Bicycling: The Safest Form of Transportation - <AUTHOR> http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/06/13/bicycling-the-safest-form-of-transportation/ <comment><USER2> I'm pro-biking, but if you live in areas that aren't friendly to bikers, I don't think these comparisons are as apt.

For example, there's a coffee shop I like that's nine miles away. (The closest coffee shop is a little over two miles away, but I really like this place). In order to get there, the best way is to take a four-lane split highway with a speed limit of 55 MPH (~89 km/h). There are signs that say to 'share the road', but let's be honest: I'm safer in the car than on the bike for that route. I've biked that way twice and probably won't do it again without taking a longer, alternate route. A dedicated bike lane or trail would change the impression here dramatically.

Time matters too. A half-hour round-trip becomes almost two hours. If we trust his conclusion, I lose around 5 minutes of life driving while gaining 234 minutes of life - roughly a 4 hour swing. But 1.5 of those 4 hours are already given back to the ride, and I have to trust that I'll be able to cash out the other 2.5 hours in the future, versus 90 minutes that I can have today with a reasonable amount of confidence.

Plus, what is safe? I've been in two car accidents and I can recall three good bike spills. I was unhurt in both car wrecks and I have scars from all three bike crashes.

The cost comparisons aren't useful for people who live in an area that requires car ownership. If you have to own a car, a lot of those per-mile costs are fixed.

Biking certainly _can_ be safer. In a dedicated bike path it's a lot harder to die due to a collision. But I think this article doesn't accept the reality for a lot of areas.

<comment><USER3> I think bundled up in his assumptions are things like "if needed, change where you live to enable this lifestyle".

If you've not read mmm before, he's a pretty radical life hacker type. Lots of insight into the assumptions we all make about how we should live, but he also does things many people just don't want to do.

Maybe you'd be happier if you moved just a few blocks away from a good coffee shop, and could bike there and maybe get rid of your car entirely. Maybe you'd be far less happy. It's worth asking yourself those types of questions, though, right?

<comment><USER2> Absolutely worth asking those kinds of questions!

But such an outlook would require a softer headline. "How bicycling can be the safest form of transportation" would do a lot better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I used to read a lot of these articles, but the assumptions were just too silly for me.

there is no assumption about amount of extra time it takes to ride the bike. Somehow riding a bike gains you money, when in fact its the cost of driving the car that should increase instead, and the riding of the bike should be some trivial number per mile (cost of bike maintenance). etc...

The argument might be valid but its presentation is just silly.

<comment><USER5> The extra time it takes to ride a bicycle can be minimal. When I drive to work, it takes about 20 minutes; when I cycle it takes about 30. In urban traffic a car tavels only about twice as fast as a bicycle on average, and bicycles are easier to launch and park. I find that trips of 2 miles are less are faster by bicycle, and that's the most common kind of trip.

Most people who insist on riding bicycles for commutes organize their lives around that: living in a place close to work, for example. The author is a person who took up cycling and never stopped; in that case, bike commutability is something he probably planned for when choosing a home, work, and career. People who have organized their lives around driving everywhere have different considerations.

What his argument boils down to is that bicycles have similar or lower accident risk, much lower operating costs, and traveling by bicycle improves your health—and health is extremely valuable.

<comment><USER6> My problem with bike commuting is sweat. So when I used to commute (7mi), I showered after arriving at work, and after my ride back.

It really made my day, but seriously it added non-negligible time to my commute. Showering @ home is easier, showers at work can be occupied, and the 2nd shower after coming back was an extra 15m too.

<comment><USER5> I only have the sweat problem in July and August where I live, and it's easily fixed for me by simply wiping off my arms and face with a damp towel when I come in. It's quick and works surprisingly well.

Everyone's situation is different of course. Bicycle commuting is frequently oversold; The sweet spot for cycling is 2 miles or less or 2-5 miles, which accounts for a lot of trips, but lots of people live farther than that from work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Regardless of all the statistics, math, and you-live-longers in this I have to disagree. Maybe I'm just an incredibly lucky driver (zero collisions) and a disaster-magnet on a bicycle (40 year old woman driving an SUV (SF), 33 year old man driving delivery van (SF), drunk driver (Sunnyvale), 92 year old driving a van (Sunnyvale)), but I know where I feel safe. That said, I still love to ride my bike.

<comment><USER8> The most common types of car-bike collisions are some sort of scenario where the car fails to yield. If you know that, you can prevent a lot of them. For instance, never assume that a car turning left across your lane will yield.

<comment><USER9> Very accurate. Pretend that car drivers cannot see you, and act accordingly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "lift heavy things without fear of injury"

In my experience bicycling did the opposite of that for me. I love biking (way more than I like lifting heavy things, incidentally), but it does nothing to teach you how to lift properly, nor does it really even build the right muscles. Learn the hip hinge if you want to lift heavy things without fear of injury.

</comment><comment><USER11> Bicycling is a great way to get around and traffic would be better for everyone, even motorists, if more and more people decide to bicycle.

People get skewed impressions about how safe/unsafe cycling is because they imagine worst case scenarios for cyclists. To be clear the worst-case outcomes for cycling accidents are truly awful and very fatal... getting right-hooked and run over by a garbage truck, getting hit from behind or T-boned by a car travelling at highway speed.

But fatal bike accidents are exceedingly rare. The vast majority of typical bad bike accident outcomes however are little more than road-rash, a broken collarbone or a concussion and frequently these are the fault of the cyclist. A "totaled" bike amounts to something less than the deductible cost of auto- insurance in most cases.

Fatal car accidents are ALSO rare but fender benders (IMHO) have been getting MORE common as a result of mobile phones. Sadly a "fender-bender" can do massive financial damage--- $500 for each popped airbag + $1000++ whatever auto-body damage was incurred. Of course "fender benders" easily extend into "totaled car" when enough damage is done, even if everyone is unscathed.

<comment><USER12> " frequently these are the fault of the cyclist " \- citation needed.

<comment><USER11> Most bike accidents are just ordinary mishandling of the bike resulting in a fall. Of course these things ARE NOT tabulated anywhere, there's no way to give a citation for this but those of us who ride a lot know it is reality. Who is going to file a police report because they fell while getting out of clips or because they hit a road defect the wrong way?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Living in San Jose and seeing many, many people ride in bike lanes in the wrong direction, I wonder how safe it is. It terrifies me every time I see it. I want to honk and wave and tell them but I'm afraid it'll only cause an accident.

<comment><USER14> This lack of understanding happens all over the US. I don't see how it happens. Many of the people doing it clearly think that a bicycle is contraflow like a pedestrian.

<comment><USER15> In Manhattan, it's mostly bike couriers who go the wrong way. When I cut across one short block the wrong way because it's convenient, there have been a few pedestrians who've called me out on it. So someone who's on a bike all day should know the "right" way by now. There are also frequently bikers on some busy avenues when there's a bike lane a block over, which is also just laziness or failure to plan ahead.

<comment><USER14> Sure, I'm an occasional rule breaker and I know the traffic rules well enough.

I'm talking about people like the person I saw slowly riding a 3 wheel cargo bike up the wrong side of one of the busier streets in this small town.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> There's a lot of silliness in here, as other comments point out already. There is _one_ good argument in here, that cycling gives you a net increase in lifespan because of the exercise. Once you count that, I'm pretty sure the risk when cycling becomes negative.

The trouble with that idea is that if you really want to minimize risk, you should drive for your transportation, and get your exercise from something safer than cycling.

Not that I see the risk of cycling as unacceptable. But if someone is going to argue that cycling is a net gain, the argument had better work!

</comment><comment><USER17> Using national odds and figures to make personal decisions is a deadly trap. If your area/commute isn't average then this statement has to be re-evaluated dramatically. Saying "Bicycling is that safest form of transportation" using this data is true only in a special situation.

His argument that the risks of cycling are exaggerated does hold some water. People are pretty bad at assessing risk.

</comment><comment><USER18> I loved riding my bike, did around 1200km a year. Last summer I slipped in the rain, demolished my ankle, was non-weight barring for 12 weeks... That costs a lot of money.

I know this is personal experience, and not representative of everyone, but one accident on a bike costs a tun.

<comment><USER12> Accidents in cars can be equally catastrophic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is disgustingly sloppy. I'm not opposed to rough approximation, but every number present here has crippling, unaddressed confounders.

\- The per-hour evaluation is obviously bad. Per-mile numbers are present and more sane, but a vague handwave at 'unnecessary driving' is used to justify focusing on the prettier, less sensible number.

\- Driving at 70 MPH versus biking at 12 MPH is a ludicrous point of comparison. If you're traveling at 70 MPH, you're almost certainly driving somewhere that you couldn't realistically bike. Driving 4 hours to a family gathering is reasonable in a way that biking 20 hours _on the highway_ is not.

\- The risk numbers are only appealing because of this absurd conflation. Americans get killed in cars because of drunk/distracted/sleepy drivers, and because highway speeds are life-threatening. At city-commuter speeds, a driver can likely survive a head-on with a bus.

\- The bicycling numbers are similarly absurd. The audience for this piece, and the group most likely to cycle for their commute, is an audience living in dense cities. Boston and San Francisco are far, far more dangerous cycling locations than residential, sidewalk biking included in these values.

\- The cherrypicking here is fundamentally dishonest. This is a 2013 piece that uses 2010 bicycling risk numbers. Why? _Because 2010 was the safest year for bicyclists in two decades._

I could go on, but suffice to say that "that's the worst case" is simply a lie. It is far better than the _best_ case, because these are complete incomparables.

<comment><USER20> Taking parking into consideration it's often faster to bike < 5 miles in a city than drive that distance. For longer distances Trains and then Aircraft win.

<comment><USER21> The car turns out to be pretty useful for traveling long distanecs. I've both driven from NYC to Montreal and taken the train. The train takes 12 hours. Driving takes 6 hours.

