Show HN: Oware: a minimal abstract strategy game - <AUTHOR> http://luciangames.com/oware

<comment><USER3> In the spirit of constructive advice - and perhaps I'm missing something - <USER2> I just looked at your site and while it all looks very sci-fi and slick, I have absolutely no idea what the game is, how it works or why I'd want to play it. I even watched the video and that didn't make things any clearer.

I mean, wikipedia tells me this is a well known game in certain parts of the world, but I've grown up in the UK and I've never heard of it, so a description somewhere on your site would be nice.

Now, I'm certainly no app marketing guru - I'm currently employed writing software for enterprise - so you probably shouldn't take any advice from me terribly seriously, but I do have an ipad at home and my girlfriend has an iPhone, and I'm not sure what I'd be buying if I were to rush home and find this on the app store.

I can tell you that it LOOKS professionally done, but I just wish I knew what it did.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback.

It's a game with no text whatsoever. When I realized that the rules are so 'baked in' to the game, and that what remained could be discovered by the player on her own, it struck me as kind of a unique design opportunity.

So I also wanted to take the same approach as much as possible with the promotional materials, to keep the text to a minimum, and hopefully give it kind of an air of mystery. I'm bracing myself for the outcome.

<comment><USER3> Well, best of luck. I really hope it goes well for you. The design does look great.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Promo Keys:

      AppStore:
        0: NR9KN9AKEET3
        1: WL63XYY9AFKX
        2: H9LPMAKFERNL
        3: T93YRRXKN9JY
        4: KN7RTK4PWP69
        5: FF379HFT3ML4
        6: F9MNYAKEXHTY
        7: RYH3AT7YN7TN
        8: PWYLJWL3WP96
        9: F9PHRYLTX94W

      Desura:
        0: UQNYS-9CLO5-HBHJC-AHTOX-7B8A2
        1: PKLJ6-QMSXR-1MHY4-JTDS7-U4JEW
        2: WC4NW-548N9-SUJVW-AVGIG-7G5IO
        3: UBMVY-98FFZ-VP08I-A699B-T8AJA
        4: R5KXF-87OWH-QX07R-YNZYC-CILLZ
        5: ODK4G-6HT33-AIF8H-ZK0XZ-994IV
        6: Y5Y52-CHU9R-MK9IA-J096V-BLJ4C
        7: NIU70-4L8BO-DS6D7-TYZA9-PZCWI
        8: V5NCY-EQM5D-DVDB9-S1SDQ-HE1OQ
        9: SDUID-1DZT0-AUAKS-2BF62-H1J6C</comment>


The Myth of the Super Programming Language - <AUTHOR> http://alarmingdevelopment.org/?p=392 <comment><USER2> Sadly, not much in the way of any reasoning. Paul Graham etal have give reasons why they think Lisp is great, and their secret weapon. What is authors reasons for saying that is false.

I used to program in a hugely popular language, in which it was a pain to even open a file. It took ages to find out how to open it in append mode. How to format a decimal ... moving a piece of code into a try catch block was painful. Often one's productivity can suffer due to a language no matter how proficient one is in it.

Given the same amount of expertise in 2 languages, if i can write the same feature in much less time in one language, then it is more powerful.

<comment><USER3> Don't you think the burden of proof is the other way around? We see selection effects all the time. Shouldn't you expect super programmers to get more done because they're simply better programmers?

It's a strawman argument to say that, "well, Lisp is more powerful than assembly." Of course. But is it more powerful than C#? Maybe, but the Lisp advocate should be the one asked for proof.

<comment><USER2> iirc, the Lisp guy did offer some proof. Like macros.

One aspect that should be remembered is availability of libraries to do your tasks. I've read that CL just did not have a good enough set to use. Reddit was written in Lisp and then moved to python. One reason was threads, the other was that py had a lot of stable libs that could be reused.</comment></comment></comment>


Why Cory Doctorow Thinks Apple's Disappearing Headphone Jack Should Scare You - <AUTHOR> http://www.fastcompany.com/3062741/the-iphones-disappearing-headphone-jack-reason-for-concern <comment><USER2> Fortunately Apple has significant competition in this space, which means those of us already using a competitor's phone don't have to care, and everybody who was using Apple's phones can choose another brand if analog out is important to them. I don't think Apple fully appreciates that they no longer have the power to set the standard for this kind of thing any more.

<comment><USER3> > I don't think Apple fully appreciates that they no longer have the power to > set the standard for this kind of thing any more.

I can totally see Apple getting away with this, however, only time can tell.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The market will decide. Apple sells around 70M phones a quarter, time will tell. Corey is free to buy whatever phone he wants.

<comment><USER5> Exactly. If Cory's so concerned about this, making your own phone has never been easier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Today it's easy to record streamed music from the analog headphone jack on the phone, and even to convert the stream back to digital and transmit it in real time to someone else."

