Why You Hate Contemporary Architecture - <AUTHOR> https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/10/why-you-hate-contemporary-architecture <comment><USER2> Reminds me of the bad old days of software without any U/X considerations. Software developers were disdainful of their users as well (and many still are).

It was only with the advent of A/B testing and some serious study into U/X that the mindset slowly began to change.

I'm hard pressed to think of any modern building that's pleasant to look at. They're the architectural equivalents to Gordian Knot [1], Bulk Rename Utility [2], File Matrix [3] and other things not fit for human interaction.

[1] [http://foro.doom9.org/images/shot- toolarge.png](http://foro.doom9.org/images/shot-toolarge.png)

[2] [https://i.stack.imgur.com/4U32R.png](https://i.stack.imgur.com/4U32R.png)

[3] [https://thedailywtf.com/articles/Enter_The_Matrix/](https://thedailywtf.com/articles/Enter_The_Matrix/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't hate it and don't think I should. I love brutalist architecture. Vast expanses of midcentury concrete and bunker-looking buildings gives me a sense of tranquillity, permanence, and purpose.

<comment><USER4> I love looking at brutalist architecture in books, or maybe walking past some.

Working in one, not so much. I used to work in one, it had tiny windows up high, you needed a chair to get to them, you never knew what time of the day it was, if it was raining, or what.</comment></comment>


Rumor: Running iOS Apps on Macs - <AUTHOR> http://inessential.com/2018/05/31/rumor_running_ios_apps_on_macs <comment><USER2> Couldn't disagree more with this. It's been more than 7 years that the "native apps is dead long live web app" hasn't worked out as expected. We still get better apps and performance with native apps than web app and I still don't see how this trend is going to reverse in the very short term.

</comment><comment><USER3> Most of productive apps are web based these days. It seems like the desktop era has long gone.</comment>


Ask HN: Would you pay for a GTD app for Windows (like Omnifocus)? - <AUTHOR>

I am thinking of building tho equivalent of Omnifocus/Things but for the windows platform as a desktop application and selling it for $75.  Would you pay for that?
Any tips, suggestions or feedback would be appreciated.
Thanks. <comment><USER2> I'm not sure it's that simple anymore. I don't think I would pay for any GTD/productivity app unless it also had a mobile counterpart. Not only does this mean you'd need to create a compelling app for Windows, you'd also do the same on mobile and figure out how to sync everything together.

I don't have any data on this, but I suspect the Windows community is more split between iOS, Android, and Windows Phone than the Apple community.</comment>


Tesla reveals Supercharger network, Free Fill Ups - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2012/09/24/tesla-supercharger/ <comment><USER3> The arguments in this thread are amusing to say at the least. 30 minute charging times, high prices of Tesla cars. Yes all that is true. But this was never about 'Electric cars are awesome now'.

I'm pretty sure cars during and before pre Henry Ford times were not very great in terms of their overall affordability, total cost of ownership and availability of fuel all around the country. You could trust your horse to drive you back home on any day more than a car. Similar to that, the IBM computers during their early days. You mobile phone is likely to have more computing power than all the computers IBM sold a few decades back, they were highly painful to use, maintain and use. Needless to say all these things had huge maintenance issues.

But these things have caught on. So have automation, productivity and so many other new things that eventually people show friction towards but later take them to be fate accompli and learn to move forward.

Electric cars, self driving cars, wearable computing(like Google glasses) well these really might look to be unfeasible at this time. But please, these are just ideas which are waiting for their time to come, with a little push they will eventually catch on.

<comment><USER4> Electric cars are 100 years old and have not improved much, bizarrely [http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2010/05/the-status-quo-of- ele...](http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2010/05/the-status-quo-of-electric- cars-better-batteries-same-range.html)

<comment><USER5> Electric cars have improved immensely.

\- Better battery performance and lifespan. \- Improved charging time and technology. \- Distance cars can travel in a single charge. \- Increased torque and horsepower. \- Affordability and increases is mass production.

And most importantly, increases in the necessary infrastructure to support long-distance travel (exactly the topic at hand)

Your comment is very uninformed.

<comment><USER6> Did you read his link? The point the guy makes is completely correct.

Let's say tomorrow some grad student gets fusion going at a very low price. The best way to use this to power cars would be to use it to create a fuel with a high energy density. If you had 'free energy' you'd extract C02 from the atmosphere and turn it into a hydrocarbon.

For more info look at:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density>

and this interview with Nobel Prize winning Physicist Robert Laughlin

[http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2010/08/laughlin_on_the.htm...](http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2010/08/laughlin_on_the.html)

the key quote is:

"The ones that are technically trained get it right away: hydrocarbons, which we burned today have the greatest energy density possible of all fuels. Things that have carbon in them. Will people fly airplanes? Usually people say yes for the same reasons. Well, how are you going to make the airplanes fly? Battery. Batteries are pretty heavy. Oh--you can't have airplanes unless you have hydrocarbon fuels. You could in theory do it with hydrogen, but it's highly dangerous, noxious fuel. Quantum-mechanically, we know the energy content of those fuels is optimal. There will never be anything that beats them."

A massive breakthrough in energy density for batteries might be possible but it's unlikely. Huge resources have been put into improving batteries and while they have improved it's not been enough to get near the energy density of hydrocarbons.

<comment><USER3> >>Well, how are you going to make the airplanes fly? Battery. Batteries are pretty heavy.

 _"Heavier than air flying machines are impossible"_

-Lord Kevin.

Yet we have them today, thanks to a phenomenon in physics called Bernoulli's principle- <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernoulli%27s_principle>

_"The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them"_ \- Albert Einstein.

Why, O why do we think that problems have to, must be and will be solved at the same level and direction of thought the problems were framed in? Besides the whole point of a disruptive technology is that the solutions generally come as a bolt from the blue, completely surprising even the biggest experts in those areas. Directions from which those solutions come from are so radically different paths than originally they would come from. And this has not happened once, twice but many times.

Over confidence in science especially with regards to the negative aspects is not a good direction to begin with.

<comment><USER7> That's actually not how airplanes fly at all...

<http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=22977>

<comment><USER8> Bernoulli's principle is indeed how airplanes fly. Your link shoots down the silly equal-time theory, not Bernoulli's principle.

Basically, airplanes fly for three reasons:

1\. The wing deflects air downwards. 2\. Air moves faster over the top of the wing than over the bottom. Much faster than the equal-transit theory indicates. 3\. Air pressure is higher on the bottom of the wing than on the top.

The important thing that few people seem to grasp is that _all three are equivalent statements_. They aren't additive. There aren't three _different_ reasons airplanes fly, there's _one_ reason airplanes fly, with three different ways to look at it.

<comment><USER9> This interesting. You say there is one reason airplanes fly. But "deflecting air downwards" is causing an lifting force by action=reaction (the way a rocket works) and "air pressure is higher on bottom of the wing than on the top" is causing a lifting force by pressure differences.

Those are different reasons, or am I mistaken here?

<comment><USER8> Nope, they're completely inseparable. If you deflect air downwards, no matter how you do it, you must end up creating a pressure differential where air pressure is higher on the bottom than on the top. If you create such a pressure differential, then no matter how you do it, you'll end up deflecting air downwards.

Pressure is just a fancy way of saying force per area. The air pressure on the bottom of the wing is just the downward force exerted by the wing on the air, divided by the wing's area. The only way to deflect air is by applying a force to it, and the only thing applying a force to it is the wing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I would say Elon Musk is the greatest entrepreneur of the past century - <USER2> more so than Steve Jobs. He simultaneously created three separate companies, all in extremely complex industries, and combined all of them into one overall strategy.

The precision manufacturing they learned with Space X is incorporated into the Tesla S. Their aim is to make the Model S the most reliable and problem-free vehicle due to this precision.

Now they are incorporating SolarCity technology into the entire system. This is absolutely brilliant!

<comment><USER11> Interestingly I was expecting him to have much better presentation/communication skills though. I guess being an successful entrepreneur has nothing to do with that.

<comment><USER12> I noticed that... he does lack some communication skills but .. in the end, the important thing is what you say and what you do, not how you say it. There are a lot of entrepreneurs out there with very good presentation skills and use a lot of buzzwords and get everybody excited but in the end, they don't produce anything. Facts before words do it for me and this guy won me with his presentation :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is it outrageous to think that eventually this "gas" will be free because outlets will compete to have Tesla and other electric customers _stuck_ at their restaurant, bar, store for a half hour?

<comment><USER14> I remember talking to a friend who worked for an oil company, who told me that the shops at gas stations actually make 2-3 times more than the revenue generated from the gas. If you were an oil company which dealt exclusively with the consumer (which of course non of them are) you would in fact be a catering business which sold gas on the side.

<comment><USER15> >I remember talking to a friend who worked for an oil company, who told me that the shops at gas stations actually make 2-3 times more than the revenue generated from the gas

That is completely impossible. Maybe _profit_ , but not revenue. Even my sedan with a 17 gallon tank costs more to fill up than even a pack-a-day smoker with a lottery addiction and a love of energy drinks is likely to spend at the shop.

<comment><USER16> Former gas station owner here (don't ask). Profit is correct.

Typically a gas station makes 1 or two cents per liter. A 17 gallon tank is approximately 68 liters so that's between $.68 and $1.36 or thereabouts in _gross_ margin for the station. Of that they still have to operate and service the pumps, and deal with periodic mandatory environmental upgrades and inspections.

