Roomba Inventor Joe Jones on His New Weed-Killing Robot - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/home-robots/roomba-inventor-joe-jones-on-weed-killing-robot <comment><USER2> As a hobby gardener and wannabe roboticist I've thought a lot about this problem. Before I continue I love this thing and am seriously thinking about getting one.

However, a concern that I'm sure they've thought a lot about is in it's technique. I really only care about making sure there are no weeds within, say, 8 inches of my plants (or put another way, my level of concern about a weed is proportional to it's distance from my vegetable or flower plant). This looks like it will weed everything _except_ the 8 inches around the plant. Never mind things like cucumbers that spread out on the ground and have important bits that are short and can't be contained by the wire protectors. Still, an exciting place to start.

<comment><USER3> I do raised beds as well, so I have the same concern. But from my point of view the larger issue is that I'm almost never _only_ weeding. Like, it's just not that big of a job.

But more importantly, time spent "in the garden" includes a lot of inspection and minor adjustments to all kinds of things— move plants on a trellis, pinching suckers off the tomatoes, clipping blighted leaves off of plants, ensuring flowers are getting fertilized, monitoring fruit growth, etc.

All of this stuff is an essential part of being in tune with what's going on out there, and I'm not sure that having a robot do one small piece of it is beneficial. Basically, this product doesn't really look like it was built by a gardener— it looks like it was someone who had a solution they wanted to apply elsewhere, and spent 15 minutes watching a gardener at work, without really understanding what they were doing.

<comment><USER4> Watering would be a nice function as well. Many people don't want to bother with water pipes, so a bot that takes care of watering would be useful.

<comment><USER3> In my opinion, that suffers from the same fundamental issue that it's covering a small portion of the visible work that a gardener is doing, but isn't accounting for all the observation and tweaks.

Basically I'm just not sure it's realistic to pitch this product to someone who wants to have an outdoor garden but spend little to no time actually tending it. I feel this kind of user might be better served by something like Aerogarden.

In any case, it's a much harder problem because watering even a small garden takes a _lot_ of water, so for it to be practical, you either need a robot with a huge (and very heavy) reservoir, or a base station at which it can fill up (which would almost certainly require leaving the garden bed itself, massively complicating the whole system).

<comment><USER5> Maybe you could attach a garden hose.

<comment><USER6> _> Maybe you could attach a garden hose._

It would have to be a much stronger robot to haul around a garden hose. Those things can easily weigh several kilograms when they're full of water, not to mention they can get caught on obstructions rather easily.

<comment><USER5> Have you used one of these robot vacuum cleaners? I sometimes think they spend more time getting caught on obstructions than vacuuming. :)

<comment><USER7> There's always a sock waiting to be stuck on somewhere...

But I don't get it why they won't make the robot reverse a short bit and try to go around instead of just rolling over and die.

That would solve 99% of the situations I have rescued my old Roomba and current Neato from. It's very seldom they actually got something entangled in their brushes.

<comment><USER5> I think the concern is probably causing damage. In my home it's usually wires that are a problem.

<comment><USER7> It already is damaging things as it is. The Neato have peeled a USB cable and an audio cable. It also have chewed on a few laptop charger cables but they seems to be tougher so no damage. Hopefully it won't peel something that could be dangerous.

I doubt it could be that hard to detect an unusually low rotation speed. Now it seems to chug until it really stalls. Instead it should stop the brushes immediately and retreat, then retry with just the fan running.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I expect that one thing that will come out of deep learning is mechanical weeding for industrial level agriculture. Instead of spraying crops with herbicide, mechanically remove weeds. Bonus is agricultural machinery tends to be high capital cost anyways, which allows for a lot more processing power and sensors than a garden robot.

<comment><USER9> I really hope we get there soon. Not only could this eliminate usage of herbicides, but many smaller autonomous robots vs one really big John Deere could also remove the need for monocultures. And that would really be a major improvement for both crop yields and the environment

<comment><USER10> As someone who lives in a country where 55% of the population is involved in agriculture, it sounds more terrifying than wonderful.

What will all these people do once farmers are unnecessary?

<comment><USER6> _> What will all these people do once farmers are unnecessary?_

There aren't that many people working on farms in developed countries. In the US, only around 3 million people (or <1% of the total population) work on a farm. [0]

In other countries where many people are involved in agriculture, the pending industrialisation/automation of farming will probably have a similar impact to what happened in North America and Europe over the 20th century: more people will move to urban areas and add value to the economy in other ways.

[0] [https://www.agcensus.usda.gov/Publications/2012/Online_Resou...](https://www.agcensus.usda.gov/Publications/2012/Online_Resources/Highlights/Farm_Demographics/)

<comment><USER10> I'm talking about India. 55% of the workforce turns into hundreds of millions of people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> As a Roomba owner, I have to say that I'm not really impressed with their decision to make another product when their first one barely even works.

> "Some 15 million of them are cleaning floors all over the planet, and > they're doing so reliably and affordably and autonomously enough that people > keep on buying them"

It is absolutely not "reliable". It's _barely_ better than cleaning the floor myself. Some days, cleaning the floor myself would actually be easier, or ends up being what I have to do anyway. The number of issues I've run into with the damned thing is absurd and I feel like they should be fixing those before making a new product.

I think people are for the most part getting tricked into buying these. They're not that great.

<comment><USER12> I've had a Roomba 780 cleaning my apartment daily since 2013. Issues I've encountered so far:

1\. It occasionally doesn't properly return to the home base, because it's hard to find a good place for the home base where it can't be moved/knocked over accidentally. This happens maybe once every 2 or 3 weeks, and is just a mild annoyance: you just need to carry the Roomba to its home base yourself.

2\. After 3 years of usage, the battery died in such a way that it emptied rapidly enough for the Roomba to not be able to return to the home base. This was easily fixed by installing a new battery.

I recently upgraded to the Roomba 980, and it seems to work better than the 780 — it cleans more quickly and returns to its home base more reliably. Also, less cleaning required due to a different brush design.

Overall, I feel that I'm definitely getting my money's worth out of the product, and it's doing a great job at vacuuming. YMMV, but for me, it's great.

<comment><USER13> 3x the value of a non-robotic vacuum?

<comment><USER14> Better to compare it to a cleaning service. Say $30 an hour, and the roomba does the rough equivalent of an hour a week when you let it run daily. 4 years (208 weeks) of $30 is over $6000, ten times the price of the 780. Even if the roomba does the equivalent of 6 minutes of maid-time each week, that's not bad.

<comment><USER15> Not even close - cleaning lady can do a lot more than just vacuum the floor.

>Say $30 an hour

Depends on where you live. Around here (CE Europe) I get cleaning service for ~5$/h (~15$ for 3 hours of work once a week).

<comment><USER14> Youd have to pay for extra time for services besides vacuuming. Even if your price is 6x lower, the roomba is still cheaper.

<comment><USER15> But the cleaning lady doesn't take nearly as much time vacuuming as a roomba I just don't think it's a comparable service at any level or that it can replace a cleaning service - it can supplement it by vacuuming more often.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The term "weed" feels pretty outdated at this point. People consider many beneficial plants to be weeds just because they didn't put them there. For example, people remove clover, a wonderful nitrogen fixer, from their lawns in order to maintain their unsustainable monoculture of nonnative grass. Is a weed-killing robot solving the right problem? Modern agriculture works against nature rather than with it.

<comment><USER17> A weed is essentially any undesired plant that self propagates effectively. The fact that some of them are beneficial in some aspect is irrelevant if they are unwanted. The entire point of a garden is that it's full of stuff that some human wants.

<comment><USER18> Their point is that if a clover is necessary for healthier vegetables, maybe the education around what weeds are should be fixed.

<comment><USER19> _Clover_ is certainly not what concerns typical gardeners. Is there a reason I should love the morning glories that are constantly trying to kill my tomatoes?

<comment><USER17> Only because it's impossible to defeat. :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Gah. I have to wonder who thought the ieee.org website design was a good idea. 2/3rds of the page taken up with not the article, but a whole bunch of noisy, visually intrusive links to everything and its mother? The article sort of squeezed in on the left 1/3rd seeming almost like an afterthought.