Now, if you happen to be traveling on a route that 400,000 other people travel every day, trains might win. Tokyo to Kyoto is a 2h 19m train ride, while the drive is 6 hours.

Europe does a little better than the US, but not as well as Japan. Paris- Frankfurt is 4h by train, 6 hours driving.

(Everything is always 6 hours apparently!)

<comment><USER22> According to the internet, NYC-Montreal by car is 595 km Paris-Marseille, in france, by car is 774.92km

Paris-Marseille in train is 3h17. The trains are comfortable, you arrive in the middle of the city and you don't have to park.

Conclusion: get yourself a better train network.

Edit: Just saw you took paris-frankfurt as an example, which seems to be a particularly poorly optimized route. :/

<comment><USER19> Comparing an American highway map to a train map is telling.

The highways are a neat, practical grid, and we cut the landscape to enable that. The traintracks, coming later, had to circumvent both natural features and the highways occupying the best routes. Plus, without a culture of train travel, express routes are pricy and most trains stop constantly to fill up and scrape together a profit. Worse, even our express trains simply have slow top speeds.

The one thing I'm proud of is our train system for _freight_ , which is actually quite efficient.

<comment><USER21> The rail system predates the interstate highway system by almost a century. The reality is that the highway system was built by the government, and the rail system was built by private companies. The government had better planning tools than the private companies (eminent domain), and ended up with a better system.

<comment><USER23> Furthermore, if you look at old maps of many cities, you'll note that many current highways either are adjacent to still-used railroad tracks or use the right of ways of railroad lines that no longer exist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I love cycling, and I wish I lived in a place where it was more practical and safer. As great as it is for the environment, traffic, and health (mental and physical!), if you know a decent number of people that cycle a lot, you will see a continuous stream of injuries among your friends.

</comment><comment><USER25> Though very amusing and quite charming, I would hate to be driven to the hospital on a gurney bed attached to a bicycle or have the fire department arrive on tandem bikes with fire ladders.

<comment><USER26> what about first-responders on bicycles, especially in a disaster zone where roads may compromised?

I had a friend who was a bike messenger in new york while he was going to school for paramedics and during 9-11 he got downtown before the second building fell</comment></comment>


Less is Better: Interview with DHH - <AUTHOR> http://uxmagazine.com/strategy/less-is-better

<comment><USER2> This interview is from a couple years ago, but the article gives no indication of that aside from this note at the very bottom in italics:

 _This article was originally published on the User Interface Resource Center (UIRC). For more info, please see<http://uxmag.com/uirc> _

Just FYI...

</comment><comment><USER3> This sounds like an embrace of the famous "worse is better essay".

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

<comment><USER4> Why are people down voting this? It's not spam or trolling. It's a valid comment, and a useful link.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> How do you decide when less is more, and when more is better?

There seems to be this optimal balance that he alludes to, but never really discusses with exact detail.

</comment><comment><USER6> Less audio links would be better. Looking at the comments on the post, I see I'm not the only one who had a bad user experience on that page.</comment>


Why has the hearing aid industry gone completely digital? - <AUTHOR> https://slate.com/technology/2019/09/hearing-aids-digital-analog-sound-music.html <comment><USER2> _Digital technology may offer advantages in its ability to tailor amplification to a particular individual's loss profile as well as the availability of programmed settings for different social situations, plus extra bells and whistles like Bluetooth and app-tracker options. What it cannot do is faithfully reproduce natural sound in a way that is subjectively satisfying and moving and true._

Oh buddy do i have a xiph rant for you. I am more or less entirely willing to chalk this up to what I shall politely call "top-down effects".

[https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil- young.html](https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html)

Frequency tuning and rapid readjustment of it is the key feature of modern hearing aids and we're just barely scratching the surface of what we can and should do.

Here's why: presbycusis, or age-related hearing loss, has a cruel fact about it. As the threshold of audibility rises for a particular frequency, the threshold of pain lowers. Rather often, the reason people don't use hearing aids is that they create a situation in which you can hear but also every sound is painful!

Precise digital control of per-frequency intensity amplification can make that a lot less terrible. If it hurts to hear at 4khz, we can squelch that frequency but boost the 100-400hz range and your speech audibility should still get the boost you need to talk to your grandchildren. Throw a BLE connection to a nice multicore GPU smartphone into the mix and we can start offloading really complicated processing to the thing in your pocket.

<comment><USER3> Can you really offload per-packet processing to a connected Bluetooth device without injecting a frustrating amount of latency? Bluetooth isn't known for being a fast protocol

<comment><USER4> How do Bluetooth headphones compensate for the latency?

<comment><USER5> In my experience, they don't; if I'm typing on an iPhone there's a noticeable delay between me tapping a key and hearing the sound in my QC35s.

<comment><USER2> That's not the bluetooth latency you're hearing, that's just how active noise cancellation works.

QC35s buffer about 75ms worth of ambient noise and then phase-invert it and play it back. This destructively interferes with the outside noise, and cancels it. But you have to sample your environment on some time window to get it to work, so when ANC is on, there's lag. This is also why ANC only works well for slowly-varying noise like airplane drone, but can't handle impulsive sounds like gunshots.

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

<comment><USER5> Interesting, thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > What it cannot do is faithfully reproduce natural sound in a way that is > subjectively satisfying and moving and true.

Gahhh. This just makes me want to cry.

Look, sonney-me-lad, you might want an analogue amp in your ear, that has a terrible frequency response, is prone to feedback and will most likely destroy what frequency range you have left, but lets not blame this as a technical problem. (don't start me on battery life)

You like the "warm" sound of "analogue". Hand in hand with this claim, is that somehow one can have the ability to tell digital recorded sound from analogue. As an ex recording engineer, I can tell you, you're full of crap. I could[+] make a very convincing "analogue" sound using a mackie D8b digital desk and 24 track digital recorder.

I can tell you now, that if I played a cd, housed it in a box that looked like it had tube on it, then attached a record player, Piped it into a decent amp with some NS-10s. It would sound great. To convince you of course I'd need to clip off the top frequencies, (8k+) add some clicks and hiss (raise the noisefloor) you'd then be espousing the wonders of its "warm analogue sound".

Why have digital hearing aids concurred the world? because they are better. One can steer the microphones, they use less power, the frequency response is trivially tuned to your hearing range, there are limiters in there to stop damage, The speaker can be calibrated, as can the microphone.

you can add a directional handheld mic so you can point it at people so you can hear them talking. You can add background noise reduction trivially.

All of this can't be done with frankly shitty analogue hearing aids.

Don't fuck up other people's lives with your nonsense.

<comment><USER7> >clip off the top frequencies, (8k+) add some clicks and hiss (raise the noisefloor) you'd then be espousing the wonders of its "warm analogue sound".

You know, you may have a product idea there. Not so much for hearing aids, but as a standalone device.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> My dad explained to me that his hearing loss is dominated by his inability to zero in on conversations in a crowded room. That has made it so that he's much less willing to go out to socialize in restaurants, because that environment creates a form of isolation brought on by his hearing loss. While his hearing aids certainly do help, I would argue that they haven't gone digital _enough_.

Being able to audibly isolate a speaker in a room full of other speakers would be a boon for his case (and I would presume many others). Anyone on HN working in this area?

<comment><USER9> Speech enhancement (denoising/dereverb) and seperation is absolutely a hot research topic, as it's needed for fields like voice assistants as well. Unsurprisingly, the state of the art is variety of deep neural networks, here's a good overview of recent developments [1]. Of course, many of these are far from real time, but earlier techniques are used in some digital hearing aids iirc. Apple have also released [2] some details of the system the Homepod uses, along with audio samples.

A quite interesting further development of these is this paper [3] which uses brain activity to determine which particular speaker the listener is trying to hear, and then optimises that.

[1] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.07524](https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.07524) [2] [https://machinelearning.apple.com/2018/12/03/optimizing- siri...](https://machinelearning.apple.com/2018/12/03/optimizing-siri-on- homepod-in-far-field-settings.html) [3] [https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/5/eaav6134](https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/5/eaav6134)

<comment><USER10> Deep neural networks should be able to do source separation.

<comment><USER2> Imperfectly, but the results are at least passable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have profound hearing loss, wear hearing aids on both ears since early childhood. I felt immediate palpable improvement when switching to digital hearing aids. Only for listening to music I switch them to "analog-like" mode (which, nevertheless still applies the 20-60dB equalizer and compressor I need). Of course some people might have opposite experience, I am not trying to invalidate anything.

The big picture is: sadly we don't really have any way to objectively measure hearing quality and its improvement due to hearing aids. We can push buttons whether we hear tones or not. We can count understood/misunderstood words. But the results don't have clear relationship with real-life hearing situations. For example, in my case, in silent room tinnitus appears which interferes with testing. And sometimes I hear better, sometimes worse.

Unlike vision, it's very hard and time-consuming to test with any repeatable/reproducible patterns, or to accurately explain to another person problem with quality of the sound.

Also, the hearing aids market is very tightly controlled by oligopoly of manufacturers and doctors. There is no way to self-adjust them. I'd very much buy user-programmable BTE package capable of 80 dB gain which I need for some frequencies. But there is plainly no such thing available without any strings attached. I have played with jackd under Linux, too, don't remeber clearly but it was problem to set the equalizer with 60dB differences.

<comment><USER12> I'm also profoundly deaf, using two BTE hearing aids as well and your comment is 100% what I'm frustrated with as well. My hearing aids are CONSTANTLY "adjusting" noisy environments for me - Usually exactly when I don't want them doing a damn thing. I'm very good friends with my audiologist, but it would take hours upon hours in her office, fiddling with all the various controls and options, to get things perfect. I want to be VERY clear too, it isn't a problem of have too many controls, that's actually an amazing benefit... The problem is that we can't reasonably expect audiologists to really spend the hours upon hours of time making minute tweaks and adjustments to capture that perfect hearing aid experience. It would just be SO much easier if after wearing them for months and I suddenly noticed my "noisy environment" adjustments were actually annoying, I could go in and make adjustments on my own.

