How long does a freezer stay frozen when the power goes out? - <AUTHOR> https://woodgears.ca/heating/freezer.html <comment> an-allen Hi. Actualexperience here... it depends on the ambient temperature and how much stuff is in said freezer. So heres a data point:

Freezer: normal upper level refrigerator freezer chock full of frozen fish caught on holiday in Alaska.

Place, Time: Houston, TX, Late Summer, Hurricane Igor just hit and knocked our power out for 14 days.

Findings: We kept the freezer shut and at about 4-5 days the fish was noticeably thawing and getting flexible. Still cold, but not frozen. I think we might have made an attempt at dry ice but it was too late in the process to matter.

At day 8 or so it had completely defrosted.

At day 10 the smell was so horrendous that if we opened the freezer door we would gag.

At day 14 the power returned. On day 15 or 16 we opened the now cold rotted fish in the freezer and cleaned it out. We vomited multiple times. The smell, despite multiple rounds of bleach, never really went away. The stench permanently inextricable from the lining of the freezer, and the flavor of every ice cube ever made in it from then on.

<comment><USER3> You missed the perhaps most important datapoint: how often and many times did you open the freezer? Side loaded freezer and fridges are extremely inefficient because all the cold air is let out when you open the door.

<comment><USER4> This is also why it's important to FILL the freezer as much as possible if you know you might lose power.

We lost power for 4 days, but I packed in every water bottle I could find before hand, and everything remained frozen for the entire period. Literally almost no space left for air.

We also did not open it, of course.

<comment><USER5> Plastic bags of water are even better because they leave no spaces between them.

<comment><USER6> Careful with that, it can be a massive headache when you want to try and get them back out again if you make the mistake of letting them freeze around something to where it's now stuck in place.

<comment><USER7> I too have had a freezer full of bags of delicious homemade chicken stock, each intertwined with and near-permanently bonded to the wire shelving.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The location of the freezer or refrigerator is critical. If you live in a house that has a typical unfinished basement, don't overlook the advantage it offers. With one simple change, you can noticeably lower your electric bill, reduce your carbon footprint, gain extra kitchen space and improve your health. Just move your refrigerator to the basement.

Since the basement is normally cooler than the upstairs, the refrigerator will run less often. This will not only extend its lifetime, but also lower the electricity it consumes, thus also reducing your carbon footprint. The kitchen space previously wasted by the refrigerator has uses that are only limited by your imagination.

Finally, you and your family will directly benefit from the exercise you get with trips to the fridge. Of course it is not convenient - that is the point. Sometimes you might even pass up that extra dish of ice cream, because it's a pain in the butt. However, the size of your butt may be improved.

It's a simple step that can be done in a couple of hours. And the recurring benefits are automatic and last a lifetime.

Method #1: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2J8ul- CcrzY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2J8ul-CcrzY)

Method #2: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXCiWk- aIyc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXCiWk-aIyc)

<comment><USER9> This seems like a decent idea if the thing that's in your fridge is ice cream, but not if it's ingredients for cooking meals. Whoever does the cooking is going to spend a ton of time running up and down while stuff overcooks, and then they'll be even more tired _and_ get more complaints from the rest of the family. So you should be absolutely sure that you have an equitable family dynamic and that everyone agrees that you do, before you try this.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, I can certainly appreciate the environmental and cost savings, but this would make me miserable. I could get myself the make the trip for ice cream, but the multiple runs back to the fridge while preparing food has me agitated just thinking about it.

<comment> em-bee you'll learn to plan your meals better. take everything out that you need before you start...

<comment><USER11> "Refrigerate X while cooking Y, then remove X from fridge as Y begins to [something]," and variants of that phrase are common scenarios in recipes. Your point is only valid for a portion of recipes, not all.

Let's also take into account how many ingredients you may need from the fridge when you plan ahead. Certain meals may require multiple trips to/from the basement (however far away that may be) depending on how many - and the size of - ingredients involved.

Also, what mjmj said, re:kids.

<comment><USER12> Very few recipes involve taking stuff from the freezer repeatedly however, most things will need to thaw in advance. Making ice cream in a freezer in the basement would suck, however.

Not having the fridge readily available in the kitchen would suck, though, so that only works if you have a dedicated freezer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> A simple way to detect power failure induced thawing in a freezer is to store a paper cup about half full of frozen water in the freezer. By keeping a coin on top of the ice it's easy to see with a quick glance if the temperature has risen for an extended period of time (possibly due to a temporary power failure or the door not being fully closed).

<comment><USER14> It is possible for the Ice to partially melt and the coin to not sink, the ice would need to COMPLETELY melt before this test would work, given the nature of ice it is possible for food to raise to an unsafe temperature while the ice is still melting

This "trick" should not be used in place of proper temperature monitoring

<comment><USER15> I usually just put the cup upside down in a small container. If there's any melting the water will collect in the container.

Another poster said use an upside down water bottle, which sounds like an even better option.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Maker of the video here.

For a moment, I though this was about _my_ video and article, but reading the comments, it's more about everyone sharing their stories. Few of the comments reflect having read the article. Fair enough, sometimes it just takes a link to give theme for a discussion.

<comment><USER17> If I've learnt anything from reading Hacker News for a few years it's that I would take this as a compliment that the article did a good in covering any aspect we might be curious about and answer any questions we might have had. For example the fact that you did the experiment with an empty and full freezer and with empty boxes vs food pretty much preempts any nit-picks you might get from people in this this thread.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> It depends on the thermal mass of the contents, the effectiveness of the insulation, and the external ambient environmental temperature.

In real world use, it also generally depends on (1) how frequently and for how long you open it, and (2) whether it's top-loading (efficient) versus front- loading (inefficient).

Source: My venture custom designed and built a refrigeration circuit with autonomous electronic management from scratch over the last year or so, so have done numerous recent tests in this space. I also visited about 4 different fridge factories in Guangdong and spoke to their engineers, investigated the different available chemical coolants, relevant sensors, etc.

<comment><USER19> I keep a coffee mug filled with water in the freezer with a penny on top.

<comment><USER20> Have you seen how long this setup takes before it'll trigger a change? Ive left glasses of frozen water to thaw and they most definitely don't thaw evenly. They also take way more time to thaw than any regular food product due to the significant heat/surface area ratio difference.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > about 36 hours

> while the power is out, for each time the door is opened for five seconds, > subtract 7 minutes

<comment><USER22> > 27 hours in a garage and not a basement

<comment><USER21> thats not a quote...

<comment><USER22> Well, it's a paraphrase:

> If it were in a hot garage at 30° C, the food would thaw in about 3/4 of the > time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > When opening an empty upright freezer, all the cold air can just "fall out"

I recently found that the ice-cream refrigerators of street vendors (and everything else that is being sold when the doors are frequently opened) are opening on the top for that exact reason - to not let cold air "fall out" (because cold air is on the bottom)

<comment><USER24> This is also why the Trader Joe's freezer/refrigerator section is designed the way it is. Turns out that a chest freezer/refrigerator with no top on it at all isn't that much worse than a standing freezer/refrigerator with a door that gets opened and closed over and over again.

<comment><USER25> Most normal supermarkets in Europe either have upright doors (more common if space is limited) or open chests. The open chests are covered when the shop is closed.

The budget supermarkets tend to have chests with a transparent sliding door on top.

<comment><USER26> In germany the sliding top door is standard in almost all supermarkets, ranging from ALDI to Edeka, it covers "normal" and "budget" supermarkets. The only places I see non-transparent doors is bulk supermarkets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> A test with the freezer as full as possible with just water would be interesting as a best-case set of data points to compare against.

I always keep containers full of water in the bowels of my refrigerators/freezers only removing them when the space is required for food. There's not much sense in keeping empty volumes of air in a refrigerated space.

<comment><USER28> When there's no airflow in the refrigerator, then it takes a long time to chill food, the reverse of how a blast chiller can chill food really quickly by moving lots of air. But maybe the water chills the air to make up for this, IDK. It would be interesting to experiment.

<comment><USER27> It's like pre-loading your refrigerator/freezer with a sack of ice. If your power goes out long enough for your food to spoil, what will you do? Well, maybe you'll go buy some sacks of ice to throw in there until the power turns back on.

Ok, if you have the space to spare, why wait for the failure to go fetch the emergency ice? Just fill the empty space with ballast water and you're ahead of the problem.

Once the thermal mass is at the desired temperature, it will help bring newly introduced items to the desired temperature _faster_ , not slower.

The only time it slows down the cooling is when first introduced @ a warmer temp, or when there's been a failure for long enough to let everything warm up. But note that in the failure scenarios, the thermal mass helps keep the space cool for longer than had it not been there. Just remove the warmed ballast when the failure is over to let the perishables re-cool first, then reintroduce the ballast when appropriate ... perhaps even pre-cooling it elsewhere first.

<comment><USER12> Practically all of your food has a thaw point that's below the thaw point of ice. The energy absorbed in the phase transition of ice to water massively eclipses the energy to heat up the same amount of water by one degree. In effect, all your food will protect your newly acquired ice from melting.

You want something that has a thaw point way below your foods thaw point - <USER2> salt t your ice.

<comment><USER29> I had never thought about this but you're right. Big frozen water/soda bottles of ice still increase the overall thermal mass and will almost certainly slow full thawing. Otherwise, ice blocks in a cooler wouldn't work.