<comment><USER21> This is what it looks like on a 2560x1440 resolution monitor: [https://i.imgur.com/08mYqWq.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/08mYqWq.jpg) Yes the small column on the left is the article.

<comment><USER22> You've both zoomed out in your browsers. Press CTRL+ a few times until you get back to 100%. Article takes up half the screen for me in Chrome+FF, 100%zoom @ 1440p.

<comment><USER20> No I haven't. Standard 1080p display, multiple machines, multiple browsers (Safari, Firefox & Chrome.) On all I get the same thing, the article is taking up barely a third of the page.

[http://imgur.com/8Ce68DO](http://imgur.com/8Ce68DO)

[http://imgur.com/5nnteHu](http://imgur.com/5nnteHu)

To make it worse, those other three columns of links to other articles contain animated gifs, really dragging attention away from the actual content.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I think the traditional solution (weed barrier) is still better, and cheaper.

[http://www.homedepot.com/p/Vigoro-3-ft-x-50-ft- Polyethylene-...](http://www.homedepot.com/p/Vigoro-3-ft-x-50-ft-Polyethylene- Weed-Barrier-Landscape-Fabric-1142RV/206684876)

<comment><USER24> I'm not a huge fan of landscape fabric. It works for a season or two but over time it forms holes that weeds push through. You still have to manually weed but now you are less likely to pull all the roots up.

The previous owner of my house used a ton of it as a quick solution to a weed problem so they could more easily sell the house. I've spent a lot of time ripping out their quick fix. I had a nice surprise of finding a bed of sad irises under one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> > Currently I'm thinking that cameras connected to deep learning networks is > the technology with the most promise to enable a new wave of low-cost > robotic applications.

After his earlier comments about fancy sensors being too expensive I was surprised to read this. But I agree. Once some cheap neural net ASICs come out I expect a revolution in robotics will follow soon after.

<comment><USER26> An alternative outcome might be that sensor prices drop due to mass production with more adoption.

<comment><USER25> Cameras are pretty cheap and already mass produced like crazy. The expensive part is the processing you need to extract high level information from the pixels. That's why we need cheap neural net ASICs.

<comment><USER27> Heh, sorry for the shameless plug, but that's one of the big target applications for our chip: deep learning for robotics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> It's not clear from the article, but if I let this loose on my lawn, will it eliminate all the grass?

</comment><comment><USER29> This looks like it would be fine for a homeowner that wants a garden but doesn't like to weed. But looking at it from the commercial standpoint it doesn't make much financial sense.

You'd need to spend nearly $109,000 per acre and that is a pretty small vegetable commercial farm. In fact ten acres would probably be the minimum for one family to make a living and you'd spend over a $1 million!

You can hire a whole lots of high school kids every year for a whole lot less money. Doesn't mean it isn't cool technology, but then again so is a $450,000 Ford GT.

Still believe that commercial herbicides will soon be an endangered species. Didn't get many farmers to agree with me twenty years ago but maybe more would now.

<comment><USER30> I imagine once this is made to fit into the row spacing of commercial row- crops, and purchased at scale, larger operations would be able to deploy these at a cost competitive with herbicide applications. And once it gets even within an order of magnitude of traditional herbicides, the implications for organic crops could be huge!

<comment><USER29> Agree with you more than you do yourself. Herbicide costs are rising while technology costs are declining. First use will be organic crops but I think it will make sense for non-organic ones as well.

<comment><USER30> Once technology like this hits a critical mass, I'm not sure there will even be the need for a distinction between organic and traditional agriculture.

edit: Though I suppose there will still need to be distinctions made to make clear the differences between GMO varieties such as BT corn and the like. However, maybe by then the definition of organic will widen to allow for the incredible advancements that genetic engineering allows us.

<comment><USER31> There will be farmers who will want to perpetuate a distinction just as you have microbrew vs craft vs "commercial" brewers.

Once a majority of produce and fruit can be classified as organic from a chemicals PoV labor intensity may become a point of distinction in order to fetch a better price in the marketplace (I say that as someone who typically supports /buys/ organics).

<comment><USER30> I guess I don't understand the distinction you're talking about. Are you saying that people would be inclined to pay more for food they knew had more human hands involved in it?

It's a bizarre future, but I guess we're already seeing people pay 25x for a hand bag if they know it was made in a conflict-free village or something of that nature. I suppose its only natural that our abundance will begin to allow us to start making those sorts of luxury designations for our food as well.

<comment><USER31> It's exactly that distinction I'm making. Oftentimes automated machinery is better at making things than humans at making the same (furniture, cars, shoes, etc.) but people like buying "crafted" items for various reasons (vanity, support of craftspeople, local economy, what-have-you).

However, the main point is some farmers will find some kind of marketable distinction bigger operations won't be able to leverage (labor intensity or small production varietals "heirloom", etc.) Something which would allow them to fetch a better price and make them viable as a business)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The wheels look too tiny for the real world. Nice idea, though.

This guy invented the Roomba? He must have been really screwed by iRobot if he has to do a Kickstarter to fund his next project. He should either have enough money or the reputation to talk to VCs.

<comment><USER33> I am also perplexed.

The "goal" on KickStarter is set as US$ 120,000 (at this moment it reached more than double that US$ 265,213).

So he asked to receive between 108,000 and 110,000 US$ (net of the Kickstarter fee of 5% and of the additional - absurd BTW - "payment fee between 3 and 5%).

This can be a rather large or a ridicoulosly small amount (of course it depends on points of view) but I propend for the "ridicolously small".

A (hopefully) succesfull robotics engineer in his fifties should have (or can procure through relations) that amount of money easily, and he is "only" a co- founder (and CTO) of the new company.

It seems to me - I have noticed it on other projects that ask for otherwise senselessly small amounts of financing - that Kickstarter is used only to give some visibility to the product/invention.

Seen this way the 10,000-12,000 US$ (financed by crowd BTW) are more "advertising expenses" than anything else, and even if at the end Kickstarter gets (thanks to the higher level of founding contributions) double of that, it is still peanuts for the amount of visibility it provides.

<comment><USER34> Yeah for projects like this the Kickstarter is really just used for "pre- sales" and marketing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Might work on the East Coast or in water-intensive gardens elsewhere, but in California almost any reasonable garden will have a layer of rough mulch to reduce evaporation (and suppress weeds). Maybe this robot could navigate my mulch but I'm doubtful.

</comment><comment><USER36> Joe Jones is one of my heros, I've still got my copy of "Robots: Inspiration to Implementation" that was such a great focal point for robotics in the 90's.

Tilling seems like something that would be pretty challenging though. The whole "weed/not weed" thing has a lot of interesting questions around it. I always thought something that would keep your driveway and sidewalk clear of snow would be the next bit opportunity to automate.

</comment><comment><USER37> I can think of two very specific (for me) use case. Kill weeds in driveway pavers / patios where anything growing green is fair game and a Poison Ivy extreme prejudice terminator. I don't want to use pesticides since I have dogs and enough land to see the occasional rabbit, turtle, garden snake and I don't really want to harm them either.

<comment><USER38> Does Roundup actually hurt animals?

<comment><USER39> Which animals has it been tested on, and where are the studies? Chemistry is presumed dangerous until proven safe.

<comment><USER40> pubmed is your friend: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10854122/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10854122/) is a good example. "Multiple lifetime feeding studies have failed to demonstrate any tumorigenic potential for glyphosate"

Roundup is about as safe is it comes - common vinegar is more toxic.

<comment><USER41> Well there's still a lot of back and forth on this from my understanding. Earlier this year some emails came to light from Monsanto regarding ghostwriting some research, aka they wrote an article and more or less had some scientists sign off on it as though they had done the research. They were also tipped off about the International Agency for Research on Cancer's determination for being a probable carcinogen so they were able to "prepare a public relations assault on the finding well in advance of its publication".