You have to do millions of liters per year to turn a profit on the gas. Gross profits on store goodies are on the order or 20 to 30%. If they're refrigerated then likely it is on the low end, if they are non-perishables then it is on the high end.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I was looking forward to this announcement and watched the live announcement. The most interesting/surprising parts of the announcement to me was:

1\. Superchargers are already deployed in California. Nice work, Tesla, for building it out and proving it works.

2\. The whole U.S. will be covered in a few years. Great for traveling cross country.

3\. It's solar-powered. I wonder if they have a electricity backup... probably, my guess. But still impressive.

4\. It will be FREE for Tesla owners. I don't know how they're pulling this off. To me, this was the most shocking part. How are they going to pay for construction, rent, etc, and still afford this? It's a great extra benefit for Tesla owners... to travel around the country for free (of course you need to buy the car and maintain the car, but still).

I wonder if the extra electricity generated from the solar panels will go into paying the rent for the spaces.

<comment><USER17> _3\. It's solar-powered. I wonder if they have a electricity backup..._

It's grid electric powered. The canopy doesn't do much.

Let's calculate:

      Guess that the canopy for each bay is 7 by 4 meters, 28m^2

      Sunny spots receive about 4kWhr of solar power per square meter per day.

      Solar panels might be 25% efficient.

      Total daily power: 28m^2 * 4kWhr/m^2/day * 0.25 = 28kWhr/day

      Model S has an 85kWhr battery, half charge is 42kWhr.

It is going to take about two days to charge off the solar.

<comment><USER18> >It's grid electric powered. The canopy doesn't do much.

They're sizing the installations in partnership with SolarCity, one of Musk's other start-ups. They claim they'll be sized such that it will generate as much energy over the course of the year as the vehicles consume. Meanwhile, you're estimating power output from a CG rendering on a marketing page.

You could argue whether or not they're lying, but they're certainly not incompetent. SolarCity's sizing calculators take these (and many more) variables into account.

<comment><USER19>
      generate as much energy over the course of the year as the
      vehicles consume

Yeah right. At what utilization rate? A single charge is ~90KWh, and takes half an hour. Two charges back to back are 180KWh.

jws guesses that each slot generates 28KWh/day. A ten slot charging station would only be able to charge three cars without going into the red. Tesla would have to build a lot of very oversized installations in a lot of sunny, rural locations to hit breakeven.

<comment><USER20> So you are basically saying that Musk is lying. This doesn't sound too much like him, does it?

A simpler explanation would be that he's not telling the whole story, and that perhaps they have dedicated solar farms in development/deployment or something to that effect. Don't afraid to dream a little bigger, darling.

<comment><USER21> Sure doesn't sound like him. He's headed up the first company to commercially resupply the International Space Station, for pete's sake.

You bet your ass he quadruple checked those numbers.

I'm guessing that the supply at these stations will be much higher than the demand for charging, so they'll make up the cost of "free" by selling wh's back to the grid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Ugh, tech reporting. Is there a original source for this somewhere? Theres some limited info at <http://www.teslamotors.com/supercharger>.

 _100 kilowatts good for three hours of driving_

From the announcement video, it seems they are charging at 370V with a maximum of 225 amps = 83.25kW. So that 30 minute figure for half a charge is pretty real. The cost for one such charge would be approximately 3$ with industrial prices for electricity. Given that you can feed solar power back into the grid at rates above or equal to what normal customers pay for their electricity, I could see them making break-even on this when discounting the initial investment (which will pay back hundred-fold in adoption rate for their cars).

<comment><USER23> That page and the video are the source material.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Personally, I get annoyed when a company takes an existing term with a defined definition, and then decides to change the meaning.

A supercharger is a mechanically driven air compressor which forces air into an engine. For a car company to take that name and redefine it into a marketing effort, well, it's annoying. Kind of like those 'turbo' buttons that used to be on the front of a PC.

<comment><USER25> Maybe they should have called the 'original' supercharger a "mechanical air compressor" instead of supercharger since the connection between the term and the definition is pretty weak, while Tesla's supercharger is an actual charger that charges more quickly than your average charger... making it 'super.'

<comment><USER24> 'air charge' is a specific term meaning the air entering the combustion chamber.

So 'supercharge' is a term for 'bigger air charge'.

However, when you deconstruct it, it is a bit silly. I dislike the addition of 'super' to things anyway, it's a very lazy way of coining a term.

Maybe we should all just adopt Kompressor like the Germans. And leave _supercharge, supercharger_ and _supercharged_ for the marketing folk to devalue to oblivion.

Edit : I just thought of a much better name. Who wouldn't want to connect up their Tesla to the ... wait for it..:

 _Warpcharger_

Yeah, _Warpcharger_ stations. Much cooler, and probably able to be trademarked as well.

<comment><USER26> > Warpcharger

Nope, we'll need that after SpaceX develops FTL drives.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is it - the tipping point has finally arrived.

This is a killer combination of rapidly falling prices in solar PV (thank you China/Kyoto protocol/Global warming), meeting the falling prices of Li-ion batteries (thank you astonishingly successful decade of laptops/smartphones/tablets), meets a cyclic economic boom (thank you GFC), meets rising gas prices (thank you OPEC/cheap oil/peak oil), meets anti-carbon incentives (thank you IPCC), meets autonomous cars (thank you Google), meets the development of nuclear fusion (thank you ITER) all combining into one massive tailwind for the one company just on the cusp of absolutely crushing it.

It's a complete clusterfuck of fortune, falling costs, converging secondary technologies and economic forces concentrated in one company protected with monopoly pricing, akin to those found by Apple, Google, YouTube, Intel, Cisco, Microsoft, Facebook and many other tech giants.

TSLA will go 10x within the next 20 years (or get bought out before it - unlikely) as it rides these convergent waves of progress.

Please for the love of capitalism short the crap out of it and don't buy it! I need to get as much of this stock as cheap as possible over the next 2-3 years of savings :D - you'd be doing me a favour!

Full disclosure: I have a significant amount of my net worth in TSLA stock and have done so on and off for 2 years (riding cycles for fun). I used to own AAPL - until relatively recently - whereupon I transferred all holdings to Google/Tesla. I may be exiting Google within the next 6 months due to rapid appreciation.

<comment><USER28> You are smart enough to know the risks of having a significant fraction of your net worth in one asset, so I'll spare you the lecture there.

Tipping point? No, I don't think so. It's progress, and it's good news, but 30 minutes to recharge is still a LONG time compared to the two minutes a petroleum-fueled vehicle takes, and the best of those can go several multiples of the Teslas range between fuelings.

<comment><USER29> On my morning commute, it's important that fueling be quick. I have to stop at a station and fill up, something I can't do at home. However, if I were in an EV, I could fill up at home, while I slept. It'd be fully charged when I got in to go to work. If I could charge 30 minutes to half at home, charging time is nearly insignificant.

I would still love to see hydrogen cars instead. I think Honda has it right.

<comment><USER30> It turns out that, among other advantages for electric cars, they can carry more energy than hydrogen cars when you take the efficiency of transferring kinetic energy to the car into account. There was an interview with Elon Musk where he scoffed at the use of hydrogen and the use of fuel cells.

<comment><USER29> The advantage of hydrogen lies in the speed of refueling, which is the main disadvantage of electric cars.

<comment><USER31> There's always battery swap-out. The problem with that is infrastructure cost, though.

Seems to me that the Supercharger stations are getting the time down to 30 minutes through parallelism. If one could bring component costs down even more, one could have more parallelism. What about 15 or 10 minute charging times? I'm going to guess that plans are in place to exploit some serious economics of scale when they start building $30,000 cars.

Once you have autonomous cars, this opens up the possibility of "battery trucks" once can rendezvous with on the highway to recharge without stopping.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Making a "charging station" that could take the place of an existing gas station would be huge feat of engineering.

When I go from the SF bay area down to LA, I get gas at kettleman city (because of the in-n-out :) and I go to the chevron station there. From google street view, it looks like that station can fuel 12 cars at a time. And when I'm there, there's often a line for a pump.

A gas stop takes, say, 2 minutes. A tesla charging stop takes 30 minutes. So serving the same peak flow of cars would take 15 times as many car spots: 180. Land looks cheap in that part of the central valley, so it might be feasible to have that much space. But 180 chargers, peak, each using 100 kilowatts would use 18 _megawatts_.

Great scott! That's a lot of power. So it looks like this is still in the range of luxury-car, low-volume stuff. I can't imagine what it would look like as a mass-market thing.

<comment><USER33> The interesting thing is that people will mainly be charging at home, though, and will never need to visit a charging station - the car will be topped up every morning when you leave for work. So the number of fillups needing to be done at a station should be much lower. But an interesting point otherwise! I'd guess that the marginal cost of the plugs is low enough that it's feasible, though.

<comment><USER34> But the number of people needing to fill up at this station and others just off of major freeways wont change. The people filling up/charging at these stations are in the middle of a trip and probably did charge while they were at home.

Furthermore, the range on even the Tesla Model S is half that of your typical car, so fillups are even more frequent. This could mean that highway stops have twice as many people needing to recharge.

