Whitewood Under Siege: Wooden Shipping Pallets - <AUTHOR> http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/52/hodes.php <comment><USER3> Note: I worked for a large grocery chain for 7 years

Plastic pallets are vastly superior in the long run to wooden pallets in terms of durability, and many companies have used them for almost two decades interchangeably with wooden pallets. One of the issues here is that once a pallet enters the supply chain, who knows if or when you'll get them back. When I first started working for the grocery chain, there were over 30 pallets of back inventory sitting in the warehouse (this is a very bad thing and I corrected it during my time with the company).

The main problem with wooden pallets is that they are largely made with inferior wood that can't stand up to the stresses applied to them for a long period of time. If any of the center slats break, there's no problem. If one of the ends break, then you're probably going to be cleaning up a warehouse floor from whatever was on the pallet. People are also more likely to walk away with a wooden pallet since they have plenty of utility and are very inexpensive.

That isn't to say that plastic pallets are without fault, even if they are virtually indestructible. Most plastic pallets are manufactured with a diamond plate pattern. That's nice and all, but it's still plastic and therefore, slippery. Place some frozen or refrigerated food on a pallet destined for a windy area and have fun cleaning bananas out of the back of the truck.

So the best of both worlds would be a plastic pallet with a non-slip coating on the top of the pallet and the feet.

<comment><USER4> I also worked in the grocery industry for most of a decade.

My sister worked for local fast food and general retail chains (Taco Time & Target) and I was always amazed at the lack of palletization they used. Target especially.

Target sends several trucks a day to each store. Each truck is half-full, and half of that freight is simply "stevedoered" into the truck, not put on pallets. So emptying a truck is a several-hour process of moving individual boxes of merchandise out of a truck by hand. What pallets they do use are often poorly stacked (by retail grocery standards), not well wrapped, and often fall over in transport.

Wal-Mart, by comparison, looks to have embraced the same "CHEP-only" policy as Costco.

<comment><USER5> What's taco time?

<comment><USER6> An inferior version of Taco Bell, often found in Canadian food courts.

<comment><USER4> It's really strange to hear you describe one as inferior when they barely sell the same food. True, they both sell food based around Mexican staples of corn, beans, tomatoes, spices, and meat, but that's as far as the similarities go.

Taco Bell has trouble proving that up to 35% of its beef comes from cows: [http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2011/01/24/lawsuit-filed- in...](http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2011/01/24/lawsuit-filed-in- california-court-over-taco-bell-beef/)

Taco Time's ground beef isn't even frozen: [http://www.tacotime.com/menu/](http://www.tacotime.com/menu/)

<comment><USER7> > Taco Bell has trouble proving that up to 35% of its beef comes from cows

Actually, Taco Bell had no trouble at all proving that their beef met the standard, and the suit was dropped pretty quickly.

See: [http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/19/us-lawsuit- tacobel...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/19/us-lawsuit-tacobell- idUSTRE73I42U20110419)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've worked in grocery logistics for several years, and can tell you from experience just how political CHEP, PECO, and iGPS pallet distribution can be. Because of the size of my organization's warehouses, CHEP especially requires stringent audits, and if a truck sent out with CHEP when it was not supposed to, the gestapo comes after you.

I will admit, though, that CHEP are the best when it comes to quality (other than iGPS, perhaps). They are far less likely to have splinter, warp, and degrade. They are also much more resilient to the abuse that the supply chain puts on them.

An important point to remember is automation. The logistics industry is becoming more and more automated. Consistent, high quality pallets are becoming a must. The typical hi-lo is becoming less and less common, while in its place are robotic automated guided vehicles, distribution conveyors, and high-bay storage and retrieval machines. I know from experience how much pain and frustration is caused by broken stringers, splinters, and warped whitewood (in our industry, we call them GMA pallets [Grocery Manufacturers Association]]. Literally days of lost time annually, which can equate to millions of dollars.

I have no real opinion about what the best direction is. You either fork out more up front for the good stuff (with all of its politics), or you just deal with the bad quality and inconsistencies of whitewood.

I have to say, this was a very interesting article...a nice change from Python 2.7 vs. 3.X!

<comment><USER9> Disclosure: I run one of the largest wooden pallet manufacturing companies in the United States. My family has been in this business for 50+ years.

Your perspective on whitewood comes from a 3rd tier perspective (grocery, as you say). In other words your various suppliers buy their pallets from various sources and then ship their product into you on those pallets. You and your (former?) employer are not directly involved in their procurement so you have little say in what you get, and I'm sure the quality varies widely.

That being said whitewood pallets (or just wooden as we would say) are actually a very cost effective and reliable way to ship product in the US, much more so than plastic. There are many quality manufacturers around the entire nation that provide great product and service, much better than your experience seems to suggest. Plastic is expensive to buy, more expensive to lose, and has various other problems and concerns.

To compare a built CHEP pallet with a "whitewood" pallet is a bit misleading however in several directions, especially to come to the conclusion that they are the "good stuff". They are the good stuff in terms of build quality because (by my estimation) they are built roughly 3x as strong as a generic 48x40 (standard GMA pallet.) They also cost upwards of 3x as much to manufacture and the process is no different than the bad quality pallets that you have had experience with. (Estimated GMA is about $10-11 per, CHEP block pallet would be above $30, depending on locale.) Of course they hold up better, they are built to do so. However, the pallet industry has gone from standardization on sizes in the last 20 years (GMA 48x40, Coke pallet 36x36 mentioned below) to being specifically engineered to the load it was made to carry.

TL;DR: There are wooden pallet manufacturers out there that produce a high quality product. CHEP and plastic are both expensive but have their own issues.

<comment><USER10> Aside from expense, what issues do plastic pallets have?