Relevant Times Article: [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/14/business/monsanto- roundup...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/14/business/monsanto-roundup- safety-lawsuit.html)

<comment><USER40> There is always the Monsanto conspiracy... That group is very vocal, but hasn't done a very good job of getting real research past peer review (getting their "research" into newspapers is easy and they do that all the time). Monsanto is evil (source: a personal friend employed by Pioneer - about as biased as they get), but getting past peer review is hard, even when you are evil.

<comment><USER41> Yes, but you can't ignore that the study you mentioned above was done funded by Monsanto, they paid Intertek to do it. [1] "Ten of the 16 scientists on the Intertek panel have been consultants for Monsanto in the past and two others are former Monsanto employees, according to a roster published on Monsanto's website." Paired with the unsealed internal emails from earlier this year, it's at least enough to raise an eyebrow at.

Unfortunately I do not think that peer review is incorruptible either. It is certainly important and speaks more for credibility, but especially in a case like this where there is so much money involved, personally I'm still waiting to see more information. I mean those emails just came out a few months ago, who knows what else will be found at this point?

[1] [http://www.reuters.com/article/us-monsanto-herbicide- glyphos...](http://www.reuters.com/article/us-monsanto-herbicide-glyphosate- idUSKBN0TQ2XH20151208)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Have a look at naio technologies ([http://www.naio- technologies.com/en/](http://www.naio-technologies.com/en/)).

They make agricultural robots for easing farming. They have a bunch of robot to remove weed

</comment><comment><USER43> The "if it's small, it's a weed" is probably ok for a v1.0 product. They might want to talk to Toshiba - they bought IBM's retail Point-of-Sale business a few years ago, and they had a product called "Veggie Vision" [1] that identified produce at the cash register via a camera.

Insert "Not Hotdog" joke here, but having a wifi connection to the cloud where heavy-duty weed classification software could be run would keep the device costs low.

[1] [http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/view_group.php?i...](http://researcher.watson.ibm.com/researcher/view_group.php?id=2021)

<comment><USER33> >Insert "Not Hotdog" joke here, but having a wifi connection to the cloud where heavy-duty weed classification software could be run would keep the device costs low.

Actually I would like to insert here that time the connection was down for half an hour and the thingy eradicated all aunt Julia's plants, and it's not a joke (at least according to aunt Julia, who didn't laugh at all).

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> The article pointed out the inventor's book, Robot Programming : A Practical Guide to Behavior-Based Robotics. [1] Are there any other interesting/recommended texts for this domain?

The book refers to a website that seems to have been domain squatted by GoDaddy. An alternate .net tld is present, but unfortunately uses old Java applets. [2]

1\. [https://smile.amazon.com/dp/0071427783/ref=rdr_ext_tub](https://smile.amazon.com/dp/0071427783/ref=rdr_ext_tub)

2\. [http://www.behaviorbasedprogramming.net/manual.html](http://www.behaviorbasedprogramming.net/manual.html)

</comment><comment><USER45> Tertill solves a big issue. Lots of ppl want to have a weed free garden and don't have time/ don't want to pull out weeds all the time. But I do hope, though, that Tertill is just a very basic starting point. I can immediately think of 20-25 improvements.

</comment><comment><USER46> How long will weeds last if you keep decapitating them? I'd imagine they would deplete the soil even faster than just letting them grow(which brings it's own problems with shading out plants and propagation)?

</comment><comment><USER47> It feels like everyone gets their own Martian rover to me. still a world of solar powered helpers for menial tasks is interesting. with low enough costs eventually you won't care about how many you need.

</comment><comment><USER48> The main issue with just trimming is that sprouts coming up from roots of nearby trees have infinite energy and will get thicker every time you cut them.

Not to mention that the worst weeds also spread horizontally

</comment><comment><USER49> Seems like insects and rabbits are a bigger problem for the typical backyard gardener than weeds. So if the robot has insect and rabbit shooing modes, maybe...

</comment><comment><USER50> Does anyone know why the wheels are inclined this way? I guess it has much more grip on the soil this way but is there something else?

<comment><USER51> It's explained in the video. It scrubs the ground to prevent weed saplings from growing.

<comment><USER50> Thanks, I didn't pay attention to the video the moment he said that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> What stops someone from walking up to your garden and stealing your robot?

<comment><USER4> The fact that it isn't worth the effort to steal it? I mean, it's a nice demo, but it has to be better than that to be useful. They say it needs planks all around the work zone. That could be solved with a camera placed at some height. What if the soil has small ditches, as it is the practice when planting? It needs nice level soil to work, as well. It's not using computer vision, or not an advanced form of CV to distinguish good from bad plants. So it requires manual identification for each plant. In my opinion, it's not ready for prime time yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Commercial organic farms mulch heavily, which nicely controls weeds.

Non organic farms spray.

Home gardeners apparently aren't mulching, which has myriad other benefits besides weed control. I love robots, but mulch is a much better solution.

<comment><USER54> >> "Home gardeners apparently aren't mulching"

Yeah.. wow. Stop by a Home Depot sometime next spring and observe the mountains of bagged mulch they stock. Home gardeners and hobby farmers do indeed mulch. A lot. Where I am they stack mulch between gas pumps at every station. If that's too much trouble a single call will have a truckload on your property inside a week.

Simple weed killing robots of the sort depicted here will find their home on lawns. We're not all living in a coastal desert; ample fresh water affords nice lawns and that means squabbling with weeds.

<comment><USER53> I was just responding to the video, which seems to clearly be an unmulched home garden. So I am assuming from their marketing that is the application they are targeting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> I like this robot. It's cute

<comment><USER56> yes

<comment><USER56> surprised more people aren't pointing this out

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Needs lasers, invasive bugs are worse.

</comment><comment><USER58> scale it up a bit and drop a bunch of them in Middle East to weed out terrorists.

</comment><comment><USER59> Am I the only one who had to click to find out that weed being talk about isn't Marijuana?

</comment><comment><USER60> This is ridiculous but I'd rather see people going this route than spraying glyphosate or some other poison. That said, the root of this is a dangerous kind of hubris.

The idea of weeds is a tragic fallacy. There are some "weeds" that are selling for up to $15/lb (nettles, lambs quarter). Most weeds are beneficial for cooking and herbal medicine. And most any weed can have some kind of beneficial role in the garden.

Same thing goes for "pests". One plant's pest is another plant's companion.

Yet people are all but obsessed with exterminating misunderstood creatures from their local ecosystems. In my view, this robot is not so far off in the grand scheme of things from a robot that goes around killing other animals and even people, based on shallow, superficial misunderstandings of another being's potential.

I wish as much engineering effort went into understanding as it does into stuff like this.

<comment><USER61> Lets not get hyperbolic - folks pull plants for a local monoculture of beneficial botany. That's all. Its not a skynet extermination program or anything.

Heck, I pull volunteer flowers from my flower bed if they don't jibe with this years' layout. Its not about what's a 'weed'. Its about what I want in this here bed, and what I want in that one over there.

<comment><USER60> On one hand, I feel you. Actually, I think a "weeding robot", programmed well, is a much better alternative to the chemical/GMO program.

But weeding as an act of moderate human selection isn't what irritates me. It's peoples' blind acceptance of an entire false taxonomy of "good" vs "bad" plants/organisms. It's dualistic and dangerous in the long run. It's stupidity posed as common sense. It's a kind of eugenics that's directed not just at humans but at entire ecologies.

Right now what Monsanto is doing with chemical resistant plants is unconscionable. The glyphosate scheme is obscene. It's _worse_ than some skynet extermination program. In the midst of a massive loss of the earth's sustaining biodiversity, we have unchecked corporate powers playing out obscene world domination plans. The stakes are _too high_. Why do people feel so nonchalant about the Roundup scheme? Why do we eat their corn? Cause they're only killing weeds.

There's a massive extinction happening right now. What are we doing? Programming robots to decrease biodiversity.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: API to order pizza? Does it exist? - <AUTHOR> Where can I find an API to place an order for a pizza? <comment><USER2> Where are you located? Domino's has an API apparently: [https://github.com/aluttik/pizzapi](https://github.com/aluttik/pizzapi)

I rather like Domino's surprisingly, compared to their pizza in the early 2000's its quite delicious now. I'd say its on par compared to Costco, though still a step below your average local pizza chain.