<comment><USER33> Yeah, that's a good point. Fortunately, I think it will be fairly cheap to make a large number of plugs, except for maybe the beefed-up electric infrastructure. There aren't too many rest stops right now with an industrial- sized electric feed :-)

<comment><USER35> The Santa Fe railroad had a similar problem - how to feed an entire train of passengers in the 30 minutes it took to take on water (steam locomotives typically run out of water before running out of coal).

Their solution was to partner with a restaurant operator, supplying his restaurants with fresh produce & refrigerated meat.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Harvey_Company#History>

If McDonalds was smart, they'd sponsor charging stations at their restaurants. Park your electric car, swipe a credit card, go get your McMeal, use the bathroom, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> If these become as popular as they seem like they should, I foresee long lines at the supercharging stations. I'm sure that 1. Tesla have thought of it and 2. They will milk the positive publicity from such an occurrence, but it could still be a PITA for, eg., folks who want to get home from Vegas.

<comment> eric-hu What's to keep Tesla from partnering up with major supermarkets and malls?

Tesla could offer free covered parking spaces to the building owner-operators and free (or metered) charging to the customers.

The owner-operators get free 'green' PR, and could see increased business as customers have an incentive to stay in the stores longer.

Tesla sees a real-estate free way to offer more charging stations, a marketing cost for their vehicles that also adds value to their product.

<comment><USER37> Yeah, I feel like charging stations of tomorrow will be advertised in the same way "free wifi" is advertised today.

<comment><USER38> All we need now is supersized induction charging mats for electric cars.

I have a feeling that would be very dangerous for some reason, but I'm not an EE so who knows. Certainly would be pretty inefficient though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> So painful that the actual article was buried because they used a different link:

<http://www.teslamotors.com/supercharger>

<comment><USER19> I wonder why they used CGI renders if there's supposed to be actual stations already in operation.

<comment><USER39> One plausible explanation is photos of the actual stations are filled with lots of background clutter that just doesn't suit the mood of the presentation.

<comment><USER40> Or the presentation was prepared before the stations were complete.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I think electric cars will only really flourish once self driving vehicles become more practical and common. That convergence, along with civilian drones, will expand and improve our options for transport immensely, while also improving efficiency dramatically. It's still a long way to go, but the technologies to make it happen exists today. It's going to be more of an infrastructure change, for example to provide specially marked routes and stopping points for self driving vehicles. The benefits of implementing this is going to take a while for people to realise, but doing so will be comparable or cheaper than current mass transit projects, while offering significantly more flexibility regarding routes and capacity. It will allow people to improve the mobility they have with their own cars now, while improving efficiency so people can live better in and around bigger cities.

For example, instead of bus routes, you can have a car come to pick you up at or near home at a scheduled time, or on demand, to take you to the train station to make a scheduled train on time. When the train arrives in the city you can have a similar car take you to the office. The cars can manage stopping to recharge by itself. The car routes can be updated and optimised based on demand or congestion, new routes can be added easier than bus routes. Software can manage your individual trips so you only have to make decisions based on time and cost. Deliveries can be done with automated cars and flying drones, and this can be adapted much quicker based on demand.

</comment><comment><USER26> Here's a thought (disclaimer - IANAEE):

Could we charge electric vehicles while driving? Could we bury, say, some coils under the highways and have cars have a transformer on board to draw power from the road? That would remove the need for charging stations on a long-distance trips almost completely.

<comment><USER42> You're looking for an induction system here. At speed you may encounter some unwanted force effects (think maglev).

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> 30 minutes to charge...still puzzled why Tesla has gone with the recharge model rather than the battery swap model ala Better Place.

<comment><USER22> Because the battery swap model doesn't exist. It's a cool idea, but it's not right here right now.

<comment><USER44> I've been in a Better Place car here in Israel and experienced the swap, it works. Also, Shai Agassi recently completed a full cross country trip (North to South). Small country, but still.

What makes you think this is not a viable solution?

<comment><USER23> Israel is only 263 miles from north to south. The Tesla S (85kwH)can go 300 miles. Seems like the Tesla might be overkill for that country.

<comment><USER3> Hmm,

This seems to be a perfect use case for Israel.If you are a regular office goer, charge once and may be use it for a whole week and half.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Tesla had a 250 million dollar operating loss in 2011 and 106 million last quarter. Add 700 million of debt onto that, and... I wonder how long they can keep up this kind of expansion.

This however, is really cool.

<comment><USER46> Elon Musk alone has an estimated $2B fortune, so at least five years at that burn rate? :)

Facebook's IPO bled much more money out to bankers than all Tesla has spent so far, it's not like they are doing bad. Tesla has the potential to take over a sizeable slice of the (huge) automobile industry.

<comment><USER47> They also have on thing that I don't think Facebook has, an awesome leader with a great vision.

That goes a long way in todays world.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> World changing. Hats off to Elon Musk and his team.

</comment><comment> at-fates-hands I think its interesting to hear people constantly challenging this technology.

Fist it was it couldn't be done. An electric car? No way.

Then Telsa Motors comes out with an electric sports car. No way! Too expensive! Top Gear made a mockery of the car. Not feasible, what happens when you run out of charge?

Then Tesla Motors figures out a way to create "re-fueling" stations for their cars. No way! 30 minutes to charge my car? WAY too long! Stupid.

Whether you know it or not, each step this company takes, it's answering every one of the doubts people have about this technology. Affordable completely electric cars are a lot closer than most people think.

</comment><comment><USER49> I notice that they have multiple stations along the 5 between SF and LA, but nothing between Gilroy and Los Angeles, which is around 350 miles. Why not a stop in Santa Maria or similar?

I suspect the problem is no where isolated enough that they won't have to worry about large numbers of local residents choosing to just go to Supercharger station rather than charging at home. As an occasional use to make people comfortable with a Tesla (long trips are possible), this is probably well worth the money. But it's unlikely to sustainable if owners choose to forgo the home charger.

<comment><USER50> Between SF and LA, highway 5 is faster than 101. From SF you'd go thru Gilroy, then over to 5 via Pacheco pass, then south to LA.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> I find it rather amazing that a single entrepreneur takes on a task normally expected from governments.

<comment><USER52> Would that task be supplying the international space station, or building an EV charging structure?

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Come on, 30 minutes for a charge that'll get you just 180 miles? I just checked the 2012 Honda Civic specs[0], you can fill up with 13.2 gallons in 2 or 3 minutes, and that'll get you 13.2*32 mpg combined = 422 miles. There's no way this is gonna work unless the charging process is much faster or they swap batteries instead.

0: <http://www.edmunds.com/honda/civic/2012/road-test-specs.html>

<comment><USER33> Are you comparing charging stats unironically and saying it's a dealbreaker if it's not just as good as the incumbent in this category? It's really not that terrible to stop for 30 minutes after 3 hours of driving. Long road trips just went from wildly impractical to almost convenient, assuming the chargers are well distributed.

You could compare the 0-60 times of the Civic and say it's unacceptable that it takes the Civic twice as long to get to 60 mph, or that it only seats a measly 5 people, uncomfortably at that, or that it only has one trunk.

<comment><USER53> > Are you comparing charging stats unironically and saying it's a dealbreaker > if it's not just as good as the incumbent in this category?

Yes, I can guarantee you that the layman doesn't give two shits about electric cars. Until it's cheaper and/or more convenient for him than gas cars, he won't switch. And until laymen switch, you won't get the economies of scale necessary for a vast charging network.

> assuming the chargers are well distributed.

That's a pretty big assumption. First of all, Musk said there are charging stations in several cities in California, but exactly _how many_ are there in each city? Do you have to go to one particular location in each city for charging? Because that's DOA. There's no such thing as _one_ convenient location for everyone.

And don't forget that right now all the testing is being done in California and Nevada, both of which are well known for their plentiful sunlight. But how much energy will the solar panels be able to contribute back to the grid when installed in a place like Seattle? Far less, I'm guessing.

<comment><USER54> The Tesla site shows the locations. They look to have one in each city, but its not as big of an issue as your make out. The only need to make them convenient for travelers. Locals can always charge at home. That's something you can't do with a gas-powered car.

<comment><USER53> > Locals can always charge at home.

In which case you're just pushing the negative environmental effects to the power plant.

<comment><USER55> > . Until it's cheaper and/or more convenient for him than gas cars, he won't > switch.

You keep changing your argument. It's fuckload more convient to almost never have to go to the gas station, change oil, coolant, transmission fluid. Fuckload cheaper too.

Fail, go back to troll school.

<comment><USER53> > You keep changing your argument.

Strawman, I never changed my argument.

> Fuckload cheaper too.

Oh really? Have you seen how much a Model S costs?

You need to work on your reading comprehension and math, go back to school.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> It's this kind of hybrid (paid/free) model that solves the chicken and egg problem; the more common the fuel pumps, the easier it is for people to switch to electric.

</comment><comment><USER57> When will they include a solar charger with the vehicle? "Buy a Tesla. Drive it for free, forever."

Add to that an engine that requires /a magnitude/ less maintenance than a gas one.

</comment><comment><USER58> This is a very disruptive technology. I am wondering how much surface of solar panels (and "solar power") do they need to charge to answer to all the demand on a daily basis. And by extrapolation is this can be done widely (for buildings, universities, homes...)?

The oil industry should rethink its business model. And we should buy Tesla's stock right about now.