It's also infuriating how sub-par the accessories market is. I have a compilot air 2 (bluetooth add-on) that lets my hearing aids connect to my phone, car, computer, etc. It's great, but at $300 I really expected it to work for more than a couple of hours... It also has to be clipped within 12 inches of BOTH hearing aids? My phone communicates through bluetooth across the house to my computer... Is there really no way around having to clip this dongle on the neck of my shirt? It doesn't bother me now, but damn. People in meetings and in public constantly think I'm recording them or something. Nevermind the disgusted look I've gotten at a urinal. It's just... Not ideal.

<comment><USER13> That's why you should self-fit. It's absolutely possible - check my comment below for details.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > What [digital technology] cannot do is faithfully reproduce natural sound in > a way that is subjectively satisfying and moving and true.

There is a one-word description of that sentence, and the word is "bullshit." It might be the case that most digital hearing aids today do not reproduce sound as faithfully as older analog ones. But it is always possible to build a digital signal processing path that is _audibly indistinguishable_ from an analog one in a double-blind test. It might cost more or require better engineers than those who currently design hearing aids, but blaming the problem on "digital technology" is utter nonsense.

</comment><comment><USER15> To the question:

\- Smaller.

\- Improved battery life.

\- Better tailored to specific hearing loss (e.g. certain frequencies).

\- Telecoil compatible.

\- Improved Feedback Control. Better safety features.

The entire article could be boiled down to an argument that "analogue is natural, digital is artificial." It compares digital hearing aids to MP3s. The problem is, there's nothing inherently natural about the way analogue audio works, and it can manipulate and alter the sound profile just like digital (inc. compression/artifacting, particularly when space constrained/dealing with cross-interference).

Just because a technology is older doesn't automatically make it more "pure." If they argued for a way to configure a hearing aids/remove artificial filtering, that's fine (I agree), but to suggest that digital and analogue audio fundamentally work differently from a perceptual perspective isn't really factual.

</comment><comment><USER16> There's two points here, one good one bad. The bad one everyone has already spotted; the claim that digital is inherently worse.

The good point though is the one about the industry lacking participation from people with hearing loss themselves. The "nothing about us without us" argument. Plus a sub point about the US healthcare system being expensive and not actually consumer friendly.

(Hearing aid wearer here who works for a digital audio company here! But I get mine from the NHS, so I pay nothing and expect no choice. They work well but not perfectly - the multiple sources problem is still big)

</comment><comment><USER17> > Analog aids merely amplify existing sound—a more sophisticated version of an > ear trumpet—such that there is no real interruption of the original acoustic > wave.

That's just false and shows how little the author understands about audio systems. The microphone and driver in a hearing aid (and their interaction with the ear canal) alone will change the sound drastically, regardless of whether the signal processing between the two is analog or digital.

<comment><USER18> In fairness the latency of an amplifier with no filtering is less than 10 microseconds. Coherency between the amplified and unamplified signal is preserved. I've done some personal work on custom IEMs with ANC and the lowest latency controller I could find was the teensy. Even in the fastest round trip time you would be adding 5-10 ms of latency. Speed of sound / 16 kHz = 2 cm. A whole cycle at 2cm. If you want coherent wavefronts then low latency is essential. If the latency is fixed and less than the distance between the speaker and the eardrum (very short) then you can do some DSP tricks to fix up destructive interference.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This just happens to be on NPR today: "Untreated Hearing Loss Linked To Loneliness And Isolation For Seniors"

[https://www.npr.org/sections/health- shots/2019/09/12/7602312...](https://www.npr.org/sections/health- shots/2019/09/12/760231279/untreated-hearing-loss-linked-to-loneliness-and- isolation-for-seniors)

</comment><comment><USER20> Another neophobe "analog is better" opinion.

They're wrong. Vinyl is back because it's hipster and other reasons, and it's in absolutely no way better.

In order for analog to be better either:

1) The (analog) filters on the hearing aids are bad. Not unique to digital.

2) You can hear more than 22KHz. I doubt it, mate. No offense but you're not young anymore, so very unlikely among an already rare population.

3) Math is wrong. Fourier analysis shows that digital doesn't "approximate" the frequencies of analog. It completely contains the exact same information.

</comment><comment><USER21> It has gone digital because it's cheaper and allows for better custom hearing curves. Because remember there's an underlying hearing issue already.

"It turns the world into mp3" digital quality is not necessarily bad, some models might have issues, of course.

<comment><USER22> Sadly, years of 128kbps iTunes sales have ruined the idea of digital music for a lot of people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Counterpoint: Adam Savage discussing his hearing loss and how awesome new hearing aids are.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-Ptuq85R8Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-Ptuq85R8Y)

</comment><comment><USER24> Interesting argument but I don't buy it.

\- Digital hearing aids are smaller, lower power and easier to configure than analog hearing aids (think "fits in your ear canal" vs. "you wear the original iPod on your belt")

\- The benefits of full-analog audio are contentious at best and almost certainly imperceptible for people with hearing loss

If you want further convincing that A->D->A conversion is perfectly fine, [https://xiph.org/video/vid1.shtml](https://xiph.org/video/vid1.shtml) is excellent.

</comment><comment><USER25> > Analog aids merely amplify existing sound—a more sophisticated version of an > ear trumpet—such that there is no real interruption of the original acoustic > wave. Digital aids, by contrast, pick up the sound, process it into binary > digital information, and then reproduce the sound as a new wave using a > built-in digital-to-analog converter. Digital devices thus have to re-create > the activity that our brains and ears co-evolved for eons to perform. It is > hubris to think that a few decades of research and development might not > fall short.

Why do writers so often accuse experts of "hubris" while arguing that their own poorly informed opinion is superior to the well-informed opinion of said experts?

That said, most digital systems don't make it easy (certainly not easy enough to be relevant to a casual user) to obtain the many noise / filtering / distortion effects you get with an analog setup, and that's a legitimate complaint. While the audiophile scene is rife with placebo effects and woo, I've long wondered if some UX lessons couldn't be salvaged. Could hiss+pop+lowpass+distortion+hardware_pickiness settings be packaged into a form that would make people willing to consume them in a digital context?

</comment><comment><USER26> Does the author actually have a reason why analog would possibly be better, other than giving consumers choice?

Is the purpose of this article anything other than to generate clicks from hipsters who will click on anything that paints digital in a negative light?

<comment><USER27> > Does the author actually have a reason why analog would possibly be better, > other than giving consumers choice?

Duh no. And this article does a disservice to itself, as it looks like there could be a real issue of fidelity in the digital chain[0]. Bluetooth is known to cause issues (lag, bandwidth variations, …), and the processing chain might be problematic:

> the digital processor samples incoming sound at a rate far lower than that > of an old CD player

I don't know if there's any truth to it, but it should certainly be investigated and if true fixed. It might also be that the perceptual models used in these hearing aids are not correct for, well, hearing aids.

[0] though some of the complaining could be a question of habit, the wearer's old hearing aids had a coloration to which they'd gotten more and more used, the different profile of the new ones is jarring even if it might be more correct

<comment><USER24> CD sampling is 44.1kHz. 22.05kHz is used in plenty of HAs. I haven't seen anything lower (but wouldn't be surprised to learn otherwise)

22kHz sampling isn't a problem in practice as:

\- HAs focus on speech comprehension, not music. Speech doesn't high much content above 5kHz, so even 22kHz is double the Nyquist rate.

\- Music is perfectly enjoyable at 22kHz (but obviously better at 44kHz)

\- People getting hearing aids have hearing loss, and the majority of hearing loss is in the high frequencies

<comment><USER28> To add to this, most middle age adults can not hear above 15khz and threshold is very high at 11khz, especially if they were exposed to high sound levels in youth. Virtually no one can hear above 22khz.. if you ever hear people saying they can it is most likely bs.

People often tell stories about playing a sound or being in a lab etc. they _think_ they heard above 20khz, but mostly likely what happened is whatever inevitable non-linearity exists in their playback chain acts as a mixer creating frequencies well in the easily audible range.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I don't know about the technical tradeoffs in hearing aids, but the other stuff in this article is breathtakingly ignorant.

</comment><comment><USER30> There are two great videos on why this author is wrong about digital sound.

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

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

</comment><comment><USER31> Probably vanity?

[https://www.notechmagazine.com/2017/08/non-electric- hearing-...](https://www.notechmagazine.com/2017/08/non-electric-hearing-aids- outperform-modern-devices.html)

</comment><comment><USER32> Also to add, the vast majority of the users use cell phones, and the ability to pair your hearing aids to your phone is a big deal

</comment><comment><USER33> Because digital is a completely superior choice?

</comment><comment><USER34> Because marketing, need something new to sell. My mother in law has worn hearing aids for years and was recently convinced to upgrade to the latest greatest as she has to have her phone on speaker and has trouble hearing/understanding when she can't see the person, eg, not in the same room but shouting. S0 €5000 ($5500) later and still has phone on speaker and still can't hear at a distance.

</comment><comment><USER35> They went digital because "sound colors" doesn't exist.

Also: Niquist-Shannon.</comment>


Keeping It All in the Google Family - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/13/business/smallbusiness/13tree.html

<comment><USER2> Amazing. Seriously, I have always wondered why isn't the solution for all the financial worries of startups and the VC play.

This is the "change" that would make a lot of things easier, ensure startups keep up their momentum and not waste in VC fund raising process. More you have angels who are truly angels backing founders. (I understand this can hurt lest rational thinking is lost)

Micro financing at angel level (be it 5 friends/colleagues or more) is great. Someone needs to institutionalize this or have some learnings on how to deal with accountability, resolving dispute and the like.

For people in India, Israel, Ukraine and the rest of east Europe the startup costs are quite low. $100K is like close to upper end angel funding.

