Google News Showing Las Vegas Shooting News in Entertainment Section - user-on1 And It is not surprising at all.
https://news.google.com/news/headlines/section/topic/ENTERTAINMENT?ned=us
FYI Google's HI Team, Please Fix it. I don't think that is entertainment news. <comment><AUTHOR> There's a certain incredible postmodern truth to this.

News, even though sounding really important, is really just entertainment. This is such a hard idea to wrap your head around sometimes. That being said I just got off of The Daily Mail / NY Times, but in a way that was just entertainment and calling it anything else would just be an illusion.

What then is news? Well first the newsworthy is in direct proportion to your ability to get involved. So local news is almost always news, followed by State, then National, the international. The internet does indeed exist and has changed news somewhat but the hierarchy above is still important.

Also news is a lot of context. So if you want to be an informed citizen reading about what's going on now is one of the worst things you can do sometimes. Free Speech, racism, violence, the limits of power, the philosophy of law, capitalism, etc. these are tough concepts that you have to read about if you want any chance of understanding.

The "Very Short Introduction" series is one of the best ways to get started: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_Short_Introductions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_Short_Introductions)

<comment><USER2> Very much agree.

The less I read the news and the more I read books, the happy and more informed I've felt. Neil Postman's book Amusing Ourselves to Death talks about "news without context," how the Queen of England having a cold does not in any way impact my life and there is nothing I can do about it.

In a way the news lately seems more exciting and terrible, and I definitely don't make light of it, but ultimately I can't really do anything directly to affect it other than voting and donating to causes I believe in. And so I try to do that and feel that that is enough. Humans are not capable of handling a world's worth of information.

Nassim Taleb argues in the book Fooled by Randomness that day to day, the behavior of things like the news and stock market prices are almost completely random. Only when you look at it from a monthly or yearly view do you actually see signal in the noise.</comment></comment>


Apple's Covid-19 Response - <AUTHOR> https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/03/apples-covid-19-response/ <comment><USER2> "We will be closing all of our retail stores outside of Greater China until March 27" \- Does this mean all stores globally closed, except inside China, which are back open?

<comment><USER3> Yes. And all retail employees will continue to be paid.

<comment><USER4> At least in Europe, they need to continue paying wages, unless they established some (potentially illegal) freelancing scheme over employment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nice! Everyone make sure you get your coronavirus response papers ready! Wouldnt want to be the only person on the planet not talking about how they're handling it!

<comment><USER6> This really is an underrated comment.

In the last 24 hours I've received more than a dozen emails from random businesses that have my email address - many of which I have not interacted with in years - letting me know that my health and safety is their _top priority_. It's like someone in the marketing department realized "hey, here's an opportunity to send some spam without looking sleazy".

It's opportunistic and gross.

<comment><USER5> Thank you for your support here. I want you to know that I deeply care about everyone who responds to my post. You'll be glad to know that you can keep writing responses from home for the next week. After that the coast should be clear, so I expect you to come in.

-sent from nuclear bunker

<comment><AUTHOR> The nuclear bunker is their industrial design lab in Cupertino.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wonder which companies will benefit from this pandemic, long-term. If there's a surge in remote working, for example, seems like that could be good for FAANG, bad for transport companies, commercial real estate, public events. Is there any analysis out there about this?

<comment><USER8> Streaming sites like Netflix, maybe?

<comment><USER9> Maybe Disney, more likely. Hollywood has essentially frozen production and from what I'm hearing they're really not setup for working remote in pre/post (especially the latter). Combine with delayed releases, cancellation of film festivals (which are marketplaces as much as exhibitions for content) and the _new_ releases this year appear to be on a giant delay.

Disney is interesting because they have the deepest bench, so to speak in terms of catalog. They also have the kids stuff, and all the kids are at home. They also had their stock dip below $100 with the crash this week, had to shutdown their parks, and quite recently reorganized the entire direct to consumer business. I'd put some money on Disney coming out on top there.

Netflix relies on new content to reduce churn. If production is halted I don't know how that looks for them. However if you take out their capex on production, they suddenly become stupidly profitable. So who knows.

<comment><USER8> Even with it's deep catalog, Disney+ still has far less content than Netflix. I do agree that Netflix relies on new content to reduce churn, but my argument wasn't so much about existing users (churn), but about millions of new people who never had Netflix deciding to sign up because they have nothing else to do at home.

As for the rest of people, I agree that when you're competing with hundreds of other sources of entertainment and ways to spend your days, Netflix's catalog may not be amazing, but when most of the population is stuck at home, I'm sure there are plenty of stuff people will find and enjoy on Netflix.

Disney is definitely a runner up too. They've started moving releases closers. They just released Frozen 2 and the new Starwars movie digitally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Good to read they're doing what they can. In the meantime, there's business like ours (in travel, 70-ish people, not profitable) that are fighting to survive this crisis. Would've liked to see an extension of the deadline for the apple sign-up requirement. I know we're late, but this means we need to spend valuable time redesigning our sign-up whereas what we currently need to do is redesign our entire business model to stay alive. Curious how others in the market feel about this

</comment><comment><USER11> Great, at least this one was more interesting than the critical response my dry cleaner or 10 minute oil change place is taking.

</comment><comment><USER12> My intuition is that this is a supply chain / inventory management closure, not a virus risk closure. They have 509 stores in 25 countries (incl China). I don't believe that they would close over 90% of those stores simultaneously due simply to generalized viral transmission risk.

I find it guileful that they announced the closure in the middle of the night at the end of the week, a day after having announced the opening of their four remaining China stores to great fanfare from the equity market.

<comment><USER13> They are providing inventory to a bunch of other retailers and are continuing online sales, this really sounds like they don't want people coming in and touching the same piece of glass.

<comment><USER12> Inventory is a lot easier to manage when you don't have to send it to 500 different sites and predict demand. If you're coming up short on inventory, the reasonable choice is to put it into one central repository and ship from there. There are several different configurations for each type of device, varying based on color, memory, and carrier.

If they were only concerned about the virus, they would take the display models out of the showroom and continue to process pick-up orders. And they wouldn't shut down stores worldwide (ex-China).

No health body has recommended worldwide retail shutdowns, and no competing device vendor has closed all of its stores worldwide (ex-China). This is a ramification of the factory shutdowns we saw in China several weeks ago.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Bragging about unrelated topics in the first paragraph, and touting a $15M donation while sitting on $200B in cash. So magnanimous. By the way, get back to work.

<comment><USER15> Is there a guide on how much are you supposed to give? Would $200B be good enough? Why criticize how much is one giving

<comment><USER16> We have tipping guidelines so yes someone should create one. They probably got 15m in earned media from the PR alone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> For a company that literally owns a significant chunk of all the money available in the world, this response seems tepid at best.

<comment><USER18> More money doesn't always make something happen faster or better. Governments are likely spending hundreds of millions to billions. Even if Apple had committed a billion dollars, would that result in better training, more personnel, more useful medication, medication where it needs to be, better tests, or more testing in the short term?

I suspect the answer is no, because I think those are likely all constrained on the supply side right now and money is not currently the problem.

It's sort of like a disaster happening in the area close to you. Maybe you go to try to donate your time to help others affected by the disaster. Maybe when you get there you see 50 other people standing around twiddling their thumbs because there's more people than they have useful tasks for at the moment. Do you stick around all day with nothing to do so you can say you helped, or do you leave after 30 minutes and promise you'll check back tomorrow to see if they have more use for you then?

<comment><USER19> > _More money doesn 't always make something happen faster or better._

Elon Musk tweeted "Coronavirus panic is dumb"[1]. When there were school kids stuck in a cave, he sent a team of engineers halfway round the world to try and build a submarine rescue effort. Instead of tweeting that, he could have tried to build cheap CPAP/respirators in bulk, on short notice and deliver them to hospitals.

I'm not saying he should have, but SpaceX dropped the price of rocketry _a lot_ by trying and using off the shelf components; manufacturing is something which effort and money could plausibly move the needle on quickly, where research into speculative medication might not have any results, and that is something we can imagine him doing where we can't imagine a large company with big manufacturing experience pivoting to doing unexpectedly.

[1] [https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1236029449042198528?ref_...](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1236029449042198528?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw)

<comment><USER18> > Instead of tweeting that, he could have tried to build cheap > CPAP/respirators in bulk, on short notice and deliver them to hospitals.

Could he have? How long would it take to retool and retrain whatever resources are needed to be able to do that and actually start producing something? What capacity would he be capable of putting out, given that his his facilities are probably configured for a much difference scale (cars and large semi-bespoke aeronautical components)? If it's a 5% increase in CPAP machines 6 months from now, how helpful is that?

What if doing so means that 20% of the workforce no longer has work to do? What if not producing their actual product and CPAP machines instead leads to enough loss in money/market they need to let some amount of their workforce go?

At some level I don't think asking Musk or Tesla/SapceX to do this is really any different than asking you to work half days for three months and donate the other half your time to helping with Coronavirus issues in some manner while living off savings to help supplement less pay. If during or at the end of that time you don't have a job anymore (either because you weren't there or general market recession), or some major problem came up that you were unprepared to address because you've been reducing your savings, was that a smart thing to do? Did it help more than it hurt? What if you have a family to support?

