Cigarette butts are the single greatest source of ocean trash - <AUTHOR> https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/plastic-straw-ban-cigarette-butts-are-single-greatest-source-ocean-n903661 <comment><USER2> My own cognitive bias about smokers littering is why I vote in favor of any cigarette tax. Yes, I realize that not all smokers think the street or sidewalk is an appropriate place for their used cigarette. But the people I see smoking do this, so I (inaccurately) assume they all do (without consequence).

<comment><USER3> It seems no one uses their car ashtray anymore, either -- probably because it makes the car stink.

So they hold the cig outside their window, tap the ashes into the street, and often flick the butt into the road. I sometimes wonder how many lit cigs get dropped by accident into the road.

<comment><USER4> What cars still have ashtrays? I haven't seen one since 1990s models. I have several cars 2002 - 2004 and none of them have an ashtray, or a lighter.

<comment><USER3> Wow! You're right -- and they don't come with lighters anymore either, at least not _standard_ ...

I guess cigarettes are also to blame for our lousy 12v outlet design?

<comment><USER5> _I guess cigarettes are also to blame for our lousy 12v outlet design?_

Pretty much. There's some business school case study waiting there about network effects, or backcompat, or something. Someone a long time ago needed 12VDC for their new KarDooHickey(tm), but how is the user easily going to get 12V to the device? And here we are.

VWs and BMW motorcycles used/use a Hella plug that is similar to a lighter plug, but was actually designed to be used the way lighter plugs are now. Our '81 VW camper van has one on the dash. Sadly, despite being a better design for the purpose, BMW motorcycles are the only vehicles I now of that still use them. I can run a 75W electric jacket off those plugs, something I would not try with a lighter plug (it might work for a while, but not reliably).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Simple solution, but thought to implement: do to cigarette butts what it has been done for empty glass bottles: each one has a deposit cost of, say, $0.20, and when you return them you get the money back.

Cigarette packs should be modified to allow for easy storage of used butts, so you can return it to the cigarette seller when you buy a new pack.

<comment><USER7> I like the idea.. it is tricky to get right though. Cigarette butts smell a lot, so if smokers started carrying around 20 butts in their pack at work/home, non-smokers would not like it. Its hard to imagine modifying a pack cheaply enough to contain the smell.

<comment><USER8> In Europe where people get their deposit back for bottles, the homeless (interestingly, not just them, a study in Germany said it also gave bored pensioners something to do) look in trash cans to find bottles to return. I remember reading an experiment where a city (I think in Canada) implemented a trial program to give people 6 cents per cigarette butt: they spent the money marked for the returns quicker than expected because the homeless people collected butts diligently.

It's a bit of a crazy world to make the homeless clean up pollution other people make, but even without this program there are (and will) still be homeless people...

<comment><USER9> I'd imagine public ashtrays be pillaged, as they are now to recycle the half smoked tobacco rests. Bad idea.

<comment> Harvey-Specter Who cares if public ashtrays are "pillaged"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Except it isn't, it's fishing nets

[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-22939-w](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-22939-w)

<comment><USER11> that only talks about garbage content in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. maybe cigarette butts have different physical characteristics that causes it to accumulate differently than plastics?

edit: reading the paper further, it looks like they're only surveyed plastics, not any other materials.

<comment><USER12> From the article:

> The vast majority of the 5.6 trillion cigarettes manufactured worldwide each > year come with filters made of cellulose acetate, a form of plastic that can > take a decade or more to decompose

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Love this project to train crows to pick cigarette butts. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15486368](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15486368)

I had hoped that the vaping trend would mean fewer cigarette butts, but now I'm seeing plastic Juul capsules littered here and there. So much for ecological millennials…

<comment><USER14> I hate that project. It's completely gross to poison crows by training them to do something that we could train humans to do - _with the exact same incentive system_.

<comment><USER15> Is there any evidence that the crows are poisoned? Can you provide the source?

<comment><USER14> Why would you demand evidence for this?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Cigarette butts will have fully degraded within 15 years. Plastic straws take hundreds of years unless they're flaked off by the sun and then become small plastic bits in the stomachs of fish (still undegraded). It's all bad, but cigarette butts are significantly less worse than plastic.

</comment><comment><USER17> I read somewhere the other week that fishing gear was the biggest source of ocean trash. Which is it?

<comment><USER18> Likely due to volume vs pieces.

By volume, I believe fishing nets are the largest polluter, but likely if you counted the pieces, cigarette butts might be higher.

<comment><USER19> That does seem like a faulty metric to identify the worst pollution problems. By pure count there are probably more microbeads than cigarettes in the ocean. So this article is basically saying that of the countable pieces of pollution in the ocean, there are more pieces of cigarette butts than anything else.

I have a hard time trusting reputable news sites when they have this type of sensational reporting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> On the one hand, cigarettes give you a slow painful death and they are _still_ not universally banned, so there is not much prior reason for hope.

On the other, banning filters seems like a simple enough solution to such a concrete and immediate problem as littering that it might be reasonable to believe an enforce can be implemented despite the track record.

</comment><comment><USER21> > The vast majority of the 5.6 trillion cigarettes manufactured worldwide each > year come with filters made of cellulose acetate, a form of plastic that can > take a decade or more to decompose.

Another way of saying this is: they're moderately biodegradable. It would seem reasonable to give manufacturers a strong incentive to make them even more biodegradable.

(To be clear, I think that smoking in public commercial spaces is seriously problematic, and I think that smokers should find a way to responsibly dispos of their trash or have one forced on them. But it does seem like the degree of blame here is a bit overblown.)

</comment><comment><USER22> How do all these things end up in the ocean in the first place? Plastic straws or cigarette butts, seems like we have a garbage collection problem.

Rather than banning the item of the day that we find in the ocean, can we fix garbage collection so that none of or crap ends up there?

<comment><USER23> How is something made of plant matter and paper not biodegradable anyway?

<comment><USER24> The cigarette is made of (chemically treated) plant matter and paper, but the filter is not. Its main purpose is to turn brown when heated so the smoker thinks the filter has trapped something bad for them. A "marketing function" as the article says.

<comment><USER25> If cigarette smoke is blown through a paper tissue it will get stained (dark brown spot)[0]. I don't think paper tissue is treated in order to become brown with cigarette smoke. Perhaps it absorbs something? On the other side, obviously, the cigarette filter (butt) does not seem effective in protecting the lungs from cancer or other smoking generated doseases. From that point of view it has only a "marketing" function.

[0]source: personal experience

<comment><USER24> "One chemist discovered that if you adjust the pH in cellulose-acetate filters, you can get them to change color during the smoking process, making it look like some really bad stuff is being screened out."

[https://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/columns/straight- dope/ar...](https://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/columns/straight- dope/article/20781759/do-cigarette-filters-do-anything)

Or you might prefer this: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4688990/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4688990/)

<comment><USER25> Thank you for your references. The second one has little to do with the subject though. The first one confirms that "This did, indeed, block a little tar and toxic gas, but smokers, ever resourceful, responded by changing their behavior—smoking more, taking deeper puffs, etc—thereby making the practical effect of the cellulose-acetate filter approximately nil". This by the way, is what happens in the napkin "experiment" I was referring to. By the way, I just learnt that what I was calling a "filter", it is not a filter, but a mixer.[0]

TL;DR: It's a device whose purpose is to mix the smoke of the cigarette with air which is intaken via the micro holes found on the body of the mixer (a.k.a. "filter). The different air/smoke mix rates give the smoker a different perception of the smoothness / lightness of the cigarette. As a side note, as your first reference mentions, this "filter novelty" may have made things worst as the smoker will make deeper breaths and keep the smoke longer into the lungs when inhaling a more diluted smoke puff.

[0] [https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/07/cigarette...](https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/07/cigarette- filters/533379/)

<comment><USER24> The second ref was as support that the "filter"s are also bad for you in their own right but provide a "benefit halo" that helps support smoking, just as the tobacco companies intended.

<comment><USER25> Thank you

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Even considering the cartridges, vaping is much less impactful as far as littering. Even one small juul pod replaces at least a pack worth of butts. With time less wasteful designs can certainly catch on.

</comment><comment><USER27> How is organic plant material in the ocean, anything but an esthetic problem?

<comment><USER11> >The cellulose acetate fibers used as the predominant filter material do not readily biodegrade because of the acetyl groups on the cellulose backbone which in itself can quickly be degraded by various microorganisms employing cellulases.[23] A normal life span of a discarded filter is thought to be up to 15 years.[24]</comment></comment>


How to tell a geek - <AUTHOR> http://catherinedevlin.blogspot.com/2009/06/how-to-tell-geek.html <comment><USER2> OK, let's get this straight once and for all...

Saying things like, "All geeks..." "Every geek..." "Geeks will always..." is just wrong.

Makes no more sense than saying, "All lefthanders..." "Every woman..." or "Nebraskans will always..."

There are as many kinds of geeks as there are geeks (NbrOfGeekCategories == NbrOfGeeks). Sure, there are a lot of generalizations, but we are all unique.

I bathe regularly, socialize often, have never watched Star Trek, don't play video games, and enjoy sports.

OTOH, I plot out every trip on Google maps before leaving home, schedule my day out in half hour increments, and place my things out in the morning to be picked up in the proper order. I have to go through the supermarket counter- clockwise to optimize filling the cart. If I learn a new fact, I'm looking for the general rule about 6 seconds later, and am plotting out use cases within an hour. I'll probably have some code written, too.

Is there anyone out there just like me? I didn't think so. (Thank goodness.)

