Ask HN: Whats the most challenging book you have ever read? - <AUTHOR> I just finished "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" by Julian Jaynes.<p>It's one of those books that constantly leaves you uneasy and unsure whether you understand what you are reading but what an amazing read. <comment><USER2> MIT's Introduction to Algorithms

I'm not a technical book person and I definitely threw this book across the room multiple times during this class. Hardest I've ever fought for an A-. It's not poorly written, I just struggle with math-y books.

[http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/introduction-to- algorithms-t...](http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/introduction-to-algorithms- thomas-h-cormen/1100497803?cm_mmc=google+product+search- _-q000000633-_-9780262033848pla-_- textbook_instock_under26_pt109-_-q000000633-_-9780262033848&ean=9780262033848&isbn=9780262033848&kpid=9780262033848&r=1)

<comment><USER3> Completely agree.

One of the few books I kept from college and still pull it out once or twice a year when I need to look up something and refresh/relearn. Incredibly dense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There are quite a few at the top of this list, and they vary based on subject. Are you speaking about technical books, or literature, or something else?

Regardless, the one that I spent a good year reading through multiple times was Farnsworth's Classical English Rhetoric. A brilliant book that challenged my knowledge of rhetoric and enabled me to hone my rhetorical skills. You can read it to learn or read it just for the awesomeness of the passages.

[http://www.amazon.com/Farnsworths-Classical-English- Rhetoric...](http://www.amazon.com/Farnsworths-Classical-English-Rhetoric- Farnsworth/dp/1567923852)

</comment><comment><USER5> _The Art of Computer Programming, volume 4a: Combinatorial Algorithms_...and I am not suggesting I understand a meaningful fraction of it. It reminds me of how little I know. And in fairness I've been reading volume I by fits and starts since the late 1980's.

 _Critique of Pure Reason_ for similar reasons in another of my lifetimes. It's another book I'm not smart enough to criticize meaningfully.

Fiction, clearly Cormac McCarthy's _The Road_. As a parent it's just brutal to find a place to put it. Not necessarily my first recommendation among his novels, either.

</comment><comment><USER6> One of them was "How to read a book" by Mortimer Adler. I kid you not.

It taught me just how much I was reading for my own entertainment, not for real information.

</comment><comment><USER7> It probably wouldn't be as enlightening to most adults, but Problems in General Physics by Irodov kicked my ass in high school and taught me a lot

</comment><comment><USER8> Buddhist books whichs content cannot be fully understood as a concept and require subsequent meditation experience.

Most programming books are challenging to me as I'm more of a learning by doing guy and the content is usually either too abstract for me or in form of sample projects that dont teach much beyond mere replication.

</comment><comment><USER9> I've never had any problem reading any book, obviously with the exception of ones written in foreign languages I don't speak at all. You can't fake it if you don't know anything at all. (trying to read chinese characters like Ezra Pound who squinted at them for obvious pictographic meanings.)

But there's one exception, my black horse.

I tried to skim the Bible (Old and New Testament), in multiple translations. Including easy ones, dumbed-down ones, ones for deaf readers, etc.

I thought that as literally millions of people have read this stuff for literally hundreds of years, and it permeates every part of western culture, it would be a walk through the park. Much easier than "more difficult" or specialized stuff.

This is not true. I found it absolutely horrific to try to read it from beginning to end. It's very difficult and basically I gave up, even in situations where I had no other reading material and absoluetly nothing else to do except drink some coffee and try to read it. I found the old and new testaments are unreadable.

This is not just because of the subject matter. For example (I've said this elsewwhere) I found the Qu'ran an incredibly easy skim. You can do it in an hour. (easily, and for meaning.)

Just try it:

[http://www.nooresunnat.com/Audio/Complete%20Quran/Quran%20Tr...](http://www.nooresunnat.com/Audio/Complete%20Quran/Quran%20Translation%20in%20English%20by%20Mufti%20Taqi%20Usmani%20Sb%20DB.pdf)

This is just 566 pages triple-spaced with mostly blank lines, it's like 180 actual pages. It's incredibly repetitive. You can really stop on the parts that say something.

The whole thing doesn't say much, there's not all this useless geneology and history and names and such. It's easy.

Start skimming now and you'll be done by the time you get an answer to a quick email you just sent. 20-40 minutes if you're fast.

So it's not me. It's not hte subject matter. It's just that the old and new testaments are not the same at all. they're incredibly dense books that somehow made it into our culture while being totally unreadable sequentially. (for understanding.)

obviously it's fine to look up specific verses in. but as a book? Forget it. Even if you're stuck on an island with nothing else, it makes for the most impossible reading you'll ever find in a language you speak.

</comment><comment><USER10> I would distinguish between challenging, because book is so overwhellming because of high level of proficiency required to read with understanding (eg. University paperbooks) so here I could say that a lot of was hard thus challenging. Other kind are challening because it change way you think about world and/or things and it's hard to apply knowledge you get, even you know it's right "view" like for me some of buddisth papers and Enchiridion by Epictetus. It's pleasure to read, but when you want to live in stoic way - yeah, then it's challenign.

</comment><comment><USER11> Definitely loved Julian Jaynes. It's a "just so" story, but quite compelling and interesting - enough so to have a cult following.

Probably the most challenging/rewarding book I've ever read was Fuller's Synergetics. It offers an understanding of science and nature that is holistic in a way that is timeless and self-evident.

[http://www.amazon.com/Synergetics-Explorations-Geometry- Buck...](http://www.amazon.com/Synergetics-Explorations-Geometry-Buckminster- Fuller/dp/0020653204)

</comment><comment><USER12> The definition of challenging I'm choosing to apply here is, stimulating, confronting, enlightening.

Martin Meredith's masterfully researched and written The Fate of Africa completely altered my worldview, and brought into sharp focus contemporary African politics. More broadly speaking, it brought clarity to global politics in general, and our human condition.

</comment><comment><USER13> Ulysses by James Joyce, but I am not sure if I missed large parts of it.

<comment><USER14> Ulysses is a walk in the park compared to his later work, Finnegan's Wake.

<comment><USER15> Finnegan's Wake is easier to read, in my opinion, because it isn't a linear novel. By its very construction, the non-deterministic "narrative" implores the Reader to leap, skip, and jump about as though lucid dreaming. John Bishop's introduction to the Penguin Classics edition (not my favorite edition, but definitely the best intro) provides a supporting context for this.

I think the book is great fun.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Field and Wave Electromagnetics: [http://www.amazon.co.uk/Field- Electromagnetics-International...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Field- Electromagnetics-International-David- Cheng/dp/0201528207/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1420706734&sr=1-2&keywords=field+and+wave+electromagnetics)

That shit was tough.

</comment><comment><USER17> "Consilience" by EO Wilson is a challenging and rewarding book, especially considering it is thin, uses small words and short sentences. And has no math whatsoever. My recollection is I could only read a couple of pages at time without needing a nap.

</comment><comment><USER18> Definitely GEB. This book stole 5 years of my life =)

<comment><USER19> I read GEB not long after finishing a CS degree. Still had to try bloody hard to wrap my brain around it all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The infinite book - [http://www.amazon.es/The-Infinite-Book-Boundless- Timeless/dp...](http://www.amazon.es/The-Infinite-Book-Boundless- Timeless/dp/1400032245)

Sometimes is a bit hard to conceptualize the infinite, you know!

<comment><USER21> Link to Amazon.com [http://amzn.to/1wqUnbO](http://amzn.to/1wqUnbO)

<comment><USER20> Sorry, but I did not knew that amazon had an url shortener, thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Don Quixote. I was in HS at the time. Was pretty pissed off at the ending after reading through it all. Looking back, though, I'm glad I read it.

</comment><comment><USER23> 'The Zen Experience' by Thomas Hoover

I didn't get most of the Zen kōan from this book. But I feel its a great book about the history of Zen.

</comment><comment><USER24> Probably not the answer OP is looking for, but for me it was Baby Rudin at uni

</comment><comment><USER25> The Bible.

<comment><USER26> And it was challenging because ...? Did it change your life or some other reason?

At a guess, I'd imagine many people would find the complete book challenging because of the unexpected material and viewpoints that can be found in sections of the Old Testament, like: [https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Judges+19:22-30](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Judges+19:22-30)

<comment><USER27> On this topic, you may want to check out How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now by James Kugel. It provides a historical overview of how the implicit and explicit interpretations of the old testament narratives have changed with respect to scholarship. Great read.

[http://www.amazon.com/How-Read-Bible-Guide- Scripture/dp/0743...](http://www.amazon.com/How-Read-Bible-Guide- Scripture/dp/0743235878)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Good books about filesystems? - <AUTHOR>

Aproaching the new Mac OS, i´ve heard a lot of people complain about it´s obsolete filesystem as of now, and how Apple should change to a new one soon.<p>Thing is, i don´t quite get why one is better than the other, or what is a filesystem exactly, besides the basics. Is there any good book or blogpost with a modern approach as to what they are, and what are the best ones, the basics of how they are programmed, etc? <comment><USER2> This is a gap that should have been plugged long ago: a comparative guide to real filesystems. I know of no such book.</comment>


Twitter CEO: 'Irresponsible' to focus on business plan now - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9139678/Twitter_CEO_Irresponsible_to_focus_on_business_plan_now

<comment><USER2> There's a related article in current issue of Wired [<http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/10/ff_twitter/>]:

The company's revenue will be a modest $4 million or so this year. Even so, Twitter reportedly turned down a $500 million acquisition offer from Facebook last November and seems perfectly happy to burn through its roughly $150 million in investor funds...