</comment><comment><USER59> Why not a small trailer with battery packs for long trips? or if you don´t want-need to go green, it could go with an engine and a generator. You connect it to your car and that way you can add range in an easy way. It´s also fast to swap at the e-station, just 2 min...

</comment><comment><USER60> A lot more slides and details here:

[http://www.treehugger.com/cars/tesla-unveils-its- supercharge...](http://www.treehugger.com/cars/tesla-unveils-its-supercharger- network-drive-free-forever-sunlight.html)

</comment><comment><USER61> I understood it to be free for _existing_ Tesla customers, not new ones...

<comment><USER62> Right, owners of the "S" model can charge free for life. No word on what owners of subsequent models will pay for it. I'm eager to see whether they can trim that 30 minutes down to, say, a max of 15. 30 minutes every three hours is too long, but 15 would work. Get out, plug in, go take a bio break, come back, wash your windows, and you're just about ready to hit the road again.

These are exciting times to live in.

<comment><USER63> >>These are exciting times to live in.

I agree. This is the first time I actually believe we may become oil independent in the not so distant future (i.e. decades, maybe even in our lifetimes). As soon as the market realizes that a credible replacement to oil is here I expect oil prices to crash. I wonder what will oil companies do when they realize that their markets are about to evaporate?

Exciting times indeed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> The 30 minute charging time kind of sucks, but it's a small price to pay for owning a completely electric car, and I'm sure it's probably up there as far as improvements go on the priority list.

</comment><comment><USER65> As a plugin prius owner. I find it a bit annoying that they don't just work with existing charging networks like ChargePoint to help expand the accessibility of electric car charging.

<comment><USER18> They already support ChargePoint on all their cars.

As for making Supercharger compatible with the SAE J1772, somehow I doubt Tesla wants a plug-in Prius lazily charging its battery for hours while a fast-charge compatible vehicle waits its turn.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> I'm not clear on where they're putting the solar panels. Are they storing the electricity? Can it charge more than one car at once?

</comment><comment><USER67> I always felt the Wildcats 3.0 comic was cancelled way too early. Now I get to see it played out in real life by Elon Musk.

</comment><comment><USER68> I'm glad theres at least one entrepreneur whose denting the universe versus profits, Musk for president.

</comment><comment><USER69> So, at what point does the local government slap a tax to pay for the roads and how much will it be?

</comment><comment><USER70> I think we finally know the real purpose behind the Dead Space Markers...

</comment><comment><USER71> I think this conversation should be less about the electric vehicles and more about the idea of creating a decentralized solar grid. And one that will encourage existing gas station owners to do the same and bank on all that lost solar energy.</comment>


Tesla Motors Revenues Drop by 1/3, Creating a $34.9 Million Loss in Q3 - <AUTHOR> http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/11/tesla-motors-2010-q3-34-point-9-million-loss.php

<comment><USER2> Thats the moral dilemma with government bailouts, once you receive free money from the government an organization has absolutely no incentive to be efficient and respond to the demands of the market place. The results are products that are to expensive, products that nobody wants, inefficient manufacturing and employee, distortion of the free market place, and incentive to not make a profit in hopes of getting another bailout which creates a negative feedback loop that self-destructs a company.</comment>


Why CouchDB? - <AUTHOR> http://books.couchdb.org/relax/why-couchdb <comment><USER2> I've read tons of documents, articles, and how-tos on schema-free non-RDBMS DBs like SimpleDB, CouchDB, BigTable, DBSlayer etc. by now and I agree they seem very interesting and powerful. However, I just don't see how having each document (e.g. invoice) have it's own field structure would be a good thing. Every database I've ever worked on is structured and every new document has almost always the same data as every other document. That is not because of the limitations of the database but rather the nature of the business. Every invoice should have the same exact fields as every other invoice because employees are trained to fill and understand the implications of the data in each field. This has a lot more to do with business process efficiency and nothing to do with computers. RDBMS just facilitate that business rigidity more naturally. Of course, nobody's saying I can't do this in CouchDB but then why use CouchDB if I don't need the fluid document structure?

Also, the biggest question I have is, how powerful are the dynamic views? I have tables with 10m rows and often serve 100+ select queries per second with joins/where/having/order/group-by/full-text-search functions. The business goal is not to make group-by queries but to summarize data in real-time as the analysts want e.g. sales by product per day or shipments by employee per week. How fast would a view that performs an equivalent function work on CouchDB? Can I optimize it somehow because I don't see much mention of index colums anywhere?

What bugs me most is that when dealing with databases like CouchDB and SimpleDB, the "best practice" advice I hear is to just write summary data and search indexes on my own. That is every time a new invoice is generated, add +1 to the summary.count.invoice record, add +300 to the balance.customer.acme- corp record and -5 to inventory.widget record. And don't forget to add every unique word in the document to the search index table. While that would be great if I knew the exact business needs ahead of the time but in reality, first you capture all the data you can capture and then generate reports based on the needs of the user.

I fully understand all the wonderful things that CouchDB and SimpleDB provide like statelessness, replication, caching, and scalability. I know they are not SQL databases and will not offer drop-in replacements. However, I just don't see how I can use them for any of the hundreds of database projects I've been involved in over past decade and a half as easily as any decent SQL server.

Here's an article I want to read someday. "How CouchDB will be a better solution when you try to do X" where X is something real-world database folks do on a regular basis and X is not a blog engine, recipe manager, or address book. I have tens of GB of data that I'd rather store in SimpleDB than host myself on MySQL or Postgres. However, what I make from all of these document- oriented databases is that they're wonderful, they will solve all of my scalability and concurrency problems, and they will require me to reimplement all of the necessary grouping and indexing features of a typical RDBMS myself.

<comment><AUTHOR> business evolves. This is why often the focus is on process rather than objects. In reality there are no real classes of things, just instances, each distinct. The key word you mention is "structured". Sure, if you're building apps to support the DMV where documents and forms change once every 30 years and people work for life sitting there doing data entry on screens that look like those forms then it's a safe bet you can design a relational schema that supports this. The same holds for banking and other transactional settings. The relational approach is powerful, with an algebra to back it up and support a query language.

So where do you put the logic, business rules, integrity constraints that govern this data? In stored procedures, key constraints? Or does it leak into the application code, especially if the code is OO. Using OOP how do the objects map to the tables? Some high level abstraction like hibernate that presumes to make that declarative and automatic? Now what if the schema is not so static, suppose it's dynamic. How does it evolve?

I think what many have recognized is that there is considerable overlap in the db world with app servers and web servers. The web is a much more dynamic place and increasingly I think relational databases are used more for just simple storage.

We've all used RDBMS for years and they've had loads of PhD theses put into making them what they are. Sometimes a different view is helpful. CouchDB has a dirt simple REST based API. It uses JSON for communication and Javascript in the database. It lets you store almost anything you want and it supports replication. For a real world scenario think of say something like a web-based lotus notes that supports on and off line use and collaboration.

Another very interesting aspect of CouchDB is it's choice of implementation language, Erlang. What it inherits from OTP is readily seen in the small amount of code needed to implement it. Moreover when it comes to robustness Erlang is frightening in how rock solid it is.

For what it's worth I think it's a keeper

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> CouchDB is different from a relational DB in so many ways its almost silly to be doing the comparison. However, many people use and understand SQL, so we must show them what differences to expect.

Your argument about normalization being more realistic has its place. CouchDB models documents, which by necessity are somewhat complete, even when taken from their original context. Document modeling is radically different from relational modeling.

In document modeling, more emphasis is placed on the document life-cycle as opposed to inter-record normalization (relations). And in document modeling the client has a greater responsibility for saving data that is useful to the user, rather than asking the relational store to reconstruct the objects.

I think there are a lot of uses for CouchDB alongside relational DBs, but I'm especially excited to see what kinds of crazy things people figure out how to do with p2p offline replication.

</comment><comment><USER4> I can see the point in terms of avoiding table locking etc. but I still don't see it (not that it is pretending to be) as a silver bullet - surely you would still want to maintain your relational data structure and then have it write to couch db when appropriate for read access, almost like a denormalized view onto your relational data.

<comment><USER5> CouchDB is no silver bullet. I hope we never give the impression that we think it is.

On your point: You can still manage relations in CouchDB, they are just implicit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's not installed, and code I wrote for it a year ago does not work anymore.

<comment><USER6> To explain my comment...

1\. Couchdb is not installed and available everywhere like mysql.

2\. The API is not stable (they haven't reached 1.0 yet), so code you wrote for it a year ago does not work on versions today. Code you write for it today will likely not work in two years time.

This is 'why not couch db' for me.

<comment><USER5> These are fair points, but what do you expect from a project in alpha state not nearly half the age of MySQL? :)

<comment><USER7> If they're trying to sell themselves as a reasonable alternative (let alone superior), yes, I do.

<comment><USER8> Wait, what? Where does it say we're an alternative to relational databases, or MySQL?

<comment><USER6> The whole article is a comparison to relational databases.

<comment><USER9> I think they're trying to say how they differ from relational databases since most people know and understand relational databases. It's like telling someone in America how cricket is played and using baseball as a base point to explain it.

<comment><USER6> Yes. Saying how something differs is called a comparison.