</comment><comment><USER3> Back in the day, like way back in the day, some programmers at SGI wrote an X application to order burritos by fax from _La Castena_ when it was on Rengstoff. This might have been the first internet (pre-web) ecommerce application.</comment>


Why Do Americans Smile So Much? - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/05/why-americans-smile-so-much/524967/?utm_source=vxfb&single_page=true <comment><USER2> Rather superficial reporting for The Atlantic, but interesting nonetheless. The point being ubiquitous smiles are evolved in mixed societies to indicate friendliness in the presence of a language barrier, where in some Asian countries smile and an eye contact may indicate your superiority and actually be an invitation to fight.

They mention Russians as an example, and it's very clear here: people from the middle class upwards mostly do smile (especially in this decade), whereas people with worse socioeconomic background still are very hostile to smiling strangers. But it may have more to do with ubiquitous fear and hiding of emotions inherited from Stalin's time.

Would be interesting to read a more deep analysis of meaning of smiles in a wider variety of cultures.</comment>


Mozilla Firefox market share hits another new low - <AUTHOR> http://www.drwindows.de/content/9946-nutzungsanteile-windows-10-stagniert-chrome-besteigt-thron.html <comment><AUTHOR> Slowly Mozilla should find a new strategy, and with the most big changes yet to come (XUL removal and Webextensions arriving)which will impact fans of the old powerful Firefox add-on system and theme system very much, it does not look like things would improve in the future.</comment>


Self-driving features could lead to more sex in moving cars, expert warns - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbc.ca/beta/news/technology/sex-distracted-driving-1.3562029 <comment><USER2> That doesn't sound like something that should come with a warning, it sounds like something that should come with flowers and chocolates.</comment>


Why Is SFLC Siding with Oracle Over Linux Developers? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.emacsen.net/blog/2016/02/28/why-is-sflc-siding-with-oracle-over-linux-developers/ <comment><USER2> Bloggers whose imagination ends at "The only conclusion that I can come to is that he must be recieving money from Oracle." aren't worth reading, IMO.</comment>


Ask HN: Useful civil disobedience measures a developer can partake in? - <AUTHOR> I am inspired by apps such as Firechat (https://www.opengarden.com/firechat/), Signal (https://www.signal.org/), and even Facebook (https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/books/review/how-an-egyptian-revolution-began-on-facebook.html) to a degree.
What is missing from this space?
How can we make a difference? <comment><USER2> Jeff Schmidt's book Disciplined Minds discusses how to survive graduate education while keeping your original identity and ethics roughly intact. The book has some advice for how to operate as an activist in a professional role within an organisation, where your goals are quite different to the org's goals. Not quite what you're looking for, but a pretty interesting read: [http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/](http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/)

another angle: ignore the developer aspect specifically and get involved with civil disobedience to aid existing groups that you wish to support, and gain experience on how to operate.

</comment><comment><USER3> Organize people. Start with a small group, and focus on a small project. Grow that thing.

</comment><comment><USER4> Start where you work.

Participate and start discussions around ethics when your company engages in something questionable. You don't have to threaten your job, but you don't have to accept as business as usual without any critical thinking.

Persuade your colleagues to do the same and lead by example.

Or just quit, if you're working for Facebook. Insanely smart software engineers are not plentiful. If enough people declined to work for Facebook, they will be feeling an impact in their bottom line and scalability.

</comment><comment><USER5> We once had a flood knock out telco lines all over a state. Firechat was an option but nobody knew about it. What needs to happen is more education regarding these tools.

</comment><comment><USER6> Beautiful question, yet even now I am still unable to answer this for myself.

</comment><comment><USER7> Start solo. I read the laws know the laws. Plan on getting arrested. Don't insult anyone instead insult yourself. Write your message out(have a script)

</comment><comment><USER8> Cryprocurrencies

<comment><USER9> Can you elaborate? What measures involving cryptocurrencies, specifically?

<comment><USER8> Promotion, creating onramps</comment></comment></comment>


Samsø runs on renewable energy and makes money doing it - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/30/identity/blowing-off-the-grid <comment><USER2> If demand increases for energy the price of energy should go up. Considering electric cars are a thing, I think it should be a fairly safe bet to invest more.

Europe is going to very rapidly move to electric cars. Especially since places are starting to get fines for their pollution caused by diesel cars. Also car companies have indicated this is in their immediate plans. e.g. VW has stated that is their immediate direction. So far this year electric car sales are up 78%. Public sentiment is there. Prices are achieving parity. The only reason diesel cars were being sold is that car companies made more profit from them. Now with the huge fines, lawsuits, and recalls coming that has been shown to be fools thinking.

Europe desperately wants to stop relying on Russia and the middle East for energy. Especially since both have been abusing the supply for political bargaining.

This should keep the price of electricity up. So the government should regulate to make it safer for these farmer sized investments. Otherwise this could be a nice financial investment for people to bet on. I've already learnt of a number of players in London moving to the electricity markets from financial ones... so there should be plenty of liquidity there.

The hot pipes idea for delivering heating really does work well. Much of Finnland also uses pipes for delivering heat. It's a really efficient method.

<comment><USER3> It would be interesting to see the EU standardize on a single charging infrastructure and roll it out EU wide in large enough numbers to make having a full electric vehicle a decent reality. With the large wide-open spaces between population centers of the US it's a harder sell.

As for the district heating idea, why not use solar (thermal or electric) energy to provide large portions of the heat?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Through subsidies....</comment>


Internet Outages Could Occur By 2010 As Capacity Stalls - <AUTHOR> http://news.yahoo.com/s/cmp/20071121/tc_cmp/204200341

<comment><USER2> And I bet a week's pay that Ron Paul will be the cause.

But let's analyse the statements in the article. The core is fine, peering is fine, last mile in Europe and Japan are fine... etc. The only ones who are screwed are last-mile customers in North America. The same people who have been sold 2Mbit "broadband" that is explicitly throttled upstream and quietly throttled downstream, by companies that have _already_ received $billions in tax breaks to upgrade their damned systems.</comment>


Y Combinator Gives A Crash Course On What It's Like To 'Work At A Startup' - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/17/work-at-a-startup/ <comment><USER2> For those who thought about applying and didn't, I sincerely say you should try as much as you can to overcome your doubt next time and send an application in.

For those of you who applied, but were turned down, you should apply to future events until you get an invite. And as soon as you do, try as hard as you can to attend.

The event is seriously worth it -- even if you have to travel from some distance away, like I did. The chance to interact with the YC founders, and realize that they are really far more down to earth than our imaginations might make them seem -- ok, maybe just my imagination--, is really enlightening.

I'll admit that my doubts made me seriously contemplate not applying; against all the giants I would be competing against for an invite, what chance did I have. I imagine it is reasonably similar to the sort of doubt potential founders feel when they think about submitting an application to a YC funding round; the competition is bound to be insurmountable anyway, so why bother. That I have a reputation amongst my friends for being pretty self-confident makes me wonder just how severe of a roadblock this can be for most people against themselves, before anyone else even has a chance to weigh in. Either friends are wrong about me, or this is a legitimately huge impediment.

My thoughts eventually boiled down to this: what do I have to lose? Pride and dignity, maybe, but only if I let that happen. So I applied, against what doubts I still had.

Of course, all of the above advice is predicated on YC holding more of these events, which I _sincerely_ hope they do. I'm sure there are many more people who would greatly benefit from being able to attend, and I'm at least reasonably sure the YC founder crowd would benefit considerably in meeting more potential employees at another event like this.

<comment><USER3> Apply? Puh-lease.

I'm a student and I crashed it on a whim. I literally got on the BART after work. Of course, it took me two hours to get there and I had to ride in the cars of two strangers.

It put a human face behind a lot of the entrepreneurs and I got to meet some really interesting people. The most important take-away I got from it was to screw architecting the perfect, solution and just launch. The second is to never let petty things like applications get in the way of interesting events.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> <http://www.justin.tv/ycombinator/b/265435483>

</comment><comment><USER5> You could find out yourself without going to this crash coarse, actually, trying to start a startup is the best crash coarse there is (note I havn't read the article, popping out for milk).

