German court issues nationwide ban on Uber driving services - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/03/18/uber-germany-ban-idUSFWN0WJ04W20150318 <comment><USER2> Here in the Netherlands Uber drivers are being driven off the road, threatened and they have their cars marked ([http://www.ad.nl/ad/nl/1038/Rotterdam/article/detail/3911575...](http://www.ad.nl/ad/nl/1038/Rotterdam/article/detail/3911575/2015/03/17/Weer- Rotterdamse-Uber-snorder-klemgereden-en-bestickerd.dhtml))

Its crazy. I for one can't wait until the taxi mob is competed off the market. Taxi drivers here are more often than not complete a-holes that try to scam you every chance they get. I for one welcome uber with open arms. I'm sorry for the nice taxi drivers but your business is deeply ill.

<comment><USER3> The problem here is unfair competition: in The Netherlands taxis are bound by the 'Wet Personenvervoer' (Law persons transport). Uber can encourage drivers to ignore the law, because it has deep pockets to cover for legal costs of drivers.

I agree that the taxi market is ripe for disruption, but this is only fair if other taxis are not bound by that law as well.

Another question is if we want complete deregulation. E.g. I would personally want to be sure that the driver has proper insurance, etc.

<comment><USER4> Every car should have a proper insurance, right? At least here it's the law.

<comment><USER5> Every car has to have third party insurance. Basically covering any damage you do to someone not in your car. Insurance covering damages to passengers in your car is a different insurance, and insurance covering passengers in your car because they are paying you to drive then somewhere is different a insurance again.

<comment><USER4> Over here (Finland), the mandatory insurance covers passengers (and driver) also in your car, not just third parties. Different countries obviously have different practices. I can see that this is a problem in countries where the vehicle's insurance does not cover its own passengers.

(In fact, the mandatory car insurance here even covers personal damages of third parties at fault if they are pedestrians or are riding a bicycle; i.e. if a bicyclist runs a red light and collides with a car and hurts himself, the care cost is carried by the car's insurance. If the bicyclist hits a tree, the tree has no insurance... this applies to personal injuries only, not the broken bike. Any damage to the car is covered by the bicyclist's insurance if any.)

<comment><USER6> You sure there is no difference between passenger and paying passenger?

<comment><USER4> Not for getting insurance compensation as passenger. For premiums paid by the driver there well could be a difference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Disclaimer: I'm an uber Uber user.

It seem that the German government ensures that everyone gets the same version of the laws. I don't see how that's wrong.

There are generally regulations (and not a few) wrt taxi. Drivers need to pass an exam, get licenses, pay a lot on various taxes, insurance, etc. Most of all, however, there's a limited number of taxi medallions.

Perhaps not all these do make sense, but that's not an excuse not to obey them.

So perhaps a government authority that ensures that it's own policies are respected is not unexpected.

So yes, Uber contributes a lot to the quality of the transportation. That's why I'm using it. But I don't see how that has anything to do with the fact that it's one the verge of the law (good or bad) or even against the law in some cases - which is what the German authorities decided.

I don't think this has anything to do with their self-driving cars or the German government taking care of the unemployment problem. In fact, it's probably helping employment.

Now how did this play out in the US?

<comment><USER8> How is it(removing uber services) helping employment,given we know that uber increases demand for taxi services ?

<comment><USER9> How does it increase demand for taxi services?

If your answer is by making it dramatically cheaper by externalising the costs of running a sustainable taxi business... then how does having a greater number of people employed on wages that they cannot afford to live on benefit anyone?

<comment><USER4> It makes it easier to order a taxi. For instance in the case of Germany, I've sometimes walked a distance simply because I'm not sure if my German is good enough to handle the phone call to the taxi dispatcher, or just because I don't know the number of the taxi company/dispatcher/order central. With an app, I know how to use it.

<comment><USER10> That is very very lame excuse. Because it suggests that you are unable to use Google and your preferred App store.

There is an App for it, called "Taxi Deutschland" (how obvious is THAT?) [https://itunes.apple.com/de/app/taxi- deutschland/id454467694...](https://itunes.apple.com/de/app/taxi- deutschland/id454467694?mt=8)

There is even a German wide number, which works in any major city: 22456 from you cell including text service [http://www.22456taxi.de/](http://www.22456taxi.de/)

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the Taxi Deutschland hint. Unfortunately that app freezes on startup in my Android phone (I just get the screen with a selection of tutorial or starting app, but it locks up there.)

The app seems to be in German only, and it is of course Germany-specific. I can deal with that pretty OK but not all potential users can. Uber uses the same app for any country.

(Downloading an app local to a country while roaming there may be a rather expensive idea, BTW.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think that Uber has done tremendous amounts to modernizing the taxi industry, and maybe even for breaking down some taxi monopolies. These are both good things.

I can't comment on UberX, but regular Uber should absolutely be subject to regular taxi/safety/liability clauses. Which isn't to say that those clauses couldn't be modernized, but IS to say that it should also not be a surprise when a company gets a nationwide ban for violating them. Regular Uber is exactly a taxi system, with a state-of-the-art automated dispatch and billing system.

<comment><USER12> I don't see how it has done so at all, at least in Germany. Precisely because the industry is so highly regulated I don't see how Uber offers anything that I don't get with a regular taxi.

<comment><USER13> You get the thrill of drivers who are uninsured and poorly paid (once you factor in the capital costs of the vehicle and the cost of vehicle maintenance). Welcome to the libertarian paradise.

<comment><USER14> Uber provides, faster, safer, cheaper, more comfortable service than any government run taxi service. Without a driver rating system, I remember getting frequently being asked to leave the taxi when requesting short distance rides. Taxis would often drive at dangerous speeds to acquire more customers. Taxis were typically driven by foreigners which could not find other jobs. If Uber is as low paying as you describe, why is it that we get more intelligent drivers? Surely they are intelligent enough to quit if the pay is too low.

Uber users like myself vote on each ride with their credit cards to keep these services going. And with that, it means that the day Uber does something poorly, we have the freedom to immediately switch to a competitor.

<comment><USER15> > Without a driver rating system, I remember getting frequently being asked to > leave the taxi when requesting short distance rides.

In Germany? Not saying that it doesn't happen, but it is illegal. (Which often is an important argument to why Taxis are protected against competition, since they are forced to provide services that are not always profitable)

<comment><USER16> What's illegal and what's enforceable are two different things, particularly in Eastern Europe.

Uber just launched in Romania and it's having a hard time getting off the ground. I asked a taxi driver why he wouldn't join. He said he'd be scared for his safety from other taxi drivers.

Anecdotally, getting a cab from a major hub (airport, train or bus station) in Bucharest, without calling dispatch, entails a fixed price and the meter turned off. Illegal? Surely.

The main advantage of western countries, culminating in the U.S., is that laws are enforced regularly and predictably, most of the time.

Germany is doing just that. They're old laws, sure, but they must be enforced until they get a change to revise them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> No oversight. No privacy. No standards.

Can't say I blame them.

<comment><USER18> Because the oversight, privacy, and standards are working _ever_ so well..

[1] [http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/taxi- driver-20...](http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/taxi- driver-20-years-raping-passenger-article-1.1789225)

[2] [http://coconutgrovegrapevine.blogspot.com/2014/06/the- county...](http://coconutgrovegrapevine.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-county-taxi- cabs-are-unsafe-and.html)

and so on..

Call me when your "overseen, private, and up to standards" taxi has an immediate rating system that will cause the driver to effectively lose their job if they continue to provide crappy drives.

I do blame them. Bureaucracy sucks, and I can see why people would want to subvert it. Government's just mad they're not getting their vig. That's all this boils down to.

(Fixed link 1)

<comment><USER19> The problem is that Uber wants all the gain without really taking on any of the responsibility, costs, or consequences beyond the bare minimum for PR and marketing purposes. In essence, they set up a system to parasitize an industry through corrupt practices.

I am all about competition, but they don't want to compete, they want to undercut the market to destroy it and corner it so that they can then implement regulatory capture at a later point.

<comment><USER18> I disagree with you that it's "corrupt". Why should someone who wants to drive someone other places need to jump through more hoops than the ones Uber has in front of them? (Background check, constant ratings?)

And if you take issue with Uber for other reasons (shady recruiting practices come to mind), there are other rideshare services that do not have those problems.

<comment><USER19> I'm talking, exactly, about the "other reasons", of which their shading recruiting practices are only one aspect. Just off the top of my head comes to mind that Uber was caught calling Lyft cars and then ditching or cancelling them or something like that. Another aspect is how they are manipulating the public to fight their self-interested battles with government for private- profit.

Like I said, I have nothing against competition, which is really one of the concerns people should have, because Uber knows that they are currently in a land-grab type of scenario to corner the market, especially right before autonomous vehicles come on line. Due to the nature efficiency characteristics of the future transpiration system and gargantuan barriers to entry, Uber is attempting to shut out the competition in order to put a stranglehold on transpiration. They'd eventually get broken up, but in the mean time, they can execute regulatory capture, corrupt our government in the good ol' fashioned way through lobbyists, and make billions if not trillions in the mean time.

Sure, the taxi system is corrupt down to the bone in many, if not all cities. But what Uber is doing, is riding proclaiming they are the handsome night in shining armor on a brilliantly white horse, when in fact, under the shiny armor is a wolf dressed in sheep's clothing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> More detail here: [http://fortune.com/2015/03/18/german-court-ban- uber/](http://fortune.com/2015/03/18/german-court-ban-uber/)

<comment><USER21> The main reason (IIUC) for the verdict was (a little bit simplified):

Most of the drivers for uberPOP break german laws because they have no proper license and insurance to be commercial drivers.

