Thoughts on Rust, a few thousand lines in - <AUTHOR> https://rcoh.me/posts/thoughts-on-rust-a-few-thousand-lines-in/ <comment><USER2> I'm a network engineer, and I've done C++ for over a decade now. One of the nice things about Rust is that they decided to go with async over fibers, which is in line with how most high performance C++ is written. The Rust team also isn't rushing Future out the door, so it's coming along much nicer than the C++ Future, which is usually replaced because it's not monadic.

Rust is great, and I highly recommend learning Rust if you want to become a better C++ developer. C++ introduces a lot of _unnecessary_ headaches Rust completely solves. Rust is worth the switch if only because reading error messages from expanded templates is horrible compared to type system that actually understands type parameters.

I'm really bullish on Rust becoming even more mainstream, to the point anyone can pick it up and use it in their business without a second thought by 2020.

<comment><USER3> I am a big fan of rust but I don't think the Async using the "await" keyword or using Future/promis is the way to go.

I wrote a large web app in scala using Futur only and it turned into a monster because of it. Even if you don't use callback you still need to manualy unwrap them and they pollute your méthode signature.

Then more recently I wrote a pub/sub server in c# using the "await" keyword. While much better it still polute your method signature and make the debugger and stacktrace useless. Also you still have to think about trying to no make anything that could block spinlock or calling api that are not Async ex: Createfile

Compare this to Golang where project like Groupcache (1) have super clean code that replaced a thousand line of code C++ system at google.

Why do you think Golang fiber/gorotine are worse ?

(1) [https://github.com/golang/groupcache](https://github.com/golang/groupcache)

<comment><USER2> The answer to this question is quite involved. As you may already know, Rust at one time had a fiber model, but it was removed in favor of Futures.

One big advantage of Futures is they are decoupled from their execution environment.

For example, different types of executors can be used depending on the type of Future. For example, you may have an IOThreadPoolExecutor to handle accepting and responding to connections that should spend very little time blocking and a CPUThreadPoolExecutor for offloading heavy processing. In Go, you have no say in how goroutines are scheduled, you sacrifice control to reduce complexity.

Another big one in network programming is the polling mechanism. In Go, you have no control over your polling mechanism, whereas with a Future is decoupled from the event loop, and you can write your own event loop on any experimental kernel APIs you'd like.

Rust made the right move because in Rust, just as in C++, we want maximum control. Futures are more primitive, and it's possible to build coroutine models on top of them, but not vice versa.

<comment><USER3> I agree with you. I guess the best solution would be something in between "await" and goroutine.

My understanding is the main issue with "await" model is that you only abstract The Task model.

Running task don't gave a real ID and stack like "Go" and "Erlang" you can list all running fiber how much memory and CPU they use ...

I believe you could write your own event loop easily in Go if they exposed the internal api used to pause and resume goroutine, you can already pause goroutine by having them wait on a mutex and resume them from your custom event loop by releasing that mutex.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> One thing I don't like about Rust is how taking a slice of a string can cause a runtime panic if the start or end of the slice ends up intersecting a multi- byte UTF-8 char.

I would prefer it if this feature didn't exist at all rather than cause runtime panics.

[https://play.rust- lang.org/?gist=e02ce5e9aacfee3a2b4917d5624...](https://play.rust- lang.org/?gist=e02ce5e9aacfee3a2b4917d5624b9ec1&version=stable)

<comment><USER5> Go indexes bytes on strings, even though there's a builtin type called Rune which delimits utf-8 codepoints. This is yet another footgun. Is there a language that doesn't handle this poorly?

[https://play.golang.org/p/CkBp0w8T621](https://play.golang.org/p/CkBp0w8T621)

<comment><USER6> UTF-8 is at odds with efficient array indexing. I like pythons approach where bytes and strings are distinct types, though I have no idea what it is doing under the hood.

<comment><USER7> I actually had to work with Python strings at the C level recently, and their approach is pretty clever. IIRC, the runtime can take any common form of Unicode, and will store it. When you access that string, the accessor requests a specific encoding, and the runtime will convert if need be, and then store it in the string object.

So it handles the (very) common case of needing the same encoding multiple times (e.g. for all file paths on Windows), while not introducing too much overhead in memory or speed.

I could be mistaken on exact details though, especially since I recall there being multiple implementations even within py3.x.

<comment><USER6> Any idea how it handles indexing? Does it convert everything to 32 bit chars and ignore graphemes?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > A lot of great, well loved, crates don't have a lot of Github stars.

This was a really important learning for me. When I'm looking for crates to solve a problem and there's only a handful of them, I almost always go through every single one of them, even if some have thousands and the others only tens of downloads.

It's an incredible feeling to find those unknown diamonds..

<comment><USER9> Make sure to thanks the maintenars of those repo. It really help!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > the escape hatch suggested on the internet, > `partial_cmp(...).unwrap_or(Ordering::Less)`

This is often a Bad Idea, as you get unstable sorts and you are right back to the same problem.

\- Explanation: How do I get the minimum or maximum value of an iterator containing floating point numbers? — [https://stackoverflow.com/a/50308360/155423](https://stackoverflow.com/a/50308360/155423)

\- Example: [https://play.integer32.com/?version=stable&mode=debug&editio...](https://play.integer32.com/?version=stable&mode=debug&edition=2018&gist=d459a0de3fc4dce15a090d078cf8f15e)

See also:

\- How to do a binary search on a Vec of floats? — [https://stackoverflow.com/q/28247990/155423](https://stackoverflow.com/q/28247990/155423)

Instead, use a wrapper type or raise a panic.

<comment><USER11> Isn't there a default _total_ order for floats? E.g. -Inf < -1.0 < -0.0 < 0.0 < 1.0 < Inf < NaN?

<comment><USER12> Yes, there is: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_754#Total- ordering_predic...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_754#Total- ordering_predicate)

It is not something to use by default though. It is implemented in software and thus a lot slower than the hardware comparison.

<comment><USER13> I'm curious as to why it isn't implemented in hardware. Is it really so rare to need to sort floats, or so common to need a different ordering when you do?

<comment><USER11> Of course sorting floats happens a lot. In practice one rarely encounters NaN's and ±Inf's, so fast comparison for concrete values is the default. I don't know why the 'slow' total order is not implemented in hardware though.

But fortunately in comparison sort algorithms that run in O(n lg n) you can get away with doing an O(n) partitioning of the array into [-, +, NaN] and then applying a fast integer comparison operator to the negative values (-) and positive values (+).

In fact the above idea ties in neatly with QuickSort, which is already based on partitioning & sorting recursively.

<comment><USER14> > Of course sorting floats happens a lot.

Is this true?

I am actually struggling to remember the last time I did a sort with a float/double as the key--especially in a performance bounded context

... <thinking> ...

Aha. Graphic engine. Octtree with coordinates.

I really had to think about that.

So, I'm a bit skeptical of float sorting happening a "lot".

Is this perhaps an ML primitive somewhere?

<comment><USER15> Languages that only have floats, such as JavaScript and Lua, certainly sort floats quite often.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Rust is one of the few times where the language/ecosystem does precisely what I wished it would do. For instance, being able to partially destructure JSON into a struct in a typesafe manner is just awesome.

<comment><USER17> This sounds really useful, you don't happen to have an example of this do you?

Thanks in advance!

<comment><USER16> I'm basically talking about Serde. Read the section titled "Parsing JSON as strongly typed data structures". What's nice is that you don't have to include all the fields in the JSON in the struct. Serde will only give you the ones defined by the struct.

[https://github.com/serde- rs/json/blob/master/README.md](https://github.com/serde- rs/json/blob/master/README.md)

<comment><USER18> I'm not sure I'd consider that lib any safer than the average serialization library when things like this happen: [https://github.com/serde- rs/json/issues/464](https://github.com/serde-rs/json/issues/464)

<comment><USER19> Panics are memory safe, so that's still more safe than many parsing bugs.

<comment><USER18> The issue does not mention memory safety and neither did I. Honestly, knee- jerk reactions like "BUT MUH MEMORY SAFETY" doesn't inspire confidence specially when it couldn't help saving that dev from the troubles and bugs documented in the issue. To quote a few:

> it was a hassle to track down because Rust itself didn't complain and the > panic message during serialization wouldn't tell me which file of the > hundreds of thousands was causing it to die. For lack of a purpose-built > tool, I had to manually bisect it until I narrowed it down.

> That said, definitely a footgun in the standard library to be remedied.

> My main concern here is getting rid of the footgun if at all possible. I > really don't want to have to maintain a special "Never allow these types to > creep into structs I'm deriving Serialize/Deserialize on, because the > compiler certainly won't warn you" audit list.

If that's considered safe in Rust's standards then I rest my case.

<comment><USER20> Safe in rust usually has a very specific meaning: [https://doc.rust- lang.org/nomicon/what-unsafe-does.html](https://doc.rust- lang.org/nomicon/what-unsafe-does.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> One thing Rust doesn't seem to be doing very well yet is guard clauses, specifically when handling Option<T>.

I've seen and appreciated the use of guard clauses in many languages, as a good way to quickly check for a few conditions at the top of a function, and return early if those conditions aren't met.

Since it seems that Option<T> are recommended in Rust, there's a lot of time you want to quickly return if `Some(x)` is _not_ here (i.e. it's `None`), and if it's here, continue through the function, without having an unnecessary indentation from an extra brackets.

There seem to be a good amount of smart discussion into handling those [1][2]. some threads are more than a year old, but it seems to be making progress.

[1] [https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/45978](https://github.com/rust- lang/rust/issues/45978) [2] [https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/pre-rfc-allow- pattern-matc...](https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/pre-rfc-allow-pattern- matching-after-guard-clause/6238)

<comment><USER19> You can use ? on an Option if your type returns an Option. If it returns a Result, you can use ok_or()?, and at some point in the nearish future, you can just use ?.

<comment><USER21> I see, not very familiar with both those idioms `?` and `ok_or()?`

My current understanding is that those would return an Error only? I was more describing cases where you do want to return, but not necessarily return an `Error`.

For instance in a simplified example function that returns a boolean, you could decide to return `false`. is it possible there?