Musk's responsibility is to his stock holders and employees. He should do his best to make sure his company runs well and is profitable enough that he's not laying people off, or causing the stock price to drop any more than it might because the general market is in free fall, which also negatively affects many (including retirees and pension funds).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> _Apple's committed donations to the global COVID-19 response — both to help treat those who are sick and to help lessen the economic and community impacts of the pandemic — today reached $15 million worldwide._

Not that it's Apple's job to fix COVID-19, but this is the equivalent of an average US houshold income family crowing about donating $1.80 of their yearly $63k income. Using Apple's annual profit, not revenue. [Edit: correction $18]

<comment><USER13> And then the next part:

> We're also announcing that we are matching our employee donations two-to-one > to support COVID-19 response efforts locally, nationally and > internationally.

Plus everyone is still getting paid:

> All of our hourly workers will continue to receive pay in alignment with > business as usual operations. We have expanded our leave policies to > accommodate personal or family health circumstances created by COVID-19 — > including recovering from an illness, caring for a sick loved one, mandatory > quarantining, or childcare challenges due to school closures.

<comment><USER19> I don't know whether to be happy that a major American company has publically said such things, or carry on being disgusted that such a thing is not normal and is worth a PR announcement.

Seriously, _Apple_ 's leave policy didn't include " _recovering from an illness_ "??

<comment><USER20> I work at Apple. I've not reviewed the new guidelines but can confirm that yes, Apple do indeed let you take sick time to recover from an illness. Of course they do.

In fact, the only time I ever had to interact with Apple HR about time off was when I wanted 3 months off after my kid was born. I ended up getting paid for all of it except the last week. Any other time I've taken sick leave I just need to let my manager know, and I took 2 weeks once when I was hit by a car.

Don't get the wrong idea, I don't take sick leave at the drop of a hat, but I've been here for 15 years, and life happens. I currently have the max- possible 240 hours of sick leave available. In my view, Apple are fairly generous for a US company regarding sick leave. US companies pale in comparison to EU companies, but that's the US for you.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Apidock.com SSL cert is expired - <AUTHOR> https://apidock.com/ruby/Enumerable/group_by <comment><USER2> On the one hand, I appreciate how their certs expire every 3 months. It's short enough that I don't forget how I did it last time, but long enough that it's not annoying. On the other hand, someone still has to push the button.

</comment><comment><USER3> Page footer reads "If you have any comments, ideas or feedback, feel free to contact us at email@example.com"

</comment><comment><USER4> [https://ismycertexpired.com/check?domain=apidock.com](https://ismycertexpired.com/check?domain=apidock.com)</comment>


Newly Discovered Design Pattern: "Code Well." - <AUTHOR> http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/12/newly-discovered-design-pattern-code.html

<comment><USER2> When did this anti-Design-Patterns meme start, again? Was it the most recent Yegge novel, or was it earlier than that?

I'm not completely sure what raganwald is saying, but I _think_ he's saying this: knee-jerk opposition to the use of Design Patterns is just as silly as knee-jerk opposition to most any other technology.

Part of the job of a good developer is to sort out the BS from the hype, from the long-term, useful information. And for better or worse, Design Patterns (just like Java and C++ and other things that have survived long enough that they are no longer flavor-of-the-moment fads) reflect real-world needs, or they simply wouldn't be as well-known and widely used as they are.

Said another way: the problem isn't Design Patterns; the problem is the bad developers who don't know how to use Design Patterns.

<comment><USER3> What anti-design patterns meme?

I write programs with Design Patterns, I catalogue new ones from my work, I use them to teach and communicate. "A Pattern Language" is one of my favourite books.

What did I say? Well, I quoted someone else telling a story about their experience:

[http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/12/newly-discovered- design-...](http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/12/newly-discovered-design- pattern-code.html)

I thought it was a good story because it illustrated two different mind sets when it comes to writing programs and what happens when they come into contact with each other. There's no preachy conclusion, it's a human interest story.

I also talked about a particular cultural approach in this post:

[http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/12/pouring-water-back- into-...](http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/12/pouring-water-back-into- flask.html)

There, I expressed opposition to the idea of a fixed set of standard patterns.

So, now you know what I was saying.

<comment><USER2> As I said, I wasn't totally clear on your intent, so I hope you don't take my comment personally. It seems that we agree, in most ways.

The anti-DP meme is just a trend that I have been detecting in the threads here, and in other places. I was commenting on a phenomenon that is bigger than you (but to which you /do/ seem to be responding).

<comment><USER3> I didn't take it personally, I took it as a sign that I am not writing clearly.

Thanks.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


SuperPay: 1 year going, $873,851 Processed, 684 Paying Businesses, $0 raised - <AUTHOR> https://superpayit.com/ <comment><USER2> Seems like the customer base consists of tiny startups, since the average volume is only about $1300 per customer per year.

The statistics also show that the company has earned only $8700 in a year (assuming the 1% transaction fee quoted on the web site), which suggests that the company has no employees other than its founders and won't be able to hire anyone unless it starts growing very quickly.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Any thoughts on the product, site, literally anything?

<comment> jags-v UI looks clean and sleek. The info on global reach page is a bit confusing for me. Wasn't able to determine , if those are the countries where SuperPay is supported ( as in a business can use SuperPay as a customer ) ?</comment></comment>


Writing a recursive ascent parser by hand - <AUTHOR> https://www.abubalay.com/blog/2018/04/08/recursive-ascent <comment><USER2> As an _exercise_ in showing how LR works, this was an interesting article. However, I'm unconvinced that this would be a good approach to implement in a real system when the grammar might change in the future (and they pretty much always do). When things change, I think it'd be difficult to keep it correct, and there are lots of tools to help (such as bison and ANTLR). I've implemented several recursive-descent parsers; their simplicity makes it practical to do directly. But recursive-descent, if you're going to use it, seems to cry out for tooling. Does anyone have a different experience?

<comment><USER3> Haven't used it myself, but have heard many rave about Perl's Parse::RecDescent

<comment><USER4> Recursive descent is very different (if I understand correctly.) Some languages that can be parsed with a recursive ascent parser cannot be parsed by a recursive descent parser.

<comment><USER3> Right. Was responding to _" But recursive-descent, if you're going to use it, seems to cry out for tooling"_

<comment><USER5> As I mentioned in an uncle comment, recursive descent permits localised hackery to switch parsing scheme or dynamically fix tricky context-specific grammar constructs, which argues against tooling.

Tooling is still very useful for grammar validation though, and it's the way to go for ad hoc parsing of a simple or new language.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a pretty cool JSON parser in C:

[https://github.com/vincenthz/libjson/blob/master/json.c](https://github.com/vincenthz/libjson/blob/master/json.c)

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm pretty sure that Brendan Eich's Narcissus (JavaScript in JavaScript) uses a "recursive ascent" parser, or what I would call a hand-written bottom-up parser:

[https://github.com/mozilla/narcissus/blob/master/lib/parser....](https://github.com/mozilla/narcissus/blob/master/lib/parser.js)

I played with this code like 8 years ago and remember being pretty confused by this style of parser. I was expecting recursive descent but it was something else.

<comment><AUTHOR> That definitely looks like normal recursive descent- it has functions `Script`, `Statements`, `Statement`, `FunctionDefinition`, `Expression`, etc.

<comment><USER7> Recursive ascent / bottom-up also has functions that follow the grammar, so that doesn't mean anything.

It's a matter of whether the children are resolved before the parents, or the parents are resolved before the children.

The pushTarget() calls all over makes it look like bottom-up parsing. That doesn't appear in recursive descent (top down) parsers.

<comment><AUTHOR> > It's a matter of whether the children are resolved before the parents, or > the parents are resolved before the children.

Yep, and Narcissus resolves the parents before the children by virtue of `Script` calling `Statements`, `Statements` calling `Statement`, etc. before ever actually seeing the bodies of their corresponding production rules.

A bottom-up parser doesn't work that way at all. Its states aren't determined by what they're about to parse, but by what has already been parsed. The `pushTarget` function in Narcissus is completely unrelated to bottom-up parsing.

<comment><USER7> Yeah I see what you mean. There is some stuff that doesn't look like a recursive descent parser to me, but that's probably because there are some JavaScript idioms and that's not my main language.

<comment><USER8> The code you mentioned, pushTarget in particular, is for semantic checking, nothing to do with purely syntactic analysis AKA parsing. In particular, pushTarget is for break to label and continue to label (the "Target" is a labeled statement's exit or continue point).

<comment><USER7> OK interesting, thanks. Yes that definitely could be part of my confusion -- that the code is doing more than parsing; it's also doing some semantic analysis in the same pass.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Early on in the WebAssembly project, when it was still a pre-order AST encoding, I wrote an LR-style shift-reduce parser for the bytecode. It was fun exercise, until it came to debugging. It's fast but relatively hard to maintain, even for a constrained, designed bytecode like WebAssembly. WASM is now a stack machine, so parsing maintains an abstract stack. It's remarkably close to the same algorithm, but a lot easier to think about because of WASM's (now) explicit stack.

</comment><comment><USER10> Many parsing algorithms were designed with the idea that the input cannot stored in memory as a whole and that you need the parse the file from start to end. However, nowadays, memory is usually not a problem, especially not for parsing files that are editted by humans. Who is going to use a gigebyte sized source file? When you store the source in memory this allows for parsing algorithms that can go backwards. I implemented a recursive decent algorithm with back-tracking which stores all parsed non-terminals at the location where they were first parsed. This results in a simple and relatively fast parser. I used it to implement an interpretting parser, which takes a grammar and input file and parses the input file according to the grammar, returning an abstract parse tree. Actually the parse takes an abstract parse tree of the grammar to parse the input. The grammar is parsed by the interpretting parser itself using a hard coded abstract parse tree of the grammar of the grammar. See [https://github.com/FransFaase/IParse](https://github.com/FransFaase/IParse)

<comment><USER11> > Who is going to use a gigebyte sized source file?