<comment><USER3> You are right- we are different. I go through the interior aisles of the supermarket first before finishing with a perimeter swing (where the cold stuff is kept). The perimeter swing is, of course, counter-clockwise. I like to keep my angular momentum up.

<comment><USER4> Do you go in the opposite direction when you shop in the other hemisphere?

Seriously, are you suggesting that part of "geekiness" is a tendency to think through and design an approach before doing anything? Or maybe that it's a skill for rationalizing any approach afterwards?

<comment><USER5> I think there is a tendency to get bored by repetitive tasks an find ways to do them better. No forward planning necessary.

One of my first jobs was maintaining a national phone book library: 50lbs of new books in and 50lbs old books out every day, just the kind of thing to keep a 15-year-old busy all day. Within a couple weeks I had redesigned my pipeline to reduce labeling errors and speed the whole thing up by a factor of 2 or 3, which meant I could do other work as well (which lead to me learning print design, then animation, then programming).

I was not planning ahead, just bored, and it seemed normal to me. I was shocked when I tried to train my replacement: she stared at me like I was from Mars. I tried to explain how she should sort the new books first by state, not size, rip through the label printing process in one shot, remember that the list is now backwards when you apply the labels, spot-check every tenth book (ie, when you hit a perforation in the label fan-fold)... etc. She just went on with print-stick-shelf process for each book, and it took her all day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Came across this already today. In order for the creative director to view the site on my local machine he asked for the IP address. I decided instead to install a local DNS server. Am I crazy? Also, anyone else know of an easy way to get PCs to recognize the computername.local address that Mac's have? Otherwise, I'll just keep configuring the DNS.

<comment><USER7> Set up a dev server?

<comment><USER6> Good call. Anyone willing to donate one? We're in the NYC area. Bootstrap startup. All of our money goes towards keeping the site running.

<comment><USER8> Why does your bootstrap startup have a creative director? What does this person do?

<comment><USER6> We are equal partners. Is it so strange? We come from the advertising world. He is an award winning creative director. I was the CTO at our former employer.

<comment><USER7> A cheapo box with Ubuntu on it could probably be had used for under $200. For instance, this box is overkill for what you need:

<http://newyork.craigslist.org/que/sys/1229891889.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The notion that a geek will always write a program instead of doing something manually is becoming a cliche.

<comment><USER10> Honestly the 3rd or 4th time I have to do something I'll write a program for it, and only if I know they're would be a 5th or a 6th. I've almost written myself out of my job about 3 times now. I got hired to do IT and run manual reports, after a few weeks our internal IT was up to speed (user support isn't that high volume if their systems are in order), and a few weeks later I had no more "manual" reports. Luckily for me I know how to drum up more projects, I go and find "sore spots". Now I've got a trail of automation and reputation for taking the pain out of our processes. I'm valued and it makes me happy. And to think I could be doing manual reports instead..

I also know I'm responsible for work happening on days when I spend all my time reading HN...

<comment><USER11> I do not know how you can call yourself a geek if you can tolerate boredom 3 or 4 times before even considering making a program instead. For some reason, you (and others here) assume efficiency is an attribute of geekdom. I suggest that efficiency is actually a contraindicates geekdom.

Being a geek is more about fun, it is not about how well you can optimize.

<comment><USER10> My boss doesn't like me wasting my time on a program for one off reports. In fact I had to sell him on the "let me program something for that" because he can't program and doesn't want any major part of our "process" to be outside his understanding. The way I program a project has to do with what technology I want to try (and of course a bit of what fits) and I have tons of fun doing it. Putting off programming my way out of work has more to do with not fully understanding the requirements (ie, why said report should be run and how often) then being lazy or bored.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "I've heard it said that a good geek is lazy, but I think it's more precise to say that a geek dreads boredom above all else. We'll move mountains to accomplish a task, as long as it's interesting."

In my opinion, this is the largest problem with unit tests and TDD. Much of it (though not all) is the type of boring work that lazy programmers dread. Calling it "professionalism" and saying it's what good developers are supposed to do doesn't help.

I'm not sure what the answer is for overcoming this. Dynamic languages help by cutting down on the amount of code. However, it still seems like we need better tools. Perhaps a way to convert a stack trace into a test? Or maybe a repl-to-unit-test generator?

</comment><comment><USER13> I can agree (and this is not only for GEeks), simply here's why

Creating an application is fun, there's no monotony on it, in fact you don't repeat code, if you need it again, you can recall it.

Grease ebowl tasks are annoying and boring so no one wants them.</comment>


HTML Bouncing Ball Using Nested Marquees - <AUTHOR> http://kthffmn.github.io/blog/2016/02/08/html-bouncing-ball-using-nested-marquees/ <comment><AUTHOR> I'm surprised that <marquee> tags still exist, let alone that they can be made to move vertically and can be nested!</comment>


Apple, Qualcomm settle royalty dispute, sources say - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/16/apple-qualcomm-settle-royalty-dispute-sources-say.html <comment><USER2> Did not see that coming.

Press Release: Qualcomm and Apple® today announced an agreement to dismiss all litigation between the two companies worldwide. The settlement includes a payment from Apple to Qualcomm. The companies also have reached a six-year license agreement, effective as of April 1, 2019, including a two-year option to extend, and a multiyear chipset supply agreement.

</comment><comment><USER3> The Qualcomm CEO was right. I can't believe it. [https://www.cnet.com/news/qualcomm-and-apple-may-be- calling-...](https://www.cnet.com/news/qualcomm-and-apple-may-be-calling-a- truce/)

</comment><comment><USER4> Hopefully the FTC case doesn't get settled.</comment>


Founder Vesting Schedule Advice - <AUTHOR> Imagine three senior engineer founders are creating a startup consulting business. The goal is to initially land small contracts, but ultimately to grow the business into a much bigger firm with many employees and maybe eventually be acquired after 6 years.
The standard stock vesting period is a 4 year vest, possibly with a 1 year cliff.
Now what are the advantages and disadvantages of longer vesting schemes (just for the founders): How about vesting periods, say 5, 6, 8?, 10???! years.
Longer vesting periods provide more reward for founders that stay longer. Is that more fair?
Would investors find a long vesting period attractive if they were considering this business for acquisition?
With longer periods there is a greater chance of large amounts of unvested stock upon acquisition. How should the founders ensure they are properly rewarded in this case? Should they have put in some partial single trigger acceleration at founding? Or should some sort of acceleration be negotiated as part of the acquisition?
Other thoughts? <comment><USER2> Longer than 4 years is probably better. I recommend the advice at [https://blog.samaltman.com/employee- equity](https://blog.samaltman.com/employee-equity)</comment>


Ask HN: I hate working alone, but I want to pursue my startup - <AUTHOR> My concept is decent - I've received pre-seed funding from the EU off the back of it, but it now needs full-time attention to get the first customer, probably for the next six months. I'm prepared to quit my well-paying job to pursue it. I have about 2 years living expenses saved up.
But, I'm an extrovert, and quickly become depressed without being able to have that morning cup of coffee with someone, or to be able to tell someone who cares. I don't have a co-founder, and I haven't found one who would fit that doesn't have something tethering them to a regular paycheck. I can't even happily work from home for anything longer than a few days - I get very depressed.
Without coworkers, I'm worried that I'll fail. I'm not worried about hard work - I'm worried about my own psychological health.
I would love to hear some stories, from anyone who has faced a similar situation. <comment><USER2> Why don't you look at a co-working space? You wouldn't need to give up any equity, but you would get access to some of the social aspects you seem to be after. They're probably better than simply working in a public setting like a coffee shop since you'll be mixing with people doing similar things to yourself.

One thing I would say is that you are wise not to ignore your mental health. If you already know you are prone to depression when working alone, make sure you never have to.

Lastly, can you talk to anyone where you sourced the funding? Do they have any mentors etc? They might have some ideas.

<comment><AUTHOR> My startup is in Fintech, and my funders are based in Copenhagen. Despite searching hard for relevant co-working spots there on my behalf, they couldn't offer me anything.

The language barrier was an issue with Copenhagen too, so I searched hard in London, but ultimately the cost of living was prohibitive, and I didn't find the 'vibe' I was searching for either.

I'm now back in Australia, and will take from your comments that I should search harder for a decent scene domestically.

<comment><USER3> Where in Australia are you based?? I've seen a bunch of really awesome coworking spaces in Melbourne and can help you get connected to the people I know.

<comment><USER4> Yeah both Melbourne and Sydney have several places that are decent as per the people who work there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Pretty good advice so far regarding working arrangements. After pursuing a startup idea for 3+ years and having it not work out, I would also encourage you to question why it is that you need 6 months before getting an initial customer. Learn quickly and fail as fast as possible.

1) Can you pitch your idea to customers first to gauge their interest, get initial feedback before building?

2) Can you presell customers, get something like a letter of intent signed?

</comment><comment><USER6> I've been participating on RemoteTogether [1] for a few months now. I live in rural Texas -- my wife and I moved here for her grad schooling from Seattle -- and locally I haven't really made many friends and it's been a bit of a tough adjustment from me as I like the city quite a bit more than a rural setting.

RemoteTogether is a good discussion community, and we have a Slack that we all hang out on. It helps break up the mundanity of working alone at home here. Come say hi!

[1]: [https://www.remotetogether.com](https://www.remotetogether.com)

</comment><comment><USER7> Honestly, there's nothing wrong with looking at the situation and saying, "No, not for me". Plenty of sensible people do. It's quite possible that another cofounder would not be enough social stimulus for some people.

Realistically, if the company is a startup in the sense of being organized for large amounts of equity investment and rapid growth, it will probably fail whether or not there are coworkers [or even cofounders].