But you're really better off adding salt to those bottles so they absorb energy when melting below the freezing point of pure water (and frozen food).

<comment><USER30> While that's true, since the current topic of this conversation is about emergency preparedness, I think having potable water (in ice form) would be much preferable to salted water.

<comment><USER12> It's substantially more efficient to store a pack of bottled water or two on top of your fridge - and keep your food at the same time. Water keeps well even if not frozen.

If you want to keep tap water, you can buy silver ion additives at any camping/outdoor store. If you're really planning for preparedness, buy a ceramic water micro filter and additives. That can make nearly all water usable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is an extremely interesting question, both from a scientific and a practical point of view, but the article doesn't really answer it at all.

He starts by measuring the temperature in the freezer, but then puts a realistic amount of food in it and doesn't want to let the food go bad. So he makes an extrapolation from the warming between -18 and -11, but immediately points out (fairly) that the extrapolation is not really valid. Then he answers a completely different question - how much cold is lost when you open the door. The answer to that is also quite dubious and of limited applicability.

The experiment I would like to see is this: fill a freezer (or a couple of different types of freezer) X% (where X could be 50, 80, 100) with a mix of different frozen foods, including ice cream, meat, vegetables, cooked meals, bread. Turn the power off. Every day, open the freezer briefly, long enough to retrieve some of your samples, maybe some from the top/front and some from the bottom/back. Then tell us, for a few types of food and location in the freezer, what day did the food thaw enough that you wouldn't want to refreeze it? What day did the food become less than perfect if consumed immediately? What day did the food become inedible?

People can put up with different levels of yickiness so you'd want descriptions more than numbers here.

</comment><comment><USER32> You want the contents to remain BELOW 0C, not hovering at 0C while everything melts.

You can do this by adding some salt-water bottles, which have a lower melting point, and will therefore absorb a lot of heat (heat of fusion) well below 0C. Eg add 250g salt/liter gives melting point of -18C.

Of course you waste some space on useless salt water vs potable - maybe there are better alternatives, eg fruit juice? Milk? Honey?

<comment><USER29> I'd have to do the calculations but wouldn't you be better off with a solution that just _barely_ froze at freezer temps? Because of latent heat of melting? i.e. you want it to freeze--just at as low a temperature as possible given the freezer temperature.

Your basic point makes sense to me though of course thawing isn't even.

ADDED:

Doing the calculation. It takes 334 joules to melt 1g of water vs. about 4 joules to raise that same gram of liquid water 1 degree. Freezer temp is supposed to be about -18 degrees Celsius.

So the latent heat of melting is a bigger deal than a few degrees of raising liquid temperature. So you should have ice packs maybe somewhere in the -10 degree range which is what I assume commercial ice packs do.

<comment><USER33> Completely saturated salty water freezes right around -6F or -21C. And most home freezers are set to right around that for energy conservation reasons, but max out even lower. So you could use any briny water and it will phase change before your food melts.

I'm surprised a 12v based deep freezer that runs off a reasonably sized solar panel is not more popular/affordable. With the right amount of thermal mass, and good insulation, and a small battery you could greatly extend how long your food stays cold. There are a lot of people who live in places where snowy weather or high winds and loss of power is an eventuality. In an emergency losing your food is a bigger concern than just the cost of the food.

<comment><USER34> 12V/120V freezers do exist and are marketed towards RV, camping, and off grid markets. Disadvantage is they tend to be smaller, cost more. But they are very efficient. Where a residential freezer might draw a couple of hundred watts dual voltage fridges draw 25-50 watts. And automatically switch between 12VDC and 120VAC. So they can be connected to both shore power and a battery at the same time and it 'just works'

<comment><USER29> There are also propane fridges/freezers but they are also smaller. (Though at the point where you have a large propane tank, you could arguably just as well have a backup generator.)

<comment><USER34> My impression is the big advantage of absorption fridges is they will run off a tank of propane for a long time. But Downside they are very slow to cool down and running off AC/DC they aren't very efficient.

But yeah cheapest thing to do is get a furnace transfer switch and a generator. That seems to be how rural people in the upper midwest avoid freezing to death when the power goes out in the winter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Related but tangential anecdote:

When we went on our honeymoon my mother in law came around and left our freezer full of delicious meat, fish all sorts. But then inexplicably turned off the freezer electricity switch on her way out.

2 weeks later my little sister cane around to leave us some milk in the fridge for our return. Only to find the entire kitchen wreaking of rotting meat and water and other crap all over the floor.

She cleaned it up without even telling us - plus did I mention she's a vegetarian and hates the smell of meat.

Top marks for my family that day.

<comment><USER36> You had your freezer on a switched outlet?

<comment><USER35> Not even - it was inside a little electrics box with switches for the cooker, dishwasher, washing machine and things like that which you don't ever really turn off unless you're replacing them. The one outlier is that the extractor fan is also in there and maybe that's why she thought she needed to turn those things off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Tropical Storm Isaias hit my area last week with tornados (which has been really rare.) and power went out for a few days.

Our local utility company actually has a FAQ / Tips page[1] to answer this question. It appears that the information was sourced from CDC[2] and American Red Cross[3].

[1]: [https://nj.pseg.com/outageandgasleaks/duringanoutage/outager...](https://nj.pseg.com/outageandgasleaks/duringanoutage/outageresources)

[2]: [https://emergency.cdc.gov/poweroutage/pdf/poweroutage.pdf](https://emergency.cdc.gov/poweroutage/pdf/poweroutage.pdf)

[3]: [https://www.redcross.org/get-help/how-to-prepare-for- emergen...](https://www.redcross.org/get-help/how-to-prepare-for- emergencies/types-of-emergencies/power-outage.html#During)

</comment><comment><USER38> I was just looking at getting a NG generator installed for my parents on the east coast, after watching these recent storms come through. I'd dawdled on this for years, because it was just infrequent enough.

Anyway, I also looked at battery backup systems (Tesla, Enphase, etc). Unfortunately, it seems they haven't reached cost competitiveness with the plain old gas generator yet. Not a lot of power density (time), and too expensive for the benefit in noise/fumes/etc. $15000 for 2-3 days worth of backup, compared to $5000 for installing a Kohler run of the mill NG unit, etc.

I was disappointed -- was hoping that batteries were further along than they are. Anyway, I'm sure there's going to be a run on getting these installed for the next few months, so clearly there's plenty of time to think it over.

<comment><USER39> An inverter that runs off the 12V battery in your car is very cheap. Get one, and an extension cord, and you have an emergency power source to cool down your freezer every few days.

<comment><USER40> This is the approach I am taking (bought inverter, will test it out next weekend). I don't think you can really run this off the battery (it will be on the order of 1000 watts): instead you need to have the car turned on and will be essentially running it off the inverter. So it's essentially an inefficient gas-powered generator that you already have on-hand and you need to make sure you have some gas in the tank.

<comment><USER39> I don't think a freezer draws anywhere close to 1000W when running. Perhaps you are talking about a startup transient?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Small things. If the power goes out, throw a blanket or two over the freezer asap. It makes a big difference.

</comment><comment><USER42> Related ... the last time I was in the market for a chest freezer (a "deep freeze") I wanted one that showed a log of temperature over time ...

This, essentially, does not exist. It appears that there are laboratory freezers that support this (very simple) feature, but they are relatively small and _very expensive_.

A better way to go is an electricity monitor on the plug, where you track electrical power over time and assume (reasonably) that full electrical power implies full temperature control.

Still ... a simple log of temperature over time (without resorting to weird solutions with raspis dangling temp wires into the freezer ...) would be a very nice feature and I'm disappointed that it doesn't exist ...

<comment><USER43> Such data might be interesting to look at, but as long as the freezer does its job (aka keep everything stored within it fully frozen), what's the point in having that data?

<comment><USER42> "... what's the point in having that data?"

In normal, day to day life, I think it would have little value.

The use-case I am envisioning here is: you have a high value store of frozen items (meat, etc.) and you leave your home for 20 or 30 days ...

When you get back, the freezer is running nicely and everything is frozen and things look great - but what if there were a 3 or 4 or 5 day power outage in the middle of your trip that thawed things out just enough to spoil ?

Or what if there were one or more power outages (or brownouts) _that you were aware of_ that were _not_ , in fact, long enough to ruin your stored food ... but how would you be sure ?

If you had a time view of freezer temps you could make those determinations easily.

<comment><USER44> This is all kind of overkill. Just put a penny on the surface of a cup of ice in the freezer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Personally, I throw blocks of dry ice in there as soon as the power has been out a few hours, just in case. Beats regular ice all the way.

<comment><USER46> How do you safely handle dry ice? I'm legitimately asking, I know retailers sell it with big warning labels but I wouldn't know how to transport it, move it, and similar.

<comment><USER45> I've handled it for decades.

First thing you do when you get your slab is that you wrap it in two towels, then you fold down the loose edges and pop that in a cooler. Towels towels towels, that's my go-to.

You _can_ handle dry ice with your bare hands -- I have scores of times -- the trick is that contact with pressure (squeezing or weight) is what is going to give you frostbite. Otherwise, I have swiftly moved two pound chunks with bare hands if I were lazy. Any pair of winter or driving gloves is sufficient so long as the fingertips aren't open. Just leather gloves are dandy.