        // Function that returns a boolean value
        fn is_equal_to_ten(n: Option<u32>) -> bool {
            // some one liner  that checks for None, if it's not none, gives you `x` when `n` matches content of `Some(x)` (not real code):
            if let Some(x) = n else { return false; /* what to do in case it's a None*/ }

            // `x` is available here:
            return (x == 10);
        }

Would this be considered bad practice in Rust?

<comment><USER19> The question mark operator works via a trait, Try. Both Option and Result implement Try. If you use ? on a None value, it will return None, just like using ? on an Err returns an Err.

ok_or is a method on Option that would let you manually convert it to a Result. You could then combine it with ?, turning a None into a specific Err.

It won't help for stuff that returns bool, it's true.

<comment><USER21> Thanks for the detailed answer :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > Unlike nearly every language I've ever used, Rust actually encourages > variable shadowing.

Haskell does it too, for the same reason/purpose / with the same effect.

<comment><USER23> Swift does, but typically for Optional promotion. You see stuff like `guard let delegate = delegate else { return }` inside functions all the time, shadowing a property with a local & promoting the type from Optional<T> to T.

It's not the same as the Rust example because you're shadowing an ivar to a local, but since `self.` is implicit you're still shadowing.

<comment><USER10> > for Optional promotion

You'll see the same in Rust

        fn example(name: Option<String>) -> Option<usize> {
            let name = name?;
            Some(name.len())
        }

Or

        fn example(name: Option<String>) {
            if let Some(name) = name {
                println!("{}", name.len());
            }
        }

A main difference is the requirement to use `Some`, which allows for the flexibility to apply to any enum.

> but since `self.` is implicit

To make sure I'm following, do you mean that Rust's `self.` is implicit in Swift?

<comment><USER23> That all makes sense. I've only done a couple days of Rust, so my recollection is spotty. The shadowing makes sense because if a local variable was moved out, then you're not really shadowing it anymore. Is my understanding of that correct?

> do you mean that Rust's `self.` is implicit in Swift?

 _Swift 's_ `self.` is implicit in Swift – in most contexts, to access a property the `self.` is not required. `self.name = "John"` and `name = "John"` are equivalent (assuming self is an object with a name property).

There are places where explicit `self.` is required though – when you want to differentiate between a shadowed local and a property (obviously), or when you're inside a closure (to make it clear that the closure is capturing self, not just capturing a reference to the property).

<comment><USER10> > The shadowing makes sense because if a local variable was moved out, then > you're not really shadowing it anymore. Is my understanding of that correct?

This is kind of a philosophical corner: can you shadow something that isn't there anymore? Once you've moved out of something, if you attempt to use the old name, then you'll get a compiler error different from "no such variable", so it's still there in _some_ sense.

Pragmatically, I think you are on the money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13>
        let foo = "...";
        let foo = parse(foo);
        let foo = escaped(foo);
        ...
        doSomethingWith(foo);

I don't see how this is helpful for avoiding the bug described. The most common bug with this type of code is mistaking which form "foo" represents at a given line of code, or that form changing as the code evolves. For example, if one programmer writes

        let foo = "...";
        let foo = parse(foo);
        ...
        doBarWithFoo(foo);

and another programmer comes along, doesn't notice the call to doBarWithFoo, and needs an escaped version of foo:

        let foo = "...";
        let foo = parse(foo);
        ...
        let foo = escaped(foo);
        doBazWithFoo(foo);
        ...
        doBarWithFoo(foo); // This still looks correct in isolation

This is a classic problem with mutable variables that frequently causes hard- to-spot bugs. Whereas if each form has a distinct meaningful name, this change wouldn't introduce a bug, and if somehow a bug were introduced, good names will make it possible to spot even considering the line in isolation:

        doBarWithFoo(fooEscaped);  // Hey!  The input to doBarWithFoo shouldn't be escaped!

If the only useful form of foo is the final one, then you can avoid having accessible names for the invalid intermediate forms like this:

        let foo = escaped(parsed("..."));

Or like this for more complicated logic (I'm not a Rust programmer (yet) so this may not be the right syntax):

        let foo = {
            // Complicated logic
            finalForm;
        };

I feel like if I ever write a lot of code in Rust I'll find a linter rule that warns about shadowing variables and use it religiously. But maybe I'm missing a use case where it's crucial.

<comment><USER24> I believe the way this is solved is by having the type of escaped(foo) different than that of parse(foo) and only accepting a EscapedString in doBaz and an ParsedString in doBar.

Your type structure at no extra runtime cost is String : ParsedString : EscapedString.

This ensures you don't escape strings before parsing them too. Nice!

<comment><USER25> This is common in Haskell as well using `newtype`. You can have type aliases like

      type A = B

but you can use the following function with a B:

      f :: A -> _

whereas

      newtype EscapedString = EscapedString String
      f' :: EscapedString -> _

would prevent from using f' with the wrong data. Newtype is a zero-cost abstraction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I've not done any rust dev before but the whole variable shadowing thing really scares me, in that it makes it not obvious where the initial declaration comes from. This seems difficult to reason about.

<comment><USER27> IMO, it should scare you less than mutating the variable, which is the equivalent pattern in most other languages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28>
      let foo = "...";
      let foo = parse(foo);
      let foo = escaped(foo);

Is it really shadowing or mutation of foo?

I would consider this shadowing (something you can do in OcaML):

      let foo = "..." in
        let foo = parse(foo) in
         let foo = escaped(foo) in
            dosomething(foo);;

<comment> UK-Al05 You can't mutate variables in rust without declaring mut

<comment><USER28> But how do you know just by reading that code? It would not be obvious to me at all.

<comment><USER29> let foo = bar; let foo = bat;

is shadowing

let foo = bar; foo = bat;

is a compilation-time error because foo isn't mutable.

let mut foo = bar; foo = bat;

is reassignment.

in working code, either foo is declared as mutable or it's not, and it's pretty obvious from the code what's happening.

<comment><USER28> I guess. I would just never write code like that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> > _Like Go, Rust can compile statically linked linux binaries._

The GNU C library (needed not only by C programs for C things) doesn't support static linking, so the only way this is possible is to use another library entirely, or raw inlined syscalls (where applicable).

<comment><USER19> Yes, we have full support for MUSL. It's a

      $ rustup target add x86_64-unknown-linux-musl
      $ cargo build --target x86_64-unknown-linux-musl

away.

<comment><USER31> Yeah, Rust's musl support is great. We use it heavily at work for all sorts of CLI tools. Many thanks to everybody who worked on this.

(And if you need to link against common C libraries like OpenSSL or PostgreSQL, I maintain a Docker image with the necessary C toolchains, and instructions on how to use it: [https://github.com/emk/rust-musl- builder](https://github.com/emk/rust-musl-builder). There are a couple of similar images out there, too, I think.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Great job. Just a nit/request for that gif illustrating agrind's use -- I keep watching it to see what args you've passed to see how it's being used but the output finishes and loops before I understand what I'm seeing. Not sure if it's a property of the image or my browser but if you can turn off the looping in the image that might work better. Or add static frames at the end for the slow folks like me ;)

</comment><comment><USER22> This makes me want to add `p90`, `p50` and so on to jq...

<comment><USER33> You could always just pipe JQ output to angle grinder...I should make a output-json mode so you can pipe it back to JQ :-P

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I think the concept of ownership of rust should be divided into "ownership " and "right of use " two parts.

This is more in line with the "bank lending model " it advocates.

</comment><comment><USER35> Wow the Rust hype is really an echo chamber right now. Seems very academic and nobody really seems to be using it in production..

<comment><USER36> Quite a few people are using it in production: dropbox, npm, and I believe amazon and microsoft.

 _I 've_ used it in production, and subjectively it was much easier to work with than C++.

<comment><USER19> Amazon and Microsoft both are, yes.</comment></comment></comment>


Azimuth Climate Data Backup Project - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/592742410/azimuth-climate-data-backup-project <comment><AUTHOR> Jan Galkowski (Akamai Technologies), John Baez (UC Riverside), Scott Maxwell (NASA Mars rover driver / Google), and Sakari Maaranen (Ubisecure) are working to archive terabytes of US climate data in advance of the Trump Administration and a possible deletion or removal of public access to such data.

The kickstarter campaign target is $5,000.</comment>


America's Cars Are Getting Faster and More Efficient - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-05-17/america-s-cars-are-all-fast-and-furious-these-days?cmpid=BBD051717_BIZ&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_term=170517&utm_campaign=bloombergdaily <comment><USER3> A few weeks ago I bought a Chevy Bolt EV...according to the dealer it was the first one sold in my state (Utah). I'd been on a waiting list for almost a year.

Sure, ICE engines are getting better, but EVs are rapidly gaining and will soon surpass. The Bolt is a bit expensive for a car of its body type, but "gassing up" at home is amazing, the 200+ mile range is great, and the sharply reduced emissions are a weight off the mind. It's also super quiet, as you would expect, and _boy howdy_ does it have get-up-and-go. Sure, some of it is psychological because a) it's whisper quiet as it accelerates; b) the raft of batteries in the belly keeps that car planted to the road; and c) there's no pause to down-shift. But I've owned some fast cars[1], and this one _feels_ like the fastest yet.

It's nice that ICE engines are improving, but between the Bolt, Tesla Model 3, and other soon-to-arrive practical EVs, I believe that the sunset of ICE is beginning.

[1] Notable examples in order of speediness: 1973 Dodge Charger (340ci), 1970 Dodge Challenger (383ci), 1996 Camaro Z28 (350ci), 2000 Camaro SS (350ci).

<comment><USER4> Electric vehicles are a tough sell now though. The Chevy Bolt EV has a 60 kWh Lithium-ion battery; to charge that fully costs $8.7 in Utah (14.5 cents per kWh). Per the EPA's measure that gets you 238 miles.

Gas costs approx $2.24/gallon in Utah. A Prius has a 11.3 gallon tank and a 540 miles range (again, EPA standard). That means that $11.15 would get you the same distance as a full Bolt EV charge in gas.

Now, before electric vehicle fans jump for joy at the $2.45 saving per 238 miles, we also have to account for the cost of the two vehicles. The Bolt EV costs $36,620, the Prius $23,475.