The question was if Uber breaks the law ("Personenbeförderungsgesetz") by simply acting as a broker for those drivers - And the judge said yes, they do.

<comment><USER22> The thing isn't just that Uber may break the law, but that it encourages others to break the law. Call it anti-libertarian, but in Germany a company shares responsibility for the behaviour it is creating. They would have to put controls in place (within reason) to ensure that Uber drivers don't break the law -- but of course they don't because they're well-aware that that would reduce the number of drivers and drive up costs and prices.

Basically, Uber is breaking the law when it comes to passenger transportation the same way Mega was breaking the law when it came to file sharing. It created an environment that promoted illegal activities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The permit to commercially transport people costs 421 Euro:

[https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=y&prev...](https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=de&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fde.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FF%25C3%25BChrerschein_zur_Fahrgastbef%25C3%25B6rderung&edit- text=)

Far too much for some casual Uber drivers.

<comment><USER15> That is necessary, but not enough. To operate a taxi you also need a taxi license (which sometimes just is a 50 € fee, sometimes has to be taken over from an existing taxi company, all depends on the city) + of course insurance etc.

You can use it to operate a "rental car with driver", like UberBlack does, but that has other limitations to be not too taxi-like (most notably you can't take new passengers or their orders while on the road, you have to return to your home location after every trip)

<comment><USER22> "Funkmietwagen" (rental cars with a driver you that picks you up and drops you off and can be hired instantly by phone) are actually very common in most parts of Germany I've been to. Many businesses offer you to call one instead if you ask them to call you a taxi (though I think they have to explicitly tell you it's a Funkmietwagen rather than a taxi).

That said, Uber isn't really solving a problem here. There are already call-a- taxi apps (though they don't seem to have been very successful) and the only value add Uber provides is that it encourages an entirely illegal business model (i.e. transporting persons without the required qualifications, no insurance coverage, no guarantees and no reliable pricing).

Sure, UberBlack may be a nice idea if an ordinary taxi is beneath you or socially inappropriate, but other than that Uber simply doesn't offer anything new.

Note that Germany and the EU in general have very strong customer protection laws. The health, safety and protection of the passenger is an actual concern in the local market. Uber (and similar "disruptive" services) gain most of their appeal from entirely disregarding that.

It doesn't matter how appealing your business idea is if it doesn't work within the restrictions of consumer protection.

<comment><USER15> Yes, I should have added that this is fairly common already. I just wanted to add it since there was a bit of confusion about which Uber products are allowed/forbidden and why.

And this is the legal framework for Uber to provide new services. If a good app + the driver ratings people seem to like + ... really provides a market advantage, then they should go nuts there ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I just wanted to see if I could search for someone to drive me to some specific grocery store for a specific day, to see how much that would cost me if I would plan in advance.

It's a 15min ride, and the bus service is poor for that particular route. I need to carry a lot of food, and on welfare aldi is a must for me, so I would gladly pay for gas money plus some more instead of taking the bus, especially since I carry frozen food.

I started entering my info. Closed it immediately when it asked for my credit card before I could search for anything.

I'm sorry, but if uber is getting money from rides, I really think it should at least play nice with governments and laws, especially when it has so much value on the stock market. It's a matter of respect, being disruptive doesn't excuse everything.

Building and regulating civilization has a cost, if you want to improve people's lives, don't be so greedy about it. It doesn't require so much money to help people find each other for car rides.

I totally understand that cab licenses are against the libertarian's dream, but when I sense unjustified money behind it, it sets me off immediately. The internet doesn't feel very free, it's just another new land for money makers, and I'm often okay with it, but here, I'm not.

<comment><USER25> > _Building and regulating civilization has a cost, if you want to improve > people 's lives, don't be so greedy about it._

This. I wish many a company took it to heart. But then again, a lot of companies (and startups) don't care about improving people's lives; some unfortunately use the talk about "improving lives" as a marketing angle.

As for Uber, it's pretty clear now that they don't care about improving anything else than the contents of their wallets - I'm surprised that no one banned them yet for literally being assholes.

<comment><USER24> I'm sure they are being pissed on by governments because they're a net loss to society. People just like to use shiny smartphone to order a taxi.

I hate that new libertarian trend of pretending to solve a socio economical problem, while it requires a smartphone and a fast dataplan. The army developped those techs and now it's being used for profits and profits. Oddly there is so little money involved in techs like bittorrent or openstreetmap, etc.

Investors should really think about having a legitimate improvement for society. I mean if I was an investor, I would be so much proud of creating free services. That's the only way honest improvements has ever worked, when it was not so much profit driven.

<comment><USER25> > _I mean if I was an investor, I would be so much proud of creating free > services. That 's the only way honest improvements has ever worked, when it > was not so much profit driven._

And that's why you and I are not investors, but just poor developers who like making video games. There aren't many investors out there who care about actual improvement for society; I might hesitantly point to few names, but that's it. For the rest it's just another level of money-making-money game.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I haven't bothered to look at Russians' responses to Uber, but the whole idea must seem strange to any Russian. It has been normal in Russia since the fifties to flag down cars (i.e. everyday, private traffic) on the street and pay a driver for a lift. Usually the fare is cheaper than a taxi (I don't remember ever calling a taxi in Russia). The drawback is that not all drivers are headed in your direction, but then again, it's only a matter of time till someone who is comes along (this problem is further ameliorated by drivers who moonlight as gypsy cabs and will take you wherever for the right price).

My point is that the service that Uber provides is viable primarily due to largely baseless social conventions (i.e. middle-class paranoia). If the fare is all that matters to a given consumer, then any car/driver will do. If security matters more than fare, then taxis will do. Uber is operating in a gray area between these extremes and as soon as A) we cease fearing our neighbors (I believe that the decline of suburbia and renewed urbanization will eventually take us there) and B) taxi services will begin offering better technical solutions, Uber's service will become largely obsolete.

</comment><comment><USER27> Interesting point: Uber is (rightfully) continuing their service, because the ban only goes into effect when the plaintiff pledges a security, to compensate Uber's loss, in case this ban is reversed.

I have no idea if the plaintiff wants to take that risk.

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm wondering whether the ban also applies to uber taxi, they had a big marketing campaign just last week in Berlin where you were able to take a ride for free for a couple of days [1]

[1] [http://blog.uber.com/freeubertaxi_berlin_en](http://blog.uber.com/freeubertaxi_berlin_en)

<comment><USER29> Just uberpop it looks like. More details in this article: [http://www.ft.com/intl/fastft/293403/uber-ride-sharing- banne...](http://www.ft.com/intl/fastft/293403/uber-ride-sharing-banned-again- germany)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Just Uber specifically? So you can just download a different app and order rides again? Why?

<comment><USER31> Other, competing services to uber, aren't functioning (or at least not as pervasively) in germany.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I don't understand why Uber (not UberPOP, which in theory operates with licensed drivers) has been also banned.

Can anyone explain why?

</comment><comment><USER33> The caveat with disruption: Sometimes an industry which is very tightly regulated, or which has a lot of middlemen, has these obstructions for a reason.

A taxi service holds enormous opportunities for kidnappers or rapists. I'm a man, which basically disappears the rape risk, but there are many Central and South American countries where getting in a taxi could be quite risky for me, and could involve _me_ disappearing. even some parts of Mexico.

Recent related stories make Uber look really bad:

[http://boingboing.net/2014/11/19/uber-can-track-your-one- nig...](http://boingboing.net/2014/11/19/uber-can-track-your-one-night.html) [http://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/uber-executive-suggests- dig...](http://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/uber-executive-suggests-digging-up- dirt-on-journalists) [http://www.buzzfeed.com/anitabadejo/uber-but-for-real- estate...](http://www.buzzfeed.com/anitabadejo/uber-but-for-real-estate- disputes#.yiVDk2w15)

Also, just to state the obvious, both Uber drivers and regular taxi drivers have logical incentives for driving unsafely.

In this context, I have no problem with governments wanting to regulate Uber literally to death, at least outside of California. I understand cabs are completely unacceptable garbage in California, and the HN audience definitely skews Californian, but cabs are gold in Chicago, London, and New York, and probably quite a few other places too. Maybe Germany is one of those places.

Also, although I'm sympathetic to libertarians, disruption doesn't always fix things. The Internet crippled the music industry, but introduced stacks of new middlemen in the process. Ask Zoe Keating how that "democratization" turned out.

[http://zoekeating.tumblr.com/post/108898194009/what- should-i...](http://zoekeating.tumblr.com/post/108898194009/what-should-i-do- about-youtube)

In music, the corporate middlemen are this pernicious infestation, which just reappears after you thought you'd wiped it out. Artists have to sacrifice a lot to develop their art to a serious level, and a lot of music performance takes place in situations where people are celebrating (i.e., drunk or high, late at night). So somebody has to provide security, as well as business sense. There's a lot of opportunities for middlemen to get their middle on, and disrupting a market, under those conditions, just means shuffling in a new deck of middlemen. It doesn't change the game.

In the same way, my guess is that disrupting a market which is inherently full of criminality risks - incentives to drive unsafely, opportunities for kidnapping and rape - means you just shuffle the deck of regulations.

Yet another criminality risk: taxi services of any kind, whether Uber or not, hold terrific opportunities for armed robbery. In some cities, being a cab driver is very dangerous, for this reason.

So, if Uber kills the entire taxi industry, then governments will have to scrap their taxi regulations and re-build a similarly gigantic regulatory infrastructure around Uber instead.

I think Uber is a really good lesson for entrepreneurs in how a market can look awesome but actually suck.

</comment><comment><USER34> Stuff like this is going to be more and more common as govt doesn't want 25+ % of their population to be unemployed due to nerds churning out code.