<comment><USER9> In response to "Wait, what? Where does it say we're an alternative to relational databases, or MySQL?" you responded: "The whole article is a comparison to relational databases."

Sure sounded to me like that was an answer to his question, and you were saying the author is saying CouchDB is an alternative to relational databases by saying it is a comparison.

I obviously wasn't trying to define what a comparison is, I was just giving a reason FOR this particular comparison.

You need not be so snide, sir.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Does anyone know of large production websites that use CouchDB extensively?

<comment><USER8> <http://wiki.apache.org/couchdb/CouchDB_in_the_wild>

<comment><USER10> Hm, so I guess the answer is mostly no. =/

The biggest site on there is wego.com. Great site, and I think they open sourced much of their Rails CouchDB integration. But only 30k unique visits per month.

<comment><USER8> It's still very early days. If you want do do a very large production setup of CouchDB, you will be sitting on the bleeding edge of community experience. That's not for everyone, of course.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> One point from the article: RDBMSs do not represent data in the same way as in the real world.

This is a horrible misconception. In fact, CouchDB et al. _store_ data like we do in the real world but they certainly do not represent data as it is in the real world. That crown goes to RDBMSs. Suppose we have two physical records of a company's logo. Then the company logo changes but only one of the records is updated. That kind of error took place because the physical storage model (two places) did not correspond to the data model (one entity). That is where RDBMSs shine and CouchDB fails. RDBMSs allow data relations to be expressed and then have the DB enforce these relations. This incurrs some overhead (and I suspect, makes most web programmers think that RDBMSs are "old school") but in most cases, this overhead is paid for several times over in future data integrity.

<comment><USER3> oops, commented when I meant to reply. Here goes:

CouchDB is different from a relational DB in so many ways its almost silly to be doing the comparison. However, many people use and understand SQL, so we must show them what differences to expect.

Your argument about normalization being more realistic has its place. CouchDB models documents, which by necessity are somewhat complete, even when taken from their original context. Document modeling is radically different from relational modeling.

In document modeling, more emphasis is placed on the document life-cycle as opposed to inter-record normalization (relations). And in document modeling the client has a greater responsibility for saving data that is useful to the user, rather than asking the relational store to reconstruct the objects.

I think there are a lot of uses for CouchDB alongside relational DBs, but I'm especially excited to see what kinds of crazy things people figure out how to do with p2p offline replication.

<comment><USER12> _I'm especially excited to see what kinds of crazy things people figure out how to do with p2p offline replication_

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Lotus_Notes></comment></comment></comment>


Ask YC: Python implementation - <AUTHOR>

which python implementation would be good for windows platform with GUI + serial comm: connectivity?<p>thanks. <comment><AUTHOR> I also did some research on that and found out as follow:

\- there are mainly 2 implementations: CPython and Jython, but i guess i will follow CPython...

\- for serial comm: i found this page. <http://pyserial.sourceforge.net/>

\- I still don't know which one is good GUI module (easy and nice API)

...funny that i am the only one answering my own question.. :o)</comment>


Logo Evolution of 25 Famous Brands - <AUTHOR> http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/logo-evolution/ <comment><USER2> I am afraid they are wrong about the BMW logo, the colours are actually the Bavarian colours and not to symbolise a propeller cutting through a blue sky. Although, their shapes might be picked because of a propeller, but their colours are not chosen for that reason.

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting but two years old and out of date....</comment>


U.S. Postal Service Logging All Mail for Law Enforcement - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us/monitoring-of-snail-mail.html?hp <comment><USER2> About seven years ago, I was at a sushi bar and struck up a conversation with an older gentleman sitting next to me. He told me he was a developer and created systems for USPS. I am always fascinated by the technology used in large scale systems so I picked his brain for a good hour.

From what I recall, he said at the key distribution centers, USPS scans every single mail (in standard envelop sizes) and in under a second, runs OCR for the destination address. Results from OCR are matched to the address database and if the match is significant, the mail is automatically diverted to the correct queue. Now here's the fun part - if OCR fails or print/handwriting is unreadable, a photograph is immediately sent to one of the hundreds of humans waiting to decipher the address and type it in (think Amazon Mechanical Turk). The humans have under 10 seconds to read, decipher, type, and submit the correct address. During this time, the letter is held up in a waiting buffer and the moment the correct address is available, it is diverted to the correct queue.

I asked him if that means USPS took a photo of every single piece of mail and he said yes, they had to, otherwise nobody would ever get any mail due to the sheer volume of mail they had to manage. I asked if the photos of envelopes were saved forever and he said, well, I'm pretty sure they are but I'm not allowed to publicly admit that.

I know it's a personal anecdote but that was seven years ago. I can't even imagine what they're doing now.

<comment><USER3> Better OCR (and, cynically, perhaps a higher tolerance of error to cut costs) is making the human handwriting readers obsolete.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/04/us/where-mail-with- illegib...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/04/us/where-mail-with-illegible- addresses-goes-to-be-read.html?pagewanted=all)

<comment><USER4> I wouldn't be surprised if modern domain specific OCR can give you an error rate that beats that of a time-constrained human reader.

<comment><USER5> While I agree with you at the general level, it sounds like these trained individuals are ridiculously good at what they do. Even seven years ago, to be able to take a crack at an envelope in just 10 seconds and type out the result is impressive.

<comment><USER6> And their jobs are getting harder:

"It used to be that we'd get letters that were somewhat legible but the machines weren't good enough to read them. Now we get letters and packages with the most awful handwriting you can imagine."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Goddamnit this is NOT OK. This is the dark side of the technological improvements to "productivity": we have enabled a level of productivity that allows the few to track the many.

It's time we technologists all sat down and though about ways to turn the tide - they are using technology to track us, how can we use technology to thwart them?

My best answer is: data flak. We should all start building system that include extra data. Browser components that load other pages in the background. Phones that text at random. Snail mail to nowhere.

You're gonna snoop on all my data? Take it ALL and choke on it.

<comment><USER8> Essentially what you're proposing is a DoS of the tracking system. The problem with that (at least with physical mail) is that it takes far more resources to generate physical mail than to scan it. A DoS shaped like that will never work unless you have some way of massively amplifying the effect you are having.

Postage on a post card is currently 33 cents. How many postcards do you reckon you'd have to send before the automatic scanning process costs even one cent extra?

<comment><USER9> I would imagine the DoS is half of the benefit. The other half is manufactured reasonable doubt.

If a person were to send periodic letters with real and fake cryptographic messages to random individuals of importance, barring a warrant to read the contents of each letter, that would constitute reasonable doubt as to whether or not that person was legitimately communicating with another person of interest.

<comment><USER8> It would also likely be taken as suspicious in its own right.

<comment><USER9> True, but given the facts of the past few weeks, it's completely reasonable to set up such a system like this now for yourself as a hedge for what the political landscape may look like in the future. I know what is illegal today, but I have no idea what may be made illegal tomorrow or 10 years from now. Implementing such a system is a hedge/insurance against dystopian futures that are becoming reality.

As long as such a system is in place and significantly predates (on the scale of years) any crime you are accused of, this argument of hedging against a dystopia makes a lot more sense and is far more defensible.

<comment><USER10> > _I know what is illegal today_

That is impressive, even if you are a lawyer.

<comment><USER9> Hehe. Yeah, I know. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Maybe I'm alone here, but I never had an expectation of privacy in regards to what I write on the outside of a envelope and drop into a public receptacle (mailbox). I expect the contents to be considered highly private, but not the outside.

There's also this issue of willing disclosure of information to an entity. When I put a stamp on something and drop it in the mailbox, I know I'm handing that information over to a government authority (or whatever you want to call the USPS's weird relationship to the government). Regardless of what they are or aren't supposed to do with it, the fact is that I know I'm putting my info in their hands and trusting them. This is unlike PRISM, where I send an email through Gmail with no expectation that it should ever pass through government hands.

Also, I'm under the impression that most if not all hand-written addresses are digitized for sorting purposes. I think you have to be naive to assume the postal service wasn't keeping that data on file.

<comment><USER12> Abortion protesters used to write down the license plates... just some publicly available meta-data, right?

<comment><USER13> Yes. What is your point? Nobody has any expectation of a right to drive anonymously.

<comment><USER14> But they do have a right to privacy in their medical history. Recording license plate numbers at a hospital, abortion clinic, etc. is a violation of that right, even if it might otherwise be legal.

<comment><USER13> That logic isn't obviously correct. People do not have a right to go about in public, to and from notorious places, in a 2-ton death monster that requires licensure and indemnification to operate, anonymously. People requiring a higher degree of privacy than that offered by cars would be better served taking their bicycles.

<comment><USER14> I would argue that a _de facto_ right to privacy is created by the nature of the destination. It doesn't matter if someone can see you or your car, the fact that it's a medical destination should create a right to privacy of that trip.

<comment><USER15> > It doesn't matter if someone can see you or your car, the fact that it's a > medical destination should create a right to privacy of that trip.

So what you're saying is that the government should enforce a built-in gag order on people? Interesting...

<comment><USER14> _> It doesn't matter if someone can see you or your car, the fact that it's a medical destination should create a right to privacy of that trip.

So what you're saying is that the government should enforce a built-in gag order on people? Interesting..._

They already do with regard to medical information, in the form of HIPAA. A right to privacy has to include the right to prevent others from disclosing certain kinds of information about oneself. You could also consider it from a defamation/slander/libel perspective.