Therefore for the Bolt EV to make economic sense you have to drive 1,276,942 miles. Or fuel has to get much more expensive, or electricity much cheaper. Regardless, the economics don't add up at all when compared with hybrid gas vehicles.

Yes, I know, lower maintenance, but not $13K lower. And before you talk to me about the cost of driving to and from a gas station, let me remind you about battery loss due to cold temperatures (this is Utah we're talking about, after all).

In general people buying electric vehicles in 2017 are buying them for non- economic reasons. They lose money. Hybrids are likely the best bang for your buck, and may remain that way even after Tesla ship their $36K competitor (since no other major metric in the equation changes, electricity is still very expensive, and gas very cheap).

<comment><USER5> You forgot oil changes in you calc. Also your $8.70 is only $4.19 in Washington :).

Costs are dropping on EVs and will continue to drop as economy of scale picks up. They may not make sense today but there's a good chance they will tomorrow.

<comment><USER6> Interesting. In Vancouver in CDN$ $5.15-$7.72 to charge and $firstname.lastname@example.com per liter to fill up.

[https://www.bchydro.com/accounts-billing/rates-energy- use/el...](https://www.bchydro.com/accounts-billing/rates-energy- use/electricity-rates/residential-rates.html)

<comment><USER5> Yup, hydro is awesome for cheap renewable electricity.

<comment><USER7> Try to tell that to an Ontarian.

<comment><USER8> The hydroelectric generation is cheap in Ontario, but not overly abundant. The majority of the power in the province comes from much more costly nuclear sources.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm not sure that I believe their assertion that cars have gotten lighter. Perhaps the real land-yacht monstrosities have been weeded out (and replaced with SUVs). But it seems like comfort and safety concerns, coupled with more power and better fuel economy have been causing equivalent cars to become heavier (and more expensive) over time.

As an example, one of my first cars was an 84 VW GTI. It weighed ~2000lbs. Try to find a car that light today. There is a nice comparison of that car and a modern VW GTI here: [http://www.automobilemag.com/news/then-vs- now-1984-volkswage...](http://www.automobilemag.com/news/then-vs- now-1984-volkswagen-gti-v-2015gti/)

I think the same is probably true of most 70s and 80s economy cars vs today's cars. Today's equivalents are much heavier, but much safer, and much more pleasant to drive

<comment><USER10> I have made this argument before on the internet and I have learned that it is a European vs American perspective.

American cars in the 70s and 80s were _monsters_. Definitely heavier than modern cars.

For example, here are 10 popular cars in the US from 1984. [http://www.caranddriver.com/features/1984-10best- cars-1984-h...](http://www.caranddriver.com/features/1984-10best- cars-1984-honda-accord-page-4)

        Audi 5000s: 2850-3100 lbs
        Dodge Daytona: 2830 lbs
        Honda Accord: 2300 lbs
        Honda Prelude: 2220 lbs
        Mazda 626: 2220 lbs
        Pontiac 6000STE:  3000 lbs
        Pontiac Fiero: 2580 lbs
        Porsche 944: 2830 lbs

On the heavy side, no?

Then again, the best selling car in the US in 2016 is the Toyota Camry which is 3,245 to 3,480 lbs so I guess I'm wrong. Maybe US cars were monsters in the 70's then?

<comment><USER11> Don't forget 'car' is a rather arbitrary category. The car > minivan > SUV 'soccer mom' transition added these beasts:

      Infiniti QX80 – 5,633 pounds
      Toyota Sequoia – 5,730 pounds
      Toyota Land Cruiser – 5,765 pounds
      Lincoln Navigator – 5,830 pounds
      Lexus LX 570 – 6,000 pounds

<comment><USER12> The Toyota Land Cruiser is not like the others, it's popular with militant groups. And has been in production since _1951_.

<comment><USER11> That's a connection more or less in name only. Much like the connection between a military hummer and an H3. The 1950 FJ and BJ was a jeep knockoff with a cloth roof. [https://www.fj.co/blog/history-of-the-toyota-fj- series/](https://www.fj.co/blog/history-of-the-toyota-fj-series/) [http://www.toyota- global.com/showroom/vehicle_heritage/landc...](http://www.toyota- global.com/showroom/vehicle_heritage/landcruiser/collection/model_bj_1.html)

The FJ40 from 1960 is somewhat comparable, but weighed 1/2 (3263 lbs) what the modern beast weighs.

The FJ60 ([http://tlc4x4.com/fj60.htm#sthash.nB2cpi4h.dpbs](http://tlc4x4.com/fj60.htm#sthash.nB2cpi4h.dpbs)) from 1981 was even closer and heavy at 4246 lbs, but again still 1,500 lb lighter than the current version.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> old-gregg I suspect that people of the future will look back and be amazed that for more than a century we've been legally allowing our slow-reacting bodies [1] to ride around at 80mph in a 2-ton hideous mechanical equivalent of a horse, killing ourselves [2] and simultaneously destroying our cities [3].

I myself used to be a "petrolhead" my 20s and it's quite amazing to observe this awakening when looking in the mirror. I suspect it was caused by the revolution in electric/self-driving tech and traveling more and comparing car- centric US cities to other places.

      [1] 250ms delay at best, for young and healthy adults.
      [2] #1 cause, ahead of all guns, including suicides.
      [3] https://progressivetransit.wordpress.com/2012/01/25/cars-kill-cities

<comment><USER13> In the US only about 1 out of every 70 deaths is from an auto accident. As a single cause of death, it's not even in the top 10.

Less than 1 in 3 accidental deaths is auto accident related.

More people commit suicide (42,000) than die in auto accidents (40,000).

[http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/282929.php](http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/282929.php)

Deaths per mile driven have plummeted over time. From 24 per million miles in 1921, to 7 per hundred million miles in 1950, to 2.5 PHMM in the 1980s, 1.5 PHMM in early 2000s and now about 1.1 per hundred million miles.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_i...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_in_U.S._by_year)

They are set to plunge further as automated braking and collision avoidance become standard features over the next decade.

Edits: Corrected to deaths per 100M miles, not deaths per 1M miles.

<comment><USER14> 1 out of 70 is pretty damn huge. We have global campaigns about preventing cancers that are less dangerous than car accidents. There was panic over Ebola, which killed essentially nobody compared to car accidents.

Yet the general response to 1/70 people deaths being because of cars is "meh, oh well."

<comment><USER15> Agreed. Part of the problem is that we use the word "accident" when it's almost always someone's fault.

Everytime I see someone driving terribly I know there's a 50%+ chance they have a sizable dent on their car from a car crash or from them hitting some inanimate object. It's actually a game I play - I'll see someone driving poorly and then say "where's the dent" and look for it. Sometimes I'll even switch lanes to check the other side where it will inevitably be. For certain cars like the Pontiac Grand-Am, my theory puts the dent % and dent damage much higher.

In many ways, insurance and how we treat collisions as "accidents" enables them to drive with no regard. By the time they're dropped from insurance, they probably already hurt someone.

<comment><USER13> Except that statistically car injury accidents are so rare, they probably haven't.

<comment><USER15> I was talking about those that get dropped by insurance (usually multiple crashes) and also - you can get injured and not report it.

But anyway, 4.6 M injuries isn't rare. "But there are also millions more who are seriously injured — an estimated 4.6 million in 2016 according to NSC" [1]

[1] [http://fortune.com/2017/02/15/traffic-deadliest- year/](http://fortune.com/2017/02/15/traffic-deadliest-year/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I always wondered why American cars are so inefficient. Seems such a waste of your significantly cheaper gas :)

I drive an Opel Astra H 1.7 CDTI and I can get up to 50 mpg (4.7 l/100 km) on the highway, and I never dip under 40 mpg (5.8 l/100km) even when doing a lot of city driving. I understand that my car is comparatively somewhat smaller (1200 kg) and underpowered (100 hp), yet I can't imagine needing more horsepower. It's a very comfortable ride as well.

But even my parents' larger car doesn't get even remotely as low as 25 mpg. First time I saw a car with less than 30 mpg was when I drove a company van.

When I compare these numbers with my American friends, they're incredulous as to how low they are, and they're not exactly driving SUVs either. What do you get in the place for this lower efficiency? Are American cars that much heavier? More comfortable? Faster?

<comment><USER17> "What do you get in the place for this lower efficiency? Are American cars that much heavier? More comfortable? Faster?"

I cannot speak for everyone, but as someone who lives in the US and also spends a lot of time in Europe, there is a very big lifestyle difference at play here.

First, I have a five person family (wife and three kids) and you[1], statistically, as a European, have 1.6 children - and as a highly educated HN reader, probably less (on average).

Second, Americans move around _a lot more than most europeans do_. On the occasions that I have lived in Europe, I always spoke of how interesting it was that we could just "drive to St. Petersburg" or "just drive to Transylvania" or whatever, and otherwise smart and interesting european friends would look at me like I was a crazy person. It is very, very rare to meet Europeans who drive across multiple countries for leisure.[2]

So when I drive five people, weighing over 500 lbs total and accompanying luggage the equivalent of one Europe away and over two mountain ranges[3] I am going to need something more than a lawnmower engine. This is not an edge-case - this is something we do multiple times per year.

That being said, there are some very interesting cultural differences in the other direction ... once while in Denmark I saw a decent sized horse trailer being hauled by a nice, new Audi A8. Basically 100% of the driving public in the US would have considered this a gaping tear in the fabric of reality.

[1] Not _you_ , but you _on average_.

[2] Zurich to Transylvania is 1800km - about the same as SF to Denver which is ~2000 km.

[3] CA to MN, for instance, over the Sierras and then the Rockies.

<comment><USER18> > It is very, very rare to meet Europeans who drive across multiple countries > for leisure

Then you've never been to the south of France in the summer.

It's _filled_ with license plates from all over the EU. Mainly Dutch, UK, German. I've even seen Estonian plates.

It's ~1200Km from the Netherlands to the south of France. People do it in camper vans all of the time.

<comment><USER19> Also Italy, north Spain, Croatia. And Germany/Austria/Switzerland in winter season.

It might not be as widespread to travel long distances by car as it is in the US, but it is definitely not "very, very rare". I would even say it's common for many Dutch, Danish, German, Belgian, Polish (from what I can observe).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> My first car crush was in high school: the 2002 Subaru WRX. It would be fine to get some souped-up monster, and high-end BMWs are always fast, but when I first saw those silly little bug eyes and the trademark blue color? God did I want one.

