WakeMate (YC S09) runs out of cash, co-founder allegedly spams users - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/06/28/wakemate-out-of-cash-co-founder-allegedly-spams-users-to-raise-money-for-similar-new-venture/

<comment><USER2> They built a legitimate product that some people wanted and managed to get it manufactured and shipped. That's a lot farther that most go.

The product sales weren't able to get to enough volume to support the company and the needed lowering of costs that comes with volume manufacturing. That's not uncommon. Sometimes hardware devices do better with large corporate backing because they can afford to take a loss longer while they build up a market. For small operations, this is the perfect case for venture capital where outside money is needed because of high costs of doing real manufacturing.

I see no need to hate on them like the article does. It's sad the founders turned on each other at the end, that can't have helped things. If these guys pull out, have the right insights about what they have learned, and do another round at something else, their chances of success will be much higher than someone without their experience and ability to actually envision and execute a product that people wanted. Just not enough people this time.

</comment><comment><USER3> Baffling with all the publicity they have surely this character would have been better off with an open and honest kickstarter? Stating they realise they made mistakes in the past how they are going to correct them and what is different or better about the new product. I would have probably contributed because I think its a really interesting product.

</comment><comment><USER4> There is no allegedly about it, I was spammed with an offer for a new Wakemate. I forget the wording. Plus the follow up apology.

<comment><USER5> true but I like to stay on the safe side until Greg gets back to me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Robin, it's time to update your employer on your HN profile ;)

<comment><USER5> ha, good idea :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If the previous Eligible App HN submission is anything to go by, this will be ninja downvoted by HN mods.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm reserving judgement until we hear both sides of the story.

Obviously, this could simply be blatant bad behavior, but as even Arun said in his post, he doesn't really know what's going on. I could easily envision a situation where the company has run out of capital and one of the founders decides to take things into their own hands to keep the idea going simply driven by passion.

Of course, if that was his motivation, his execution was remarkably poor.

<comment><USER8> It's pretty clear cut-- if Milife is a new corporation, with new owners, then the only way they should have had the list is if they paid WakeMate for the list. Any other use is theft from WakeMate shareholders. I think the odds are very good there will be legal problems for Milife, possibly criminal.

Greg took Pincus's lie cheat and steal message too seriously.

<comment><USER2> The shareholders are the VC investors. If they want to rip apart one of the few people around that managed to execute manufacturing a real hardware product and getting it shipped rather than stay on good terms and get in on his next idea, that's their decision. Foolish, but it's their life.

<comment><USER9> It seems fair that they wouldn't want to encourage this sort of thing; founders/employees of a company can't just start a new company and use information from the existing one to start it up. Criminal charges seem pretty heavy, but it seems like what was done here wasn't right.

<comment><USER8> I have seen former employers get the FBI to come after ex employees who used lists, data, etc. expropriated from the company. All it takes is a phone call. Really, its not the company's choice anyway... if the law has been broken, the authorities pursue it at their own perogative.

<comment><USER2> Has a law been broken? I don't agree with all the people stating a law has been broken without saying which one. Smells like smearing someone. Accusing someone of committing crimes is very serious.

He was still the President and founder of WakeMate when he sent an email about a new thing he was getting into. He didn't hack into an account he had no access to - it was his account. The article claims he didn't "get permission". Get permission from who? It was his account.

Claims this is "criminal" are absurd, ridiculous, and libelous.

On the other hand, the story discusses that the code that is owned by what is left of the company is going to be open sourced, essentially given away to the general public. This code is the real value of the company and likely cost millions to develop. Was this move approved by the shareholders? It does not say that it was. This move is something that the company owners could object to. It's blatant theft of company property and transfer of it to others. Have the VC owners of the company and thus the code signed off on it? Even if they have, it might not be relevant. Since it appears they are out of money, is the company in bankruptcy court? Do they owe suppliers? Are they going to go through bankruptcy or not? Transfers of the core company assets at this point should not be done without the approval of a judge, not even the VC "owners". If they have debts and assets (the source code) and reallocate those assets to others knowing that they are going to have to declare bankruptcy, that is fraud. The code usually would be sold at public auction and the money then used to pay off debt owned by the company, which may include unpaid bills, but may also include salary owed to the principals to wind down the company in a way so that assets can be sold for a reasonable amount. I see no indication that anyone involved in preparing this code for open source release is going to be paid for it. They are under no obligation to do so without pay even if such a move was approved by VC owners and/or a judge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I like the fact that they are open sourcing the tech though, perhaps someone else can improve it so it doesn't go on fire.

<comment><USER11> The actual device is safe. Only the provided cheap Chinese usb charger can catch fire.

<comment><USER10> The device was smouldering in the video. <http://www.twitvid.com/UBBWC>

The cheap charger may have sparked it, but it was the lack of current limiters or heat cutoffs in the device that appears to be the actual problem. Electrical inputs should be treated much like form inputs on a web page. Never trust them to be what you designed for.</comment></comment></comment>


The Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel (2007) - <AUTHOR> https://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_tunnel.htm <comment><USER2> I have a signed Burrito Tunnel poster on my wall from kickerstarting idleword's trip to Antarctica. It's awesome. [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/431908798/send-idle- wor...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/431908798/send-idle-words-to- antarctica/description)

</comment><comment><USER3> Previous discussion.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9958407](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9958407)

</comment><comment><USER4> how have I lived my entire life without knowing about this?</comment>


Wolfram Alpha Can't - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/wacnt <comment><AUTHOR> Saw this page linked from slatestarcodex.com, and was immediately nerd-sniped. I read through the entire history and was amazed by the depth and variety of all the different queries, some of them quite amusing. Pretty mind-opening to think of the level of AI needed to solve these automatically. Good source of puzzles and interview questions too--I wrote programs to solve a bunch of them.</comment>


Advice to new programmers - <AUTHOR> http://olafurw.com/2019-01-27-programmer-advice/ <comment><USER2> I love the simple software-centric approach to analyzing this survey and categorizing the answers.

There's one thing I'm sure was mentioned a lot by 17.1% of the participants, but it's one thing I'd like to stress:

Find a good mentor!

I've been teaching my son programming steadily for a few years now, and every so often he likes to take what he just learned, go and revisit some old programs he wrote or read from before he understood the new concept, and understand it better and often improve on it a lot (even rewriting it sometimes), and then he comes back to me very excitedly telling me how the new concept I taught him greatly improved the thing he did.

He's already writing code better than I did when I was a decade older than him, easily grasping new concepts like linked lists, garbage collection, pointers, and Lua coroutines and so on. When I was his age, I was still struggling to understand arrays in QBasic, had nobody to mentor and guide and teach me, and was generally pretty lost. Having a mentor who can guide you carefully and at your pace is an incredibly powerful shortcut.

<comment><USER3> The need of mentoring must be completely voluntary. I was hired to be a team senior of developers who didn't think they needed a mentor and it didn't work out so well.

People actively seeking a mentor are likely willing to consider the advice and tough criticism they get as points to self-reflect upon, because they want to improve. They want to become faster stronger developers. As common as that might sound I have found intentional yearning for self-improvement to be rare or severely misunderstood among junior developers in the corporate world. More common than self improvement is interest in specific technology stacks of the moment and persuit of near instant gratification.

EDIT

Actually, I can remember observing this behavior once as a junior developer. When I started learning JavaScript 12 years ago the real big deal then was Java. Compared to me at the time everybody seemed incredibly experienced and talented, but most of the developers were negligent to the point of horrid incompetence at the frontend skills even though this was a big brand web business and 90% of their efforts generated frontend code.

There were a few Java developers who did have a solid understanding of the frontend code, but they intentionally didn't advertise this. I had to actively observe for it. After badgering some of these people it was clear they were willing to provide mentoring if I asked for it and worked my ass off to chase it.

What I learned the hard way is the people who made the best developers had a secondary skill they actively thought about more than their primary skill and used that to reinforce their primary skill. At first it was Java developers who had a solid grasp of things like CSS, but I also saw it in others who were working out product management skills or business pricing logic more related to finance than programming. These people also tended to make strong mentors. The people focused on only their primary skills weren't as capable and didn't seek mentoring themselves or have much to offer other junior developers.

<comment><USER4> On that topic, if you are the most senior person on the team and the other members don't seem like they want mentoring, my biggest piece of advice is to wait. Sometimes it feels like you are waiting forever (and with some people you will be). Mentoring is as much about trust as it is about passing over knowledge. You can imagine the people you will potentially mentor as wild animals. Even if you have gobs of yummy food on hand, they won't be ready to take it from you at first. The trick is to stand still, keep your calm and keep offering small little treats. Eventually one or two of them will come by and take a nibble. Don't pounce on them. Just stay calm and keep offering treats. Eventually some of them will come to trust you well enough to eat a whole meal from you. Some never will. That's just the way it is.

<comment><USER3> In front end development trust is universally near absent. People are wanting instant gratification and there is huge peer pressure to concede that a tool or framework will solve all your problems for you. _Invented here syndrome_ is the name of the game. They don't trust themselves or each other. It really feels that for most frontend developers it really is all about tools and trends until they spinoff into another career path or promote out.

I do agree that trust is huge for mentoring.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure about typical front end development culture (the front end devs we have on our team are really very good), but I have been very surprised about how this generation of programmers in general choose to trust people and code. To be fair, it might just be some of the people I've met, but as an old guy, it seems to be more prevalent than I've ever seen before. I find that younger devs are prone to trusting code written by people they've never met before. If it's popular on the internet, it seems that it must be good. On the other hand, they seem to be _very_ cautious about code they get from their colleagues. As you say, _invented here syndrome_. It seems like if the code was written by someone they know, then it can't be any good.