Now, if you're feeling fearful, you can drive with the windows down, but to be honest, carbon dioxide in too high of quantities will invoke a gasping/coughing reflex. You would have plenty of warning. You can verify this by putting a small chunk of dry ice in water, leaning over the cup, and inhaling. You'll cough, and that is the reflex to look far. It isn't shy about making itself known. I have driven around with fifty pounds of dry ice in coolers with no issues.

Now that you've driven home, you can take the dry ice, towels and all, and put one in the freezer, one or two in the fridge. Now, this stuff sublimates, so you won't have water everywhere, but don't worry about pressure building up in the two compartments, you'd have to use straps to hold the doors down tight enough to be an issue. I put the dry ice at the top of each compartment, as a trend.

It'll save your refrigerator's worth full of food.

<comment><USER47> One note: if it behaves like dry ice in a cooler does, it can carbonate many of your food items. I've used dry ice on camping trips and ended up with carbonated fruit.

<comment><USER48> I can't tell if this is a warning, or a cool discovery.

I feel like carbonated fruit would be a treat, but I suspect I might be wrong?

<comment><USER47> It sizzles on your tongue when you bite it. I thought it was interesting but not desirable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Last week the power was out Tuesday 2 pm until Friday 8 pm, 78 hours. I left the lid shut on a 7 cubic foot chest freezer in the garage, where the ambient was in the 70s F most of the time due to the cool weather. When the power came back on, the temperature was about 37 degrees at the top of the freezer. Ice cream in the second layer down had a light bit of crystallization, but no other obvious defects. Other food will be evaluated before being eaten, but it should be safe since it was below or at normal refrigerator temperature, although texture may suffer due to being refrozen.

</comment><comment><USER50> The solution for this is to buy a generator. Hand started 1 kW ones go for ~130€ these days ([https://toom.de/p/inverter-strom-generator- sg-1200/1501059](https://toom.de/p/inverter-strom-generator-sg-1200/1501059)), plus enough cable from <somewhere outdoor> to <location of fridge>. That's enough for 24/7 running the fridge and any other important appliances (think a TV/radio and a cellphone charger to have access to some form of information/communication).

Don't even need to keep a jerrycan around and risk the fuel go stale if you know how to siphon fuel from your car in an emergency (for a widespread outage, it is not guaranteed that gas stations are operational). Only requirement is to check oil level and start them up and run for at least half an hour once a quarter (you might get away with half a year).

PSA: Do not, never ever, even dream about putting that generator indoors unless you have a certified chimney sweep (or whatever your regional equivalent is) certify the safety of the exhaust system. And even if you do (or have any other sort of fuel furnace in the house), get at least a CO warner at the most bottom place of your house!

</comment><comment><USER51> The temp curves may be non-linear, so I'm not convinced about the extrapolation from just a few hours.

I get not wanting to spoil food -- but why didn't he try with, say, jugs of water? Easy way to fill the freezer, great thermal mass, and probably a decent approximation of freezable goods.

</comment><comment><USER52> I operate 5 inexpensive chest freezers 4 hours a day on a solar microgrid system. 4 hours is enough to keep them frozen hard, as long as they are full. I use water bottles to fill any extra space.

If you put a lot of stuff in them at a time, they will need to be run overnight (>12hrs) to freeze them down hard. If you do not freeze the contents completely at first, it may not ever freeze, because if it doesn't store the latent energy of freezing the freezer won't have enough thermal inertia to remain below freezing during the 20 hours of rest.

On very rainy periods, we can go about 48 hours from the end of the last freeze cycle before any significant melting occurs.

</comment><comment><USER53> Note, it doesn't just require an outage to stop the freezer working.

Many modern freezers ironically stop working properly under low (but above freezing) room temperatures encountered in unheated rooms (eg outbuildings, garages, etc) in colder climates.

</comment><comment><USER54> During an extended power outage you can add quite a bit of time by wrapping the freezer in more insulation. Anything will do; fibreglass insulation, quilts, blankets.

You'll be shocked at how cold the inside of the blanket gets.

</comment><comment><USER55> Thawed vs unthawed isn't a bool. You're really interested in the long-term safety of the food, and that starts to decrease as temperatures start to increase.

-18C/0F is the point at which most pathogens are forced to hibernate and bacterial cultures stop growing. But they don't die, and they'll start to revive at higher temperatures - which means they'll begin to spread if there's a regular thaw/freeze cycle, even in a freezer that spends some of its time at -18C/0F.

</comment><comment><USER56> If you can restock the freezer with ice, you can keep it cold for several days easily. Spoken from experience, thanks PG&E.

<comment><USER57> Where do you get ice if you are out of power?

<comment><USER58> You can buy giant bags of ice really cheap at many gas stations, convenience stores, grocery stores, wallmart, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> All else being the same, the more mass in in the freezer, the less that a given inflow of heat will warm it. If 10 heat units enter, they will warm 10 kg of uniform contents much less than 100kg.

If you have extra space, using it to store something dense that has a high specific heat and is inexpensive is easy: use ice. (Glaciers take a -long- time to melt!)

</comment><comment><USER60> We bought dry ice blocks and put them in the freezer which lasted nearly 2 days-- just in time for the power of course.

</comment><comment><USER61> I bought and filled a chest freezer in pandemic preparations.

Cost of the chest freezer: CAD 1,000

Cost to completely fill the freezer with good food: CAD 2,700

Given that, during a pandemic or a winter storm in Canada, a power failure can be a prolonged event...

Cost of a good gas powered generator to keep the freezer viable beyond a day: CAD 1,000.

This article seems to validate the generator purchase.

<comment><USER62> If society and food supply chains had actually broken down due to a massive pandemic (imagine ebola with a 30% fatality rate tearing through a population of 350+ million in the USA and Canada) you would have been much better served by a stockpile of rice, beans, canned food, multivitamins and other true disaster supplies.

<comment><USER61> The scenario we are planning is power down for several days.

Not the collapse of civilization.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Nitpick and fun fact:

"we avoid opening the fridge and freezer to keep the cold inside."

Technically, you cannot keep the cold inside because cold is a word for the absence of warmth (energy), so you're actually trying to keep the warmth outside.

Words indicating the absence of something (cold, darkness, ...) are called privatives.

h/t Terry Pratchett

<comment><USER64> Technically there is a mass of cold air that comes out of the fridge when you open the door. Keeping the door shot keeps this mass of air inside.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> Here's what I've learned about refrigerators recently.

My fridge is failing in a revealing way. It has an automatic defrost unit- this means that it heats the evaporator coils in the freezer every so often (I think it's once every 36 hours) to melt the frost off of them, producing the same condensation you normally get from an A/C. So where does this water go? Well there is a hose from the freezer to a pan underneath the fridge. There is a cooling fan for the condenser coils there which can dip into this pan. The idea is to use this water to help cool the condenser coils, making the fridge a little more efficient.

Anyway, so the failure has to do with the management of this condensation water. When it's not working, you get a puddle of water in the bottom of the fridge compartment which eventually leaks out to the floor. First thing to check- is the hose clogged? Yes it is, washed it out, but problem still happens. Next thing to check- behind the back wall of the freezer you find the evaporator coils. At the bottom is some cheap metal called the "drain trough". It is a funnel that leads the condensation into the hose. This is where the planned obsolescence comes into play. I'm convinced that the manufactures make this metal out of steal with just the tiniest amount of galvanization so that it will eventually rot out. I think even plastic would have been a better material.

It's theoretically possible to replace this metal, but consider the work involved: you need to empty the freezer, dry it out, remove the back of it, figure out how to move the evaporator coils out of the way without damaging them, unscrew the trough, and figure out how to wiggle it out. You need to do this at least twice (once to debug the issue in the first place, next to actually replace it). Finally good luck finding the replacement in stock (also add the time needed for this search). The fridge is maybe good for 12 years, but little chance of replacement parts stocked for that long. Certainly this is the case for my fridge, and I fabricated a temporary patch out of rubber.

Also, of course, there is absolutely no way for you to inspect this part before you buy a new fridge. Maybe it's even worse on new fridges, who knows?

Edit: check it out, someone else noticed this:

[https://email@example.com/rusted-through-in- four...](https://email@example.com/rusted-through-in-four- years-c897fd7ce08f)

<comment><USER66> > This is where the planned obsolescence comes into play. I'm convinced that > the manufactures make this metal out of steal with just the tiniest amount > of galvanization so that it will eventually rot out.

One thing I never got about "planned obsolescence" as some sort of way to get more recurring revenue is how it works with competitors. If you're the only game in town then it makes perfect sense, but if your appliance died an early death, are you really going to buy from the same manufacturer? What if another manufacturer doesn't do the same thing and their appliance lasts longer? Wouldn't you lose market share? For it to work you'd need some sort of conspiracy with all the other competitors so everyone cuts quality in unison, which we haven't seen a lot of evidence of. The only one that comes to mind is the lightbulb one.

<comment><USER67> They make their products fail in non obvious ways and the competitors do the same thing. You won't be able to see the flaws when you buy the product.

Recent example, my parents buy "stainless steel" because they think it is more durable but it's purely cosmetic because of the internal parts. They had a stainless steel microwave that stopped working because the door would not stay shut.

I was able to pry open the framing of the door and located the tension spring that was required to keep the door hooked shut, well it had been attached to the flimsiest plastic tab I could imagine.