I'm not saying don't do it. I'm just pointing out that there is nothing wrong with coming to a conclusion either way.

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER8> My personal solution to the very same problem.

I could see that living this way, thinking this way, was of no benefit to me. I saw that I would have much greater benefit by breaking the chain of this behavior, and becoming comfortable in my own skin.

I know that these days, the more common refrain is to 'just be who you are and let the chips fall where they may'. I realized also though the behavior of catering to this desire was self limiting. There are many times in life when you will have to go it alone to be successful.

Just some advice from someone else who solved this differently.

May you have the best of luck, no matter what happens.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm not sure I would call myself an extrovert, but I definitely don't enjoy working alone in my apartment. For the past two years I've been working almost exclusively in co-working space and I'm really enjoying it. If there are some available in your area, I'd suggest auditioning a few of them until you find one that has the vibe you're looking for. For me, I really needed an open concept space with communal seating and lots of light, and the space I ended up has a pretty vibrant community. May need to just shop around a bit. Just an idea.

<comment><AUTHOR> Are you working alone, or with/for other people? Do you take intrinsic satisfaction in the work, or is it the experience of a happy user that drives you? How do you form bonds with your fellow co-working space users in what is inherently a temporary location?

Sorry for the question bombardment, and thanks in advance. I'd love to make this thing work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> A dog might be what you need. They can be trained to become therapy dogs[1]. These are used as de-stressing tools in universities, schools, disaster areas, etc. Dogs provide a level of companionship that is very nurturing to the heart. :)

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

</comment><comment><USER11> I've heard Berlin has a reasonable cost of living and a vibrant startup scene, also you would be close to Eastern European developers, should you need more programming muscle

May I ask, how did you get that EU funding? I have a couple projects in mind, a bit of money won't hurt

</comment><comment><USER12> I have it the same way, I have it best when I have somebody to say goodmorning to. Btw. I live in Copenhagen as well.</comment>


Reimplementing jQuery's Deferred as a Standalone - <AUTHOR> http://www.ous.io/2013/04/24/deferred.html

<comment><AUTHOR> This is my first post, so I'd love any sort of feedback - good and bad. Mainly constructive. Thanks</comment>


Patience is a Virtue: Revisiting Merge and Sort on Modern Processors [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/209622/patsort-sigmod14.pdf

<comment><USER2> Direct link to the article: [http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/209622/patsort- sigmod14.p...](http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/209622/patsort-sigmod14.pdf)

<comment><USER3> Thanks; changed. Submitted was [http://research.microsoft.com/apps/mobile/publication.aspx?i...](http://research.microsoft.com/apps/mobile/publication.aspx?id=209622).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Curious that in their references-section GNU qsort is linked to [http://opensource.apple.com/source/emacs/emacs-41/emacs/lib-...](http://opensource.apple.com/source/emacs/emacs-41/emacs/lib- src/qsort.c?txt) (via a url shortener). That is from emacs source tree hosted by Apple, instead of something more canonical like [https://sourceware.org/git/?p=glibc.git;a=blob;f=stdlib/qsor...](https://sourceware.org/git/?p=glibc.git;a=blob;f=stdlib/qsort.c;hb=HEAD)

There are some differences between the two, I'm not sure if the changes are anything beyond cosmetic.</comment>


Ask HN: Is there room for a new 'curated' search engine? - <AUTHOR> Google results seem to be getting progressively worse, and even if they aren't, there are too many relevant websites to accurately display on a single search results page. It seems to me that a return to the original Yahoo model might actually have a place in 2019. <comment><USER2> Is part of what makes google less useful their attempt to "curate"? It's worth thinking about what constitutes curation.

I would say that adapting results towards expected customer preferences (eg giving pet owners and programmers different results for "getting started with python") is curation.

Perhaps more controversially, so too is the pruning of results at all – if most of what I'm searching for is spam/malware, then so be it.

Search engines are already very curated, IMO. There's room to differentiate by choosing _NOT_ to curate. I would be curious to use a search engine that used nothing but PageRank circa ~2006.

Pedantically, any algorithm/ranking/weighting system is unavoidably curatory by design.

But to answer what I think you mean, yes, I think there's room for opinionated search engines for many values of "opinionated". Another way to think of these might be "contexts" that you apply overtop of a search engine, and perform many searches within that context.

For example, when I'm searching for front end things, I wish google were smart enough to time-scope my searches dynamically using knowledge I don't have. I search for Mongoose operations and get top results from 2011 saying X doesn't exist, but it was added in 2016. I would like to see only results from when the thing I wanted existed. But only ever searching the last two years _all the time_ costs results that would be helpful in other times.

When searching for device repair instructions, I wish the engine were able to adopt my estimations about sites that aggregate forum replies or repair instructions in automated ways to gather clicks, and either banish them or loudly mark them.

I'm not sure how to do this with major traction, or without being eaten by google, but "ecosystem of many opinionated and accurate search contexts" feels like it would add value to the world.

</comment><comment><USER3> Curation is unlikely to be helpful when it comes to a search engine of any decent size, in my opinion.

However, I agree Google's results are getting worse, but I think that is more a result of the way they weight results, and personalize them.

Covering personalization - I've yet to see it work effectively for a large audience. It does drive certain markets, but by whales rather than everyone. So most people get things badly, and a few are driven towards a certain goalpoint, in Google's case adverts, where they tend to make clicks or purchases of the intended partners.

On weighting results - Google seems to have stopped weighting results for relevance a long time ago. They seem to prioritise things differently now. Exactly how I'm not sure, but it does seem to include Recent Events, using technology Google has a vested interest in, and Partners, and all those get addressed before relevancy.

If you can solve the relevancy problem (which is huge, from above, Recent does not always mean Relevant, but it can), then you can certainly attract the technological crowd.

Google seems to have aimed their search engine at popular events, news and social media.

Where would you aim your search engine?

</comment><comment><USER4> For sure. I think there is both demand and it's possible to scale it. We have examples of amazingly successful group curation at scale with wikipedia, stackoverflow etc. We also have forum platforms that successfully curate information, Reddit, HN etc (which many people use to find better recommendations than Google).

However, the value in curation is only on a particular subset of queries. Those where you want to discover information and have some introductory terms to go on ("Motorbike Safety", "Analytics SAAS", "Buying a Fridge" etc). What youre looking for is an expert in a niche area to point you in the right direction. Curation is very beneficial here.

The second type of query, where you are looking for a specific piece of information (specific business, specific book review, weird fact) etc Google already does fine on. And curation wont help (nor will it scale on such precise info).

</comment><comment><USER5> Some thoughts:

\- If there are too many relevant websites to display on one page, search vs. manual directory does not really make a difference.

\- The curated model was long kept up by DMOZ, which had an army of volunteer editors but eventually shut down. Some editors took over and built curlie.org, but there is no innovation since DMOZ (which itself had no innovation)

\- Curation is a big topic nowadays. Pinterest for example is based on that idea. However, things might be a bit more decentralised these days. I am just thinking about the awsome-* lists on GitHub.

\- Manual directories may fail build a "searchable" taxonomy. I am searching maybe for a technical support company specialised in that product, located in this city, offering low rates. This is an easy example, but there are tougher ones. General purpose information retrieval (like Google does) might be a better fit for such problems than prebuilt taxonomies.

\- Based on the last two points, curation might be more successful in small topics rather than in a Yahoo-like all-topics setting.

<comment><USER6> Pinterest is a completely parasitic website that doesn't provide backlinks to content, and hides results from google search. No attribution and no original content. That is completely disgusting to me. There is no way to get to the original post. It honestly wouldn't surprise me if they were hotlinking too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I think there is room for 30 - 50 curated niche search engines - done similar but different then the old dmoz and yahoo.

In so many ways google is failing many niches that it once served well. I have been doodling ideas on how to do some of those niches better, like adult.

</comment><comment><USER8> I'd say so. Google is a joke, it doesn't give relevant results anymore and limits itself solely to 'pop culture' results. There needs to be 'contextual search', i.e look at your previous queries and factor that into your current search.

<comment><USER9> I don't work at Google, but considering the amount of research scientists on the search team and the troves of data they have on users, I think they already use contextual data quite heavily.

Anecdotally, if you type a google search for something along the lines of spring break in Florida, then search Google Flights, it auto-populates the dates of Spring Break into the search.

<comment><USER10> I see this behavior constantly in autocomplete.

Search for [flights to london], then start typing [things to do] and the first suggestion will be [things to do in london].

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I really want one for personal webpages/projects only. Oh, and forums.

</comment><comment><USER9> This might be close to what you are looking for. Human Curated is their goal - [https://find.xyz/about](https://find.xyz/about)

</comment><comment><USER12> Curated and Niche. Google is still great for general searches in my opinion but when I need a drill down level of search that can only happen with curation, we have a gap there.

</comment><comment><USER13> The problem is that there is no way that curated can scale (at least, I don't see one). As the web has grown, curated becomes less and less possible.

</comment><comment><USER14> My go-to tends to be site:reddit.com as a filter for most search queries.

Works pretty well in most cases.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm planning to create one , perhaps more of an "information engine" rather .</comment>


The Computer for the 21st Cenury (1991) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.lri.fr/~mbl/Stanford/CS477/papers/Weiser-SciAm.pdf <comment><USER2> I remember reading this article in Scientific American at the time. It seemed like it had a lot of things right even then, although it also seemed to contain some hopelessly off base ideas as well. One of the interesting big but close misses here is the idea of "tabs". You see this in the Star Trek: The Next Generation (and related) TV series as well from the same time frame. This idea that ubiquitous computing would mean that we would have lots of computing devices that each were not very sophisticated. The reality is that it's actually shockingly easy to make very capable computing devices (e.g. smartphones, tablets, etc.) and for the most part you only need one of each variant (e.g. an ebook optimized one, a tablet, a smartphone, etc.) instead of many.