<comment><USER9> There's a massive PR engine at work for both the wooden and plastic side, but the things brought up most are fire and chemical composition. You would think that nothing could worse for a fire than wooden pallets (It's a constant concern for us, not so much pallets but just wood products in general) but there's a serious hazard with the manufacture of some plastic pallets. (Think oil fire.) I'm sure some of this has been overcome or can be, but it was an issue just a few years ago for sure.

In order to combat the fire front manufacturers starting using chemical composition to make their pallets flame retardant. One of the those chemicals is called deca bromine and is considered to be extremely hazardous. This creates a problem specifically in scenarios where food contact is common.

This is a dated article, but it references some of the concerns.

[http://www.palletenterprise.com/articledatabase/view.asp?art...](http://www.palletenterprise.com/articledatabase/view.asp?articleID=2886)

<comment><USER11> Not to mention the whole sustainability and foreign oil dependency issues of plastic. Whereas plantation timber can be grown locally in the US, keeping the jobs and money on home turf and lowering the risk of ecological issues from oil drilling.

I guess fire and contamination risk is much more immediate to the company bottom line, unless the material origin could be turned into a branding/marketing factor - "We only use goddamn all-American pallets!"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interestingly, this article completely leaves out soda (aka pop aka coke) pallets. All of the major soft drink bottlers use about the same size and shape pallet, and it's much smaller than the traditional whitewood pallet. Often, they'll put their pallet onto a square pallet, then that one a whitewood pallet, when they deliver to grocery stores.

Pepsi, Coke, and other soft drink and beer distribution companies even have their own, smaller, powered pallet jacks. The powered pallet jacks that grocery and other retail stores use are usually too big for these smaller pallets.

These companies have been slowly moving to plastic pallets over the past decade, and wooden pallets of those dimensions are hard to find today. The plastic pallets offer some level of 4-way access as well.

\---

Edit: I had forgotten about these full-size plastic pallets. They are so much cleaner and easier to use. Even new whitewood pallets leave behind a cloud of splinters and wood dust. These leave behind some shipping dust as there are no cracks for dust to fall through. They stack more securely and don't get heavier when wet like wooden pallets. And you can stack about twice as many in the same space.

[http://www.foodlogistics.com/article/11442316/smaller- faster...](http://www.foodlogistics.com/article/11442316/smaller-faster-and- sustainable)

</comment><comment><USER12> There's also an interesting system in Europe called EUR-pallet. [0]

They are usually made out of higher quality wood and quite durable. The system works by trading pallets for pallets, so if you receive some goods on a EUR pallet the driver takes an empty EUR pallet from your stack and it'll be reused at the other company.

[0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EUR- pallet](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EUR-pallet)

<comment><USER13> EUR-pallet isn't the only alternative.

I'm fascinated that after all these years there isn't a standard pallet size. I have tried to design products that can "ship on a pallet" and end up shooting for a footprint one meter on a side which fits within a lot of format but leaves plenty of wasted space:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pallet#Dimensions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pallet#Dimensions)

<comment><USER9> 1) There are plenty of standards in the pallet industry, especially in the EU. ([http://www.palettes-cp.com/welcome-en.html](http://www.palettes- cp.com/welcome-en.html)) The US has the 48x40 GMA which for many years was used almost exclusive in the grocery chain. These standards were born of similar or exactly the same needs from different customers. Things like 2x2 barrels, poly supersacks, square and octagonal boxes, etc. All those things are standardized and so the pallet that goes underneath them is largely the same.

2) Customization is a factor of efficiency. Why would someone shipping a product want to buy a standard size pallet that doesn't fit or hold the weight requirement for his use case? Instead, he consults with either internal packaging specialists (in big companies) or a manufacturer directly to design a pallet to fit his load. By doing this he actually knows the limitations of the packaging (stacked x high, racked, weight distribution, unstacker and rollerbed compatibility, etc) and also has some general idea that the product he is receiving is correctly priced for his requirements. Many times those requirements are customer driven, meaning my customer's customer.

Source: I make pallets, lots of them.

<comment><USER8> That's pretty neat: I discuss an interesting subject with someone on Hacker News that directly affects my current industry, but I am a few levels down in the supply chain. I deal more with product distribution and logistics, while you deal with the actual manufacturing of the pallets they sit on. Thank you for your expertise and insight!

<comment><USER9> Believe me, the last thing I ever thought to see on HN was pallets! Glad to have the conversation!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> YC application question: "How have you hacked a system in real life?"

> What is most vexing to many recyclers is the belief that the accumulation of > blue pallets in their yards is not an accident, but a deliberate CHEP > strategy. After all, collecting these stray pallets takes a lot of labor, a > lot of miles, and a lot of trucks. If you are CHEP, why do this work > yourself if you can get someone else to do it for you, at a price that you > dictate?

> In 2008, a group of recyclers filed a class action lawsuit, claiming that > CHEP was leveraging its dominant market position, and violating anti-trust > law, by transferring its operational costs onto recyclers. The recyclers > argued that CHEP had made them into a "conscripted collection army."

</comment><comment><USER15> Stunning to see Cabinet Magazine being referenced on HN. For those that don't know, Cabinet is an excellent magazine that covers many topics, but has something of a philosophy and art focus. Great article, as always.

<comment><USER16> This is why I read HN - fascinating article, knowledge of an industry I had never thought about before, and a heads up about a new source of information, Cabinet Magazine. Thanks, HN!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> CHEP and Bunnings (the dominant hardware retailer here) had a big spat over this recently.

[http://www.smh.com.au/business/bunnings-11m-pallet- cleanser-...](http://www.smh.com.au/business/bunnings-11m-pallet- cleanser-20100511-uupr.html)

They now refuse to allow any CHEP pallets on to any Bunnings site. LOSCAM, whitewood or nothing.