Everything else about the microwave worked perfectly fine but because this flimsy 2mm thick plastic tab broke, it was now junk.

So i drilled a hole in the plastic frame and reattached the spring to that hole (which was drilled in a way that made it more stable) and fixed the microwave.

There was literally no increase in cost to anchor this critical tension spring in a less fragile way, in fact I would argue it cost them more to design this special failing piece.

The whole industry is just absurd, the whole way we run the economy is absurd. It only makes sense if you have infinite planets to exploit for resources with infinite room for waste.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> Freezer: 8-cubit feet of space totally full! If you keep the door shut and don't open it the food will last about 12-hours.

This happened to me this week. Use dry ice to keep the food fresh. Dry ice costs $1.00 a pound, you need 25 pounds total, five for the freezer. This solution will work for about 12-hours.

</comment><comment><USER69> 36 hours in 19C room or 3/4 (27hrs) in 30C seem about right

worked in insurance company with people claiming broken freezers among other things and you can for sure get through day even in hot weather

of course this won't fly in shops where they have to legally store the products frozen during whole distribution chain

</comment><comment><USER70> It would be interesting to see the effect of adding insulation like blankets, or foam would have.

</comment><comment><USER71> at least half a day is usually safe. All Appliances sold in EU have this in their data sheet: 'power cut safe "X" h' defined as 'temperature rise time'

Me example from last year: 4h at about 20C Ambient temperture: 4 degree Celsius loss from -20C

Too bad smart home temperature logging is failing too while power is off: [https://twitter.com/mxfh/status/1194646175644897281/](https://twitter.com/mxfh/status/1194646175644897281/)

</comment><comment><USER72> So much electricity does it use every time you open the door?

</comment><comment><USER73> I'd like to see a similar experiment that analyzes the effect of opening a window on the oxygen (and perhaps other gases) content of living spaces

</comment><comment><USER74> It would be nice to see the rest of the thermal analysis, and see if it matches the provided specs

</comment><comment><USER66> is he using... excel 2003? I hope he doesn't open any untrusted documents, because he's probably a sitting duck in terms of exploits.

<comment><USER75> In the YouTube video comments he says it's 21 years old. So Office 2000 (released to retail in June 1999).

He added: "Super snappy on a modern computer!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> All this is missing is an executive summary!

</comment><comment><USER77> Does it not depend on what is in the freezer?

Like, if it is half-filled with icepacks versus frozen beef?

<comment><USER78> The article addresses thermal mass, although not into the level of detail of X% ice packs and Y% food.

<comment><USER77> I keep a certain amount of icepacks in the freezer, in case the power goes put, but also because the thermostat seems to swing a bit.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are good ways to find other young professionals in your area? - <AUTHOR> I live in a college town that doesn't have a lot of stuff going on - how do you make friends as an adult? <comment><USER2> I've been in that same situation.

I've made friends from co-working spaces and surprisingly a few friends from going to a few off the beaten track meetup(.com)'s

Best advice is to just put yourself out there and remind yourself that good friendships take a while.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the great advice!</comment></comment>


Upgrading to Sublime Text 3 - <AUTHOR> http://harrywolff.com/upgrading-to-sublime-text-3/

<comment><USER2> Hopefully in about a week or so Package Control 2 should be going beta. It includes a bunch of features to make publishing packages easier, proper ST3/2 support, better proxy handling on Windows and a new snazzy website to improve package discovery.

This should make it much easier to upgrade to ST3 since there won't be all sorts of manual steps to get community-built packages working.

</comment><comment><USER3> Does SublimeLinter work correctly now with different versions of Python? In ST2, SL parses code as Python 2.6, which gets some 2.7 syntax marked as invalid (e.g. with statement with more than one bind).

I would imagine this gets worse with ST3 embedding Python 3.

<comment><USER3> To answer my own question, no SublimeLinter is not fixed. It parses as Python 3 and there doesn't seem to be a way to change it.

<comment><USER4> It would probably be possible to make the extension use the system's installation of python if available instead of the one embedded with Sublime, but that would require some coding.

<comment><USER3> I think it would have to be a per-project setting, since one might reasonably work on projects written in all of Python 2.6, 2.7 and 3.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have also found Sublime Text 3 to be much faster at common tasks than Sublime Text 2. It is going to be well worth the upgrade.

<comment><USER6> I'm not trying to picky or anything, but what tasks did actually become faster? I'm only asking because my current ST2 (build 2220) is blazingly fast. Fuzzy search seems instant. Files open and preview instantly, even large binary ones. And there is no interface lag, even on a retina. The only thing that I can recall waiting on is using the package manager.

<comment><USER7> Startup times are drastically faster. Python plugins are now `out of process` and load async. Also, the very latest beta uses skia instead of cairo. The api is now thread safe which will mean less `Plugin x is taking too long` messages. And so on ... Even updating is faster, with the new binary diff based auto updater

<comment><USER8> "Startup times are drastically faster" - is that 1 millisecond as opposed to 2?

<comment><USER9> Startup time is more like 5-10s for me on a Core i5 iMac. Better than eclipse, not better than vim.

<comment><USER10> Same for me, i7 Win7. Thankfully I rarely have a reason to close ST2 once open.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> For me, the moment DisposaBoy has GoSublime ( <https://github.com/DisposaBoy/GoSublime> ) working and being maintained on ST3 I shall upgrade.

One person created a fork ( <https://github.com/quarnster/GoSublime> ) which he got working, but it's already a couple of months behind HEAD. So I am waiting, as I reckon other Go devs are too.

<comment><USER12> I've been using GoSublime under ST3 without any issues. Maybe I'm not making full use of it's functionality, but I haven't had any problems with it yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Thank you. I've been putting off upgrading for fear that it is a huge rabbit hole. It sounds like this is not the case, so I'm planning on giving it a shot this weekend.

<comment><USER14> It's been quite painless for me, although I did have to install all the plugins again, via Package Control, which was a bit tedious. The good news is that most plugins seems to have been updated for compatibility.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Question: I've been evaluating ST2 for a couple of weeks and I'm thinking of paying for a licence. Do I get a licence now, or do I wait and get a licence for ST3?

<comment><USER16> If you buy a license now, it's valid for ST3. No need to wait. It's in the FAQ.

<http://www.sublimetext.com/sales_faq>

<comment><USER15> Ahah! I missed that; thanks very much for the info!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I check this every couple of weeks, hoping to see SublimeCodeIntel appear as working: [https://github.com/wbond/sublime_package_control/wiki/Sublim...](https://github.com/wbond/sublime_package_control/wiki/Sublime- Text-3-Compatible-Packages)

<https://github.com/Kronuz/SublimeCodeIntel>

</comment><comment><USER18> Any Windows/ASP.NET devs using this in combo with VS.NET? I like ST2 for taking notes and documenting things, but I'm not using it as a primary IDE. Are you using it for LESS/SASS? I'm trying to figure out how to utilize more of the cool features of ST that aren't available in VS.NET.

</comment><comment><USER19> Has anyone used ST3 with Rails development? The code inspection/method navigation feature has me intrigued. I'm wondering how functional it is compared to Rubymine's capabilities.

Sadly since there's no demo/trial for st3, I can't try for myself.

</comment><comment><USER20> >when you select a file in the project browser it now opens up a temporary tab

Any way to have binary files like say, images, show up in the project browser without previewing their contents when you click on them, in this version?

</comment><comment><USER21> I have something like seven tabs in each version of Sublime Text.

Can anyone recommend a good way to migrate your projects and tab session to the newer version? I think I have two versions of ST2 as well.

</comment><comment><USER22> Your link to the download page is wrong. It's just a "#" now.

</comment><comment><USER23> I wish someone would fix SublimeClang

</comment><comment><USER24> Isn't there some way to install Sublime Text 3 and have all my ST2 plugins and projects just work?

<comment><USER25> Not really. You're talking about the difference between Python2 and Python3.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> The dev needs to hurry up and add GTK3 support to his app. This is why I don't like closed-source software. Soon I'll be on Wayland and I'm going to have to use XWayland just to run Sublime Text 3.</comment>


Stanford Teaches Self Driving De Lorean to Drive - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/cars/2015/10/stanford-teaches-a-self-driving-delorean-to-drift/ <comment><AUTHOR> Clearly this was a bit click baity (back to the future day etc) but it raised an interesting question for me which was this, "If a self driving car can achieve maximum performance, does a police officer have any chance of catching them if driving manually?"

Think about that for a moment, sort of robot car meets Transporter. So often high speed chases end in disaster, but if the car was driving could it make it work? Could the bad guys then shoot at the following officers at their leisure?</comment>


Tardigrades crash-landed on the Moon and probably survived - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/08/tiny-tardigrades-crash-landed-on-the-moon-and-probably-survived/ <comment><USER2> See [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20634080](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20634080)

and [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20628574](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20628574)</comment>


Algorithms and Data Structures Explained and Implemented in JavaScript - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/trekhleb/javascript-algorithms <comment><USER2> The documentation and code quality is all good.

The implementation choices leave some things to be desired. The Queue and Stack implementations are Linked Lists instead of array backed, the hash table is closed instead of (the only barely more complicated) open Robin hood hash table scheme, the union-find/disjoint-set implementation doesn't have path compression or rank unions.

Overall very good, but it could be Great (tm) with just a little bit of work.

<comment><USER3> Wait are linked lists not better for first-in first-out data structures? I thought arrays were not preferred in those cases because shift/unshift are highly inefficient.