But I think a lot of that is a lack of confidence and experience. It's hard to talk about this without sounding like a gigantic ass because no matter how I put this, I can't find a way to express how much I really respect other developers. However, I've noticed that there seems to be a big reluctance for actually reading and appreciating the code in the tools people use -- almost as if there is some magic seal on the code and despite it being open source, we are not worthy to gaze upon the code. I think there is a fairly large amount of hero worship going on and a kind of herd mentality. To question the laws that were handed down from on high is blasphemous (almost literally). It is to the point where many people feel that they are transgressing badly if they even deviate from the "community approved" coding standards. Thank god for auto-reformatting tools is all I can say!

When these same people see their colleagues, they realise that it's just some other goofball like themselves. Their colleagues are struggling, making mistakes, rewriting, grinding away. So I think there is a kind of group impostor syndrome going on where they think, "Well, that guy isn't that much better than me and I suck!" What they don't realise is that their heroes in the FANG companies and their nameless horde of community members are just goofballs too -- struggling, making mistakes, grinding away.

I think as well, we often see projects and people fall from grace. Some project grinds to a halt, or the horrible problems it's had from the start become more obvious to the horde. And then all of a sudden it's, "That guy is a joke. Only morons would use that framework. All the cool people have moved over to <some other equally flawed thing>". But again, I think it's just part and parcel of a lack of experience and confidence. Most young devs are secretly, desperately hoping that somebody out there knows "how to do it right". They get disillusioned quickly when they discover that their heroes don't know how to do it right.

And of course, nobody does ;-) But that's a hard message to sell.

<comment><USER3> As a side story to your wonderful comment I had a colleague recommend I use a different IDE at work because their favorite code beautification tool was only available in one editor at the time. They didn't realize I am a contributor on the project they were promoting or that one of the code beautifiers in that project was mine. The team on this tool were actively working on diversifying to various IDEs but just hadn't gotten there quite yet. That was an awkward moment.

<comment><USER5> I'm curious: how was that awkward, rather than hilarious or glorious?!

<comment><USER6> Right, we weren't there but from the description it seems like serendipity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have a problem. I try to be as helpful as possible. But when deadlines are near(and that seems to be constant lately) I lose my patience. I lose patience when juniors ask things they could have easily searched. I lose my patience when they come to me going "this isn't working" without having tried any alternative. I lose my patience when they ask me for things I could not know, that they should know and all I do to solve the problem is just probe a bit more.

So how do you, who are comparatively more experienced than your peers, not lose your patience?

EDIT: replaced 5x instances of loose with lose. Oh god. I was kinda' drunk and would be tempted to blame auto-correct on my mobile device but I just tried it, and it doesn't turn lose into loose. So I must just be a idiot.

<comment><USER8> I've learned that there are certain skills that separate good developers from mediocre ones, and that's 3 main things 1) curiosity 2) Grit 3) Patience

Curiosity is having a problem and caring about finding out why it isn't working. Grit is having the resolve to keep chipping away at the problem until it's solved. Patience is realizing that things take time.

Whenever a junior starts asking me things when I'm on a deadline, I politely tell them to "keep looking". I'll potentially provide a hint if it will help. Some get annoyed and scoff at me and tell me "I've been searching!". Others keep looking.

<comment><USER9> in that situation perhaps you could review their keywords. I know that sometimes the solution can be found through searching, but knowing what to search is half the battle. Reviewing their search terms and suggesting alternatives should take very little time and helps them keep searching and gets them off your back for a little while. It is also not as dismissive as 'keep searching'

<comment><USER8> I have tried that strategy but many people get offended when you question their googlefoo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> All very good and important advice for those entering the industry. I'd like to stress the people aspect even more. Treat people the way you want to be treated. If an engineer doesn't understand a certain technology, kindly explain it to them instead of berating them for being "not smart". The jerks will outnumber the saints, but being the latter almost always pay off (being successful, high status, generally liked by everyone else etc.) in the long run.

<comment><USER11> I'll second this with my anecdata. The thing that has always made me the most money is being able to communicate technical things to non-technical people in a way that doesn't make them feel stupid. There is usually at least one better coder than me on any given team, but they never get advancement because they can only talk to other engineers who they are also usually talking down to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> As a somewhat still new and self taught programmer, the "dont compare yourself to others, but where you were in the past" really resonates with me.

I've come a really long way and I'm proud of how far I've come. At the same time I definitely have moments where I interact with someone else and think I'm still such a novice. I am much better at when this happens, being ok with it being true and using it as motivation to keep learning and get better.

<comment><USER13> I'm gonna give you a secret... this will make your career easy... listen.

'The more you learn, the less you know'.

Now say it to yourself.

<comment><USER14> Totally. Something I learned very early on was your big idea isn't as big or clever as you think (necessarily, but sometimes it is!), so it's worthwhile to canvas the office to first find out the history of why something is the way it is or why we don't currently do X.

Often you find it used to be done that way in the past and then they stopped doing it that way because Y. It turns up all kinds of interesting stuff that no amount of thinking will get you to on your own.

That would be my number one advice for those starting out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> These replies were not what I expected. Practice, practice, practice is not necessarily good advice if you don't know what you're doing. Before I took college programming classes I was self taught and wrote what I later learned was called "spaghetti code." I had no idea (before the classes) who was giving me good advice and who was giving me bad advice. My code was unorganized and a total mess.

In my class, our textbook was "The Elements Of Programming Style" by Kernighan and Plaugher. As far as I'm concerned, it is THE book for beginning programmers. It's rare and expensive now, but worth it.

In a nutshell, it taught:

\- program in a direct way, do NOT try to be clever and code in weird, complex ways. Your code (not just the comments) needs to be readable to others, what it does should be evident. (The book gave examples of both, and after looking at a number of these examples, you get the idea of what K&P mean by ELEGANT programming.)

\- Subroutines must have one entry point and one exit point, and accomplish one task.

\- Add lots of comments in your code to help others or even yourself in case you forget what your thinking was.

These are just a few examples of good programming practice. I later became a professional programmer, using assembly language and C++. But that first college book was the one that outshone all the later ones that I read. Get it if you can find it!

I would also highly recommend Dennis Ritchie's books.

One more thing - object oriented programming is good, but I'm not sure it's paradigm will win out in the end. As an assembly language programmer, I began to realize the power of data driven programming, and I began to write my programs in that way. Which is why I think this new language, Julia, holds a lot of promise. I say this as one who has only read ABOUT Julia, not as one who has studied the language itself.

<comment> V-2 _> \- Subroutines must have one entry point and one exit point, and accomplish one task._

Sometimes code is much cleaner if you exit a method or a function early. Especially in languages with automatic memory management where you don't need to concern yourself about leaks so much.

 _> \- Add lots of comments in your code to help others or even yourself in case you forget what your thinking was._

Lots of comments is a red flag to me. It often indicates the code itself is of poor readability. But it's usually easier to just slap some comment on it than to properly rewrite it... "A comment is a failure to express yourself in code" (Uncle Bob).

 _> These are just a few examples of good programming practice_

I'd argue they are debatable, and at the very least not necessarily universal.

<comment><USER16> Ah, the most important rule - there are no rules, only compromises.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The overwhelming majority of these points are useful, and the exact thing that "engineering culture" Twitter has been excelling at for a while now. It wasn't always easy to find people supporting people at every stage of their career, but there are several accounts to follow to do just that.

The "one page ahead in the manual" quote is a great example of this. It's hard to remember when you didn't know everything you know today -- so think about yesterday, or last week, some smaller time slice. What did you learn yesterday that somebody on your team may not know? Operating at that layer and sharing knowledge freely shows you're a friendly resource and shows that you're honest about your journey. It attracts other people who are slightly above or below that level, who can share and multiply what you're learning.

(And it has a great byproduct of teaching you where the egos sit at your company.)

</comment><comment><USER18> My advice would be to learn and master vim.

When I began programming, I was forced to use vim and hated it, I didn't understand why someone would use such an "old school" text editor to write programs. I abandoned it and moved on to typical IDEs. As a young programmer, it's difficult to see the value.

But many years later I discovered the power of vim came from customizing it to my exact preferences, and mastering all the shortcuts and its grammar. After a year's worth of effort, I began coding at the speed of thought, and programming has been much more enjoyable ever since, as time moves on I only get faster and faster. It's like cooking with a really sharp knife vs a dull one.

<comment><USER19> This somewhat depends on the technology you're using as well though. Writing Java in vim is a pain in the ass in comparison to something like IntelliJ that has auto-importing, go to definition, etc

<comment><USER18> You can do all those things with vim. Look it up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> Blinks- I posted something similar in another thread about advice but take a programming terminology/vocabulary class, you probably know most of it after a few years experience but even a slight misunderstanding in diction can have serious implications down the line. I was surprised how much I learned and how beneficial it was to the conciseness of my code comments. This can be especially helpful with network stack and TCP/IP related work, remembering all the acronyms can save you a lot of time.

</comment><comment><USER20> More on the "growing your career" side:

Build something that solves a problem and put it on github.