Also note the sharp contrast between the concept of "scrap computers" that have no identity whatsoever and the reality of today where everyone's mobile computers (phones, tablets, e-readers, laptops, etc.) are all intensely personalized. A lot of these errors are based on trying to naively map pre- digital behaviors and use cases onto a world of ubiquitous computing, rather than imagining entirely new methods of interaction and use. Why bother duplicating hardware to maintain two separate pieces of information locally when you can simply have two files open in different tabs in an editor, or two google docs, or emails, or what-have-you?

<comment><USER3> > _for the most part you only need one of each variant (e.g. an ebook > optimized one, a tablet, a smartphone, etc.) instead of many._

"need" sets a very low bar for criticism. You can argue that you don't _need_ pretty much anything.

The question is really whether there is a way for many device-instances to have a sufficiently large increase in cost-benefit ratio compared to using a single device-instance.

For example, I find it plausible that multiple tablets could be quite useful if there was a good way to coordinate the displays and interactions between them (e.g. for proof reading and arranging material). Such benefits would require changes in the OS UI, probably.

<comment><USER4> This is totally doable and could have been done 10+ years ago. Except it didn't happen, because unfortunately, the problem isn't technology. It's business.

Software vendors have _no_ incentive for making it easy for people to exchange data between devices and software they have no control over. "Ubiquitous computing" gives them at best little to no business value, nowhere near enough to justify effort to make their applications support it, and they see anything that makes it easier to extract data from under their control as a business threat.

These days, big companies like to create cloud platform to enable a limited "ubiquitous computing" for themselves - that is, you can work on something on multiple devices, as long as you're using their specific platform and have Internet connection always on.

The technical building blocks need to happen at OS level and they could, but OS vendors won't bother either, knowing that applications won't make proper use of it. Commercial applications will try to maximize the amount of data they suck in, and minimize the amount of data they let out. It's fundamentally the same reason we don't have universal APIs for websites, why websites fight so hard _against_ people who try to make them interoperable (see also, the Google Duplex HN thread).

I really want to see ubiquitous computing happening, but I can't see how it's going to, given that the software industry will reject it even if it was handed to them by OSS people ready and working, on a golden platter.

<comment><USER5> _"Software vendors have no incentive for making it easy for people to exchange data between devices and software they have no control over"_

That isn't needed to get the multi-device UIs for _"multiple tablets could be quite useful if there was a good way to coordinate the displays and interactions between them"_ ; the devices could all be from the same manufacturer. For example, games where not all players get the same information (e.g. scrabble, cluedo, many card games) could have the shared UI on a tablet, with players using their phones for looking at their cards/stones.

<comment><USER4> In that case there's exactly nothing preventing such UI from happening. But that's not "ubiquitous computing", that's just "a multiplayer game".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a prescient article given the state of computing at the time it was written. In reading it I also wondered if this explains Steve Jobs insistence of using the name iPad (he was pressured to change the name because the default reference of "pad" was to something rather different). But, the author really blows it at the end (the last two paragraphs) when he claims that ubiquitous computing will mean the decline of the computer addict and of information overload.

<comment><USER7> It's probably how the ThinkPad got its name.

<comment><USER8> Before the ThinkPad there was the THINK pad [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9A9GBTFrFTQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9A9GBTFrFTQ)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I was reading the paper published on Project Jaquard and this post was cited as one of the inspirations. Furthermore, it was also said that Project Jaquard fulfils some of the predictions made in the paper.

</comment><comment><USER10> I had the great fortune to meet Mark Weiser when I was an intern at PARC in the late 90s. He was an amazing visionary.

</comment><comment><USER11> from his wikipedia page:

\- Technology should create calm.

It's as inspiringly true, as inherently rare.

Calm IMO is most often a byproduct of long learning process and craft. This brings know how. In these days of impatient ever shifting grounds, you only get stress.

</comment><comment><USER12> typo in title: Cenury

</comment><comment><USER13> Fascinating article.</comment>


We Put a 3D Graphics Layer in Applesoft Basic - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> [https://paleotronic.com/2019/03/12/theres-a-3d-flying- dragon...](https://paleotronic.com/2019/03/12/theres-a-3d-flying-dragon- inside-microm8s-applesoft-microbasic-interpreter/) seems to be what the url should be

</comment><comment><USER3> Does the link just come back here ?</comment>


Rules of the seat-acquisition game on the Overground - <AUTHOR> http://www.brelson.com/2011/10/sit-down-on-overground-prepare-for-war/ <comment><USER2> Sounds like quite a different set of tactics from to the cross-country theatre of war.

There is a whole other type of player on the x-country trains: the seat- reserver. These people allocate themselves an assigned seat number for their journey when they buy their tickets. This is a completely free-of-charge option available to all users of the UK rail network, but only a select few are ruthless enough to go through with it and wield those little cards against their fellow man.

Some of the saddest, most unnecessary arguments I've ever witnessed on public transport involved seat-reservers. On one journey, my girlfriend was sat next to a stranger, and with me having failed to find a seat I was stood nearby. A seat-reserver showed up and demanded the seat of the woman next to my girlfriend. This woman was somewhat old and did not want to give up her seat. An argument broke out (a polite British white middle-class argument, mind you), and my girlfriend decided that she would give up her seat before shit started getting real.

In the meantime, the conductor had been summoned. By the time he arrived, these two women who had just been arguing were now sitting uncomfortably close to one another and attempting to mend the fence. Things had begun to calm back down, but the ensuing discussion with the conductor stirred everything right back up. It transpired that the seat-reserver's ticket had entitled her to my girlfriend's seat all along, and the older lady next to her needn't have worried. The two people made an awkward show of offering to swap seats with each other and declining.

The stakes on the cross-country battlefield are high. Fuck it up, and you're jammed against the toilet doors nose-to-nose with three strangers for the next several hours. It's no wonder some people feel tempted to reserve seats, but I've always felt quite strongly that able-bodied people asking other able- bodied people to move based on the authority of a small piece of card is a bit pathetic. Don't reserve yourself a seat unless you have a legitimate need to sit down.

<comment><USER3> maybe it's being up in the northeast, on trains that aren't standing room only past the first stop, but I generally see people respect the seat reservations. I've only seen a "that's my seat" discussion (not argument) maybe twice in the past three years.

My only complaint is people who think their ticket reserves a second seat for their jacket.

Oh, and the stag/hen dos in coming into Newcastle on Fridays, damn they can stink up a train.

<comment><USER4> Stag/hen do's coming into Newcastle and the school holidays are a _nightmare_ for rail commuting, invariably leading to stress and headaches all round.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Saw a young guy get on the DLR at bank with a limp. There was a bit of commotion as he excused himself past people and asked someone to shift out the disabled seats.

All the time I'm thinking 'typical Londoners, they could have made that so much easier for that poor guy if they just held back for 2 seconds'

He got off at Canary Wharf minus the limp! I laughed for about an hour.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is why we can't have nice things.

Not only talking about his subpar game (he didn't even know he could check windows), he introduced more players into the secret society of sit-down artists.

Pathetic.

</comment><comment><USER4> The interesting thing is this can actually be reapplied to something even more important than getting a seat on the tube, pub queues.

Pub queues have similar social dynamics, as the queue is a lie and it works much the same way (unless the bar staff are very, very good at tracking punters) as the seat-acquision game. You're looking for the specific formations of people who've ordered or are just ordering, where the densest clusters are and so on, but you are not alone. There's another thirsty, strategy minded drinker taking the same tactics, game on.

</comment><comment><USER7> I've seen people act like this, and kind of understand it, but it's a high investment for a very low payoff. It reminds me of people who fight for position by lane changing in cities with big commutes.

Or being determined to get off the plane a bit earlier of being aggressive at baggage collection. The petty gains don't begin to compensate for the energy loss, and the effect on your personality.

Over multiple rounds of play it's highly unstrategic. The only way to win is to identify losing games, and avoid playing them. I have built a habit where I always stand unless the carriage is practically empty, and then I never have to interact with the situation.

Generally English commuters are a respectful bunch: reserved, quiet, they let people off the train before trying to get on, there are still plenty of men (who want seats) who ignore it if ladies are standing. Celebrate it. It's nice not to live in Italy.

</comment><comment><USER8> In a way, I'm happy I'm not the only one who has thought about this situation.

I do this every time I'm on an outbound 7 train in New York. The train runs first through a hipster/young area, then a number of distinct ethnic neighborhoods, and finally ends in Flushing (the city's second Chinatown). Needless to say, strategically standing next to certain people in seats is the way to go.

</comment><comment><USER9> That was a good read, but I don't think it's relevant to HN. Therefore, I must not upvote.

<comment><USER10> <http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

This post is all about analysing the dynamics of a situation and finding the optimal behaviour within that situation. That seems highly relevant to this community.

<comment><USER9> I guess you are correct. I much prefer it over endless discussions about whether entrepreneurs are only the people who raise VC money or not. I'll upvote it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hard to describe how much i enjoyed this.

<comment><USER12> +1. Reminds me of Urinal Game Theory:

<http://people.scs.carleton.ca/~kranakis/Papers/urinal.pdf>

NB: Haven't actually read that paper, only the abstract, I've just discussed the concept in a class...I think I might read it later today!