</comment><comment><USER6> Hmm. I'm planning on doing something similar in Atlanta (I run the Georgia Tech Entrepreneurs Club).

Any advice?

<comment><USER7> Think of it as a startup product and give it a go. The short presentation format works very well.

You probably won't get the turnout YC did, but a much smaller event would end up being much more intimate, a huge plus for introverts.

If the space you use space that's going to be anywhere near capacity, pre- chill it as much as you can before the event. People and projectors are remarkably exothermic.</comment></comment>


Plausibility bias? You say that as though that were a bad thing - <AUTHOR> http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/plausibility_bias/

<comment><USER2> The key observation here is that you're much likely to see false positives coming from the implausible than from the plausible. This is simple statistics -- if p=.05, that means there's a 5% chance that "no effect" would be mistaken for "effect". In cases where there should be no effect (prior probability near 0), 5% of the time you'll get a false positive and almost 0% of the time you'll get a real positive. In cases where it's plausible there could be a real effect (say, prior probability 50%), you'll get false positives only 2.5% of the time (5% of the 50% there isn't an effect) to go with 50% real positives.

Thus, the argument goes, in order to reduce the ratio of false positives to real signal, we should require more signal from implausible experiments. That is, we should make the required p value scale with the prior probability. This is a form of bias, but it's a very appropriately scientific form of bias -- bias based on evidence rather than error-prone forms of cognition. (This is simply a statistical reframing of the statement "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".)

<comment><USER3> Isn't this the very definition of confirmation bias?

<comment><USER4> Others can quibble over definitions, but yes, it's effectively a fudge factor in favor of whatever we believe _ought_ to be so, and against whatever we believe _ought not_ be so.

So on one hand, given the nature of statistics, it is necessary to cut down on the noise. On the other hand, it puts the model before reality, and necessarily obscures anything unexpected or contradictory.

<comment><USER2> It's not a matter of _ought_ versus _ought not_.

It's a matter of _evidence_. If we have strong evidence against hypothesis X, we should require at least moderately strong evidence for hypothesis X before we accept it. We can continue to explore it, but we shouldn't give a lot of weight to weak evidence (such as likely false positives) in the face of considerably stronger evidence against.

This does, necessarily, obscure certain types of surprising results when the data supporting them is limited. That's OK. Science sometimes converges slowly.

<comment><USER4> _If we have strong evidence against hypothesis X, we should require at least moderately strong evidence for hypothesis X before we accept it._

That's a normative position: "We _should_ require..." And a normative position with an excellent pedigree is still a _normative_ position.

That's not a bad thing, though. Good science requires good judgement. Good hypotheses do not spring wholly formed from logical deduction, there is necessarily an element of informed speculation and guess-making. Evidence must then be interpreted, _weighted_ even, and credibility assigned to third-party results.

So yes, it is very much a matter of _ought_ and _ought not_.

<comment><USER2> but it's not a matter of what we believe _ought_ be so vs _ought not_ be so -- that is, it's not a matter of what we _want_ to be true. It's a matter of the strength of evidence we _ought_ to have in order to draw conclusions, given other sets of evidence. It's a normative position, but it's not the _specific_ normative position (based on confirmation bias) you described above.

Think of it as a spectrum. On one end is the pure flake -- always giving too much weight to the newest evidence, no matter how weak, and therefore swinging wildly between different beliefs (I've heard this called "regressive bias"). On the other end is the pure dogmatist -- always giving too much weight to prior evidence, and therefore holding fast to a prior conclusion, ignoring or dismissing even strong contrary evidence ("confirmation bias"). Somewhere in the middle is the proper level of evidential weighting -- giving both old and new evidence the appropriate level of consideration, and therefore changing beliefs exactly as much as is warranted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Science-Based Medicine is a great blog. If you read HN, you should read SBM. Indeed, you should go read the complete SBM backlog.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you think AI will enact big change in how our world works? - <AUTHOR> Right now I consider myself a bit of an AI enthusiast. I have no doubt that if we could emulate brains or something, we could really change things, but I'm unsure of neural networks.
They're really good at finding patterns that humans can't, and I can't really figure out how we can use this new system to change things. Right now the best things I can imagine is "the ultimate recommender."
What big changes do you think AI will be able to make? <comment><USER2> If you think about it, isn't logic boiled down to making the best recommendation? When we make a decision its our logical minds making a recommendation based upon stimuli, previous similar decisions and that elusive 'intuition'. Neural networks already can do the first two, although the third might not ever happen and could be the distinguishing factor between human intelligence and artificial intelligence.

The problem is of course that neural networks currently can be 'the ultimate recommender' as you say, in only one highly specialized task i.e. image recognition, personal recommendations like music, or even self-driving cars. As far a I know there is no way to have a neural network learn two separate skills. Yet anyways.

The big change that I'm hoping will be figured out is how to connect all the specialized neural networks. Having a neural network that once presented with a problem 'recommends' another neural network to best solve it. The person/company that figures that out, no small task, will be an instant household name if not already.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree with the linking idea.</comment></comment>


Platform wars: the final score - <AUTHOR> http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2016/7/25/platform-wars-final-score <comment><USER2> So he predicts the amount of smartphones to double from 2.5b to 5b, implying that the majority of it will be android phones, but the "Platform wars" are over?

Nothing is over, even the "browser war" is now back on in full force, I suspect a new operating system (or perhaps windows 10? who knows) will emerge that will challenge both iOS and Android. Why? because something like this always does.

<comment><USER3> I kind of agree. I have no stats for this, but my impression is that neither Android nor iPhone users are really happy with their devices, they just tolerate them. That sounds like a ripe market for a disruptor.

<comment><USER4> I think that impression might be quite subjective – my impression is the exact opposite. I don't have any numbers either, but most people I know, both Android users and iOS users, are quite happy with their devices. They do of course have minor issues, but that will almost always be the case with something targeting such a broad audience.

I am not sure how I could be more happy with my device. Right now it mostly does what I want it to do, the battery lasts a couple of days, and it rarely bugs out.

edited: changed "really" to "more" in the second paragraph.

<comment><USER5> How about a smaller (but not thinner) phone that is strong enough to act as a laptop when hooked up to monitor/keyboard/mouse?

That would be cool. Give me a 3GHz i7 quadcore with 500gb ssd that I can also put in my pocket and have the battery last 2 days.

Always having 2 or 3 expensive computers on my person seems dumb.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think what's lacking here is a real definition of what 'winning' means.

<comment><USER7> 1\. survival: is the platform expected to be alive after next year?

2\. relevance: is the platform even considered for any reasonable, non-niche task, use, or development?

3\. influence: is the platform halo strong enough that it can nurture/trigger changes outside the platform (feature parity, pressure to improve/innovate)?

Apple and Google cross all thresholds by a significant margin, and adding more numbers (doubling even) to either one will not change that. "Winning" is not about market share as an end.

At a vanishingly distant 3rd and 4th places, MS is desperately fighting for 1. and 2. (and can only do so thanks to the now unified Windows platform), while BB has clearly lost 2. and is arguably losing 1. Don't even talk about 3. for either one.

<comment><USER6> Absolutely could not agree with you more!

One thing I'd add - likely related closely to survival and relevance is around product sustainability and platform responsibility - I'm talking mainly in regards to consistently demonstrating due-diligence of maintaining, servicing and supporting the platform / services such as widespread, timely security patching controlled and measured across a reasonable age range of products while also responsibly protecting customer privacy.

While on the surface this may seem more like measures of product quality rather than success - I believe they are critically important, key indicators of a successful product / deliverable.

As you say - winning is not solely about market share or pure profit, but also sustainability and social responsibility which in turn then feeds back into both relevance and survival in the long run.

*Pleasse excuse any typos, rushed my reply just on my phone late at night when I should be sleeping.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > _Apple and Google won_

How can the war be over when two rivals are standing?

Unless the objective of any war in the computing arena is to be understood as: "Microsoft is not there".