Am I wrong? I thought array-based queues resulted in O(n) queue/dequeue. Now for stacks, which are last-in first-out, it makes sense to use an array.

<comment><USER4> > _I thought array-based queues resulted in O(n) queue /dequeue._

Not necessarily. A circular buffer[1] can be used as a queue with O(1) queue/dequeue. C++ implementations (gcc?), IIRC, uses an interesting array-of- arrays approach; it also has O(1) queue/dequeue. I'm not sure why the array- of-arrays approach is better than a circular buffer, though.

Array based designs can result is less allocations, and maybe less overhead. For example, if you have a circular buffer with space for 16 items, it only needs to allocate space if you need more room, whereas a linked list queue would allocate for each and every item placed into it. Linked lists also require space for the pointer to the next link, for each link in the list. (And, if you keep them, back pointers, though these aren't necessary for just a queue.) Arrays might have some unused slack space, however.

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

<comment><USER5> Resizing a fully contiguous circle buffer would cause a copy every element as well forcing you to make a single contiguous memory section. Array of arrays just needs to resize the top level array.

<comment><USER6> But the copy only has to move n items, but was constructed with m items, where n < m (and usually n << m). Where n is the max size of the queue and m is the total number of items that will ever be enqueued.

On the other hand, an array of arrays (no recursion) doesn't change the big-O complexity cost, just the constant multiplier. That should definitely improve performance of the uncommon operation (the copy), but hypothetically might slow down the actual queuing operations (and drastically reduce throughout)

But maybe you meant the array of arrays to be recursive? That seems like it would alter the big-O (from n+m to log(n)+m). But typically m>>n, so the net result is the same.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This repo is beautiful. The README is detailed and clear, and the contents seem pretty exhaustive. As a native JS guy I'm especially excited to check out the implementation of non-tree graphs!

Having said all that: The algorithms I've had to tackle at work tend to be fairly trivial or total one-offs involving scheduling events in human time.

How much algorithmic work do you other JS folks end up doing?

<comment><USER8> > How much algorithmic work do you other JS folks end up doing?

I recently built a questionnaire/form editor/builder which relies heavily on tree structures. I ended up writing a lot of tree walking code. It was the first time I've ever needed to implement interview-like questions in an actual project.

I make heavy use of functional programming in Javascript, which lends itself to really clean implementations of algorithms like tree walking, e.g.: [https://hastebin.com/qapawepavi.js](https://hastebin.com/qapawepavi.js)

<comment><USER9> As someone new to JS I find vanilla JS tedious for FP, what library(ies) do you use to ease this?

<comment><USER8> I have to admit I'm far from a FP guru, very little experience with true functional languages like Haskell etc. For me it's more a question of style and applying functional paradigms when possible, eg treating functions as first class citizens, making heavy use of .bind() and passing functions as arguments. I use ES6 via Babel and actually find it to be quite expressive and powerful when used correctly. I just try to keep my functions very small with tight separation of concerns. There are lots of libraries to make JS "more functional," as the sibling comment alludes to, but I find vanilla JS (or at least ES6) already has many of the features necessary for functional programming, as long as you make the conscious choice to use it that way.

<comment> crooked-v It requires use of Babel, but you might find the function bind operator an interesting alternative to .bind().

[https://babeljs.io/docs/plugins/transform-function- bind/](https://babeljs.io/docs/plugins/transform-function-bind/)

<comment><USER8> That's very cool! But I'd be hesitant to introduce something non-standard into the codebase. Sure the toolchain can handle it but I'd be worried other devs won't immediately recognize the syntax.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Had the same idea and got sad you got there faster. But then I looked at the code and realized you did it better than I would have done it so good job!

<comment><USER11> Me too! I wanted to refresh myself on implementations and expose the JS community to some stuff they may not have been exposed to... TypeScript is still fair game!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I like it! Something I've been thinking about recently is using ES6 proxies to visualize algorithms like this. Lay out the arrays and objects as blocks on a canvas, and highlight the blocks as the algorithm reads / writes to the corresponding slots of the arrays / objects.

<comment><USER12> This kind of visualizations?

[https://visualgo.net/en](https://visualgo.net/en)

[https://www.cs.usfca.edu/~galles/visualization/Algorithms.ht...](https://www.cs.usfca.edu/~galles/visualization/Algorithms.html)

<comment><USER13> [https://visualgo.net/en](https://visualgo.net/en) is super cool! Thanks for posting it

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is a terrific idea! The code I reviewed so far looks very well written. Thanks for this... folks looking to interview for a software developer position (especially at Google or with any group that emphasizes fundamentals) would do well to get acquainted with this repo!

</comment><comment><USER15> I would be interested in hearing feedback on this book [1]. I bought it for a friend who's getting started with programming, coming from a different field. It seems a good book overall, but I haven't had the time to take a very deep look at it.

[1] [https://www.packtpub.com/web-development/learning- javascript...](https://www.packtpub.com/web-development/learning-javascript- data-structures-and-algorithms-third-edition)

</comment><comment><USER16> Tangential, but is there a name for a Trie that isn't for string searching/matching? I've had a need for this in the past but each node needed to store a non-character value. This was to facilitate a sort-of path finding where the input was matched against a known set of paths.

Every library I looked at had implementations revolving around nodes that stored chars (you know, for auto-complete scenarios) but nowhere in the definition of a Trie is it bound to such an implementation (so I thought).

<comment><USER17> I think that is just the common use case.

It shouldn't be too hard to roll your own here, it's just a set of tree traversal functions.

<comment><USER16> Oh I did, was just surprised every formal language had one tied to string searching/matching, including this demo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'd love to see something like this for every language... similar to the to do app which has become the de facto standard to compare web frameworks..

</comment><comment> 52-6F-62 If anybody wants to build it into a library I threw together an index file and included the rollup run to allow you to import everything as one library or as separate modules:

[https://gist.github.com/robertfairley/11ba23640578650671dbde...](https://gist.github.com/robertfairley/11ba23640578650671dbde4df1f4737f)

</comment><comment><USER19> Along similar lines, does anyone know of something similar that includes multigraphs? (Graphs with parallel edges).

There's a python library called networkx, but it is so heavily object-oriented (multi-inheritance) as to make it impossible to get any benefit from reading the code.

</comment><comment> 52-6F-62 Damn I'd just started doing something similar on the side. Looks like I'll have to rethink my efforts. :)

Nicely done

</comment><comment><USER20> Seems like a good reference manual to use before attending an interview at Google/Amazon/Facebook etc

</comment><comment><USER21> They don't explain lock-free data-structures?

</comment><comment><USER22> Bookmarked! Well done.

</comment><comment><USER23> is there a similar thing with python too ?

<comment><USER24> [https://www.geeksforgeeks.org](https://www.geeksforgeeks.org)

<comment><USER25> I have mixed feelings about that site.

There are people posting verbatim interview questions, which is a breach of interview NDA.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Gold!</comment>


Night Sight for Pixel phones - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/25/18021944/google-night-sight-pixel-3-camera-samples <comment><USER2> If you're interested in learning more about this stuff the head of the Pixel team (Marc Levoy - Prof emeritus at Stanford) has an entire lecture series on this stuff from a class he ran at Google. They are here along with lecture notes:[https://sites.google.com/site/marclevoylectures/home](https://sites.google.com/site/marclevoylectures/home)

What's really cool is you can see him talk about a lot of these ideas well before they made it into the Pixel phone

<comment><USER3> If you're thinking of taking a look, I particularly enjoyed Lecture 7 of this series. The practical applications of Fourier analysis in image recognition/filtering/processing are really quite amazing.

Plus, if you're at all curious about the technical details for how exactly something like Night Sight is implemented on the Pixel, understanding what Fourier transformations are and how they are utilized is vital.

<comment><USER4> Yeah like build this tech into AR glasses.. see day while in night or see a ton clearer at night.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Prior work at Google Research before it made it into the product:

[https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/04/experimental-nighttime- pho...](https://ai.googleblog.com/2017/04/experimental-nighttime-photography- with.html)

And by the original researcher in 2016:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7lbnMd56Ys](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7lbnMd56Ys)

<comment><USER6> There's also this set of slides on the technology behind SeeInTheDark: [http://graphics.stanford.edu/talks/seeinthedark- public-15sep...](http://graphics.stanford.edu/talks/seeinthedark- public-15sep16.key.pdf)

<comment><USER7> multiple frames approach sounds similar to Hubble telescope approach.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What the Pixel cameras are doing is staggeringly good. My father is the founder of [https://www.imatest.com/](https://www.imatest.com/), and has a substantial collection of top-end cameras. He's probably in the top 0.0001% of image quality nerds. But most of the time, he's now entirely happy shooting on his Pixel.

<comment><USER9> If you don't mind my derailing the conversation a bit, could you ask your father what he would recommend for 4K/60fps video as competition for the Panasonic GH5s? In its weight class, it's one of the few 60fps (and 400Mbps bitrate capable) cameras that can be mounted to a relatively small sized gimbal, and flown on a drone that doesn't cost $10,000.

Is there anything expected to be released in the next few months that will be in a similar price, feature set and weight class?

<comment><USER10> Personally I would suggest checking out the new Fuji X-T3 -- I just got it and am very happy with the video quality. It's actually the only other small camera right now that will do 4k60p 10-bit.