</comment><comment><USER18> The article is stacking the deck pretty heavily:

 _After all, collecting these stray pallets takes a lot of labor, a lot of miles, and a lot of trucks._

vs

 _they receive blue pallets whether they want them or not_

So the recyclers' hands are tied because they _receive_ pallets mixed in with white pallets when delivered by the truckload, but then they get to turn around and talk of all the effort collecting them. It's not hard - <USER2> educate your customers - "I won't pay for blue pallets, because they're rented equipment. You can ship them to me, but I'll reduce the payout for a truckload by the number of blues". What the article is promoting is that the recyclers get to play the innocent... then directly profit off it.

Don't get me wrong, I think the idea of renting pallets is stupid, but then again, I'm not making $3.5B/year. But the article seems to gloss over the fact that selling something you do not own is not legal, regardless of how much labour you put into it (otherwise burglary and fencing would be legal). These pallets are _clearly_ marked; it's not like they're hard to confuse.

<comment><USER19> "I won't pay for blue pallets, because they're rented equipment. You can ship them to me, but I'll reduce the payout for a truckload by the number of blues".

Correct me if I'm wrong but my impression from reading the article is that recyclers don't pay for those used pallets, they're just taking away what would otherwise be trash. So there's no incentive they can offer to eliminate the blue pallets from what they're receiving.

<comment><USER20> It depends on the place. If you only have a few pallets you probably get charged for the pick-up. If you have many pallets you get paid a small amount. There is a cost associated with getting a truck from one place to another irrespective of how loaded down it is.

Part of the reason the whole CHEP thing happened is that there is very little high-level communication that goes on around all this. The pallet supply chain is mature and the folks managing it don't necessarily talk to the folks making it happen day-in and day-out all the time. Getting them to enforce some kind of rule that they will view as bullshit is going to be next to impossible. The blue pallets will show up at your facility anyhow and are you going to pay to ship them back? And then bill your customer for the cost of shipping them back? Either they won't pay and you'll have to take them to collections when they switch to a new recycler or you'll roll over since you want to stay in business.

When you're moving $10k worth of stuff on a $10 pallet and paying $2 to get it picked back up the $2 is a joke. When it costs $2 to pick a pallet up and $2 to send it back and your profit margins are probably 10-20% then if you get 5% CHEP pallets you end up paying double for them if you try and do the right thing (which eats up your 10% margin) or you just look the other way and don't think too hard.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> A really compelling read.

How many hidden industries like the pallets one are out there, waiting for software (or hardware) aid or disruption? I mean, 3.5 billion in pallet- related revenues :) , and millions in losses due to lack of tracking... is RFID really the best solution?

<comment><USER20> How much does a pallet cost to manufacture and how much does a lo-jack cost to implant? Further, how much does it cost to keep the lo-jack running for a decade?

I used to run a 10,000 sqft logistics facility (really tiny in that world) and we kept a stock of about 20 pallets. I seem to remember the wooden ones costing $2-$5 used and the plastic ones less than $50 new. The most expensive pallets I could find from U-Line are $100 or so. [http://www.uline.com/BL_8204/Rackable- Pallets](http://www.uline.com/BL_8204/Rackable-Pallets)

Figure that adding an armored place to put a lo-jack would cost $5-$10 (gotta protect it) and that the actual lo-jack would cost at least $50. It would need to be metal encased with a way to sneak an antenna out, have a "lifetime" battery (lithium-thionyl-chloride, not cheap [http://www.all- battery.com/lithiumprimarybatteries.aspx](http://www.all- battery.com/lithiumprimarybatteries.aspx)) and the whole thing would have to be molded in to the pallet lest someone get clever and remove them cheaply. The batteries MUST be an integral part of the lo-jack so that someone couldn't just remove the batteries and neuter the device.

Then the data plan to keep it connected up to the world via the internet would cost at least a buck or two every month (in HUGE bulk purchases, individually it's something like $10/mo/device). Worse is that if someone puts them inside a metal building or metal shipping container or metal truck they're going to have a hell of a time getting a GPS fix and/or communicating with the cellular network.

So now that you've done all this your $40 to $100 (max) pallet now costs at least $50 and perhaps even $100 more PLUS it costs you something monthly whether people are renting it or not. What do you get to charge for this? From when I can tell, about $5 per trip. [http://www.palletforum.com/tm.asp?m=26458](http://www.palletforum.com/tm.asp?m=26458) That's on a nominal $20 pallet cost although they may cost more now, the forum post is 2 years old.

I can't see how building a lo-jack into a pallet is going to be a compelling value proposition given all the limitations.

<comment><USER22> lojack won't work for the reasons you mention, RFID really is the best solution because it's cheap and they don't need to change their existing inventory. There's no need for plastic pallets, they could embed the RFID tags into each of the wooden blocks which make up the corners of the pallet. If one doesn't already exist, it's probably quite simple to produce a nailgun like device which literally shoots an RFID tag into a block of wood, which would make tagging existing pallets straightforward and cheap.

The palettes are cheap enough that they actually don't need the exact location of each of them. All they need is the ability to track pallets at certain points in the supply chain, which will give them a good indication of global pallet movements.

RFID tag readers are also quite cheap so you could potentially fit a lot of them at relatively small expense. They could be embedded into the flooring of trucks, the entrances of warehouses and the arms of forklifts.

<comment><USER23> The problem with RFID for pallets is that the logistics space is still too decentralized. I work for a company which does a lot of custom RFID integration (we have worked with the companies in the article for tracking pallets.)

First, the RF properties of inserting RFID tags into wooden pallets just doesn't work well; it is far better to stick a label on the outside of the pallet. But then you get into durability issues, etc. So iGPS really had the right idea here, with molding the tags into the actual plastic pallet itself. Great read range.