Though the company held a discussion earlier this year called "What Do We Want to Be When We Grow Up?" the mission statement is still a work in progress. "If there are three sentences I'd use to describe Twitter," Stone says, "one of them would be 'I don't know.'"</comment>


Fixed Raises $650K More and Heads to Oakland - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/03/fixed-the-app-that-fights-parking-tickets-raises-650k-more-and-heads-to-oakland/ <comment><USER2> This makes me sad. If you make a mistake, own it. If you get a fair parking ticket, pay it. Don't be a leech. Cities have scarce resources that are not designed to fight people looking for loopholes.

<comment><USER3> > If you make a mistake, own it.

But if the city makes the mistake, they shouldn't own it? It's their own rules, on their terms, designed to confuse newcomers. I can't fathom how you would think this is fair.

<comment><USER2> Sure, if that's the case. In my experience, though, these services simply contest everything in the hope that the officer in charge or the ticket will not have time to follow up, and the case will get thrown out even if it's a perfectly reasonable fine. It works, but that doesn't make it right.

<comment><USER3> > these services simply contest everything in the hope that the officer in > charge or the ticket will not have time to follow up

No. If you actually read the article, they generally contest things on the grounds that there was a mistake or error in issuing the parking ticket that makes it invalid.

<comment><USER4> Generally? That doesn't sound like an argument against the basic idea. If they only contest when they fins a specific error, I would agree. If they contest everything hoping the police won't show...it's a short term hack. If a service makes every ticket contested, cities will change the process.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For L.A. residents, this is pretty wild. Drives me nuts. This is what happens when bureaucratic agencies run wild, with no one but helpless citizens to hold them accountable [emphasis added]. This is why this is such a great idea!

[http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2014/11/12/city-leaders- react...](http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2014/11/12/city-leaders-react-to- bogus-parking-tickets-exposed-by-cbs2-report/)

</comment><comment><USER6> You (and they) should write the state after Oakland - there are many Oaklands.

<comment><USER7> But only one that is a "neighboring city" to San Francisco (CA).

<comment><USER6> It doesn't say San Francisco in the title.

<comment><USER7> I suppose if reading literally the first sentence of the article is too much trouble, then yes, that is a problem.

<comment><USER6> That exactly what I read: the first sentence, than I closed it as regional news. (There are tons of startups in the San Francisco area, it's only interesting when it's not in that area, and that's what I thought this was at first.)

Is it really that much trouble to put the state in the title? Or do people living there forget there are other places in the world?

<comment><USER7> Well I do think Oakland California is the most populous and well-known city of that name so it's a resonable assumption that's what the article is about. I dont disagree that it's a good idea to be as clear as possible in titles. But if I saw an article about Madrid, I'd probably assume it's the one in Spain even if I happened to live in Madrid, Iowa.

I guess the question is whether Oakland, CA has enough prominence to be known widely outside the region. And I do think it's a major city in its own right, not just in its relation to San Francisco.

<comment><USER6> San Francisco and Madrid, yes. Oakland? No, it's not that widely known, to that level.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> You guys need to come to Los Angeles

<comment><USER9> > heading to L.A. in March</comment></comment>


Ask HN: So what's going on with Bird and Lime? - <AUTHOR> Are they dead? Haven't heard anything major in months from these companies. <comment><USER2> They've effectively saturated a lot of the "easier" markets (those with a solid fit of weather, demographics, and city policies), started withdrawing from some of the harder/less-profitable ones, and are trying to reach better profitability metrics before another big round or IPO. Meanwhile, as stephencoyner pointed out, they're both testing various models/deals/plans and in Bird's case different vehicle types to try and increase ARPU and retention.

They're both very much alive, but not as shiny as they were a year ago now that market realities have caught up and investors are a bit more wary following Uber's failure to meet IPO expectations and WeWork's debacle.

</comment><comment><USER3> Seems like they're still throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks...

[https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/25/21152362/bird-pay- cashles...](https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/25/21152362/bird-pay-cashless- payments-scooter-app)</comment>


Linear regression - <AUTHOR> http://eli.thegreenplace.net/2016/linear-regression/ <comment><USER2> If you're new to learning about regression and want to use it, I would prioritize the statistical issues. There are lots of computational details you could read about, like in this post. However in simple cases, fitting least- squares linear regression is one line of code:

        w_fit = X \ yy; % Matlab/Octave, X is NxD, yy is Nx1
        w_fit = np.linalg.lstsq(X, yy)[0] # NumPy equivalent

Knowing how to construct the "design matrix" X is the important bit. What are your features, how will they be pre-processed, and given what you've done, should you trust w_fit to be meaningful, or just useful for prediction?

If you've thrown in lots of features, hoping to get good predictions, you may want to do "regularization". The computation is no harder for simple versions. One way to do "L2 regularization" is to add some extra rows to X and yy before fitting the weights:

        % Matlab/Octave... the NumPy is nearly as simple.
        [N, D] = size(X);
        lambda = 1; % regularization constant
        X = [X; eye(D)*sqrt(lambda)];
        y = [yy; zeros(D,1)]

Or you could use an actual stats package like R's libraries that will contain a lot more care. Again, you need to understand the statistics, for example how you should select lambda. Then you'll want to know how to diagnose your model and whether you should trust it.

It's fun to work out the least squares maths and implement these things from scratch. But it has been done, and it's not what matters for most applications.

EDIT: a discussion with good links on linear models and beyond from the other day [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12237998](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12237998)

<comment><USER3> Econometrician here.

I really hate that linear regression is being explained in "Machine Learning" language. "Features", "design matrix", "prediction s".

<comment><USER4> And many in the sciences are confused by 'endogenous' and 'exogenous', but just say 'independent' and 'dependent'... Every field has its jargon and econometrics has no primacy here; no reason to have a strong emotional reaction to words you understand because they're not what you learned in college.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The single most important fact about linear regression is the Fritsch-Waugh- Lovell theorem. It's the whole reason why we're not scared as shit of using linear models.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisch%E2%80%93Waugh%E2%80%93L...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisch%E2%80%93Waugh%E2%80%93Lovell_theorem)

Basically, it means that omitting variables is ok (subject to terms and conditions).

Assuming that IQ and shoe size are uncorrelated, but that income is a function of IQ and shoe size, I can run a regression:

income = a + b * IQ + residuals

and trust my estimate of b. FWL theorem says that running that regression and then

residuals = c + d * shoe size

is the same as running

income = (a+c) + b _IQ + d_ shoe size + eps

It's an amazing result and it's all based on linear algebra, no belief in statistics required.

<comment><USER6> Eh, orthogonalizing variables is a necessary precondition for this. When was the last time variables were totally uncorrelated and you didn't know it beforehand? Unfortunately such cases are the exception rather than the rule, and you lose interpretability by projecting into a low-rank orthogonal subspace. Not that interpretability is necessarily the be-all and end-all, but the "terms and conditions" are pretty important here!

<comment><USER5> > When was the last time variables were totally uncorrelated and you didn't > know it beforehand

Whenever we have an actual theory of the underlying phenomena.

It's common in econometrics to impose orthogonality conditions on the theoretical equations so structural parameters can be recovered; or so we can filter partial correlations. For example: a regression of prices and quantities sold will mix the effect of shifts in demand and in supply. Solution: find something that correlated with demand quantities but not price directly (for example, changes in consumers' wealth).

A realistic, much cooler example:

[http://homepage.univie.ac.at/robert.kunst/pan2011_pres_rabas...](http://homepage.univie.ac.at/robert.kunst/pan2011_pres_rabas.pdf)

<comment><USER7> > no belief in statistics required

Yes, but now you have a statistical assumption: that your structural model holds.

To make use of the Fritsch-Waugh-Lovell theorem, you must test that your orthogonality assumption holds using statistics :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There is one conceptually simple issue often missing in such nicely presented write-ups (and which appears to be missing here): error in the abscissa ('x-axis') values. Things like time-series tend to dominate such analytics and in such data collections it's typically assumed that the time-stamp data is of suitable accuracy that any error there can be neglected. But there are many other data sources where there is notable error in both 'x' and 'y' data for which commonly employed linear regression doesn't allow, (quick example: my friend the hydrologist collects flow rates in rivers at sample transverse distances which are hard to be sure of as one is dangling above the raging waters). As a respectable starting point for regression which allows for error in both axes i'd recommend Deming regression: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deming_regression](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deming_regression)

<comment><USER9> Those cases are also handled by least squares regression, mainly variants of total least squares regression.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Anecdotal thought, I find practical guides and tutorials like this far more useful for learning machine learning than any of the public MOOCs like Andrew Ng's machine learning class. There's a lot of dense content shown in video lectures and very little practice. I almost had to google every topic and find a write-up like this to drive each concept home.