<comment><USER9> I just spent ten minutes skimming reviews and specs for that - it looks very nearly ideal for what I have in mind. Should be sub $1500 for just the camera body, no lens, and is under 500 grams.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > Google says that its machine learning detects what objects are in the frame, > and the camera is smart enough to know what color they are supposed to have.

That is absolutely impressive.

The color and text on the fire extinguishers along with the texture detail seen in the headphones in the last picture are just stunning. Congratulations to anyone who worked on this project!

<comment><USER12> It's impressive, but it also means that your camera isn't always going to capture what's there -- it'll capture what it guesses was there. I wonder how easily it is fooled to capture something that's not there?

<comment><USER13> I think the article is factually correct but makes it sound a little more complicated or advanced that it probably is. I mean, depending on how you interpret it you could think that it does basically "hey, this looks like a fire hydrant, let me paste a fire hydrant in there" which is obviously not exactly something AI can do reliably today, especially on phone hardware.

I'm _guessing_ that it works similarly to low-budget astrophotography but with the computer doing all the busywork for you: when you want to photograph stars or planets and you don't have a fancy tracking mount to compensate for earth's rotation you'll have very mediocre results with long exposure. If you expose a lot to see the object clearly then you get motion blur. If you use a shorter exposition to reduce the blur you don't have enough light to get a clear picture.

One solution is to take a bunch of low-exposure pictures in a row and then add them together (as in, sum the value of the non-gamma-corrected pixels) in post while taking care of moving or rotating each picture to line everything up. This way you simulate a long-exposure while at the same correcting for the displacement.

An other advantage is that you can effectively do "HDR": suppose that you're taking a panorama with the milky way in the sky and some city underneath it, with a long exposure the lights of the city would saturate completely. With shorter exposures you can correct that in post by scaling the intensity of the lights in the city as you add pixels (or summing fewer pictures for these areas). This way you can effectively have several levels of exposures in the same shot and you can tweak all that in post. In the case of the city/milky way example you'll also need to compensate for the motion in the sky but obviously not on land which is also something you can't really do "live".

I have a strong suspicion that it's basically what this software is doing: take a bunch of pictures, do edge/object detection to realign everything (probably also using the phone's IMU data), fit the result on some sort of gamma curve to figure out the correct exposition then add color correction based on a model of the sensor's performance under low light (since I'm sure by default under these conditions the sensor will start breaking down and favor some colors over others). Then maybe go through a subtle edge-enhancing filter to sharpen things a bit more and remove any leftover blurriness.

If I'm right then it's definitely a lot of very clever software but it's not like it's really "making up" anything.

<comment><USER14> > which is obviously not exactly something AI can do reliably today, > especially on phone hardware

But do we know that it runs on phone hardware? If voice interfaces have taught us anything, it's that we can't ever make that assumption again.

The amount of data you'd have to send to run this off board would be enormous, but hey, anything for a jawdropping hype feature, right? It just works, those preview pictures literally made me check the price and size of the pixel 3, and I haven't been interested in anything but a Sony Compact since the z1c came out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I would like super sensitive cameras like this to be used inside fridges to see the very faint glow of food going off.

Chemical reactions by bacteria breaking down food produce light, enough for humans to see in only the darkest of places (if you live in a city, you won't ever encounter dark enough situations).

A camera simulating a 1 hour exposure time in a closed refrigerator ought to be able to see it pretty easily.

<comment><USER6> Reading between the lines of [1], bioluminescence is used to detect bacteria/fungi/other organisms in food, but only by adding luciferase to a sample and measuring the light emitted when luciferase reacts with ATP. Because living organisms contain ATP, the ATP content can be used as a proxy for contamination by microorganisms.

But I didn't find anything on bioluminescence occurring naturally in the kinds of bacteria you'd want to be warned about. Did you ever personally see glowing food?

[1] [http://cdn.intechopen.com/pdfs/27440/InTech- Use_of_atp_biolu...](http://cdn.intechopen.com/pdfs/27440/InTech- Use_of_atp_bioluminescence_for_rapid_detection_and_enumeration_of_contaminants_the_milliflex_rapid_microbiology_detection_and_enumeration_system.pdf)

<comment><USER15> Rotting meat definitely glows. I've personally seen decaying mammal carcasses glowing in the woods at night (always either green like foxfire or an odd almost monochromatic cyan that must really stimulate the eye's rod cells).

It's very faint and would be difficult to notice without trees to shield it from moonlight. A camera could pick it up with a long exposure.

<comment><USER16> Thanks, I hadn't known about this effect. Apparently it's been known for a long time. In the 1600's, Robert Boyle claimed to have been able to read an issue of The Philosophical Transactions by the light of a rotting Neck of Veal: [https://blogs.royalsociety.org/publishing/boyle-and- biolumin...](https://blogs.royalsociety.org/publishing/boyle-and- bioluminescence/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This reminds me of a similar project: "Learning to See in the Dark". They used a fully-convolutional network trained on short-exposure night-time images and corresponding long-exposure reference images. Their results look quite similar to the Pixel photos.

[http://cchen156.web.engr.illinois.edu/SID.html](http://cchen156.web.engr.illinois.edu/SID.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> It's notable that this 'accumulation' method effectively lets you have a near- infinite exposure time, as long as objects in the video frame are trackable (ie. there is sufficient light in each frame to see at least _something_ ).

I'd be interested to see how night mode performs when objects in the frame are moving (it should work fine, since it will track the object), or changing (for example, turning pages of a book - I wouldn't expect it to work in that case).

</comment><comment><USER18> Damn. I've had an iPhone since the 3G, but this is really tempting me to get a pixel.

</comment><comment><USER19> Damn! That's honestly impressive! I started reading thinking it was going to be a simple brightness-up kind of thing, but it's incredible how they are able to recreate the whole photography based on an initial dark raw input.

I must imagine that the sensor is doing an extra but un-perceptible long exposure than then is used to correct the lightning of the dark version.

</comment><comment><USER20> This might be a weird criticism but... making photos taken in the dark look like they are not actually dark seems kind of like a weird thing to do? I've struggled with my micro 4/3 camera to capture accurate night photographs, but the last thing I wanted of them was to be brighter than I was perceiving them to be.

That said, the effect of some of these photographs is striking, and I'm sure the tech is interesting.

<comment><USER21> I hear what you're saying. But I almost always capture photos for data, not art, and would really benefit from this. As long as it is a setting, we both win.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Prepare for a lot of cute sleeping baby photos on your feeds, folks. That's what I'll be using this for.

</comment><comment><USER23> Now if we could only get this on APS-C & 1" compacts like the sony rx100 or fujifilm xf10. With first class smartphone integration and networking.

<comment><USER24> My thoughts exactly. If a little IS work and some great noise reduction like they've shown here can look this good, can you even imagine what an APS-C or full frame could pull off?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Any hardware reason for it to only work on Pixel phones?

<comment><USER26> Supports a better Camera API - some people have cracked it to work on non- Pixel devices already though.

See: [https://www.celsoazevedo.com/files/android/google- camera/](https://www.celsoazevedo.com/files/android/google-camera/)

<comment><USER24> Can you say more precisely what version you would need to get the new night stuff? I tried installing the latest "recommended" version on my Nexus 5x, but it refused to even install it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The Huawei P20 shipped out in April with this feature -- I look forward to dxomark's analysis of the Pixel 3 phone compared to the P20, which currently remains on top: [https://www.dxomark.com/category/mobile- reviews/](https://www.dxomark.com/category/mobile-reviews/)

Upgrading from a 3-year old Samsung S6, where I could almost see the battery percentages drop off percent by percent, the P20 Pro's 4000 mAh battery has been great (too bad the wireless charging didn't appear until the new Mate P20 Pro).

<comment><USER28> The Huawei does _not_ have this feature. Look at the review in your own link and you will see that the images for low light are comparable to the pixel or iPhone. If you compare night sight to those, it's completely different.

<comment><USER29> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBKHnKkNSyw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBKHnKkNSyw)

Except the Huawei does and in actual same-setting situations the results are better than the Pixel.

<comment><USER28> You're confusing sensor size for the algorithm again. The Huawei sensor is twice as large as the pixel 2, which is why both cameras without night mode on has a vast improvement in the p20. It's also why the improvement by turning night mode on in the p20 is not as great of a leap as on the pixel.

<comment><USER29> Incredible.

Did you actually watch the video?

The P20 Pro does exactly what this new night mode does, albeit did it months ago. It does image stacking (which is not a new approach). In direct comparison testing -- in that video -- it yields better results.

This whole discussion has just been an bizarre.

<comment><USER28> There's really no point in continuing this since I don't think you understand what the size of the camera sensor does in low light. I was simply pointing out, over and over, that it is not the same feature Huawei had. Just like you can't take a $50 point and shoot with extremely complex software that took the same image quality as a $5000 Nikon, and say that "this technology exists". Huawei has better camera hardware in almost every dimension you can imagine, and more than half the pictures in the video you sent are worse on the Huawei, despite those advantages. I did not say that Huawei can't take any pictures that are better than the Pixel. I said it's not the same technology, and dismissing this as "it's already been done" is ludicrous. If the Pixel 2 had the same hardware as the P20 the results would be even more impressive.

<comment><USER29> Dear god. Incredible.

You are completely and utterly wrong. Yet you continue. Amazing.