The other problem is the hugely distributed nature of the supply chain. Pallet poolers like CHEP just don't have the resources to stick an RFID reader at every location that can possibly accept pallets, and distributors / store locations have no incentive to help CHEP out with returning accidentally- delivered CHEP pallets. RFID readers are unfortunately not cheap enough for CHEP to start parking readers everywhere to see where their pallets go.

Trust me, as a manufacturer of RFID readers, our company would absolutely love a scenario where RFID readers start being embedded in every trailer and on every forklift, however realistically that solution is still at least a few years out, and the cost needs to come down probably another order of magnitude to be practical for use in the pallet industry. iGPS was just too early to the game.

<comment><USER22> thanks for the insight! regarding embedding the tags I was imagining a small device around the size of a large coin with perhaps three prongs / nails attached. The prongs would embed into the wood keeping the tag in place, and the force of installation would depress the device into the wood slightly, but the RFID tag itself would remain on the exterior of the wood, so it should still be readable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Maybe this is a rare streak of jingoism for me, but it seems odd that a foreign company has been able to come in and dictate through the courts that the whole industry should work on a completely different model. Perhaps the reason "blue" is such a good deal for shippers is because much of the real cost has been transferred to third parties. ISTM the courts should force CHEP to include a significant deposit in its contracts, or else forgo the discounted forced labor of the recyclers. It wouldn't have to be a 100% deposit, but it would have to be high enough so that shipping destinations were no longer indifferent to whether the pallet was returned to CHEP or recycled or stolen.

<comment><USER25> _...it seems odd that a foreign company has been able to come in and dictate through the courts that the whole industry should work on a completely different model._

Remove the word "foreign" and that statement still makes sense and it still describes an objectionable state of affairs. No jingoism required.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> One of the theories on how the Asian Long Horn Beetle (an invasive insect that is also a wood boring bug) came to the US was in wood used in shipping. Either palettes (skids is the term I've heard), or wood bracing in shipping containers.

Plastic doesn't seem so bad.

<comment><USER27> As a software engineer, I have only once in my lifetime delivered something for which I had a certificate that it was bug-free.

This was when the company was moving some work to be done in India. We shipped a lot of used servers there, and they were on wood pallets. Prior to shipping, the Indian customs required a paper called phytosanitary certificate for the pallets. It meant the pallets had no bugs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> One major downside of the wooden pallets is the ever-present risk of fire. I worked at a food/vegetable processing plant once, it'd get vegetables from the field, we'd pack them, chuck 'em in boxes and stack them on pallets. (vacation job, yay)

Next to the plant were huge stacks of wooden pallets. Years after I worked there, the whole plant burned down; a fire started in the pallet stack, and since they're awesome fire material they took the whole factory with them. Not sure if it was accidental or intentional though.

Bonfires and world record attempts for bonfires often involve large amounts of wooden pallets. Cheap, very open, stable/stackable, ideal fire material. There's a picture of the world bonfire record in Norway where they build a giant tower out of pallets.

<comment><USER27> Isn't fire also a danger with plastic pallets? Generally, plastic fire is even worse than wood fire (in terms of heat and toxic substances generated). Wood burns, but it isn't instantly flammable and may in some circumstances withstand fire better than steel (though this is counter-intuitive).

You can add chemicals to plastic to make it resist fire, but those have other problems, often with toxicity.

Generally, if you have huge stacks of some unused material in a place, and it can catch fire, there is something wrong with the process. It would make sense that those pallets are worth some money so you can get rid of them easily. If not, should the local authorities control the amount of material stored if it can be a hazard?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Typical: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7672923](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7672923)

No-one talks about it when I submitted it.

</comment><comment><USER30> You could easily make a cheap machine that could make pallets to order out of plastic packaging scrap on-site. Judging from this article though, that might annoy a hell of a lot of people.

<comment><USER31> Have you ever seen an injection moulding machine that can produce something the size of a pallet? Do you know how much energy it takes to run one and how much expertise to keep it running? How much it costs? How much energy is required to power the recycling process?

[http://i01.i.aliimg.com/photo/v0/1830977371/plastic_pallet_i...](http://i01.i.aliimg.com/photo/v0/1830977371/plastic_pallet_injection_molding_Machine_with_different.jpg)

These machines are viable because they run continuously (at least, when they're not broken).

You don't make them 'on-site', you make them in a thing called a factory because that's the only place where you can get the economies of scale to justify your capital expenses and your operational overhead as well as your energy supply arranged in such a way that you'll turn a profit.

I'm all for decentralization but there are good reasons why the word 'easily' is not applicable in the sentence above. Annoyance does not come into play until you've figured out how to do this economically.

<comment><USER32> You wouldn't use injection molding for a pallet - it's too big. However compression molding is an option. It's not as accurate as injection molding, but it's significantly cheaper. Or at least it is at the scale my father-in- law works at when he makes plastic pallets :). His pallets are custom designed for a specific industry to fit in their manufacturing and logistics workflow.

<comment><USER33> The real problem is that "plastic packaging scrap" is not

A) unlikely to be a single type of plastic

B) unlikely to be the type of plastic you would want to use for a pallet

<comment><USER30> Plastic export pallets are already made from low grade mixed waste.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How come there aren't more "Kayak for x" websites? - <AUTHOR>

Kayak, Priceline, Expedia, Trivago, etc. they all are selling the same airline tickets and are just aggregator websites, how come there aren't more for other industries?   I go through the same process whenever I buy something online, I check the top 4 or 5 sites and Amazon for the best deal, basically what Kayak is doing but just manually on my own.  How come the aggregator sites for travel work but you don't see them for other industries? <comment><USER2> Airlines work well in a sense because there are relatively few carries. Other industries are as streamlined or heavily regulated to make a Kayak for x work as well. Like Kayak for rental housing would be great in some cities but trying to coalesce property managers is worse than herding cats.