It was weird to figure out that it only came with a 2 liter engine. Apparently turbos help a lot. It was even weirder when the 2005 STI came out with the same engine ... and a bigger turbo. And it was yet weirder when I looked at a 2014 BMW 3 series ... and they have twin turbos and tiny engines.

To me, the last 15 years have been car manufacturers figuring out that with the right kind of engineering, you can get rid of turbo lag, and if you don't have lag or reliability problems, turbos make everything better. Smaller, faster, more fuel-efficient. My dad's sedan has a twin turbo these days. It gets 35 mpg.

I get that it's only one piece of the puzzle, but it's been so fun to see that tech go from niche-y to ubiquitous.

<comment> semi-extrinsic In F1 they now have waste heat recovery systems, as I understand it (please, F1 engineers, correct me if I'm wrong) in the form of mechanically decoupled turbine and compressor wheels on the turbo. The (exhaust) turbine generates electricity which it can feed either to the battery or to the compressor wheel motor (acting like a regular turbo in the latter case). In this configuration, you can also electrically spool up the compressor wheel from the battery, giving exactly zero turbo lag, and they can also recover impressive amounts of energy that would otherwise be wasted - about 1 kWh in a 90 second lap.

[For a longer while, we've had anti-lag systems on racecars that basically burn petrol in the manifold, always keeping the turbo spinning. These are horribly fuel-inefficient and destroy turbos etc. quickly.]

I sincerely hope that electrically coupled turbo systems are adopted in road cars. The recent Audi/Bentley top-end (diesel!) SUVs with electric turbos are promising in this regard, but I don't think they do waste heat recovery _per se_.

<comment><USER21> The coolest thing about current F1 engines is that they eliminate a major inefficiency of turbos. In a modern turbocharged, once the turbo hits maximum boost an electronically actuated wastegate opens to avoid over boosting the engine which wastes all the energy you worked to create.

Coupling the turbine shaft to a generator allows you to recapture that energy normally lost to the wastegate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Article is interesting but gets a few things wrong:

1\. Starting the analysis in 1975 is misleading (the Ford administration). The most interesting cars are from the late 60s early 70s before emission regulations, oil crisis, car bumpers, ect kicked in (and dealt a huge drop in power, increase in weight, ect).

2\. Cherry picking a muscle car for its weight is also misleading. Muscle cars weren't light. Some had 6 or 7 liter engines (That's a lot of iron!). They were quick-ish because they were powerful. Muscle cars might be the only cars to have lost weight in the last 40 years, since its ridiculous to have a "sports" car weigh as much as a family SUV.

Look at the accord, or the civic and see the weight gains.

In fact, cars _have_ been getting lighter but over the past 5 years, because they've become ridiculously heavy. This is new and excited (they're still whales though)

3\. Yes my SUV has 300 hp, which is insane. But I go around a mountain corner much slower in it with it's 4000 lb than I would a FIAT 127 (kids, remember to downshift to keep the drum breaks cool!).

Point is, a car isn't a good performance just because it has a good weight/power. Just the weight itself is important (light always wins for the same power weight ratio).

<comment><USER21> Minor nit:

1\. I think you have to start with 1975 because emissions requirements are the biggest component of why car performance started to drop in the late 70s. It's really hard to compare a car with and without emissions equipment.

2\. Like others have said, model bloat accounts for a lot the weight gain within a specific model. The Accord used to be a small sedan that's grown into a full size. The modern Civic is bigger than the 92 Accord my family had when I was a kid.

3\. A Nissan GT-R weighs nearly 2 tons as well and will outhustle the Fiat and the SUV around that mountain :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I have a 2016 Ford Mustang GT/CS and consistently get 23-24 MPG with mostly highway/freeway driving. It's unreal that a 5.0L V8 with 435HP (stock) gets that good gas mileage. The materials and fit & finish is better all around too.

We are truly living in the middle of another "golden age" of automobiles. Watch out though - here come the EVs :)

<comment><USER24> 24 MPG is embarrassingly bad. A 1970s Datsun 240Z gets the same fuel economy. Compared to a modern luxury car, a new BMW 3 Series will get 80 MPG on a freeway. There's nothing wrong with buying a gorgeous car like yours, there are plenty of reasons to have one, but trying to claim it's environmentally friendly is just ridiculous.

<comment><USER23> Whoa there. I never said it was "environmentally friendly". That is indeed ridiculous. Just saying that _for the amount of power it has_ , it gets better than expected gas mileage.

Also, it looks like a 1970s Datsun 240Z averages significantly worse: [http://www.fuelly.com/car/datsun/240z/1973](http://www.fuelly.com/car/datsun/240z/1973) \- further proving my point, and the one of the article in question.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The most useful result is that almost everything on the road can go uphill without slowing down. Even heavy trucks. This requires not just engine power but better cooling.

<comment><USER26> I see you haven't met my 2000 corolla. :-)

<comment><USER27> Median car horsepower has increased 50% since your car was made!

<comment><USER28> Not for Toyota Corollas incidentally. The 2001 model 1.8L Corolla RunX with 189hp is still just about the most powerful Corolla ever made. New Corollas top out at 138hp.

<comment><USER29> They can go up just about any grade without slowing down, though (unless you're talking about "slowing down" from some speed near the limit of the car's performance and transitioning to a steep grade, I guess).

Given the CVT and the soft suspension and brakes designed for being a mild- mannered passenger car, it'd be a little goofy to make an option for a much more powerful Corolla. You'd end up with something not a lot of fun to drive, or a completely different car.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I think it's weird that they didn't weight any of the charts by how many of each car were sold. It only measures how many car configurations were available.

</comment><comment><USER30> > Cylinder deactivation debuted about 10 years ago

No, it debuted over 100 years ago, and was standard on every Cadillac V8 for sale in 1981 - 36 years ago. Sure today's versions are better, but the quote above is about as literally false as one can get.

[1][https://www.hemmings.com/magazine/hmn/2008/04/Cadillac-V-8-6...](https://www.hemmings.com/magazine/hmn/2008/04/Cadillac-V-8-6-4/1610045.html)

</comment><comment><USER31> They have to be a lot more efficient to haul around all the extraneous shit that people have demanded be put into cars over the years. Of course it's always extreme in "Top of the Line" products like this Bentley ([http://blog.caranddriver.com/it-takes-a-lot-of-wiring-to- kee...](http://blog.caranddriver.com/it-takes-a-lot-of-wiring-to-keep-a- modern-vehicle-moving-witness-this-bentleys-harness/)) but the trickle-down effect is inevitable. Happened with air bags, IIRC. Look how many companies are adding variations of "Auto Pilot" or driver assists.

Basically we painted ourselves into a corner. Technology and Distractions have an inverse relationship with Driver Attention and Performance. People don't like hearing that, but I don't like having to honk at people weaving into my lane because they're on their phone at 70 MPH.

<comment><USER32> The sensors and actuators used in active safety driver assistance systems are light and take up very little space. Most of the extra weight comes from passive safety improvements such as stronger unibodies. Those are far from extraneous.

Plus cars are simply growing because most people prefer larger vehicles. A long drive in a tiny penalty box car is a miserable experience.

<comment><USER33> Another "hidden" weight adder is the dreaded "NVH" (Noise, Vibration, and Harshness). Basically car manufacturers add "heavy stuff" to make the car quieter and ride better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> The chart makes me sad. My Subaru BRZ (2013-) "sports car" comes with only 200hp. Many people looking for more power install aftermarket superchargers.

<comment><USER33> A nearly perfect car. I say "nearly" because of the slight torque dip in the mid-range. It's too bad no one is buying them because they don't have "enough power". I am waffling on either a BRZ or a MX-5. I'm leaning towards the MX-5 because it seems like the BRZ/GT-86 may not be around much longer.

<comment><USER35> I once owned an FR-S (totaled from someone rear-ending it on the highway, going to buy another next year) and currently I own a '90 Miata and a '94 Skyline GT-R. Comparing between the ND Miata and the BRZ I would go for the BRZ in a heartbeat.

Two reasons:

1\. The NC/ND Miata crowd is a much older demographic, keeping their precious car in the garage over the winter, keeping it bone stock, bringing it to the dealership instead of working on it themselves and only taking it out on sunny days. I don't click with that crowd.

2\. The aftermarket support for the FR-S/BRZ/GT86 is completely overwhelming. Want a completely different exhaust setup or want to run flex fuel? Turbocharged? Supercharged? There's quite a few choices to select from. ND Miatas have some selection, but not nearly at the same cost or availability.

You can get rid of that torque dip quite easily if it's bothering you, by the way. Just need new UEL exhaust headers and a tune. You'll even make a bit more power when you're finished with it, so win/win.

Personally I'm loving that people aren't buying them because it's been keeping the barrier of entry way down. They truly are remarkable cars... There's a lot more to a car than the numbers. The suspension/geometry and chassis with 55/45 weight distribution, MacPherson struts, Torsen limited slip differential comes standard, and low center of gravity due to its boxer engine are top-notch compared to something like a 370Z.

<comment><USER33> Hmm, that's surprising. I am a bit of a track rat and figured the Miata had more aftermarket support. Flyin' Miata has a ton of parts and upgrades. I don't see a lot of Miatas on the track where I am, the ones I do see have a substantial number of mods.

Most of the BRZ/GT-86/FR-S I see in my neck of the woods are all blinged out visually with not many good "handling/performance" mods (aside from giant supercharger or turbocharger setups which IMHO is the last thing one should modify).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> These new engine technologies are really cool if you enjoy driving performance cars, and it's amazing how it's possible to comply with EPA requirements while delivering so much power, but all these systems add a lot of complexity.

Direct fuel injection, turbos and fancy transmissions are the min technologies which make these powerful efficient cars possible, but they're all impossibly complex to service!

DFI leads to carbon fouling of intake valves, because port fuel injection "washed" fuel over the valves, cleaning them and burning up residue. Turbos are high RPM, high heat parts which have nowhere near the longevity of a modern engine, and there are lots of cars with 8 and 10 speed automatic transmissions to get every last bit of efficiency out of the engine.