Not only are you adding to your portfolio, but you're demonstrating that you can take a problem and come up with a solution for it. Canned "To Do" apps aren't as impactful because there's a 1000 tutorials for this online and everyone knows it (though they can still help for showing knowledge of a technology or stack, so don't count them out)

<comment><USER21> This is how I broke into my first full time dev job from tech support. I wrote a web page without any frameworks or anything that would upload images, remember the hashes for them, rotate them, and detect duplicates. I built it because I didn't want my daughters pictures on Facebook but wanted to share images with family. Then I made a YouTube video with lots of pictures of pizza to demo it. The hardest part for sure as a dev learning only from my Google fu was the async stuff. But I doubled my income that year, so it was definitely worth it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Be humble. Be kind. Remember you're never as senior as you think you are. Opposing opinions are not wrong. Remember to have fun, because building things is awesome. Tomorrow is an opportunity to be better.

<comment><USER19> I wouldn't necessarily say that opposing opinions aren't wrong. Sometimes they are, and a lot of the time it's because of some form of institutional inertia. In general though, you'll have great ideas, people will politely tell you to fuck off, and you have to be able to get over it quickly or you'll make yourself hate your job.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> A quote from _why is something I'm occasionally reminded of, and still struggle with sometimes even though my first lick of programming was 15 years ago:

"When you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. Your tastes only narrow & exclude people. So create."

</comment><comment><USER24> Some good advice on there. I like the no shortcuts one. Another way to put it is the longest way is the shortest way. If you think you are taking a short cut you are likely taking a long cut overall.

<comment><USER25> I learned SO much about windows during the 2 weeks when my mouse was broken and I was too cheap to replace it. Turns out you can do pretty much anything without the mouse, even without turning on handicapped assistive mode!

And there was a time when a snotty admin convinced me that he had the authority to require me to do development in vim. He did not, and damn that learning curve was steep- but I picked up skills that still serve me well a couple decades later.

Oh, and another one - we had a process for cranking out custom reports, where if you could express the entire thing they were asking for in SQL, then you were done. But if any part of required programming logic, you had to create a controller, and a template file, and register them, and do a full product release... it was a big hassle. And man did I ever learn how to make SQL jump through hoops at that job.

So, a corollary to your "The longest way is the shortest way" is my life lesson - Constraints make you better.

<comment><USER24> I like that. A constraint means you have at least a starting point too. I've always struggled to keep on track when faced with seemingly infinite options. The first few decisions/constraints that define a project and allow it to be worked on can take a long time.

I really wonder if that admin was more of a 'bastard operator from hell' (old school reference) or sneakily getting you to improve yourself.

<comment><USER25> > I really wonder if that admin was more of a 'bastard operator from hell'

Ha, yes, he absolutely was. Just very lazy, knew I already had SSH access to our staging server, and knew I needed to develop on there, but didn't want to bother setting up SSHFS and configuring it to be accessible from my windows machine, and didn't want me telling him to do a new staging deploy every 10 minutes while I tried to figure out how to get some connected hardware working right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I have learned that I have peak efficiency in code in the early morning and stays strong for 6 hours. By 8 hours I start getting hung up on simpler problems and it's just a waste of time to keep on going. Take time to relax and sleep. You will have the answer to your problem sometimes just minutes from wake.

</comment><comment><USER27> A side note: next time you want to scrape Twitter use [https://github.com/twintproject/twint](https://github.com/twintproject/twint) which is relatively faster and use some tricks to avoid scraping defense techniques.

</comment><comment><USER28> Ah sir, you could just ask me directly [https://lukaszkups.net/notes/tips-for- beginner-programmers/](https://lukaszkups.net/notes/tips-for-beginner- programmers/) ;)

</comment><comment><USER29> Love the advices, many of them resonate to me as well, thanks for sharing.

</comment><comment><USER30> Pick your favorite open source project, fire up debugger and start hacking.

<comment><USER31> This one is pretty close to what my advice would be. I started out making games at 9 yo, using clickteams klik&play, tgf, and later mmf and mmf2. (They were the creators of amos & stos although that was before my time)

For those unfamiliar with the development experience, its very similar to scratch but with a spreadsheet-like layout.

When I seriously started learning the workings of more complex logic in these tools is when I started reading the "source code" of the 2d platformer Zeb, programmed by Lee Bamber (who would later go out to make Dark Basic), drawn by Nolan Worthington.

This taught me in a very condensed manner lots of advanced programming techniques. Like a teacher of mine used to say, this will feel like drinking Fun Light (concentrated drink supposed to be cut like 1/12) directly out of the bottle.

And that tradition has stuck with me, decompiling dlls and inspecting websites etc.</comment></comment>


IBM getting into the HTML5 authoring game with open source Maqetta - <AUTHOR> http://coolthingoftheday.blogspot.com/2011/04/ibm-getting-into-html5-authoring-game.html

<comment><USER2> I have a related question: I have friends in two camps. One camp says all tools like this are inherently limiting, and websites should be built by coders who know how to code. They typically go on to talk about bloat-ware etc., and the fact that even the best tool will give you unnecessary code. The other camp says that with the tools out there, there is no reason to build everything from scratch every time, and that the photoshops and dreamweavers (and now Maqetta--sorry, but it is in the same classification in my mind) of the world are the only way to go.

What's an acceptable middle ground?

<comment><USER3> We're just a few years into serious codegeneration tools. Most people still have the bad taste of MSVS code generators in their mouth. When it evolves, code generators will be unbeatable to manual coding, area by area, language by language, slowly. Some langs/frameworks/toolkits will never have decent codegeneration.

A paper document generates code also, like OO.org (LibreOffice) or OOXML. They're pretty good at that, I have yet to meet the first guy manually writing a doc by hand. Html5 will replace those document formats, simply because they're based on paper.

The camp saying current code generation tools suck, are right. The camp saying future code generators will fit your needs, are right also.

<comment><USER4> _I have yet to meet the first guy manually writing a doc by hand._

Actually, real typesetting is done with LaTeX which is a document markup language. There are WYSIWIG editors (e.g. LyX) but I seen anyone actually using them.</comment></comment></comment>


Top Design Flaws in the Human Body: Our bodies are full of hack solutions - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/24/error/top-10-design-flaws-in-the-human-body <comment><USER2> My personal favorite poorly designed part of the body is the sinus cavity.

When we used to walk on four limbs, our heads would naturally incline to an angle that allows full drainage of the sinus cavity. Now that we walk upright, there's a dead spot in the back of the cavity where mucus and bacteria can pool. This is why if you're experiencing sinus pressure but you haven't reached the stage where nothing in your head is moving if you tip your head forward you can often feel an immediate lessening of pressure.

<comment><USER3> Always wondered why after surfing the water didn't drain out of my sinus until I bent over to pick something up. Thanks for the insight!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A nice picture of laryngeal nerve 'hack' pushed to 11: [http://blog.eternalvigilance.me/wp- content/uploads/2013/04/g...](http://blog.eternalvigilance.me/wp- content/uploads/2013/04/giraffe-recurrent-laryngeal-nerve.png)

</comment><comment><USER5> [feature request] What about the inability to selectively serialize memory and put it into sperm / egg? I mean, I get human long term memory is probably relatively new and gene serialization is as old as time, but it would be incredibly helpful if we could serialize even a little bit of our memories and experiences into our next generation. It would avoid tons of repeat learning every generation needs to figure out (e.g. don't touch fire, don't lick electrical sockets, don't shit in your bed, reading, writing, riding a bike, monads, etc.), and allow us to focus on higher level things like cracking Navier Stokes or unlocking immortality.

<comment><USER6> That's called "instinct", and the partial implementation "imprinting". "Learning" is how we rush the process ahead of evolution

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> My favourite flaw is that you can swallow (without problems) pieces that are so large that they can get stuck in your oesophagus further down the line blocking it. You can't even swallow your saliva when that happens.

</comment><comment><USER8> My vote goes to menstruation.

It's an extremely wasteful exercise.

Most mammals do not need to do it, so there's an existing model for how reproduction can work without the need for ~monthly blood and tissue loss.

<comment><USER9> Most mammals go through some sort of estrous, but only a few menstruate. The main difference is that humans and some other primates have the capability to mate and rear young pretty much at any time of the year, which is why the women are generally always capable of becoming fertilized.

There are other, more advanced social theories that go into the role menstruation plays in society, but historically, menstruating monthly has been an advantage, not a disadvantage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Mother Nature is not, and has never been an engineer. Evolution is trial and error. DNA is spaghetti code of the highest order.

<comment><USER10> Erm... "software engineers" are not, and have never been engineers. Programming is trail and error. Computer code is spaghetti code of the highest order.

The article is kinda... I dunno. Its solution to the spine problems allegedly caused by walking on two legs is ultimately to go back to walking on four legs. This however... urm... presents its own problems, the solution to which is left as an exercise to the reader.

Build a better human first, then criticize the one that already works...

<comment><USER11> I suspect the whole article is a joke.

It had brain as hack at #10.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Meandering arteries seems rather questionable. I suspect the existing approach is safer as the shoulder and elbows can take quite a bit of abuse and internal bleeding is a very serious issue.

I would suggest the digestive system is much more of a hack. But, losing the ability to manufacture vitamin C is both unusual (Just some primates and guinea pigs?) and problematic.

</comment><comment><USER13> I think the biggest flaw is the location of the entertainment center next to sewer system.

<comment><USER14> If you really think about it, it's probably unavoidable. You have to reward an organism when it performs necessary functions. Which is why defecation and urination are pleasurable.

You could move the piping, but you'd still have to reward the action. And if there's reward sensors there, clever animals will figure out how to trigger the reward without the action.

In other words, you can move the sewer but they'd probably just build another playground there.

<comment><USER15> You could also make the "full tank condition" painfull, without making draining it pleasurable.