It's just too hard to get the information to aggregate. Job boards the same way. Plus lots of competition and it's such a local-market driven thing.</comment>


Show HN: Tridiv - CSS 3D Editor - <AUTHOR> http://tridiv.com <comment><USER2> I don't often say "wow", but this is just amazing. And I was actually struggling this week to get the appropriate css transforms together for some simple 3d effects on a website of mine -- this will make things a TON easier.

edit: ah, just saw that not all major browsers are supported, which makes it less useful in an immediate sense for me. But still an awesome little product that shows what's possible in a web browser (and hopefully all web browsers soon).

edit edit: Would you mind discussing what it would take to make it work in other browsers? Is it not possible, or were there just too many browser- specific prefixes/workarounds required to make it a worthwhile effort for this initial version?

<comment><AUTHOR> In theory every browsers that support the CSS property "transform-style: preserve-3d;" can run the app. But in practice it's not that simple, for example Firefox has some serious performance issues with 3D, and the overall experience using the app was really bad.

I built the app with cross browsers in mind, so it will be really easy for me to expand the list of supported browsers in the future (hopefully).

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> A codepen demo I made to introduce Tridiv capabilities :

[http://codepen.io/juliangarnier/pen/hzDAF](http://codepen.io/juliangarnier/pen/hzDAF)

<comment><USER3> Holy moly.

I'm going to throw this at anyone that doubts the capabilities of HTML5/CSS3

<comment><USER4> While it's possible, the output reminds me of code/application generators of the past. That (hopefully) means that as technology progresses, we'll get better abstractions. And then the cycle will repeat itself. :)

<comment><USER5> Can you cite some examples of these generators you speak of?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I really love the hero unit. It's a great example of an animation that tells a short story, and gives you a feel for the app.

First you see a flat rectangle with drag handles, which sets your expectation, 2D WYSIWYG editor.

The rectangle animates into a 4 sided cube, 2D becomes 3D, it's a 3D tool.

Then the cube breaks into 2 angle brackets, the output is just HTML and CSS.

I'm left with a nice little feeling :) Awesome work

<comment><USER7> I had totally missed the fact that it ends as two angle brackets! Very smart logo and indeed very good way to introduce the product.

<comment><USER8> Me too, that's clever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is amazing, what's the plan for it? Open-source?

</comment><comment><USER10> Not compatible with Firefox. Too bad.

<comment><USER11> Seriously, it's just ridiculous. There is no legitimate reason whatsoever to make hard browser whitelist like that in 2013 -- without button like "use anyway" or something. It hard-blocks even the new Opera, while the new Opera uses the same exactly engine as Chrome. And you can't just simply spoof user agent in old-school way, no, it uses client-side detection, so you should make GreaseMonkey script just to run the app. On the other hand it doesn't warn Chrome users with HW-acceleration disabled, and just breaks. It's IE6 story all over again.

<comment><USER12> You okay?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Wow. just. wow. So smooth. It has the features you expect for editing and easy cloning, very impressive.

I've been looking in to using some 3d css to spice up my resumé timeline, you have just made my life a whole lot easier!

</comment><comment><USER13> Holy hell, that's amazing. (Just repeating everyone else, but it deserves it.)

Is there an "About" page? How was it built? What are future plans? This is so crazy impressive I don't even know what to say.

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is extremely impressive! great work.

</comment><comment><USER15> that is the craziest work i have seen in a long time.

you need to check this !

innovative, beautifull, usefull. big gratz.

ps : too bad we cant upvote

<comment><AUTHOR> yeah weird

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Also I wanted to say...I hate how backend developers front end developers. You are proof that front end devs are no joke and we can do impressive work!

<comment><USER17> Your username is very fitting for the subject matter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> At the rate of repeating what everyone else has said, this is truly impressive. Initial loading was a bit choppy and slow on Safari 6.1 on 10.8.4, but after that it was smooth.

It's projects like this that reinforce my belief that A: browser plugins must die and never come back and B: "web apps" will ultimately become as powerful as (and replace) desktop apps.

<comment><USER19> A: Browser plugins did this 15 years ago on computers that were orders of magnitude slower. Doing this all in the DOM with CSS has a redonkulous overhead.

Whats even worse is that browsers have become these monolithic silo projects that only three or four companies on the planet can develop. They have become much more complex than the actual operating system. I still remember the days when a browser was mainly a layout engine, and all fancy stuff was deferred to plugins. If only we had safe sandboxing technology back then...

B: The benefit of web apps are that you just go to an URL, no installation required. And you get "sync" for free. That's about it.

The downsides are:

\- They are slower (or require faster computers) because of added overhead.

\- They run in the browser window (although that can actually be nice! I'd like to have native apps in tabs like in my browser sometimes)

\- Making them work offline is hard. You have to put all the business logic in JS, and can't rely on the server.

\- Accessing local files is hard

\- Communication between apps is hard, to impossible. *

In the end you are back to mainframe computing like in the 70s, but with 3D effects.

\-----

*) One of the biggest reasons why Windows was so successful in the enterprise? COM and Automation. You could just slap an Excel spreadsheet onto your VB application, manipulate a Corel draw file from your MFC application, create database applications basically via drag and drop, and so on. There were (are) hundreds of shops selling custom components from shiny buttons to complete business report generators. And of course you could control almost every enterprise app with a little .js or .vbs script. Sure, all that stuff was ugly, unglamourous, and buggy, but it got the work done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Wow, pretty incredible stuff. Well done.