I know of at least 6-7 ex-Trilogy startups in India - brilliant guys, doing it right, when it comes to funds Indian VCs are most risk averse they wouldn't invest in anything other than jobs, matrimony, real estate and travel. I have always wondered why would it really bother for couple of ex-Trilogy in US to invest. For 2 guys to put something like $50K it would be hardly anything.

</comment><comment><USER3> How did this get to front page, I wonder. The first paragraph:

      AS befits a company whose name is a play on words, Google (named for the mathematical term
      "googol") has come up with playful names for its workers. Employees are known as Googlers,
      new employees are Nooglers and gay employees are Gayglers. Now that the company has been around
      for a decade and employs upward of 20,000 people, another group has earned its own name: former
      Googlers are known as Xooglers.

<comment><USER4> What about it? (warn.: not an EN speaker)

<comment><USER3> Sounds like something out of a high school newspaper.

(unwarning: not a native en_XX either :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrapreneur>

</comment><comment><USER6> If it sounds like propaganda, it is propaganda.

<comment><USER7> If it does not sound like propaganda, it is definitely propaganda.

<comment><USER8> Michael Moore?</comment></comment></comment>


Microsoft open-sources clever U-Prove identity framework - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/03/microsoft-open-sources-clever-u-prove-identity-framework.ars <comment><USER2> Cool. I wondered where Stefan & Credentica ended up. For those unfamiliar with the work, Brands took the old Chaum credentials (an application of his seminal blind signatures stuff) and made them practical for a lot of purposes using alternative crypto techniques that were light enough to run on smart cards. Credentica was trying to apply the work to information management within the enterprise, but it always seemed like cool tech to use for a lot of the applications that get shoehorned into some collection of OAuth, FBConnect, etc.

</comment><comment><USER3> Very interesting, it reads like anonymous banking mixed in with identity. I've been wanting to know if anonymous internet cash would ever take off, and the only organisation staying around for any time I've noticed is eCache:

<https://ffij33ewbnoeqnup.onion.meshmx.com/> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECache>

</comment><comment><USER4> As a business owner I might prefer to carry liability if it also gives me access to demographics and contact information of the users, and users may not necessarily care since they don't carry the liability.

This may turn out to be a tough sell, both to merchants and buyers.

<comment><USER5> A) Data-mining loving businesses could still make customers create an account to checkout and get their emails. Even if they don't store their credit card information, they still know what the customer is buying and can email them recommendations.

B)I think that if given the choice, most buyers would choose the more secure option for payment if it was free.

C) This is great for banks and customers that bear the burden of identity theft. As the number of sites you give your information to increases, the probability that a site with your data will be comprised approaches 1.</comment></comment>


Carnegie Mellon Reels After Uber Lures Away Researchers - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/is-uber-a-friend-or-foe-of-carnegie-mellon-in-robotics-1433084582 <comment><USER2> tl;dr

uber hired 6 PIs, 34 engineers, and the institute's director by, in some cases, doubling salaries and/or paying $x00k bonuses

Apparently systematically underpaying people (for science!) isn't as good a strategy as one may naively believe it to be...

<comment><USER3> One serious problem with universities, and the explicit reason Danny Hillis had to create Thinking Machines to get his Connection Machine (CM, first version) developed, is that they can't pay researcher more than the pay professors. The CM needed 1-2 top notch analog engineers there were wires in the interconnect that had to hit each of the processor chips, which could be as many as 65,536.

And, yeah, the people who pay for this sort of thing have been on a campaign since the '80s to drive down salaries for STEM researchers; the only reason the fields are doing half-way well nowadays is the Great Recession has made other field suck, and of course lots of private money from companies like Google and Uber.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sounds like the institution moved and left Carnegie Melon behind.

</comment><comment><USER5> This echos the story of how Symbolics/Lisp Machines effectively wiped out the MIT AI Lab in the 1980s.

Can anyone else think of similar parallels?

<comment><USER3> The problem with that analogy is that these companies _didn 't_ gut the MIT AI lab, especially at the level of actual AI researchers vs. the systems people who built and maintained ITS, MACLISP, the Lisp Machine and the Chaosnet (MIT's first LAN). Per [https://web.archive.org/web/20140401022259/http://danweinreb...](https://web.archive.org/web/20140401022259/http://danweinreb.org/blog/rebuttal- to-stallmans-story-about-the-formation-of-symbolics-and-lmi/) for Symbolics and my memory as an LMI employee:

      Tom Knight (from MIT AI Lab)
      Jack Holloway (from MIT AI Lab)
      David Moon (half-time as MIT AI Lab)
      Howard Cannon (from MIT AI Lab)
      Mike McMahon (from MIT AI Lab)

Plus Richard Greenblatt for LMI.

While some of these people did some actual AI work (and that included Richard Stallman), they were primarily systems people who developed the infrastructure AI research needed prior to industry adopting the these sorts of things like large physical memories ( _one million dollars_ ... er, 9-bit bytes), personal workstations, LANs, etc.

ADDED: People really wanted and needed Lisp Machines (Danny Hillis was quite distressed LMI's weren't available when he needed them for Thinking Machines), way beyond what the AI Lab could build, let alone how improper it would have been for them to get into that business, so the commercialization of it was pretty much inevitable, be it on a shoestring, later rescued by TI for LMI, or via the healthy VC market back then for Symbolics.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for correcting my history!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> WSJ commenters speculate that CMU screwed up their contracts and could've protected themselves with better.

Thoughts? Do academic researcher contracts ever include non-compete clauses?

<comment><USER3> Given how easily these positions go "poof" when a grant ends or doesn't get renewed, that would make any such hiring contract _amazingly_ unattractive (poor pay, no equity, a resume that may not make it clear you can cut it in industry), and very much against the general academic ethos.

As a matter of law, they would only be enforceable against industry sponsored research where the companies involved maintain trade secrets, which again is against the ethos of academia, especially nowadays. (The only legal basis for non-competes is that you will learn trade secrets and need to be prevented from getting the "first bite from the apple* by initially disclosing them to another outfit before legal action can be initiated).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> They lured staff away from NREC. I don't think this will affect the academic programs of Carnegie Mellon at all. NREC works on technology commercialization not fundamental research.</comment>


Jony Ive has been Removed from Apple's Leadership Page - <AUTHOR> http://www.apple.com/pr/bios/

<comment><USER2> DaveLeeBBC: Apple: "We're in the process of updating the Exec Profiles on [http://t.co/nd3b5fbCQ3](http://t.co/nd3b5fbCQ3) and Jony's profile will be back up online shortly."

[https://twitter.com/daveleebbc/status/435385382549860352](https://twitter.com/daveleebbc/status/435385382549860352)

He's back on US site too.

<comment><USER3> P to the hew

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> No boardroom politics get passed on to the webmasters in a PR team before they make it to the well-informed. So never draw conclusions from a corporate webpage. And even then, he is there on the right, not smiling :)

</comment><comment><USER5> [http://www.apple.com/pr/bios/jonathan- ive.html](http://www.apple.com/pr/bios/jonathan-ive.html) \- looks like he's still there, although he appears to be wondering if he left the stove on.

</comment><comment><USER6> So, he's back again. Whilst I was originally surprised at his removal, I was actually quite excited by the possibility. He's been effectively designing Apple's hardware for 15-20 years now, and the opportunity for some fresh oversight would've been quite refreshing.

</comment><comment><USER7> He's still present and so is his detailed bio page - [http://www.apple.com/pr/bios/jonathan- ive.html](http://www.apple.com/pr/bios/jonathan-ive.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> I see it there, at the right-end of the first line: [http://cl.ly/image/2W3W0I3E0t2w](http://cl.ly/image/2W3W0I3E0t2w)

</comment><comment><USER9> Hm? [http://i.imgur.com/lYRV1P8.png](http://i.imgur.com/lYRV1P8.png)

</comment><comment><USER10> I can see him right now if I use Incognito.... Maybe cdn / caching issues?

</comment><comment><USER11> Seems to be there now?

<comment><USER12> I'm not seeing him? UK/Chrome

<comment><USER11> I've got...

Tim Cook, Eddy Cue, Craig Federighi, Jonathan Ive, Peter Oppenheimer, Dan Riccio, Philip W. Schiller, Bruce Sewell, Jeff Williams

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Trouble in paradise?

</comment><comment><USER14> Shows up in chrome.

</comment><comment><USER15> And?

</comment><comment><USER16> Omg who cares?

<comment><USER12> Quite a lot of people admire him, he's changed the face of Apple (almost literally).</comment></comment>


Xinjiang Re-Education Camps - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_re-education_camps <comment><USER2> This thread got removed from the front page?

<comment><USER3> Users flagged it.

This topic has been discussed very often and very repetitively, which eventually makes a story off topic for HN, at least until significant new information emerges.

That is not to say that it isn't important; quite the contrary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> The international response to this has been bizarre, and several majority Muslim countries consider this an 'achievement':

"In July 2019, 22 countries including U.K., Germany, France, Spain, Canada, Japan and Australia signed a joint letter to the UN Human Rights Council urging China to close the camps in Xinjiang.[27][110] In reaction to this, 37 countries including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar, UAE, Sudan, Angola, Algeria, Nigeria, DRC, North Korea, Russia, Venezuela, Philippines, Myanmar, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Palestine have signed a joint letter to the UNHRC praising China's "remarkable achievements in Xinjiang."[0]

[0] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_re- education_camps#Re...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_re- education_camps#Reactions_by_country_in_the_UNHRC)

<comment><USER4> I find it pretty remarkable (and scary) that the international community is much more comfortable calling out the USA on human rights abuses than it is China (e.g. the world pretty uniformly opposed moving the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem).

It goes to show how much you can accomplish foreign policy wise by being completely intolerant of any criticism (assuming you are armed with a sufficiently large stick and a people unified enough to wield it consistently).