Shouldn't lead to addiction, and would work as well.

<comment><USER14> That would only work if you wanted the organism to always reach a full tank, or near full tank, before taking the action.

I'd wager that's a non-ideal situation. Think about the times you've reached a completely full bladder...not a good position to be in.

So you have a combo. Taking a whiz is pleasurable, so you do it when you can. But if you get over full, you get a nice zap of discomfort to let you know you're in a danger zone.

<comment><USER15> you make the pain gradually increase from 0 to 1 for blader filled to 0.8 to 1.0 respectivly, and add automatic safety valve to be sure.

It's basically how it works right now, no need for messing with positive reinforcement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Or maybe these are all just "myths", ie. not still fully understood?

Eg. the retina: [https://theconversation.com/look-your-eyes-are-wired- backwar...](https://theconversation.com/look-your-eyes-are-wired-backwards- heres-why-38319)

<comment><USER17> That seems to address a subtlety about the layers of the retina, unrelated to the (bigger) problem of the optic nerve unnecessarily punching through the retina, leaving a blind spot that can't pick up light.

This feature/bug is absent in cephalids with no corresponding downside.

The human optic nerve structure makes more sense as being an artifact of path dependence and the "local improvement constraint" than it being (more) globally optimal in design space.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Hey people under 30 or so, do you even know who MacGyver is? :)

<comment><USER4> The birth of that show was surprising : [http://macgyverglobal.com/2012/11/05/macgyver-the-real- origi...](http://macgyverglobal.com/2012/11/05/macgyver-the-real-origin- story/)

<comment><USER19> part 2: [http://macgyverglobal.com/2012/12/11/macgyver-the-real- origi...](http://macgyverglobal.com/2012/12/11/macgyver-the-real-origin- story-2/) (3 and 4: just click "next" after 2 and 3)

part 5: [http://macgyverglobal.com/2013/03/20/macgyver-the-real- origi...](http://macgyverglobal.com/2013/03/20/macgyver-the-real-origin- story-5/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> There was an article just a few days ago where they found the "backwards" retina has denser cells on the front side which concentrate red and green wavelengths. Seemed a bit fishy to me, but it suggests that we don't that our eyes are not optimal. Some of the other things listed are suspect AFICT because we just don't know all the influences that led to them. Arteries? Those are ancient in origin and reflect a weird balance between flexibility, getting the blood distributed, and not bleeding to death from injuries.

While I'm sure there is hackery behind all of these, I don't think humans know enough yet to claim we could do better.

<comment><USER21> That's just nature making the best it can of a historical accident.

If you were designing the eye from scratch, you'd have the nerves coming out the back like in squid. Then if you wanted something that concentrates the red and green wavelengths, you could put something else in front of the light sensing cells.

You'd end up exactly where you are now, except you'd not have a huge blind spot, and wouldn't have to spend as much brain power compensating for it.

<comment><USER22> The blind spot is not huge. It's easily compensated for, and it appears the mammalian eye has other attributes that make it work well. We just don't have enough data to understand whether mammalian eyes embedded a major problem that had to be compensated for, or if this design has attributes that make it desirable.

<comment><USER23> Maybe, but either vertebrates or cephalopods have to have sub optimal design. My money is on the backwards retina being the kludge.

<comment><USER22> No, neither is required to have a suboptimal design. Why do you think that? Mammals are quite successful.

<comment><USER24> They can't both be optimal. The probability that both are exactly equally good is so remote as to be ignorable.

Successful does not imply "no flaws." It's interesting to see this argument brought up in the context of biology. It's frequently applied to software, for example it shows up in basically every discussion of PHP.

<comment><USER25> >>They can't both be optimal.

They could both be optimal for their respective uses. Humans don't spend a lot of time on the seafloor, and cephalopods don't spend a lot of time in the open air. Certainly there are other tradeoffs to be made as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> So, this is the so-called "intelligent design"?

I think not.

<comment><USER27> Just to play devil's advocate...

It almost certainly is intelligent design, because it's intelligent given certain constraints (the existing gene pool in a given generation, and the fact that something working is better than something theoretically better but doesn't actually exist). God iterates using an Agile process.

<comment><USER28> Backlog:

Epic - Improve test coverage

<comment><USER29> Yes, one gigantic integration test (Live/Die) is unhelpful and makes it very difficult to pinpoint problems. Looking for something beyond "it compiles".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> What about the heart or other critical yet non-redundant organs. In the tech world we try to avoid single points of failure like that.

<comment><USER31> Which is why the Gallifreyans engineered a backup, I assume.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> > This change put tremendous pressure on the lower vertebrae, sticking about > 80 percent of adults, according to one estimate, with lower back pain.

So it's evolutions fault now that a lot of people are sitting around all day long?

> And to add insult to injury, the width of a woman's pelvis hasn't changed > for some 200,000 years, keeping our brains from growing larger.

As if increasing something like the pelvis wouldn't have detrimental consequences in other parts of the life.

> A man's life-giving organs hang vulnerably outside the body.

So where are the statistics that show that this is a problem to begin with? I don't know anybody who got his family jewels ripped off accidentally - technically it could happen of course.

This whole list is ridiculous. The human body is not a buffet where you can take some of this and some of that. It's all interconnected mechanically and physiologically.

</comment><comment><USER33> Given enough time, all of the listed problems would evolve to a fix. The iterative method has made 2 billion cells work in harmony with just a few kinks. Scrum over waterfall.

<comment><USER34> No, not necessarily, and I think not particularly likely. Evolution is not "progress". We are not evolving to some platonic ideal. Much of what is discussed in this article are local maxima that our ancestors hit many millions of years ago. Because evolution is not planned, and their is no fitness function other than continued survival, all species are going to be filled with such anatomical quirks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Wasn't this link about the backwards retina on the front page recently?

[http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/look-your- eyes...](http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/look-your-eyes-are- wired-backwards-here-s-why)

</comment><comment><USER36> Some describe it as having been "Designed by Committee":

[http://threepanelsoul.com/2010/07/05/on-design-by- committee/](http://threepanelsoul.com/2010/07/05/on-design-by-committee/)

</comment><comment><USER37> I think the teeth/jaw issues are a matter of misuse not flawed design. The switch from hunter-gatherer diet to modern diet was too fast to blame hill- climbing evolution errors.

<comment><USER24> That distinction doesn't make any sense to me. The switch to a modern diet was ultimately a result of evolution. If evolution gave us the ability to radically switch diets, but didn't give us the ability to properly deal with the new diet, then that's an example of evolution producing something flawed.

<comment><USER37> I disagree that there is no cutoff point for what can be meaningfully blamed on evolution. Would you say that it is an evolutionary flaw that if we drink too much alcohol we get cirrhosis of the liver and die?

<comment><USER24> I would say that it's an evolutionary flaw that many humans _want_ to drink so much alcohol that they die from it. Just like it's an evolutionary flaw that we like consuming much more food than is good for us, simply because that part evolved in a time when it was physically impossible to overeat consistently.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> This seems more like a list of edge cases for things that normally work pretty well. Why not change the things that contribute to war, overpopulation, disease, etc?

</comment><comment><USER39> There is also the mitochondrial DNA which is probably placed in the most unsafe environment inside the cell.

<comment><USER40> Mitochondrial DNA needs to be in the mitochondria, presumably because of proximity and/or latency issues. That's why the vast majority of mDNA has moved to the regular DNA or simply disappeared. The stuff that's left behind isn't an accident.

<comment><USER25> Well, I suppose you would know better than the rest of us! :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> What do these 'hacks' indicate about the Intelligent Designer(s) in charge of human creation? That is, can we, as believers in Intelligent Design, discern anything about the Deity(ies) who did the design? The obvious question is: "how many deities did the design? One or more?" After that, you'd move on to gender, and other indicators. Ultimately, one would hope to be able to have Scientific Proof of the truth of one or more creation stories, and denial of all the others. Or am I just dreaming here?

<comment><USER42> > What do these 'hacks' indicate about the Intelligent Designer(s) in charge > of human creation?

That they likely don't exist.</comment></comment>


81% of 'suspects' flagged by Met's police facial recognition technology innocent - <AUTHOR> https://news.sky.com/story/met-polices-facial-recognition-tech-has-81-error-rate-independent-report-says-11755941 <comment><USER2> Bayes' theorem strikes again. Even if the odds of a false positive are only 1 in 1000, if 1 in a million are criminals then out of 1000 flagged people only 1 might be a criminal.

<comment><USER3> ...which makes an 81% false positive rate remarkably good. You've massively whittled down your list of potential subjects and made the job of humans immeasurably easier. An 81% false positive rate would be nightmarishly awful if this system served as judge, jury and executioner, but it's incredibly useful as a means of improving the signal-to-noise ratio of surveillance data.

<comment><USER4> That would be true if wiggling out of the net of justice when you are innocent were not so expensive. There are a lot of poor people who can't afford the system you speak of.

<comment><USER3> The world is not America. _Your_ criminal justice system might be a Kafkaesque nightmare, but ours is mostly OK.

<comment><USER5> Both the USA and UK provide legal aid for poor people even if the procedures are different. If you cannot afford a solicitor, the government will help you pay for one, but they probably won't be the best. In both countries rich people get better legal representation than poor people.

Don't make the UK out to be some paradise (legal or otherwise), it struggles with plenty of its own problems.

<comment><USER3> The UK doesn't have cash bail, so nobody is stuck in pre-trial detention simply because they can't afford to buy their freedom. It doesn't have elected prosecutors, judges or sheriffs. It incarcerates less than a quarter as many people per capita. It doesn't have three-strike laws and uses mandatory minimum sentences only for an extremely limited number of serious offences.