</comment><comment><USER21> With the plethora of webGL, canvas, css3d apps out there, the exceptional feature of this app is the user experience and interface. Every click feels intuitive and snappy and if I want to complete an action, it feels seamless. Nice job, seriously keep up the good work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Making the UI was a big part of the fun.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Julian, keep this stuff up. I think others should know about your impressive Codepen examples as well:

[http://codepen.io/juliangarnier](http://codepen.io/juliangarnier)

Check out the Hartwig chess set (playable too!) and the solar system demo.

</comment><comment><USER23> Julian, that's very, very impressive. How long did it take to get this together?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hard to say, it was a side project I did in my spare time. All I know is that I started working on it 4 months ago, and spend my whole summer vacations working on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm sure you'll have no problem finding a job now. Great work!

Small thought - when you're moving an object, wouldn't it be logical to also allow for small step moves with the arrows?Now it will move the camera position.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup, > roadmap :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is really amazing... however we had something like that 15 years ago called VRML, and it probably was 1000 times faster. This is an incredible abuse of css, nevertheless very cool.

</comment><comment><USER25> I got the chills checking this out. Really awesome stuff.

</comment><comment><USER26> This is beyond amazing. You are a genius.

</comment><comment><USER27> In terms of rendering speed, how efficient is CSS compared to webGL or other related 3D technologies?

</comment><comment><USER28> Doesn't work with Firefox. Damned kids and their damned monoculture. Make it work with my shit!

</comment><comment><USER29> Very impressive demo.

I see you're looking for work. I expect you will be inundated with offers, be picky.

</comment><comment><USER30> Safari on iOS 6 crashes every time I add a solid to the scene; which is kind of fascinating.

</comment><comment><USER31> Mannnn...u rocked this big time with web. Its so performant!

</comment><comment><USER32> Are there any options (or plans) for import/export?

<comment><USER33> I'd love to see a high quality 2d image renderer or a common 3d format exporter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> This is amazing. Is it possible to create a sphere?

</comment><comment><USER35> This is really cool. Wondering why not WebGL?

</comment><comment><USER36> can't seem to figure it out on chrome 29 on windows7. maybe I have a conflict or need bleeding edge chrome.

</comment><comment><USER37> It's flat on chromium 28

<comment><USER38> It is severely broken on Chromium. Ironically, his app works completely fine on Firefox (Canary), the browser he tried so hard to block.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wow you are very talented.

</comment><comment><USER39> I just had a VRML flash.

</comment><comment><USER40> Unreal!

</comment><comment><USER41> SO COOL

</comment><comment><USER42> Not compatible with firefox...bye!

<comment><USER17> Wait: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6251831](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6251831)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> amazing.</comment>


Have Keyboard, Will Program - <AUTHOR> http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001221.html

<comment><USER2> More illuminating keyboard review: <http://xahlee.org/emacs/keyboards.html> <http://xahlee.org/emacs/ms_keyboard/ms_natural_keyboard.html>

</comment><comment><USER3> I actually don't like the home key cluster in those keyboards. The one I use doesn't have a space between the up cursor and "end", so there's less stretching required.

And messing with the arrow key cluster would be commendable if you put them all in one row like hjkl.</comment>


7 Bits Are Not Enough for 2-Digit Accuracy - <AUTHOR> http://www.exploringbinary.com/7-bits-are-not-enough-for-2-digit-accuracy/ <comment><USER2> This is something I don't think folks really appreciate until they run into it in their own code. Back in the early days of microcomputers when everyone was rolling their own floating point code, some packages would very slowly diverge as things went back and forth between decimal and binary. In particular was an example of a BASIC program that was printing out a series of numbers for an accounting program to paper tape, and then later reading them back in when additional data was added. That round trip ended up in variations of a couple of pennies every trip through the system.

</comment><comment><USER3> IEEE 754 Floating point numbers should only be used where you can tolerate rounding errors. Even if you have enough precision to do base conversions, actually doing math will frequently introduce rounding errors.

You can either be very careful to avoid the many cases where this can happen, choose a different number format (fixed-point, decimal floating point, numerator-denominator, arbitrary precision mantissa binary floating point, which one depends on your problem domain), or use units that let you work in integers (equivalent to fixed-point, but easier to explain).

</comment><comment><USER4> "7 Bits Are Not Enough for 2-Digit Accuracy If You're Using a Naive Encoding."

Information theory says you can fit 100 values into 7 bits.

If you're not going to use the right encoding, I can also come up with encodings for which 100 bits isn't enough to fit 100 values.

<comment><USER5> The article is _specifically_ about round-tripping between base-10 and base-2 floating point because the precision of floating point is a very real issue if you're doing conversions. This is e.g. one of the reasons why decimal fixed point is preferable for many types of operations.

Fair enough that the title leaves it ambiguous, but the ambiguity is resolved in the first sentence of the post, and further clarified in a lot of detail over the next paragraph and a half.

<comment><USER4> Sure. I'm mad at the headline.

The whole setup is a problem that shouldn't exist, because you're using 7-bit floats for an inappropriate range. When are you going to run into 7-bit floats as the default? If you're not thinking about it, I suppose this could happen if you scale it up, but it's less surprising to say "4862057400958023983457609283094859 can't be represented exactly in floats".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's a pretty click-baity title, it should be hedged to 'native floating- point' or something.

In the second section the author _clearly_ shoots down the title, while again choosing to repeat that it 'isn't enough', having again as a subheading:

>Seven Bits Looks Like Enough But It Isn't

When that section clearly demonstrates that it _would_ be enough.

This statement really should be hedged.. You can just straight-up do binary- encoded decimal and change every pair of decimal digits into 7 bits and back again (bin 0000000 for decimal 00 through bin 1100011 for decimal 99, see reference [1] for chart), end of story and never suffer any degradation.

I realize this isn't the scheme that is _chosen_ , but that is a choice. Both the title and the quoted sub-heading imply otherwise; i.e. that it isn't enough bits. As shown above clearly it is.