I used to mess around with the ROSE C++ source-to-source transformation framework ([http://rosecompiler.org/](http://rosecompiler.org/)). One of the files in there (defining the AST structure for representing C++ programs) was about 100,000 lines of autogenerated code. It wasn't heavily templated, I think, but it did pull in a bunch of standard C++ headers. I could imagine the whole preprocessed thing approaching a gigabyte.

<comment><USER10> Yes, parsing generated source code might be a problem, and yes, C++ preprocessing adds a lot as well. But even 100,000 lines of 80 characters whould still be (a little less than) 8 Mbyte. I did not design my interpretting parser with maximum performance as a goal, but just to have a parser that is easy to use and allows for much flexibility with respect to the grammar specification. I feel that it is a good parser for domain specific languages.

<comment><USER11> > even 100,000 lines of 80 characters whould still be (a little less than) 8 > Mbyte

Um, you're right of course. I _did_ do the same math in my head but somehow got confused by two orders of magnitude.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Top-down (descent) parsing gets a nice speed boost when you realize creating an AST isn't always necessary. Top-down parsing happens in the same traversal order as AST iteration, and this makes creating an AST not required.

Bottoms-up parsing on the other hand typically requires creating the AST first, only to traverse it top-down in a manner resembling recursive descent. The speed advantages of bottoms-up are often lost in the inefficiencies of the AST.

Of course this doesn't always apply. It depends on the language.

</comment><comment><USER13> At first I thought the parser is written by hand literally :)</comment>


Xiaomi just made a 'hoverboard' - <AUTHOR> https://www.techinasia.com/xiaomi-hoverboard-ninebot-mini/ <comment><USER2> I saw some handicapped guys modify regular Segways to have these knee high, hands free controllers years ago. They went all around the Los Angeles Industrial tools conference without using their hands. It was brilliant and made the segway seem like an extension of their legs. They could weave among all the people with ease and you didn't even know they were on segways until you got close to them.</comment>


The bugs that will give us free power while cleaning our sewage - <AUTHOR> http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18872-bugs-will-give-us-free-power-while-cleaning-our-sewage.html

<comment><USER2> science!=engineering, so I say vaporware until I see a prototype.

<comment><USER3> It's never wrong to want proof, but read the article first:

 _This month the team will begin building a pilot plant to demonstrate the technology at the Dokhaven waste water treatment plant in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, working with from Radboud University Nijmegen and water purification firm Paques, based in the Dutch town of Balk._

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> ...and then they evolved... ;-)</comment>


The most efficient way is wrong - <AUTHOR> http://blog.webnet-it.co.jp/2010/01/12/the-most-efficient-way-is-wrong/

<comment><USER2> Sounds like the bystander effect's influence on the web. A difference is that the requester is contacting others directly, not passively waiting for help. I guess the mentality of being a small part of a crowd is the most important factor in the effect.

</comment><comment><USER3> Very true. Specially asking for advice/mentoring in such a mass way is not just wrong, it's outright disrespectful.

<comment><AUTHOR> In the person's defense, he was specifically looking to generate a panel of advisers, not a single mentor.

This may have been successful, but I personally only felt motivated to reply when I received a direct message.</comment></comment>


Uber criticised for raising fares during London terror attack - <AUTHOR> http://metro.co.uk/2017/06/04/uber-slammed-for-putting-prices-up-during-london-bridge-terror-attack-6683200/ <comment><USER2> Was there an actual surge of ride-seeking right after the attack? If so, it's only an example of the system working as expected under unexpected circumstances. Sure, we may quibble with the morality of it, but isn't that the whole point of delegating decision-making to a statistical algorithm?

<comment><USER3> The point of delegating decision making to an algorithm should not be to maximise profit when people are dying or to absolve yourself from the responsibility of being a decent human being. Developers at Uber should be ashamed of the system they've built.

<comment><USER2> I doubt anybody who reckons themselves at risk of dying will choose not to hail an Uber because the price has spiked — one would expect demand to be almost totally inelastic under those circumstances.</comment></comment></comment>


NET Cloud Platform as a Service - <AUTHOR> https://nodechef.com/dotnet-hosting <comment><USER2> Interesting but the prices are absolutely ridiculous (a 2GB instance of Postgres will cost 290$ a month !).</comment>


What Happens If Uber Fails? - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/03/uber/520302/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> The thought of Uber failing is reminiscent of Myspace shifting to Facebook, Napster shutting down, etc. I don't think they're going to fail, but if they do, I don't think much would really happen. Lyft would get a big boost, other competitors would rise to fill the gap, and there would be a mad scramble of companies to hire the new influx of experienced and talented people on the market. Then the world goes on.

<comment><USER3> There would also be a pricing model adjustment of some kind.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> what's going on at uber is the surfacing of internal problems due to culture and management. this isn't really a structural issue in their core business (they have those too, but shitty company culture isn't an example of it), and I'm having a hard time seeing how the fate of uber is anything besides management shakeup and then keep-calm-and-carry-on.

what does happen if a unicorn startup fails though? I dunno. this is a risky business isn't it? some investors lose money and a bunch of former employees find new jobs. ::shrug:: life goes on. I'm having a hard time buying into any notion of fear contagion. this isn't like the dot com bubble.

</comment><comment><USER5> Given the amount of uber hating world wide lately why aren't their competitors gaining traction? 'Grab'bed a cab in KL - same deal as uber but cash first - wouldn't know about it otherwise - so uber? who cares?

<comment><USER6> > uber hating world wide

I don't know if that's accurate to say. Do people part of the "outrage culture" hate Uber? Sure. But I don't believe that that sentiment accurately reflects what most people think about the company. Most people just go about their day, and are at most peripherally aware that some people are pissed off at Uber and that's that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Maybe someone will bring back [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company) ?</comment>


A Denver Suburb Experiments with Free Lyft Rides to Light Rail - <AUTHOR> http://www.citylab.com/commute/2016/08/centennial-lyft-transit-partnership/495080/ <comment><USER3> There is great potential for something like Lyft to fix the rail "first mile" and "last mile" problem. If they can integrate systems with government so that the Lyft cost is part of the rail fare, then it's possible it could be covered by the commuter tax benefit. That would be a big win for everyone, lower cost for commuters, steady income for Lyft, increased ridership for rail.

EDIT: The more I think about it, this is such a good idea I hope Lyft is seriously working on this. With something like Lyft Line, the optimization potential is immense. Assuming each Lyft Line car can have 3 passengers and most workplaces would be within 2-3 miles of a rail station, rides could be very cheap and fast. For example, most coworkers going home would probably share the same Lyft back to the station. The short distance (assuming a 2-3 mile radius) combined with Lyft Line would allow very high throughput during rush hours. If the Lyft cost can benefit from the commuter tax deduction, that's just icing on the cake since the car sharing alone should drop costs by a lot. And there's also networking effect. Coworkers will want to encourage coworkers to do this so they can lower costs for everyone.

<comment><USER4> The old is new again. Lyft invents the commute carpool.

<comment><USER5> Except Lyft is on demand; I don't have to be waiting in my driveway exactly at 7:45 every morning, lest a coworker have to wait for me and hold up everyone else as well - and I'll never be held up waiting for them either.

<comment><USER4> Have you ever taken Uber pool? It's like that, but worse, because you're riding with strangers that you can't yell at for dilly-dallying.

<comment><USER6> It's a fair point about the dilly-dallying (although I believe there are rules like you can't be more than 3 min late, tho I don't know how strict they are.) I've definitely had rough lyft lines where I seem like I'm really being taken out of my way. But most of the time it's awesome, and kind of fun.

But the important difference that pavel was identifying was that you don't have to decide ahead of time that you are heading to the bus station. That's huge! You decide to head downtown or whereever, pull out the app, bam someone's coming to pick you up. To me this feels very different than, e.g., "casual carpool" in the Bay Area.

<comment><USER7> I think Uber Pool only gives you 1 minute from the time the driver arrives, but I've never had a driver leave without the second passenger when they took 5 or 10 minutes to show up. Plus people never like to admit that they're at fault; if they driver leaves after 5 minutes because a passenger wasn't at their pickup point, the passenger can probably leave nasty feedback and risk the driver being banned if it happens a few times.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I live in Centennial. Once a week I commute up to Westminster for work. I've been contemplating the light rail + train to get me to within 5.5 miles of my office. However, it looks like this would be about 1.5 - 2 hours vs my 45 minutes (on a bad traffic day) drive in my POV. I'm not sure it'll be worth it. Even with a free trip to the closest station, that's only going to shave about 3/4 of a mile off of my walking/biking trip.

Edit: If anyone lives in the area, I wouldn't mind meeting up. My email is in my profile.

<comment><USER9> Time is often an underrated element in these discussions, as is the sunk cost of already owning a car if transit can't take you everywhere.

I can get a bus to downtown Pittsburgh a block away from my house, but I'll almost always drive because I can often get downtown in almost half the time (25 minutes vs 45), I can often find free parking, and I can then set my own terms for arrival and departure. Fares are currently $7.50 for a roundtrip, which is over two gallons of gas or a gallon of gas and a cheap parking spot.

Point being, if you already have a car and if you can park cheaply, public transit, as much as I personally like it, becomes a tough value proposition.

<comment><USER10> Traffic can be a real thing. For me to get most places in Boston it's actually at least as fast for to take the subway then to sit in rush hour traffic. I guess buses don't have that advantage though.

<comment><USER11> Not sure what you're talking about. Taking the train from Alewife to Downtown always beats the car, just not a bicycle.