<comment><USER4> This sounds a bit of a Luddite approach to me. Yeah, all those spinning Jennies make weavers unemployed.

<comment><USER35> Right, but if you blame the proximal cause of unemployment then you don't have to address the underlying social issues or ask hard questions about the legitimacy of a system that snatches defeat from the jaws of victory.

<comment><USER4> Good point. Spinning Jennies and Uber taxis work as scapegoats; often the mental change is the hardest.

<comment><USER36> What mental change? To accept boring non-innovations as something fundamental?

<comment><USER35> No, to accept the possibility that we will need to institute economic policy that decreases the supply of unskilled labor without punishing the unskilled laborers for working below capacity.

We've done it before and we'll do it again, but in a society that (correctly) sees hard work as a personal virtue and is controlled by people with a vested interest in conflating the personal virtue with the societal virtue of promoting hard work, there's a fight every time the policies need tweaking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> My, god people. The number of those supporting the useless regulation is so great it astounds me. If you want to regulate something as simple as driving people around, claiming drivers need licences, permissions and passing some sort of exams certifying they are indeed capable of driving cars with passengers, why don't we regulate something much more critical, like software development?

Software runs the world these days, you can't just let people with no licences write shitty code. Politicians and bureaucrats should join their forces and decide whether each individual programmer is of a certain level. If not, he is banned from writing code and should be fined or imprisoned if he ever tries to do that.

Or let's regulate musicians. You know, it would do good. I'm so tired of all these useless crappy bands that write all the same music, thinking they are different. Even though I don't listen to them I also think others shouldn't be listening to them too, as this influences people's tastes in a direction I cannot approve of. So yes, licences for musicians!

<comment><USER38> I'm so sick of government interfering in business. Why the hell are there so many pointless regulations governing electrical appliances? If I want to build a toaster with undersized wiring, no safety earth, no thermal cut-offs and no flame retardant plastics, why should the government be able to stop me? Why should I be burdened with the cost of product liability insurance? I can just base my company in the Cayman Islands and dodge the inevitable lawsuit when my product kills someone.

Taxis are regulated for a reason. I want to know that when I get into a taxi, the vehicle is roadworthy. I want to know that the driver is competent and medically fit to drive. I want to know that he isn't a convicted rapist. I want to know that his insurance is still valid when carrying paying passengers. Uber provides none of those guarantees, but intelligent regulation does all of that without creating a significant barrier to entry.

<comment><USER37> Notice how you constantly say "I want". What if I, on the other hand, don't want to know those things and am simply concerned with the price, prepared to take a risk here? What right on earth do you have to tell other people what ratio of risk/reward is acceptable for them? Yet, this is exactly what regulation does: it says "this is in the public interest", yet "public" is very different in its preferences towards prices, comfort, risk and other factors.

If you want a safe taxi, by all means, use the government approved service. I for one couldn't care less, so I'm gonna go with a cheaper service. Everyone should have that choice.

<comment><USER39> Why should the people maimed by those cut-price cabs suffer from the poor risk assessment of the people using those cut price cabs?

<comment><USER37> Why would they suffer? If you are concerned with your safety and trust the government vetting process, you are free to use government-licenced taxi services exclusively.

<comment><USER27> You really don't get it, do you?

Road traffic is dangerous. Not only for people sitting inside those cars, but also very much so for everyone else.

The pedestrian your cheap taxi without working brakes just ran over didn't choose your taxi.

You did. And you're proudly saying that you have assessed the risk and... are willing to let other people take it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


VW to Reshuffle $56B Battery Push as Samsung Deal at Risk - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-27/vw-to-reshuffle-56-billion-battery-push-as-samsung-deal-at-risk <comment><USER2> > Tesla, beset by concerns over demand and its ability to make a profit, last > month accused its battery supplier, Panasonic Corp., of being the culprit > for tepid production rates of the affordable Model 3.

I'm confused. I thought the Gigafactory was supposed to be building batteries, as in building cells, not just building battery packs from third party cells.

<comment><USER3> The gigafactory is building the batteries and cells and all, it's just that the gigafactory != Tesla. Panasonic is their partner and is responsible for a significant chunk of the space and equipment for manufacturing cells.

[https://electrek.co/2016/07/29/tesla-gigafactory- panasonics-...](https://electrek.co/2016/07/29/tesla-gigafactory-panasonics- machine-battery-cell/)

<comment><USER4> So what is Tesla's contribution to this? They always make it seem like its their baby.

<comment><USER5> The chemistry of the battery. They just don't package them

<comment><USER6> Panasonic is the bottlers as Tesla is to corporate Coca Cola. Is Coca Cola any less real because someone else is churning out the soda?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is this putting the ID.3 at risk?

<comment><USER8> aww, you really expected VW to be serious about electric cars?

<comment><USER9> Yes. [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-12/vw-s- audi...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-12/vw-s-audi-porsche- margins-sag-in-costly-shift-to-electric-era)

The real news here is that the EV revolution is finally starting to really take off. The auto companies that are not already pushing hard on developing EV's are going to be left behind and go bankrupt. Of the incumbent auto makers, VW is the most committed.

<comment><USER10> I really don't buy it. In the US, the best-selling vehicles are SUVs and trucks, and it has only gotten more pronounced now that the US has become a net oil exporter and the spectre of $5/gallon gas that we approached 15 years ago is just a bad memory.

Ford alone sells more F150s in a single year than all the EVs all together.

<comment><USER11> You picked a good example with Ford that illustrates the parent's point, probably in a way not intended by the parent post. Soon Ford will no longer be an automobile manufacturer - they will only be building trucks and SUVs (aka fake trucks) with the lone exception of the Mustang.

Ref: [https://www.nbcnews.com/business/autos/ford-stop-making- all-...](https://www.nbcnews.com/business/autos/ford-stop-making-all- passenger-cars-except-mustang-n869256)

<comment><USER12> Aren't SUVs and truck protected from foreign competition by the chicken tax?

VW is also building more SUVs. They have like 4 models not counting Audi, Skoda and Seat.

<comment><USER13> I didn't know what the chicken tax was. Here's a write up on it: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/the- strange-...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/the-strange-case- of-fords-attempt-to-avoid-thechicken- tax/2018/07/06/643624fa-796a-11e8-8df3-007495a78738_story.html)

In short: the EU wanted to stop a flood of US chickens in the 60s so they imposed a tariffs. The US then retaliated by tariffing trucks, mainly from VW.

But what is a truck? Is a minivan a truck? I didn't know this but the Ford Transit is built in Spain and comes to the US with rear seats and also glass windows in the rear. At customs the seats are ripped out and the rear windows are plated over now making it a popular delivery truck, this voiding $250M in taxes.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The BufferApp Welcome Email - <AUTHOR> We at Auctionful.com joined BufferApp today. I was quite struck by how simple and personal the welcome email was.
<comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-----
Subject: Joel from Buffer - Amazing to have you on board!
Hi,
I'm guessing it's not every day that you sign up for a new service. That's why I want to make sure everything is in place for you to feel welcome and at home. On the slightest whim, please drop us a line firstname.lastname@example.com or Tweet us @bufferapp.
I hope you have already got the gist of using Buffer. If there is just one single tip for getting the most out of it, I'd say try the browser extension. I think you'll love it. It's a terrific way to amaze your friends and followers with awesome content you find on the web. Whenever you find something you want to share, click the Buffer icon in your browser. That's it.
One last thing I want to say is that the whole team are always around, almost 24/7, to reply to your emails. In fact, you can just hit reply to this email or any others you receive from us. Whether you need help, have ideas or just want to say "hello", we'll get back to you within a few hours.
- Joel and the Buffer Team
P.S. In case you also want to connect with me personally, just Tweet me anytime @joelgascoigne
</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-----
My notes
1. From the founder
2. Open with a personal note.
3. Reassure them that you are super responsive, and that this is a beginning of a conversation.
4. Product one liner
5. One tip.
6. A way personal to connect with the founder.
7. No images, all text - made it very readable.
8. Also note the usages of - Amazing, Terrific, Love it used in the context of the product.
Very solid. While these points may sound simple/obvious, a lot of services fumble here. </comment><comment><USER2> That's well done.

You can split the product intro email and the personal intro from the CEO email, by the way. Stagger the CEO email by a bit and deliver it as text only, and _many_ users will perceive it as if the CEO had just mailed them personally.

e.g.

Hiya,

I saw you signed up for the free trial the other day. My name is Patrick and I'm the founder of the company. Drop me an email any time if you have a question or need anything.

I know one guy who puts "Sent from my iPhone" on it but that strikes me as being more aggressive than I'd care to do. (If you don't like the "I saw you signed up for" verbiage then a) email this email to yourself, rather than to them, and b) copy/paste the text into a new email to the email address called out at the top. Then everything is literally true again.

<comment><USER3> > Then everything is literally true again.

And yet completely fake.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Joel and his team are awesome. They make a great product and make great decisions when it comes to their customer support. They also do great emails for buffer updates

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--- Hi,

I hope all is going well with you! I'm super excited to share the news about a big new Buffer feature. You'll now be able to track analytics in real time for each of your social media posts to know exactly how much impact they have had.

The following analytics are in your account now:

For your Tweets: number of clicks, retweets, mentions, favorites and reach. For your Facebook posts: number of clicks, likes, comments, shares and reach. For your LinkedIn posts: number of clicks, likes, comments and shares. Check out this blog post to get more juicy details about how the new Buffer analytics work.

It'd be awesome get any thoughts you have on the new real-time analytics feature or how you use Buffer in general. Just hit reply to let us know.