All these expensive technologies make for less reliable cars that need more maintenances, and cars are much younger when scrapped because they're simply not economical to fix. Your local transmission shop won't rebuild a 10-speed auto, they'll buy a remanufactured one from a specialist, which costs many thousands.

It's a bummer for a weekend mechanic like myself, that cars are becoming so impractical to run for a long time. I consider it wasteful to scrap a perfectly nice ten year old car because of a bad transmission or blown motor, but there are increasingly more of these.

<comment><USER37> Cars are far more reliable than every before. The median age of cars on the road has been steadily creeping up for years.

Turbocharging does not make an engine less reliable: every big rig on the road is turbocharged and designed to go hundreds of thousands of miles while seeing engine loads unheard of for passenger cars..

I'm not sure why people have the perception a 10 speed auto is less reliable than a 4 speed auto. Planetary automatics, by design, add gears exponentially. Almost all 5+ speed automatic uses a Lepelletier gearset, which is basically a traditional four-speed with another planetary gearset in front of it. It's not that different from how big-rigs turn a four-speed manual into a 12-speed, or a 6-speed into an 18.

Fact is, as gear ratios grow in autos, they get more robust. ZF builds 8-speed automatics capable of __1000ft.lbs of torque __which is way more than the gold standard of four-speeds (the GM 4L60e) could handle in it 's highest output applications (380ft.lbs).

<comment><USER36> The machinery we build is more reliable than ever because of improved manufacturing tolerances, CAD stress analysis, better understanding of materials, etc, but manufacturing isn't perfect and materials aren't perfect.

When you add more complexity, you add more opportunities for failure, that's just a fact. Twin engine airplanes have twice as many engine-out emergencies as single engine airplanes.

I have the perception that 10 speed transmissions are less reliable than four speed because I've messed with the innards of both. There are size and weight constraints in cars, and you have to get those 10 gears into similar space where you used to get 4, particularly in transverse applications. Transmissions almost never fail due to the gear set failing. What happens is that some chunk of a clutch plate breaks off and causes havoc, or some solenoid gets weak and allows for clutch slippage and the clutch plates overheat and damage the fluid, which cascades pretty quickly. Big rig transmissions are seriously big and heavy duty, car transmissions are dainty things by comparison. Your Getrag example is an exception - it's a high performance transmission meant for expensive cars. Yes, once cost isn't a constraint, things do get beefier and more reliable.

My point was that the complexity of these things makes it very hard to fix them, so cars reach end of life sooner. You could have Jimbob's Local Transmission Shop rebuild your transmission in the past, now Jimbob is over his head. He has to send it out to a rebuilder, who will charge several thousand dollars for this thing, so it's only cost effective to fix cars which are relatively new.

Turbos are used to make smaller engines behave like bigger ones, they help generate more heat and more pressure to develop more power, but weight and size are still constraints, so everything operates closer to maximum stress tolerances. I've been racing cars for almost ten years, and on hot days, it's not the naturally aspirated engines which blow up, it's the turbos. As with transmissions, big rig turbos are not constrained by size, weight and cost like passenger car turbos. They have gotten a LOT better, don't get me wrong, but a turbocharged engine is a much more complex system than a naturally aspirated one.

In my opinion, the sweet spot for technology/simplicity is behind us. Cars built between about 2000 and 2010 have simple port injected engines, very good engine management systems which result in very clean emissions, and generally no turbos. You can cost effectively keep one of these things running forever, and what happens is that the body and interior fall apart before the engine quits being cheap to maintain.

I'm a car guy, I love working on the things and hacking on engines and ECU's. Don't get me wrong, I think new cars are wonderful, but they're becoming tightly integrated systems with little in the way of user serviceable parts - throwaways like cell phones.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> They picked an interesting starting point for their comparisons, which was 1975, several years after the following:

1) HP ratings went from SAE gross (at flywheel with no accessories) to SAE net (at flywheel with accessories and stock exhaust) 2) Smog controls (AIR, EGR, and cats) 3) Lower static compression ratios to handle unleaded fuel

That said, computer-controlled spark and fuel, and now direct injection, makes modern cars a lot more fun if maybe a little same-looking.

<comment><USER39> The EPA data only goes back to 1975. [https://www.epa.gov/fueleconomy/download-co2-and-fuel- econom...](https://www.epa.gov/fueleconomy/download-co2-and-fuel-economy- trends-report-1975-2016)

<comment><USER40> Yeah, it turns out that a lot of environmental and energy stuff didn't exist until the 1970s.

Nixon created the EPA, Carter the DoE, 1970 and 1977, respectively.

It wasn't until the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo that concerns over automobile efficiency even registered for most Americans. Gas was cheap. Cars were big. Life was good.

(That being the thinking, if not the reality.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I've definitely seen it in my last two vehicles.

My old 2003 Ford Explorer had a 4.6 L V8 with 239hp. 0-60 in 8.8 seconds. 14/19 mpg. 4,381 lbs

My current 2014 Ford Explorer Sport has a 3.5L V6 twinturbo with 365hp. 0-60 in 6.0 seconds. 16/22 mpg. 4,697 lbs

</comment><comment><USER42> These are incredible times for performance ICE powered vehicles. You can buy a very fast car from the showroom, but the aftermarket and hot rod world has a cornucopia of options to build (or buy as crate motors) just about as much power as you want. Street driven twin turbo drag racing 'door' cars running 7 second quarter mile times are common. With electric performance in drag racing and hill climb (such as pikes peak) rapidly improving to it's an amazing time to be alive...except for the shortage of race tracks where these cars can be safely put through their paces.

</comment><comment><USER43> What the heck do you need all that horsepower for? You got the speed limit anyway. If you'd make the cars lighter and put in a 100hp engine you'd end up using half as much gas. Yikes!

<comment><USER44> So they can win social Top Trumps at parties? Beyond "dick swinging" the utility is probably limited.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I was driving a 1960's Classic Mini Cooper the other day, just leave my body in there if we crash.

</comment><comment><USER46> This part was interesting, fuel injection has been optimized to the point of modeling the way the fluid vaporizes so it perfectly mists out, making sure to never hit the walls of the pistons:

> It's also put to use in the Camaro V6, the middle-of-the pack, Goldilocks > choice that makes 335 horsepower. This machine highlights one of the most > critical things in engine evolution: direct fuel injection. Carburetors that > mixed fuel with air disappeared from assembly lines long ago.

> But it was only in the 21st century that engineers perfected the practice of > shooting a mist of gasoline directly into the cylinder. Less fuel is wasted > and the engine is more powerful because it stays cooler. (The gas actually > evaporates before it explodes, cooling the cylinder in the same way that > sweat cools the skin of an athlete.)

> "Today, we can model it, we can visualize it, and we can make sure the fuel > ends up in the air, not on the cylinder wall," said Prabjot Nanua, director > of Detroit-based GM's advanced engine and racing engineering.

</comment><comment><USER47> The most fun car I've ever driven was my 1985 Toyota Tercel, with all of 65 horsepower.

I don't think any car I've had since then has gotten better fuel economy than that old Tercel. But the old Tercel probably polluted the atmosphere a lot more, and I'm sure it would've disintegrated if I'd ever been in a collision with a larger vehicle.

<comment><USER48> I beat the hell out of my '96 Tercel. Took it every where (hiking, camping). Not a single amenity. Loved that car. 42/mpg highway.

Still brings a tear to my eye.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Faster and more efficient doesn't equal good for the environment. Buying a new car is almost always a net negative for the environment. It doesn't even matter if it's more fuel efficient, or electric. What matters is the vast amount of resources required to produce each vehicle, and the amount of toxic emissions and waste generated in the production process. And, even if it's electric, the electricity has to come from somewhere. And electricity frequently comes from environmentally unfriendly sources like coal power plants.

So if you're in the market for _any_ new car, keep that in mind: you're not doing the environment any favors, nor your bank account.

</comment><comment><USER50> Soccer Moms' Revenge

[https://grassrootsmotorsports.com/articles/soccer-moms- reven...](https://grassrootsmotorsports.com/articles/soccer-moms-revenge/)

 _Once we unloaded our gear, luggage, tires and a bunch of other junk from the same Honda Odyssey—a minivan, remember—that had just carried us 400 or so odd miles while watching DVD movies in air-conditioned comfort while sitting our bourgeois asses on cushy leather seats, it proceeded to storm around the autocross course in 49.09 seconds. In other words, it cruised to a near dead- heat with the Porsche [356]._

</comment><comment><USER51> Past a certain point (like, not being able to maintain highway speed limit up a modest grade), I am not sure this extra horsepower is such a good thing.

The thing I really notice when driving lower usable power-to-weight vehicles like a heavy truck or an unpowered bicycle or a car with a dying clutch or is this: they force you to think further ahead, work harder at predicting the possible movements of all other road users and in short, be a better, safer, more aware driver. I actually find them more fun (except on the track or an empty parking lot of course) too for this reason.

Is it possible excessive horsepower is making us shittier drivers?

<comment><USER52> It is much more fun driving a lower powered car at the limit than an overpowered on at 25%.

(source -- owner of 1990 miata. 120hp, 2000lbs. Steer the front with the wheel, the back with the throttle.)

<comment><USER53> Yep. I think I made a slight mistake in buying my last car as I wanted to prioritize power, so I got an AMG with 381bhp - and yeah, the car is a monster, it does 0-60 in 4 seconds, but I very quickly found out that when going on some twisting mountain roads it's just too much power to really have fun - you get out on a straight, and are instantly doing 80mph+, on a 60mph- limit road, so you just end up cruising until the next turn which is neither interesting nor fun.

In a lower powered car, on a sufficiently technical road it's hard to stay at the speed limit, so you end up working the car and having loads of fun(like I am sure you do in your Miata). In a super powerful car that part is gone, and the drive becomes slightly less enjoyable because of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> For a good anecdotal, non-American example:

My grandmother lives in quite a hilly town. Her old car was from the mid-80s, with few airbags and basically zero crumple zone, so at a certain point her kids (my mom and uncle) persuaded her to get a new one.