<comment><USER13> I was asked a question on this topic when I was interviewing to be an intern at Microsoft over a decade ago. To this day it is the only interesting interview question I have ever been asked.</comment></comment></comment>


Grid Style Sheets – Replace CSS with a Constraint-Solver - <AUTHOR> http://gridstylesheets.org/ <comment><USER2> As GUI dev who worked with Apple's AutoLayout extensively I can confidently say constraint-based layout is a trap. It looks like more intuitive way to go on simple examples, but complexity spikes quickly as number of controls goes up. It's more complicated, more resilient to changes (harder to maintain), easy to get wrong, hard to understand and debug, bugs generally look uglier (what would be minor misplacement in CSS often becomes overlapping or clipping). It does not support word wrapping without hacks and restrictive assumptions about width. It is a real mess to insert/remove controls dynamically.

Compared to previous experience with Qt, I don't see any advantage of constraint-based layout over box-based layout.

<comment><USER3> I saw the headline , didn't even read the article and came here to say this and saw your comment.

I've been struggling with auto-layout for about six months now. I finally get it but there's a certain impedance mismatch between how you want your elements to be laid out and what constraints are required to achieve the same result. Humans beings aren't wired to intuitively think like a constraint solver.

I'm not an experienced developer but my thinking on this issue is that the platform should provide some functionality to achieve the most common boiler- plate layouts and anything more complex should be written in code.

Usually constraints are simple and so are the layouts. But to achieve more complex layouts you need constraints which are at cross purposes to each other but have different priorities. It's not intuitive to work through this stuff.

Here's an example :

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/25766747/emulating- aspect...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/25766747/emulating-aspect-fit- behaviour-using-autolayout-constraints-in-xcode-6)

The answer there is great but tell me , you could have aspect fitted the view to it's parent in just four lines of code instead of going through this confusing series of constraints.

I was making a tic tac toe game and I decided to try and draw the boxes and lines using auto layout. The constraints were making me tear my hair out and finally I wrote 5 lines of custom layout code and it took me only ten minutes and this was after futzing about with the constraints for half an hour and it did what I wanted to on an iPhone , iPad and for any height or width.

I personally believe in a simplified version of FlexBox for common cases (yes I think it needs to be even simpler) and custom code for anything more complex.

Bringing in all the baggage of a constraint solver to do your layout is like trying to use an Abrams Tank to kill a mouse.

<comment><USER4> Perhaps the right approach would be to still use constraints to describe the layout, but to infer those constraints from examples provided interactively by the designer. The workflow would be:

10 designer creates an initial mock-up

20 designer re-sizes the window / uses another device

30 designer alters the style on that new format, re-sizing boxes, changing font sizes, etc.

40 constraint solver finds a minimal set of constraints consistent with the designer wishes

50 goto 20

<comment><USER5> Some sort of genetic constraint generator, where the fitness function is examples provided by designers?

<comment><USER4> The examples are meta-constraints. The fitness function is the parsimoniousness of layout constraints, under the constraint that they reproduce the examples.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interestingly, @vjeux specifically preferred flexbox to a constraint solver (cassowary) for react native: [https://twitter.com/nikitonsky/status/561941079038390273](https://twitter.com/nikitonsky/status/561941079038390273)

His main points:

* you can't express text wrapping which is a huge issue. You've got to do workarounds in order to support it

* the api is very reference based. You need to say that the right of this element is left of this other one. whereas in react you don't want to assign every element you create to a local variable to get that reference the best api with react is one based on containers. <HorizontalLayout>... This is what I started with in react native but then, i realized that this was so close to flexbox that I could just use it instead :) you could use cassowary as an implementation detail of flexbox but that doesn't give you much

* also, when i tested cassowary, the js version, it was extremely slow. The version that we have in react native barely appears in traces for real code that we have

</comment><comment><USER6> One of the absolute worst things about iOS development is struggling with auto layout. Sure there are some things you can do with it that are hard to do in a box layout method but 95% of the time it's just a massive headache to achieve something you could do with flexbox or even Bootstrap in a much more transparent way. In fact, one of the most appealing things about React Native is that it lets you do iOS layout _with_ flexbox.

So I'll pass on similar constraint-based approaches to HTML layout, thanks!

<comment><USER7> Agreed completely. Constraint-based layout solvers are very appealing to programmers because they seem intuitively like the "right" solution -- but that intuition is based on the programmer's mental model of user interfaces. Constraints don't match the way designers think and work, so they're not good as a non-programmer's interface.

As often happens with solutions that are abstractly "right", constraint-based layout engines do a great job of fixing complex theoretical non-problems that nobody was asking to have fixed, while at the same time failing to address real-world issues that impede users' everyday workflows.

<comment><USER8> > appealing to programmers because they seem intuitively like the "right" > solution … Constraints don't match the way designers work

Interesting, I'd say almost the opposite.

These constraints capture almost exactly the same thing as the orange guide lines you see in Keynote (or Powerpoint, or whatever). This is inset from the top right by 10, this button is the same width as the one above, the distance between these two buttons is eight.

That's almost exactly what designers' specs look like in my experience – screenshots annotated with lines with numbers on 'em.

<comment><USER9> > That's almost exactly what designers' specs look like in my experience – > screenshots annotated with lines with numbers on 'em.

Yes, but that's because those designers were asked to specify the layout in engineer terms. :) That doesn't mean that that's the way they think and conceive the UI.

<comment><USER10> Actually - learning to draw, one of first thing to learn is proportions.

Distance between eyes is equal to one additional eye; nose lies on a line that connects it to bottom of the ear; mouth are about halfway between chin and nose; body is about seven heads tall, etc.

I'd say constraint solving is pretty much in line with that kind of thinking.

<comment><USER9> You're right. The drawing canons are, in a way, constraints.

However, it's not relevant for this, I think. Drawing is very different, goal- wise, from design. Designers do learn how to draw early on their education, but I think it's more a matter of learning how to "see" and developing other useful skills. The approach to drawing doesn't translate directly to the approach used while designing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> From their demo: structure.gss

         @h |-(#message)~-~(#follow)~-~(#following)-(#followers)-|
         in(#profile-card)
         gap($sgap)
            !strong {
              &[top] == &:next[top];
            }
          }

If you inject stuff like this into a project, make sure you're doing it solo. 'cause if you're on my team, i'll slap you.

WTF is this voodoo? Less and Sass aren't complex enough? CSS isn't hard enough to work with as it is?

<comment><USER12> > _' cause if you're on my team, i'll slap you_

Because you're so macho, right? And anything you don't understand shouldn't be used.

[EDIT] I find the sample code quite readable -- as long as one understands that it does more than constraints in that example, and that you of course have to read on the symbols to get them, like you'd have to read on Ruby's @, C's * and &, on regular expressions, etc.

But this macho talk from "team leaders" I dislike.

What exactly does it try to prove, even "metaphorically"? That the leader is so arrogant that wont discuss but bully his team? How about we reverse it: who would want to work in a team with some slap happy lead? Who'd want to hire that team or acquire that "talent"?

(And would this talk help the IT industry attract more female programmers?)

<comment><USER13> Way to overreact to some shallow taunting. You read a lot of things into this that aren't there.

<comment><USER14> Look at how he/she tacks some feminist pandering onto the end of the post. It's just one step away from accusing the original commenter of creating a hostile work environment.

This is the exact type of person you don't want on your team: thin-skinned, easily offended and expecting the same level of mollycoddling we pour onto children (another problem in itself).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Demos were all slightly wrong on Android chrome until I rotated screen at which point they completely broke. Using js to augment layouts with useful functionality is a great idea, but relying on it for core styling is a terrible choice.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'd love to use this. But in the back of my head I still think javascript should be optional if possible ... not that 99% of the rest of the world cares ...

<comment><USER17> > javascript should be optional if possible

I got a blank page so I closed the tab.

Any page that requires javascript and I don't need to use (at the level of do my taxes) or that I don't trust the owners of gets the same treatment.

So yeah optional javascript is a thing unless 100% of your audience are absolutely required to use your site.

EDIT given that sites today use google analytics instead of their own server logs I wonder if non-javascript users just don't even get logged by the javascript-for-everything brigade?

<comment><USER18> You are a minority. Perhaps not here (HN) because "I disable Javascript" seems to be a pretty trendy thing to say (:P), but in the world at large you are.

It's bad enough we have to build websites that work on IE8. We have to worry about screen readers and other accessibility problems, but we also have to worry about a fraction of users that disable a fundamental browser feature literally every site uses? Nah. It'll break and you can expect it to break! Sorry. :)

<comment><USER19> You have to make your site accessible to search engines, so as long as you're not doing something weird like using javascript for styling and layout, just treating users who have disabled javascript as search engines should work just fine.

<comment><USER20> Google has been working pretty aggressively at learning to crawl JS-framework- powered apps lately. I'd still play it safe and serve up HTML when possible, but JS isn't the SEO black hole it once was.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I go to the demo, resize the browser window, and the layout falls apart. Not a good advertisement.

[http://i.imgur.com/KkxICEw.png](http://i.imgur.com/KkxICEw.png)

</comment><comment><USER22> Constraints are the right approach to layout. This should have happened years ago. The important concept here is defining layout like this:

        #elmA[top-left] == "area"[top-left];
        #elmB[bottom-right] == "area"[top-right];

The trouble with this is that it's expressed as a programmer's approach; everything is about variables, not geometry. Constraints should be input from a GUI, like Dreamweaver. To see what this looks like done right, try sketch mode in Autodesk Inventor, where you can draw lines, circles, and arcs and constrain them to each other in various ways. Designers would love it if they could do layout that way, and we could lay off a few thousand Javascript programmers.

<comment><USER23> As a non-designer, I disagree. I played around with FreeCAD a bit, and I was constantly wishing "just let me enter the damn formula" while messing with those graphical constraints. Or could be it's just implemented badly there...