\- Joel and the Buffer Team

P.S. The whole Buffer team (check out this picture of us! :)) is sitting here and we are waiting eagerly to hear about your thoughts and ideas. We'll be around to answer all your emails for the next few hours. Drop us a line!

\---

My notes:

\- from the team \- they are sticking around after sending the email to answer requests \- New feature description is short and sweet

<comment><USER5> There is certainly a theme to their emails.

Critics of this style say that lengthy emails are bad, and that their length does not convey extra information.

I would like point out that there is a email writing style for office use and a different one for customers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I had a similar email when I joined InVision but unfortunately it gave a very creepy feeling.

\----

Subject: Your insights?

Hi again,

I think you signed up a couple weeks ago now...

How has your team been liking InVision so far? Any new ideas on ways we can make our product even better?

Write me back, I would love to hear from you...

P.S. Did you know about the UX Toolkits section? You can download a bunch of totally FREE high quality UI widgets and stencils -- and we're adding new ones all the time. Check it out: <https://projects.invisionapp.com/resources/>

Thanks! \-- Clark Valberg

<comment><USER7> Apart from the "shameless plug" at the bottom it seems an ok mail to me.

<comment><USER8> Actually, it's terrible and nothing like the Buffer email. This one is impersonal and it's all me, me, me... all about the project and the company, not the customer. And "I _think_ you signed up a couple weeks ago now..." sounds bizarrely vague. I mean, do they know I'm a customer or not? Have they paid any attention to _me_? Apparently not. And then they expect feedback about their product. This could've been phrased much better so the focus was on improving the customer's experience or resolving their problems.

@neebz: I understand why you didn't like that email, although I wouldn't equate it with the Buffer one

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I enjoy hacking email copy so I rewrote this for fun trying to make it a little easier to take in:

\----

Hi John,

I'm Joel, the founder of Buffer. Thanks so much for signing up.

It's probably not every day you sign up to something new so I want you to know that my team and I are here to make you happy, 24/7.

You should try out our awesome browser extension. It'll help you share amazing content to your friends and followers twice as fast.

Let me know if you have any questions or suggestions!

Have an awesome day.

Cheers! Joel

P.S. You can catch me sharing interesting content on Twitter, @joelgascoigne and the team and I usually respond to emails within a few hours.

<comment><USER5> While its shorter, I think its very bullet pointy - if you know what I mean. The original text reads more fluidly as if it was a conversation. Even though its longer, it has a sense of personality - making it more readable.

<comment><USER10> I agree. Over condensed copy can easily come off as insensitive and pushy. I feel this is pushing me to try that browser extension.

People should not be afraid of long copy, just make sure your hook is sweet enough to get people on board for a meaningful ride.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I really like how the message they put on the end of the email about how they will stick around and answer any customer emails. I actually took up their offer and emailed them back to let them know I like the product but it wasn't solving enough of a pain point for me to upgrade it. They got back to me immediately and said they'd keep working hard to solve that pain point for me.

I'm actually considering doing something similar in my next email newsletter, cause that's awesome customer service.

</comment><comment><USER12> Agreed, keeping it simple. It'd be cool if more services resorted to well- crafted text-only emails. Never going to happen, heh.

</comment><comment><USER13> I signed up for Buffer but never got around to using it but I do remember this email and thinking how good it was

</comment><comment><USER14> Joel and his team are AMAZING at this kind of stuff. My favorite is how at the end of every email blast they send, they put a PS at the bottom that says feel free to hit reply, they're standing by for the next few hours to answer all replies to that email.

</comment><comment><USER15> The once from Mixergy, Im afraid I might have deleted mine, but it was unique and offered a lot of customised value.</comment>


Free vs Freely Distributed  - <AUTHOR> http://blogmaverick.com/2009/06/30/free-vs-freely-distributed/ <comment><USER2> I'm somewhat surprised that "Free" as a concept gets people so hot under the collar.

Like the concept of "Open Source" or "The Selfish Gene" people seem to become enraged by the very thought of it and end up responding to straw men of their own creation.

I've not read the Anderson book but anything I've read by him on the topic seems almost boringly obvious to me, and I would assume anyone who spends much time online.

I can understand people not liking it if their industry and therefore livelihoods are under threat, but for anyone else it's seems too banal to get worked up about.

Here's John Gruber reacting in a bizarrely prickly manner when readers pointed out that they are consuming his ad supported blog for "free":

"Daring Fireball is decidedly not free. It's simply a question of who gets charged. Readers don't, but sponsors and advertisers do. What makes it work so well (so far) is that this makes everyone happy. I'm earning a nice salary. Readers get to read my writing in exchange for a small portion of their attention which I direct toward ads. And sponsors and advertisers are happy to pay a fair price to reach an audience of good-looking, intelligent readers such as yourself. But there's nothing free about it."

I can't connect that in any sane way to what I've read from Anderson, only to some "freetard" (I really dislike that word) caricature of his position. I fear Gruber would have a stroke if I pointed out that probably most (and the best) of my online reading matter is both produced and delivered without direct payment or advertisment.

</comment><comment><USER3> Mark Cuban's argument about the economics of Free is much better than Anderson's original thesis or Gladwell's retort, which both rely heavily on convenient anecdotes and clever phrasing. I guess that's the difference between a successful businessman and pop-economics writers who sell ideas to the masses.

</comment><comment><USER4> He ignores a huge number of problems: for example, if you copyright news (i.e. the facts), who owns it. It is often reported independently by multiple sources in parallel. Can no one else talk about an exclusive at all? If you need to pay to link or to re-produce short quotes you destroy a lot of the usefulness of the web. Those are the sort of copyrights the newpaper industry are talking about.

With regard to music, yes it is expensive to promote music, but that it partly because of competition from lots of other well funded people. Reduce the funding the everyone, and it will become cheaper.

That said, some of the comments are very insightful.

<comment><USER3> The facts clearly cannot be copyrighted. What can be copyrighted (or at least leveraged for monetization) is editorial voice, brand recognition, and timeliness. TMZ broke the Michael Jackson story, and their reward for being first was huge levels of traffic and citations. If anything, this was INCREASED by citations around the web.

The "copyrights" the newspaper industry is trying to claim are more an irrational death rattle than any sort of sensical business plan. The newspaper giants are done for and everyone knows it. Even if they could get these laws passed and enforced, would anybody pay to link to or cite a news source? Of course not. You would either cite a source that waives these ridiculous fees or start calling up sources yourself. Mark ignored these claims because they will never amount to anything.</comment></comment>


Not just balloons. Helium shortage may deflate MRIs, airbags and research - <AUTHOR> https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/05/10/helium-shortage-could-deflate-mris-manufacturing-and-research/1169464001/ <comment><USER2> I have a friend that is a professional diver and he says he was told from his gas supplier that there is no helium shortage. According to that guy, one of the places helium comes from is natural gas wells, and we have a lot of them.

So what's the truth?

<comment><USER3> For a long time there was not much use for helium, so it was wasted (vented in to the atmosphere). Then we started storing it. Then we sold off the stored helium, driving the prices down. Now we're out of stored helium and the prices are going up again.

<comment><USER4> And so we're just back to letting the market decide, or will there's be a replenishing of the reserve?

<comment><USER3> Demand must be a lot higher than it used to be, or we wouldn't have been able to sell the reserve fast enough to deplete it. As the price rises, some uses of it won't be worth the cost, and critical uses will have to become more efficient. I doubt demand will drop so much that there will be a large reserve again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Discussion at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19887816](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19887816)</comment>


World Cup Visualization - <AUTHOR> http://worldcup.altometrics.com

<comment><AUTHOR> My team threw this together this week. It's a simple aid to intuition for which World Cup teams are strongest, based on goals scored and goals allowed so far during this world cup.</comment>


Show HN: Virus Cafe – Make a friend in 2 minutes - <AUTHOR> https://virus.cafe <comment><AUTHOR> Hey folks! I built Virus Cafe to help you make a friend in 2 minutes! My goal is to help people stuck indoors because of COVID-19 (or police curfews) to make meaningful connections with strangers.

Here's how it works:

1\. You are matched with a random partner for a video chat

2\. You're given a deep question to discuss. You have 2 minutes!

3\. The only rule is: no small talk!

Small talk is the worst and I'm on a mission to eradicate it. I've expertly crafted over 200 questions designed to stimulate good conversation and skip past the boring introductions.

Here are a few samples:

\- When in your life have you been the happiest?

\- What would you be willing to die for?

\- What is the biggest lie you've told without getting caught?

\- What is a belief you had as a child that you no longer have?

\- What human emotion do you fear the most?

\- If a family member murdered someone, would you report them to the police?

\- What absolutely excites you right now?

I hope you use Virus Cafe to meet a new friend and make a deep connection today.

Feross

<comment><USER2> > Small talk is the worst and I'm on a mission to eradicate it.

To me small talk is the lubricant that makes conversations flow smooth with strangers. You can hear inflections and humor and irony all in a relatively safe, unemotional topic. Also, since your philosophical side is not needed, your emotional intelligence can be more engaged. For example, just by seeing how someone responds to a comment on the weather, you can learn about the person and maybe even find a shared bond(even if it is one as small as you both dislike hot, humid weather). Finally, especially needed in this divided time, it serves to humanize one to the other. So, I guess I am a fan of small talk.

<comment><USER3> Counterpoint: Most smalltalk topics actually get people to give an almost pre- rehearsed response.

For example if someone asks "What do you do for a living?" I will give the same answer I have given 1000 times. Ill ask them and they will do the same. There is nothing unique here.

Each to their own though.

<comment><USER4> > Counterpoint: Most smalltalk topics actually get people to give an almost > pre-rehearsed response.

yeah, but you're supposed to then extrapolate on the other persons' pre- rehearsed response in order to escalate the conversation into something that flows without effort.