Is this really that common nowadays?

Personally I think the move is more of a way of selling Apple/Beats headphones than any DRM/Anti-piracy stuff.

<comment><USER7> Pirating anything is not statistically common. Loss figures have always been completely fictitious and DRM has always been a hammer in search of a nail.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> "The end-to-end digital audio stack will allow for higher quality audio"

Highly unlikely. For starters, most people already use cheap earbuds which negate any advantage whatsoever.

Plus, environmental noise is practically irrelevant over the short distances of a headphone cable, so you're not gaining anything by going digital for the lat few feet.

In theory, headphone manufacturers could attach matched digital-audio converters (DACs) that take into account the headphones' characteristics, but in reality, I suspect blind A/B tests will reveal nobody can tell the difference.

The reality is the potential upside is meager, and the potential downside is huge.

</comment><comment><USER9> None of riaa/dmca/drm can prevent pirate from cutting apple headphones with knife and receiving audio directly from speaker wires, so drm argument is pretty weak. What is really worrying me is that "one doesn't simply plug quality 3.5-headphones into lightning socket".

</comment><comment><USER10> Am I the only one who wondered just who this Cory Doctorow person is?

<comment><USER11> Round these parts? Probably. Or you're in the minority.</comment></comment>


Our data centers now work harder when the sun shines and wind blows - <AUTHOR> https://blog.google/inside-google/infrastructure/data-centers-work-harder-sun-shines-wind-blows <comment><USER2> This is the future. Using algorithms to optimize usage of renewable energy. Not only will it be lower carbon, it will be cheaper. What's interesting is they describe it working on forecasts (for wind and sun) instead of instantaneous renewable production. I wonder what the rationale for that was? Basing the algorithm on instantaneous information should be more accurate and thus give better savings, but maybe it varied too much to reliably run the loads they want.

Imagine when your fridge can do this: freeze extra cold when the sun is shining (or wind is blowing), don't run the compressor when it's not, only run the blower after you open the door to move that extra cold from the freezer, allow a slightly larger temperature range, and of course run as necessary to avoid spoilage. It's not a simple algorithm, it has to handle various timeframes, such as solar being a daily cycle except there's less in winter and can go for a week or more with very little (storm/overcast). Maybe it could also use a bit of "learning" like the Nest thermostats to also optimize predicted usage.

I know of one commercial product that sort of does this: the Zappi electric car charger. If you have grid-tied solar, it measures the current being fed back to the grid and adjusts the charging current to match. So if a cloud goes over your house, or you turn on a big appliance, the charger reduces the power to the car by the same amount. This maximizes the use of your own solar energy and minimizes the use of grid energy.

[https://myenergi.com/product/zappi/](https://myenergi.com/product/zappi/)

<comment><USER3> > Imagine when your fridge can do this

I've been posting for years that an effective grid "battery" is internet connected refrigerators, water heaters, A/C, car chargers, etc., that only run when power is cheap, i.e. when solar/wind is providing excess power.

A great deal of our demand for electricity is elastic and shiftable, which will eliminate a huge chunk of the need for grid batteries.

Glad to see this finally gaining some traction!

<comment><USER4> This will only work with fine-grained energy pricing (on the scale of minutes) and smart meters.

Does this exist anywhere in the world?

<comment><USER5> It works well if you can aggregate the distributed resources so they're large enough to bid at the wholesale level.

<comment><USER6> The market is a little more dynamic than that, wholesale bidding into the ISOs is still the biggest option but many utilities run load shifting programs of various sizes as well.

Still, the conclusion is like you said. There's basically no real-world scenario where it makes sense for a residential customer to go it alone, because they can make at most a couple hundred bucks a year. So makes sense for their device companies or someone else to figure it out with utility and pay thousands of homeowners to agree to participate. Ohmconnect has a cool service in California.

<comment><USER5> Demand response programs are great because of their scale and ability to provide incentives and command and control without directly interacting with the markets.

The real big thing is aggregating the aggregations. Distributed Energy Management Systems (DERMS) / Virtual Power Plant Management Systems are an active research topic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Optimizing for this is a perfect task to throw at a simple market. Especially because actually reworking the software to take advantage of resources at different times is often going to require a decent amount of work by engineers.

One way to do it would be assign various jobs a value, (which could be dynamic e.g. it might get more important as information becomes stale) and have them bid on compute power. You could make the value virtual.

Or you could use real money. This is the premise behind EC2's spot instances. So when power is abundant, your prices drop and the relevant jobs kick off.

Using real market prices makes sense especially if you're renting out computing power, most customers will be happy to adjust workloads to save money.

Even if it's entirely internal, it's good to have a facility to "optimize for cost" and then report the savings. That's helpful to get the engineering resources devoted towards it, because "I saved $X" is a great bullet point to put in anyone's promotion packet or to base a bonus on.

