For others, it spit out a couple of numbers for stats like
"conspiracy", "irony", "bias", "pseudoscience". Why are these the attributes
chosen to measure? How are they calculated? Is something like "irony" even
meaningful when trying to detect fake news?

Viewing the documentation section of the site, there is a small blurb claiming
that it uses "custom AI classifiers", "custom machine learning models trained
on fake and biased articles", and "database of trusted and biased websites
created by our experts" to calculate these numbers. AKA, there is absolutely
zero meaningful explanation as to how these numbers are calculated and why
they should be trusted. This entire feature is a complete black box, and for
all we know, the "database of trusted websites" could be created by Russian
spies trying to sow misinformation.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Here's a summarization I'd like (and would pay for[0]): chats. I mean IRC
logs, Slack & Telegram groupchat logs, etc. Between work and local
Hackerspace, people produce so much text on IM that I can't really keep up
with it. I'd love a solution that I could feed such chat logs, and get back
e.g. list of topics covered.

\--

[0] - as long as it wasn't a cloud SaaS where I have to share my data with
vendor's machines.

~~~
charris0
Totally agree, I tried to prototype this but the datasets to train ML
summarizations from are pretty much all from news articles. Trying to take
that model and summaries chats resulted in gibberish for me. The salient take-
aways from Chats and other non-factual / loosely structured text seems so
dependent on what _you_ care about, summarisation is difficult.

------
etaioinshrdlu
Is it abstractive or extractive?

What exactly does this have to do with blockchain?

The landing page is more marketing than technical and may not really be a good
fit for this site.

~~~
BjoernKW
From their "Technologies We Use" page (
[https://www.summarizebot.com/summarization_business.html#tec...](https://www.summarizebot.com/summarization_business.html#technology)
) I gather that they use a Blockchain for storing their training data and
language models.

In theory that makes the language models auditable and tamper-proof. I'm not
so sure about the supposed benefit of that, though. Yes, it means that the
model itself cannot be tampered with (in order to introduce bias to the
summaries, for instance) but as long as the algorithm itself remains closed
source you could still alter the results by for example boosting some values
while attributing less significance to others.

Simply publishing both the algorithm and the model as open source alongside
with an SHA-2 hash to make sure neither has been tampered with would achieve a
lot more in terms of reproducibility and trustworthiness.

Then again, they would've had one buzzword less in that case ...

~~~
therein
Right but you could also commit your changes to your model into a Git repo and
use the "blockchain" that Git provides.

When people say blockchain the meaning that there is a distributed consensus
comes into the picture. In this case, there is no reason for a distributed
consensus on ordering or anything.

But if you are suggesting there are many text parsers that train the model,
and there is a central modal that's held by the network state, sure. But I
don't know what's the benefit to that as I don't think simply training on more
text will allow this bot to produce better summaries.

------
anon1253
As others have mentioned, I have no idea what any of this has to do with
blockchain, or how it could even conceivably help with anything other than
riding a hype train. That being said, would be curious to see how it holds up
against the standard state of the art (e.g.
[https://github.com/sebastianruder/NLP-
progress/blob/master/e...](https://github.com/sebastianruder/NLP-
progress/blob/master/english/summarization.md)) as summarization (especially
the abstractive kind) is very hard, but also has a surprising amount of useful
applications

------
diegoperini
Is Show HN becoming more and more a "roast my buzzword aggregator project"
tool or is it my selection bias?

------
wj
I guess it is like that software that Yahoo bought from a 15 year-old that
summarized articles:

[https://gizmodo.com/yahoo-shutters-that-30-million-app-it-
bo...](https://gizmodo.com/yahoo-shutters-that-30-million-app-it-bought-from-
a-te-1796375197)

------
melicerte
This page. Summarized. For your consideration.

[https://www.summarizebot.com/api/378d4eec8d0e4ddeb8142c84433...](https://www.summarizebot.com/api/378d4eec8d0e4ddeb8142c84433b7afd.html)

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bryanrasmussen
What kind of a person writes enough that it becomes useful to summarize what
they write, but is incapable of summarizing what they have written so that a
summarizebot becomes useful to them?

~~~
proxygeek
It probably would be more helpful on the pull side rather than the push side
of the channel. Useful for consumption of content in certain situations by
certain segments of readers.

Say, someone scanning through a list of legal docs to identify the most
relevant ones. A short blurb would be pretty helpful.

~~~
bryanrasmussen
sure, I was obliquely referring to the headline - Extract main ideas in YOUR
texts... - seemed to prompt the question.

on edit: fixed misspelling, just woke up from nap.

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amelius
Are there any benchmarks for this kind of task, and how well does this tool
perform w.r.t. them?

~~~
team-o
In terms of measurement, there's ROUGE
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROUGE_(metric)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROUGE_\(metric\))
In this paper they discuss a few benchmarks in their introduction and describe
a new benchmark.
[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1808.08745.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1808.08745.pdf)

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abhisuri97
Idk about the blockchain stuff, but it is semi-featureful since it can extract
text from images (I'm assuming its just using Tesseract OCR. At least it could
get the text out of this
[http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/msword_...](http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_rasterization/msword_text_rendering.png)),
and I assume audio (but I am having difficulty testing it out). Tbh the
formats it accepts as well as the fact that it is available over messenger are
huge "selling" points for me and should be way more emphasized on the product
page than blockchain and AI.

------
ArtWomb
The end goal is wider distribution of content. Here, for example, are
summaries (json) of all 1008 academic papers accepted to NeurIPS 2018:

[https://github.com/contentinnovation/NeurIPS-2018-papers](https://github.com/contentinnovation/NeurIPS-2018-papers)

It would be really cool to be able to translate via ML high level AI progress
into standard American journalistic english. To some extent Bloomberg TicToc,
Jinri Toutiao are already generating short form video for breaking news
stories.

------
anotheryou
Why not have a paste text field for a quick demo on the landing page? Best
pre-filled (some cherry picking is ok :) ).

------
decentralised
I'd be curious to learn more about the use case for blockchain here.

For instance, Ocean Protocol plans to use TCRs for data quality, meaning that
data providers and data consumers evaluate the quality of a dataset in a
continuous way, so that certain assets can be moved up/ down the ranks in near
real time.

------
dominotw
can i see an example


Drupal Solr Next Gen - the refactoring - caludio
http://groups.drupal.org/node/92799

======
auxbuss
Like most folk, I've heard of Drupal. But I'd not heard of Solr. I read it as
"soir" and, not surprisingly, searching wasn't finding anything.

Anyway, for those, like me, who haven't heard of Solr, here's a brief
description and a couple of related links:

Solr is the popular, blazing fast open source enterprise search platform from
the Apache Lucene project. Its major features include powerful full-text
search, hit highlighting, faceted search, dynamic clustering, database
integration, and rich document (e.g., Word, PDF) handling. Solr is highly
scalable, providing distributed search and index replication, and it powers
the search and navigation features of many of the world's largest internet
sites.

<http://lucene.apache.org/solr/> <http://drupal.org/project/solr>