"What do you do for a living?"

"Mergers and Acquisitions."

"Oh. I have a friend that does nearly the same thing. They told me this anecdote, does that kind of thing ever happen to you?"

"Oh, as a matter of fact.."

Without small talk there is no sharing of useless trivia by which to use as a jumping off point into real conversation, unless there was some introduction or motivation behind the meeting, anyway.

<comment><USER5> Murders and executions?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is there a chance for chat instead of video call? I like the idea but I'm not exposing myself in video. I know it "ruins" the experience but each one to its own.

<comment><AUTHOR> I understand how you feel but I don't think anything can replace looking into another human's eyes.

<comment><USER7> Well, video certainly hasn't replaced it. Maybe one day we will all have devices with the multiple cameras and the signal processing to allow actual eye contact over a video call.

<comment><USER8> Na I don't think any tech can replace face to face interaction.

<comment><USER9> The same way no face to face interaction can replace the ability to write messages to people on the other side of the planet. Inability of substitution does not make something superior or inferior.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I met a German girl on this app. We had a great time and right when we were exchanging numbers the server restarted. Please give a lengthier grace period. :(

<comment><USER11> Hey, it's the German girl :) I just sent you an e-mail - hope to stay in touch!

<comment><AUTHOR> This is incredible.

<comment><USER12> Will this be one of those classic threads? Like the lotta Bitcoin for pizza? I hope so.

<comment><USER13> Can you link to this thread?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Don't want to sully the conversation here, but I want to raise an important point - so @feross, please stick with it.

I gave my daughter (6) my iPad for ten minutes this morning and put her on a site to draw minecraft skins. I took a call and took my eyes off the device (but not daughter) for about five minutes while I paced around the room. When I sat back next to her, she somehow ended up on virus Café and was in a video chat with someone. This scared the absolute hell out of me as I knew nothing about the site, I wondered how on Earth she'd managed to stumble on it so quickly, how she'd been able to allow access to device cameras so easily and, ya know, "Virus Café".

To get around it, I've default denied mic and camera access and had to have a serious conversation about stranger danger.

I accept my own lapse in this, but to mitigate it happening to other kids who don't have helicopter parents, can you _please_ put some form of test _before_ you ask for camera settings? Some form of multiplication or division, or asking for the year you were born would be a massive boost to safeguarding young kids.

<comment><USER15> I am 40, my first access to a computer was when i was about 4 maybe? I wrote my first program (10 print "hello", 20 goto 10) at 6.. IMHO this early introduction massively impacted my ability to understand tech and assimilate information around me.

While i think that monitoring usage of devices is important, the idea of not giving a 6yo an ipad or similar when in all likelihood their familiarity with these concepts will benefit them greatly is a bit naive.

So while i don't know the answer, i 100% agree that the solution is not to leave it all to parent.. I would expect a cashier to question my 15yo buying booze, even if i had said it was okay - this is basically the same thing imho.

or a bit like the high voltage warning signs behind barbed wire and locked gates in electricity sub-stations.. or weak roof signs that only burglars will ever see - ultimately we want to minimise the harm.

<comment> y-c-o-m-b Same here - almost 40 - I was exposed to electronics at a very young age and that was an early catalyst into becoming a software developer.

Too often people argue for an all or nothing approach, when there's a good compromise in-between.

Parenting is complicated. There's thousands of books on the subject and probably thousands on the subject of electronic use for kids.

These comments telling the OP they can't change every website so "it's not worth trying" are not productive. There's nothing wrong with requesting this feature from Virus Cafe. Maybe it's something they were planning on doing anyway. You never know and it doesn't hurt to ask. What if the change is implemented and it becomes a web-design standard for other sites to adopt? Every idea starts somewhere and HN is a good platform for it to start in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> As this is HN, could you elaborate on the technologies you used to build this platform?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure thing.

The video and voice chat is powered by WebRTC. The getUserMedia API allows a browser to access the webcam and microphone of the device. I used my own simple-peer ([https://github.com/feross/simple- peer](https://github.com/feross/simple-peer)) library to make WebRTC a bit easier to work with.

The server is Node.js. I'm using Next.js for the first time on this project. I usually use a custom Express server for my projects. I'm a fan of several of Next.js's decisions -- it feels really nice to use, if a bit limiting sometimes.

I use the 'ws' package ([https://github.com/websockets/ws](https://github.com/websockets/ws)) to implement a WebSocket server which is used to help the peers get connected over WebRTC. Once peers are connected, all video and video is transferred directly in a peer-to-peer fashion.

Except sometimes the connection can't be established, so to improve reliability of WebRTC you need to set up a TURN relay server for those situations. I used coturn ([https://github.com/coturn/coturn](https://github.com/coturn/coturn)) for that.

Lastly, I used Chakra UI ([https://chakra-ui.com/](https://chakra-ui.com/)) as my React component library.

Really happy with how the easy the app has been to build.

The most difficult part was getting it to work on Safari for iOS. I spent about 50% of the effort working around various bugs in the Safari media stack. [https://twitter.com/feross/status/1263544033135038464](https://twitter.com/feross/status/1263544033135038464)

Hope this was informative!

<comment><USER17> That's great thanks, really informative. May I ask where your hosting this all?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm a huge fan of Linode. I've been a customer for nearly 10 years. I wrote an review a long time ago here: [https://feross.org/linode-vps-hosting- review/](https://feross.org/linode-vps-hosting-review/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > \- What is a belief you had as a child that you no longer have? ...

Hm, the type of some of these questions resemble the type of the personal questions used for password recovery by some companies. As a paranoid person, I am reluctant to disclose this information to unknown people.

<comment><USER19> But you should never give the correct answer for password recovery.

 _What is a belief you had as a child that you no longer have?_

Purple Ocean.

And that can be your answer for all the questions: first pet name, elementary school, and so on.

<comment><USER9> > But you should never give the correct answer for password recovery.

Exactly. You're supposed to use your password manager to generate a second password and use that as your answer. I know this sounds stupid but it is the only way to stay safe.

<comment><USER19> The only problem with this is if you have to read it to someone live. Otherwise, yes!

<comment><USER20> i've heard stories of call centers accepting "oh, i don't remember, i just typed a bunch of random letters and numbers" as confirmation over the phone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The name does not inspire enough confidence for me to click on the link.

<comment><USER22> Using the word virus on the internet is like using the word bomb in the airport. It's not a good decision.

<comment><USER23> It's a great decision, it filters out some people you probably wouldn't care to talk to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I had some very interesting conversations here. I don't remember the exact questions and dailogue but I'll note some here for users to know what they can expect. It was addictive. I got to a couple participants that covered their camera and decided to disconnect after seeing me (Internet strangers do that).

#1 What is the social and economics structure (theoritical or fictious) that you tend to agree with. We spent a minute or so discussing how we are new to the platform and it is our first session. The participant was from Europe and immediately opted for Capitalism. I sort of agreed and waved good bye at end of 2 mins.

#2 Do you believe in after life? The participant was a cheerful African women. I disclosed that would prefer not to have a after life and belong the void. That is the only way to achieve peace for me. She immediately exclaimed that she prefers to have an after life as she believes that there is more to experience than the chaos we experience in life.

#3 What is it that you would change in your past? It was a North American man. We shared some personal experiences. We ended up extending the time multiple times and it was fun talking. I think we both took something away from the chat.

#4 You use a public toilet and notice there is no toilet paper. You are inside the stall. What do you do? An Indian origin participant from Africa shared some witty advice here. We ended up in small talk, and realized he has visited places in my city in India. We had an interesting conversation about how intellectuals can study spirituality and ignore the illogical and derive value.

I had some very interesting conversations here. And I might use this platform again. Good job!

</comment><comment><USER25> Just to say I love the background animation when one refuse to allow the camera. Attention to details is everything.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am glad someone noticed!

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> My comments after trying it for a while:

\- First off all, I like the idea! Thanks for making this! HN will often hold a hobby-project to the standards of a professional product, and will hence criticize a lot, but don't get discouraged, I enjoyed it.

\- From time to time I got a repeated question, or the question was a bit lame/uninteresting. Maybe add a feature so you're able to "reroll" the question once per conversation (perhaps with agreement of the other). Personally I would like it if you could e.g. choose a category before getting matched.

\- I got insta-disconnected quite often. This doesn't really bother me that much as I can try again immediately, but it could put people off when they try out the app and get skipped the first couple of times. People will judge the app on the first conversations. Do you punish frequent disconnecters? (Maybe put a limit, like max 2 disconnects per minute)

\- The "no small-talk" is not very effective, some will entirely ignore the question. But I don't really think you can avoid this.

\- I never got matched to a troll / something inappropriate. On the contrary: some conversations where quite wholesome (like a very friendly camel farmer with his little daughter). I hope it can stay this way.

\- A majority of people I got matched to where from Saudi Arabia. This is not an issue on its own, but I found that many of these had poor English skills or a bad connection, which made conversations difficult.

\- Some conversations where interesting, but some were also very lame. It's not so much the question that's important but also the personality of the person you get matched with. There are quite some people that go "idk lol how about you" after getting asked the conversation question. However the quality of the conversations are really the maker or breaker of the experience. It can be worth wading trough the bad ones for the good ones. Good ones occur less frequent tough, but tend to be longer. Indeed, 2 minutes is very short to have a proper discussion, so you extend it if it goes well. You could try to enhance this by e.g. making each renewal of the timer a minute longer.

</comment><comment><USER27> tried matching with 3 people, all took one look at my face and peaced lol

nice app though! love the small touches with the emojis and sounds!