</comment><comment><USER11> Why you are not testing independence of errors? [http://people.duke.edu/~rnau/testing.htm](http://people.duke.edu/~rnau/testing.htm)

</comment><comment><USER12> A common gotcha with linear regression. Imagine that your data points look like they roughly fit the shape of a tilted ellipsis. The linear regression will _not_ run along the axis of the ellipsis, the slope will typically be smaller. This is because you're minimizing the square distance along the y axis, not the distance from a point to the line itself.

<comment><USER5> What you appear to want is "total least squares":

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why you are not testing for constant variance? [https://onlinecourses.science.psu.edu/stat501/node/367](https://onlinecourses.science.psu.edu/stat501/node/367)

<comment><USER6> Because, to quote Box,

'To make the preliminary test on variances is rather like putting to sea in a rowing boat to find out whether conditions are sufficiently calm for an ocean liner to leave port!' (Box 1953)

Plot the residuals instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Ctrl-F "Gauss"

 _0 matches_

Ctrl-F "Markov"

 _0 matches_

The fuck? Only the single most beautiful result in the field. Please don't misunderstand me, the presentation is great and it is quite practical, I just wish people would remember that very smart individuals have been coming along for pretty much the entirety of humanity's existence.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauss%E2%80%93Markov_theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauss%E2%80%93Markov_theorem)

The proof is hinted at in the writeup, so why not link to it?

<comment><USER11> I don't understand why they down vote you. Probably because they think that they know Statistics. Programmers at Hacker News always think that they are the master mind of Statistics. In fact they know almost nothing about Statistics. For example if you don't test for constand variance and independance of variances then you cannot graduate from Department ofStatistis. But here they down vote you for knowing real Statistics.

<comment><USER13> > But here they down vote you for knowing real Statistics.

That is quite literally a No True Scotsman argument.

GP was likely downvoted since the Ctrl-F meme adds nothing to the discussion.

<comment><USER6> Personally, I felt that the omission was rather important. When the first year's worth of many statistics programs can be condensed into one beautiful theorem, which is centuries old, I feel it's disrespectful to one's forebears to ignore it.

However, I get the impression that once the meme sensor goes off, any links remain unvisited and reading comprehension may suffer. So I learned something here, too.

I'd edit the original to remove the meme, but since I can't do that at this point, readers will have to try and control their Internet Police tendencies and read a few sentences.

Or not. Rather a shame, hopefully the author of the piece will fix it and this will all be superfluous.

<comment><USER14> [post author here]

FWIW I did not find your original comment particularly offensive, and didn't downvote (I think years on the internet have made me resilient).

The Gauss-Markov theorem is very cool. However, as I discovered while doing some reading for this article - whole _books_ were written on linear regression. The amount of information to convey is almost limitless and I didn't want to turn this one into a multi-part article. I simply wanted to write down (code and math) the things I find most pertinent to understanding how the regression works.

<comment><USER6> Fair enough! If you felt like adding it as a footnote, great, if it doesn't fit the purpose, that's fine too. And to reiterate, it's a beautifully laid out, concise, high-content piece of writing. I should have phrased it differently; how it's said may matter more than what's said.

Essentially I wrote a reaction post but, given the amount of revising and reanalysis/examination-of-assumptions I've been doing lately, I ought to have said something like:

"This piece is an excellent tutorial on how to do linear regression, why gradient descent is fundamental (far beyond OLS or fixed effects models), and so forth. However, if you are interested in why all of these things are possible in the multivariate case as well as the simple bivariate case, you might find the Gauss-Markov theorem to be a 'light bulb' moment." Because that's how it happened to me.

Cheers, and thanks for writing a great piece that I will be pointing others towards.

<comment><USER14> Thanks for the feedback and the useful reference. I'll definitely add the Gauss-Markov theorem to my to-look-in-depth-at-later list and may write up about it at some future point.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How much does it really cost to use Plaid? - <AUTHOR> I've been building an app that uses Plaid (https://plaid.com) in order to pull transactions from bank accounts on behalf of users, but so far I've only been using the sandbox API (free plan) for development. The next plan up from free costs $500/mo + "usage-based" fees, but I haven't been able to track down any quantitative dollar amount for the "usage-based" fees. I'm curious if anyone has any experience paying for Plaid's "usage-based" fees, and if so, what those realistically might be? <comment><USER2> I have been trying to figure this out too. Did you find anything out about their usage fees? What about Yodlee?</comment>


Dissecting Trump's Most Rabid Online Following - <AUTHOR> https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/dissecting-trumps-most-rabid-online-following/ <comment><USER2> The title of this piece doesn't adequately reflect the fascinating methodology it contains. The 538 team uses latent sentiment analysis to create a kind of algebra for subreddits, i.e. r/running + r/weightlifting = r/fitness. Politics aside, it's (IMHO) well worth the 15 minutes it takes to read. I'd love to see HN readers more experienced with the methodology take it to task and see what shakes out.

<comment><USER3> Agreed, I submitted the same link with the title "Semantic Analysis of Donald Trump Sub-Reddits," but even that leaves out the fascinating idea of "subbreddit algebra" that the article goes into. Articles like these are why I love 538. It's like popular science for statistical analysis.

<comment><USER4> Me too, too!

Not only is this a really cool and novel (as far as I know) use of machine learning techniques, there's a lengthy footnote that goes into some detail about the method. _And_ the presentation is great, very slick modern HTML.

So it seems like an excellent fit for HN, apart from the title which will unfortunately put a lot of people off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The code is on GH [1] and the data is on BigQuery [2].

[1] [https://github.com/fivethirtyeight/data/tree/master/subreddi...](https://github.com/fivethirtyeight/data/tree/master/subreddit- algebra)

[2] [https://bigquery.cloud.google.com/table/fh- bigquery:reddit_c...](https://bigquery.cloud.google.com/table/fh- bigquery:reddit_comments.2015_05)

<comment><USER6> Big Query table used is actually _all_starting_201501_

[https://bigquery.cloud.google.com/table/fh- bigquery:reddit_c...](https://bigquery.cloud.google.com/table/fh- bigquery:reddit_comments.all_starting_201501)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This story is extremely fascinating and relevant to the HackerNews Community but it's already been Shadow Banned. Neat.

<comment><USER8> sorry but how can someone/some group shadow ban a story and who do you suppose would be behind shadow banning this one?

<comment><USER7> The mod's can choose to "bump" a story off the front page as a form of moderation. [http://sangaline.com/post/the-stories-that-hacker-news- remov...](http://sangaline.com/post/the-stories-that-hacker-news-removes-from- the-front-page/)

They do it constantly to stories deemed "not worthy".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I haven't read the linked articled (yet), but I wanted to urge everyone to check out r/the_donald. It is the strangest online community that I've seen.

Truth doesn't really matter unless it supports us, everyone who says good things about us is right and everyone who doesn't is a corrupt MSM cuck libtard. To get banned you don't even have to be critical of Trump. If you're even ambiguous you'll get banned. In a sense this is self-selection in that the only people that haven't been banned are lunatic-level supporters.

Basically, it's Donald Trump times 380,000. You have to experience it.

<comment><USER10> It sounds just like the /r/Hillary_Clinton subreddit I briefly checked out during the election. I said something a little bit critical of Hillary and was immediately banned.

This is just how Americans are these days. You have to pick a camp, and you need to agree 100% with everything in that camp or else you'll be shunned. And there's only two main camps too; if you try to pick an alternative camps, or even a camp that's really a sub-camp of one of the two main camps, you'll be shunned and derided.

<comment><USER11> r/Hillary is a run of the mill biased sub-reddit. T_D is biased and lunatic in a way that will have sociologists publishing papers for years to come.</comment></comment></comment>


New Firefox service will generate unique email aliases to enter in online forms - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/new-firefox-service-will-generate-unique-email-aliases-to-enter-in-online-forms/ <comment><USER2> Sign in with Apple also can generate random e-mails:

> _For example, if firstname.lastname@example.com is your Apple ID, your unique, > random email address for a given app might look like > email@example.com._

* [https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT210425](https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT210425)</comment>


Watch AT&T invent cloud computing in 1994 - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_a7hK6kWttE <comment><AUTHOR> Related Wired article from 2014: [https://www.wired.com/2014/05/tech-time- warp-cloud-is-born/](https://www.wired.com/2014/05/tech-time-warp-cloud-is- born/)</comment>


Concise electronics for geeks (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/electronics/ <comment><USER2> Not a bad text. Didn't find anything obviously wrong in a quick scan.

Two comments:

1\. As usual, and as per all electronics resources, its pretty much devoid of the practicalities of BJT/FET amps. Sort of, here are some facts, now go away. How do I go about designing a non-inverting amp with a small signal gain of 6dB? How do I calculate the input and output impedance to determine stage loading? Not even TAOE (2nd ed) nails that down well. This is really really important if you want to do anything analogue. 2\. Tails off towards the end.

I spent a number of years in a past life doing EE and I've found only disappointment in books. All the useful knowledge I had was from sitting down with guys who are older than transistors and like their Teks with vacuum tubes in them. Frustrating because they're a dying breed of engineer.