<comment><USER5> The Jerusalem UN vote reflects views about the disputed status of Jerusalem rather than anti-Americanism.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Another aspect of this campaign is the razing of mosques and Muslim holy sites in Xinjiang: [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/07/revealed- new-e...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/07/revealed-new-evidence- of-chinas-mission-to-raze-the-mosques-of-xinjiang)

</comment><comment><USER2> vice did a 30 minute piece on this craziness: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7AYyUqrMuQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7AYyUqrMuQ)

</comment><comment><USER7> Interestingly enough, no Muslim country is officially criticizing China, they're all on the officially supporting side.

<comment><USER8> The PRC has been working very hard to stymie any criticism of the camps, and it isn't afraid to bully countries to achieve its diplomatic aims:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/25/world/asia/china- xinjiang...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/25/world/asia/china-xinjiang- muslim-camps.html)

> "Many, many governments are looking the other way and self-censoring on the > issue of Xinjiang," said Daniel R. Russel, the Obama administration's > assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs. "Beijing is > notoriously prickly about its self-declared 'core interests,' and few > countries are willing to put the economic benefits of good relations with > China at risk — let alone find themselves on the receiving end of Chinese > retaliation."

> When countries do criticize China, they tend to do so in a group, seemingly > as a way to diffuse and lessen possible retribution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Don't miss the video of the blindfolded and handcuffed men (prisoners) being let on to a train car [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGYoeJ5U7cQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGYoeJ5U7cQ)

</comment><comment><USER10> One thing I never hear people discuss, is the best way to combat terrorism.

So, let's agree that reeducation camps are terrible and inhumane, what is a good solution?

<comment><USER9> One person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter. See Hong Kong, the rebel alliance, or almost every national revolution in any country ever. China doesn't have a terrorist problem.

<comment><USER10> What about the people who dislike the freedom fighters but live in Xinjiang?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Even with all the possible 're-education' camps, USA is still the country with more incarcerated. Even though they have much less population.

<comment><USER9> Thank you 50 cent troll

<comment><USER8> > Thank you 50 cent troll

That would imply he's taking that position because he's being paid, which is most likely false. It's far more likely for a particular posting of propaganda, disinformation, or whataboutism to be made by a useful idiot [1] who's been duped than by an actual, self-conscious influence agent.

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

<comment><USER9> You're right</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Coronavirus Stats Visualized - <AUTHOR> https://coronavirus2020.live/ <comment><USER2> Could you also please show infection cases/deaths within China alone? I've noticed something weird in the data reported from inside China (at least the WHO SitRep values). It seems like they are following a quadratic trend (R^2 = 0.96), while the rest of the world is following an exponential trend. Your own graphs show exponential in the World stats.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Made it just in a few hours with Google Sheets and data studio. The hardest part was collecting data and fixing inaccuracies in WHO reports :)

<comment><USER3> Good job, never used Data studio, it looks like a nice way to make quick prototypes. I wonder if anyone might be interested in using a single API to get all the data instead of scraping it from different sources at this point. The API I did for my project ([https://coronavirus.gg](https://coronavirus.gg)) might serve this purpose, if anyone is interested...</comment></comment>


Show HN: ProgressBoard – PM Tool made for makers only - <AUTHOR> https://progressboard.co/ <comment><USER2> Have you considered adding project templates?

For example, if your target audience is developers, a project template would include modules like authentication, authorisation, user management, logging, admin pages, payments, etc.

That way as a user I'll keep in mind on the things I eventually need to focus on, without wasting too much time thinking about them, and focus on the important aspects of the product instead.</comment>


The Rise of 'Facadism' in London - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/in-pictures-50396337 <comment><USER3> I actually appreciate this. Glass and steel are nice from a distance, but when's the last time on the sidewalk you actually took a pause and leaned on one for a break? These new textures are cold and distant, pristine and fragile. You're not supposed to touch them.

Concrete, stone and brick are the opposite. They're timeless and welcoming. You can touch them without having to worry about leaving a print. They feel like they take care of you, rather than the other way around.

And aesthetically, IMO, there's nothing more incredibly boring than just sheets of untouchable glass straight down the street. There's no texture and no character.

A good compromise is to allow the warmer facades of old buildings to continue to exist, and leave the new ones to the skyline, so long as they continue to be isolating.

<comment><USER4> I'd rather they put in a building that actually _uses_ the facade they sit behind, in keeping with the architecture they supposedly want to preserve. The examples where it's just a wall with new style building sat behind look awful, and the windows don't even line up - so probably very inconsistent light, times of deep shadow and limited views from inside.

Looks more like the sort of thing your neighbour might do if they were a builder and you'd _really_ upset them. :)

<comment><USER5> Like most architecture, there are good and bad examples.

Planning/regulation can't really do much about the subjective, and the nature of these tends to make permissions a central player. "Facadism" is becoming a "best practice" compromise between preservation, modernity, commercials & such. The danger there is box ticking tokenism and the ugly architecture that comes from that.

Some bad architecture will always exist regardless but a lot of the bad examples in this style come from this "designed for planners" tokenism.

<comment><USER6> Can you provide a single good example? Every example I know of is bad for building occupants and looks terrible at street level.

<comment><USER7> This one in Seattle was pretty good, I think: [https://goo.gl/maps/9vaMWncm1m6SA96F9](https://goo.gl/maps/9vaMWncm1m6SA96F9).

<comment><USER8> It's a very basic and simple architecture so it looks ok. What's in London is a different thing. Buildings there are much more exquisite and what's being built behind is much more uglier.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wonder how much the difficulty in bringing these building up to modern standards plays into these decisions. Over the years these building would have been fitted with a variety of different heating systems; perhaps starting with open hearth fires when they were built with large brick chimney stacks to provide thermal mass. Over the years they probably got coal gas put in, or perhaps a back boiler hot water system operating on a thermal syphon, eventually being replaced by an early gas or oil boiler central boiler.

Each of these steps leaves another complex layer of hacks, fixes and dead pipes behind making it a long and challenging job to strip out and replace.

Similarly, when built it probably had no electrical supply at all, eventually being attached to the grid and wired with mineral insulated cable and re- wirable fuses. Over the years electricians have probably updated bits of this leaving old wires in place behind walls and ceilings.

Then you have the walls which would initially be lath and lime based plasters, with horse hair for strength and arsenic to stop the rats eating it. As these buildings got more sealed up, windows improved and fireplaces boarded up the condition of the plaster deteriorated. In places the plaster is patched with modern gypsum based plasters which aren't really compatible with the naturally porous building materials.

Even if all that is fixed and updated there is little or no insulation in the construction of the building. Adding it internally can cause issues with condensation buildup in the fabric of the building and is all but impossible to achieve without fairly large cold bridges due to the existing construction. Adding it externally can't be done without significantly altering the appearance of the building.

If that is all dealt with you probably have accessibility issues with steps and narrow door ways. Possibly fire safety issues etc.

<comment><USER10> Thank you for a well-informed comment that points out that old buildings are at best a labrynthine nightmare of hacks and at worst a potential death trap.

Too few people moaning about what's happening to these buildings are willing to pony up the cash to actually pay for it. Tell me, if _you_ had the choice between paying 500k for a new, insulated, safe, building or 500k + much higher insurance for an old, cold, dirty, impossible to work on building, which would you pick? The former, of course, which is why "protecting" a building is basically stealing a home from its owners (and why old listed structures can be a dirt cheap adventure if you like a challenge)

I own and live in a protected structure (thatched cottage in Ireland). Here's some of the issues.

1) The previous owner had "protection" foisted on them against their will. This made their house and its land (aka "curtilage" basically worthless. I paid next to nothing for it.

2) It's massively inefficient, and I need (difficult to get) planning permission to upgrade the heating system. Imagine needing planning permission to replace your boiler with a heat pump!!! I may be able to do a wood pellet stove, but would really prefer heat pump (0 carbon). Right now it's an ancient POS oil stove (looks neat, though I've grown to loathe it) - bit like [http://www.handfenterprises.ie/products/details/wellstood- tw...](http://www.handfenterprises.ie/products/details/wellstood-two-oven/28) . I also am forbidden from using double-glazed windows, etc.

3) In the most technical, literal reading of the law, I literally cannot hang a picture on the wall without planning permission (using a nail or drilling a hole alters the original material, after all!) - of course nobody does this, so instead everybody just has to guess what their council's particular heritage officer cares about (some are damn-near gestapo like) and hope they don't find themselves on their bad side.

3) I am not allowed to add windows or make them bigger. This is a problem because only one of the windows is big enough to crawl out of, and there is one door. In a fire we may well die

4) Not ONLY do I have to keep a "plaything for the rich" thatched roof, I have to keep it _specifically_ in oaten straw, a material that decays quickly. It's about 20k for a roof on this tiny, ~550 square foot house that will last, oh, 10 or 15 years. Thatch offers literally no advantage whatsoever over a modern roof. At one time, it was what you used if you were poor and couldn't afford anything else, because straw was a waste material, but now with combine harvesters instead of traditional threshing and short-straw oat varieties you can't use straw from normal oats, so you specifically grow oats to make straw for roofs. In the UK I understand water reed is more commonly allowed, and it can last several decades, but Ireland forbids it (in the midlands at lest).

5) House insurance is about 5X as expensive as it would be.

I knew all of these things before I bought the house, which is how I have a place on a few acres a 15 minute bike ride through a nature preserve from a train station rthat has commuter service to Dublin for under €70,000, but the ONLY way this place makes sense is because I have an assumed resale value of 0 and can pretty much toss it in the bin and still come out ahead compared to paying rent.

For the previous owner, "protection" was a complete disaster. Sadly the only reason it got protected was because the last owner was too poor to upgrade it before the law changed, and they could've benefited most of all from increasing home values.