The UK is far from perfect, but most of the criticisms of the American criminal justice system simply don't apply.

<comment><USER6> Aren't people far more likely to be a victim of crime in the UK?

<comment><USER7> From petty crime, I suspect, yes. Why, because even when criminals are convicted they spend very short periods of time in prison (if at all). And, on release, they have much less chance of integrating into normal society than previously and fall into a pattern of reoffending, going to prison, reoffending, and so on.

In the UK, it seems, almost everyone has a tale about when they were burgled, when they were mugged or when their car was broken into.

Is this so in other countries, I think not?

<comment><USER8> I have never been burgled, mugged or had my car broken into. The only crime that I worry about on a regular basis is pickpocketing but this is similar to other European countries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Berlin did experiment with facial recognition. They had 300 test subjects that regularly used a particular train station. They claimed to have achieved a 65.8% detection rate, or up to 200 properly identified persons per day (so 1/3 were false negatives). However they also identified 0.67% wrongly, so given 90,000 people using that station a day, that means about 600 people were wrongly accused by the system each day (false positives).

They declared the system, which wrongly suspected up to 600 people a day at a single train station of being wanted criminals, but missed a lot of actually wanted criminals too, a major success.

Mind you, they used high resolution photographs as the training input for the system, something police does not necessarily have available of criminals and suspects they try to track down.

[https://www.ccc.de/de/updates/2018/debakel-am- suedkreuz](https://www.ccc.de/de/updates/2018/debakel-am-suedkreuz) (German)

<comment><USER10> I don't understand the pessimism about this. In any real-world scenario this type of system would be followed by human review of the photographs, followed by actual investigation. Nobody is proposing arresting all 600 people straight away.

Whittling 90,000 photos down to a set of 600 is a major accomplishment. Even if 599 of those are false positives, that 600th person would probably never have been caught, because it wouldn't have been feasible to review all 90,000 photos manually.

<comment><USER11> >Even if 599 of those are false positives, that 600th person would probably never have been caught.

Society needs to accept that some percentage of crimes will _invariably_ occur. Our question is "what maximum level of crime can we accept?" which then determines the time and resources required to achieve that level. I have no patience for this "zero-tolerance" rhetoric.

<comment><USER10> I don't disagree with your point. It doesn't really have anything to do with the question at hand though.

All I'm saying is that these tools are clearly doing a useful job and pretending like false positives are an insurmountable problem is a bit silly.

<comment><USER9> Are they tho? Are they doing a better job than say police randomly checking people?

Let's actually do some crude math to try to estimate how many new cops we'd need to hire in Germany just to check out those false positive hits. I mean, what's the point of such a system if you do not check out the hits and make sure, right?

Let's assume it takes police 15 mins to check out a potential hit in person (finding the person, checking their identify and asking some questions), and they work in teams of 2 to be able to secure each other.

The Deutsche Bahn alone says in 2018 they had 5.7 million passenger in Germany per day traveling by rail[1]. Let's assume all the train stations get equipped with with this tech and let's assume their 0.67% false positive rate holds. That's 38,190 checks you need to do on innocent people, per day, or 1591.25 checks per hour.

A two person team can do 60 / 15 = 4 checks per hour. So you need to have 400 such teams at any given time. A shift is only 8h not 24h and people only work 5/7 days per week, so 400 * 2 * (24/8) * 7 / 5, so you need to hire at least 3,360 police officers (well, probably more like 5000, because we completely disregarded a lot of variables, such as vacation days, etc) just to harass DB rail passengers who were incorrectly classified as threats, nationwide. Remember, those are all false positives, not one of those people is actually a criminal the system is meant to be looking for.

IIRC an average police officer costs the state about 90K per year on average in Germany. So you'll be spending 300+ million EUR per year on harassing innocent people just because your tech is kinda shitty.

Now if those 3,360 police offers would do actual useful work instead and prevented or solved some crimes...

Also, I don't want to be that person who happens to have a similar enough face to some criminal so the face detection triggers on me all the time.

[1] [https://www.deutschebahn.com/resource/blob/3992284/f9331633c...](https://www.deutschebahn.com/resource/blob/3992284/f9331633c8a19470629f9e3aa6d5fe8c/20190328_bpk_2019_daten_fakten_en- data.pdf)

<comment><USER10> Admittedly I don't have any data for this, but I think it's fair to assume that this number of 600 would go down to 10-20 or so after a quick human review of the data. So I think your estimate of 15 min per "hit" is wildly overstating things.

And again I don't think you're asking the right question to begin with. There is a whole separate argument to be had about whether we as a society actually want these kinds of systems and whether we think they are worth the cost (whether they require 300 or 3000 additional officers). But this system is being developed under the assumption that people do think it's worth it, and it does a pretty good job of making it a lot cheaper than it would otherwise be. I wouldn't call that a failure.

As a side-note, I would imagine this would not actually be used routinely in every single station, at least not in the beginning. You could only activate it when needed to catch very high-profile criminal. For example after the attack on the Berlin Christmas market the terrorist managed to travel all the way to Italy (?) before being stopped. If the German police could have fed his photo to this system that would have been extremely helpful, even if it would have meant a couple hundred officers having to review photos for a day.

<comment><USER9> >Admittedly I don't have any data for this, but I think it's fair to assume that this number of 600 would go down to 10-20 or so after a quick human review of the data.

Yes, you have no data for this. Sieving out 95% of hits just because a human glanced at the results is a ridiculously optimistic estimate, even if you manage to staff the screens with humans who are actually good with strange faces; and most humans are not. Humans on average not being good with faces (of strangers) is why witness statements are so unreliable and put so many innocent people in prison (and we have data for that). And you want to sieve out faces that the computer already thought were similar enough to warrant a match, which won't make it any easier.

They're trying to sell a horrible system that does not work correctly to the public. It doesn't matter if the public thinks it is worth it after they massively misrepresented what it actually can do. (Oh, and the German public isn't exactly known for been keen on surveillance either).

>I wouldn't call that a failure.

I would and I do.

>If the German police could have fed his photo to this system that would have been extremely helpful, even if it would have meant a couple hundred officers having to review photos for a day.

This is not backed by any data either. He could have easily been one of the 1/3 of people the system fails to detect. Or he could have further disguised himself for the system not to trigger. Oh wait, he did[1], with a beanie and a scarf and later with hood. And nobody took notice, because a lot of people looked like that as it was cold outside. In the summer, you'd just get some big ass sunglasses to cover enough of your face that the already poor system would not have triggered.

And by the time the police actually had a preliminary ID and a preliminary picture of a sufficient quality that would have allowed facial recognition, he already had left Germany. And by the time they actually had fingerprint evidence he even was in the truck, he had traveled 3 or 4 countries.

The likelihood that such a system would have helped finding Amri, even tho he actually took trains and didn't just go into hiding close by or took a car, is minuscule. Those "couple hundred officers" would most probably had more success if they spent their time actually investigating Amri and his acquaintances[2]. Also, let's not forget that by the time we would have used the facial recognition system, he had already murdered the truck driver and carried out his attack murdering another 11 people, injuring another 55.

So in the end, even your terrorist-strawman here is pretty bad at justifying such a system.

[1] [https://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/bild-1128683-1091474....](https://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/bild-1128683-1091474.html) [https://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/bild-1128683-1089847....](https://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/bild-1128683-1089847.html)

[2] Well, maybe... Given the massive failure by law enforcement before the attack, I am actually not too sure. Amri had been under surveillance for months before the attack, and they even had a snitch close to him, who even drove him from NRW to Berlin. He had previously been convicted in Tunesia (in his absence because he had already fled to Italy) of robbery, and was further investigated for theft and drugs, and in Italy he was convicted of arson and battery, and spent more than three years in jail, where he started a lot of fights and was already being tracked by Italian counter-terrorism because he showed lots of signs of radicalization. He was under surveillance in Germany by counter-terrorism as well, but they further found out that besides violating the movement restrictions of his asylum, and using multiple identities (they knew about 3 or 4 before the attack, but in the aftermath they found he was using up to 14), and his links to radical Islamist groups, he also paid his bill by dealing drugs. He also was known to the US agencies and had been put on the US No Fly list. His asylum had been denied, which prompted him to try to go to Switzerland with fake documents (to marry somebody there and avoid deportation), but he was caught and jailed, but then let go again because his replacement papers from Tunesia were expected to take more than 3 months to arrive. Let go even tho he was known to be a flight risk, a violent convicted criminal, a drug dealer and very chummy with radicals, and even tho he could be jailed for more than 3 months for being a deportee alone awaiting deportation.

This guy was a walking red flag, and German law enforcement had enough evidence to put him into a prison cell for the drug dealing alone, and he had a deportation order, but they decided not to act.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The panopticon _is_ coming and its accuracy will improve. Facial recognition by itself may not improve much, but when paired with other information it's going to skyrocket in accuracy, and I suspect it'll happen in China first if it hasn't already. That other information will include things like the possible identities of other people in the same vicinity that have known associations, locations pulled from recognized devices, other fuzzy identifications along travel routes, gait analysis, matching facial recognitions with clothing identification to improve tracking, etc. None of the individual parts are that difficult, they just result in a massive amount of fuzzy data to be mined and computers can be very good at that mining.