<comment><USER24> Newest XCode does this in the right way I think. It lets you do most of the stuff from the GUI (and detects conflicts), but you also have the power to enter constraints manually in the code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Auto-Layout is the worst. I used to spend so much time trying to figure out why things didn't line up or behave like they are supposed to. Luckily pods like Masonry and Paper make things easier but still, it is frustrating. To have it in CSS sounds like an absolute nightmare.

</comment><comment><USER26> Autolayout is great once you've spent the first three days pulling your hair in anger.

Yet, i would absolutely not use it without the wysiwyg tools xcode provide, such as warnings on conflicts or automatic preview after changing the uppermost container's frame.

</comment><comment><USER27> I just watched this GSS intro talk from last year: [https://vimeo.com/91393694](https://vimeo.com/91393694) It looks interesting, but obviously from this and the demo page it needs alot of work to be ready for the mass market.

One piece of advice for Dan if you are reading HN, you have a nice relaxed speaking style but please stop using the word "crazy" or "it gets pretty crazy" which for me at least parses as: "too complex to work with".

</comment><comment><USER28> If your layout system's site looks like complete arse on a major browser like IE, your layout system deserves to be ignored.

<comment><USER29> +1. Unusable on IE. Screenshot for those not on Windows: [http://i.imgur.com/oFoAbAS.png](http://i.imgur.com/oFoAbAS.png)

<comment><USER30> Looked even worse on my tablet [http://i.imgur.com/tP5YSTu.png](http://i.imgur.com/tP5YSTu.png)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Kudos!

I've been thinking about constraint satisfaction solver for layout, and keep it in mind as a possible project for a future. Great to see someone shares this view and went on to implement it.

I haven't studied this concrete project deeply, but the idea in general seems appealing, because CSS is hell.

(The site says this constraint language is used in Apple products - I didn't know that).

<comment><USER32> Not sure what you mean that "css is hell", although I understand from working with a lot of programmers (I do front end they do back end) that CSS is seen as something you might also want to learn but not really because it isn't proper programming. CSS as it is now is incredibly powerful and works almost as it should (almost int he way all languages/technology are works in progress).

I can see this (GSS) as having its place amongst a developers list of tools, but ultimately I can't see how it is better than Flexbox, or why I would want to a javascript library to do layout, or who in their right mind would want to pass a project using this on to someone else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> > [http://puu.sh/igQ03/9d6f0ffcb5.jpg](http://puu.sh/igQ03/9d6f0ffcb5.jpg)

I'm opposed to most CSS grid styles as I feel they trade accessibility for a faster production speed. This seems to have neither of those benefits.

</comment><comment><USER34> That profile card demo completely breaks if you reduce the browser height a bit:

[http://i.imgur.com/MLhaheD.png](http://i.imgur.com/MLhaheD.png)

Perhaps this is why the web uses box-based rather than constraint-based layout.

</comment><comment><USER35> None of the demos work correctly on safari iOS

<comment><USER36> Just tried a few demos on iPad 3 running iOS8, works fine for me.

<comment><USER34> Yes, because the iPad has a large screen. It doesn't work well on iPhone-sized screens.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I must admit a certain trepidation anytime I hear the phrase, "and replace it with a constraint solver!" Not that they aren't useful and powerful tools. That's exactly the problem, they're very powerful tools. I'm not entirely convinced that doing website layout should require so much computing power.

Also, ironically, the site looks pretty bad on mobile and the entire left side of the page is chopped off. I don't take any "new ideas in style" page seriously if the mobile (or desktop, or whatever I'm using) experience on that page is bad.

</comment><comment><USER38> I found the picture at the top to be a funny reflection of the problems of layout. The bird (I believe that's a cassowary as on the book cover) in a spacesuit is an interesting juxtaposition artistically, but the helmet face plate won't be able to rotate down over the birds beak and seal the helmet. A 'layout' case that the image didn't consider. Layout is hard.

</comment><comment><USER39> I don't trust a layout engine whose webpage advertising the engine has centering issues... iPhone 5s in portrait does not center the section starting with 'Polyfills' but does so in landscape mode; I'm pretty sure this was not the expected design.

<comment><USER40> The bottom is cut off as well. Where it says e-mail address and then something else but you cannot see it. Like this idea but this looks a bit bad for someone offering a solution to css bad parts :/

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Heh, I'm looking at React Native with Flex Box precisely because of difficulties I've had with AutoLayout.

</comment><comment><USER42> What is up with that logo? That's a terrifying chimeric space thing that I don't want on my machine.

</comment><comment><USER43> Lol, I have a post from years and years ago where I rail against 960 gs and the like "grid style sheets" for not being semantic, and about a year ago one of the authors of this emailed me asking me to amend it specifying that I wasn't talking about this. I declined, and went on to comment how the use of JavaScript for layout was even worse, lol. I was a little irritated at the hubris of the guy and may have gone a little overboard.

You can't choose such an incredibly generic name though and then expect all existing references to update, that's simply illogical.

Update: [http://jdon.at/1cgIw](http://jdon.at/1cgIw) the emails in question

<comment><USER44> Its funny that you post that, he comes off a lot better than you in that thread.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Building YouTube Alternative - <AUTHOR> If you would be tasked with creating youtube alternative(not at that scale, of course), how would you approach it from technical point off view? Which technologies, patterns, designs.. would you go with and why?<p>As a side note - would you consider a sort of distributed pattern, like bitchute is doing with bit torrent? <comment><USER2> You're asking deep architecture questions that sound simple but require a lot of consideration.

* choose a front-end language your team is comfortable with, because it will need to be written quickly and be maintained * choose a back-end language for the same reasons * decide whether you're going with an SPA and start splitting requirements * start with `ffmpeg` as your transcoder because it's free and easy * plan for the scale you expect * auto-deployment on the cloud for the machines converting video * messaging so the app can add transcoding jobs to the queue, and the transcoders can take jobs from the queue, and status of jobs reported to the user * research royalties you'll need to pay for the various types of video (MPEG-LA is a good place to start for h.264) * do this _early_ * choose your tech based on your team's experience and comfort * sometimes you'll need to hire to expand the comfort * prefer OSS over commercial to start, but be prepared to spend money for support * unless you need some specific functionality that is only available commercially

And a hundred other things :)

I've done this a couple of times for companies in the past (Primerica, ConocoPhillips), including transcoding _during_ uploading a couple of years before anyone else (like encoding.com) was doing it (totally bragging, yes).

<comment><AUTHOR> i think that AV1 will take over the h264/h265 due to licensing.</comment></comment>


Magic tricks created using artificial intelligence - <AUTHOR> http://scienceblog.com/75358/magic-tricks-created-using-artificial-intelligence-first-time/#5JWJjypPfkqJs2vO.97 <comment><USER2> I'm a magician, and it's one of my biggest passions in life.

This is being reported in many publications as the first time artificial intelligence has been used to create a magic trick. This is false, not only has it been done by others before, it has been done by this team at Queen's Mary University before. Saying it's the first time certainly makes it more news worthy though.

Edit 1: If I were communicating this to someone else, I would say that they used analysis to create a new method, not a new trick. It's a new method, if it's really new, I haven't validated that in magic, and the vast majority of time any method you have isn't new. But perhaps it is, I will take that at face value for now.

Edit 2: "we suspected that audiences would be suspicious of the involvement of technology in the delivery of a trick but we've found out that isn't the case."

Audiences are suspicious of the involvement of a phone during a trick. This is a minor contention, but their quote is flat out wrong. It would be interesting to see why they came to this conclusion.

Edit 3: Here is a video for the main trick discussed, "Phoney". Apologies for the misc intro, this was the best version I could find.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5qWi3yeu0M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5qWi3yeu0M)

Edit 4: Analysis of the method of the trick -

The captions say the cards are shuffled, but they aren't. They can only be cut. From there you deal 6 cards, and ask the spectator in order to tell if you if they are red and black. From there, you can determine the card.

Edit 5: And for my last trick, I found this method isn't even new, I can see it published by Persi Diaconis - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persi_Diaconis](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persi_Diaconis)

Edit 6: As with any method, I might find a significantly earlier providence for the method, but I'm still looking for my own sake.

<comment><USER3> For Edit 3, I think you might have included the wrong link. That's a very short video that shows only the setup of the trick. Maybe this one would be better? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hHgEa0CAdU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hHgEa0CAdU)

And while we're at it, is there any reason the videos emphasize the flip to show the face of the cards as they are being laid out? If they are going to do this, it seems like a much simpler and direct way to do the trick.

<comment><USER2> Re: Edit 3 - Thanks. I was trying to show one where the text was readable. I think both work, as far as I can tell.

The video is actually the worst way I've seen to perform this method/trick. The flip is actually unnecessary, as is even asking for the color of each individual card.

I really would like to continue further, but I already feel bad about any exposure I've included.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is it AI? They had to formalize a problem and define what a "trick" is. So the problem becomes a search for a solution in a space of possibilities. If the space is small then brute-force search will find all the solutions. I don't think this kind of approach has anything to do with AI. Of course if the space to search is large then genetic algorithms or other AI solutions can be used and we can say it's AI...

Looks like "AI" is a cool term nowadays and it's hijacking the more basic notion of formalizing a problem and using a computer.

<comment><USER2> At the moment, I can't find anything they've added to a known card trick. Let alone how it was AI.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yep. Systems that construct narratives like that can be entertaining. Performance and presentation of self are key skills for a chatterbot on the right side of the uncanny valley. (I.e. we can make an actor that plays Jarvis before we make Jarvis.)