Edit: if you want a really decent book on electronics but don't want to pay for TAOE, the "ARRL handbook" which is a yearly publication is a good bet. Anything from about 1995 onwards has a number of decent electronics chapters in it covering basics, linear, digital, transmission lines etc right up to RF plus all the maths you need. Turns up for not much money on Amazon, ebay etc. About 20% of the book is self-love about amateur radio so just ignore those bits. Also, maths are a bit wonky as they are practically inclined and mostly using ratios in imperial units but you can substitute SI units in and out fine if you look at the equation definitions rather than their application. Earlier ones have decent self-build projects for power supplies, test equipment and the like. I built an AF oscillator and various crystal-based RF oscillators and filters literally directly from the book.

<comment><USER3> Indeed. Learning from one of the oldheads is the only way to become competent. Schooling from professors on that stuff is useless. Engineering is _doing_ , not test taking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For those looking for a less-concise, but more comprehensive reference, The Art of Electronics was just released in its 3rd edition!

[http://artofelectronics.net/](http://artofelectronics.net/)

With a lot of relevant new content (references to Arduinos, etc), which is great since the last edition was from 1989.

And while the basics of transistors, etc, haven't changed since then, it's arguable that the kinds of circuits that are of most relevance may have changed. (A/D conversion, general interfacing with digital logic, things that didn't have simple IC solutions in 89, etc).

<comment><USER5> Speaking of, after getting the third edition, I have the second version sitting unused. If anyone wants it for the cost of shipping, let me know.

<comment><USER6> I highly recommend someone take this generous offer. The book is very dense, but only because it is so beautifully concise. And you'll go quite far into the 2nd ed. before running into any anachronisms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> God, I hate the hydraulic analogy. It almost made me flunk a 101 electronics class because I couldn't connect the dots between the analogy and the physics of what's actually going on. Plus the fact that our teacher was hell bent on explaining and modeling circuits almost exclusively with equations from the start of the first course.

<comment> david-given Which particular part of the hydraulic analogy didn't work for you? I've always found it really helpful.

<comment><USER8> The part where it explains inductance!

/s

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> That is excellent, especially the first parts on how conduction and semiconduction work. I've never seen an electronics text explain that so well.

</comment><comment><USER10> I think I ask this every time the topic comes up but I'm on a quest to answer my electronics questions without learning maxwells equations!

What happens when you pull the plates of a charged capacitor apart? Does it gain energy or lose energy, how much?

Why isn't a van degraff generator violating conservation of energy? It seems like it adds charge linearly until the breakdown voltage?

<comment><USER11> >pull the plates of a charged capacitor apart? Does it gain energy or lose energy, how much?

It gains energy equal to the work required to separate the plates assuming one plate has a +ve charge and one -ve. If they've both got the same charge then it loses energy.

>Why isn't a van degraff generator violating conservation of energy? It seems like it adds charge linearly until the breakdown voltage?

The charge gets there but a motor pushing it there on a belt. So energy from the motor increases the static energy of the sparky bit.

<comment><USER10> See that's the problem, I don't even have enough knowledge to explain my questions properly :-(

I guess what is the formula for pulling the plates apart? Does it depend on voltage? And at some point say they're miles away wouldn't you be losing energy by moving them further apart?

(I Don't even know where to start clarifying the van degraff question)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It seems strange to reject deep dives into mathematics, but then start by talking about nuclei and valence electrons. I personally like the hydraulic analogy, but only for one paragraph to explain the corresponding concepts of voltage, current, and resistance.

</comment><comment><USER13> Fantastic, very much reminds me of the style in The Art of Electronics(another great reference).</comment>


Show HN: PDF.cool – API for converting web pages to PDF - <AUTHOR> http://www.pdf.cool <comment><USER2> I've noticed you've made a few of these APIs lately, nice work!

Can I ask how the business side of that is going for you? Also, what do you think of the token-based billing rather than monthly plans?

</comment><comment><USER3> That's pretty cool. I'm guessing at that pricing you must be running Chrome in Lambda?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm running a Chrome Headless cluster which allows me to provide multiple services on top (also check Screen.rip & Page.REST)</comment></comment>


Try out our free online stylist service and discover your true style - <AUTHOR> https://therebutia.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> We just released a beta version of our service and we would love for the community to try it out and give your feedback. Our service is built to identify what type of clothes really suit you based on body structure, hobbies, and occupation and analyzes you very carefully. Letting you choose what you need and should wear. Even giving you choices you never have thought of, and an opportunity to become more adventurous or creative. With our service, we want shopping for clothes online to become fun, simple and reliable. You simply log in (please note social login is still not functioning), fill out your appearance and your stylist will give you a recommendation. You are welcome to give us feedback on your experience with filling out your appearance, how you liked your recommendation and if this is a service you might use on a regular basis and recommend to others.</comment>


Will your new MacBook crash to the ground without MagSafe? - <AUTHOR> http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/mac/will-your-new-macbook-crash-to-the-ground-without-magsafe-yes-3601461/

<comment><AUTHOR> [http://www.wired.com/2015/03/magsafe-power-adapter-safer- usb...](http://www.wired.com/2015/03/magsafe-power-adapter-safer-usb-c/)

</comment><comment><USER2> Couldn't they just make a USB power supply with a magsafe breakpoint near the plug?

<comment><USER3> Third-party accessory begging to be made, similar to the MagSafe1/2 adapters.</comment></comment>


Smjörið er brætt og hveitið smátt og smátt hrært út í það, þangað til það er gengið upp í smjörið. - <AUTHOR> Thanks to a fix by Patrick Collison, utf-8 now seems to work right. <comment><USER3> So. A note to all the "unicode makes this unusable" people -

Apparently, while you were complaining, someone else was solving.

<comment><USER4> OK. Now how about database access (with support for prepared statements), regular expressions, and networking?

<comment><USER5> <http://paulgraham.com/core.html>

<comment><USER4> Super-duper. I'm not going to use Arc for anything serious until essential libraries are in place.

<comment><AUTHOR> Different people have different ideas of serious. To me, exploratory programming is fairly serious, because that's the kind of programming that generates ideas.

Arc is already capable of supporting some subset of applications that are serious in your sense. News.YC is at least moderately serious in that sense.

<comment><USER4> You said News.YC uses some kind of persistent hash structure for storing everything. This seems to me like Greenspun's Tenth Law except with Berkeley DB instead of Common Lisp; I wouldn't want to write the logic to do what BDB already does much better and faster (I don't want to implement ACID transactions myself if I decide I need them).

<comment><USER6> news.arc stores all information in flat files as lists.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> ♫♪♫ to my ears. I ♥ unicode! To ∞ and beyond, ☺

<comment><USER8> How do I make the infinity? Actually where do I get all those symbols?

<comment><USER9> You have to buy a unicode keyboard. They have over 95000 keys and take up about nine square meters. Hope you have a big desk.

(Sorry, I couldn't resist)

<comment><AUTHOR> You know, that would actually be an amusing hardware-hacking project.

If you made a keyboard that had every character in every language spoken in the EU, you could even file to make it a standard with whatever earnest standards body is in charge of such things. No linguistic minority should have to use control keys! It would be like giving peanut butter to a dog.

<comment><USER10> A smart bureaucrat might mandate dynamically rewritable keys and get the Optimus <http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/optimus/>

But smart people don't endeavor to regulate minutia.

<comment><USER11> _But smart people don't endeavor to regulate minutia._

I think you just implied that all politicians are dumb. I agree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Do I understand correctly that Arc strings are sequences of octets?

If so: I really don't want to be a negativity guy but it seems like every language that has made an 8-bit string the default string type has regretted it later because it is so painful to change it without breaking code. Okay, Paul says that he won't mind breaking code. Maybe he means it, but it doesn't make any sense to me to knowingly and consciously repeat a design mistake that dozens of other people have made and regretted.

It really just takes one day to get this right. You need to distinguish between the raw bytes read from a device and the true string type (which needs to be 21 bit or greater). You need a trivial converter from one to the other (which you can presumably steal from MZScheme) and back.

That's it. You get this right at the beginning and you never have to backtrack or break code.

My apologies in advance if this post is based on incorrect premises. I'm trying to help.

<comment><USER13> Arc snarfs the string implementation from MzScheme which support Unicode in The Right Way, as code points rather than octets.

<comment><USER12> So should I infer that the only reason UTF-8 is mentioned is that the reader APIs do not let you select the codec? Or is even that provided in which case it is accurate to say that Arc supports Unicode-in-general?

<comment><USER13> Arc uses MzSchemes reader (it modifies the readtable slightly to support []-syntax). AFAIK you cannot access the reader API from inside Arc. The reason Utf-8 is mentioned is that it is the default encoding when MzScheme reads or writes files or streams.

I don't think anyone at this point would claim that Arc supports unicode-in- general.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> .(; sɹǝpuoʍ sǝop ǝɹnssǝɹd ɔı1qnd ɟo ʇıq ǝ1ʇʇı1 ɐ 'ǝǝs ¡ʍou ǝɯosǝʍɐ sı ɔɹɐ uı ʇɹoddns ǝpoɔıun ¡ɥɐɥ

<comment><USER15> Yes, because writing upside down is so incredibly useful! How did we ever live without it?

/sarcasm

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Nâh, dâh zèn we maui klâh mei...

