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"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

— Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

One of my all-time favorite essays is by the same author: "The Shape of Rome" —

https://www.exurbe.com/the-shape-of-rome/

- Do a quick mindfulness/breathing exercise.

Clearspace does exactly this:

https://www.getclearspace.com/#how-it-works

I've been using it for a month or two, with good results. Good luck!

Another nice write-up at NYTimes (gift):

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/19/technology/microsoft-quan...

When possible, they pick "control points" at places where there are usually no passengers on board — for example, the ends of a linear route, or the bus depot.

But otherwise, they have a bunch of optimizations to spread the pauses out so they aren't too jarring. They also display the timer prominently so that riders are aware of what's going on.

In practice, riders seem happy with the tradeoff, since it has resulted in overall lower times to get from point A to point B.

This phenomenon is called "bus bunching". My friends, two profs from Georgia Tech and UChicago, came up with one solution for it. They wrote a paper about their solution[1], and then built a startup that has successfully implemented it at a bunch of places[2].

[1]: [A self-coördinating bus route to resist bus bunching](https://doi.org/10.1016%2Fj.trb.2011.11.001)

[2]: [NAU’s new bus system makes for shorter wait times for riders](https://news.nau.edu/nau-bus-schedules/)

I very much wanted to believe this, but the study you linked to lists "Percent of national health expenditures for physician and clinical services: 19.8% (2015)".

What do you think accounts for the discrepancy between 3.12% and 19.8%?

PROTECT IP already has 41 sponsors out of the 100 members of Senate:

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d112:SN00968:@@@P

The facts that almost half of Senators are sponsors and that they represent whole states would make a spatial visualization less helpful, I think.

I figured this particular format would be more effective to highlight the small minority (32/435) of House members sponsoring SOPA. So I started there.

You're absolutely right that PROTECT IP deserves just as much attention, though. I will get to work as soon as I can on compiling a table of the PROTECT IP sponsors' contact info.

Thanks for the suggestions. Will get that info up asap.

I wanted people to see at a glance whether there's a chance their own representative is supporting the Act.

Also, the reason I started looking at it was to see if there really was a concentration of support in any particular region. It seems as though there is.

But your point is well taken... I probably should make it smaller so it's clear there's more information below.

Thank you

hey HN -

I put this together because I was curious who the actual sponsors of SOPA were.

I welcome feedback on how to make the site more informative. In particular I would like to include links to some of the best articles discussing the issue. Any suggestions?

Thank you

SEEKING FREELANCER -- Looking for someone to build a web client for our existing backend, which was developed for iOS and Android apps. We're in Chicago but remote is okay too.

Ruby preferred. The timeline would be around four weeks. There are relatively few screens that need to be built, but some slick JavaScript animations will be required.

A UX specialist who can also code the web client is doubly preferred, and additional work polishing the UIs of the existing mobile apps is available.

Please contact hnfreelance811 at gmail dot com. Links to past work are helpful.

From one of the author's responses to comments:

"It’s that insurance is fundamentally zero-sum — the only transaction is money going back and forth. When you buy a refrigerator, say, your value for it is huge. (If refrigerators cost $50k you’d probably suck it up and buy one — how the hell are you going to live without a refrigerator?) So you come out way ahead when you get it for [I haven’t actually the faintest clue what a refrigerator costs]. And Maytag or whoever does too. Win-win! Insurance is fundamentally either win-lose or lose-win."

I don't think that's true. The consumer also gains a reduction in the variance of his or her expected outcomes. This is a good for people who have diminishing marginal utilities of wealth (most of us).

There're two components to the money going back and forth: the actual costs of the claims, and the insurance company's margin. The costs of the claims are like Maytag's production costs.

We buy the refrigerator if we value refrigeration more than the margin we give Maytag. Similarly, we buy insurance if we value the reduction in variance more than the margin we give the insurance company.

Whether or not the price is worth the value we get from the service is a different question; but it is not fundamentally win/lose.

For what it's worth, I dropped out of college, ended up starting a company, and had a decent exit (fortunately). But I'm using the freedom that gave me to go back to school.

I was able to manage before by teaching myself out of books, but there's something to be said for learning with expert guidance and a community of peers.

I am also gaining exposure to a variety of fields which lend themselves less well to self-instruction than programming does (for example, molecular biology) and in which I believe a lot of the action for the next fifty years will be happening.

So, yeah, unless you already have a product that has traction and that demands your fulltime attention to continue growing, there's no reason to drop out of school.

My advice to students is: imagine that you were forced to drop out of college against your will, and then were given a chance to go back five years later after slogging it out in the real world. Would your attitude be different than it is now? Would you perhaps go to more office hours, skip less class, explore more subjects, play less Xbox, join more clubs?

I think we've encountered all of these issues already :) Definitely would appreciate any resources for them that people can suggest.

Actually, both; developing for other companies is a way to pay the bills and gain exposure to new things, but the ultimate goal is to make our own stuff.

So definitely, processes for communicating and dealing with clients are things we'd like to hear about.

I loved Good to Great, especially the data-oriented nature of it. And, of course, Seven Habits is a classic. I look forward to checking out the others. Thank you

Sounds like a valuable perspective on the "team" part. Thanks very much.

Getting Things Done is a permanent resident of my bookshelf (and OmniFocus is one of all of my devices). That's exactly the sort of guide I was looking for, but for a company instead of for an individual. So I am very eager to check out your other recommendations; thank you very much.

If you can set aside 10 days during which you are completely cut off from the outside world, check out Vipasanna. I found it tremendously valuable. It teaches you to filter less of the info your senses are continuously delivering to your brain, and be more aware of every sensation.

What's the point, you ask? Well, beyond the obvious benefits of being more aware of physical sensations, in the process of disciplining your mind, you find out a lot about yourself -- what issues in your life are constantly distracting you from the task at hand, etc.

This only works when you starve your mind of new distractions -- hence, no talking, writing, reading, or even eye contact during the 10 days. It's a lot of time, I know, but for me it was well worth it.