Another definition of "war is over" might be that everyone has some open hardware in their hands (that they actually own), which runs a fully open source everything from the boot firmware through to the system UI and apps. In other words "Microsoft is not there; Google is not there; Apple is not there ..."

<comment><USER9> I assumed the author meant that the market had stabilized and the period where you might see large gains or losses by the individual players over small spans of time (like a year) is over. The war metaphor is just a metaphor after all (and a pretty lousy one at that, clearly).

<comment><USER8> So, effectively, there is a "ceasefire".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> In the comments there's an interesting take on the Wintel era desktop wars, apparently Apple wins that decisively, as long as you don't count Microsoft.

I wonder if that will be the long term view on Android vs iOS, that Apple won it as long as you focus on Lenovo and HTC and Samsung and other manufacturers and ignore Google.

Though as Google seems a little bit less focussed on capturing all the profits, possibly everyone will benefit from the competition.

</comment><comment><USER11> If anyone needs me, I'll be sulking in the corner with my Windows Phone.

<comment><USER12> I really do miss my Windows Phone, which has sort of surprised me, having expected to be wowed by current Android device.

The app gap is/was a brutal death blow to an otherwise very nice platform.

<comment><USER13> Sometimes I feel this way. Yet I wonder if it's just that my WP didn't have many apps. Had it been fully loaded the battery and speed advantages may have disappeared.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is another vague post by Ben Evans. His work goes after the hot topics and either states the obvious or makes several low information content, i.e., not disapprovable points. Sorry to be negative but not seeing in his work what's that interesting to discuss.

<comment><USER15> Ad Hominem, while not completely useless, is still less useful than discussing specifics of vagueness in a comment.

If you want to add to the discussion constructively, maybe consider more specifics about why the vagueness is annoying?

<comment><USER16> It's not ad hominem, he talks specifically about the article, not the person.

>>> His work goes after the hot topics and either states the obvious or makes several low information content, i.e., not disapprovable points

<comment><USER15> "his work" not specifically how the work does it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The Chinese and Indian markets are just now beginning to wake up. Even if it were reasonable to say anything is ever settled in the technology space (Blackberry anyone?), given that companies coming out of these new markets are sending clear signals they intend to make their own way, given saturation of the mobile market in these economies is incomplete, given their governments' are more explicitly hands on with issues of technology and it's social implications, given their clear break with U.S. policy on I.P. (be it technology or pharmaceuticals),,, I'd hardly feel comfortable putting my money on the "it's all settled" bet.

</comment><comment><USER18> Things shake up all the time. Take the example of Microsoft announcing the ML based Editor feature yesterday, a number of people in my office were genuinely excited to use Word after that. Bottom line is things come from left field from time to time and it is foolish to predict things.

</comment><comment><USER19> I guess the most interesting move possible now is what happens if Android does a desktop/laptop edition and starts trying to compete with MacOS/Windows in the business space.

<comment><USER20> I doubt that. Google bets on cloud solutions, so you can get Google "OS" on any device that's capable of running a modern browser.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm not sure the point if I were going to develop an app today I would probably use xamarin because it could be developed a lot cheaper for both platforms.</comment>


Groupon getting pummeled daily in Israeli deal market, Buy2 leads - <AUTHOR> http://www.vccafe.com/grouper/groupon-getting-pummeled-daily-in-the-israeli-deal-market-buy2-leads/

<comment><USER3> It's ridiculous to measure the popularity of any non-Facebook service by number of Facebook fans. The percentage of users who fan a page of Facebook can vary vastly between competing companies.

<comment><AUTHOR> I wouldnt say totally preposterous to compare. After all these companies rely heavily on Facebook for their marketing, of course their email list is probably their key marketing tool, but that info isn't available. Then again, I did also write the article so I am a little biased, thanks for the feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's all in perspective - "100,000 Facebook friends in Israel is equivalent to over 5,000,000 Facebook friends in America"

<comment><USER5> As a straight translation of percentages, sure. But who cares that 1.3% of the population Likes something except in the context of total population? "1 out of 77 kids has an awful haircut, an equivalent to over 5,000,000 awful haircuts in America."

Better to keep the scales the same: US state with closest pop to Israel is Virginia, total market available to Groupon in Israel is arguably about equivalent to that.

<comment><AUTHOR> The point is that the penetration of daily deal sites in the Israeli market is deeper than that of the US. And groupon is lagging compared to its Israeli competitors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> how big is the Israeli market overall? About the size of what US state - <USER2> Pennsylvania?

<comment><AUTHOR> GDP of israel is just over that of Louisiana.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do I improve my reading speed? - <AUTHOR>

The more you can read, the better.
I was currently reading Linus Torvalds' blog, where he mentions he has a reading speed of 100-150 pages/hour. That sounds awfully fast for me.
How fast do you guys read ? Any good techniques to increase one's reading speed ? <comment><USER2> You know that inner voice you have when reading, that mentally speaks what your eyes are reading? Tell it to shut up.

When I read, at most, I'll say the first two words of a sentence every two to three sentences in my mind, before reading turns into more of an absorption of whats on the page. Obvious exceptions being when I'm reading something like Infinite Jest or Finnigans Wake (which sits unfinished on a table at home). But those books are _difficult_.

</comment><comment><USER3> I find cutting off sub-vocalizing does not help at all, instead it totally messes with how much I comprehend or remember the material I'm reading. Instead I make that little voice in my head go as fast as I can, and it works.

Try practicing talking as fast as you can to a friend, like comically fast - but without making mistakes or abbreviating anything. I used to do this with my sister when I was a little kid all the time, and I have a pretty decent reading speed now. (Can easily finish something like one of the biggest Harry Potter books on a slow Sunday)

As always, heavily technical material takes longer to read. But something like a larger HN discussion thread I can comfortably get through in a couple of minutes. Goodluck!

</comment><comment><USER4> If I'm reading fiction or something that's not too heavy, I tend to read at 800 - 1200wpm. Anything technical or with oddly shaped sentences/paragraphs slows me down to 600 - 800wpm. I'm not sure how many pages/hour that is, but I can finish off a 400 page novel in a couple of hours if I'm not distracted or interrupted.

I can only suggest what techniques work for me; I never intended to turn into a speed reader and can't recall perfectly the process of becoming one (I was mad about books as a kid/teenager and read novels very regularly from about the age of seven). But anyway, I don't subvocalise the words as I read, although I just realised I do as I write lol. I also ignore all the little words, like conjunctions and articles. My brain just seems to skip over them and focus on the nouns and verbs. Depending on the length of the paragraph (this doesn't work if it's huge), I look at the block of words and take in the order of nouns and verbs to 'see' the information being presented. That is, I don't 'read' left-to-write; it's more like observing a picture.

Also, I tend to subconsciously force myself to maintain/improve my reading speed quite frequently, by being aware of how long I'm spending on a book or article and setting a deadline for when I want to be finished then speeding up to make sure I meet it. This is a result of me not really being able to justify the time I spend reading books and articles 'for fun' instead of studying or working.

</comment><comment><USER5> Here are a couple of things I've tried that work:

-Try using a pen or your finger to guide your eyes through the words in a line with a uniform speed. This will prevent your eyes to slow down at certain words.

-Try using a "L" shaped piece of paper to guide you through the words, and to prevent the previous word to be shown. This will prevent the unconscious backtracking of the eyes.

-Stop pronouncing the words your read in your mind. Try keeping a 'hmmmm' voice in your head to prevent vocalization.

While I found these techniques useful, I do not use them while reading the things I enjoy. I use them usualy just to skim over articles and comments to get to the important parts, and to avoid the bulk.

</comment><comment><USER6> I can finish a 500 page book in about 4-8 hours. Building the scenes in my head is much more of a bottleneck than the actual mechanics of reading. Complicated scenes, e.g. The Pillars of the Earth, which is heavy on architectural terminology I'm not familiar with, and a huge amount of characters, e.g. Good Omens, slow me down considerably.

Also, being within earshot of people having a conversation slows my reading down to a grinding halt so my technique to read faster, outside of reading more, is basically finding a quiet place.