</comment><comment><USER6> Its last trick will be to make us all disappear :D</comment>


Ffcms – FFmpeg's -filter_complex made simple - <AUTHOR> http://stryku.pl/poetry/ffcms.html <comment><USER2> This is really awesome -- FFmpeg's filter_complex is powerful and appropriately named "complex" lol.

I built and sold a company built largely around FFmpeg and this type of tool would've been really useful for understanding how FFmpeg's filter chain works. If you're interested in some non-trivial OSS examples, check out [https://github.com/transitive-bullshit/ffmpeg-gl- transition](https://github.com/transitive-bullshit/ffmpeg-gl-transition) and [https://github.com/transitive-bullshit/ffmpeg- concat](https://github.com/transitive-bullshit/ffmpeg-concat).

One non-obvious piece of advice I have for developers delving into ffmpeg's filter_complex is to try and keep the filter graphs as short and simple as possible. Creating complex filter graphs programmatically (as ffcms does in this case) is super powerful, but I've also found in practice that larger filter graphs often lead to random, impossible to debug errors. This could be due to anything from some combination of VM resource constraints, internal ffmpeg leaks that compound at scale, etc etc.

My advice is to think carefully about what you want to use ffmpeg for. It's _excellent_ at transcoding and doing minor filter graphs but trying to get too crazy with complex filter graphs will lead you down a dark path that imho ffmpeg wasn't really meant for. If you can break up your complex filter effects into smaller, isolated ffmpeg commands it may be slightly slower but your rendering pipeline will be significantly more robust.

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad to hear that you like it (:

Thank you for the links. I'll check them out.

Aaand of course, thanks for the advice. Personally, I've never been in a situation where `filter_complex` caused problems. But, I've never done some weird filtering there too, so you may be right.

I'm not saying that now, with ffcms, you should write JSONs that produce an A4 ffmpeg command. If you're doing so, something is not right.

For now, it's just a tool that helps me with timelapse creation for my fiancée. Let's see how it evolves.

<comment><USER2> That's an awesome use case I hope your fiancee appreciates all your hard work haha.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> " _-f lavfi -i testsrc - declaration of an input. The input format is lavfi, the input file is testsrc. This is duplicated four times to imitate four different inputs._ "

You can feed a single input multiple times in a filtergraph, so you can make do with only one. In this case, it hardly matters, but the input packet will be demuxed and decoded only once, unlike in the examples.

<comment><AUTHOR> True, but I wanted to stick to the official example.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I spent quite a while trying to replace the syntax of FFmpeg's filter-graphs with a tree-structure of nodes. Then about a week in I remembered why you should never build a DSL over a DSL.

I personally find the FFmpeg syntax to not need further abstraction. There's more than a few projects that try and replace the graph and they'll be stuck trying to keep pace with version creep.

<comment><USER5> > Then about a week in I remembered why you should never build a DSL over a > DSL

Yes.. I was very excited to do the same, even automate it in a way.

It's a tool that is (IMO) impossible to automate.. Making it easier is project dependent... But it wont translate for someone else usually.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Ffmpeg's built-in filtering has gotten a lot more advanced since i last looked. Is it possible to use this as a full/near-full avisynth replacement?

Is it possible to compile avisynth code down to a filter_complex statement?

Is anyone using Vapoursynth?

</comment><comment><USER7> Thank you. Very welcome addition. You could of course use a script for that, but that requires more effort / is more difficult for a lot of people to understand.

I hope there will be a similar structure (or DSL) for imagemagick, as it's it has the same difficulties.

<comment><USER5> I can say from experience of my own and others, that people usually keep these close to their chest, I consider mine a bible. In fairness, its a tool, so what you do with it is up to you. It's really hard to organise a standard library for even video work as each source is always a bit different, given the amazing community aroudn questions and answers I suspspect nobody wants to have a standard the same as ImageMagic.. It really is a different beast.

Edit : With certain frames, certain 'standards' settings would not result the same, so.. It's really impossible to have 1.

You might have 1 clip which requires 2 entirely different settings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This FFmpeg Python bindings [0] provides wrapper for filter_complex which simplifies its use a lot !

[0]: [https://github.com/kkroening/ffmpeg- python](https://github.com/kkroening/ffmpeg-python)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's actually awesome. Didn't know about this feature but I'll take a look for sure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Love it. FFmpeg is so powerful, but so opaque. I think there could be a whole vertical of startups dedicated to tooling built to simplify using it. Looking forward to seeing this develop.

<comment><USER10> There definitely are. There are video transcode SaaS platforms which wrap something (maybe FFMPEG) in a nice REST API.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Too bad its using JSON. There are lots of other cleaner formats like YAML, RJSON, etc

<comment><USER12> I feel like JSON is a fair choice these days. More people would dislike some YAML IMHO.

<comment><USER13> Anything that's going to be handwritten shouldn't be using json, it's unnecessarily verbose to read and produce

I personally prefer toml

<comment><AUTHOR> I thought about TOML for a while. Went with JSON because I just wanted to start working.

Like I said in one of the comments, final decision has not been made yet. JSON is not written in stone, plus ffcms could support more than one language, e.g. JSON and TOML.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Review my startup, BeautyBloc.com - <AUTHOR>

We're positioning BeautyBloc.com as the "Groupon for beauty products and services." The idea is that by being more targeted, we will get higher quality customers for our merchants and also provide deals that are more relevant for the our opt in subscribers. Would love to get any and all feedback you may have on the business model, the best way to merchant leads, drive traffic to the site, the site itself, etc.!<p>Thanks so much! <comment><USER2> clickable <http://www.BeautyBloc.com/>

</comment><comment><USER3> Wondering why you chose the "bloc" part of the name. (For me, it has unfortunate implications.)

Thanks.

<comment><AUTHOR> We chose it to reflect a group of people coming together to collectively reach a common objective. In this case, a deal. What implications does it have for you?

<comment><USER3> I hear "This site is some means to block out beauty" -- you know, kind of like "ad blocker", only somehow for "beauty". Not sure what on earth that would mean but it does not sound like a good thing if you are trying to sell beauty products (or coupons for beauty products or whatever). I also just think "beauty" sounds vain, so for me it is offputting.

I also associate the term "bloc" with "Soviet bloc countries", which is a real negative thing historically in the US. So I wouldn't be very comfortable with joining a "bloc", even without subliminally wondering if joining this "bloc" would ensure I became uglier. (Edit: I will add that in that context, the idea of a "beauty bloc" brings to mind very unflattering cold war images of Soviet Bloc women. Not anything I would aspire to look like.)

However, my mind isn't normal. So take that opinion as a sampling of one, and no reason to think it is representative of your target market (since I don't wear any make-up ever as I am allergic to everything).

Good luck with this.

<comment><AUTHOR> That makes a lot of sense - thanks so much for your thoughtful feedback!

I certainly didn't think of the negative Cold War implications, since I am originally from Ukraine and the Soviet Bloc was not perceived as a negative thing on our side of the world.

I will do some more research with others to see if this is enough of a deal- breaker to require a name change.

Thanks again!

<comment><USER3> I have been thinking that something like "beauty buying bloc" would probably be fine. It would clarify things enormously (ie not imply "this is a means to block out beauty"). And it's possible that changing the name like that wouldn't really require changing the domain name.

Also, women who are younger than me wouldn't be likely to have Cold War associations. So I think the demographic of your target market may impact this.

Good luck with this.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is a really good suggestion - we'll see how we can incorporate it! Thanks again for your feedback!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Drought Nearly Killed Off Humans 70,000 Years Ago - <AUTHOR> http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/C/CLOSE_CALL?SITE=WIRE&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

<comment><USER2> Fortunately, they discovered thirst quenching Sprite (tm)!</comment>


What are the best (non tech) job interview practice resources? - <AUTHOR> having recently been through interviews for jobs globally after a 7 year gap, it seems that there arent very good, tech-enabled resources.  Can anyone suggest some, or ideas for some that they would have found personally valuable?<p>Particularly, practice for behavioural, hypothetical and analytical questions for non-tech roles  - there's heaps of resourcing for technical/coding interviews. <comment><USER2> Similar question from last month "Ask HN: Resources for Interview Preparation?" [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18244220](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18244220)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! i had updated the question to specify non-tech roles, and that must have happened just after you replied!</comment></comment>


A Review of Dash, the API documentation browser and code snippet manager - <AUTHOR> http://www.samuelmullen.com/2014/11/app_review-dash

<comment><USER2> You know, I've heard of Dash and my knee-jerk reaction has always been, "Eh, I'm ok lookin' stuff up."

But you know... maybe I'm not. I just installed it, and I'm going to give it a try.</comment>


Ask HN: Review my startup browserstage.com - <AUTHOR>

Maybe a fresh set of eyes will help me create a better landing page for my new startup: http://www.browserstage.com <comment><USER2> I believe that a fresh set of eyes help, so this is my first impression from the landing page:

Wow, nice design...

Hey, that huge gray block is probably supposed to hold a flash plugin, too bad I (and many people) disable automatic execution...

Let's check the headline: "Web Automation That Just Works, No Code! Nothing to Install! No Virtual Machines!"

Web automation of what? Is it something like Windows Azure WebJobs?

Let's check the bullet points... Oh, it seems to be about TEST automation. Test of what? Web applications, I suppose.

There's some nice feature information on the page. Interesting, let's click on the blue links to find out more. Oops, they're not links.

I hope this helps. Congratulations and good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much for the feedback! Very good and true points indeed!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The design is clean but think about the message you are sending to visitors of the site. Right now (ignore whatever is in the video. i''m at work and can't watch it and you have to assume there are others that won't watch it as well), you're telling them what the software does, which forces them to see how it fits in to their lives. Tell them exactly how this fits into their life/current practice/problems.