And you're not the first to distract with claims that it is someone else's ignorance.

The P20 Pro does image stacking. _Period_. That is exactly what this new Pixel mode does. In actual results the P20 Pro is better.

<comment><USER24> >That is exactly what this new Pixel mode does. In actual results the P20 Pro is better.

I'm not the person you've been talking to, but I don't think I'd agree with that statement. To take the video you linked earlier for example, the Pixel frequently gives better results. For example, this one shot [https://youtu.be/wBKHnKkNSyw?t=227](https://youtu.be/wBKHnKkNSyw?t=227)

Note that the Pixel 2 has a much smaller sensor, and the exposure time on the P20 is _18 times longer_ , and yet the Pixel generates a much better sharper image. What you're saying is correct, that the P20 is using some very advanced image stabilization to get results that good from 6 seconds of data, but the Pixel seems to clearly offer more advanced software.

<comment><USER29> The example shot you gave is clearly better on the P20. Also the P20 has a slightly larger sensor.

Further, you're reading entirely too much into the exposure times. They are artificial and either camera software can choose to put whatever number they want in there. The aggregate time. The average time. The theoretical equivalent time. Etc. It is _not_ the actual times.

<comment><USER28> No, it's not better. The P20 is over-exposed, causing the colors to be off. The level of detail is equivalent, but the colors on the P20 are the worse. And no, it's not _slightly_ larger. The sensor is TWICE as large in area as the pixel 2.

I took actual photos with the pixel 2, and I know the actual time taken. It's less than 3 seconds every time. By all accounts and reviews I've seen, the P20 is 10-25 seconds. Show me a review saying otherwise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> gingerbread-man Kind of a tangent, but it was really cool to see a picture of the author's Schiit Jotunheim headphone amp in the article. One of the founders wrote an _amazing_ book on building a hardware startup: [http://lucasbosch.de/schiit/jason-stoddard-shiit-happened- ta...](http://lucasbosch.de/schiit/jason-stoddard-shiit-happened-tablet- lblb.pdf).

</comment><comment><USER30> The biggest challenge to do this technically is to use gyroscope data to work together with the stacking algorithm. It's hard to tune the gyro to work great for any phone. A pure software solution to analyze the perspectives transformation would be too slow.

<comment><USER31> Is it hard to tune the gyro because its accuracy is too low, or because it's accurate to begin with but degrades over the course of the long exposure?

Is a pure software solution even reliable enough under these conditions? Slowness can be worked around by doing it in the background, and you get a notification when it's complete. Some people would be okay if that's the only way to get photos they wouldn't otherwise be able to get, short of buying an SLR.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> All those shots look amazing, but they're of stationary objects.

I really want to know how that works for people! 99% of photos I take are of people, and the lighting is always bad.

Are there any photos of people?

<comment><USER33> There's a photo of the author in the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> How does Pixel implementation of low light photography differ from Samsung? Are they comparable in photo quality?

</comment><comment><USER35> Wouldn't video still be extremely blurry? This is mostly for things not moving / pictures

I wonder if this technology will eventually supercede military night vision goggles. Having the ability to add color perception at long distances could have useful for identifying things at night.

<comment><USER36> you are right that this would be useless in its current state for video. But if it ever got smart enough to start stacking images on a 3d model of the world you could do some incredible stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Why not use the actual article title?

"Google's Night Sight for Pixel phones will amaze you"

<comment><USER38> "will amaze you" is an unnecessary clickbaity addition. They could have left Google in though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> How are you going to do a review of Night Sight and not even go outside? Every photo just taken in a room with the lights turned off. Come on, man. Tell your editor he needs to wait until nightfall.

<comment><USER40> Huh? There are a bunch in the second half of the article.

<comment><USER39> Ah. An update was posted literally in the last ten minutes. This article came out yesterday (when I first saw it)

<comment><USER28> I loaded loaded this on a pixel 2. The results are absolutely stunning. It does take ~4 seconds to take a picture, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> That's great, but we should find a different name for "photos" that change image information in the process.

</comment><comment><USER29> Interesting, but a tad rich with puffery.

Pre-OIS Google did this with image stacking which was a ghetto version of a long exposure (stacking many short exposure photos, correcting the offsets via the gyro, was necessary to compensate for inevitable camera shake). There is nothing new or novel about image stacking or long exposures.

What are they doing here? Most likely it's simply enabling OIS and enabling longer exposures than normal (note the smooth motion blur of moving objects, which is nothing more than a long exposure), and then doing noise removal. There are zero camera makers who are flipping their desks over this. It is usually a "pro" hidden feature because in the real world subjects move during long exposure and shooters are just unhappy with the result.

The contrived hype around the Pixel's "computational photography" (which seems more incredible in theory than in the actual world) has reached an absurd level, and the astroturfing is just absurd.

<comment><USER42> I can see your point: this basically just looks like long exposures, or stacked exposures, which is basically the same thing of letting more photons hit the sensor, aligned using OIS.

Any thoughts on why Apple, as the other leading phone maker with a heavy emphasis on camera quality, has not implemented anything like it? Not to discount the difficulty, but OIS aligned long exposures kind of seems like low hanging fruit. Instead, they keep trying to open the aperture more.

<comment><USER43> well to be fair google hasnt implemented it yet either. there could be significant reasons for that, like results could be worse than default except in specific situations</comment></comment></comment>


Underpaid and not sure what to do about it - <AUTHOR> Review time is coming up at work, and I've found out I'm being paid at roughly the 30th percentile for someone with my experience (3 years, Python/Django backend) in the city I work in (SF).  I've been with the company for about a year, and I would like to stay there, but certain external factors have caused money to become tighter than it was a few months ago.
I want to fix this situation, but I don't particularly want to change companies.  I like going into work; enjoy my coworkers; and the company is in a good position to become cash-flow neutral very soon, so we're in a good place in spite of all the articles about the impending blood bath in the Valley.  On the other hand, I've explicitly been told by my tech lead that the days of 10%+ raises are over, but I'm making around 16% less than the median.
Is this a hopeless situation? <comment><USER2> The median wage also depends on your experience and abilities. You may not be worth that much to the company.

If you think you deserve more, ask for a raise and if they say no, ask what needs to happen for you to get one.

Otherwise, find another job. This is how I got raises every few yeara, when I was an employee.

<comment><AUTHOR> I have asked.

This was the response:

>...the days of 10%+ raises are over....

<comment><USER2> This is usually a bad sign. Your company will probably be out of business within 5 years. It might be time to look for another job.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's hopeless. If they pay you poorly in the beginning they will almost never give you a raise to market when your skills advance. This is why it is important to negotiate aggressively when getting a new job.

The only time I got a 25% raise was when I negotiated it before I took the job. The deal was, raise me to market in 6 months or we decide it's not working out and we go our separate ways.

</comment><comment><USER4> Wait six months and get a new gig -- jumping ship after a year and a half is fine, and that's how to get paid more.

Smart monkey doesn't let go of one branch till another is firmly in hand.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's exactly (and unfortunately) what this monkey was thinking. :(</comment></comment>


NFC Ring - <AUTHOR> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mclear/nfc-ring

<comment><USER2> Disclaimer: I didn't post this thread but I'm the guy running this Kickstarter and trying to get NFC Rings into the hands of hackers to do beautiful and wonderful things.

Also worth noting one of the founders of this project is Matt Mullenweg, the creator of Wordpress.

Some cool things I made with the ring I haven't announced before but you guys might like..

* An NFC controlled Gun trigger (hold gun with ring in hand and you can fire it) * Various hidden door locks (touch door in right place with ring and it opens)

A huge challenge I face right now is trying to use OpenCV Haarcascades to measure the width of ring fingers, I have a project up for it [https://github.com/mclear/html5-measurer](https://github.com/mclear/html5-measurer) \-- any input from CV guys would be great :) Also worth noting all of the software for the NFC Ring is under an Apache license.

Thanks @andrewchoi for the post! :) Appreciated!

Thanks Hacker News folks for the support and backing.

I'm heading out for some beers with my dad at 7pm(GMT) but when I'm back or tomorrow I'm happy to answer questions, in the mean time Tanya will be answering questions through Kickstarter.

<comment><USER3> This thing looks awesome. Thanks for making this happen!

I'm sorry to hear that the Galaxy S4 won't work with this. That's the phone I'm most likely to buy next. Could you say more about why they're incompatible?

<comment><USER2> The S4 has the NFC antenna in the battery this makes it unable to read small tags, the Alpha ring does work with it but that ring is only really suitable for larger chaps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What a cool idea! I hope they think of a less generic name, because as it stands there's going to be a lot of mindshare/SEO conflict with NFC Championship rings.

I hope they can use the success of this kickstarter to figure out manufacturing efficiencies that enable them to test out more form factors. Personally, I'm crazy about the idea of a wearable NFC device but I don't like the aesthetics of a ring: a wristband (or, ideally, something I can attach to the bottom of my watch face) would be much more preferable.

<comment><USER2> Agree'd on generic name, we spent hours umming and arring about this. I wanted to go with "McLear Torus" but most people didn't get the joke, so that got shot down, it's something as an engineering company we are wrestling with, we have a marketing company working with us working on solving this problem.