<comment><USER9> My house was built in the 1870s so I'm quite familiar with most of the things I mentioned above! Thankfully it's not in a conservation area though. I certainly think there needs to be a balance between the needs of modern occupants of a building and the desire to preserve the heritage of traditional buildings. If there isn't an acknowledgement of the need to modernise these buildings they fall into near museum status. I don't think that is good for modern day occupants or for those who would wish the home to be maintained into the future.

<comment><USER10> It definitely isn't - protection is often the first step to a building falling in to decay. That way you can get it delisted, hopefully.

This dilapidated mill was in horrible shape in street view 8 years ago, and since then has rotted even further. It's dangerous and hideous, but it's "protected" so it remains a huge burden on the town.

It's illegal to tear it down. You'd be a moron to put any money in to instead of just building something else. But the heritage fetishists won't delist it so it remains, an eyesore and attractive nuisance, which does wonders for liability insurance no doubt.

[https://goo.gl/maps/r2STVqbRMLmbhDY3A](https://goo.gl/maps/r2STVqbRMLmbhDY3A)

Hell, imagine if we had protected status for codebases. "You could rewrite this from scratch but dammit you're going to keep this in jQuery because that's our heritage!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> m-i-l The ones where the old and new windows don't line up always seem a bit dumb. Must be a horrible experience for the people inside the new buildings, looking out of their windows onto a brick wall a few centimeters away. Both cited examples of this (Artillery Lane and Caledonian Road) are student accommodation, so I wonder if building at ultra-low cost has something to do with it.

Many of the others I don't have a particular problem with to be honest. There's actually one (not cited in the article) on the adjacent street to where I live, but they're building the new house to match up with the old facade so the nice Victorian era terrace isn't really disturbed. I'd much rather that than what they've done on another adjacent street - some overseas developer has bought one in the middle of a row of identical terraces, torn it down, built an iceberg basement, and a big new "modern" building that looms threateningly over the other buildings in the street like a largely windowless slaughterhouse with odd disproportionately large misshapen windows in improbable locations. I don't want to sound like Prince Charles with his "monstrous carbuncles", and I accept that perhaps there may be some people that somehow find that sort of "modern" building somehow aesthetically appealing, but I can't see how anyone would possibly think it was in keeping with the rest of the terrace either side, and have absolutely no idea how they got planning permission in such a strict conservation area.

<comment><USER11> I think the Cally Road one won worst building of the year.

ah yes - [https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/aug/29/carbunc...](https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/aug/29/carbuncle- cup-student-housing-ucl)

<comment><USER12> These should only be legal if that facade is integrated into the new building, not just a mask in front it. Yes, it's more work for the architects but otherwise it defeats the whole point of the exercise.

<comment><USER13> As a Londoner, I agree. Generally, I don't have any problem with historic facades being integrated into modern buildings so long as it's done well.

Some of these examples, where the building was built behind the historic facade with no attempt to integrate it at all, are apppaling and should never have been allowed. The developers of these projects took advantage of loopholes in planning laws.

In other examples from the article, like the College East, Wentworth Street (Spitalfields E1) example, the historic facade has now been perfectly integrated into the new development. In fact, it is a huge improvement on what it looked like before:

[https://email@example.com,-0.0722792,3a,75y,13...](https://email@example.com,-0.0722792,3a,75y,131.01h,104.42t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sIJJrCtUYxcnZWeTHbicNkQ!2e0!7i16384!8i8192)

(I cycle along this street every day!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Classic:

[http://www.urban75.org/blog/the-fake-houses- at-23-and-24-lei...](http://www.urban75.org/blog/the-fake-houses- at-23-and-24-leinster-gardens-bayswater-london-w2/)

That one at least keeps the houses looking similar. For a lot of the ones in the article I don't see how you are keeping thing aesthetically similar when you put a huge monster building behind the facade.

</comment><comment> King-Aaron This is big in Western Australia, where a lot of our heritage buildings have had their facades kept in place. Makes for a wonderful aesthetic. [https://freoview.wordpress.com/2019/01/21/fantastic- fremantl...](https://freoview.wordpress.com/2019/01/21/fantastic-fremantle- facades/)

</comment><comment><USER15> 'Facadism' is also getting popular in germany and I think there are some really nice examples here. If done well, i think it really achieves the best of both worlds. The buildings fit in and preserve the atmosphere and character of the city while also being modern, livable and built for their real purpose on the inside. There are some examples where it's hard to tell that in fact only the facade survived and the entire back got replaced, others archive a good harmony between the old and the new. I think it's a great idea! But, as always, poor executions can always be found (some examples can be found in the article).

<comment><USER16> _The buildings fit in and preserve the atmosphere and character of the city_

That's the questionable bit. I don't think they do, it's disjointed and jarring. It has all the hallmarks of design by committee for me - <USER2> gets their box ticked, but the overall picture is a shocking mess.

But then this is all subjective, so I guess you can't please everyone.

<comment><USER17> The examples in the article are disjointed and jarring, but there are many buildings that get this approach right so you barely notice it's a new building with an old facade.

Obviously the perpetrators of #2 and #4 in the article should never be allowed to design a building ever again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I live in Dublin and they do similar things but I haven't seen buildings not aligned like Thomas Lloyd is pub's in the article.

Sometimes can be pleasing entering an "old facade" but inside everything is brand new and modern.

</comment><comment><USER19> Oh my god these are ugly.

I expected samples how new is incorporated into old but this free standing facade is just plain ugly. Most of the houses seem to be built so at X moment they can just tear the facade down, because it now looks ugly.

I personally would prefer incorporating new with old. Keep the old facade, but it should be part of the house and working with the overall architecture.

<comment> 52-6F-62 This surprised me too. Toronto does a lot of integration with older buildings. People like it—at least better than just demolishing some beautiful or historic architecture. That's what I expected until the first photograph.

<comment><USER20> I hate the new trend of preserving tacky neon signs. The Sam The Record Man sign is just ugly. So was the Honest Eds sign (although that one is a bit nicer).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Outside of the most well-executed instances, facadism does one of two things. It either highlights how terrible the new building behind it is, or it highlights how terrible the old facade is in front of the new building. I think the true legacy of Facadism will be that it illuminates the ridiculousness of indiscriminate preservationism, much in the same way that Brutalism and International Style illuminated the ridiculousness of trend chasing.

You can take any survey of the most beautiful cities in the world and they will all have something in common: they were beautiful long before urban planning, historical preservation committees, or design review boards existed. Their beauty is of one of evolution...the slow process of tearing old ugly things down and building new things in their place, some of which may also be ugly, but others which will become iconic to the point where nobody _wants_ to tear them down. Democratic ideals shoved into beautification and preservation processes will only ever result in the preservation of things that shouldn't be preserved, and the construction of the lowest common denominator of putrid architecture.

</comment><comment><USER22> This is horrible. Those photos are pure examples of architectural laziness. There were so many ways to integrate those facades in a real modern building - instead of keeping them outside as a pointless wall, prone to degradation.

At this point it would have been better to destroy everything.

Mixing old and new is an art... you need harmony between the two. And this harmony is missing in those pics. Perhaps in other countries they are better at it (italy? france? hungary?)

</comment><comment><USER23> In Norway, the government protects heritage building's facade but allows for the internals to be rebuilt to modern standards.

Sometimes this makes sense as the old buildings were extraordinarily energy inefficient and preservation rules make it near impossible to insulate using modern materials. Some buildings are uninhabitable or cannot meet modern standards for environmental control yet are protected from demolition for historic reasons.

Unfortunately, the loop holes are exploited to the maximum, making a mockery of culture heritage preservation intentions. The government is responsible for many of the re-development decisions, causing the arbitrariness of architectural styles in some parts of the cities.

We've seen several buildings, in choice locations, be destroyed by "accidental" fires because of cultural heritage preservation rules.

<comment><USER24> I live in Oslo and I am genuinely shocked at the quality of construction here - so many corners are cut it is insane. They are not cheap either - we're talking 15k to 25k NOK per month.

My offices are in a beautiful modern well known office district / tourist hotspot and just yesterday one of the doorframes fell off the wall in the kitchen.

My own apartment is 90sqm, modern and in a well known central "expensive" part of town, was built only a few years ago, and the floor is so noticeably slanted that my bedroom cupboard door will slide open on its own from time to time.

The floorboards (whilst stunning) feel like they are built on-top of roots and boulders - the cement was clearly not levelled properly before the boards were placed.

I put a level on the kitchen counter and the bubble is obviously not centered.

On more than one occasion I have viewed apartments in Oslo where the master bedroom is so small that the property owners have to put a door on either side of the bed so you don't have to step over the bed to get out of the room. These apartments were also in the 20k NOK range.

1 in 10 apartments have ceiling lights. Apparently Norwegians really like standing lamps?

<comment><USER25> I have no ceiling lights in my house except for the kitchen and bathroom. Free standing lights give me a lot more flexibility and a powerful uplighter gives much better shadowless light than any ceiling light I have ever had.

I don't live in Oslo though, I don't think I could afford it. And though I work for StatNett at the moment I work remotely and only have to go in once a week or so for meetings so I don't have to deal with rush hour trains every day. But if you can put up with commuting you can find much cheaper, much bigger, places to live within quite easy commuting distance of Oslo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Images 2 and 4 are the worst - where they are trying to squeeze an extra floor in so the new facade windows dont align with the old facade windows.

Images 6 and 7 are postmodern additions - maybe its not your style but they aren't without architectural thought

The others are all standalone facades unclear what their final outcome will be. Perhaps they were never of a good standard, were beyond repair at the time or were taken away during construction. In any case just keeping the facade is probably better than 50 years ago when theyd just demolish the whole thing.

<comment><USER27> The mismatch in floor heights is something I also find jarring. The changes in standards mean that floor heights are reducing, leading to this. It'd have cost them more to build matching floor heights and they might have had to have one storey less to get planning permission.