Her worry was power - the old car was a pretty upcharged model to make it uphill to her house, and she was not looking forward to figuring out which new models had the same power-to-weight. Turns out she needn't have worried - <USER2> can't even _find_ a car in her preferred (pretty small) size range with that little power anymore.

</comment><comment><USER55> I try to drive as little as possible to stop destroying the planet, no need to travel 100s of miles, there's lots of interesting things close to you, and if you walked to them you'd live longer too

<comment><USER56> Nice intention, but have you been to suburban america? There's nothing there.

<comment><USER55> Sounds like a good place to not live then.

<comment><USER56> This sounds like you think they should die. The US lower/middle class live according to their means, and the housing created for them to live in is horribly dependent on cars. You are fortunate to have falling into a location/social class where your potential properties are pedestrian-friendly & close to point-of-interest. Hundreds of millions of people do not share your fortune.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> When I visited America, the first thing I noticed when getting out of the airport was the big ass cars everywhere. Most of the cars in my country is smaller.

Superminis are very popular here. As of now though, I drive an Chevrolet Tahoe and it's rare to meet a car as big as it is.

Why there is not much big cars here it's because there is heavy taxation on both the cars CO2 per km and on the gas itself. Gas in Sweden costs maybe 3-4 times as much as it does in the US.

</comment><comment><USER58> This doesn't take into account that manufacturers used to under-rate the horsepower on their cars. Legend has it for the purposes of insurance and the NHRA.

<comment><USER59> There were also corporate rules. At one point, GM wouldn't allow one of their cars to have a better power to weight ratio than a Corvette. The answer for Pontiac was to sandbag on the advertised power.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Another implication of all this power is that there is now little need for "passing". Everybody can reach the speed limit easily on almost all roads.

</comment><comment><USER60> The huge stride in efficiency recently has been made possible by direct injection. Engines no longer have to work hard to pull intake air through a mostly closed butterfly valve. Attributing this advancement to govt regulation is preposterous. Just as regardless of whether govt had mandated faster processors, industry would have created them anyway.

<comment><USER36> Direct injected engines still have throttle butterfly valves, or something complex like VANOS to simulate one with valvetrains. Air and fuel must mix at a correct ratio, if you're requiring little power, you need little air and little fuel. Lots of air and low fuel gets you detonation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> The last 3 cars I owned here in Germany had the following real life consumption:

45 mpg (bought 2002) 35 mpg (bought 2013) 42mpg (bought 2017)

<comment><USER62> I'm fairly certain that the reason the 2002 car was that efficient was because there was less emission regulations back then. They could simply use a more efficient burn at the cost of more polution. This was exactly what the VW scandal was all about.

<comment><USER61> It was a VW Polo Diesel and the others are gas :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Would love to see a similar article on motorcycle improvements. Seems like the line between top-of-the-line MotoGP bikes and the most expensive street bikes is becoming quite thin.

[https://www.clippp.com/](https://www.clippp.com/)

</comment><comment><USER64> I'd love to see a chart of the power/weight ratio of engines over time.

<comment><USER65> Not particularly impressive. You can make an engine significantly lighter by changing the short block from cast iron to aluminum. The only problem is long term reliability (if an aluminum block ever overheats, it is significantly more likely to destroy itself than cast iron).

<comment><USER66> My car as a cast iron engine block; alas, it doesn't have replaceable cylinder liners nor are bigger piston rings manufactured, so when the workshop managed to crack a piston they ended up having to change the entire engine. Yet another example of the throwaway society, eh... :(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> 2016 Ford Taurus SHO has an Ecoboost 2.5L engine with twin turbo and I chipped it and added high performance intake/exhaust. ~550hp, 25 mpg. My beater from 98 was worse on mileage at 150hp. Strange.

</comment><comment><USER68> If there's an affordable, reliable car that performs well that's better than what Honda and Toyota have to offer, I'll sure as hell buy it. I don't care if its a Chevy

<comment><USER69> Article title is misleading you, this isn't about American-based car companies it's about the cars Americans drive including Honda/Toyota/BMW/etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> Would love to see a similar article on motorcycle improvements. Seems like the line between top-of-the-line MotoGP bikes and the most expensive street bikes is becoming quite thin.

</comment><comment><USER71> Direct injection is a mixed bag: on my 2010 VW CC you have to "decarb" the intake valves every 30-40K miles because they do not get washed by the fuel.

</comment><comment><USER72> In what applications will electric engines not be able to replace internal combustions engines? I don't want these improvements to go to waste long-term!

<comment><USER73> Small scale power generation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> >If a 1976 driver were to somehow get his hands on a car from 2017, he'd be at grave risk of whiplash. Since those days, horsepower in the U.S. has almost doubled, with the median model climbing from 145 to 283 stallions.

1976 was right in that era where gas prices took a huge jump, and to keep Americans from buying the more fuel efficient Japanese cars US car makers were producing seriously underpowered vehicles with better mileage. I wouldn't be surprised if that year represents the nadir of horsepower in American cars.

<comment><USER75> > I wouldn't be surprised if that year represents the nadir of horsepower in > American cars.

And yet, a graph in the article shows more than 25% drop in horsepower from '76 to '83\. Are you claiming that was entirely due to an increase in Japanese car models dragging down the average even as American models bounced back?

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> For all the talk by liberatians and their ilk that regulation is bad and unnecessary, that chart of median fuel effeciency due to government requirements should give them pause. Wow. Well over a decade of non-progress until a path forward is mandated. Suddently the needle starts moving, with car owners, the environment, and energy import needs as big winners here.

<comment><USER77> Libertarians are not anti-regulation, they just believe that the good and bad consequences of regulations should be understood.

Often, those who are not libertarians will support a regulation simply because they agree with its stated aim... things like "the patriot act" or "the affordable care act".

Those names are chosen to sound good, not because they reflect the intent of legislation or the outcome of it.

To give you an example of the folly of fuel economy regulation, consider that 90% of automotive pollution is created by the oldest 10% of cars on the road. Does it really make sense to force all buyers of new cars to pay extra? Why not charge a tax that increases for every year a car gets older, so that the person driving the smoke-emitting clunker has an incentive to upgrade into something that is cleaner and safer.

Libertarians value having a clean environment just like anyone else does. The question is how to create regulations that are fair and don't create disincentives for innovation. Note that several automakers needed government bailouts partly due to the cost of complying with fuel economy regulations. But rather than letting those companies fold and allowing Tesla to rise to prominence much sooner, our regulators propped up the makers of the most polluting cars, a move which set back US emissions significantly (compared to the counter-factual I described).

<comment><USER78> > Libertarians are not anti-regulation

Yes, they are. See [https://www.lp.org/issues/the- economy/](https://www.lp.org/issues/the-economy/)

"Libertarians believe that the only proper role of government in the economic realm is to protect property rights, adjudicate disputes, and provide a legal framework in which voluntary trade is protected."

<comment><USER77> First, the Libertarian Party is not "all libertarians".

Second, environmental regulation falls out of property rights, since pollution spreads onto people's property. If you pollute a stream, the stream carries the pollution to someone else's property and damages it.

<comment><USER79> And the libertarian response to that issue is not the ounce of prevention, but the pound of cure.

Rather than have _a priori_ environmental legislation, the libertarian position is to wait until the (possibly irreversible) damage is done, then try and find the person who did it (if you can, and good luck if it was a variety of entities), then take them to a court, then prove them at fault (not a given, especially if more than one party), get a judgement of fiscal damages against them (hopefully they have enough money for recompense, but not enough money to tie you up for years), then actually get the money from them, and finally put that money towards cleaning up the spill (again, if it's not irreversible).

<comment><USER80> Not at all. A perfectly viable libertarian response to your hypothetical is a carbon tax or pollution tax - some cost applied to a negative externality.

<comment><USER81> Did I miss the stampede of Libertarians advocating that?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER82> Yes, as soon as they sense competition from electrical vehicles

</comment><comment><USER83> I just came back from Boston, every other car was a SUV

</comment><comment><USER84> there's nothing better than a german cars !

</comment><comment><USER85> My '87 Camaro weighed 3300lb. The equivalent model today weighs 3700lb. A '77 weighed 3500.

My 2001 corvette weighs 3040lb dry, a new Z06 is 3700.

Tell me again how things are lighter?

<comment><USER86> The new ones seem...poofier...larger...maybe less dense?

Less mass per cubic meter?

</comment></comment><comment><USER87> How is this article not called "Too Fast Too Fuel Efficient?"

</comment><comment><USER88> The arbitrary speed limits on US highways have hurt US Auto industry and world auto industry a lot in terms of kinds of roads we build and the kind of cars we built.

Imagine how much innovation that could not happen there.

</comment><comment><USER89> I've always been baffled by the lack of progress in increasing MPG for automobiles.

my 2001 toyota echo: ~35 mpg

my 92 VW cabriolet: ~28 mpg

my 2001 ford ranger 4x4: ~25mpg

These vehicles all got better or equivalent of vehicles made 20 years later.

<comment><USER13> 1992 Golf Cabrio:

MPG: 28 city/ 32 highway

HP: 110

0-60: 9.5 secs

Length: 153" Weight: 2193 lbs

2017 Golf Cabrio:

MPG: 25 city/36 highway

HP: 170

0-60: 6.6 secs

Length: 167" Weight: 3,000 lbs

Over the last 25 years the VW Golf has gotten almost 50% larger, is far safer, far more comfortable, far faster, and has basically identical gas mileage.

<comment><USER89> This is one of the points of confusion for me. I didn't buy a cabriolet to take kids to and from school, to haul gear around or to beat some other kid in muscle car off the line. Increased safety is a nice, but bigger? faster? I would trade speed any day for better mileage. But apparently better mpg is less of a demand than bigger and faster.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER90> If only the auto industry hadn't canned Henry Ford's efforts to mass produce cars with hemp-composite materials.[0]

They would be arguably faster, lighter, more efficient, and safer than anything on the market.

But, ya know. Car wrecks are good for business, and efficiency is bad for business.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srgE6Tzi3Lg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srgE6Tzi3Lg)

<comment><USER91> In other words, a Trabant.

Hemp is not a magic fiber, it's just able to be grown with a much lower environmental impact than cotton. Otherwise its just another fiber.

<comment><USER66> And if you're involved in a tragic crash where the wreck of your car catches fire, at least you'd die happy, eh?