If you know someone who has successfully used this and found it beneficial include a small feature on them. Or do it on multiple people. Visitors will get to see some of its applications and also testimonials are a great way to build trust quickly.

Good luck!

<comment><USER4> I agree. The messaging should be focussed on the BENEFITS, not the features. Right now I'm seeing that I can run test more easily without using code...but how does that help me? Why do I need to run test? How will it help my business? What kind of results can I see? Focus on the benefits and solving my problems rather than what the app actually does.

</comment></comment><comment> why-el Step 1: Either add more info to this HN post through the comment section provided below the title, or make your submitted post a link to your home page. You are asking people to copy paste here.

I suggest you open up your platform when you advertise on HN. There is no need to lock it up behind a beta invite while soliciting people's help here.

<comment><USER5> I also read somewhere that non-link posts like yours are given a lower value/priority in the HN ranking algorithm and fall off quicker.

<comment><AUTHOR> Unfortunately I cannot add the link now ... But we'll make do :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think it all made sense and looks good. I signed up for a private invite. Congrats on the tool. I definitely see value in it!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!</comment></comment>


Comb Sort - Just As Good As Quick Sort - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comb_sort

<comment><USER3> The guy who originally devised the algorithm is a professor at the University of Guelph, in Ontario, Canada. He's a pretty interesting professor - <USER2> from being drafted into the Polish army during World War II, wrote some of TCP at Stanford in the 70's, somehow ended up teaching networking, operating systems, and some other random subjects in an off-the-beaten-path Canadian school that's mostly known for farming.

I'm a student there; it's neat to see an article about his creation pop up. :)

<comment><USER4> Heh. I was excited to see it as well. I originally thought you had posted it when I saw it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The article neither claims, nor offers any evidence, that comb sort is "just as good as quick sort"; could someone fix the title here, please?

I'd guess that it probably performs about as well as Shell sort: hard to analyse, strongly dependent on the detail of how your increments are chosen, typically worse than _O_ ( _n_ log _n_ ).

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm going to need some citations before I believe that it's just as good as quick sort.

</comment><comment><USER7> Sorry if this is too meta but:

I usually think the wikipedia.org items on HN are just a silly waste of time (e.g, not _news_ ) but I do have to admit that this one got me. Neat algorithm. Hadn't heard of it prior and wouldn't have thought of it spontaneously.

<comment><USER8> I like the occasional wikipedia article on HN. They are often illuminating and amusing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Does anyone know of a proof that this really is an $O(n log n)$ sort? I can sort of see it intuitively, but I can't quite convince myself it is true.

<comment><USER10> I'd guess it is generally O(n log n) for random data, but not mathematically. At least seems to me that an for an inverted range (n, n-1, n-2, ... 0) the algorithm will come down to O(n^2). I could be wrong though, didn't really think about it for that long.

Edit: I might be in the wrong here. I did some quick tests with this code (<http://yagni.com/combsort/combsort.py>) and did not find it to be much slower when data is a reversed range vs. sorted range. So much for that intuitive thought.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Mintodo.xyz – The Simplest Web-based Todo List - <AUTHOR> https://mintodo.xyz <comment><USER2> Now, I've got fat fingers. If I accidentally tap the wrong spot, I lose a todo. On iphone I don't see an undo. What am I missing?</comment>


America's Power Grid Isn't Ready for Electric Cars - <AUTHOR> https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/12/americas-power-grid-isnt-ready-electric-cars/577507/ <comment><USER2> Citylab.com has published some great articles, but this isn't one of them. It's not clear to me why they published this article or who the intended audience is. And I'm skeptical of the conclusions, given that the article doesn't mention the rise of wind and PV solar power generation coupled with energy storage capacity.

<comment><USER3> FYI, electric cars can also act as grid energy storage capacity.

<comment><USER4> Could, in theory, with additional hardware and integration and agreements needed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This piece is an obvious plant by the anti-electric lobby.

The article does not mention the word "battery" in any of its forms ("battery", "batteries") even once. And yet batteries are the proven solution to exactly the problem they are pretending is unsolvable.

</comment><comment><USER6> Citylab forgets an important factor: the electricity consumption of oil refineries.

Almost all of it goes to making "branchy" isomers needed for gasoline, or things like hydro desulfurization. Reduce the demand for gasoline and diesel, and now you have surplus electricity, which so happens to be more per gallon than the equivalent electrical energy in a gge of EV usage.

This isn't a panacea- if you don't have refineries in the area, and/or their power can't be fed to the grid, you might have a problem.

California and Texas are solid, though.

<comment><USER7> I tried looking, and couldn't find anywhere close to a source that says that refining gasoline consumes so much electricity you'd get more mileage using it to power a BEV. Do you have something

<comment><USER6> This page, although a bit sloppy maybe, has a lot of referenced links in it that should help you find what you're looking for:

[https://greentransportation.info/energy- transportation/gasol...](https://greentransportation.info/energy- transportation/gasoline-costs-6kwh.html)

<comment><USER7> Yeah, that was one place I looked. But the only credible linked calculation had it at 0.2, not 6.

The others seem to conflate energy with electricity consumption (it doesn't at all surprise me that the process uses a lot of _energy_ , just the supposed electrical consumption).

Further, the back of the napkin just doesn't work out. The US refines 18.5 million barrels a day (for 2012 from WP), or 283 billion gallons a year. This implies 1698 billion kWh of consumption out of 4015 billion kWh total electrical production, or more than the total which is used by industry (one third).

You seemed to know what you were talking about which is why I asked for a source... I have a very hard time believing it's even within an order of magnitude of the correct figure.

<comment><USER6> Although I'm finding it hard to find confirmation (or denial), I believe refineries have captive power plants as part of their operations, which are effectively isolated from the grid, and kept out of aggregate electricity generation statistics (they always seem to call it "net electricity" for some reason and maybe this is part of why).

<comment><USER7> But those captive power plants would have to add up to be a third of the capacity of the power plants on the main grid - that's a huge amount.

If the process uses a lot of heat, and you're why wouldn't you just skip the electricity generation and use the thermal energy directly? So presumably the electrical consumption to the extent it exists is for a more sophisticated use than that.

I would suggest (in the absence of other evidence) the government report linked above is correct - that it's relatively efficient in terms of electricity consumption, but not in terms of overall energy consumption.

<comment><USER6> Check out [http://www.iaee.org/documents/denver/varela- salazar.pdf](http://www.iaee.org/documents/denver/varela-salazar.pdf)

Texas has 2GW of refinery cogen capacity alone.

<comment><USER7> According to the numbers in that document, that's equivalent to 0.46 kWh per gallon. It also notes:

"The comparison of both graphics suggests that refineries in Texas have excess capacity in many cases"

Compared to a "typical requirement". The slope of the line for "typical requirement" is 0.22 kWh per gallon. This either means Texan refineries are atypically inefficient, or they sell power back to the grid or shut down their power plants.

Either way, we're still an order of magnitude away from the 6 kWh/gallon figure, and from sources that look fairly credible.

<comment><USER6> Fair enough.

I do know that extraction and pipelines also require prodigious amounts of power. Obviously not so much that it's uneconomical, but seeing the electric bill for one oil well in the Permian was eye-opening, particularly at the 3c/kWh rate they somehow got. It'd be nice to know the range for different kinds of oil wells. Maybe that's the source of the electrical use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Thanks to decades of stalling-off and fossil-fueled obstructive lobbying, so far we've largely failed to build anywhere-near-adequate de-centralized and alternative energy sources.

Originally the fossilers hoped to keep viable alternatives out of the public eye. Now that that's failed, they've got paid foolers running around.

Rome's burning. Nobody wants to make the small sacrifices, nobody wants to think about the Big Sacrifice. So it goes.

</comment><comment><USER9> It is pretty average that they didn't discuss the fact that the peaking power plants are very expensive, typically burning higher grade fuels like natural gas or diesel, rather than goal or nuclear. And, rather than encourage old style night time off-peak use, we need charging to occur during solar PV peak on colder days, and cars (mobile batteries) to supply to the grid during peak summer load, providing grid stabilisation to account for wind/PV variability.

</comment><comment><USER10> What if, as seems quite certain, much of the electricity is supplied from off the grid by solar energy at homes, work places, shopping malls, and so on?

It seems the me the article was designed to make the problem look more difficult than it really is, as a way of undermining the adoption of EV's.

</comment><comment><USER11> All that oil not used in cars could be used to power charging stations...

</comment><comment><USER12> obviously bollocks</comment>


Feynman: Difference between Mathematics and Physics - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obCjODeoLVw&feature=share

<comment><USER2> _"It's too bad that it has to be mathematics and that mathematics for some people is hard."_

 _"We cannot...convert this thing to any other language. You have, if you want to discuss nature, to learn about nature and to appreciate nature. It's necessary to find out the language she speaks in. She offers her information in only one form."_

Heh, this rings all too true for me right now. I'm making a game that will try to make a tiny bit of fairly advanced maths at least basically accessible, while still being fun to play. (As you might imagine, this isn't exactly an easy task.)

It really _is_ too bad that, for lots of people, mathematics feels unapproachable - it would be nice if it were very easy to make people with a near 100% non-mathematical background see and understand the power and weirdness of pure mathematics, or the mathematical part of physics.

But it's certainly not easy, which is probably why so many attempts to make some maths-based subject digestible (e.g. the abundance of 'educational' games, which are all too often just about arithmetic) just crash and burn, not least because few people seem to be even _trying_ to figure out how to get concepts across differently.</comment>