Something similar happened near where I lived in London. Developers got permission to build an apartment block on condition that it looked the same as its older neighbour. The result was an odd looking mini version, about 2 metres shorter than the original.

<comment><USER17> For #2 and #4 it's not just the floor height, it's that they built a new building while pretending the old facade wasn't there. It's just a random wall standing in front of a completely unrelated building.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is… _sad_. I mean, if there is no other choice because restoration of the building is no longer technically feasible, fine. But just to throw up something bigger and newer? For shame.

<comment><USER29> I can't believe they build new buildings behind the façade where the windows don't line up.

London's bigger problem is the shoddy quality (at all stages) of new construction, in the unbound race for profit.

<comment><USER30> The race for profit is pretty malleable. Just set up the taxes and other incentives right, and people will do the right thing for profit.

<comment><USER31> Taxes, incentives, and regulations don't directly achieve the goal. If the real goal is a shift in company cultures across an industry, then there also needs to be well-informed communication. Incentive structures can be part of that communication[1]. But people don't obey incentives unless they keep those incentives in conscious thought. If incentives were all it took for organisations to pay the cost of changing priorities, then there would have been no value in naming a bug "Heartbleed".

[https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/04/09/what-heartbleed-can- tea...](https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/04/09/what-heartbleed-can-teach-the- oss-community-about-marketing/)

<comment><USER30> Who says incentives have to be purely monetary?

<comment><USER31> Not me

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Context which might be missing is that the buildings shown here are some grade of "listed buildings," where demolition prohibited under law for cultural or historical reasons.

Whilst some of these examples are particularly ugly, it strikes an interesting balance between maintaining the historically important aspects of the building, whilst modernizing it (or at worst, preventing a safety risk).

What's fascinating is when the aesthetics of the past don't align with the economics or building regulations today. Large windows and high-ceilings are both energy in-efficient and waste a lot of potential square-metreage.

</comment><comment><USER33> I"m assuming that they need to keep the facade because of historic value or something but why not attach it to the new building? Some are saying it is laziness but it seems like it would take a lot of work to make sure this freestanding wall is structurally sound. Not to mention all the extra work having to clean two walls instead of just one (I guess it would actually be 3 different surfaces, the front and back of the facade and the front of the new building). Of course, the architect won't be the one cleaning it...

So are they like this because someone thinks this looks good???

<comment><USER34> Most of the time they do tbf, but these are mostly very bad examples.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Most times 'facadism' is not an architectural choice, is the only way to get a permit to renovate a building. In case of doubt, 'gatekeepers' will always leave it as it is.

And 'facadism' is not that new. In some English cities, around 1800, it was common to get a land plot with an already built facade. It worked fairly well as a way to keep unity while allowing fragmented private iniciative.

</comment><comment><USER36> The spotted dog is the best example imo. Seems like they thoughtfully integrated old with new. But wtf is that atrocity on calendonian road?

</comment><comment><USER27> Some of these designs are great and others show the laziness and focus on cost-cutting in much of modern architecture. Just putting a new building behind an old facade is not architecture, it's copy and pasting. The true architects are those who manage to reuse the facade and fuse new and old into something that blends and flows together.

<comment><USER31> When I think about the delays to Crossrail, I feel compelled to defend laziness, copy and pasting, and focus on cost-cutting.

It was originally scheduled to open in 2018[1] and is now not going to be finished until well into 2021. Why? A large part of that is the work they need to do in order to "manage to reuse the facade and fuse new and old into something that blends and flows together"[2]

[1] [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-50345344](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-50345344)

[2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Qi046Xn6lA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Qi046Xn6lA)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> For any non-Brits looking for a glimpse into the (multi-million pound) challenges of converting London buildings into modern homes, check out Grand Designs:

[https://www.netflix.com/title/80160755](https://www.netflix.com/title/80160755)

The Kennington water-tower conversion is a nice example (S10,E5).

</comment><comment><USER38> If these are the worst examples they can find in the entire city of London, I'd say things are not going so bad.

<comment><USER30> Indeed. The topic itself is fascinating, but it doesn't seem like much too complain about.

The ugly part is when they don't line up the windows. Otherwise, it's fine.

<comment><USER39> There's also at least a potential aesthetic problem where the new building behind the facade is taller than the facade, especially if it extends above by a significant amount. That's very common indeed.

<comment><USER30> I'm happy with that look. If you can't hide the change perfectly, I'd rather the building be honest and blatant about being a hybrid.

But I can see how tastes differ.

<comment><USER39> It varies in how well it's done - much as with windows, some are very sympathetic and others not. It's also particularly noticeable for people who occupy higher floors in other nearby buildings and I'm not sure this is often considered in the planning process.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> We've got some buildings like this in Amsterdam too. Sometimes it's done really well, and I'm happy they managed to preserve a beautiful ancient facade while updating the insides to modern standards for non-collapsing structures. And sometimes it's an atrocity.

</comment><comment><USER40> Many of these examples seem dangerous, like a place for water inclusion and freezing/melting and rot. The examples where the buildings tie together well aren't so bad. But the ones where the windows don't even line up?! Throw that builder in the sea.

</comment><comment><USER41> That one on Stamford Street was there for decades as a very grand frontage to a car park! It was quite weird walking past it. The new building behind it doesn't 'work' with it at all, really.

</comment><comment><USER42> And I thought "eggshelling" (removing and rebuilding from scratch the insides of a building) we had in Warsaw was bad.

To think it never occurred to anybody in the decision chain that this might be a bad idea.

</comment><comment><USER43> Well, I suppose it is slightly better than just bulldozing everything.

At least it gives the public some vague sense of what it was like when architecture wasn't adversarial.

</comment><comment><USER44> I used to live in a Victorian townhouse made of 4 flats.

Opposite, inbetween some terraces, I suspect as a result of WW2 bombing, was a council block. 5 floors in the same space as the 4.

So it goes.

</comment><comment><USER45> Most of these are trash.

I like old buildings, a lot, and I also understand that growth requires new construction sometimes replace old buildings, but this is kind of the worst possible outcome. It still destroys the old building, and puts an incoherent one in its place. Some mergers of old and new are interesting and cohesive, but it seems like there isn't even an attempt to make them work together in a lot of cases.

</comment><comment><USER46> Seen this a _lot_ in Perth Western Australia in the last 10 years or so.

</comment><comment><USER47> Yerevan, Armenia really loves this style of building too

</comment><comment><USER48> You can blame Prince Charles for this

</comment><comment><USER49> I thought 'Faragism' is in the rise.</comment>


New Round of Funding Expected to Give Rovio $1.2 Billion Valuation - <AUTHOR> http://iphone5release.ca/angry-birds-value-set-at-1-2-billion/

<comment><AUTHOR> Anyone _still_ doubt that we are in a bubble?</comment>


Intelligence-Augmented Rat Cyborgs in Maze Solving - <AUTHOR> http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0147754 <comment><USER2> Doesn't seem to have much to do with _augmented_ intelligence - rather the rats are _telecontrolled_. To me augmented intelligence requires a bi- directional communication between the brain and the computer, in which the brain actively asks for help, and provides the information needed to obtain it.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. On another note, some of the research they referenced here is that of O'Keefe, Moser & Moser [0] which was absolutely groundbreaking. It dealt with decoding the neural signatures rats produce when navigating rooms -- allowing us to peek into their "inner coordinate system," in a way. Perhaps there are interesting questions to be asked about augmented intelligence when approaching spatial tasks from this kind of perspective.

[0]: [http://www.nature.com/news/nobel-prize-for-decoding- brain-s-...](http://www.nature.com/news/nobel-prize-for-decoding-brain-s- sense-of-place-1.16093)</comment></comment>


Startup Tips from Jay-Z - <AUTHOR> http://themetricsystem.rjmetrics.com/2009/12/21/top-5-startup-tips-from-jay-z/ Lyrical excerpts from the past decade of Jay-Z's most inspirational business-themed rhymes <comment><USER2> "I'm not a businessman I'm a business, man Let me handle my business, damn"

That has to be one of the best lines of all-time from Jay-Z. Great post. Thanks for sharing.

<comment><USER3> I listened to that song countless times when I first heard that line. Absolutely wonderful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I find #2 and #3 to be contradictory. Being a "business, man" is what Jay-Z is all about. He's made himself into a brand. Kids buy HP computers simply because he endorses them. That brand and iconic status is quite separate from his "businessman" status as founder of Roc-a-fella, CEO of Def Jam, owner of the 40/40 club, New Jersey Nets, etc. He definitely stays out of the limelight while running his businesses. That would be the being in the "food and beverage" mode. As Jay-Z the rapper, however, he has to take on a gigantic public image. You can't really follow #2 while abiding by #3.

I also wouldn't say 2001 was when Jay-Z was a "young star." He was already incredibly mainstream in the late 90's.

Of course, I understand that this post was more for entertainment value :)

<comment><USER5> I think the author of the blog post misinterpreted the lyric in number three. It isn't Jay-Z talking about himself. So it's not really contradictory:

 _The first verse is rumored to be about Jaz-O, his former mentor and business partner, or about long-time friend, business partner, and co-founder of Roc-a- fella Records Damon Dash._ <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_One>

He's saying that _they_ should have kept a low profile, while _he, the 'business, man'_ developed his personal brand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> [Offtopic]

In reference to point 5 - That line made me respect Jay-Z as an artist. He isn't in my top 5, but that was honest of him to admit. In that song, he says something along the lines of "Lyrically, I'd rather be Talib Kweli". Now, Talib Kweli _is_ in my top 5. He writes on some deeper topics then most mainstream artists, and as a result, is rarely heard of. Kweli, in a song he wrote after Moment of Clarity came out, would say:

> If lyrics sold then truth be told, I'll probably be just as rich and famous > as jay-z

Anyways... A lot of rappers are ex-drug dealers. As a result, many of them are business-savy. I feel Jay-Z is the best example of this.