<comment><USER12> He's more referring to where Commuter Rail, not subway, is the method. Problems notwithstanding, subway lines other than the Green Line will _always_ win over driving during peak times.

A great example would be coming from Waltham via the Worcester/Framingham Line versus driving along the Mass Pike -- it'd be a coin flip as to what wins on a given day.

Moreover, outside of subway service the only alternative (where available) is bus which can easily double commute times compared to driving. In some cases (Waltham and Newton for example) there's the Inner/Outer Express Buses which also competes directly with Commuter Rail in terms of timeliness (10% slower on average) but at a lower cost -- you can take non-express buses as well which are cheaper still, but tack on another 35-45 minutes each way -- we're talking 3 to 4 hours of commuting a day from northern parts of Boston to central Waltham via a combination of subway and non-express buses.

However, Commuter Rail tends to be faster than driving on longer trips. Such as coming from Providence, Worcester, Fitchburg, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> FTA:

 _Centennial's dial-a-ride program, provided by RTD, currently costs about $21 per one-way trip, requires advance sign-ups, and averages just a little over four boardings per hour._

Wow, that's scarily inefficient. I'm glad some places are trying alternatives, but I hold out little hope this will happen in California any time soon - <USER2> SEIU would shut it down faster than you could say 'competition'.

\-- edited for formatting

<comment><USER14> Another area that's scarily inefficient in transportation:

[http://money.cnn.com/2016/01/12/technology/lyft-medical- ride...](http://money.cnn.com/2016/01/12/technology/lyft-medical-rides-health- care/)

"Typically, National Medtrans Network calls livery cab companies to book rides. Cancellations, late cars and fraud are big problems. Sometimes it can take as many as six phone calls to complete one booking. A 2005 analysis found that 3.6 million Americans miss or delay medical appointments every year because of transportation issues."

<comment><USER15> > 3.6 million Americans miss or delay medical appointments every year because > of transportation issues

So...less than a single missed or delayed medical appointment in a person's life in expectation?

<comment><USER16> Sure, if it's a uniform distribution and everyone only goes to the doctor once a year. More likely there's a bunch of poor old people constantly missing appointments, and poor parents unable to take their kids.

From the study ([http://onlinepubs.trb.org/onlinepubs/tcrp/tcrp_webdoc_29.pdf](http://onlinepubs.trb.org/onlinepubs/tcrp/tcrp_webdoc_29.pdf)):

"The estimate of 3.6 million Americans who miss or delay medical care because of a lack of access to NEMT each year [...] is conservative and should be seen as a lower bound estimate. Response bias inherent in these studies, e.g., their difficulty in surveying the homeless and other truly disadvantaged individuals, lowers the estimate, and some populations may be totally ignored in the data."

"Finally, several factors and trends—disproportionate population growth of groups in the current target population; the aging of the U.S. population; more expensive, less affordable healthcare; rising disease prevalence—will conspire to dramatically increase the future projection of transportation- disadvantaged individuals at risk of missing health care, i.e., this study's target population."

"In terms of health status, the target population suffers from critical diseases at a higher rate than does the rest of the U.S. population, and it generally accesses more medical care than does the rest of the U.S. population, despite its transportation barriers, almost certainly because it is much more ill on average."

<comment><USER15> > in expectation

I don't know what you're arguing against.

<comment><USER16> I thought your comment was implying this statistic wasn't really a big deal when you average it over the whole population. I was trying to argue that a simple average is misleading, and it is a big deal.

If "in expectation" is a well-defined statistical term or something and I misunderstood, my bad.

<comment><USER15> No worries. "In expectation" is indeed a technical term, in the same sense of "expected value".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This makes a LOT of sense for the elderly. My grandmother occasionally schedules a pickup from her home in the suburbs, and the system is very lacking. First off, it's based on scheduling a time far in advance. Second, there's no way to get real time updates. Third, the van/bus that picks her up is often EMPTY!

I see a lot of people trying to map the functionality of this onto their non- retired lifestyles, but I think that's missing the point. This will mostly benefit seniors.

</comment><comment><USER18> Relatedly, I'm hyper impressed by Lyft's partnership-based approach to working with governments. As a transportation person, the work Emily Castor and her crew have done is pretty remarkable. Lyft has been super scrappy in seeking these kinds of mutually beneficial agreements.

</comment><comment><USER19> That's actually pretty cool. I bet that Lyft has some sort of guarantees around availability to ensure some sort of base capacity at set times of day.

</comment><comment><USER20> This is so so so very much cheaper than building freeways and promoting single occupancy driving.

<comment><USER21> Lyft (not Lyft line) is for all practical terms single occupancy driving. There might be two people in the car, but only one of them has a purpose to the trip.

<comment><USER22> But the capacity (utilization) factor is potentially much higher. If a lyft driver takes 10 people to and from the train in a day, 1 car is used for 10 trips versus 10 cars and their corresponding storage costs. The variable costs might be similar, but the fixed/capital costs are much lower.

If the lyft driver picks up more than 1 person, the costs start to drop precipitously.

<comment><USER23> If there is still one car for one person making each leg of the trip, the on road utilization has not changed. The parking utilization has been reduced, however, which then could open more lanes and increase density.

<comment><USER24> The road utilization has increased as well as the fuel usage for the driving between passenger drop offs and pickups. As well as the commute of the Lyft driver. That said, if it causes people to take the train the next 25 miles into the city as opposed to driving it could actually decrease.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is a great idea. If it got popular, Lyft line could cut the cost of it, while still being efficient.

And, the best thing, if it does really well then the data can be used to plan new high quality bus routes or even light rail to replace it.

This isn't ever likely to work for suburb to suburb transit (and I don't think there is a model that would) but could definitely work for suburb to downtown style transit.

</comment><comment><USER26> While this is a new concept for something a government does, this is already a thing that I've seen tech companies in the south bay provide to their employees when they are too small to afford sending busses.

</comment><comment><USER27> If you lived near the station you could get free lift rides anywhere nearby and also back home :)

<comment><USER28> That can be easily prevented. Just mark rides as free only if start or end within 50-100 feet of billing address.</comment></comment>


2017 will be filled more votes on the EU - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@octskyward/ok-what-now-e3f64d38f7#.ufcl2twn3 <comment><USER2> As someone living in the Netherlands, let me place a few sidenotes next to the section about it:

\- The 88% poll appears to be conducted amongst (online) Telegraaf readers (here is an online version: [http://www.telegraaf.nl/watuzegt/25920298/__Britten_moeten_i...](http://www.telegraaf.nl/watuzegt/25920298/__Britten_moeten_in_EU_blijven__.html)) which is a bit comparable to the British 'Daily Mail'.. It's very anti-EU, and while it definitely has a large number of readers, the 88% is not at all representative of the Dutch population.

\- The Ukraine referendum is mentioned, specifically: " _The agreement itself is not that critical but the vote was widely used as a vote on the EU itself. It went against the EU by 61% to 32%, albeit on low turnout of only 32%._ ". The low turnout is relevant, a lot of people decided to strategically not vote in order to signal their dislike for the referendum itself. Although the minimum turnout (30%) was barely reached, the fact that this turnout was so low - combined with the fact that the anti-EU parties implicitly marketed it as an anti-EU vote - signals to me that much fewer people would vote against the EU in a referendum similar to the British one.

There is certainly a lot of anti-EU sentiment, but this article does appear to cherry pick its sources.

<comment><USER3> Dutchie here. More sidenotes:

> It makes a bit more sense when you realise that the man doesn't actually > like democracy

Why does this mean he doesn't like democracy? He doesn't like direct democracy, but he loves our indirect democracy. I don't see the need for a referendum in the Netherlands, the next parliamentary election is coming up soon and if people want to leave the EU they can vote for the Socialist Party or the Party for Freedom, both want to leave the EU.

> The Dutch have a lot to lose from Brussels forcing a UK/NL trade war on > them.

We have a lot more to lose from Brussels forcing a NL/DE trade war, if we decide to leave the EU. Economically we're practically the 17th Bundesland of Germany.

> He's also survived a prosecution for "inciting hatred" (he was found not > guilty).

Geert Wilders is facing more prosecution for asking his followers whether they wanted more or less Moroccans in The Netherlands, after which they chanted "Less! Less! Less!".

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks to both of you for your insights. It is always difficult to interpret foreign politics.

The basic assumption of democracy is that people can make good decisions. It must be so even in indirect democracy because otherwise how are voters meant to judge the track record of their existing politicians or the manifestos of new ones?

You can't argue on one hand that people are too dumb to understand the issues and on the other that people should select representatives that do because those representatives (a) come from the existing population and (b) aren't supposed to be elected on the quality of their smile but rather their policies.

I'm sure Mark Rutte believes he is a democrat, whilst simultaneously ignoring referendums and pretending nobody wants them. I think that's a nonsensical position.

The second Wilders prosecution is interesting. Whether one likes his position or not is irrelevant, it was political speech. If the Dutch courts decide to jail (?) the countries most popular politician for talking politics, well, I would not be in .NL when that happens ... sounds like the kind of thing that can spark civil unrest.

 _> We have a lot more to lose from Brussels forcing a NL/DE trade war, if we decide to leave the EU_

Yeah, but at that point Brussels would be fighting a trade war on two fronts. How much tolerance for conscription into a fight for the power of the EU elites do the ordinary people in Europe have?