<comment><USER15> > They already do with regard to medical information, in the form of HIPAA.

HIPAA type records are not publically displayed when people walk outside.

To the extent that a given condition _is_ public people are allowed to note that. This is why assholes were legally allowed to call me pimple-face, for instance.

<comment><USER14> _HIPAA type records are not publically displayed when people walk outside._

No, but there are some things that ostensibly take place in public but should still be considered private, absent some urgently pressing higher need that can only be met by disclosure.

 _To the extent that a given condition is public people are allowed to note that. This is why assholes were legally allowed to call me pimple-face, for instance._

At some point of excess, wouldn't that fall under verbal abuse, harassment, or bullying, depending on whether you're considering laws or school policies, and thus not be considered free speech?

In general I believe people should be able to say anything they want, but if what they say or to whom they say it violates someone else's rights, their victims shouldn't have to put up with it.

<comment><USER15> > At some point of excess, wouldn't that fall under verbal abuse, harassment, > or bullying, depending on whether you're considering laws or school > policies, and thus not be considered free speech?

Perhaps. But should that point come the speech will lose protection because it is abusive, harassing, or bullying nature. Not because it describes my medical condition.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Couldn't they pick a more sympathetic guy to talk about:

"Mr. Pickering said that although he was arrested two dozen times for acts of civil disobedience and convicted of a handful of misdemeanors, he was never involved in the arson attacks the Earth Liberation Front carried out."

Gee, this guy was a member of a group that conducted arson attacks and the government is keeping track of the mail he gives to the government to deliver? I'm shocked, really...

That said, this is a great article, and the second page gives a good description of what I think is the legal theory behind the NSA programs:

1) Don't need a warrant to keep track of meta-data (whatever is readable on the outside of the mail).

2) Don't need a warrant to access contents (opening the mail) in foreign intelligence cases (i.e. where the target is a non-U.S. person).

3) Need a warrant to access contents otherwise.

<comment><USER17> > Couldn't they pick a more sympathetic guy to talk about

"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all." \- H.L. Mencken

<comment><USER18> This is way better than all the explanations I've been able to come up with for people about why it's important to defend weev.

<comment><USER19> That might be telling you that there isn't a good reason to do so.

<comment><USER18> Oh, I had good ones, and still do: things about unpopular speech being the canary in the coal mine, things like that. It's much the same explanation.

Mencken is just a lot more eloquent than I was describing it, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> If you need to send an anonymous letter - hopefully for good (say, whistle blowing) and not evil - you can still do so.

Use a fake return address (duh).

Drive to a mailbox far away from your work or home. Pick a mailbox that has no security cameras. Don't go into a Post Office, where there will be security cameras.

Turn off your phone before going anywhere near the drop location.

(This is all coming from a PBS documentary about how they went about the 2001 anthrax attack investigation.)

<comment><USER21> Also:

Buy the envelope, stamp, and any mailed material (eg paper) far from your home.

Exclusively handle all the materials to be sent in a clean environment far from your normal haunts. You may want to wear a hair net, breathing mask, and gloves. Do not lick the stamp or envelope.

Be careful about handwriting anything, if authorities may have any samples of your handwriting — as for example on prior letters addressed, or archived forms filed. Also, do not use a computer laser/inkjet printer, which may add unique invisible tracking codes.

After leaving behind your own phone, be sure not to use a vehicle with its own phone (OnStar etc) or any RFID transponders (eg tolltags, which can be read for traffic jam analysis even on non-toll motorways). Similarly, put aside any personal ID or payment cards (passports, some driver's licenses, mass-transit stored-value cards, etc) which may have remotely-readable RFID transponders.

Try to arrange for your phone, computer, or residence to continue giving off its usual signals of your presence – so that the period of the letter mailing doesn't show up as a suspiciously idle time for you.

Avoid all private and public surveillance cameras, or disguise yourself (and your car's license plate from automated readers).

Still:

Even with all these steps, it's likely the individual's capability to opt out, with effort, from being tracked will soon be obsolete. It will be too cheap and appealing to video-record all public spaces, or even regularly dust all public spaces with unique molecular tags so that when examining an artifact later (a letter, vehicle, article of clothing, etc), all other places it has recently been are evident to careful analysis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I have lived in a country (Taiwan under its previous dictatorial regime in the early 1980s) where I assumed that all my postal mail, domestic or foreign, was read by the ruling party's secret police as part of the delivery process. The postal service in Taiwan was always awesomely efficient when I lived there, with residential mail delivery twice a day all days of the week, year-round except for a brief set of holidays for Chinese New Year. Because I assumed that all my mail would be read, I set up procedures to check whether any of it was seized. My dad and I would write weekly letters to each other, numbered consecutively. The course of post between Taiwan and Minnesota in those days was a week or less, so after a while each weekly letter would take the form of including a phrase like "This is letter number 12, replying to your letter number 10, which I received on [date]" and so on. As far as I can ascertain, all the letters I wrote and all the letters addressed to me were delivered, but I assumed that they were read by the secret police.

Foreign magazines and newspapers were sometimes seized and not delivered to subscribers, usually when they included articles about domestic politics in Taiwan. (I learned to respect The Economist as a news source by observing how often it was seized in delivery, either in entirety, or with blacking out of particular articles.) Local people who could read English could pay their hard-earned money to subscribe to (rather expensive, in those days) publications like The Economist or the Asian edition of the Wall Street Journal, but they couldn't count on receiving all of what they paid for.

The dictatorship in Taiwan eventually fell, after a largely peaceful people power revolution that forced a transformation to an open political system. Along the way, people I know, including the father of one my children's godparents, were imprisoned for leading peaceful protests urging free and fair elections and a stop to censorship. Most people don't have the courage to go to prison--especially prisons like those in Taiwan at the time. But courage is what it takes to undermine a dictatorship. A successful movement for greater freedom requires great courage, and a degree of social trust among the movement participants that is not easy to find. Allow me to repeat advice I have shared here on Hacker News before. If you really want to be an idealistic but hard-headed freedom-fighter, mobilizing an effective popular movement for more freedom wherever you live, I suggest you read deeply in the publications of the Albert Einstein Institution,

[http://www.aeinstein.org/organizationsde07.html](http://www.aeinstein.org/organizationsde07.html)

remembering that the transition from dictatorship to democracy described in those publications is an actual historical process with recent examples around the world that we can all learn from. Practice courage and practice collective action.

<comment><USER7> > ...courage is what it takes to undermine a dictatorship

Yes, and thanks for a great comment. I'm going to read that link, [http://www.aeinstein.org/organizationsde07.html](http://www.aeinstein.org/organizationsde07.html).

Anger and hatred after 9/11 is what led us down this spiral, and more anger and hatred would only change the names, not the system.

<comment><USER23> _Anger and hatred after 9 /11 is what led us down this spiral_

9/11 merely silenced the critics, allowing the power elite to bum rush the Constitution, aka the Shock Doctrine. Panopticon has always been the plan. There's always a plan, waiting for the opportunity.

<comment><USER7> It inspired people who knew better to compromise on their beliefs about freedom and torture and rule of law, and we've been paying for it ever since.

<comment><USER24> And it scared those who didn't know better into not asking themselves the tough questions required to become one who does know better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Ah, I see I've arrived at Hacker/USA Government Abuses News. And I say that as somebody deeply interested in these stories.

<comment><USER26> Agreed, although the top comment here was actually quite interesting.

HN has made an exception for all things US gov't spying related. I even lost my flagging rights for flagging all the snowden stuff (which I thought was exactly what you were supposed to do when you thought something was off topic... not my fault it was the entire front page!)

It's an important topic, but like you I preferred when HN was an oasis of tech away from this nonsense.

<comment><USER14> _It 's an important topic, but like you I preferred when HN was an oasis of tech away from this nonsense._

Unfortunately, politics have invaded our tech oasis, and I don't mean HN. The politicization and militarization of technology is undeniable; at this point, retreating to some new oasis and denying it won't make it go away. While I do want a site where I can see more articles about Erlang and lambda calculus, for now at least, I can accept the pressing need to maintain focus on political issues that undermine our ability to build the technology we want and have it used for good instead of evil.

<comment><USER26> >The politicization and militarization of technology is undeniable

You make this statement as if it was some sort of new happening. This is as old as technology itself. Finding new ways to kill each other has been the number one driver of technology progress, and always has been.

<comment><USER14> The web was not invented to kill people.

<comment><USER26> Ah, the web was invented to keep military sites in communication (presumably so that they could keep killing people) while the rest of the world was dying a horrible, nuclear death. So it kinda was.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I guess that the government's legal justification for this is that people have no reasonable expectation of privacy under the 4th Amendment re: the info on the outside of the mail (name, address, etc.). That is why the need a warrant to actually open the mail.

<comment><USER27> So does the same apply to email headers? "We didn't look at the body or subject".

<comment><AUTHOR> The best analogy re: address info on mail is to garbage that you leave on the curb for the trash collector. You probably don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy in that garbage because you exposed it to the _public_ by leaving it out on the curb. There is case law to back this up. Similarly, if you hand over a letter to a postal carrier, you arguably wouldn't have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the info on the envelope since that info can be gleaned by anybody who looks at the letter. Email would be different since that is presumably store on your computer or a server or some other place or thing that would fall under the 4th Amendment protections (and require a warrant).