<comment><USER7> > Anyways... A lot of rappers are ex-drug dealers. As a result, many of them > are business-savy. I feel Jay-Z is the best example of this.

L.L. Cool J., Missy Elliott, and Kanye West are just a few highly influential artists who have no known history of drug dealing or other criminal activity. And I think Stephen Levitt goes a long way to disproving the whole concept that "drug dealers are savvy businessmen" ([http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_levitt_analyzes_crack_econom...](http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_levitt_analyzes_crack_economics.html))

<comment><USER6> I have not seen that TED talk, though I plan to. LL Cool J, Missy Elliot, and Kanye never rap about selling drugs either. In fact, the latter two were producers first.

I should edit my OP because the truth is that there are many sub-genres of hip hop, some of which are prevelant with the drug-dealing folklore and others which are not. It was wrong of me to make a blanket statement.</comment></comment></comment>


Chrome Networking: DNS Prefetch & TCP Preconnect - <AUTHOR> http://www.igvita.com/2012/06/04/chrome-networking-dns-prefetch-and-tcp-preconnect/

<comment><USER2> This is actually quite fascinating. The lengths the Chrome team is going to, in the name of page-rendering speed, is really astonishing.

</comment><comment><USER3> This got me thinking...

When TLS, cookies or same origin policy are not a concern, why not resolve resource domains on the server side and output for example <img src="hxxp://10.0.0.1/picture.jpg"> to avoid that extra client side DNS request completely?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup, we can do that too! I didn't mention it in the writeup, but you can also insert <link rel="dns-prefetch" href="[http://www.domain.com/>](http://www.domain.com/>); hints into the head of the document to tell the browser to pre-resolve certain domains.

An often overlooked reason for supporting this is to pre-resolve hostnames behind a redirect. If you have a "<http://a.com/resource>, which redirects to "<http://b.com/resource>, and you know this relationship while you're generating the page, then injecting a dns-prefetch link can help hide the cost of the extra DNS lookup when the browser is following the 3xx.

<comment> mike-cardwell DNS pre-fetching is a great way for spammers to determine whether or not an email has been read when the recipient is using webmail with a browser which supports it. Although, I believe DNS pre-fetching is disabled over https by default on all current browsers which support it.

EDIT: This is one of the things that a website I developed tests for: <https://emailprivacytester.com/></comment></comment></comment>


Professionalization of tech by corporations to prevent a tech labor movement - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/histoftech/status/1123584886240088071 <comment><USER2> The Bell System was not innocent of this either. They made a pretty clear dividing line between "craft" labor, and management. At Baby Bells programmers were pretty much unofficially (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) not management, until it came time to do strike assignments, then, all of as sudden, programmers are managers.

One question I have is: was this a conscious decision on the part of IBM and Bell System management, or was it something that just emerged?</comment>


How to Admit Your Mistakes - <AUTHOR> http://www.lifehack.org/articles/management/how-to-admit-your-mistakes.html <comment><USER2> Just do it. Though it's easier said than done.

</comment><comment><USER3> You don't need to read the article: just admit your mistakes frankly. Repair any damage cause.

Corollary: make mistakes >50% of the time, or you're not really trying.</comment>


Ask YC: Table based layout - part of the learning curve, or just deprecated? - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN'ers,
A friend of mine, a CS major and good programmer, is working on a web project and learning HTML/CSS for the first time. As a web developer, I've done my best to nudge him in the right directions, in terms of separating semantics and layout, graceful degradation, and best-practice CSS, but like anyone who's never used code for layout, he's struggling with CSS's annoying idiosyncracies, cross-browser bugs, and weird (at first) ways of doing things.
Here's the thing: I know he could pick up functional table-based layout very quickly and produce a 'working site' with much less headache. That's how I learned it, and I have no doubt that its more intuitive to the beginner, especially with tools like Dreamweaver's table builder.
So, do you think it's best to learn to do it wrong (but do it) first, as long as one later understands why sites shouldn't be built that way? Or if I teach him table-based layout, will I just be unleashing another hapless developer who doesn't respect web standards onto the Internet?
-dan <comment><USER2> I would suggest a grid-based CSS framework, such as <http://www.blueprintcss.com/> . They eliminate most the headaches of cross- browser bugs in CSS for layout, at the (comparably minor) expense of including some non-semantic class names.

When I started learning presentation layer I went straight to HTML/CSS. Tables have always seemed ungainly and unmanageable in comparison, particularly if the project is going to be using significant DOM-modifying JavaScript, or if the layout is not set in stone.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, this is a good suggestion, I'll pass it along. I don't have any experience with CSS frameworks myself - it's just easier for me to do it by hand at this point - but I could see how they could significantly change the learning curve for beginners.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Ask yourself these two questions:

1\. Does this layout require display: table/table-row/table-cell?

2\. Do I want this to work in IE6 and IE7?

If the answers are "yes" and "yes" then you have to use a table, because that is the only way to get display: table functionality in IE6 and IE7.

If either answer is "no" then using something other than tables is probably best. If you are starting from scratch then you should probably do whatever will get you a prototype faster. If you've already laid out the page using a table, then add an issue "redo layout without using tables" in your issue tracker and prioritize it against your other issues.

<comment><USER2> Can you identify some layouts that require display: table/table-row/table- cell? They solve some problems with CSS, but those problems (insofar as I've experienced) only come up when working with designs that specifically target the shortcomings of CSS' other display modes (e.g. your shorter secondary column has a background that needs to extend the length of the primary column); or that have layout idiosyncrasies so unconventional that a designer would either need to be familiar with how to implement them to even propose them, or be actively malicious (e.g. uh... like a variable height container that sits at the bottom of a secondary column alongside a longer primary column, I think?).

But "yes" to fast prototypes.

<comment><USER3> Many times when you want to constrain an element's size and/or alignment based on the size/alignment of elements above/below and beside it, you need to use table layout. Consider a simple layout from a site I will be launching very soon (not to scale):

           BBBB
        A  BBBB
           BBBB
      CCCCCDDDDEEEEE
      CCCCCDDDDEEEEE
           FFFF
           FFFF
           FFFF

You want A to be vertically centered with B and horizontally centered with C. You can't give a fixed width or a fixed height to anything because the layout needs to be fluid. I don't see how to do it without using table layout.

If some dimensions of some elements can be fixed (e.g. the width of A and C), or if some alignments are changed to make thinks convenient (e.g. align the bottom of A with the bottom of B), of if approximate alignment is good enough, then often nested block/inline-block and some positioning fu can be used instead of tables. But, sometimes the automatic table layout algorithm is exactly what the layout needs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Honestly I don't think this question is really about "to table or not to table"

The question is whether you friend would find value spending the time now to learn how to use CSS properly despite its quirks. If he's going to be maintaining this site and others for a long period of time then he should probably eat the learning curve and learn CSS now. If its a one off project with little maintenance then do what's easier.

</comment><comment><USER5> in my humble opinion, its a step on the learning curve. he shouldn't take it and run, never learning CSS, but to build a site or two with tables is fine. especially if he later comes back and spends time re-doing them without tables.

as long as he's using the process to learn more about CSS and improving his skills, not just learning how to make better table layouts.

</comment><comment><USER6> Rather a leading question. What about the third option: that there's nothing wrong with tables?

<comment><AUTHOR> Tables are, in my opinion, a good way to learn web layout quickly, but I strongly believe that there is value in XHTML which reveals the document's semantics, and tables should be used for tabular data only. While the semantic web is in its infancy, we should try to do our best to create documents which give the future's data miners the best chance of creating linked data from our articles, essays, and appilications.

Furthermore, for developing big sites, CSS saves a lot of money and man-hours because sitewide design decisions can be made by editing a single stylesheet.

And, if he's going to do web dev in the future, and presumably add this project to his resume, his potential employers are not going to be excited to see that he thinks TD's and TR's are the way to go - most professional web dev shops use CSS/DIV based layouts.

Plus, CSS as a language, along with its support in major web browsers, is steadily improving. Old school table layouts, not so much.</comment></comment>


BrainStorming HN: "All the single hackers" - <AUTHOR>

Hi there hackers!
So my brother-in-law, after 10 months without being able to find a job has finally decided to be an entrepeneur. He is going into the "singles" and friendship building business (Real Life (tm) and on-line).
I think it is quite an idea, I believe nowadays couples tend to break and usually, one of them ends up losing friends and may feel a bit lonely.
So here are some questions for any of you that has experience with these kind of business (as a client or as an owner/worker).
- What did/do you like the most?
- What did/do you hate the most? - What did/do you find helpful?
- What did/do you miss the most? - What did/do you prefer on-line or real life? - How much will you pay for a dating/friendship service? - Other questions?
Please feel free to add so many extra info/experiences as you wish.
Thank you =) <comment><USER2> I'll outsource almost anything. My social life, i can build myself.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you fix/track crashes that aren't reproducible internally - <AUTHOR> Some of my products is getting bad reviews since my app is crashing sporadically by some customers. This is happening after a new OS update was released. The crash I'm not able to reproduce it internally and my customers are not able to send me any logs :( <comment><USER2> An option beside using firebase is to catch the exception in your main activity and send it's stacktrace to your own server. Something like this: [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/601503/how-do-i- obtain-c...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/601503/how-do-i-obtain-crash- data-from-my-android-application)

</comment><comment><USER3> I use Crashlytics for both iOS and Android apps.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! From political reasons we're not able to add Analytics to our apps :(

<comment><USER3> Interesting, where are you based?

<comment><AUTHOR> Germany but I meant political reasons internally at the company</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Researchers Bypass Apple FaceID Using Biometrics 'Achilles Heel - <AUTHOR> https://threatpost.com/researchers-bypass-apple-faceid-using-biometrics-achilles-heel/147109/ <comment><USER2> I honestly question whether we need Biometrics at all? I don't really see what benefit they have over other types of authorization?</comment>