        (define Y
          (λ (m)
            ((λ (f) (m (λ (a) ((f f) a))))
             (λ (f) (m (λ (a) ((f f) a)))))))

<comment><USER17> Great... but that's Scheme, not Arc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Wikipedia to the rescue: "The butter is melted and the flour stirred into it (slowly but surely), until it is has blended with the butter." (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:S.Örvarr.S>)

<comment><USER19> It's an icelandic recipe for roux?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> What language is that? I'm guessing Icelandic; it's a little too unicodey to be Danish or Norwegian, but the words look similar.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good guess.

<comment><USER21> As an Icelander, I must surely ask what pushed you to use Icelandic as an example. :)

<comment><USER22> Does Icelandic have the 'th' sound? I've heard that English is the only European language with it, but if Icelandic has the written thorn, maybe you have that sound too?

<comment><USER23> It does, that's precisely what þ and ð represent (the unvoiced and voiced variants respectively, which got folded into the same "th" in English). Also, þorn is the best letter name ever :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> 农历新年 Happy (Chinese) New Year!

<comment><USER25> I'll never understand why asians type all in question marks. It must be some kind of unary system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> If you are wondering: On Linux/X11, there's Ctrl+Shift+[unicde number in hexadecimal], gnome-character-map, umap or KCharMap (ت)

And now for the less serious part:

ሞሡሢ Am I the only one whom these Ethiopic characters remind of Tengwar? BTW, are there Unicode chars for Tengwar? I think there should be! (But not for Klingon, because it sucks.) I have fun wirting this on my ⌨, but ℐ∫ ᚾℍℹ⑀ not pointless? Who cares? Anyway, now we can use distinct characters for Roman numerals: Ⅰ,Ⅱ,Ⅲ,Ⅳ,Ⅴ,Ⅵ,Ⅶ,Ⅷ,Ⅹ,Ⅻ,Ⅽ,Ⅿ! Ye darn kids! Everythin we had was 7-bit ASCII, without parity, and we were damn greatful for it? You think you had it bad? I had to use Morse code for browsing porn, back in my days! And I had to etch my public key into the wall of a rotten ol' cave! We did not have this fancy-shmancy routed network, i had to remember the way from here to there all by myself!

\--- this post was presented to you by Too Much Coffee.

</comment><comment><USER27> Freude, schöner Götterfunken! Tochter aus Elysium!

</comment><comment><USER28> if you search for "Smjörið er brætt og hveitið smátt og smátt hrært út í það, þangað til það er gengið upp í smjörið." on Google this thread is the fourth result.

Damn fast...

</comment><comment><USER29> இது தமிழ

<comment><USER30> Tamil++; // (இது C)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> किसी वस्तु, व्यक्ति, स्थान, या भावना का नाम बताने वाले शब्द को संज्ञा कहते हैं। जैसे - गोविन्द, हिमालय, वाराणसी, त्याग आदि संज्ञा में तीन शब्द-रूप हो सकते हैं -- प्रत्यक्ष रूप, अप्रत्यक्ष रूप और संबोधन रूप ।

</comment><comment><USER32> Браво!

<comment><USER33> В самом деле браво!

<comment><USER34> Чему вы рады? :)

<comment><USER33> Да просто...

<comment><USER35> Делать нечево...

<comment><USER33> Мы все-таки на этом веб-сайте находимся, а не работаем... :~)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Happy chinese new year. 白人看不懂

<comment><USER37> 这个白人看得懂。

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> И цан'т белиеве ит!

<comment><USER39> И тоо!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Røv og nøgler! PG succumbs to the demands of political correctness! Will we soon see mandatory static type declarations and CSS in Arc?

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, not quite. I gave Patrick an early version of the code, a couple weeks before Arc was released, and he immediately sent me this fix. I just didn't get around to incorporating it till now.

There's a difference between things I don't care about, and things I'm actively against. I don't care about character sets and css, so those things will no doubt gradually get better.

Classic static typing, however, I think is actually a bad idea in a general- purpose language. It makes languages weaker. So it's never likely to happen in Arc itself. However, one of the explicit goals of Arc is to be a good language for writing other languages on top of, and I can imagine plenty of languages for specific types of problems (e.g. circuit design) in which static typing would be a good idea.

<comment><USER40> I don't understand why CSS or HTML are being mentioned during the design of Arc. These seem like library issues and your announcement of Arc was spoiled IMHO by the "rant" about HTML and tables. This is only made worse by the Arc Challenge which seems to be more about the design of libraries for HTML/HTTP etc. than the language.

What am I missing?

<comment><AUTHOR> I could tell from all the people already dissing Arc before it was released that whatever I released was going to be attacked on any possible pretense. So, like someone bracing himself to be hit, that was what I was thinking about as I was about to release it: what are people going to seize upon as a way of attacking it? Which meant that was what much of the initial announcement ended up being about.

It was a pretty odd situation to be in. If I'd been releasing Arc into a neutral environment, I probably would have said what I wrote in <http://paulgraham.com/core.html>. But maybe it's just as well I gave all the flames something to expend themselves on before talking about subtler questions.

<comment><USER41> I thought you handled it pretty well. Basically, you wrote a big sign saying "here is the bike shed", to make sure bike-shed commenters had something to occupy them. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Öt szép szűzlány őrült írót nyúz. Egy hűtlen vejét fülöncsípő, dühös mexikói úr Wesselényinél mázol Quitóban.

</comment><comment> patrickg-zill Bork bork bork!

</comment><comment><USER43> Η ευχαρίστηση στην εργασία βάζει την τελειότητα στην εργασία ~ kudos to 'Patrick Collison'

<comment><USER44> Έλληνας;!

<comment><USER43> Indeed. Aristotle in fact ... translates roughly as "... Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work ..."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> What needed to be changed? I am no character encoding guru but I thought that treating strings as opaque octet sequences was good enough to "support" UTF-8. i.e. Unless you actively break it, it should work by default.

<comment><USER13> See this thread: <http://arclanguage.com/item?id=1563>

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> 普通话

<comment><USER45> 湖北话

<comment><USER46> 上海话

<comment><USER47> 我还是喜欢英文。

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> geeks. you guys forget about us sometimes. what is this?

<comment><USER49> Hacker News now supports "utf-8", a way of storing text that supports characters from languages other than English.

The excitement comes from the fact that Hacker News is programmed in Arc, and the change to Hacker News implies that Arc will soon support utf-8 too.

<comment><USER48> thank you sir

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> נחמד.

</comment><comment><USER51> £!

<comment><USER33> €!!!

<comment><USER5> ۩۞۩۞

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> To je výborný !

<comment><USER53> Zdravím do Čech :)

<comment><USER52> Byl jsem narozeny cech, spravne prazak, ale ted jsem american. Prominte, muj pocitac nema hacky a carky, a moje cesina je detska.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> åwesøme!

</comment><comment><USER55> 日本

<comment><USER56> testing some pitfalls... U+005c \ U+FF3C \ U+FFE5 ¥

U+007E ~ U+301C 〜 U+FF5E ~

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> pgの自分で書いた本は日本語に翻訳されているし、これからアークも日本で広げるかなぁ。日本ではリスプを使ってる人はまだいるかなぁ。

</comment><comment><USER58> heh fantastic. I take back all that I said. Nice one ☺

</comment><comment><USER59> someone from India --> संगणक प्रणाली - आर्क

</comment><comment><USER60> Хубаво. Фонта само е някакъв преебан.

</comment><comment><USER61> það er gaman að lesa. Takk fyrir!

</comment><comment><USER62> Bona novaĵo!

</comment><comment><USER63> Buenísimo!

</comment><comment><USER64> يعيش اليونيكود, شكراً بول.

</comment><comment><USER65> ನಮಸ್ಕಾರ. ಸವಿನುಡಿ ಕನ್ನಡ :)

<comment><USER65> namaskAra, savinudi kannaDa :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> łąś żółć - <USER2>

</comment><comment><USER67> unicode and arc are ♫♪♫ to my ears too.. a fun way to play with arc and unicode might be at <http://twext.cc/go/arc>

</comment><comment><USER34> Լիսպը փայլուն է։

</comment><comment><USER68> but ixnay on the igpay atinlay upportsay

</comment><comment><USER69> ☃

</comment><comment><USER70> pg, you are my hero.

</comment><comment><USER71> My name is Daniël. Not sure though if writing that wasn't possible before...

</comment><comment><USER72> މީމަގޭ މާދަރީ ބަސް. ދިވެހި ބަހަކީ ރީތިބަހެކެވެ.

This is my language - Dhivehi. Written right to left.

</comment><comment><USER73> Paul Graham rocks.

<comment><USER74> ПГ рулз.</comment></comment>


Show HN: OpenClickWin.com – Hopefully I don't go broke with this idea - <AUTHOR> http://www.openclickwin.com <comment><AUTHOR> Woot Woot! I can't believe the day is here.

Tomorrow I will be sending out my very first prize email from open. click. win!

To celebrate the opening (and election day) I will be giving out cash money (via PayPal) to one lucky entrant.

Deadline to enter tomorrow's drawing is MIDNIGHT TONIGHT.

Head over to [http://www.openclickwin.com](http://www.openclickwin.com) and put in your email address.

It's that easy.

Then keep an eye out on your email tomorrow and be the first click on the link and you could be the winner of cash money!

</comment><comment><USER2> If the email list gets large enough, some people will get the email way before others.