Another factor is that this may be challenging when starting from a facial recognition point in a crowd and trying to identify a person, but what if you're starting from a list of "the usual suspects" who've been thoroughly photographed, had gait analysis done and had their social networks mapped? What if you start from "do we see any sign that any of these 50k individuals are in the crowd?"

<comment><USER13> What if you're breaking the privacy laws doing so?

Marijuana is illegal, so human tracking should be illegal too.

<comment><USER14> > Marijuana is illegal, so human tracking should be illegal too.

I'm not sure I really see the connection here.

<comment><USER13> Marijuana is outlawed due to social conservatism.

Privacy must be preserved for the same reason since we still haven't yet lived without privacy for long enough to see the consequences.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Yet another article framing dystopian levels of surveillance as only bad if they malfunction. As if the only reason we wouldn't want to give complete control over our lives to authority, is because the authority might make mistakes.

<comment><USER16> > _Yet another article framing dystopian levels of surveillance as only bad if > they malfunction_

Seriously, it's amazing how well framing a conversation works to divert it.

Where are all the comments about the stasi, securing databases, corrupt law enforcement, and not collecting information in the first place? Instead we're arguing over what percentage of "innocent" people can be hassled by the total surveillance state for it to be acceptable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> There aren't enough details here to tell whether or not this system is truly useful. If its false negative rate is good and other methods successfully detect the false positives, like traditional detective work, using it as a screening tool reduces the number of people that need to be investigated by a factor of 200 or so^.

However, those are a lot of assumptions— there's lots of ways this could actually be as bad as it looks on the surface:

\- Is the output of this system being used as evidence in a courtroom instead of a lead generator?

\- Is there some systematic bias in the false positives that result in a particular class of innocent people being harassed by the police during their investigations?

\- Does the system reliably include the actual suspect in its set of potential suspects?

I'll refrain from commenting on the social acceptability of this system, as I have never been a part of UK society and thus lack a baseline against which to compare it.

^My brain is refusing to do the arithmetic tonight for some reason.

</comment><comment><USER18> How does this compare to humans? If you have a human police officer watching a crowd and singling out "suspects", what percentage of those are innocent?

<comment><USER19> No human police offer could process these many faces or remember suspect databases, of course our current tech is going to be faster here.

More inaccurate, sure, but I'm thinking that with the amount of government money involved it'll slowly improve. Or at least society will reach a stage where we don't care about the incorrectly flagged anymore.

<comment><USER20> The met used to claim they had "super recognizers" doing exactly that. I'm not sure if it was true or just a lie to cover for the face recognition tech.

<comment><USER19> Amazing, I wonder how they test to qualify a super recognizer

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Reducing the search space from everyone in a crowd to 5 people seems...pretty great technology wise. I'm not sure what the problem is here.

I mean, I get that people don't like facial recognition for privacy reasons. But that seems totally orthogonal to this report, which is criticizing its efficacy, on very odd grounds.

<comment><USER22> When you are on of a crowd, you don't get treated like a suspect. When you are 1 of five you get treated like a suspect. A criminal. That direct implications on your well being. 4 people out of 5 will be Innocents that get treated like criminals. I don't want to live in that world.

<comment><USER21> Ok...but that happens all the time. If you look like someone that just robbed a liquor store and you're in the area, cops will stop you until they can clear you as a suspect. This is how policing has always worked.

<comment><USER23> Is a dragnet where everyone in a given area is checked even all that common?

Seems unlikely.

But with technology we can suddenly do it 24/7, numerous places, and for all sorts of crimes at the push of a button...the implications of that many people as suspects, that volume of innocent people accused seems pretty bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I have yet to work with a commercial facial recognition product that produced a reasonable number of false positives or negatives when dealing with 'live' data like that of a security feed of a crowd. Is there a facial recognition model or tool out there that actually works in that use case? It seems like the Met's police got sold some technological snake oil that wasn't close to ready.

<comment><USER25> It really depends on if their goal with this was actually a tangible result or just security theater. Snake oil's not a bad purchase if you're planning to resell it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> 19% of suspects flagged by Met's police facial recognition technology are _not_ innocent.

That's pretty darn useful!

<comment><USER27> Right, I made this point kinda of in another comment. It really depends on how you want to frame the conversation. I agree with the general argument that randomly stopping and questioning people because a computer hit sucks, but knowing UK law enforcement they likely politely stopped the suspects and asked to see ID. Once they provided ID they were free to go on about their business. This technology is catching a ton of people that would otherwise not be caught.

<comment><USER8> And what if you don't carry ID, as is normal in UK. Do they arrest you?

<comment><USER26> Suppose your face is identified by a machine as looking like someone in a criminal database who is wanted. Suppose that you in fact are a dead ringer for that person in the database; even to a humans who double check this match, you look exactly the same. You have no ID. What are they to do?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> precision vs recall.

if it correctly finds anyone on the watch list, but they comprise only 19% of the results returned, and the police force knows it, that strikes me as a great screening tool. just need some people to sift through it.

i doubt it finds the folks on the watch list that reliably though.

</comment><comment><USER29> Or in other words, 19% flagged were guilty.

How large does it have to be to be useful?

Bueller?

Bueller?

<comment><USER30> The problem is that innocent people could go to jail because they fall into that 81% of incorrect matches. The justice system, at least in the USA, has a presumption of innocence. The idea being that when there isn't enough evidence, it would be better to let a criminal go free than send an innocent person to jail.

I wouldn't be surprised if these systems are used _specifically_ in cases with weak evidence. If you had phone records or other hard evidence, you wouldn't need to rely on face matching. So the faulty system ends up used in the exact cases where it can do the most damage to innocent people.

<comment><USER27> I assume - I don't know, but my guess is the 81% are simply quickly stopped asked to prove their identification. Once they show their drivers license or any other basic form of ID that proves they are not the suspect they are free to go. I highly highly doubt they are detained, frisked, or even slight questioned beyond being asked to proof who they are. To me, that seems reasonable. In fact I've been randomly asked to show my ID in various countries - cop simply stopped me and asked me to show my identification.

<comment><USER31> There's _no_ ID requirement in the UK[1]. Driving licence forms a de facto ID for those who have one, but you don't even need to carry it when driving, let alone when walking! So potentially gets far more involved, and yet another small chip is taken from those Peelian principles (Policing by consent by citizens in uniform).

[1] There's several voluntary ID schemes for younger folks to prove they're old enough to be in a bar, buy alcohol or cigarettes etc.

<comment><USER27> I was no aware the UK does not require that you carry ID. I'm not sure how I feel about that law, in my experience most of the world requires you to carry ID. I don't see it at all unreasonable that an adult be required to carry ID at all times. I am Canadian by birth and Canada has the same policy but in practice it is best to carry your ID. I've live around the world and everywhere that I know of outside of europe and the english speaking world requires you to carry some form of government issued ID.

<comment><USER31> Ireland and Australia don't, or didn't, not sure about others.

The UK had them through the war and got rid in the 50s because they were thought an infringement of civil liberties - _because police were asking to see them as habit, not for reasons of suspicion_ \- funny how attitudes change. Not having ID makes something like facial recognition stations set up in the street seem an even larger overreach. We're _supposed_ to be able to go about our business without interference unless suspected of something. OK, it doesn't always work quite that way in practice, but the principle used to be much clearer, and far better respected... I rather resent losing that.

It made for a bit of an oddity back where there were the troubles in Northern Ireland and the heavily policed border between north and south. You could get on to a ferry to Dublin from the UK with _nothing._ No ID, no passport, nowt. I did that several times, I don't remember anything other than a ticket check. Change some pounds into Irish pounds when you get there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This is a temporary state of things and people need to be less caught up with the technical shortcomings. It's the world where machine vision is fully accurate that is the real problem, not only the one where the machines are buggy

</comment><comment><USER30> Put another way: they are saying that 81% of positive flags are actually false positives. Yikes. That might be better than random chance, but in the court of law that should hardly be considered evidence.

</comment><comment><USER33> The article doesn't really go into enough depth on the repercussions here one way or another:

-What is the level of impact on the individuals caught up in a false positive? A minor inconvenience? A major issue?

-It takes resources to deal with false positives, even 1 in a 1000 can be a lot of people. The question isn't how much it costs though, it's how much does it cost _without_ the automated facial match, and how much to the false positives cost, and _what is the difference between them_?

</comment><comment><USER34> For every criminal found that means 4 innocent people are flagged. Hence the 80% rate.

But if there are 1 in 10,000 people which are criminals, then 5 total people out of 10,000 will be flagged. So the chance of being flagged would be 5 in 10,000 or 1 in 2,000 which would be about a .05% false positive rate overall.

I think everyone forgets about in a situation like this is the false negative rate -- or missing a flagged person. If they miss 90% of the people they flag, then the system is pretty much worthless.

</comment><comment><USER35> 1% error would arguably be scarier for that 1%, just pointing it out. I hope this tech evolves along some strong regulations on how they are used as evidence.

</comment><comment><USER36> Also if this technology works perfectly I don't want to be checked everywhere. It should be a human right to be excluded from facial recognition checks.

</comment><comment><USER27> On the surface this sounds bad, real bad. However on the flip side it means they found a number of criminals they would have never found otherwise. Hopefully they can tighten the false positive ratio dramatically but this technology for all its faults is finding real criminals that would otherwise not have been found.

<comment><USER37> Your having already labeled those found as "criminals" rather than "suspects" speaks volumes to the problem with legitimizing such systems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> We need is a "you only get hassled once" system and policy. If you're stopped by the cops for looking suspicious, but not arrested and convicted, you should get a goodguy tag that prevents you from being stopped for a few years.