(yes, I know hemp grown for fibers doesn't contain THC or whatever the active ingredient in weed is called. It's a joke, you see)</comment></comment></comment>


Click click click - A browser-based game on online profiling. - <AUTHOR> https://clickclickclick.click/ <comment><USER2> very strange</comment>


How did the web lose faith in charging for stuff? - <AUTHOR> http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1615-how-did-the-web-lose-faith-in-charging-for-stuff <comment><USER2> The reason that the web lost faith in charging for stuff is that marginal cost is so low. What is the cost to 37signals of having another customer sign up for one of their services? If I sign up for the $49/mo. Basecamp product, they are offering me 10GB of storage as well as bandwidth and application processing. None of that has a high marginal cost. Maybe $5/mo? Plus, many users won't use all that space so it's a maximum of $5, but the average marginal cost would probably be a good deal lower.

So, while many applications might have very high fixed costs (like paying people to create wonderful applications like those in 37signals portfolio), they have marginal costs that are so insignificant that people would like to charge customers less and get more customers - often ending up with them wanting to give it away for free for maximum uptake (with the whole profit thing put off until later).

Beyond that, some applications you can't charge for. 37signals has a portfolio of applications that don't get better for users as more people use it. That's unlike Facebook, Delicious, Digg, Wikipedia, etc. If those services charged a monthly fee, it would degrade the content that the sites have. Facebook isn't useful if they only retain 10% of their user-base because they're charging $10/mo. So, some websites must try alternative ways of monieization since charging users isn't an option.

Finally, the web often forgoes charging for stuff because they get big paydays for it. StumbleUpon got $75M. Reddit commanded at least a few million. Digg is looking for hundreds of millions while having no plan for profitability. Facebook is looking for tens of billions with no plan to make money! Jaiku was bought for millions. YouTube for $1.5B. I don't need to go on. People get rewarded for the behavior of creating a site with no expectation of profits. As long as that's working, they'll keep doing it.

Personally, I think 37signals has the right idea. But that won't stop people from making free sites with no profit plan which they hope to get bought since it happens enough. Yeah, I'm not going to create visions for myself of taking over the world, but others thrive on that. As long as there is some potential of getting bought for millions and a low marginal cost, people will create those free sites.

<comment><USER3> This entire argument is flawed. If your marginals costs are so low, and you can charge $49+ (whatever) for what is essentially air, that means more money in your pocket. In fact, I'd argue that its much better if your marginal costs continue to get lower as you add more users! Why do you think Microsoft is such a cash cow?

I've seen way to many web entrepreneurs think of their products' price in relation to costs and and I just don't get it. Try to keep fixed costs low, focus on how much revenue you can extract from your customers, and drive marginal costs as close to zero as you can.

<comment><USER4> I think this is a point too often forgotten by web entrepreneurs. A product has no intrinsic value - its value is in the eye of the user. This is also to say that _every single user_ has a different value for how much they are willing to pay for your product (which may in fact be $0). Simply because something costs nearly nothing to make, doesn't mean you should sell it for nearly nothing.

<comment><USER5> > Simply because something costs nearly nothing to make, doesn't mean you > should sell it for nearly nothing.

Software costs a lot to _make_ , what is low is the marginal cost: the cost to create one extra copy. The reason costs tend to zero is: if the marginal cost is zero, it's very easy to get into a price war. Maybe _you_ won't sell it for $49, but your competitor might be willing to sell it for $29.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think a large part of it was that back in the .com craze it was:

a) Extraordinarily hard to actually charge money. The user experience sucked and people were being told that these strange new cyberpredators could drain their bank accounts on a whim if they ever even exposed their credit card digits near a monitor.

b) The main product offered was textual content, which has _always_ been an extraordinarily hit-driven business in which the misses do not monetize in any sort of scaleable fashion.

c) There was a whole lot of stupid money, and if you've got stupid money burning a hole in your pocket, then who needs to charge customers when that is just going to depress the metrics that get you more stupid money?

d) There's also a problem that the web is _relentlessly_ youth-focused. People who came of age in that brief no-money twilight expect everything to be free. People who have not hit that age yet have some transactional difficulties in paying money. (Though they clearly pay money for things that people assume are unmonetizable -- I know more than a few people who spend no money on "music" but several hundred a year on iPods.)

It surprises people every time I mention it, but there is an entire world of users out there who are perfectly on board with the notion of paying money for value. They have money, they have payment instruments which are easy to use online, they have problems which they currently treat with expensive and ineffective non-digital solutions. As an industry we need to focus on these folks in addition to the 21 year old unemployed WoW player who seems to attract about 85% of our efforts. [And though I mock overfocus on that market segment, you certainly see, e.g., Blizzard and Apple making a killing out of that guy.]

<comment><USER7> As an example of the markets you are talking about, imagine 3 people aged 25-35, starting a new business. I am that market, and I have made at least a dozen purchases. Each time it was like this:

      * hit some roadblock on the way to accomplish X
      * find 3-6 solutions, pick the one most valued/recommended/easiest/etc
      * slap down the debit card
      * never think about that roadblock again

My lower bound is probably 5:1. If you can save me five hours of work per year for the price of one hour's income, I'll take it. A good example is DNS hosting, or a SkypeIn number.

If everyone's out digging for gold, start selling shovels.

</comment></comment><comment> ryan-allen Brilliant. I love the idea of bootstrapping start ups, but I love it more when the start up has some kind of business model behind it. The real achievement is not only to get 'eyeballs' but paying customers. After all, once you're keeping yourself afloat, you can continue to do what you do.

There was an article titled 'Free is Killing Us - Blame the VCs':

[http://www.businessinsider.com/2008/4/-free-is-killing-us- bl...](http://www.businessinsider.com/2008/4/-free-is-killing-us-blame-the- vcs)

This might sound cruel and heartless, but I hope the financial crisis has the VC-funded toy-companies fail and the legitimate small businesses prosper sooner than later.

</comment><comment><USER8> >>> It seems that the web has been so thoroughly infected by the memes of "the future is free", "we'll all live from ads", "VC money will get us there", and "acquisition is nirvana" that it has almost lost its faith in the simpler ways. <<<

This is funny. I remember it to be just the opposite - web was created with the idea of free exchange of information, at first mostly between scientists and universities. Later, commercial entities came and tried various ways to make money from the web. A few succeeded, a lot more failed. This guy just reversed it.

</comment><comment><USER9> I wish there were more prominent examples (like 37signals) of small software companies that subscribe to this model. The VC funding, ad driven model has many, many examples and I think we can all benefit from a more diverse landscape of perspectives. I'd definitely be interested in hearing other examples people know about.

<comment><USER6> There are literally tens of thousands of small software companies that never stopped charging. Downloadable software got really, really viable with the Internet if you execute well. A lot of them aren't necessarily prominent because they've got their own little slice marked off and don't want to clue people in that there is money there.

Some examples off the top of my head:

SourceGear (source control) HelpSpot (help desk software) FogCreek (a few products, mostly dev-oriented) Antair (Blackberry stuff)

I don't have revenue numbers for them and wouldn't tell you if I did, but they all have 6+ employees, which means they are all almost certainly $1 million+ in yearly sales. (A few are substantially more.)

As Eric Sink said once: you don't really have to make a lot of money for the principals of a 3 or 5 man software shop to do VERY well for themselves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Charging for stuff is the "mom 'n' pop" way of doing things; if you want to get big, that's going to be extraordinary hard. Youtube, Digg, Facebook, Myspace, etc, none of those would be as big as they are today if they charged users.

However becoming big is hard, so you're left with a big decision — a hard, if not impossible road to become massive while still being profitable and not charging users, or target only the (smaller) paying audience, but remain profitable from near enough day one. Or you could of course meet in the middle with a freemium model.

I don't see the problem with the free model, you just can't charge for everything.

<comment><USER11> Give us a break with this "mom & pop" stuff. You want to compare Google to 37signals? Fine, I'll compare Apple to Twitter.

<comment><USER10> I've been thinking about your comment for 20 minutes now, and still don't understand what you mean — what do google/apple, and 37signals/twitter, have in common (business model wise)?

And with the "mom & pop" stuff, I was just referring to it being a pretty low risk model — you make something, end-users pay you, you use that income to pay your costs (compared to building something, hopefully having tons of users, and then wondering how the hell you're going to support it, never mind profit from it.)

I'm not saying "mom&pop"/paid model is bad, quite the opposite, it's my favorite…but I can see why a lot of sites decide not to use it

<comment><USER11> I don't understand your argument, because you aren't being coherent. What's low-risk? Selling time tracking software and clearing $20k a year? Or selling bookkeeping software and being Intuit? Where's the zillions of users? Being Aviary and doing free online vector editing? Or selling Photoshop and being Adobe?

The echo chamber thing is crazy here. We have a hard time finding success stories in pay services. That's because all we're considering is the ASP model. The ASP model is relatively new and heavily influenced by the San Francisco Startup model, where VC funded companies trade revenue for uptake because they will either get acquired or BK.

<comment><USER12> It's a pretty simple argument...

      A. Charge users from day 1. Your profit is easy to figure out, you should be profitable early.
      B. Build a userbase, *then* figure out how to extract money from it.

A is a low risk lower potential reward, B is a high risk higher potential reward.

<comment><USER11> To get 'A' right, you have to line up product and price. That's not low-risk. Your argument that B is higher risk/reward than A is nonsensical; it depends entirely on the particulars you choose.

<comment><USER12> Not really.

If A is failing, you can tell as you're going, and adjust. It obviously still requires skill, but it's just the time tested "make something, charge for it" model. As soon as you get users, by definition, you get revenue, and if you're competent, that means profit.

With B, you are deferring all or some of your income to some later stage. If it's not going to work out, you might not know that until the last minute when you're supporting a large userbase. You might never find a business model. _OR_ you might hit gold.

Both models are just as valid as each other, it just depends on which you prefer, and which one is more appropriate to a particular set of circumstances.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> A more useful discussion would be, what kind of apps should be paid? and what kind should be free? In my opinion paid apps/services have to meet a few criteria:

1\. substantially better than free alternatives 2\. deliver significant value at limited (user) scale 3\. not built on open source technologies w/restrictive licensing

For broad consumer-services, those 3 criteria actually limit the universe of services significantly.