The Czech Republic is already calling for the resignation of Juncker, I see. Things look volatile.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think a lot of anti-immigrant sentiment can explain the strong political push to varying western members' desire to break out of the EU. People are rightly concerned about the break up of an important institution. However, ever since the constitution was signed in 2004, I think many people have justifiable concerns about sovereignty violations, incompetence, and grift. The EU constitution is an 80 page document, and the people were given an up or down vote on it; that is not effective democracy! When the US passed the bill of rights it did so one by one. There was a vote for every single amendment, and the US constitution is a brief document.

I think immigration is a great thing, but I would have voted to leave. The EU is a great idea, but it should be limited to trade deals and trade enforcement. The single currency and the unifying political body are a bridge to far.

I don't think the Brexit is a referendum on Globalization or the Post War Order, I think it was a referendum on the limits of sovereign unity on a continent divided by many languages and cultures. The US is much less diverse and has, effectively, one language and it has trouble doing anything at the Federal level. Was there really any real hope that the EU could accomplish something an order of magnitude more grand?

Edit:

I would like to add that any democratic institution that has the power that the EU does, but the incredibly low turn out (EU turnout makes the American midterms look positively Athenian) and the high number of backlash candidates (a good number of EU MPs are actually anti-EU) that it does is doomed to be voted down by its body politic. The EU might not die, but it will for sure get scaled back.

<comment><USER5> I think that anyone who's seen what the EU/Eurozone/ECB/Comission/Eurogroup did to Greece knows that staying in the EU is not in their interest at all.

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

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure about this, so far it seems that the Greek government is (mostly) of the opinion that their situation would probably considerably worsen should they decide to leave the EU or the Euro zone, as the (significant) financial aid they currently receive from the EU would cease and the new currency that they would be forced to introduce would probably get completely devalued from the Euro (which is not, as many people say, a blessing for Greece). Also, their credit ranking would be such that they would not be able to borrow money on the free market except at a forbiddingly high interest rate, so effectively they would again end up at the mercy of the IWF, only this time they would not be able to count on the help of the EU.

Sure, the Troika and the EU (especially Germany and France) chose a path that created a lot of suffering for the Greek people in the short run, but bear in mind that Greece brought itself into this position by agreeing to become a part of the Euro zone and doing so using highly "creative" ways to mask their bad metrics to fulfill the stability criteria. If anyone is to blame here it's the EU for taking Greece into the Eurozone and the Greek government back then for eagerly grabbing that opportunity while ignoring (or not knowing) the risks. What we should learn from this is that strong political will alone is not sufficient if the underlying fundamental economic values are wrong.

<comment><USER5> As widely reported, Greece has no access to the financial aid for Greece. Those amounts are deposited directly to EU banks which bought Greek debt because of the ECB guarantee.

No more than 5-15% ever passes through Greek hands.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Yep. Sadly the question is boiled down to "In or out of EU" instead of "How to make EU better".

IMHO, Europeans need to act together on a personal level. If people forget about "French", "German", "Italian", "Greek", etc. in their minds for a while, this union will be a huge benefit for everyone. This will probably give a better european parliament which should realize the problems and act as one.

At this point most of the countries think for themselves, because of the pressure of populist ( actually that's why Cameron did this referendum, right? ).

<comment><USER8> > Sadly the question is boiled down to "In or out of EU" instead of "How to > make EU better".

We've been trying to get an answer to the second question, "How to make EU better", for almost 10 years now. Unfortunately, every time the EU has an opportunity to change, the answer the Eurocrats give is the same: "Let's keep pretending everything is fine." I'm guessing it was last summer that they managed to convince the EU cannot change (from within) with their (mis-)treatment of Greece.

<comment><USER9> > Unfortunately, every time the EU has an opportunity to change, the answer > the Eurocrats give is the same: "Let's keep pretending everything is fine."

But is it really the Eurocrats who are blocking progress? It seems to me like most of the blame should go to the European Council. Whenever I see the Parliament (or really anyone) push for meaningful reform, it gets blocked by the Council.

Instead of blaming our national politicians for their failure to push for (or even allow) reform in the Council, we keep electing them and blame the EU for their failure.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree with that analysis. It appears that people like Schulz and Juncker who make so many outrageous statements in recent days are in reality reflective of the thinking of the political elites in general, hence the difficulty of bringing about real change.

If the issue is that they're suffering from a kind of groupthink (and I strongly suspect they are) then having one of their members tossed out and replaced by someone who is actually against the group might be sufficient to break it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There seems to be a mini cold-war brewing with regards to interpreting the outcomes of the Brexit vote: It's either the EU or the UK that's dissolving. One side must be wrong and it'll pay dearly for its wrong doings. Look, the author is even comparing the EU's dusk to that of the Soviet Union. So much for subtlety.

What about: It's 2025 and the EU and the UK will still exist, still trade with each other?

Britain's Anti-EU stance had a completely broader base than in any other country and for a much, much longer time anyway.

<comment><USER11> There is another option than either EU or UK dissolving. What about both? N. Ireland could vote to leave the UK and rejoin the rest of Ireland. Scotland could vote to leave the UK and remain in the EU. Meanwhile, Spain, Portugal, France, and the Netherlands could vote to leave the EU like the UK did. Switzerland's participation in EU treaties could get revoked. Belgium and Spain could vote to break apart based on their long-running internal divides. In the end, you might end up with a denuded UK and a denuded EU and a completely different map in Europe.

<comment><USER12> I don't know why a lot of people are saying this.

N. Ireland just isn't going anywhere.

Scotland, most likely yes. But there will be a huge exodus of business from there to England. Not the other way around.

Also wales, again not going anywhere.

What you and many other commenters need to understand is that the populous/economies of the other countries in the UK are tiny compared to England.

If they were to leave, they would almost certainly get bullied in the EU.

The Scots who think they will be independent whilst being in the EU? I don't think so. They would get slapped down harder than a Red Headed Step Child!

</comment></comment></comment><comment> pi-err This skips how Brexit is mostly about British politics and very little about the EU. Of those countries, only France has a tradition of organizing referendums. The politics there will not get cornered like Cameron (amazingly) did.

There's also nowhere in Europe such a strange alliance between libertarians buccaneers (Johnson) and hardcore reactionaries (Farage).

Protectionists and reactionaries on their own would not win a referendum anywhere.

</comment><comment><USER13> > The current French President François Hollande is on track to be wiped out.

Well he doesn't have a lot of chances to be reelected, but I wouldn't say Marine LePen would get elected.

</comment><comment><USER14> I doubt many countries will want to leave after what is happening to the Uk now.

<comment> UK-AL Not much at all economically? The media has made big deal out of it. But the ftse is still higher than 2 weeks ago.

Political parties are imploding, but that's their own fault for backing one side so heavily.

My worry is the political turmoil will turn into economic troubles. If we elect a solid out leader, who has sensible plan and lays out dates for the plan then a lot of the economic distress will dispear.

The parties are shooting themselves in the foot ATM, by not accepting it and just working out a decent plan. Economic pain at the moment is caused by uncertainty of not knowing whats going on more than anything else.

<comment><USER15> Measure it in USD and the FTSE looks quite different.

<comment> UK-AL The gbp went down, however it started going back before the market closed.

And a lower currency actually gives the economy a boost.

I fully expect everything to fall again because of the drama of over weekend. That should have been completely avoidable

<comment><USER16> A boost on businesses that export, which the UK doesn't do much of. Also, isn't the definition of a strong economy basically a strong currency?

> The gbp went down, however it started going back before the market closed.

That's an interesting interpretation: [http://i.imgur.com/XL2K38H.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/XL2K38H.jpg)

<comment> UK-AL No I didnt. It wasn't that long ago that it was George Osbornes goal to try to reduce gbp because of said benefits.

<comment><USER16> Right sorry, misread second time

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's funny how the interpretations of Pope Francis' comments on the issue are taken. Some quote him as indicating too much immigration and Europe could lose its culture, others indicate he's open to the immigration and Churches should be at the vanguard in acceptance.

Personally, I think there is a place for limited acceptance of refugees, but first priority should be keeping people in the region they are from, not hundreds/thousands of miles away and expect different cultures to readily accept a large influx of a group of individuals who may/may not accept the culture they are being relocated to.

Maybe world powers should do more to settle down the unrest there. That said, a couple hundred years of meddling is hard to undo.

</comment><comment><USER18> Good article until the end where he compared an empire that was created by Russia invading other countries (yes, they freed them from the Nazis, but they _forgot_ to leave afterwards) to the EU, which was created to prevent Germany from doing exactly that every other year.

Yes the EU has economic problems in the South, but they are nowhere near Soviet-level problems. Eastern Germany was one of the better doing (de facto) Soviet states and is still far behind the West today after 25 years of subsidies.

The EU has a problematic image, but it is not like mother Russia looking after its child states. The commission has no direct elections, because the member governments which negotiated the treaties (remember, this is just a union of states) do not want elections. They want to send in their own guys. The image is so bad, because nobody knows anything about it and local governments blame it for everything. They abuse it to get laws passed and can later blame on the EU.

Many of the standard the EU creates are quite good. Think of roaming or USB chargers for example. Yes, they are regulating many things, but that's because they cannot do anything else. What we really need is not less EU but more. First of all better integration on the financial side of politics. We cannot share a currency without a joined budget/tax system. After that we can work on things like police, military, maybe even social systems (which would stop the discussion what EU citizens should get from the state).

<comment><AUTHOR> The EU / USSR comparison is indeed not perfect, the EU is much better than the Soviet Union ever was.

My point is that political unions are often painted as eternal, but the USSR proves it's possible for a huge integrated trade bloc to disintegrate within just a few years.