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a bummer! I think I'll implement a penalty for leaving in the middle of a chat. Will auto-ban folks who do that too much. Thoughts?

<comment><USER28> Maybe not ban right away, but how about longer waiting times between calls?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a much better idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I love this, it is like chatroulette but everyone i met was super nice and polite. (no surprise dicks is a good feature IMO)

<comment><USER29> Only a matter of time I'm sure. Is that still a problem with Chatroulette? They really should deploy measures against that shit. Maybe shadowban perverts so they end up together (which probably happens a lot anyway).

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Maybe I am not stubborn enough, but my experience after 5 tries is:

\- Nobody showed their face to the camera - why not but it seems odd to not be on equal foot

\- 1 person was doing ONLY small talk and did not seem interested to discuss a specific topic.

\- 4 people saw me and immediately ended the chat

</comment><comment><USER31> I love the idea of forcing "deep talk". I found that the fleeting nature of the connection doesn't pair as well with in-depth answers and good conversation, but it pairs great when the conversation is bad.

I also ran into a lot of instances where I got reported with the message of "be nice" when the other person wasn't responding and/or wasn't on cam. I'm assuming I got reported, but couldn't confirm why.

Overall, really cool concept and slick implementation. Just wish more than 30% of the conversations had been fruitful. I'm assuming if you forced people to have accounts, you'd be able to improve this experience over time.

</comment><comment><USER32> Hey! Great idea. I've had a lot of fun with it. Honestly, I'm not sure how this would even work, but it might be enjoyable if it were possible to randomise the location of both parties a little more. For the first 24 hours, I was meeting people from across the globe. However, for some reason, I now match exclusively with people from Saudi Arabia who don't speak very good English. I'm assuming the website was promoted there by an 'influencer' or something. I've met a lot of lovely people living in Riyadh, but it was a lot more fun when I didn't know where the other person was...

</comment><comment><USER33> When I open it, I'm seeing "An unexpected error has occurred".

I'm assuming either website went down because of increased traffic, or it's not working in Safari private mode. My video is also off by default, if that matters.

</comment><comment><USER34> I spoke to a couple of people and then I realised that I shouldnt cover my camera. My privacy filter was on and I got banned in 5 minutes. Good effort but I feel like its a clone of chat roulette!

</comment><comment><USER35> Wow I was a little nervous at first but that was really fun!

I did like 6 or 7. For some reason over half were from KSA. Might check that random seed :)

But still fun. Kudos to author.

</comment><comment><USER36> This sounds anxiety-inducing.

<comment><USER37> not everyone is terrified of social interaction

<comment><USER38> Not all social interaction is this terrifying.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> The screen that's visible when the video is not yet enabled is very annoying, might even be an epilepsy seizure trigger.

</comment><comment><USER40> This app is awesome! great way to meet random people all around the world, and engage in interesting conversation.

</comment><comment><USER41> The red button is clippped 80% on iPhone 7. My font size for OS is slightly larger than default

</comment><comment><USER42> This is real cool. I would like something like this for blind matching a buyer and a seller in this covid 19 time. Sellers get 2 mins and a buyer can extend it by 5 mins. Speed dating for business.

</comment><comment><USER43> The small talk dilemma, people like small talk use it to get into conversation with strangers. And the others just don't want to talk to strangers (or people who are not alike)

End of story!

</comment><comment><USER44> Hi feross! I presume this uses simple peer? We're using simple peer in our app (currently on the front page as well). Thanks so much for your work!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, this uses simple-peer. I'm glad that it was useful for you! If it's a for-profit app, please consider supporting me on GitHub Sponsors: [https://github.com/sponsors/feross](https://github.com/sponsors/feross)

<comment><USER44> We rushed to launch this without any paid features, but we're planning on doing so. The moment we have a revenue stream, I'll be supporting you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The key to eliminating small talk is to announce observations and get to a point where you speak with more statements than questions.

</comment><comment><USER45> Was fun to meet people there! Thanks feross

</comment><comment><USER46> Whats the difference with chat roulette?

</comment><comment><USER47> The "click the emojis" doesn't increase in difficulty ;)

Are the 200 questions publicly visible somehwere?

<comment><AUTHOR> They're in a JSON file in the repo at the moment. I'll open source them later today when I have a spare moment: [https://github.com/feross](https://github.com/feross)

<comment><USER48> I just wanted to start by saying thanks so much for your open source contributions. I've been using simple-peer in a few side projects and it's been a breeze.

Are you planning on eventually open sourcing Virus Cafe on top of releasing the questions?

<comment><AUTHOR> You are very welcome. simple-peer has been massively improved by other OSS contributors, and I am not an expert on the video/voice aspects of it as much as the data channel, so it's actually really great that I open sourced it. It enabled me to build Virus Cafe super quickly. The power of open source!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Nice! I have some feedback. Where can I send it to?

<comment><AUTHOR> My email is [my username]@feross.org

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> The rampant gratuitous flagging on HN has gotten out of control, this thread is exhibit A. Stop flagging stuff. If it has the slightest tinge of humor or sarcasm it gets flagged. Put the flag down. It's OK to be a little funny sometimes. Just stop.

<comment><USER51> > It's OK to be a little funny sometimes.

But people usually not trying to be funny is the only thing that makes this site usable over something like Reddit.

If we can keep away jokes and puns for as long as possible, that'd be great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Please tell me one of the topics is abortion. Always a good icebreaker. Virus cafe? Seriously, will my computer catch something using this site?

<comment><AUTHOR> No abortion questions, but I do have a 3-4 absurd questions in rotation, just to spice things up :)

\- Would you rather have someone secretly give you LSD on a random day once every 6 months or make everyone in the world take LSD all at the same time once every 5 years?

\- Would you rather have taste buds on your butthole or poop through your mouth?

\- Would you rather have sex with Donald Trump in secret, or not have sex with him but everyone thinks you did?

<comment><USER53> First one is really nice, second is fine.

Are you creating these yourself or have some source?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Gives out pretty negative feelings to me.

A sad emojii with a face mask is pretty depressing, and even worse if you see the mask as political.

Black lives matter is destroying cities across the USA.

I'm sure it's just me, but I wonder if anyone else sees this?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry that you don't like it. Can't please everyone. Lots of people have told me they've had fun meeting new people from around the world.

Regarding the hashtag, I put it there because I'm against police brutality and I'm horrified by what the police are doing. Looters should be arrested and prosecuted, for sure. But police have a monopoly on the use of violence and must be held to a higher standard.

<comment><USER54> I didn't write I don't like it, mostly think being more neutral and removing political statements might be better.

As for the Police, that was one guy. What percentage of cops kill innocent people, vs. save you from the bad guys (I was saved by cops twice, for instance). Also looks like the guy is going to be held at a higher standard and will get a harsh punishment. Is looting and burning down stores that in many cases represent people's life savings the correct way to solve the problem?

As you see, we could be talking about your chat, and we're talking about violence and depressing things like a store owner saving money for 20 years only to see it burn down by Antifa.

<comment><USER55> I think it is easy to misread the implied context of your statement as

protestors = looters = antifa.

Which is of course not true.

These are three seperate groups of people and the only subset relation that holds true (using a definition of `protestors` as simply participants) is

protestors > looters.

And I guess they constitute only a small percentage.

Additionally: Not everyone who would signify themselves as part of the antifa is a looter and not every looter is part of the antifa.

I would not jump to any conlusion about the ratios `looters/(antifa looters)` and `antifa/(antifa looters)`. (Note: They are not inverse).

Overall, my impression is that the antifa plays only a minor role and was mostly brought up by T. to derail the public discussion.

<comment><USER54> I hope it's Antifa (a terrorist organization), and not regular kids that go out and beat up old ladies.

<comment><USER38> Are they organized?

Are they able to kick people out? They have an official communications channel to take credit for the crimes they commit, and disown crimes they don't want to be associated with?

<comment><USER54> I don't know, but I've seen what they do, so if this can force cities to arrest them and make punishmenta harsher, it's most welcome.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How People Can Get You To Do What They Want - <AUTHOR> http://www.skorks.com/2009/08/how-people-can-get-you-to-do-what-they-want/ <comment><USER2> I completely agree - starting dialog about differences between your instinct and your instructions is very healthy. The trick is to create an environment where that can happen. I'm sure a lot of managers don't appreciate employees that do things like that, even if it's not done in an argumentative way. Anyone have any thoughts on how to create such an environment?

<comment><USER3> Having done the managerial thing in a few companies, I would say that a lot of employees are reluctant to question managers, even if they are encouraged to do so.

I've got several anecdotes of trying to press my team to question technical/design/administrative decisions but for the most part, they were quite. Yes, there would be one or two people who would do so (to my appreciation), but they were the exception.

To generalize, I would say that _most_ people would rather take instruction, follow the rules and not question authority - Its easier.

As far as creating an environment to encourage constructive feedback - Possibly creating a system that provides anonymity _might_ increase the level of feedback.

Though in my opinion, the idea of questioning issues of instinct vs. instruction have to be an intrinsic part of a companies culture. Tough to implement if not there from the beginning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Experiments like the Milgram experiment would not be considered ethical today because of the mental effect it has on the test subjects afterward (feeling bad about themselves for not stopping). I'm undecided if that's good or not - It just seems to have exposed a truth about human nature, which remains true even if you don't expose it. But, if it a lasting psychological impact on the test subjects... that doesn't seem desirable.

The point of the article is correct from a business standpoint as well as a moral one. Too often we fail to question processes and procedures because "that's the way its always been done."

<comment><USER5> The ethical concerns about the Milgram experiment are too varied to go into much detail here (if you're interested, [http://books.google.com/books?id=U44OAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA193](http://books.google.com/books?id=U44OAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA193) ) but the short, relevant, version is that the psychological impact was positive, not negative. 84% of those surveyed (out of 92% who participated) reported that they were "glad" or "very glad" to have participated in the experiment.