<comment><USER15> In a way email is worse, due to all the third-parties who might conceivably be "shown" the email en route.

Perhaps the courts will come up with a legal construct that information which is processed and handled in a completely automated fashion does not "count" as having been seen in public. Something similar to DMCA safe harbor and "common carrier" provisions already defined in telecommunications law, except that it would apply in general and not just to 'large enough' websites or telecom companies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Everything you do is subject to some kind of informational storage by the government. Some day our thoughts might be recordable too.

<comment><USER29> They already are. Viewing someones data problem, search results, texts, files and etc one can to surprising accuracy determine the thoughts and inner working of the through process of a person.

<comment><USER6> Surprising, you say? Do you have a link?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I can think of no legal or Constitutional arguments against this program. Yet, I am still deeply troubled by its existence. I call it unconstitutional by reason of scale.

<comment><USER15> > I call it unconstitutional by reason of scale.

Which is actually the kind of argument which justices on the Supreme Court might be comfortable with. "Yes, this program somehow squeezes into the letter of the law, but not anywhere close to the _intent_ of the law or the Constitution".

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Is the "Mail Isolation Control and Tracking System" ever used to do anything other than decide guilt by assocation?

That is, does the to/from data they collect ever get used to exonerate someone from a crime, or is it just used to decide who to put on "no fly" lists and other such un-American things?

Can this data have any use other than providing guilt by assocation? Can this data be used to say "no, not a terrorist" or something like that?

If it's just one sided, used or useful only for prosecution and persecution, then it needs to be done away with. As it stands, this practice is just Soviet. It's un-American to do guilt by assocation, and to have prosecution evidence that the defendant can't challenge in public.

<comment><USER32> Prosecutors are required to hand over all evidence to defense counsel on request, and almost invariably do (which is why it's news when a conviction is overturned on the grounds of a prosecutor concealing evidence from the defense). Likewise, a defense lawyer could subpoena this information from the USPS if it was likely to be probative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I think it's naive to ever have thought that all network and mail were not being monitored. America has been a police state since the "threat" of communism, and it's only now that we're seeing proof.

</comment><comment><USER28> I also assume that Fedex and UPS et all are required to record your data as well?

<comment><USER34> I have no idea if they are required to do so, but it's worth noting that while the government requires a warrant to open US mail and inspect the contents, your agreement with UPS/FedEx allows them to open anything they see fit to.

<comment><USER15> To be clear, it allows UPS/FedEx to open it, not the government. Although UPS/FedEx can then voluntarily give it to the government should they open it...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Why is this news? Of course they log mail for law enforcement, that's a no brainer! This has nothing to do with the NSA fallout and the fact that it's being framed as such is just silly.

<comment><USER36> Except...

"Law enforcement officials need warrants to open the mail, although President George W. Bush asserted in a signing statement in 2007 that the federal government had the authority to open mail without warrants in emergencies or foreign intelligence cases."

The scanning of the envelope is rather benign and critical to efficient operation of the mail sorting/routing system. However, the long term storage of correspondence and association in light of recent NSA disclosures is more concerning. The possibility of abuse is enormous. All you would have to do is find someone that is being tracked and start placing letters addressed to any of your political enemies in their mailbox for pick up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> If its an image it suggests that it might be fun to print QR codes on your mail which refer to specific URLs. If the URL is accessed you get a hit on who looked it up. Sort of like putting a 1x1 gif in an email which is loaded from your web site as cheap analytics (pro tip, don't do this if you work at Google, the security guys don't like it :-).

Always interesting if you can get the other side to reveal information by playing on the fact that they are trying to get as much information about you as possible.

<comment> jack-r-abbit That assumes that what ever is getting the images is also going to process them as QR codes and follow any URL encoded in them. Based on what the system is described as doing, I don't see why it would have any concern over a QR code since QR codes are not an accepted form of addressing a envelope.

<comment><USER37> All US mail gets a delivery bar code imprinted on it when it is sorted. There are quality checks that verify that the delivery bar code is accurate. Electronic postage is also created using 2D barcodes. My _guess_ is that the folks who build such systems have them just eat bar codes for lunch (which is to say interpret all bar codes) and include that interpretation in the meta data.

If as you say they are never looked at (and I can certainly believe that is true) then the URL you encoded would never be accessed. If however you got a web log entry on your web server that your URL was fetched from a machine run by Booz Hamilton, well there ya go, a bit of information extracted by putting a puzzle in front of them. :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Could you not just refrain from writing a return address on your mail? Or instead, put down a false return address?

In that case there'd be no tracking of who is mailing whom, but instead just how many letters someone is receiving.

<comment><USER32> Yes, and for most private mail that's perfectly fine as long as there is adequate postage. People who are required to furnish an accurate return address include senders of prepaid mail (you know, where it's printed on the envelope with a number), distributers of periodicals, senders of priority and registered mail, and a few other similar examples.

<comment><USER14> It's still possible to identify where the letter was sent based on the postmark and unique barcode printed on the envelope when it is scanned.

Based on [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5986635](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5986635) and [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5986011](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5986011)

Edit: this comment is for scrabble's sake, as you and I already exchanged comments on the subject.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Everytime I read things like this, I'm wondering why the US still has no strong Pirate Party. (Yes, I know, Winner-takes-it-all-2-party-system..)

Are you guys not getting fed up at some point? Land of the free, please be it again.

<comment><USER40> Well, people getting fed up (with how left-wing and liberal the US was getting) is how we ended up with the Tea Party, which is now apparently enough of a force that it controls the Republicans by proxy, and meanwhile Occupy seems to be so much dust in the wind, so make of that what you will.

I would vote for the Pirate Party. Unfortunately I can't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> From a secure, undisclosed location from some secret intercepts via advanced technological means from an interview in a secure vault inside a Faraday cage with multi-sensor shielding in bedrock deep under the Senate chamber:

Interviewer: Chairman Feinstein, what can you tell us about the USPS data collection just reported by the NYT?

Chairman Feinstein: Our committee received highly confidential, double secret, triple national command authority top secret, quadruple crypto secret, eyes only, not to be remembered (as in the movie _Men in Black_ \-- it wasn't just a movie) on the main threats to US national security.

Interviewer: And?

Chairman Feinstein: We got the best of the best of the best.

Interviewer: And?

Chairman Feinstein: Well, we learned about the main threats to US national security, in descending order of seriousness, (1) invisible squads of ETs corrupting our precious bodily fluids, (2) marauding giant herds of 100 ton, angry, rabid mastodons destroying our cities, and (3) progress in the genetics of intelligence that produced a strain of giant rats with intelligence and cunning far above that of humans. Yes, the rats have escaped and are now breeding rapidly in the sewers of our major East Coast cities and spreading quickly west. They have been stowaways on airlines and now are colonizing San Francisco and spreading rapidly on the West Coast.

Interviewer: And why have we not heard of these massive dangers before?

Chairman Feinstein: Isn't it obvious? The intense work of our committee, yes, with that of the House, and our national security command authority has been successful.

Interviewer: But what about the Boston bombers?

Chairman Feinstein: Well, nearly successful. But that was a small gap compared with invisible squads of ETs, marauding mastodons, and super genius intelligent giant rats.

Interviewer: But what did all of that work cost?

Chairman Feinstein: The budget is classified, so high that no one can see it, not even God.

Interviewer: Ms. Chairman, thank you for your interview, and I'm sure all US citizens will be intensely interested in the work of you and your committee.

</comment><comment><USER42> Guess Outbox isn't looking so bad? :P

[https://outboxmail.com](https://outboxmail.com)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5822052](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5822052)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5972640](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5972640)

<comment><USER43> Indeed! If the post office has the ability to scan all my mail before it is delivered they could at least give me a digital feed of that mail.

<comment><USER44> Haha, why bother backing up your mail when the NSA has copies of it all?

The NSA should just go all-in and make a business of all this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> [http://media.boingboing.net/wp- content/uploads/2013/07/Scree...](http://media.boingboing.net/wp- content/uploads/2013/07/Screen-Shot-2013-07-03-at-12.26-600x319.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER46> I wonder if private carriers, e.g. FedEx, are also under surveillance.

</comment><comment><USER47> The US predilection for writing a sender's details on the outside of mail has always struck me as poor civic hygiene.

</comment><comment><USER48> And yet all the anthrax letters get through to their destination and they are clueless for weeks until someone says something.

Makes you wonder what they are really doing with all this data and with the Dark Star.

<comment><USER49> It will just sit there until they have eroded our rights sufficiently that it can be used for any purpose. Storage is cheap, in particular when you print your own money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Good thing I stopped using mail like 7 years ago.</comment>


If all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed what would you pass on? - <AUTHOR> http://seedmagazine.com/content/print/starting_over/

<comment><USER2> The list in the article is terrible. Mostly evolution or biosphere mumbo-jumbo that says more about our time today than helping humanity start over.

I'd pass along the idea of the scientific method, that through observation, hypothesis, and testing we can advance knowledge in a cumulative way.