That said, I do not get the sense that the people running the EU actually care about the prosperity of their citizens much, nor democracy, and they do have a love of central planning ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Mike brings up some interesting thoughts. Near the end be brings up the concept of a European Trade Area. What if this somewhat allows the UK to (not quite exactly) fork the concept of the EU and have their own laws. Maybe other nations would join and then you'd have two unions growing in parallel which could merge down the road taking the best ideas from both. I like the long- term idea of that.

<comment><USER20> I love the opensource community sometimes :) Be it for good or bad, we always try to find a way around the issues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Can't the Swiss impose quotas, but put the quota numbers at > 720 million people ie. larger than the total population of the EU, and therefore impossible to reach?

<comment><USER22> Yes they could, but Switzerland isn't one of the many democracies that ignores the voice of its population. So something like this isn't going to happen there.</comment></comment>


The E-Cat has been replicated? - <AUTHOR> https://animpossibleinvention.com/2016/02/24/breaking-the-e-cat-has-been-replicated-hers-the-recipe/ <comment><USER2> Note that the "replication" seems to have been done by an organization that had set out specifically to produce this result and not by any sort of reputable scientists or lab. The announcement here is on the web site of a pro-E-cat book.

Needless to say, don't start celebrating the birth of the overunity era quite yet.

<comment><USER3> What makes me most happy here is that they are releasing what they claim is a rather complete "recipe"; this should hopefully lead to independent replication, hopefully by sceptics and hopefully many more replications.

<comment><USER4> "It's impossible to replicate" especially if you don't want to. There always was and still is a very strange negative fervor around this topic on hacker news and if everything goes well I think we should probably dig up all those excessively negative and accusative posts and ask for a follow up. I still remember those "This is a scam ! Rossi is a fraud !" even if no one was asked to invest and no one complained of being defrauded and all the public demonstrations were "obviously flawed" and everyone knew how to measure excess heat better than Rossi.

<comment><USER5> > "It's impossible to replicate" especially if you don't want to.

Let's start the conspiracy theories

> There always was and still is a very strange negative fervor around this > topic on hacker news

Strange? When there is no single proof of it, even by the ones stating that it works and there is no single plausible theory then there is nothing strange in the negative comments about that

<comment><USER4> yep, denial mode. there is no proof. no one is credible. it's a scam. there is no theory. things didn't happen before we had theory for them. what a bunch of scientific bigots.

<comment><USER5> Yes, or it is a conspiracy or people is in denial.

How luck we are for having people like you that can see the light.

Time to move on and stop wasting time with such nonsense

<comment><USER4> you keep trying to attach the "conspiracy" label to my text. just move on.. you have nothing relevant to say

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Off-topic but related:

Lately I've been following the newest installment of the Steorn saga, and this E-Cat technology popped up in my travels. Some background: this company Steorn has been claiming to have made over-unity/free energy/whatever devices for some years now, but for some reason they never actually deliver. Well, this time, they took a bunch of pre-orders for, basically, a cell phone charger with unlimited life, and they even sent a few out.

The only confirmed delivered unit has been to the owner of an E-Cat news blog. It has been extremely amusing to watch the owner of the blog and the readers come up with justifications for why their unit doesn't work.

Funny stuff, if you think free energy idiocy is as funny as I do.

[http://www.e-catworld.com/2016/02/24/ecw-ocube-testing- week-...](http://www.e-catworld.com/2016/02/24/ecw-ocube-testing- week-3-thread/)

</comment><comment><USER7> "E-Cat" is short for "Energy Catalyzation" which is more or less cold-fusion.

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

<comment><USER8> Thanks. I was wondering what this was about; my best guess was the CueCat from one of Joel Spolsky's old columns...

<comment><USER9> hahaha, I was thinking the exact same thing, literally cue cat and all too. Even funnier is my undergrad degree was, originally, applied physics before switching to EE. I follow science when I can but boy do I feel out of the loop sometimes. Reading your post gave me a nice chuckle.

<comment><USER8> Glad you liked it!

I just checked, and CueCats are as low as $7 on eBay. Barcode readers convert barcodes to plaintext (and barcode printers go the other way), so CueCats are good for more than just scanning ads...

I wonder if there's room for a CueCat Users' Group. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why is this so difficult? Isolate the machine in a box where the only connection to the outside world is two wires. Draw power from those wires until you've pulled more energy than any known storage system could possibly provide. Boom, done.

Of course, my question is rhetorical. The answer is obvious: it doesn't work. If it worked, it would be easy to demonstrate.

<comment><USER2> That actually doesn't work, as there's a long history of people hiding batteries in their fake overunity devices. You can also have devices that might have other forms of stored energy that might be slowly depleted, such as mechanical strain being relieved, chemical reactions taking place, etc. You can also have devices that work by taking advantage of solar power in a subtle way or other external effects.

<comment><USER10> This thing is supposedly a fusion device. Run it until you've drawn more energy than could possibly be provided by burning an equivalent mass of hydrogen, and then you know it must be a nuclear effect. If it can't provide that much energy, then it's a worthless fusion device.

I can accept that such a test may not be totally 100% definitive. But if the device is real then it could definitely pass. The fact that they're fucking around instead of just doing the obvious shows that they're full of it.

Edit: regarding potential external effects, these devices are supposed to put out a megawatt of power. There's no solar trickery that's going to let you fake that.

<comment><USER11> Yes, random internet guy has the answer.

> If it can't provide that much energy, then it's a worthless fusion device.

A fusion device that produces more energy than you put in but doesn't produce a shit ton of energy right now is a useful breakthough in fusion.

<comment><USER12> > Yes, random internet guy has the answer

Ideas (should) stand on their own around here. Take this lame attempt at Argument from Authority somewhere else.

<comment><USER13> Please don't respond to an uncivil comment with another uncivil comment. That just makes the thread worse yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The E-cat definitely triggers all my bullshit detectors. Has there ever been a case where somebody had this fantastic invention but never let anybody take a close look but the invention was actually legitimate?

The only one I can think of is the Wright brothers who didn't show their flyer for years until the patents were finished.

<comment><USER7> Greek fire.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> even unrolling 3M tape generates X-rays.

[https://youtu.be/LQBjRF9mX1Y?t=250](https://youtu.be/LQBjRF9mX1Y?t=250)

I as anybody want the cold fusion to work (and i believe that palladium experiment 20 years ago did work, and that there is something to their approach), yet "medical" X-rays from heated hydrogen gas/Li/Ni interface doesn't struck as something unexpected or pointing to any physics outside of chemistry and EM.

</comment><comment><USER16> So, what happens if you disconnect the electrical power input and connect the output back into the input. The device should continue to run for a measurably period until the 'cold-fusion' fuel is expended.

"The measurements of electrical power input were performed with a large bandwidth three-phase power analyzer. Data were collected during 32 days of running in March 2014. The reactor operating point was set to about 1260 oC in the first half of the run, and at about 1400 °C in the second half. The measured energy balance between input and output heat yielded a COP factor of about 3.2 and 3.6 for the 1260 oC and 1400 oC runs, respectively."

[http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/191754-cold-fusion- reacto...](http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/191754-cold-fusion-reactor- verified-by-third-party-researchers-seems-to-have-1-million-times-the-energy- density-of-gasoline)

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm not sure what they're trying to show with their gamma ray spectra. To me, they all look like a potassium-40 peak (at 1460 keV), with a bunch of Compton scattering at lower energies.

</comment><comment><USER18> In fact, if this is replicated by independent engineers and they just published the actual method required.. it seems that Rossi will have lost claim to any money he could have made by actually making these devices or patenting them. I guess that nobody will need him, nor will they need to pay him any money to use the idea.

<comment><USER19> He has a (US) patent already.

[https://www.google.com/patents/US9115913](https://www.google.com/patents/US9115913)

<comment><USER20> If they have patents, why don't they publish a real scientific article on this with all the information needed to replicate?

This stuff is permanently in my 'put up or shut up' category, and putting up means true independent open replication by more than one party.

<comment><USER21> A 'real scientific' article wouldn't do anything to convince people - it would be picked apart and doubted. Which is kind of an interesting thing in an of itself. I think for controversial stuff, you simply won't get scientists to budge no matter how transparent or rigorious the reporting. If the stuff turns out to be true, there will be a long delay before acceptance.

I no longer believe that open replications make much difference either (there have been open replications and I still don't know anything more).

They are focussed on industrial and consumer installations instead. I'll start really believing if people are using this in the real world and that's the strategy they have I think. So wait and see is what I do.

<comment><USER22>
      A 'real scientific' article wouldn't do anything to
      convince people - it would be picked apart and doubted

A/K/A the scientific process, which is why experimental scientists publishing results with 5-sigma confidence intervals also painstakingly account for all of the different ways they could have screwed up, e.g., the recent gravitational waves paper, the Higgs boson discovery, etc. It goes the other way, like those guys who thought they might have discovered FTL neutrinos (but it turned out to be errors in either the apparatus or their analysis, I can't remember which).

And there being a real-world production with industrial and customer installations doesn't guarantee the absence of snake oil. How many millions of dollars were squandered on the ADE 651?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADE_651](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADE_651)

<comment><USER21> There have been studies with over 5-sigma confidence intervals that are not taken seriously simply because it's controversial. It's just we're wired to the status quo and nobody likes to be tricked.

And you can't keep say, a factory or a house running on snake oil, so it will be evident pretty quickly.

<comment><USER5> > There have been studies with over 5-sigma confidence intervals that are not > taken seriously simply because it's controversial.

Can you link to some of them?