<comment><USER4> Very interesting. I was just going off the ethical arguments and data raised from a course I took while at the university where we studied the Milgram experiment.

I guess that's what I get for just going along with someone who was an "authority" on the subject.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> First, I don't buy the post's statistics. 65% of the subjects administered every shock in the experiment. But

      when we believe that someone knows more than us about a
      subject, they can get us to do what they want most of the
      time (or 65% of the time if you can believe the experiment)

mis-parses the probabilities.

Second, I think the "(65% of) people obey to authority despite what should be their better judgment" overfits the results of the experiment. Perhaps people simply listen to scientists during experiments?

<comment><USER7> The point is that the listen to scientists because they are wearing white coats, despite the (play-acted) agonized yowls from the unfortunate victim, from which the experimental subject can clearly infer that they are causing suffering. If you think that tuning such information out is normal or sensible, I suggest some self-examination.

Note that in the Milgram experiment the scientist figure never tells the subject it's safe or makes excuses for the degree of shock administered, they just insist that an external authority 'the experiment' requires the subject to continue.

<comment><USER8> Your description doesn't quite match the one in the article:

 _The researcher tells you to keep going, and that the shocks will cause "no permanent tissue damage" to the Learner._

<comment><USER7> True, sorry about that - I was thinking of the specifications for the original experiment at <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment> But still, it comes down to the question of whether you believe this abstract assertion, or the person who is (supposedly) on the receiving end of the shocks.

The disturbing issue raised by Milgram's experiment is how you can apparently persuade a majority of people to do just about anything, as long you have an appropriate authority figure around to affirm that it's safe/ legal/ necessary. With things like waterboarding and suicide bombing being stples of the news in recent years, this strikes me as a serious problem.

<comment><USER8> It seems Milgram did not follow the experimental specifications exactly as given on Wikipedia. The "tissue damage" exchange is mentioned further down on the Wikipedia page and comes from Milgram's own anecdotal recollections of the experiment.

If this is the case, it seems that he improvised rationalizations as needed to get the subjects to continue administering shocks. This strikes me as rather sloppy on his part. (...not that I think the numbers would have been all that different had he not done this.)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


What's up with americatimes.org? - <AUTHOR>

I recently found an article on this website ( http://americatimes.org/ ) via Google. Whilst reading I noticed a weird adjective. After reading/clicking through the site a bit more I found that basically every article seemed real, but slightly randomized with odd/negative nouns/adjectives.
After some google searches I found it to be copy of the actual magazine website http://businessinsider.com
Then I noticed the frontpage top header still contained a small advertisement for the used Wordpress theme. On top of that there seem to be a whole bunch of artwork load errors/glitches floating around. These seem to have to do with the mirroring process.
My first thought was that this site might be some school project. But I couldn't find any real clues supporting this. Really only things that pointed away from that idea.
Another theory, much more fun of course, would be that this is some kind of automatically generating anti USA/West propaganda site! And if you really want to get all tin foil hatty about this. How about this being a new type of a numbers station? Where the 'random' words are inserted in this mirror of another, actually existing, news site and these alterations form some kind of code. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Numbers_station )
Any Thoughts? <comment><USER2> [http://www.americaherald.com](http://www.americaherald.com) is another site like that. I would have never known it existed, until someone randomly emailed my wife and let her know that the site was using a picture of her taken off of a university website and saying she was a journalist working for them. It was actually kind of creepy.

I was surprised that a site like this could make it into Google News results.

</comment><comment><USER3> Maybe an artifact of some online reputation scrubbing service? Procedurally create a site that looks legit enough to get some Google juice, which you can then use as a source for masking unflattering search results? Might explain the celebrity connection.

Obviously this kind of naïve adjective-permutation seems unlikely to fool Google today (although you said it came up in a search result for you?), but maybe at some point in the past it was effective. Does anyone know if the recent date listed in the ICANN record is a reliable indicator of initial regisration? Or would that just be when it was last re-upped?

Might be interesting to wget these two mirrors and diff their content?

<comment><AUTHOR> Holy.... I googled "online reputation scrubbing", which you mentioned, and found one article: [http://nymag.com/news/features/online-reputation- management-...](http://nymag.com/news/features/online-reputation- management-2013-6/)

It RANDOMLY mentions Chris O'Donnell (one of the 2 domains i posted about is registered to his wife! See my long comment). Im starting to get really freaked out.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> What else I found up til now:

The footer on the front page contains a wp-login link in Vietnamese (according to google translate).

A whois gives some weird info ( [http://whois.icann.org/en/lookup?name=americatimes.org](http://whois.icann.org/en/lookup?name=americatimes.org) ) (at least the combination is strange): Registrant Name:Daniel Costello (too common a name, more on him below) Registrant Organization:Tammy S Meyer (actually owner of the accompanying address; see below) Registrant Street: 18853 Leisure Avenue (some pretty remote farm type place: [https://www.google.nl/maps/place/18853+Leisure+Ave,+Honey+Cr...](https://www.google.nl/maps/place/18853+Leisure+Ave,+Honey+Creek,+IA+51542,+firstname.lastname@example.com,-95.8119062,8992m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m2!3m1!1s0x87939be4dd1d36bf:0x4a963c02d652acbe) ) Registrant City:Honey Creek Registrant State/Province:IA Name Server:NS1.VISIONDNS.NET (also Vietnamese) Email: email@example.com (errrr, yeah..)

A google of the street address turned up some kind of land/parcel registration from the 'Pottawattamie County Assessor', actually registered to the same name, 'Tammy S Meyer': [http://pottco.org/x/card?map=on&parcel=764319400002](http://pottco.org/x/card?map=on&parcel=764319400002)

A search for "email@example.com" turns up only 3 hits, 2 of which the same WHOIS result, but one also containing the name 'Daniel Costello'. This time associated with 'acumium.com', a 'Website Development, Ecommerce, Online Marketing' company. On his company website profile ( [http://www.acumium.com/about/meet-our-team/dan- costello.cmsx](http://www.acumium.com/about/meet-our-team/dan-costello.cmsx) ) it states the following: "Before Acumium, Dan served in the U.S. Army as a Signals Intelligence Team Leader for almost four years, which explains his focus on Acumium's security and policies. He left the service as one of the _most highly decorated_ members of the 2nd Armored Calvary." Now I get this tingly suspicious feeling in my special place. Why would he use a Vietnamese Wordpress?! Or be the Registrant Contact for a domain hosted in Vietnam ?? (126.96.36.199, [http://tracert.com/run?host=18.104.22.168&gw=24](http://tracert.com/run?host=126.96.36.199&gw=24) ) Or be associated with this website??

This is where things started to get really odd. If you google one of the lines/titles of the articles, you find that the site is an _exact_ mirror (errors and all) of [http://usastar.org/](http://usastar.org/). Which whois looks like this: Registrant Contact Name: caroline odonnell Organization: caroline odonnell Mailing Address: 14915 camarosa drive, pacific palisades CA 90067 US (some crazy ass mansion: [https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-118.521481,3a,76.9y,34...](https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-118.521481,3a,76.9y,346.81h,89.98t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s2mLA4quvPXn_FvTdjay0HQ!2e0!7i13312!8i6656) )

After another google search, this mansion was apparently bought by actor Chris O'Donnel (the guy from NCIS LA!): [http://www.bergproperties.com/blog/actor- chris-odonnell-pays...](http://www.bergproperties.com/blog/actor-chris- odonnell-pays-an-undisclosed-amount-all-cash-for-a-house-in-los-angeles- pacific-palisades-area-that-had-sold-last-year-for-4675m/) His wife is named Caroline: [http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000563/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000563/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm)

I love a good conspiracy as much as the next guy, but this is really weirding me out. So where better to ask than HN to get to the bottom of this :D Any thoughts?

<comment><USER4> I'd say you are correct.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looks like the work of an article spinner (and not a very good one at that).

<comment><AUTHOR> I dont see any ads on the sites. Wouldnt one expect those to be there?

<comment><USER6> Perhaps there's an advantage to building up traffic before enabling ads (either because setting up the ad network account is inconvenient or the ad networks are flagging new sites as suspicious).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Autralia" haha

<comment><AUTHOR> Lol, yea.. Im guessing its a localized version of the original site. And since its crawled from a vietnamese/australian server thats what the menus look like (from where I live I get different geographical categories). But I have no explanation for the misspelling..

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Their header is "americal news"

<comment><USER8> Also they are using a theme with a link back to a premium theme site.</comment></comment>


Software Checklist (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/SoftwareChecklist.html?HN_rk24 <comment><USER2> A lot of problems in software stem from earlier on in the process than the testing and validation phase. They happen at the writing and design phase. So your checklist not only has to contain "check for buffer overflow by checking for a standardized pattern," it also has to have points like "make sure the code is maintainable" so the programmer won't introduce a stealthy memory allocation that won't get freed in the first place.

Of course, it's not so simple. How do you actually quantify maintainable software? Just for that one point, you could write an entire book. When you introduce other points, the process of writing quality software becomes exponentially more complex, with different aspects of well-structured designs overlapping, balancing with each other, and sometimes contradicting each other.

To bring it back to the original illustration, even if you have a flight checklist, it's not going to matter if your plane was poorly made in the garage of some beginner aviation hobbyist out of scrap metal. If your program is made of spaghetti code and poor abstractions, you're going to be working on that testing checklist for a long time.

I do agree that checklists are helpful and that more standardization would help, but we also need more quality training and certification, arguably more so. We need great aircraft designers, not just pilots.