Agreed on diversifying into other physical products but that's not in our road map so we're releasing the NFC Inlays onto the market for people to make their own items :) You can even 3d print your own NFC Ring!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't have a lot of experience with NFC, but there are replay attacks of NFC-based credit cards, e.g., the NFCProxy app discussed a few months ago[1].

Does the small size of the inlay in this ring prevent unintended reading of the information contained? (It sounds like a larger version is necessary for some phones to read it at all...)

This is a compelling idea for another authentication factor, provided there were no concerns about data leakage.

[1][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5605499](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5605499)

EDIT: The "Privacy is Paramount" video explains how the ring solves this problem.

</comment><comment><USER6> A NFC ring does seem like an interesting project, with some useful applications. I may back the project.

However, the project is only aiming to raise £30,000. Not saying it isn't a significant amount of money but with backers like Matt Mullenweg (according to a comment here), surely they can bankroll that themselves? I know starting up production is expensive and the MOQ is prohibitive. £30k is not that much money to start manufacturing, distribution, testing and so forth. The kickstarter seems to me to be essentially just validating that there is a market for a NFC ring.

The "what are we raising funds for" section also states different things, the video says MOQ is 100k (x2), while the text says 10k. It seems to me that if it is the former of the two, £30,000 is not going to get them very far. And, the company spent $8000[1] on an advert[2]. $8000 (~£5.2k) is quite a significant portion of those £30,000 they want. Lastly, shipping in September 2013 kind of suggests that they are about to start production/already started production.

Either they are expecting to raise way more than £30,000 or it is just an additional way to advertise the product and build hype. Nothing wrong with that per se, and the backers do get the ring at a discount, but I am personally not that willing to back them just for them to get extra publicity.

[1] [http://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/1ip44s/spent_8...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/1ip44s/spent_8000_on_a_marketing_video_for_my_product/) [2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqvQ0pZhEBY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqvQ0pZhEBY)

<comment><USER2> You are pretty much completely correct: * Yes we are validating, this is normal (I explain this in my latest blog post on mclear.co.uk) * The MOQ is 100k (well spotted on the 10k mistake, thanks!) * I put most of my life savings into this project and I could of raised more but that would have meant losing more control * UK kickstarters tend not to raise huge amounts so yes, we went in low.

Yea we want to build some hype, obviously we want as much attention as possible, we have 0 marketing budget left. I honestly don't see a better way to do this when you are all out of marketing budget and don't want to sacrifice more control?

<comment><USER7> I don't see anything wrong with that. I'm excited about all the possibilities of crowdfunding, including market validation and supplementary capital.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In this instance, NFC stands for Near Field Communications, a two-way RFID technology built into some cellphones [1].

This is not adequately explained in the Kickstarter, nor is it mentioned in anyone else's HN comments so far. That two-way RFID is implemented in commonly-used smartphones is a bit of tech trivia I didn't know until this article convinced me to Wikipedia [2] NFC.

In retrospect, I'm not sure why I even clicked on this -- to people in the US, an "NFC ring" is given to the winners of the NFC Championship football [3] [4] game [5].

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_field_communication](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_field_communication)

[2] If Google can be a verb, so can Wikipedia.

[3] If you're not from North America, odds are that the sport you call "football" is actually soccer.

[4] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5872981](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5872981)

[5] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NFC_Championship_Game](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NFC_Championship_Game)

</comment><comment><USER9> This reminds me of Sun's Java Ring which could run Java on its own internal Java Virtual Machine. It worked through contact rather than wirelessly. It was given away for free to all attendees of the 1997 JavaWorld conference and I remember being very excited about it at the time. Maybe, like Oracle's 1996 Network Computer thin client, we're finally ready for this technology.

[http://www.nngroup.com/articles/javaring-wearable- computer/](http://www.nngroup.com/articles/javaring-wearable-computer/) [http://javaring.blogspot.co.uk/2008/11/advantages-of- using-j...](http://javaring.blogspot.co.uk/2008/11/advantages-of-using-java- ring.html)

"When an iButton detects any intrusion, it erases its private keys leading to zeroization. With it zeroization capability and the private key, Java Ring is one of the least counterfeitable devices."

</comment><comment><USER10> Reminds me of this (not yet released?) concept, the GEAK ring:

[http://www.engadget.com/2013/06/17/geak-ring-nfc- finger/](http://www.engadget.com/2013/06/17/geak-ring-nfc-finger/)

The "unlock your smartphone" use case is underlined here, too.

Manufacturer's site (Chinese, can't read it myself): [http://www.igeak.com/Ring](http://www.igeak.com/Ring)

</comment><comment><USER11> I love the idea and design of this; it's beautiful.

But using storage-only NFC tags as an authentication token? This is not a good idea.

<comment><USER2> Watch the video that covers security, it should hopefully explain why we do it that way. Thanks

<comment><USER11> I'm afraid I think that video just misrepresents how ISO14443A anti-collision works. Most reader devices (like phones, door locks, etc.) will select the tag with the best signal (usually = the closest) and deselect others during the anti-collision protocol. This /doesn't/ rule out a malicious reader selecting the other tag, subject to being able to power it.

<comment><USER2> Try that in reality and see how it works out for you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I bought a couple of tags for my phone new S4 this week. The issue I have right now is that the tags only seem to get read when my screen is on and unlocked which mean that I'm only one click away from running a command anyway, so for now, NFC tags combined with my phone seem less useful that I first thought.

<comment><USER13> The fact you have to have your screen on and unlocked is intentional and by design, otherwise there is plenty of potential attacks where NFC is used to exploit phones whilst it's in your pocket.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I was reminded of this: [http://hybratech.com/products/orb](http://hybratech.com/products/orb)

It is a different concept, but similar enough. After a couple of years still not available.

<comment><USER15> I don't know if you can call that similar enough - the ORB incorporates way more active technology than this NFC ring...

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I cannot find any informations about size of data that can be stored in NFC Ring. I hope this is not one of this with 137 bytes. Anybody knows the memory capacity of a tag?

<comment><USER17> They're using a NTAG203.

2 is a "platform indicator", 0 is a generation number, and 3 is the code number for the memory size. 3 means 128 to 256 bytes. (0 is less than 64 bytes; 1 is 64-96 bytes; 2 is 96-128 bytes)

([http://www.nxp.com/documents/short_data_sheet/NTAG203_SDS.pd...](http://www.nxp.com/documents/short_data_sheet/NTAG203_SDS.pdf))

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Ahh yes! I've been playing around with this idea forever - so glad someone's taking it to kickstarter. Backed!

<comment><USER18> Proof: [http://www.reddit.com/r/AskTechnology/comments/17s1pd/nfc_or...](http://www.reddit.com/r/AskTechnology/comments/17s1pd/nfc_or_rfid_embedded_in_metal_ring/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Neat idea. A good spin on wearable computing.</comment>


Parallel Cross Browser Testing Using Saucelabs, Cucumber and Capybara - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/verdi327/parallel_test_tutorial?utm_source=rubyweekly&utm_medium=email A tutorial that walks through building a Rails app that contains tests that run in parallel across 6 different browsers. <comment><AUTHOR> A tutorial that walks through building a Rails app that contains tests that run in parallel across 6 different browsers written by @verdi_michael</comment>


Ask HN: Why Windows never bundle pdf reader, flash and java runtime? - <AUTHOR>

Whenever I have a fresh Windows installed, the first software to installed are Acrobat Reader, Flash and Java runtime. On my Mac these software comes with the OS. Is there any history why Microsoft don't or can't bundle these software? Thanks <comment><USER2> I thought they did bundle Flash? In earlier years they did anyway.

Java they did include, but their own non-standard Windows tied version that broke the portability aspect. Sun sued them and won, so they stopped doing that and built C# instead.

PDF only relatively recently became an open standard and when they tried to bundle it (though with Office, not windows) Adobe pointed to their shenanigans with Java and threatened anti-trust to prevent them from doing so. I think part of the threat was that Microsoft was already pushing a PDF competitor called XPS so had something to gain by sabotaging PDFs compatability.

</comment><comment><USER3> you might find this helpful, prepackage a bunch of standard windows programs to install all in one go.

<http://ninite.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for this info.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Does anyone out there embed a lot of video? - <AUTHOR>

Hey guys, I am looking for a few people that embed a lot of videos on their site / blog so I can ask some questions.<p>Thanks for any and all help. <comment><USER2> I use free WordPress (dotcom, not the self-host software). I used to embed a lot from YouTube. But found it affected loading times. When possible, I would put the video after the -More- break. Don't know if that helps at all.

EDIT: For clarification.

<comment><AUTHOR> Putting the video after the 'more' break really does help significantly. We did that on our company blog.

We are making a super video embed to help drive traffic to blogs / websites. Would you be interested in trying it out?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Technical q's or content related?

I used to work at YouTube and wrote a lot of their player embed and API code, so if it's technical I might be able to answer some q's.

<comment><AUTHOR> More content related, but love to pick your brain about SEO - can you shoot me an email neil at reelsurfer.com. What are you doing now?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I used to work at ClearChannel, and I worked on sites with lots of video embeds (e.g. Rush Limbaugh, Jim Rome, Coast to Coast, etc.).

<comment><AUTHOR> love to learn what these sites were looking for - we are building a super embed and want it to kick ass

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I worked with brightcove so I could answer questions/give insights.

<comment><USER6> 5,000,000th post - cool!

<comment><USER7> 5,001,000th post - cool!</comment></comment></comment>