<comment><USER21> Check out [http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2423692](http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2423692)

"We here report a meta-analysis of 90 experiments from 33 laboratories in 14 countries which yielded an overall effect greater than 6 sigma, z = 6.40, p = 1.2 × 10^-10 with an effect size (Hedges' g) of 0.09."

Non-fringe scientist Daryl Bem published a very controversial study involving 9 experiments. Replications were encouraged and were done across the world in the years following. With failures and successes, resulting in this meta study.

Amount of critics persuaded? Not that many probably.

The parallel here is lamenting the lack of an accepted theory or no theory at all and concluding that thereby the results are fraudulent as well as the process involved in deriving the results, by definition.

Bystanders often say, well if it's true why isn't there a peer-reviewed study etc, as if it matters. You can publish papers up the wazoo it won't matter.

 _If_ there's something special happening, there's going to be this period where mainstream science denies or disproves of it, regardless of studies and papers. Especially when gatekeepers have vested into a position of rejecting the idea.

As far as LENR is concerned, I can't say Rossi inspires confidence, but the fact that many institutions are researching this area tells me there might be something special going on. Many people aren't comfortable with the feeling that something might turn out to be false, so they assume it's a hoax a priori.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm genuinely curious as to why HN so regularly has articles about various "wouldn't it be great if this worked but obviously it never will" scams/inventions/measurement errors on the front page.

Is it because there is a contingent of HN voters who are true believers in this stuff?

Is it "point at the silly people and laugh"?

Is it some kind of attempt to make a meta point about credulity or discuss scams or something?

<comment><USER24> Maybe all of those are a factor. Personally, while I try to maintain skepticism about big claims like this, I don't like to dismiss an idea offhand just because most other people have previously dismissed it. Others are probably willing to extend the same courtesy even if the particular claim is unlikely to hold.

Just curious, would you put the EM drive[0] in the same category?

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

<comment><USER20> The EmDrive is actually _less_ physically plausible than the E-Cat if you get into it, since reactionless propulsion is identical to perpetual motion and/or infinite energy. Someone had a nice explanation of this over on Reddit but I don't have a link handy. Basically if momentum is not conserved then you can build kinetic energy without bound on finite power or something like that. The only way the EmDrive could work is if either (a) we are _really_ wrong about some fundamental stuff, or (b) it's not _actually_ reactionless but is pushing against something "exotic" like dark matter or dark energy.

E-Cat or anything like it (LENR) would mean new nuclear physics -- some way of bypassing the Coulomb barrier at low energies via some novel probably quantum mechanism. But fundamentally it's not violating anything as foundational as a conservation law. We know the energy is there via E=mc^2 and all. We just don't _currently_ know of any way to get at that energy at sub-plasma temperatures and pressures (and for the proposed fusion reaction in the E-Cat, by no known physical means). LENR would require new physics but would not break existing physics.

I do recall reading some interesting stuff about how some of the gas giant planets seem a bit warmer than they should be, and that if LENR were a thing it would provide a possible explanation for some anomalous heating observed in astronomical observations.

<comment><USER25> > Someone had a nice explanation of this over on Reddit but I don't have a > link handy. Basically if momentum is not conserved then you can build > kinetic energy without bound on finite power or something like that.

Are you referring to this reddit comment by myself?

[https://reddit.com/r/spaceflight/comments/34ay1c/nasa_resear...](https://reddit.com/r/spaceflight/comments/34ay1c/nasa_researchers_confirm_enigmatic_emdrive/cqt83lg)

<comment><USER26> What you say is true but I don't see why people make assumption 1. Does anomalous thrust tell you it can accelerate linearly to power?

<comment><USER25> The thrust doesn't need to be a linear function of input power for this argument to work. As long as you can get some constant thrust for some constant power input, kinetic energy will eventually exceed the energy put into the system.

<comment><USER26> True. But how do we know thrust doesn't go down as velocity increases? I feel like we don't have that information yet.

<comment><USER25> Maybe, but velocity is relative. So that would mean that the drive is pushing against something which has its own rest frame, relative to which velocity can be measured.

It's not clear what that rest frame would be. Virtual particles in the quantum vacuum are often mentioned together with the emDrive, but those particles are thought to be frameless.

I'll admit that it's not entirely implausible to have a special rest frame like that. We already know that the cosmic microwave background has a rest frame, and this is something that you would start to feel in the form of frontal radiation pressure as you gain speed relative to the CMB.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Having AI systems try to outwit one another could help judge their intentions - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611069/how-can-we-be-sure-ai-will-behave-perhaps-by-watching-it-argue-with-itself/ <comment><USER2> Please, make it stop, link to the actual blog post from OpenAI or the paper instead of some uninformed tech blog writer's horribly half-understanding summary.

"could help judge their intentions". Come on now. Today's "AI systems" don't "intend".

<comment><USER3> Exactly. One AI programmed with bad intentions will have bad intentions. One with good will do good as programmed. Which one outwits the other will simply result in a part of the code that has a programmed advantage over the other.</comment></comment>


Computer Eyesight Gets a Lot More Accurate - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/08/18/computer-eyesight-gets-a-lot-more-accurate/ <comment><USER2> This year's result: [http://image- net.org/challenges/LSVRC/2014/results](http://image- net.org/challenges/LSVRC/2014/results)

</comment><comment><USER3> Computer vision is one of those odd areas that I cannot see a nice gentle slope to adoption, but instead is a step change. For example NLP gives us all sorts of add ons to our current interaction with computers (hey let's do sentiment analysis of customer reviews / emails / etc)

But there is no obvious slope for computer vision - we need an infrastructure of cameras and bandwidth before it becomes ubiquitous

So I struggle to see the profitable intermediate businesses between here and there - and that troubles me.

<comment><USER4> There are many intermediate applications. From my own computer vision classes at university I remember examples of jobs when a guy is sitting and looking at a factory line or a machine for 8 hours a day in order to press a button if something goes wrong. This is a kind of work that bores humans out of their minds (thus making them extremely fallible), and that can be done much better with a few cameras and a computer running not-very-supercomplicated computer vision algorithms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> _Science is but a perversion of itself unless it has as its ultimate goal the betterment of humanity._ \- Nikola Tesla

Does this not nearly amount to "population-scale mass surveillance algorithms"? Do people not feel this is accelerating negative social impacts of technology?

Is it merely a coincidence that winning teams include many from countries criticized for their totalitarian social contracts: Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, National University of Singapore, Microsoft Research China, Southeast University (China), Chinese Academy of Sciences? There's also a presence from Holland.

Oh, and guess who won the category "with additional training data"? Google.

Come on people, we can do better than this! _SHAME SHAME SHAME._

<comment><USER6> This can already be done to a large degree... see [1]. That said, _this_ contest is about recognition of items and localization, both of which are key for the future of robotics and have little do with your surveillance state fears.

Ultimately, the thing stopping mass surveillance is not a limitation of technology, but of policy. For better or worse, the days of "they don't have the resources to do that" have been replaced by "they aren't allowed to do that".

If you have access to the raw packets going to and from every device, and the accelerometer in almost everyone's pocket, identification can be much simpler than doing full face recognition all the time.

I seriously doubt the dawn of the surveillance state will be heralded by deep neural networks recognizing faces in the streets - hardware and software backdoors on phones are cheaper and more effective.

[1] [https://www.facebook.com/publications/546316888800776/](https://www.facebook.com/publications/546316888800776/)

<comment><USER5> The stated scope is _object detection and image classification at large scale_ , so I would be interested to hear your reasoning as to why that is not applicable to mass surveillance.

It's not a stretch of the imagination to see these things being sold to airports, seaports, mass transit stations, and storefronts as a security feature. Next, your physical mail could be scanned. None of that seems politically unlikely in the current climate.

<comment><USER6> To be perfectly honest, the fact that NSA already has access to every single packet into or out of the US (and probably most inside the states as well...) for much cheaper with much less rollout overhead, points me away from these types of algorithms as a "tool of mass surveillance". Think Occam's razor - you would need massive political pull to put this in every tiny jurisdiction, not to mention equipment maintenance and the massive attack vector exposed by hundreds of "internet of things" devices piping data to some endpoint. The recognition results would need to be geolocated, time tagged, and encrypted to NSA specs. To access the data it would have to go through some kind of unclass->classified firewall, get decrypted AND they would have to keep the public in the dark, blah blah blah.

The tools _already revealed_ for large scale surveillance are cheaper, more effective, and more robust to outside attack than the mentioned ideas. More importantly, they are _already there_ \- there is no rollout cost at all! And up until recently it was also easier to keep the public in the dark...

I _do_ see applications at the places you mention, but for a very different reason - border inspections (coupled with human oversight) are an excellent place for automation where a small amount of effort could lead to a massive increase in throughput per person.

The only downside is that officials who deploy these things will want _guarantees_ on effectiveness, which you can never truly give due to statistics. Couple this with the fact that neural networks are very difficult to tune for false negatives and false positives and it would be a difficult sell.

One alternative would be to use these types of networks as black-box preprocessing, followed by a "tunable" algorithm like logistic regression where you could effectively control the ratio of false positives - a high rate of false positives coupled with human oversight could still lead to a large boost in human performance if most of the border inspection process is uninteresting.

But still there are unions... which is a whole separate issue to itself.

<comment><USER5> I remain unconvinced. Fundamentally, packets and physicalia are apples and oranges.

China, Hong Kong, Singapore, the UK, and an increasing number of cities worldwide already have _massive_ video surveillance networks allied to local law enforcement, traffic management, and other functions. Adding another stage of image processing would help to leverage and extract actionable data from those (the classic problem of CCTV is that nobody watches it) ... with probably very little additional outlay compared to existing investment.