If I see the email in my inbox but it's a couple hours old, I'll still just delete it.

I think completely random might help open rates

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Aaron. That was a big concern when coding this and have a few different "playing" options in mind such as the "x" person to click, or a click doesn't count until 10:00am, etc. But I do like the completely random part as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> So it's like a reverse lottery? The more people that play the lower the payout?

<comment><AUTHOR> Kinda. I am rethinking various ways to run the daily contests which could switch that part up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> i'm waiting for someone to write a bot that would ruin it for everyone

<comment><USER5> Easy enough - the bot would just open it as soon as it sees the email.

The prize amount would be too low to justify the time necessary to send the prize and would disincentivize anyone else from even bothering.

TBH, not even sure writing the bot is worth the time and effort.

<comment><USER4> When did that stop a troll?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Link does work</comment>


Swiss experiment with sound to make cheese tastier - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2018-11-cheesy-music-swiss-cheese-tastier.html <comment><USER2> In related news:

        Erasmus Darwin held that every so often you should
        try a damn-fool experiment. He played the trombone
        to his tulips.

        This particular result was, in fact, negative.

That's from "A Mathematician's Miscellany" by Littlewood, which is an excellent collection of quirky bits and pieces of this kind. Highly recommended.

[https://archive.org/details/mathematiciansmi033496mbp/page/n...](https://archive.org/details/mathematiciansmi033496mbp/page/n5)

</comment><comment><USER3> Any 'experiment' of this sort that isn't double-blinded and controlled is not worth doing, and shouldn't even be considered news.

We live in a world where decades later our culture is still reading and (even making movies!) about Masuru-Emoto-style bullshit because we don't teach our children science properly.

<comment><USER4> Never heard of this guy before, what an interesting.

A true con men.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I hope there is a lounge-core room featuring all the Richard Cheese covers.

</comment><comment><USER6> Advertisement at it's finest: I was suggested to buy an oscilloscope on that page

</comment><comment><USER7> The very finest cheeses, I suspect, will benefit from live performances instead of canned recording played through some cheap speaker. Perhaps he should hire a chamber music ensemble to play to the cheeses every day.

<comment><USER8> According to the local free (crap) rag he's playing Led Zeppelin for the cheese, which would be difficult to perform for a chamber music ensemble.

What begged the question: Why is there the Apple (record company) logo on the picture, if he claims to play Led Zeppelin?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've toured an artisanal bourbon distillery in Kentucky that does something similar while the bourbon ages in barrels. The music plays loud around the clock to keep it vibrating (among other things).

</comment><comment><USER10> Amazing

</comment><comment><USER11> bringing culture to cultures?

</comment><comment><USER12> Now I want to eat cheese, it's really not nice to post food-related content. I don't thank you.</comment>


Straight Talk About Sex Differences in Occupational Choices and Work-Family - <AUTHOR> https://ifstudies.org/blog/straight-talk-about-sex-differences-in-occupational-choices-and-work-family-tradeoffs <comment><USER2> > 50% of men, by definition, would have stronger interests in engineering than > the average man

By definition, they would have stronger interests in engineering than the _median_ man

</comment><comment><USER3> It's one thing to talk about biological differences and how they may help shape behavior. It's another to use them as justification to eliminate programs designed to facilitate a more inclusive and diverse culture as was the case in the infamous manifesto.</comment>


Big Data Compute Cluster using Chef, Hadoop & Cassandra in the AWS cloud - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/infochimps/cluster_chef

<comment><AUTHOR> Using hadoop for batch processing and cassandra to serve real time data are among my tools of choice. chef_cluster looks like a nice bag of tools for setting up and managing a scale-free computing infrastructure.</comment>


Penn Station Sucks - <AUTHOR> http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/penn-station-sucks/

<comment><USER2> Not sure how it's relevant to HN, but as someone who passes through Penn almost every day, an interesting read. A real shame - looking at those pictures I can't even imagine that it used to look like that.

<comment><AUTHOR> I figured it fell under the "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" rule in the FAQ ([https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)).</comment></comment>


BMW says electric car mass production not viable until 2020 - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bmw-results-electrification/bmw-says-electric-car-mass-production-not-viable-until-2020-idUSKBN1GY1BQ <comment><USER2> This has a lot to do with culture. Microsoft had a mockup of an e-reader before the Kindle, but the powers that be in the company insisted that it should run Windows (not out of malice, but because that's how they saw the world.) When Bezos, who, at the time, ran a giant bookstore, started his Kindle project, he put them on a secret team in a different building.

Car companies are run by people who love engines that burn gas. The notion that electric vehicles might be something more than compliance nightmares, that they might actually be better _cars_ than gas-powered vehicles is foreign. It's like the Microsoft execs saying "of course the e-reader should also be able to open spreadsheets and what-not." Meanwhile, the Kindle is better as an e-reader because they started from the ground up.

Same thing with Tesla. (With whom, none of these companies would be talking about going electric.) They started from the ground up.

If BMW wanted to make money on electric vehicles, Tesla has proven that you can sell an $80-$100K+ electric car (with a ~$50K interior) with profitable unit economics. I'm pretty sure an electric 7-series would sell like hotcakes, and make money. Instead, you get the i3, which some people love, but it's certainly an acquired taste, and the 3 series e, which I drove recently-- it has about 11 miles of electric range. ;( If they just made it all electric, I'd buy one tomorrow at the already high 3-series prices. But the culture isn't there yet...

<comment><USER3> I think you're way oversimplifying the situation. BMW isn't anything like Microsoft.

It's important to remember that, if you count hybrids, BMW already sells more electrified cars than Tesla and the vast majority of them at a more affordable price point than Tesla (the i3 is a pretty good value).

BMW sells a ton of cars and has made pretty good progress on the electric front. They're just not a hype machine like Tesla.

<comment><USER4> I don't think the situation isn't being oversimplified, I think OP's post is a good summary of the whole situation.

I also don't think the i3 is good value. If you compare it to a BWM series 1, you can get a better car for a better price. On the other hand, a Tesla Model 3 is perfectably comparable to a BWM series 1.

Tesla has been making good electric cars since 2012 and the BMW i3 was very limited in range until last year or so. The range was limited to 100km in a single charge and the car was being sold for more than 40000 euros (at least in Europe) which is very steep for such a crippled car.

<comment><USER3> In the US a a couple years ago you were seeing leases for the i3 starting $250/month thanks to tax incentives.

There were a couple of municipalities in my area who caught flak for giving public employees BMWs to use on the job but they were quite literally the cheapest option.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't think there's any "collusion" or other conspiracy to hold back electric vehicles, I think what BMW said is objectively true. Lithium batteries have cost too much in the past decade to put them into more than luxury cars or negative-profit compliance cars. Supply chains don't appear overnight. LG Chem, Samsung SDI, AESC/NEC, BYD, Foxconn, etc have been building factories and securing raw materials for many many years to have the capacity to sell car manufacturers enough batteries for a few million cars a year by the end of the decade. The price per kWh still makes the battery in a car like the Chevy Bolt a $8000 part, which means you're never going to make a $15K car with one inside. That price has been dropping year over year, and around 2020 is when it'll be cheap enough to make cars in the price range people actually buy them that have big batteries inside.

<comment><USER6> I'm not saying there was conspiracy but there was complacency.

The reasoning "batteries are expensive" is circular.

As Musk said, technology doesn't advance as a function of time but as a function of R&D investment. See atomic bomb or space race for the most dramatic example of how throwing money at the problem compressed the timeline.

Car batteries did not get cheaper because 2 years passed but because Tesla and Panasonic invested 5 billion dollars in a giant batter factory. And by creating a demand for lots of batteries, there's incentive for many others to invest in researching better batteries. And before that, cellphones and laptops were driving investment in battery research.

I see no reason why all this couldn't happen 10 years ago if car makers invested a sliver of their profits into electric car R&D instead of, you know, putting it all in Diesel and then writing software to cheat emission numbers.

And as a corollary, if Tesla didn't push the whole field forward with giant investments, BMW would be "objectively" saying in 2030 that batteries are too expensive to make electric cars viable.

<comment><USER7> > As Musk said, technology doesn't advance as a function of time but as a > function of R&D investment.

Sometimes. Technology is very path-dependent; to invent z, you need to have invented w, x, and y first. And even with infinite resources that takes time. We've been working on fusion for half a century and it might be ready in another half century. Will more investment help? Yeah, but tokamaks take time to build, and you don't know how to build the next tokamak until after you've done all your experiments with the current one. You can't have iPhones in 1986 no matter how much money you throw at it because the underlying processor and battery tech isn't there.

<comment><USER8> Without necessarily (or completely) disagreeing, I'm curious if you can further justify your assertion of the strong path-dependency. I am personally amazed when I contemplate the Apollo program or the Manhattan Project, and specifically the number of technologies that did _not_ exist at the time. It strikes me that there's a clear observational bias here. Particularly in the modern era, we really only have a single data point around the development of any given technology (given how trivial communication and coordination are). Are there any examples from history of the same technology being developed independently with different dependencies?

Possibly relevant, given your choice of fusion as an example, is the somewhat famous graph from the 1976 U.S. Energy Research and Development Administration report on nuclear fusion[0]. We're obviously looking at a number of projections and can't know whether they were right or wrong, but it is noteworthy that we're not even pursuing a plan we believe will ever lead to nuclear fusion ("fusion never").