</comment><comment><USER3> I find the article a bit confused about the purpose of checklists. The checklists in the aviation industry are there for the technicians (including pilots), not the engineers. The article seems to advocate automated checklists for programmers (who really are engineers) and not end users or administrators (who are technicians).

I work on a 40 year old mainframe product and as a vendor, we provide a lot of checklists for our users (system administrators). Everything from installation and configuration to maintenance and customization is covered. This approach is an exception on the mainframe and it is virtually unknown in modern software applications. (We are not really mission-critical software, but we have a culture like that.)

Could some of our checklists be more automated? Yes. But I believe today there is this strong idea in the software world that you never ever need a technician (system administrator), because everything is so user friendly and automated and reliable. So you never need the checklist either. I think this is false and there would be a benefit from stronger culture of checklists (provided by the vendor for the end user) in software.

<comment><USER4> In a previous job I worked as QA supervisor for a medial robotic company. The job entailed maintaining a 1000 page spiral-bound testing manual which could be given to anyone from an intern to a senior programmer. A slightly cut-down version was shipped with every system to be used on-site by the installation technician and left with the customer to be used before any bug-report was allowed to be filed.

It was most definitely a checklist with the purpose of finding and verifying bugs.

But it was rarely used by the developers or engineers (that I know of) because of the implicit understanding that if something was in the checklist it was a) already a found bug and has been fixed or b) if a regression occurred, would be found by the army of QA testers.

So yea I agree, checklists are used in the wild but their usefulness to coders is limited. If indeed that was what the author was implying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The meta-problem of Heartbleed was caused by a dysfunctional and under-funded open source project of OpenSSL. The Linux Foundation's Core Infrastructure Initiative was founded in response to Heartbleed and eventually created the Best Practices BadgeApp as a checklist for better and more secure open source projects: [https://bestpractices.coreinfrastructure.org/en](https://bestpractices.coreinfrastructure.org/en)

(Disclosure: I co-founded CII and the BadgeApp.)

<comment><USER6> I agree! I encourage anyone who's involved in an open source software (OSS) project to get a CII Best Practices Badge at: [https://bestpractices.coreinfrastructure.org/](https://bestpractices.coreinfrastructure.org/) ; if you are _using_ OSS, then you should prefer projects with a badge.

If you want to see a video that explains the badge, see "An Introduction to the Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) Best Practices Badge" at [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMptmhV06j8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMptmhV06j8)

New projects are participating every day (see [https://bestpractices.coreinfrastructure.org/en/project_stat...](https://bestpractices.coreinfrastructure.org/en/project_stats) ). The badging application is itself open source software; its project site is: [https://github.com/coreinfrastructure/best-practices- badge/](https://github.com/coreinfrastructure/best-practices-badge/)

(Disclosure: I'm technical lead of the BadgeApp project. Hi Dan!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm honestly not that sure that checklists are useful for writing software. It's a creative process where you are making the rules, not enforcing them. It's more like designing the plane, rather than flying it.

Now understanding how to write good software, especially good UI for human operators to work, is a hugely underrated skill. Many accidents (air crashes, nuclear accidents, etc) are caused by poor or confusing UI.

For operations, or devops, I think checklists are essential, and should be automated as scripts and dashboards. But always have the ability to do everything by hand if required, to cut out some step or modify something in a critical scenario (trust me, it always comes up, and when it does, you don't want to be shooting from the hip in a crisis).

I've specifically built jenkins operations boards with a bunch of buttons to run scripts and do operations, and it works great. You also get a built in log of who's doing what when, and what happened with it.

Also, just because I think it's interesting, and related to checklists, look at the Spanair 5022 flight disaster - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EruTu5O9LX8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EruTu5O9LX8) . Basically they missed a step in their checklist to make sure their flaps were at the proper setting for take off, but being distracted and in an unusual situation, they didn't run through the checklist correctly. Anything with manual steps can fail, including checklists.

Preparing for these scenarios is actually I think the key here. Having the knowledge written down after you've designed a system to handle adverse conditions is just a no-brainer (although it seems like no one likes writing things down, I do!).

</comment><comment><USER8> Fuzz testing is probably one of the most underused tactics, at least in my observations. It's easy to write a decently thorough fuzzer that will absolutely crush a wide class of bugs that you have.

<comment><USER9> Fuzzers are extremely underused. Even in large, mature projects, a fuzzer being part of the source tree is much more an exception than the rule. Once you've done it a few times, it takes only 5 minutes to write a basic fuzzer for a function that takes a binary blob or a string as an input, after which you can run it indefinitely. But chances are it will find a bug worthy of a fix within minutes.

Various "safe" languages are just as vulnerable to denial-of-service vulnerabilities as C/C++. Since I started fuzzing Go projects I've come across numerous parsers of untrusted data that flat-out crash if a slice is accessed out-of-bounds. Deep recursions (A() calls B() calls A() etc) can crash both Go and Rust. And in probably every general programming language you can implement logic that leads to excessive resource allocation or computation, and unintended infinite loops. These kinds of bugs can obviously be problematic for network-facing components. A royal use of runtime assertions in debug builds for arbitrary invariants/conditions combined with fuzzing usually uncovers many more bugs.

<comment><USER10> The big difference is that C and C++ usually don't crash, rather silently corrupt memory with all possible outcomes.

If it is a server process, it can even corrupt data for days until someone actually notices it, if ever.

Or they just crash in a totally unrelated memory segment a couple of hours later.

Crashing when the out-of-bounds takes place is a much better outcome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Generic checklists for Pull Requests are great. It's easy to write a Tampermonkey script that lets you paste a prewritten checklist into a new blank PR description, reminding you to do linting, run tests locally, and so on.

<comment><USER12> [https://help.github.com/articles/creating-a-pull-request- tem...](https://help.github.com/articles/creating-a-pull-request-template-for- your-repository/)

You don't need to use a tampermonkey script, they support templates :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Decent unit tests are a big part of the answer. So are other forms of testing, such as checking results via DOM in headless Chrome. Not all of it, of course. But these things essentially form a kind of automated checklist.

</comment><comment><USER14> For routine tasks that are repeated with a narrow set underlying actions, checklists are easily devised. For something with as many degrees of freedom as programming, it's just too difficult to come up with something generic. Something more doable is having a checklist for your particular project, so everyone follows similar conventions and can add to the list as flaws in the methodology are discovered - a lot of projects operate this way already, so I think we're doing the best we can!

</comment><comment><USER15> Discussed at the time: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7655018](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7655018)

</comment><comment><USER16> Human error is what makes programming difficult. You can watch a computer do billions of calculations flawlessly, while a human cannot type a few hundred words on average before they make an error of some kind. Developing software is not amenable to simple checklists, and is a very creative process. What would be more helpful than checklists are improved languages that make it much harder to make a simple mistake.

<comment><USER17> I could see developing a checklist of things to look for during code review. It might be fairly tedious since you'd probably need to scrutinize each line.

Code review guidelines or style guides come close to being checklists. There are also various kinds of static analysis like CheckStyle, FindBugs, etc. that check for common mistakes.

Of course, statically typed languages have type checking built in that prevents mistakes. Plenty of languages already have type systems and/or object constructs prevent the class of problems that led to Heartbleed (bounds checked arrays IIRC).

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Testing alone will not preserve knowledge, just safety. Knowledge requires an explanation of what the tests are doing and how the tests detect it.

</comment><comment><USER19> > He went on to explain that every time there was an accident, no matter what > the cause, the final action was to review the checklists to see if that > cause could be prevented.

Isn't this principle similar to TDD? For any bug, first, add a test that fails, then make it pass.

<comment><USER20> It's more like post deployment testing. Find a bug in deployment, write integration tests that replicates it, unit tests that isolate the failing component, add them to your test system, and make them a routine part of your testing schedule to prevent regressions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Checklists have been essential and efficient tools for both learning and sharing how to write good software. I find that the inconvenience is surpassed by the benefits, especially in the long run.

<comment><USER22> Do you have any pointers to where one might find some of these checklists? I have been building my own but they are still very sparse.

<comment><USER10> For security:

\- MISRA-C, [https://www.misra.org.uk/Activities/MISRAAutocode/tabid/72/D...](https://www.misra.org.uk/Activities/MISRAAutocode/tabid/72/Default.aspx)

\- AUTOSAR, [https://www.autosar.org/fileadmin/user_upload/standards/adap...](https://www.autosar.org/fileadmin/user_upload/standards/adaptive/17-03/AUTOSAR_RS_CPP14Guidelines.pdf)

\- OWASP, [https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Main_Page](https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Main_Page)

\- CERT, [https://wiki.sei.cmu.edu/confluence/display/seccode](https://wiki.sei.cmu.edu/confluence/display/seccode)

<comment><USER23> There's also MISRA C++ which the AUTOSAR guidelines are an extension of

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> > [...] imagine having them in an automated check list. Buffer overruns, off- > by-one errors, uninitialised variables. Already compilers warn you if > there's a chance you used "=" when you meant "==". (If only JavaScript had a > way of knowing if you meant "===" instead of "==").

Wait, a compiler that can differ between an assignment and a comparison? Witchcraft! What do those crazy computer scientists invent next? Type checking? Range checks? Testing pre and post conditions?

Fools! Computers will never be able to do that! Academic bullshit!

/s (just in case)

<comment><USER24> To the downvoter who didn't get the joke: Didn't you notice that the author's examples are exactly those mistakes that a compiler could find?

Checklists and unit tests and TDD are useful. But how about first using the right tools? I don't think they tried to repair airplanes with jack-hammers in WWII, so we shouldn't try to program complex systems with Javascript and other low-level languages.</comment></comment>