I can't see anything stopping this commercial progression, in fact I see it as inevitable unless the citizenry can somehow curb their politicians. Good luck with that...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Minor editing nitpicks:

GPU, not G.P.U. OpenCV, not Open CV

c'mon NYT, act like you know.

<comment><USER8> Open CV is a mistake, but the style guide in force at the Times gives guidance for the use of dots in abbreviations. G.P.U. appears as dictated by their style guide. The Times also inserts dots into C.I.A. and F.B.I. for the same reason.</comment></comment>


Verizon's 5G Rollout Experiences Are a Mixed Bag So Far - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/telecom/wireless/verizons-5g-rollout-experiences-a-mixed-bag-so-far <comment><USER2> >even Verizon acknowledged that the limited network they were rolling out would not scale up and would not resemble the 5G it intended to have in the years to come.

I dont use Verizon, but this article seems to be riding the Verizon hate bandwagon despite numerous mentions that this is essentially a prototype.

I'll applaud innovation and new tech, even if the first year or so requires some re-work.</comment>


A long-lost text by Archimedes shows that he had begun to discover the principles of calculus - <AUTHOR> http://blog.sciencenews.org/mathtrek/2007/10/a_prayer_for_archimedes.html

<comment><USER2> I really wish they provided a translation or something. These popular math articles are rarely any good :-/</comment>


Wearable keyboard that turns anything you can touch into a typing surface - <AUTHOR> http://www.tapwithus.com/ <comment><USER2> Having to actually put this on your hand makes it much less convenient for short-burst typing than a touchscreen. You have to take it out, fit it, and be temporarily disabled by it.

Using this for typing over long durations isn't more convenient than a keyboard and the friction would probably become uncomfortable over time.

I think this will encounter the same problem most wearables have finding product-market fit. The bar is already incredibly high in terms of the speed and ease of use of consumer electronics. If you've added even 1 physical step that adds even a half-second to an action, people will always eventually default to the half-second faster way of doing something.

There's also the issue of personal consolidation. People will generally favor a single device that does 2 things over two devices that each do 1 thing, even if the more specialized devices perform better at their individual roles. This is why releasing the iPhone eventually cannibalized iPod sales. I don't see a wearable keyboard justifying pocket space for most people.

I actually struggle to find a use for this product even when I get very specific about the use case. If you're rock climbing, you still have to position the screen of the device you're typing on. This product just added to the number of hands I have to use. Even if the screen is mounted somewhere for you, what's the ideal use case? Texting while bicycling?

<comment><USER3> I agree that these are big hurdles for adoption. The device combines two big advantages though: requires no visual focus and needs only one hand. I want that badly.

I don't see why I would have to ever take it off, a few hardware generations in. It will always be there, powered by body heat. We're turning into cyborgs without the implants.

Obligatory XKCD: [https://xkcd.com/269/](https://xkcd.com/269/)

<comment><USER4> It looks like you have to learn a new system for typing though.

And if you did make it wearable, you'd have to put a bunch of extra smarts into it to make sure you don't just start typing messages to people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It seems less productive for longer typing sessions and too slow to "install" it on your hand for shorter ones. I wonder in which use cases would this excel. Truthfully, if I am to forego tactile feedback, I'd much rather prefer a wireless leap motion that I can place on a table.

</comment><comment><USER6> Reminds me of this that fizzled out [http://matias.ca/halfkeyboard/](http://matias.ca/halfkeyboard/)

<comment><USER7> Which brings us to perhaps the best review on Amazon: "Das bard es ver gad! A've traed et far tree weex ad et werx great! A recabed et ta aw Agazad watcxers! Fave stars!!!"

<comment><USER8> Maybe the reviewer was a Scot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A wristband seems like a much less obtrusive way to accomplish this goal (tracking tendons or muscles in the forearm) and would be great integrated with a smart watch.

This looks promising [http://www.smh.com.au/it-pro/business-it/writing-in-the- air-...](http://www.smh.com.au/it-pro/business-it/writing-in-the-air-closer- to-reality-20140803-1003k8.html)

<comment><USER10> I know that some of the finger muscles run down past the wrist, but I don't think you could get precise tracking of fingertip locations with the wrist alone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> There's a startup in Austin doing a similar keyboard product: [https://gest.co/](https://gest.co/)

Personally I'm skeptical on the accuracy and usability of these keyboards.

</comment><comment><USER12> I like the premise, but the foley typing sounds and look of the product make me feel like it is a mock up and the product does not exist.

Anybody have crappy footage of a guy on youtube using one of these things? I would trust that more.

 __edit: Great video below. THANKS!

<comment><USER13> [https://youtu.be/Pq3exdcbU7U](https://youtu.be/Pq3exdcbU7U) *interviewer tries it on 2:24

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Any ideas on how it knows where you "are" on the keyboard? I.e. How does it know you're pressing the "W" key?

<comment><USER15> Based on this 4-minute review video linked earlier [1], it seems it's not actually a QWERTY keyboard, but rather a custom scheme where specific finger- movements correspond to specific letters.

They say the five vowels are the basic tap on each corresponding finger, and other letters are more complicated.

They show and mention an app that trains you how to use it; think Dance Dance Revolution and other timed 'arrow' games where you have to tap out the correct response.

I think it'd be better if it assumed homerow placement on a QWERTY and worked from there -- to be able to calibrate it to your hand, e.g. by typing a little bit on an actual keyboard to pick up the placement of your fingers for each letter. There's an app idea.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pq3exdcbU7U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pq3exdcbU7U)

<comment><USER16> looks cool for steno, where you one press of both hands to input a whole word. But they still have 2 keys per finger... [https://youtu.be/JXQQzW99cAI](https://youtu.be/JXQQzW99cAI)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Ah their waitlist is hackable(or is it crackable?). They don't distinguish between "firstname.lastname@example.com" and "firstname.lastname@example.com" \- so pretty much you can game the list and move to the top(I did something very similar when OnePlus 2 came out). So tapwithus mods - if you're listening - please fix this!

</comment><comment><USER18> If I were these guys I'd be pretty focused on the VR market.

Scribblenauts VR will need keyboard input!

</comment><comment><USER19> This reminds me to the speed typing one hand keyboards that I've read as the promise to faster writing in some places. However they were "old fashion", as in they were the future 30-40 years ago. I remember reading a conversation about how, as they stopped being manufactured now people who are used to them are crazy searching pieces:

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

</comment><comment><USER20> What an impractical-looking device. I don't use wearables, but I pretend to type without a keyboard all the time, touching my fingers to my palm. A good wearable should be shaped comfortably like a glove. Then, it should detect which finger and how bent the finger is upon touching the palm, which would indicate which column and which row on the keyboard respectively.

<comment><USER21> If we're using one-handed gestures to indicate X/Y position on a standard QWERTY layout, we're truly lost.

<comment><USER20> Ah, well I imagined at some point we'd have to type letters of the alphabet. Although, now that I think about it, I suppose dictation could help, but it's not likely to be as accurate, especially for the purposes of, for example, coding.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I was waiting for somebody to do this! Looks like they got it right and simple. Finally I'll get fine mobile text input :-)

I wonder whether our sensory system would work well enough to use such a simple strip for the back-channel too. Maybe by contracting the holes by the same patterns? I guess it would work, given how fast people can read Braille.

</comment><comment><USER22> www.gest.co A better designed device that does not require you to learn novel patterns and can do much more

<comment><USER23> Looks like they were unable to continue funding and shut down in April 2016.

[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/asdffilms/gest-work- wit...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/asdffilms/gest-work-with-your- hands/posts/1546116)

<comment><USER24> I am constantly amazed at how crappy Kickstarter is. Almost everything is vaporware, and the things that do actually launch usually turn out to be garbage.

<comment><USER25> I don't think that is Kickstarter's fault -- the fact is that building stuff (particularly real, physical stuff) is hard.

<comment><USER24> I agree and disagree. No, Kickstarter couldn't be a neutral platform and also do things to ensure that projects panned out.

But Kickstarter could certainly be more transparent. They (and their crowdfunders) intentionally foster the idea that consumers are just pre- ordering real products. There isn't any large disclaimer that says, "Hey, your money might just be going down a toilet! Do your homework and make sure these people are legit!!" Kickstarter wants to (and does) feel like Amazon of the future, which is cool until you realize you're buying a future that will never exist.

In the end, it's really Kickstarter that suffers the most. I'd be willing to bet that having fewer projects (through vetting, curation, or whatever) with higher consumer trust would be more profitable in the long run.

<comment><USER22> Some companies use a successful Kickstarter campaign as a positive signal to attract investment.

If they set a low but reasonable goal and achieve it, it is ostensibly a positive signal that a market exists for whatever niche product they are building.

While the capital acquired through is almost always not sufficient to fulfil the orders, investment helps to.

This model fails when investment dries up and the second part of the plan does not work out.

This is probably what happened to gest. They had most certainly had a working prototype and were definitely not vaporware in the true sense of the word.

It could be that the only way to create a market for such a product is through an inferior product and less creative founders who have had successful exits in the past and can self fund.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> If you can get it down to a set of gloves that use qwerty in the office I'm in</comment>


What makes a product good? - <AUTHOR> http://jesperbylund.com/2013/01/what-makes-a-product-good/ There is a difference between products that perform poorly and products that perform well that is hard to put your finger on. Designers have been struggling to tell you about it for years. But it turns out it's not the answer that is the problem, it's the question. The question is: Is it enjoyable? It's the difference between functional and great. <comment><AUTHOR> Just a simple question to ask, makes it an easy method to use in any org.</comment>