</comment><comment><USER7> I took a reading class in high school. The concept is to read 3-5 words at a time and process the current block while moving onto the next block.

The biggest problem is information retention/comprehension losses though. I believe in my program they aimed for 70% retention or better on minor details and 100% on major ones.

It takes practice to develop but it's very useful when using search engines and whatnot. I tend to not use it when pleasure reading.

</comment><comment><USER8> I actually think reading speed has a lot more to do with how things are written, than any reading skill.

For example, when I write code, I try to arrange things in such a way that my eye won't have to move much horizontally. I always put function names at the left margin, with return types above them, so that they're all "scannable" (because they are always in the same general place, my eye doesn't have to guess).

</comment><comment><USER9> I read about that quickly if it's fiction, or if the concepts in the text I'm reading aren't that difficult. My theory on how I got to that point is just that I used to read a shit ton of books all the time. One happy summer, I polished off a book every single day.

So my advice is--just read more, a lot more than however much you are reading right now.

</comment><comment><USER10> I've read slowly all my life. Turns out I have some subtle, but fixable vision problems. Find a competent vision therapist and get an exam - you may find something.

Of course if you already read quickly, I don't know if you'll find much.

</comment><comment><USER11> there's all sorts of different kinds of reading.

it's not even particularly challenging to scan text at 100-150 pages per hour. That's about 30s per page, you can do an awful lot in 30s if you set your mind to it.

I filter things in stages if we're talking about articles/posts. I'll glance at a rate of something like 10s/page first, sorting out sets of documents that may be interesting.

Next up, look a little longer, filter out crap, get the basic idea and then determine what needs to be read for deep content.

Once you are reading for deep content or enjoyment, it's totally dependent on the material.

</comment><comment><USER12> <http://www.spreeder.com> \- Saw this posted here once. It helps you learn to read faster.

<comment><USER13> Push yourself and get into the habit of using it for your online reading through its bookmarklet. It's been amazing for my reading speed.</comment></comment>


Why automated trading stop losses are not always ideal - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-automated-trading-stop-losses-always-ideal-cynthia-siantar?trk=prof-post

<comment><USER2> Rebound or no rebound, stop losses are phenomenal tools to limit the damage. Most often it would crater and annihilate, than rebound. I once got caught on the wrong side of the trade and couldn't get out. Luckily for the 'stop loss', it helped get me out of the market.

The assistant call system (described in the article) might prove to be too slow to respond to cratering black swans that could wipe out a portfolio.</comment>


"Steve Jobs' New Machine for the '90s: the NeXT Computer" (BYTE magazine) - <AUTHOR> http://simson.net/ref/NeXT/byte_article.htm

<comment><USER2> Fun Facts about the original Cube:

* A single cable connects the Cube to its monitor (with speakers and microphone). A single cable connects the monitor to the keyboard. And a single cable connects the keyboard to the mouse.

* Neither the Cube nor its monitor have any buttons, switches, or controls. The only way to turn the machine on is by pressing the Power key on the keyboard (which is connected to the monitor). It's basically a giant laptop split into 4 parts.

* Likewise, there's no way to turn the monitor off while the system is running. However, the OS will automatically lower its brightness after a period of inactivity.

* Startup takes a long time. Pressing the power key while the system is booting up will interrupt the boot sequence and begin the shutdown sequence.

* The keyboard has no Caps Lock key. Caps Lock is engaged by pressing Command+Shift which will light up matching LEDs on both Shift keys. The Control key is where it's meant to be, next to the "A".

* The keyboard has no row of function keys. The Escape key is located next to the "1" key, where the tilde would be. But if you press Shift+Escape as if to type a tilde character, you will still get a tilde character.

* The timing of the NEXTSTEP beachball is effectively identical to that of the OS X beachball.

<comment><USER3> The caps lock key just has to be the most useless waste of space on a standard qwerty keyboard. I don't think I have ever used it unless you count the times when you accidentally PRESS IT. Woops.

<comment><USER4> You can easily remap it to another modifier key on OSX in the system preferences. Other OSes/Windowing systems typically require a modified keyboard layout, but you might be able to find software to do it easily.

<comment><USER5> I map caps lock to be an extra control key. It does wonders for vim.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Consider the innovations at that time (c 1988/89)

"It sports the first commercially available erasable optical drive and advanced VLSI (very-large-scale integration) technology, and it comes with a built-in digital signal processor. On the software side, the Unix-based cube features an object-oriented version of C as its standard programming environment. It uses Display PostScript to present a graphical user interface that shields users from the traditionally user-hostile Unix command syntax, and it offers easy access to the cube's considerable power."

Design - "The cube is starkly simple in appearance and physical layout... The cube's internal construction mirrors the simplicity of its exterior"

Hardware - a 25 MHz 68030, with DSP; SCSI peripherals; 670Mb optical drive; 8 MB of RAM (4 MB optionally available, for lower price)

<comment><USER6> The funny thing is, I regularly used my NeXTstation turbo right up until 2002. It still felt fast with 128meg ram+fast hard drive. Coupled with the NeXTlaser I was able to keep up with modern life. I had Mathematica, pagemaker, openwrite, email, omniweb, etc.

In fact, even today you could use it as a usable desktop. I still find it amazing that we've gone from 8meg to 8192meg ram and two orders of magnitude cpu power but we've done very little with it. We've moved video decoding onto the main cpu, offloaded graphics to a specialized chip and that's about it. (Note: Next's shipped with a DSP similar to gpgpu today.)

Now I sort of want to buy a nextstation again and see if I can live a month just on that.

EDIT: I should note that there's STILL no replacement for Quantrix and Lotus Improv. They are miles away better than excel/traditional spreadsheets. If someone cloned quantrix for OSX I'd buy it.

<comment><USER7> Huh?? Quantrix is still around, and there's an OSX version available - I know, because I have it!

<comment><USER6> It's written in java and it just isn't quite the same as the old next quantrix. Doesn't play as nice as native nextstep quantrix does.

<comment><USER7> Yes, it's certainly a downside. And one would think they'd release a Linux version too, in that case...

That's why I prefer to use Lotus Improv under WINE ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If this stuff is of interest to you, here's Steve giving a half-hour demonstration of NeXTSTEP 3: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j02b8Fuz73A>

<comment><USER9> damn... you beat me to it. That video never gets old. Steve actually explaining some technical details and not just being cool.

<comment><USER8> It also shows he obviously had somewhat of an unhealthy obsession with the "Stencil" typeface :)

<comment><USER10> Lol, that made my morning.. thanks

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Funny that most of you are holding that code in your hand...

<comment><USER12> For those not in the know, he's referring to iOS, which is modified Mac OS X which is modified NeXTSTEP. It's truly wonderful this OS lives on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> In 1996, I bought a used TurboSlab from a company called Spherical Solutions, which was run by a man named Sam Goldberger (IIRC). I loved that machine and the Nextstep 3.3 install media that came with it even had x86 binaries, so I was able to install it on the PC I owned at the time (a Micron Millenia with a 200mhz Pentium Pro). I would have upgraded it to Openstep 4 but Next wanted something like $900.00 for it.

I loved Nextstep and I still prefer it to Mac OS X, even though the latter has became something far prettier. I really should see if I can run it via emulation, like I can with BeOS, another favorite OS of mine.

<comment><USER14> It is definitely possible to run Openstep in VMware, I used to do it. Not everything works, but it is very cool to see all the parts of that OS that made it into OS X.

edit: here's a helpful blog post by one of the VMware guys: [http://blogs.vmware.com/teamfusion/2008/05/weekend-geek- ou.h...](http://blogs.vmware.com/teamfusion/2008/05/weekend-geek-ou.html)

<comment><USER13> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This article makes me reminisce about the Color Turboslab I had in uni. Functionally, it was limited because I didn't have much software I could run on it but the layout and design was pure genius. I had this, a few sparcstations, an indigo and an Alpha. All acquired at university auctions.

I eventually had to put them out when I graduated. My car wasn't going to hold all the stuff I had acquired and something had to give.