[[[

 _Aside: in this scheme you EVEN have some kind of 28% larger space you can make use of somehow for checksumming or the like!

Naive example: when encoding any value that happens to contain digits smaller than 28 you can also encode parity information:

when encoding, if the two digits you're encoding happen to be digits 00-27 you ALSO encode the checksum value 1 by choosing to add decimal 100 (to arrive at bin 1100100 through 1111111 i.e. decimal 100 through decimal 127) or checksum value 0 by passing on doing so (i.e. keep bin 0000000 through 0011011 i.e. decimal 00 through 27).

When decoding, when you decode and encounter decimal 100 through decimal 127, subtract 100 from it before recording, and also record a checksum 1; when encountering decimal 00 through decimal 27 record it but also record a checksum value 0.

This means that in 28% of cases you gain 1 bit of checksumming information while perfectly encoding two binary digits. (If your stream doesn't happen to contain any decimal digits 00 through 27 then you just don't gain any checksumming information.)

You can use these checksum bits however you like! You can't be guaranteed to have them, but you have a good chance of having them, starting with a 27% chance of having a parity bit in the case of even a single pair of digits!

I'm not an expert on checksums, and the above is just a naive example, but the point is this: not ONLY is 7 bits enough to encode 2 decimal digits: it's even enough to add a parity bit in 27% of input cases._

]]]

[1] [http://ascii.cl/conversion.htm](http://ascii.cl/conversion.htm)

<comment><USER7> You're reading something into the title that isn't there. The author says "7 bits aren't enough for 2-digit accuracy" and you're reading it as "7 bits aren't enough to represent 2-digit numbers." The post is about converting base 10 floating point numbers (with 2 digits accuracy) to base 2 floating point numbers and back, not representation of integers.

<comment><USER8> I don't think he's reading too much into the title. He equally well showed that it's possible to encode 2 base-10 digits of accuracy in base-2 fixed point numbers and back. Nowhere does the title mention floating point numbers, which is just one arbitrary (but popular) format among a number of possibilities to encode numbers with chosen accuracy.

<comment><USER7> I find myself completely unable to care that "floating point" is not in the title, particularly since it _is_ in the very first sentence.

<comment><USER6> fair enough; maybe it's too far outside my area of expertise. OTOH I never expect round-trip conversions to be perfect and couldn't care less whether there are small errors, and would use a different representation if I did.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Unless you exclusively deal with remainders divisible by powers of 2, any digits to the right of the decimal point should be seen as an approximation. Don't confuse the way it's displayed with the way it's considered - your code should keep its numbers in terms of the smallest unit you need integrity at. (In other words, calculate your billing in floating _cents_ , not dollars.)

And, if all your remainders are divisible by tens, you should be using [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_floating_point](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_floating_point)

<comment><USER10> Why do you discriminate against the numbers on the left of the decimal point? They are an approximation too.

They are precise in fixed point representations, but floating point has a single bit as the integer part of the mantissa (and even this one can gather error on some sequences of operations).

<comment><USER11> I think you're getting something mixed up. Until you get to numbers so big that n+1 == n, the numbers on the left of the decimal point are represented exactly. They have the exact same precision as fixed point.

Ignore how the mantissa looks by itself. Once the exponent gets involved, everything that influences the left of the decimal point is an integer. That's why you use the same base for the mantissa and the exponent. The exponent losslessly shifts part of the mantissa into the integer range. Any particular floating point number is exactly equivalent to a fixed point number.

<comment><USER10> My point is that differentiating the integral and fractional parts of a floating point makes no sense. Some operations lose a constant amount of precision, others lose more precision the more different the numbers are. None of them act differently on the integral and fractional parts of the number.

Now, of course, there's a fixed point representation for each possible floating point number. But operations on fixed point numbers act differently on the integral and fractional parts of the numbers (in part because it's impossible to have a pair of fixed point numbers of the same type, but so different that n+1==n).

<comment><USER11> >But operations on fixed point numbers act differently on the integral and fractional parts of the numbers

Not really. Not in any way different from floating point. Can you explain this point? The efficient way of doing fixed point is to store it as a single scaled number, which is also how floating point stores the mantissa. You could split it into two numbers, but you could also split a mantissa into multiple numbers if you really wanted, it doesn't really change the math.

>(in part because it's impossible to have a pair of fixed point numbers of the same type, but so different that n+1==n).

I'd disagree there. You can have fixed point denominated in 100s as easily as you can have it denominated in .01s.

>Some operations lose a constant amount of precision, others lose more precision the more different the numbers are. None of them act differently on the integral and fractional parts of the number.

Precision is only 'lost' compared to other floating point operations. A long double won't _ever_ have less precision than a 32.32 fixed point number, unless you're using numbers that wouldn't fit in 32.32 in the first place.

In no way do you have "a single bit" of useful precision. Anything that can corrupt the upper bits of a floating point number can corrupt the upper bits of a fixed point number.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Sigh, you know David Goldberg wrote a really nice paper about this ...

... in 1991 ...

[http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.22.6...](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.22.6768) [http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.22....](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.22.6768&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

It is a real shame nobody ever seems to read it.

<comment><USER13> I wanted to go back to the source, or at least as far as I could go (I didn't look to see if any of Von Neumann's papers covered it :) ). I know D. Goldberg's appendix covers this (pages 218-219), for the binary to decimal direction, for single-precision floating-point. But I wanted a simple example as well, and I. Goldberg's paper had that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's quite interesting how much of our data is decimal floating point (any ascii representation like in css, html, json, javascript, svg, when we enter data somewhere), yet we convert it to binary floating point back and forth all the time.

</comment><comment><USER15> I never knew how many digits exactly could be preserved in a double. Now I know: 15 or 17, depending where you start.