[0]: [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._historical_fusi...](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._historical_fusion_budget_vs._1976_ERDA_plan.png)

<comment><USER3> You have to remember there's a huge gulf between building something once and mass producing something, putting it in market and having it produce profits.

Electricly powered vehicles existed before the American civil war, it's taken until now for them to have any hope of success in the market.

<comment><USER7> The Romans had steam engines, too. It took until the 18th or 19th century for metallurgy to catch up to the point where steam engines were worthwhile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Folks, two years is not very long. The optimistic take on this is "wow, we might get mass production of electric cars in two years? Great!"

How long does it take to design and build a car factory, anyway?

<comment><USER10> This is a very good point. But I will see if BMW actually does mass produce EVs.

It's not that expensive. If you can afford $10,000-$20,000 over the life of a car in fuel (plus a few thousand in oil changes and brake jobs), you can afford a $7500 battery. Especially since that pulls thousands of dollars worth of complexity out of the drivetrain.

<comment><USER11> I think the issue is that it's $7500 in one transaction if a battery goes bad, versus the cost of fuel which is spread out over the lifetime of the car.

<comment><USER10> Batteries can be repaired, just like an engine. And the battery rarely goes immediately bad. But I think this isn't the main issue, as cars already have to deal with the same problem of being totalled.

<comment><USER12> A car being totalled is covered by insurance. A car whose engine blows up outside the warranty period is covered by its owner's paycheck.

<comment><USER10> But as noted by another user, batteries come with long warranties. (100k miles, sometimes)

<comment><USER13> Do those come strict conditions though? For example: don't launch the car, don't use ludicrous mode more than X times over the lifetime of the drivetrain, etc.

<comment><USER14> I am curious why people fixate on the battery so much. Several of my coworkers have had Teslas for years now. To my knowledge not a single one has had a battery failure. Of all the many complaints about Teslas, I think the batteries are the least of the worries. Plus Tesla would probably cover most battery failures even if they weren't covered by the letter of the warranty, simply because they can't afford to have bad press about batteries failing.

<comment><USER10> Because they're used to crappy lead-acid batteries that need to be replaced regularly in ICE vehicles and which cause people to be stranded when they fail. Note that the Model Y will get rid of the 12V lead acid battery, which is a good thing (IMHO) if engineered correctly. One less maintenance item.

Also, consumer phone batteries (which are more aggressively charged/discharged and which usually use a different chemistry) don't last more than two or three years before showing significant capacity reduction.

Also, there were some problems with the early-year Leafs (2011-2012) losing range fast in hot climates. (Nissan solved the problem eventually via chemistry. Note this is not a problem for Teslas or Volts/Bolts due to a battery temperature management system able to cool the battery.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> For all the crap Tesla gets, this shows why they are so necessary. Switching to electric car production is a huge disruption for the existing auto industry. It basically eliminates the dealer service revenue, and turns the supply chain upside down.

I doubt they would be making any effort in electric cars if the threat of Tesla did not exist. Even as it is, they are dragging their feet.

<comment><USER16> Why would it need to destroy the dealer network and the right to repair your own car? Only because Tesla runs their business like a software house doesn't mean the others need to follow suit.

The German car makers also make gas powered vehicles versions of some of their fleet which are quite different from gasoline cars.

What takes time is building the facilities and technology to create reliable and serviceable electric vehicles.

<comment><USER17> My experience with BMW dealerships is that they are borderline criminal organizations. I have never taken my car in for a repair without them breaking something else.

I was quoted $15,000.00 for a new head because they failed to gap a spark plug.

They remove the access panel in the aero pan when doing oil changes and don't replace it. They over torque everything (drain plug, filter cover, etc).

They broke a wiring harness mount when doing routine maintenance. Just ripped it off instead of releasing the clips.

They scratch up the interior when pulling the steering column apart for airbag recalls.

They broke a headlight housing when replacing a light bulb.

They curbed my wheels and then told me it couldn't be them because "there are no curbs here". The service manager said this while standing on a curb.

These people are predators. The incentives are perverse and they do nothing but exploit their customers and the manufacturer.

My hope is that Tesla's approach will push the costs of these unnecessary repairs and shoddy workmanship up the chain where the parent company actually has an incentive to fix them.

At this point the only way I would consider buying a new BMW is if I was able to find an independent shop that can still do warranty work. Still searching for that.

<comment><USER18> What modern BMW uses plugs that aren't pregapped?

<comment><USER17> I assume the plugs were pre-gapped at time of manufacture. Maybe they dropped this plug, maybe it was a bad batch or a defect, maybe they did it on purpose. For the shop rate at a BMW dealer they can take the time to check the gap. Regardless of the root cause the dealer installed a plug with the ground bent into the electrode which caused a misfire.

They misdiagnosed it as a bent valve and told me that I probably missed a shift at freeway speed and slammed the car into second gear, causing the engine to over-rev and skip a tooth on the timing chain. Somehow this bent only one valve and the other 23 are still fine. Oh and it ran fine until they had it in their shop. Also the timing chain is still in the correct timing.

I told them to get bent and took it to an independent shop that fixed the problem for $45.00.

The BMW dealer claimed there was low compression and a misfire on cylinder 4. My independent mechanic found perfect compression on all six cylinders and a misfire on cylinder 6 (the one with the bent plug).

I went back to the BMW dealer and they refunded me the $4,000.00 in unnecessary repairs they did. At this point I think they are either intentionally sabotaging customer cars because they get away with it or the incentives drive them to employ complete idiots. Either way the most dangerous place to take a BMW is the dealer.

<comment><USER18> That's pretty strange. It's possible for a mis-shift to not skip timing, but to be high enough to float the valves momentarily and allow for a valve (or more) to kiss a piston. This can lead to a very minor bend in valves to cause an idle misfire, until the valve eventually fatigues and drops. Diagnosable through a leakdown.

A foreign object through the intake tract would be a more likely case for a 0 gap plug, as it would basically require a broken piston or valve to otherwise close up the gap on the plug and you're not missing this.

Either way, absolutely terrible on their behalf and a zero sense diagnosis.

<comment><USER17> None of that happened, the head and valves are fine. I never missed a shift.

I cut my teeth driving grain trucks so I always heel-toe double clutch. That makes missed shifts highly unlikely as the shifter slips easily from gear to gear, assuming you're pulling it into the correct gear. Also I'm not an idiot and I have never selected the wrong gate. BMW also puts heavy springs on the shifter to make it unlikely the incorrect gate is selected on accident.

There is no internal engine damage as far as my mechanic can see. The dealer did also do an intake cleaning (allegedly) which involves media blasting the intake runners. It is possible there was FOD introduced at that time. I mentioned that to the dealer and they assured me that is "impossible".

The dealer did put about 35 miles on the car while they had it for new plugs, maybe they missed a shift but there's no apparent damage to the engine.

The plug damage appears to be a result of negligent installation.

My most generous guess is they dropped it on the floor. I wouldn't be surprised if they intentionally re-gapped it to cause a misfire but I have no evidence.

When they told me I needed a new head I called around all the shops in the area that work on these cars. I asked them how this could happen and if they have seen it before. All the shops I talked to in the Seattle area said they have never had an N54 open. They've never seen engine damage on one and doubted the diagnosis. BMW Seattle was the only place that said they had seen this "several times". I think they just use this as a way to make a quick buck or their mechanics are so incompetent that they routinely grenade engines by installing spark plugs and cleaning intakes incorrectly.

What I do know is that the people responsible should be nowhere near a car and probably not allowed outside without close adult supervision.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This has been said many times, but it feels like all the manufacturers colluded to make EV cars extremely ugly and undesirable. Prime example being the BMW i3.

Of all the nice looking cars they have in their line up, one has to wonder why they went with an i3.

Put that same capability in a 3-series and it would have been a different story.

<comment><USER20> I'm not sure if you know how innovative the BMW i3 is. They decided to go for an entirely different manufacturing process using Carbon Fibre instead of traditional steel stamping and it's entire supply chain is built on renewable energy. That's a big commitment on BMWs part. Alas, the market didn't think of it the same way. The i3 might not be a looker but it's probably one of the most innovative cars ever produced in recent history. Horace of Asymco fame did an entire series on the i3 in his Asymcar podcast.

<comment><USER21> > Alas, the market didn't think of it the same way. The i3 might not be a > looker

...from an American perspective. The i3 doesn't sell much in the US, but is I think the second highest selling EV in Europe at the moment, people here apparently don't have any problem with the way it looks.

<comment><USER22> In Copenhagen it's the only DriveNow car available, and I must admit that although I am a petrolhead, the i3 grew on me.

What might look silly from the outside is an unparalleled experience in accelleration on the inside. Only Tesla's, motorcycles and proper sport cars can match the 0-50 km/h (which is everything you care about in a city commute).

<comment><USER23> Quite sure e-Golf, Leaf, the electric Kia all a good match.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The majority of car-makers are Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) expertise shops, plus a design arm, plus a manufacturing arm. Most farm out the design and manufacture of the other components (suspension, brakes, seats, airbags, etc).