<comment><AUTHOR> _"... You can make sense of anything that changes smoothly in space or time, no matter how wild and complicated it may appear, by reimagining it as an infinite series of infinitesimal changes, each proceeding at a constant (and hence much simpler) rate, and then adding all those simple little changes back together to reconstitute the original whole. ..."_

Ever heard of the Watts/Strogatz model? ~ <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watts_and_Strogatz_model>

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Several of these seem to be "a clever thing about my field" rather than a Reboot Keyphrase such as the one Feynman provided.

I particularly enjoyed Steven Strogatz's phrase which attempts to encapsulate calculus and thus impart the mathematical underpinnings that Newton did--thus providing for the first time that leap in predictive powers of human-created models that spurred the _belief_ in our ability to truly understand the world around us.

That is, it's one of the few phrases that I think would _generate the impetus for further study_ , rather than relying on that drive to be there.

</comment><comment><USER4> The proposed nuggets of information seem too complex and abstract to survive after the "reboot".

In that environment, the seed phrase would essentially be a message from supernatural beings. It would need to be simple enough not to get distorted beyond recognition when it is orally transferred by nomadic tribes in the desert who are likely to be more interested in instructions concerning circumcision and goat-slaughter than the details of double-helix molecules (think Bible, Quran).

</comment><comment><USER5> Boil water prior to drinking it.

</comment><comment><USER6> Skepticism and the importance of rigor and the scientific method.

</comment><comment><USER7> A shopping list: 'Pound pastrami, can kraut, six bagels - bring home for Emma'

That should be _just_ sufficient... ;-)

</comment><comment><USER8> Diseases spread by viruses and such, wash your hands.

</comment><comment><USER9> Godel's incompleteness theorem.

</comment><comment><USER10> I would pass a description, how to make a Gutenberg Press. Everything else will come up afterwards.

<comment><USER4> The printing press may not be all that useful on its own, if the culture doesn't have a framework for thought development that printing could accelerate.

The Chinese had printing technology long before Gutenberg, but it did not spread to Europe, nor the Middle East where the Islamic culture was intellectually advanced. It was only after the Renaissance that the cultural and political atmosphere was ripe for mass distribution of accumulated knowledge and dissenting opinion.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Would you like to get a daily email digest of the top HN stories?  - <AUTHOR>

I'm just wondering if anyone on HN would be interested in a service that delivers to your inbox, twice a day, in the morning and in the evening, the top links/stories that were submitted that day to HN.
I was thinking of building this for myself because I want to read the top stories without having to visit HN during the day. I know it's possible to get the top posts sent to my instapaper account via http://instapaperfeed.com/ which is great, but I realized that the 1 thing that I absolutey check every day multiple times a day is my e-mail and so that is where I want this delivered - preferably as I am leaving work and early in the morning when I am about to get started.
Wanted to know if anyone else feels like this would be useful to them. <comment><USER2> Before I read what you posted, I immediately thought: "This will help my productivity during the day".</comment>


Ask HN: I need help to choose the right technology and start building my product - <AUTHOR>

I am starting a new business and I am facing the following recurrent question : how to choose the right technology to build my product?
I don't want to dive into the technologies I already master just to save me some time, I would be too afraid to end up writing all over again from the beginning because the technology I chose is not appropriate.
Here are the following stuff I'll have to handle: - big amount of data (some tables might have ~1M entries)
- users (there are different kinds of users)
- reporting (for instance, I'll have to know in real time what is done by the users and also run reports on actions already done)
- build an API to allow mobile apps to consume features of the product
- all the fancy stuff to make nice mobile apps (push notifications etc.)
I am not waiting for a straight answer saying that I should use "that" or "this" technology but more for hints to help me make a decision! Thanks a lot! <comment><USER2> Just go with what you know and are comfortable with, and make sure you make it possible to change various parts of your architecture later on.

It's easy to over-think and over-engineer when starting out, and it's usually not that hard to switch to a different DBMS later on or even use a modular architecture that allows you to build different parts of your application in different languages as you go along.

The _real_ danger for you, right now, is that you won't make it to 1.0, not that you'll have to write it all over again from scratch.

</comment><comment><USER3> The languages that are thrown about alot nowadays are Ruby, Node, Python and probably a couple more. I guess you could start with a comparison of all these languages and see which fits your app best. Something like this [http://fabianosoriani.wordpress.com/2011/09/11/when-to- ruby-...](http://fabianosoriani.wordpress.com/2011/09/11/when-to-ruby-on- rails-when-to-node-js/)

any of these programming languages can achieve the criteria you put forth

</comment><comment><USER4> Honest question but why wouldn't you use languages you already know, especially if you anticipate to do all the things you listed from scratch.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just because I don't have a predilection language so I would be ok to start with something new and more suitable to what I wanna do</comment></comment>


Scaling Postgres with Read Replicas and Using WAL to Counter Stale Reads - <AUTHOR> https://brandur.org/postgres-reads <comment><USER3> Instead of having an "observer" process that updates a table with the LSN you can just ask Postgres directly: The `pg_stat_replication` view has the last LSN replayed on each replica available: [https://www.postgresql.org/docs/10/static/monitoring- stats.h...](https://www.postgresql.org/docs/10/static/monitoring- stats.html#PG-STAT-REPLICATION-VIEW)

Also, instead of updating the `users` table with the LSN of the commit - <USER2> creates extra write load - why not store it in the session cookie, then you can route based on that.

Another option is to enable synchronous replication for transactions that need to be visible on all replicas: [https://www.postgresql.org/docs/10/static/warm- standby.html#...](https://www.postgresql.org/docs/10/static/warm- standby.html#SYNCHRONOUS-REPLICATION)

Since this can be enabled/disabled for each transaction it's really powerful.

<comment><USER4> > Instead of having an "observer" process that updates a table with the LSN > you can just ask Postgres directly: The `pg_stat_replication` view has the > last LSN replayed on each replica available:

Note that that'll lag behind reality a bit, we don't continually send the feedback messages that contain the replay progress.

> Another option is to enable synchronous replication for transactions that > need to be visible on all replicas: > [https://www.postgresql.org/docs/10/static/warm- > standby.html#...](https://www.postgresql.org/docs/10/static/warm- > standby.html#..).

Note that's only behaving correctly if synchronous_commit is set to remote_apply, which has been added in 9.6. Before that syncrep could only guarantee that the remote side has safely received the necessary WAL, not that it has been applied.

<comment><USER3> Thanks!

What's your recommendation how to solve the problem described in the article? Would you compare LSNs of replicas in application logic at all?

<comment><USER4> I've only skimmed it so far, so I might be missing parts.

I think it depends a lot on what you're trying to achieve. In a lot of cases all the guarantee you need is read-your-own-write, and small delays for an individual connection aren't that bad. In that case it can be a reasonable approach to inquire the LSN of the commit you just made, and just have your reads, to whichever replica they go, wait for that LSN to be applied.

For a system that's very latency sensitive that'd not work, and you'd fall back to querying the master pretty much immediately. Or you'd use something like described in the article, although I'd probably implement it somewhat differently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Pretty clever take on an old technique.

At reddit we would store a field on the user recording the last time they voted on something. If they loaded a page that was newer than that timestamp, then we could skip reading any votes for that page since we knew they couldn't possibly have voted on anything on that page.

This basically takes the same technique and puts it a level down and reverses it, saying "this database has any update this user could have made".

I like it.

</comment><comment><USER6> If I understand this right, they can guarantee fresh point reads. But an actual query needs a consistent snapshot of all entities (rows) under consideration for the query. ... for all of the "hundreds of queries a mature application might execute to fulfill a single request". You need a snapshot of the entire database (like git)

FTA "When mutating a resource in the system we'll store the last committed log-sequence-number for the entity making the request"

This is what Datomic does by design, if you need infinity read scaling and perfect consistency just use that, and you get a host of other benefits (the replica is _inside your application process_ , like a data structure, which has profound architectural consequences, for example you can query in a loop so N+1 problem is solved).

</comment><comment><USER7> Wouldn't this only work when your client is the one that last updated the record? Because how else would you know the correct min lsn? Seems like you would need to store the map from user to lsn in something other than pg to get any benefit here.

<comment><USER8> (I'm the author.)

I'm storing `min_lsn` directly to the database, so anything connecting to it and loading a user record should be able to take advantage of the information.

I have a note in there about this as well, but although I'm showing how this information can be persisted to Postgres so that I'm only using one data store, it could really live in any kind of shared persistence layer.

For example, replication statuses and a user's `min_lsn` might be put in Redis instead, and be treated as ephemeral data such that we don't worry about losing them because they can be repopulated on every restart. It's also probably a good idea to have individual API workers caching replication statuses directly in memory so they can select a read candidate without even having to go to a database.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for writing the article, it was interesting. To see if I'm missing something here though, in order for this to offer benefit the way it is now, I would need to already have a correct min_lsn for a user? But the issue is that if I got this from a previous request it could be out of date, isn't that accurate?

<comment><USER9> I assume they are fetching the min_lsn for a user from the master so it would be up to date.

<comment><USER7> Doesn't that defeat the point of moving reads off the master? I guess they're lower cost reads though..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm having a bit of a hard time figuring out whom would use this. How big is the intersection of folks that can't figure out how to setup Citus but need a number of read replicas?

<comment><USER11> I cannot go into much details about what I do, but basically we have some kind of "network operators" that are the only one using the write db (and not a lot) and then we have a massive amount of computers doing reads on the system. We don't need citus for that, but PG replica does the job very well</comment></comment>