</comment><comment><USER12> On an earlier post they describe how they came up with the pricing for their products - "Just think to yourself what you'd pay". Well, for myself, and a fair number of others, that figure is 0. So you have to think of other ways to make money.

Clearly no one would ever pay to be able to use google to search, yet we all value it enormously.

<comment><USER11> I'm sorry, what? If the options were "Google for $5 a year vs. Altavista", you think Google wouldn't have still have gone public?

Clearly, Google had better ways to make money; when you have something as excellent as Google, you have options. But don't take as your thesis that "even Google had to go free".

<comment><USER12> $5 a year is a ridiculously low income when compared to advertising. I seriously doubt google would still be around if they had tried to charge users to search the web. Altavista wasn't _that_ bad.

I'm simply pointing out that some services don't really work too well as a 'paid' model.

Also you've got the fact that some of your competition is going to be free. If you want to now charge users directly, you have to be at least 10 times as good, or be offering something seriously different to make them pay.

I'm still firmly in the freemium camp.

1\. Make something, get people to use it

2\. Grow, make profit from advertising (Stay lean, keep costs low)

3\. Once you're big enough, some subset of your users will be willing to pay for extra features

If you instead go for paid only, I don't think you can reach anywhere near the same audience.

<comment><USER11> Google has over 128MM users. Assume Google just gets the "really amazing product" conversation rate of 10%; at $5/year, that's a recurring revenue stream of $64MM/yr, at the lowest conceivable price point you can come up with for a good product.

"But $64MM is fuck-all compared to the billions it makes now!" Of course that's true, but that's besides the point. Almost any product company number is going to suck compared to what Google can post now. I'm not arguing that Google should be a free service. I'm saying they had options, and it wasn't necessarily between "free or die".

<comment><USER12> The figure of 10% conversion rate seems pretty high to me. I'd expect something more like 0.1%. People expect things like 'search the web' to be free.

<comment><USER11> If you're telling me you wouldn't pay 40 cents a month to use Google instead of Altavista, I'm telling you that I do not believe you.

<comment><USER12> I _might_ pay that if the small problem of micropayments (IMHO managed by your ISP) was solved. But it's not.

<comment><USER11> You're being a message board geek, axod. If you have to pick your poison, and it's signing up for recurring credit card charge versus using Altavista instead of Google, I already know what your answer is. Google didn't have to be free; they chose to be, because given a spectacular product, they had spectacular freedom to find the best way to make money.

<comment><USER12> Hmm do you think they would have gotten so big if they hadn't been free from the start? How would they have got the message out that they are better? Free trials? :/

Things that are "paid only" don't seem to scale quite as well.

Of course if/when a decent micropayment model emerges from ISPs, then it'll likely change everything.

<comment><USER11> No offense, but are you even reading me before you respond, axod? Do you see why I might ask that?

<comment><USER12> >> "Google didn't have to be free; they chose to be"

I read that, and thought "That makes absolutely no sense, because they would have failed if they had not been free".

Please explain how Google would have grown to its current size, had it charged users to use its search.

Google chose to be free, because the alternative would have been certain failure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I find the emphasis on marginal cost somewhat interesting because biz that don't recover average costs lose money.

</comment><comment><USER15> The web didn't invent advertising as a business model. It has worked and been around for a very long time.

<comment><USER16> I contend that advertising is basically overpriced in general, and was a house of cards waiting to fall.

Once the internet allowed an accurate assessment of how well particular ads worked, its vulnerabilities were laid bare.

Note that I'm not suggesting it doesn't work at all, just that it has been overvalued.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> what are you successful consumer subscription products?

</comment><comment><USER18> To succeed on web, be _opportunistic_ and sell of _quickly_.

</comment><comment><USER19> There is no wonder that the rules of the game were dictated by big players, like facebook or google. They taught ordinary internet users (the mass) that good quality (usable and well-designed) services could be free.

So, if you trying to establish another service for masses it must be free, and meet the de-facto standards of quality. Tweeter is a good example.

It is possible to charge users for some very special and unique service, but only for a limited time, because free (no-cost) alternatives will emerge sooner or later.

It seems to me, that if someone wants to build such service he should think about some market-place or ecosystem (like in adult segment), not for public services for masses, because this market is already divided by rich and strong players.</comment>


Reinforcement learning with unsupervised auxiliary tasks - <AUTHOR> https://deepmind.com/blog/reinforcement-learning-unsupervised-auxiliary-tasks/ <comment><USER2> > On Atari the agent now achieves on average 9x human performance

Very impressive. I guess the human limit has to do with humans being limited about number of things to track at once? I wonder if they can apply this to optimizing the traffic lights in a big city.

</comment><comment><USER3> Can't wait to see how it will handle Starcraft 2.</comment>


Show HN: Concentration – How I avoid spending too much time on Hacker News - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/timothycrosley/concentration#concentration <comment><USER2> There's also the option of turning on |noprocrast| in my HN profile. Sometimes I've used it and found it helpful.</comment>


Stanford engineers invent 50-cent microscope - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/abs/1403.1211

<comment><AUTHOR> It's an amazing project. The structure of the microscope is made of folded paper, meaning not only is it cheap, but it can be flatpacked and shipped cheaply. The lens is also a cool innovation. They use the glass balls that rattle around inside aerosol cans as a 140x magnification element. The optical quality would normally be horrible, but since such a small image is focused through it, the quality ends up being decent. The balls are mounted in electrical component manufacturing tape, meaning you can just pop the tape in, with no alignment or scratching issues.

Here's a wired article on the project: [http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2014/03/paper- microscope/](http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2014/03/paper-microscope/)

Here's an old TED talk: [http://www.ted.com/talks/manu_prakash_a_50_cent_microscope_t...](http://www.ted.com/talks/manu_prakash_a_50_cent_microscope_that_folds_like_origami?embed=true)

I've worked with them to pilot the educational use of these microscopes in local schools. Feel free to ask me any questions about the project or the design.</comment>


Graphics That Seem Clear Can Easily Be Misread - <AUTHOR> https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/graphics-that-seem-clear-can-easily-be-misread/ <comment><USER2> This effect has a name, The Simpsons paradox [0]

The graph in [1] explains it much better than any words could.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox) [1] [https://www.analyticsindiamag.com/understanding-simpsons- par...](https://www.analyticsindiamag.com/understanding-simpsons-paradox-and- its-impact-on-data-analytics/amp/)

<comment><USER3> Seems to be the statistics equivalent of gerrymandering.

<comment><USER4> Gerrymandering is an intentional act to achieve specific outcome.

Simpson's Paradox can strike even the most committed truth-seeker trying to understand and interpret the available data.

Edit to add: Simpson's Paradox could conceivably thwart a gerrymanderer if they have an erroneous model relating demographics to voting patterns.

<comment><USER3> This is all true.. However what I meant is that the way gerrymandering can indicate a winner that is not the majority choice, is quasi analogous to how the Simpson's paradox exemplifies a weighed average that disagrees with the subtotals of the data.

<comment><USER4> Oh, I see—you mean from the perspective of the voter/pundit/analyst/politician trying to understand what an election means and their mandate for action. Sort of like the debate over electoral vs popular vote.

I hadn't thought about it that way or seen the word gerrymandering used in that way, but it makes sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The title alone made me think of a different phenomenon that occurs to me.

Its to do with websites. Lets say there a website where one downloads some free software from, for example. If there's a really big bright clear download link, Ive been taught to not click on it, as its probably going to an ad or some scam site. Ive learned to always ignore it and search for the tiny little text hyperlink that actually leads to the real download file.

Ive noticed this trained behavior of mine now applies to all websites, even when the big link is actually the real one. I will often miss it, and waste time search for the 'real' one as my brain now automatically filters the big clear ones out.

<comment> pure-awesome The name for this effect is Banner Blindness:

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you take a statistics class, one of the very first things that are taught is to be careful not to infer a wrong cause-effect relation when presented with a "correlation".

A typical example is "given any city, there is a strong correlation between number of churches and number of crimes commited." This is pretty much true everywhere in the world but that does not imply one is causing the other. This correlation can simply be the natural outcome of more populous cities having both in higher numbers compared to less populated ones.

<comment><USER7> I have found it is pretty common for people to use simplified justifications, such as cause and effect, to support their conclusions on a subject. If the relationship between the cause and the effect is not clearly stated it is very common that they may not be properly reversed during backwards analysis from an end point to a start point. In that case the qualifying behavior is a form of cognitive conservatism demonstrated through a selective bias.

While that form of thinking may sound incredibly stupid, example: how could a person confuse a cause for its effect, it is exceedingly common. I have seen incredibly smart people make this mistake. The mistake is the non-cognitive behavior at play that unduly influences what is otherwise a very logical and straight forward conclusion. Objectivity is a practicable personality trait not aligned to logic or math skills.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The article is very narrow and focuses on a single example.

What's more, the real take-away is that you can put side by side two graphs. It doesn't mean there is any causal relationships between them. The example only seems convincing because both graphs are health-related. If they were Pac-man highscore vs milk production, it would show how hollow the article is.

<comment><USER9> > The article is very narrow and focuses on a single example.

Alberto Cairo is quite the polarizing figure in the data visualization world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> A very-related classic reading on this is a short-and-sweet

"How to Lie With Statistics"

[https://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell- Huff/dp/03...](https://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell- Huff/dp/0393310728)

</comment><comment><USER11> the page appears blank to me

<comment><USER12> At first I thought you were making a joke, but it's blank for me, too, even with adblockers/https redirect disabled.

<comment><USER11> Sorry, I wasn't joking (:

The page now loads correctly

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Alberto Cairo, who produced the charts in the paper is about to publish the book "How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information". His other books are excellent, I bet this one will also be.

</comment><comment><USER14> In other words, some people don't know how to read graphs.

<comment><USER15> No, that's not at all what this is about. A better one-sentence summary would be "Accurate data can be very misleading if, for example, it's viewed at the wrong level of granularity."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> XKCD on "Curve-Fitting Methods and the Messages They Send": [https://www.xkcd.com/2048/](https://www.xkcd.com/2048/)</comment>