<comment><USER14> That seems open to abuse - wander around London until you get pinged with a false positive (vary your appearance - hat/glasses/beard - to make it more likely), then go and commit your crime, knowing one of the major tools is neutralised. Either it's good enough for general use, and we don't need this (_maybe_ have an exception for people who have been hassled multiple times), or it shouldn't be used.

<comment><USER39> Remeber the black guy with no record in Florida that was stopped 20-30 times a week, making his life unlivsble (hard to keep a job).

His life is going to get a lot more interesting with technology like this, since we know the false positives tend to have a specific race.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> just keep doing it... one day it'll come down to 75%

</comment><comment><USER41> This would be good if only we knew that they wouldn't be treated as though they're more reliable than they actually are.

</comment><comment><USER42> Proponents of this system will chalk this up as proof the system works because 19% of the suspects were not.

</comment><comment><USER43> So the machines think all <insert-identity-group> look alike.

</comment><comment><USER44> I think even 95% would be good enough, 81% is commendable.

</comment><comment><USER45> so 19% were criminals :)

</comment><comment><USER46> Doesn't sound too bad to me. I mean, moral implications aside this is a fairly successful technical achievement.

<comment><USER47> May I suggest that you up whatever success metrics you have because a 19% success rate is abysmal. I swear we have no quality standards in our industry, let alone strong ethics.

<comment><USER3> If you had a system that picked the winning lottery numbers 19% of the time, you'd be a very wealthy man.

<comment><USER37> If I had a system where 19% of my coffee refills were toxic I'd be a dead man.

My point is, in some cases false positives are ok, in other cases they are not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> _The Met prefers to measure accuracy by comparing successful and unsuccessful matches with the total number of faces processed by the facial recognition system. According to this metric, the error rate was just 0.1%._

Turn the machines off and the error rate will be 0%.

<comment><USER49> The Met prefers a metric where adding an arbitrarily large number of clown faces to the database significantly increases their performance metric.</comment></comment>


Bitbucket down - <AUTHOR> http://status.bitbucket.org/?1

<comment><USER2> We saw them having issues for about ~20 minutes via [https://zapier.com/status/](https://zapier.com/status/).

</comment><comment><USER3> Works for me.

It is Atlassian so it's probably down for "reindexing"...

(only JIRA admins will get this)

</comment><comment><USER4> I can't help it, but I absolutely LOVE BitBucket.

</comment><comment><USER5> No.</comment>


For financial geeks, a do-it-yourself hedge fund site - <AUTHOR> http://finance.yahoo.com/news/financial-geeks-yourself-hedge-fund-185923956.html?l=1

<comment><USER2> ReAlly interesting site that I have spent some time on. I am not sure all back testing data accounts for survivorship data. Neat site though</comment>


China official says film 'The Martian' shows Americans want space cooperation - <AUTHOR> http://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-space-idUSKCN0XJ1C2 <comment><USER2> It's projected that China will surpass North America as the world's largest film market in early 2017.

American blockbusters are adding small Chinese subplots that show China in positive light because these films compete for access to Chinese box office. Hollywood is also seeking co-production. Chinese Bona Film Group invested $235 million in 20th Century Fox tentpole movies.

Directed by Hollywood Edited by China [http://origin.www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/Research/Dire...](http://origin.www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/Research/Directed%20by%20Hollywood%20Edited%20by%20China.pdf)

>Appealing to Chinese Audiences American filmmakers attempt to entice Chinese moviegoers by including popular Chinese locations, actors, and products in their movies. In some cases, filmmakers make these creative decisions on their own accord, seeking higher profits for their film's release in China. Despite being produced entirely by U.S. companies, the final cut of X-Men: Days of Future Past released worldwide included lengthy scenes in Hong Kong, as well as a cameo by a Chinese boy band. The film went on to gross $116 million in China. The film Gravity appealed to Chinese audiences by portraying China's space program in a positive light: a stranded astronaut saves herself by utilizing a fictional state-of-the-art Chinese space station and lands on Earth in a Chinese space capsule. The film went on to gross $71 million in China, 10 percent of its worldwide total gross and 16 percent of its total foreign gross.

</comment><comment><USER3> Oh, cynical me...

All this time I assumed that it wasn't SpaceX to the rescue because The Martian was financed by Chinese interests.

<comment><USER4> The Chinese were part of the book plot before there was a movie. Probably because they're the only other nation with the resources and willpower to have a viable space program at the moment. We don't hear a lot about ESA these days.</comment></comment>


GPG Tools switches to subscription after update - <AUTHOR> I got an update notice for the Apple Mail integrated GPG tools. After the update you get a modal dialog in Apple Mail telling you that you now need a subscription to continue using the product. This was poorly planned and people are complaining.<p>https://gpgtools.tenderapp.com/discussions/feedback/11880-support-plan <comment> swingline-747 GPGTools tried this before. The backlash was substantial.

</comment><comment><USER2> Bad title. Title should be "Apple Mail GPG Tools ..." because this concerns Apple Mail's tools, not GPG itself.

<comment> swingline-747 It has nothing to do with Apple either. It's open-source extensions for doing GPG in Apple Mail. They were FOSS and now trying to move to O$$.</comment></comment>


4CHAN Predicts Covid-19 (Scary) - <AUTHOR> I found this video, the bloke predicted that Italy would be the most affected country and that Brazil will be where the virus will become more lethal https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6Ux6ULYIxM The info is quite shocking. <comment><USER2> This is why places like 4chan needs to exist. A place where someone can post anything like this without instantly being demonetized, cancelled, shadowbanned, etc.

Because of 4chan's reputation, people can assume the majority of things from there are bullshit. This also means a whistleblower can release some damning stuff and people will think nothing of it except that it's probably a joke/troll/shizophrenic rambling. And I think that's the perfect cover.

</comment><comment><USER3> To be honest, I've been watching this since early January, expecting the worst. I did not stockpile food in early March as Trump acted like it would be no big deal... and then all the stores around here ran out of food. This really made me thing Trump was an idiot for thinking/saying what he did. But in hindsight, if he actually did speak (what we know to be) the truth, there would have been a super large panic. So perhaps he downplaying was calculated.

<comment><USER4> Perhaps, and I think this most likely, he blurted out whatever made him look good on TV. Like everything that comes out.</comment></comment>


Harvard study predicts electric car penetration when gas hits $4.5-$5.5/gall - <AUTHOR> http://bostinnovation.com/2011/07/28/harvard-study-the-electric-car-in-the-us-market/ <comment><USER2> Here in the UK, gas (petrol) is well over $8 per US gallon (£1.30 per litre) and has been for some time. It hasn't been less than 79p a litre for nearly a decade. Most hybrid and electric cars are bought for use in London, where they are exempt from the $16 per day charge to drive into the city centre. I live in a large (>2 million population) city in the north of England and have _never_ seen an electric car here.

<comment><USER3> The article is basing itself on market pressure while the UK is an example of regulatory pressure.

<comment><USER4> You don't think that $8 gas and $16 congestion charges created market pressure? If $8 gas in the UK doesn't make everyone switch to electric, how will $5 in the US do the trick?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't understand why electricity must be generated at charging stations.

"Electric charing stations must have charging equipment, generate their own electricity and have the capacity to distribute a lot of electricity."

IMHO, the lack of a reasonable solution to the gas-station (err ... fill station?) problem is the key problem here. I was at the NYC auto show and saw the charging solutions for the Volt. They all sucked. As I recall, the fastest charging solution they had required custom electrical wiring and could charge the car in around 20-30 mins.

I've also encountered the idea of swapping batteries at the fill station. This idea has a lot of problems too but probably gives the best end user experience.

<comment><USER6> _I've also encountered the idea of swapping batteries at the fill station. This idea has a lot of problems too but probably gives the best end user experience._

You're probably thinking of a startup called <http://www.betterplace.com> . I wonder what their analysis on gas prices would be to come to the continental US (their strategy right now is to go for densely populated areas).

<comment><USER7> They just opened their first battery switching station in Denmark, of 20 they plan to open there in the next year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In Sao Paulo[BR] gas price hit US$5.5/gall __a couple of years ago, and I just spotted 5 electric cars in my life, I know we're are so called emergent but Sao Paulo is more similar to some american metropoles than anything in europe or even US.

Our "cheap" alternatine, sugar cane Ethanol it's costing US$4.39/gall. I just filled my VW with gas today and it cost me US$7.20/gall.

Mankind will adopt alternatives as soon we drain global reserves.

 __I did all conversions because we buy gas in litters

<comment><USER9> _litres_ , buy gas in litres ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Anecdotally CalTRain ridership picks up at around $4.25/gal. more or less. So, it's possible they are on to something. Next car I get, I would like to get a hybrid --to insure [hedge] against future gas price increases, rather than a way to save now.

</comment><comment><USER11> The alternative to pure electric isn't pure gas, it's hybrid electric vehicles. You can't beat the worst alternative to win, you've got to beat the best alternative. That alone makes me not trust the rest of the study.

<comment><USER12> Indeed. It also overlooks the fact that the price of fuel is only the second most important factor in determining electric car adoption, with the most important being electric car technology.

Electric cars are getting better rapidly, and I'll probably get one eventually (preferably with a fuel-burning backup motor like a Chevy Volt) but I'm waiting for the technology to get better and cheaper, not for the price of fuel to reach some magic number.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> A culture shift away from daily transportation of individuals would be much more significant than going electric. I'm all for a reasonable all electric alternative (I'm thinking motorcycle) but the reality is that until we stop having so many people traveling back and forth every day we aren't going to get away from the energy demand that such transportation requires.