<comment><USER16> It's highly dependent on the base of the digits!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Should be precision and not accuracy

<comment><USER18> I believe the point is accuracy after conversion round trip from integer to floating point and back again.

A better term might be fidelity.</comment></comment>


Where to Score: Classified Ads from Haight-Ashbury - <AUTHOR> https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/03/14/where-to-score/ <comment><USER2> >Would-be bull fighter needs sponsor

Is this gay slang? Urban Dictionary's second definition[0] suggests something like a "beard" (straight cover for a closeted person), but I would not be surprised if it were someone who got a wild hair about becoming a real toreador.

[0][https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bullfighter](https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bullfighter)

</comment><comment><USER3> More like classified ads pleading for kids to call their parents.

</comment><comment><USER4> Looks like a fun read for $6.99 shipped. Something about that time seems so wild and free - is it even possible to disconnect ("drop out") that completely any more?

</comment><comment><USER5> "So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back." \- Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

</comment><comment><USER6> Don't disappear from your parents. You have no idea how much it hurts them.

<comment><USER7> The ads are quite excellent at tackling the #1 reason I have ever had not to call: avoiding all the why-do-nerver-call accusations.

Of course, this being the 60s, many young people probably had many valid reasons to be angry. From what I gather, the "Greatest Generation" went on to create the most self-satisfied, stuffy, racist and misogynistic societies possible.

My father was kicked out for having a black friend, and my mother was told by her professor that no girl was ever going to become a doctor at his faculty. They met taking LSD somewhere in California, made a modest fortune, and only ever went back to piss on a new grave.

<comment><USER8> > _From what I gather, the "Greatest Generation" went on to create the most > self-satisfied, stuffy, racist and misogynistic societies possible. My > father was kicked out for having a black friend, and my mother was told by > her professor that no girl was ever going to become a doctor at his faculty_

Well, before that generation, the black friend would be a slave or easily lynched, and the girl wouldn't even get into the university (or be able to vote).

So I really doubt the Greatest Generation itself created the "most self- satisfied, stuffy, racist and misogynistic societies possible".

<comment><USER7> Yes-history arcs towards justice. I believe the 60s counterculture was mostly a reaction to the "stuffiness" (and Vietnam), but that sentiment is a lot harder to illustrate with examples.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Using Lisp at Paragent - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoq.com/news/2007/10/lisp-for-agile-teams

<comment><USER2> "Whether or not Lisp becomes more popular with a new generation of developers remains to be seen."

My bet is it won't. Lisp success stories have been around for ages. PG has articulated its advantages well, as have others. There's some psychological reason why it has never achieved massive popularity. If it ever becomes massively popular, it will be in a generation that is somehow psychologically different.

<comment><USER3> The hot languages in the circles I move in (Python and Ruby) are, from my point of view, poor-man's Lisps.

Quoting Guy Steele, on Java, "we were not out to win over the Lisp programmers; we were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp. Aren't you happy?"

I believe languages (both hot and widely used) will continue to move in the general direction of Lisp. As for why more people don't just leapfrog that process, I think the best answer is in Worse-Is-Better (<http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html>).

<comment><USER2> I don't think Richard Gabriel nailed the genesis of worse-is-better popularity. If valuing implementation simplicity above all else were it, then Scheme would be very popular. Unix and C became more popular than Lisp by running fast on cheaper hardware. For a long time Lisp has run fast on cheap hardware, but it's still not popular.

But if either simplicity of implementation or speed were necessary preconditions of popularity, how would Java have become so popular? Marketing? If marketing is what matters, how did Java (in its C# incarnation) displace Visual Basic?

Any time I hear someone say "Lisp would be popular except for problem X" I think of some other computer language that became popular despite problem X. Even its supposedly problematic syntax. Look at XML; it's popular, and has a syntax pretty much like s-expressions only worse.

Complexity of implementation? Slowness? Lack of marketing? Unfamiliar syntax? No, none of these explain the lack of popularity. Someday somebody will hit on what the real roadblock is and remove it, probably by accident.

<comment><USER4> Languages become popular when they gain a critical mass of developers. They can get this critical mass of developers for more than one reason. Marketing, running fast on cheap hardware, etc. can all be things that can single handedly make a language popular.

A lot of languages however have become popular due to large PR budgets (Java and the .NET family).

XML became popular because it addressed the need to have a self-documenting data inter-change format so that governments and companies can be reassured that even if a vendor goes out of business they can reuse the data (similar reasons for the push behind ODF).

Lisp hasn't yet addressed the needs of the masses (develop X blog in 15 minutes with a human readable syntax), or be pushed into the enterprise by large companies, or have a large pool of qualified developers, so it hasn't become popular.

Personally I don't think it ever will become a mainstream language. It requires a different way of thinking that I'm not sure a lot of folks can grasp. Ruby might be as close to Lisp as a lot of folks are willing to get.

<comment><USER5> Do you think it may be similar to the political phenomenon of not voting for / supporting a candidate because of his/her lack of perceived ability to win?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In light of this story, perhaps I should amend my quote: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=72655></comment>


Show HN: Instagram like stories in React - react-insta-stories - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mohitk05/react-insta-stories <comment><AUTHOR> This is an open source npm package I built for creating Instagram/Snapchat like stories in web using React. Just today I released a major update to it and I had never posted about the v1 here, so have a look! Also building a React Native version as many are requesting for it.

<comment><USER2> Will be waiting for React Native version

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> const something = function () {};

That is unlike any javascript function declaration I have ever seen. Why not just use the declaration syntax or the assignment/arrow syntax? It's just a keyword and an operator that take up space.

<comment><AUTHOR> Perfectly makes sense, thanks! I must have missed it as it was earlier export default function, will update this.</comment></comment>