Every electric car that Ford or BMW sells is the loss of a sale of a higher margin ICE car. Because of this, none of them have an incentive to switch unless some outside force _makes_ them, or they see a huge percentage of customers demand electric and only electric.

It's not just culture or stubbornness. These companies simply don't want to replace their high margin ICE cars with fairly-invested expertise and tooling, with a lower margin car that will, almost at best, just 1:1 replace the sale of a higher margin ICE car.

So they'll have "options" here and there, but they are going to wait and see for at least half a decade before they commit to anything like meaningful production numbers, a charger network, etc.

</comment><comment><USER25> That's less than two years away. I don't know how long it normally takes to ramp up production for a new car model, but it doesn't seem too bad to me.

<comment><USER26> from anecdotal experience (my father actually designs and architectures car factory assembly lines for a living), it usually takes around 1 to 5 years, depending on the amount of work involved and what kind of car is produced.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Baloney. I've been driving my Nissan Leaf for almost 4 years. Nissan has sold 300k Leafs. The Chevy Bolt is doing great. The Tesla Model 3 has a multi-year long waitlist.

BMW and some other manufacturers are being slow to adopt EVs because they aren't as profitable right now. So they'd rather keep milking the ICE cash cow as long as they can.

They also know that if they seriously offered competitive EV alternatives, people would buy them.

Why offer an EV version of a 3-Series with a smaller profit margin than an ICE model with a bigger one until they absolutely have to?

That's what it comes down to. The good news is they don't have a lot of time left to keep this b.s. up, but don't believe their lies about EVs. They are here, you can buy them, they are great.

<comment><USER28> They are quite cool, but not great for everyone (as in the majority of world's population that BMWs and VWs of the world are targeting). Even living in SV I wouldn't buy a Tesla even if I wanted to -- nowhere to charge it at home, and a bit of a walk to the nearest charger from work.

And why should BMW et. al. sell something that isn't profitable? They aren't Tesla and can't just burn through capital. On the other hand, when it does become profitable I somehow think they will have something just as good out, it's not like Tesla had some incredible magic tech that nobody else does. And at least an electric BMW would not have a build quality of a beaten up Yugo like Tesla does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> GM reached the same conclusion when it built the EV-1. I expect that there are _tremendous_ forces inside a company that push back on the sort of radical change that electric cars represent.

The difference between then and now is Tesla. I wonder if anyone asked BMW if they were given the opportunity to mass produce the Model 3, if they would have the same opinion.

As for looks, the i8 looks pretty nice. It is apparently going to be available in an electric version this year.

<comment><USER30> To be fair to GM, batteries improved a great deal since the EV-1.

I know there is a crowd of people that are enthusiastic about the EV-1 and think GM killed it, but I'm pretty sure GM had a closer look at whether they could profitably produce them than the enthusiasts.

<comment><USER31> GM could've handed the EV-1s over to the owners instead of crushing them.

<comment><USER30> That's not really the right way to phrase that. I'm pretty sure they didn't crush cars that someone else owned.

I wonder if they had offered them for sale at prices that would cover their parts obligations if that would have gone over well.

<comment><USER31> GM would only lease them, not let you purchase. When they repossessed them at the end of the lease, they would not let you purchase them; they then proceeded to crush any that were not sent to museums.

[http://electrifyingtimes.com/ev1_crushed.html](http://electrifyingtimes.com/ev1_crushed.html)

[http://electrifyingtimes.com/ev1crush.html](http://electrifyingtimes.com/ev1crush.html)

<comment><USER30> Yes, I understand.

My question is, what if GM had offered them for sale for $250,000 (I'm making up an obscene number) because they estimated that their service obligations would cost that much? How well would that have gone over with the enthusiasts?

<comment><USER31> It's a fair point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> To be fair to BMW, and I'm not being facetious here, Tesla production isn't economically viable either - and they're probably further ahead than anyone. They lost $2.24 billion in 2017, with no end to the losses in sight. BMW is just being smart.

</comment><comment><USER33> This is a bit of a self-fufilling prophecy. It is correct, that battery prices and availability are sinking currently to the point where electric car mass production becomes a reality and 2020 seems a date, where several big manufacturers can present their first generation of true mass-marked electric cars.

But the exact timing also depends on the fact that only Tesla tried really hard to bring the electric car to the mainstream. Actually, BMW was pretty early to the game with the i3 - an excellent car which came to market as early as 2013. Certainly not a huge seller at its price, but quite a good electric car. The main problem was the lack of quick iterations, it has gotten one battery upgrade since then, no variations like the rumored i5 came to be.

As 2020 is almost around the corner, let's hope that BMW comes out with exciting electric cars. Also VW seems to be set to release a couple of very serious electric offerings in that time frame (I.D, Buzz).

</comment><comment><USER34> 2020 is a 1 year and 8 months away if were talking BMW scale of mass production this is actually great news.

</comment><comment><USER35> That's strangely worded headline. "Not viable until 2020"? I see it more as "as soon as 2020." Do people not realize that's like 2 years away?

If we can start mass production of electric cars by then, that'd be amazing

<comment><USER36> I assume for some people, e.g. the type of person that would literally sleep in front of an iStore to buy a new iPhone at launch day because waiting an extra week to just walk in during lunch and buy one is "too long" would find 2 years to be an "eternity".

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> FWIW, according to an inside EV journalist friend of mine, Harald Krüger's comment is a reference for Samsung high density cells 2019 availability for a doable price that delivers 200+ miles range. [1]

[1] [https://insideevs.com/samsung-sdi-from-130-whkg- to-250-whkg-...](https://insideevs.com/samsung-sdi-from-130-whkg-to-250-whkg- by-2019-and-300-whkg-in-≈2020/)

</comment><comment><USER38> As an outsider, I forecast that in Europe the demand for the gas guzzling cars will be on a sharp decline in not more than a year. BMW and any other car company that are reluctant in adapting to the future, will be troubled economically for offering units that will not anymore be demanded.

I mean, really, who would buy the old tech (combustion engine) when even the manufacturer itself (BMW) announces that they are soon (in 2 years) to be obsolete? Cars are expensive and not supposed to be such a short-term investments.

They will have to export all their inventories produced in those 2 years to less humanitarian countries like mine, where hardly anybody considers gas emissions as a problem for us to act upon, and government does not promote EVs by any means. It is only logical for them to regard such countries as a market to dump their previous-gen technologies.

<comment><USER39> I can assure you this won't happen in a year. For most people it's a worse and more expensive product.

<comment><USER40> Indeed. The car industry seems to be committing to it but it's unclear the market will swallow it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Great, more opportunity for Tesla to scale up and eat their lunch. Innovator's dilemma at work.

<comment><USER26> The problem is, tesla is not a car manfucturer. They make a tiny amount of cars compared to the masses that BMW, VW and the likes produce.

Also, tesla has an enourmous fault tolerance compared to these guys, not to mention they produce cars which are quite more complex.

You cannot afford to "patch up" cars if you are producing thousands a week, that would make you run out of money very quickly.

<comment><USER42> Given their repeated failure to reach their target on production numbers for the Model 3, their lack of experience in mass production really seems to be the problem. The question then becomes whether Tesla can figure this out before traditional car companies catch up to them in terms of technology. If they do manage to capture the EV mass market with the Model 3, the others will likely be in trouble.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I mean that doesn't sound that bad? 2020 is only two years away.

</comment><comment><USER44> Even if they mass produced an EV, I still wouldn't buy one from them. Reason - 1. they will nickel and dime customers like crazy and charge for LED lights, 17" wheels, CarPlay subscription 2. iDrive is a relic from 90s, an archaic infotainment systems 3. 3 series drivability is no better than a Honda at this point. I used to own a e92, but F30 is a joks 4. Awful dealer network 5. They probably won't invest in a charging network

</comment><comment><USER45> 2020 is pretty soon!

</comment><comment><USER46> I feel like every gas automaker has a vested interest in saying electric cars are not viable until X years out in the future. Perpetually.

They're making money now on the current system, not much incentive to do anything besides look like they're trying to be more efficient whilst moving just quick enough to hit efficiency standards.

</comment><comment><USER47> Ok so that would be a year and three quarters from where we are right now. This time frame is a veritable blink of an eye in the planning horizon of a large automaker. It implies that they have everything pretty much designed and ready to go right now and are just waiting for battery prices to drop.

</comment><comment><USER48> Investors lose hopes for Electric motor and Tesla is unable to fund their project!

"Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak."

They are obviously going to say this to keep investors from betting their money on Tesla.

BMW surely has money from their other class of vehicles to continue funding their electric motor expedition.

</comment><comment><USER49> Tesla shareholders are effectively funding R&D for BMW/Honda/Toyota/GM/Ford etc.

<comment><USER50> Universities and by extension the rest of society funded the R&D for Tesla. Why do Tesla fans have such a persecution complex?

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> That's about right. The 2019 models will be already almost locked in. An electric for the 2020 model year is ambitious.

At the rate Tesla is screwing up, BMW might hit 5000 units a week before Tesla does.

</comment><comment><USER52> Just as a reminder: it is now year 21 after Prius.

</comment><comment><USER53> 2020 is almost here. Doesn't seem like a big deal.

</comment><comment><USER54> 2020 is only 2 years from now.

</comment><comment><USER55> 2020 is not that far.</comment>