</comment><comment><USER16> These are amazing machines. I have a Cube and a Colorstation stashed at my father's house. I picked them up on the cheap in the early 00's. The desktop felt completely modern but it was lacking modern applications. CubX remedied this though. I had a laptop with a broken screen that I put Linux on. I then ran netscape (who remembers netscape?) and other applications via an exported X session. Good times.

</comment><comment><USER17> Incidentally, I just contacted ColorWare to suggest that they offer "NeXT Black", the paint used on the Cube, as an option. I found the paint specification online in an old NeXT document for developers of NeXTBus expansion cards for the Cube.

([http://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=136&...](http://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=136&start=0&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=&sid=62ead926ef12dc8217c7c736a256980e))

Yes, 3rd party hardware developers were expected to make sure the card-end panel face matched the cube's color, rather than being unsightly bare steel.

</comment><comment><USER18> Did anyone else first read "8 Gigabytes of RAM" before doing a double take?

Moore's law is a powerful force indeed

<comment><USER19> Indeed. 25 megahertz and 8 megabytes of RAM for $6500 ($11.5k in today's dollars). And a machine with 2.5 gigahertz and 8 giabytes of RAM can be had for under $1000 today; as much storage as the NeXT harddrive can be found on a $10 usb key. 1000 times more powerful, 1/10th of the price in two decades. We live in an incredible age, people too often forget.

It's these machines which indirectly enable so much as well. People like to talk about the cloud a lot, but video that gets uploaded to YouTube has to be edited somewhere. Now while it's true that YouTube has a flash based editor _now_ , they didn't before they got big. And there is all the other video, HD quality, out there that needs to be edited on beefy machines: 3D modelling, games, music et cetera.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Beautiful machine - like the Mac Cube. I wonder if the experience with NeXT, though, helped shape Jobs' ideas about pricing, interoperability, and backwards compatibility when he returned to Apple.</comment>


Google Glass faces driving ban across UK as distraction concerns mount - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2013/7/31/4575226/google-glass-risks-uk-driving-ban

<comment><USER2> Note that, in the UK, while you may use a bluetooth headset while driving, you are not allowed to even _touch_ your phone - whether to update the satnav or whatever, especially not to hold it to your ear - without facing a driving citation.

Someone was also stopped (and given penalty points, which add up to a ban eventually) for driving with promotional writing on the windscreen (the sales rep, who was also in the car for the test drive, offered to take the points and was very nearly charged with perverting the course of justice for it.)

It is not surprising in the least to anyone who drives here that this would be the case - glass is a visual distraction while driving, which blocks your view of the road.</comment>


Kerbal Control Panel - <AUTHOR> http://www.sgtnoodle.com/projects/kerbal-control-panel/ <comment><USER2> That's a very nice piece of work, especially for the methods used.

If you want to make a front panel without going out and buying a large format laser printer, there's Front Panel Express. All they do is make metal plates with holes and lettering. The lettering is engraved and powder coated. I've used their service, and they do a nice job.

<comment><USER3> In Europe that would be Schaeffer in Germany. They do the complete housing as well. Very nice.

In fact it seems they were involved in setting up Front Panel Express: [http://www.schaeffer-ag.de/en/company/company_history/](http://www.schaeffer- ag.de/en/company/company_history/)

<comment> semi-extrinsic Yes, if you try to visit the Front Panel Express site from Europe, you are redirected to Schaeffer's site with the same service.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> That's a really cool project.

The choice of joystick is disappointing though - an arcade stick? Those are digital only, usually either 4- or 8-way. Kerbal would be better controlled with a real analog joystick. But I guess the game probably doesn't support analog input.

<comment><USER5> No, it supports analog input.

I have to say, though, if you're building a custom digital controller, it's usually easier to just crack open a cheap USB keyboard and repurpose the PCB. They are small, support lots of buttons, and already have drivers on your PC.

<comment><USER6> Or use this device [https://www.adafruit.com/product/1535](https://www.adafruit.com/product/1535) It lets you put 12 switches on it and then acts like a keyboard. I've used it for a couple of custom input projects and it works well, nothing to do on the PC.

Using a digital joystick would then be the way to go. I like his choice of that input device.

But, like Quequau, I've never been able to get into Kerbal. I guess I could go whip a panel up, but at the end of the day not sure that it would be enough to catch my interest.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, that works if you've planned your project out and junk like that :) I'm usually just slapping junk together at the last minute and cannibalising whatever I have laying around (and for some reason, I have a lot of keyboards laying around).

If you were writing the consuming app, you could get analog support with an ADC into a decoder into individual or combinations of keys. I say you'd have to be writing the app because I don't know many existing apps that support that sort of key binding (though I do seem to recall MS Flight Simulator doing it, at least for throttle).

<comment><USER6> Yea, how I fail the "True Maker test". I tend to plan stuff out, dig through a pretty well stocked set of parts. Then China markets for parts for projects that I can wait on, Digikey for a project I want to build tomorrow.

I do refactor parts (I've done the keyboard thing mentioned above) but now since I'm older I realize I don't have the time to dork around with a dodgy keyboard (ummm is that the reason I tossed it into the junk bin?) and want things to work after I fix my design errors, not after I fix a broken part.

I'm more a pragmatic Maker. Can I run to Home Despot and buy wood, fasters, plan, cut, assemble and install shelves? Yes. Can I go to Ikea, buy something close and make it fit that then looks really nice? Yes. With 400 linear feet of shelving in the robot lab, sometimes Ikea wins.

Likewise, some nifty Adafruit board is the quicker way to win.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Ironically, the controller itself looks more sturdy than the wobbly, jello ships in KSP proper (doesn't help that Unity's physics engine chokes on KSP's complexity).

<comment><USER8> To be fair, I'm not sure there is a physics engine that can handle KSP in real time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Here's another mirror, as Google's cache doesn't display the images. [https://archive.fo/bRaGJ](https://archive.fo/bRaGJ)

</comment><comment><USER10> A guy at our makerspace in Sydney built a couple times larger system with working seven segment speed & fuel indicators, two joysticks, etc. That was last year, I think the project kept growing since.

Here's a demo video from last year's Makerfaire: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCuNyiseJ5g&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCuNyiseJ5g&feature=youtu.be&t=110)

edit: grammar

</comment><comment><USER11> I love that solid hardware. It reminds me of this unique Xbox game that came with an extremely large controller: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steel_Battalion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steel_Battalion) \-- 2 joysticks and 40 buttons. $200 for the game and controller.

</comment><comment><USER12> I never could get into KSP. I really love this project, though I have the feeling I'd spend the time, energy, and effort building something similar and get right back to the point where I just can't get into the game.

<comment><USER13> Their osx support killed it for me. I don't have a gaming computer anymore, and trying to run it on my mbp ran into nothing but terrible performance and constant crashes. I would switch to the playstation version, but I don't want to buy the game again, when I already purchased it and it doesn't run well.

<comment><USER14> When was the last time you tried it?

The OS X version is still a bit slow to load, but it's far better than it was a year or two ago. I get basically no crashes and fairly reasonable performance these days, so it might be worth another look.

<comment><USER15> I get performance that's largely indistinguishable from my desktop - although, I will admit that I only played on my mbp maybe 5% of my total play-time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Google cache, since the site seems to be buckling under load: [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:JEozcO...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:JEozcOqy2J0J:www.sgtnoodle.com/projects/kerbal- control-panel/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

<comment><USER17> Unfortunately that doesn't pick up the images which are half of the content here.

<comment><USER18> The images appear to load for me.

<comment><USER17> What I mean is that the images are still being served from the original server. They load eventually, but very slowly for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I think I saw something similar in one of the Linux magazines in Barnes and Noble like a couple of years ago. I wonder if they're the same thing. Still a cool project.

</comment><comment><USER20> Thats amazing! Love the design, programming can be improved I think.

</comment><comment><USER21> on one hand, i would say 'some people have too much free time'

on the other hand, i DO say 'i know what i am gonna spend my weekend on'

<comment><USER22> > _on one hand, i would say 'some people have too much free time'_

I'd say, that's why free time is awesome, and we need _much more of it_.</comment></comment>