<comment><USER14> I completely agree. I think what we really need is some rethinking and innovating ideas on public transportation. I know that is a vague concept to a lot of American's that live in cities other than NYC and maybe Chicago and a few others, but it is a solution that works in other areas of the world. We have some obstacles to get it to work here for sure, but good old American ingenuity can surely solve those can't they?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This prediction only holds true if the market has enough viable options of electric cars. As for now, Tesla and Nissan are the only two all electric cars.

I just purchased a diesel car and diesel fuel IS at around $4.40 per gallon... I would have gladly purchased a electric car.

Tesla's price point is too high and their lower priced model is still a little ways away from release. Nissan Leaf can run only for 100 miles before it needs to be charged. This makes it a difficult substitute for a regular gasoline car because it will not be able to satisfy most Americans driving needs.

Therefore, for this prediction to hold true, its important to have enough viable options in market.

<comment><USER16> > _"100 miles ... will not be able to satisfy most Americans driving needs."_

Most Americans commute 30 miles per day. 100 miles per day covers something like three quarters of all drivers. Range anxiety is a largely psychological concern; it has little to do with actual needs.

<comment><USER17> Renting a car sucks. I would not want to do that once every month, which is about how often I drive over 100 miles.

Services like Zipcar will be strongly complementary goods to electric cars.

<comment><USER18> _> Renting a car sucks._

Now that I don't quite understand. I find renting a car to be a lot of fun. The salespeople are always super friendly, they get you in and out quick, the price is relatively low (~$70/day after taxes), and you usually get to drive a brand new model.

Maybe doing it once per month would be a headache for some. Personally, I like it and if it saved me money to drive an electric car, I would happily take this deal.

<comment><USER17> It's fun, if you're on a trip and have a lot of time. But as a semi-regular thing:

\- I have to drive to the car rental place unless I live close enough for a pickup, in which case I have to wait around to be picked up.

\- I have to arrange my trip so that I both depart and return during the rental place's hours. If I come back late, I have to pay a penalty and either take time off from work the next morning or drive the rented car a whole extra day.

\- Unless I rent from a 24-hour airport location, which is usually twice as expensive and does not do pick-ups, so I also have to pay to park my electric car at the airport.

etc. Essentially, it's just not good for routine use.

<comment><USER19> If you are a member of the frequent renter programs (e.g. Hertz gold club) it is a lot easier, too -- no need to fill in paperwork or even talk to a human each time, since your car should be waiting for you in a stall. Still not quite zip car.

The thing I hate about zip car I'd that the cars aren't maintained between users, so they are often dirty.

The thing I hate about both is that I like having a comprehensive trauma kit, tool kit, zombie/civil insurrection, wifi and inverter, nav system, etc. in my car, so it is not really convenient to transfer all of that between vehicles.

My solution will be company shared f-350 diesel and leased electric, shared at the office for work/personal use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> There is precedent, sorta, in aviation: 100LL hit $4.50 a couple years back and is now between $5-$8.

Cessna started developing an electric 172 in 2010: [http://green.autoblog.com/2010/08/11/cessna-developing- elect...](http://green.autoblog.com/2010/08/11/cessna-developing-electric- powered-172-skyhawk/)

I say "sorta" because it's not an industry-wide movement.

<comment><USER21> I think the energy economics are different for planes and cars, though. There's no equivalent of regenerative braking, or for that matter stop-and-go traffic, for planes.

And adding weight to a car doesn't make it use more energy at high speeds, which is how an old van can get 15 miles per gallon while a fully loaded semi truck gets 10 miles per gallon. Adding weight to a plane _does_ make it use more energy. The effect of adding weight is relevant because batteries weigh almost 500 times as much per joule as fuel does.

<comment><USER22> > There's no equivalent of regenerative braking

Point the nose down with the power off?

<comment><USER23> Nose up to slow down: altitude = stored energy

<comment><USER21> Right, but you don't need an electric airplane to do that. With cars, electric is much more efficient for stop-and-go driving because regenerative braking becomes possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Oh really? The current gasoline price in Germany is around 1.588 Euro per liter which is 6.01 Euro per gallon (stupid imperial unit) or glorious 8,57 Dollar.

Still no electric cars.

<comment><USER25> Different culture. Different daily life transportation realities.

<comment><USER26> This is claimed very often. I did some very basic research here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2766844> (in a related discussion). In short, I don't see a substantial reason to believe that Americans drive all that more than Europeans do, and certainly not enough to say that the US switch to electric would happen significantly below the current gas price in Europe.

(there may be other factors - Americans' general tendency to go to technological solutions earlier than others, other interests that will drive development/adoption of non-petrol powered cars, ...)

<comment><USER27> This supports your view: <http://www.bsfrey.ch/articles/456_07.pdf>

Suggests that the the average US commute time is comparable to Germany's (48 vs 42 minutes). Germany's time has an SD of 19 minutes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Cool. Where does the electricity come from?

<comment><USER29> Worst case Coal which costs far less than Oil. The really good news is the US has a lot of Coal and Coal has a drasticly lower carbon footprint because of reduced extration, refining, and transportation costs per BTU.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I don't think it makes sense to term this prediction in price of gas. Even as they say in the study, one of the most weighted factors in a purchasing decision is the number of charging stations available. It's the cart and the horse, even if gas is $5/gallon, consumers won't be super motivated to buy cars b/c of a lack of charging stations, and charging stations won't be built due to a lack of existing demand.

These things need to happen together to make the change, not just the gas price hike. Like others have alluded to, there needs to be more of a cultural shift or incentives from the government.

I think it makes sense to do this study with more focus on number of charging stations or public/private investment in the space rather than gas price.

</comment><comment><USER31> There are many places where prices are higher than that, I would have liked them to explain why those places don't have electric cars.

As a concrete example, nowadays a liter of gaz is at about EUR1.50 in France. That's 1.50 EUR/L * 3.8 L/gal * 1.43 USD/EUR = 8.2 USD/gal.

Of course people drive less here: cities are less car-friendly, public transportation is more developed, and when choosing a house, people take transportation to work/shops/leisure into account. But there is virtually no electric car, despite significant tax breaks and nuclear electricity at 0.10 EUR/KWh.

</comment><comment><USER32> I paid $4.53/gallon for diesel in Boston yesterday, so I guess we're all good to go on the electrics. (I bought a diesel instead, which does get great mileage.)

</comment><comment><USER33> to me the situation reminds the 1976 when somebody needed to build and start selling usable personal computer, ie. Apple. We have all the components in place, yet attempts to convert regular car into electric (amateurs as well as Tesla/Nissan, etc...) clearly show limitations of that approach. The 500kg 30KW $10K block of batteries is the centerpiece (or spread along the floor) around which the car needs to be (re)designed the way it is designed now around gas engine and transmission. Designing for the pure electric one would get the main things taken care about - weight and shape resulting in 200+ miles range car.

Saw here, on 101, a guy driving at ~60mph a bare metal 4 wheel electric drive platform (with a couple of kind of roll-over bars) and it strangely evoked associations with Wozniak's Apple I.

</comment><comment><USER34> Has any of you seen "Collapse"?

Its a Documentary, and in it this guy states that there is no realistic substitution for oil, and once we run out of it society will collapse.

Pretty scary.

<comment><USER35> If we run out of it all of a sudden yes. We are starting to feel the pain at least here in America and already we are starting to adapt. So no, our society won't collapse. We will find a way, we always do.

<comment><USER34> I hope we do, but it seems to me that a lot of components of an electric car will depend directly or indirectly to oil, that it will be like saying that if we run out of water, we can always drink coke.</comment></comment></comment>


CodingHorror - Geekatoo, The Geek Bat Signal - <AUTHOR> http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/04/geekatoo-the-geek-bat-signal.html

<comment><USER2> Previously: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3898037>

</comment><comment><USER3> I've become too cynical I think. My first thought was I was basically letting a potential robber (actually, my _first_ thought was serial killer) in to my parents home with this service.

<comment><USER4> How is this any different than any local computer store? How is it any different than Geek Squad? Geek Squad, in particular, has a bit of a scandalous history.

If anything, this (Geekatoo) is better. The Geekatoo website provides a means to post feedback about a tech. The profiles for the techs are also much more personal than you'll ever get to see for a company like Geek Squad.</comment></comment>


Ask YC: How many of you have Blogs? - <AUTHOR>

Many users have a lot of different interests so I'd like to check out your blogs and add some of them to my RSS reader. <comment><USER2> I have one at <http://www.empoweringhealthykids.com> (news, info and tips on childhood health) and I contribute about once a month to <http://www.sharcmedia.com>

</comment><comment><USER3> I have two blogs <http://theperfectbalance.blogspot.com> and <http://yourteamonline.blogspot.com>

</comment><comment><USER4> <http://kontsevoy.blogspot.com> <\-- a typical developer's blog. I have an issue with ranting, that's the only thing I constantly want to blog about :-)

</comment><comment><USER5> <http://www.daemonology.net/blog/> <\-- mostly FreeBSD related, but some of it is of more general interest.

</comment><comment><USER6> <http://daniellefong.com>

Random interesting things, plus hints to what I'm working on inelegantly strewn about.

</comment><comment><USER7> <http://aaroneous.tumblr.com> <-things that go through my head that others may find interesting. :]

</comment><comment><USER8> Used to run <http://waziwazi.com>, a blog on robotics. I haven't found much time to update it now though.</comment>