<comment><USER8> In the UK households used to be able to get economy 7 electricity, which meant cheap electricity at night (I'd guess for 7 hours?).

I've wanted to have realtime pricing like that for a while, it seems to be becoming available again.

I honestly thought that was what the advanced electricity meter roll-out was going to do; but it seems not.

More direct energy cost to service price charged seems like a good thing in general.

<comment><USER9> TOU pricing is pretty widespread at this point; I have it in a medium-sized city in Canada, and intentionally run laundry (electric dryer) in the evening when power is half the cost of daytime use. With EVs coming online and being set up to charge at night, it would definitely be nice to have a minute by minute spot pricing scheme, though, then you'd basically have a mechanism for using the chargers and other intelligent devices on the consumption side as an intelligent buffer.

It's goofy, but another one is situations where you have a lot of stored heat energy, thinking like pools, hot tubs, hot water heaters, etc— all those things could be activated in response to spot pricing with pretty simple policies (I want a shower of at least X degrees at 7am, I want the hot tub at at least Y degrees by 9pm, etc).

<comment><USER10> I think when widespread overnight charging of EV's is a thing cheap evening electricity will be phased out

<comment><USER9> Even in that world, you'd still want a way to manage the load through the night so that you don't have all the chargers clicking on at 11pm and then when the cars are full have a few hours later, demand craters until morning.

With renewables the incentives for load management become even higher (per this article). The real next step after second-by-second billing would be setting up chargers with backfeeding capabilities/policies, so that you have an arrangement with your employer to charge your car at work on cheap daytime solar power, sell it back into the grid during the evening rush, then charge up again on overnight base load. Most EV batteries are way overspecced for what people need in daily use, so as long as you have a special "charge me to full and stay there" mode you can switch into, there'd be no reason (other than a bit of wear and tear) not to cycle your battery like this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is a really good argument for carbon taxation to appropriately increase the cost of dirty energy. Send the correct price signal everywhere rather than making your own software do the equivalent of looking out the window at the weather and trying to decide if it's a sunny or rainy or windy or clam day, and thus if solar or wind generation is making the grid cleaner. Or if instead those are likely offline and the grid is dirtier today.

Best thing. Then you incentivize a cleaner grid overall and you don't even have to worry eventually about this kind of thing.

<comment><USER12> In particular a revenue neutral carbon tax with dividend should be politically as uncontroversial as it gets because it is also economically equitable. It's totally perplexing to me why these relatively low-hanging fruit solutions are not being pursued.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It seems that it must be a really difficult problem to work out the optimal solution for having spare capacity to allow time/location shifting of workloads to minimize carbon per unit of compute.

This Dell paper[0] suggests that 16% of the carbon over a typical server lifecycle is from the manufacture, so you probably don't want a server sitting there unused for 23 hours per day, since the overall carbon/compute ratio would be worse overall.

The post doesn't mention this metric, but it would be really nice to see something more detailed in time - especially with this overall efficiency of the server/datacentre lifecycle in mind, rather than just energy consumed from use.

[0]: [https://i.dell.com/sites/csdocuments/CorpComm_Docs/en/carbon...](https://i.dell.com/sites/csdocuments/CorpComm_Docs/en/carbon- footprint-poweredge-r640.pdf)

<comment><USER14> Carbon consumed in building a server is sunk cost and would be paid independent of whether the server does any kind of carbon-footprint-aware load shifting.

Assuming the server is "sitting unused for 23 hours a day" is the wrong model for what this work changed. You're assuming the server could be running at 50% duty cycle vs. 100% duty cyle. It isn't; since we're talking the batch load, there's a roughly fixed amount of low-priority work to be done and doubling the amount of CPU active-duty time alotted to doing the work doesn't get the work done faster (the details on that are complicated, but that's the right model for what Google's describing here). One should model the duty cycle as fixed relative to the processor (i.e. "This global datacenter architecture, over the course of its life, will do a fixed N units of computronium work on these batch tasks") and then ask whether that work should be done using coal to power the electrons or wind.

<comment><USER15> Suppose I'm building a new datacenter that I want to do some constant amount of work each day. It doesn't matter the time of day. I can either power it with solar power, in which case it will run for 1/Y of the day, or with coal power, in which case it will run 100% of the day. If it only runs for 1/Y of the day, then I will need to buy Y times as many computers in the solar scenario than in the coal scenario.

If Y = 2 and only 16% of the carbon in a typical coal-powered computer's lifetime is from the manufacture, then solar makes sense - solar is 2*16% = 32% of the carbon of coal. But if Y = 10 - so it's running 10% of the time, meaning there need to be 10x as many computers built - and 16% of the carbon is from the manufacture, then solar power is actually worse for the environment than coal power: solar takes 60% more carbon than coal power.

Of course, this is a vastly simplified situation, but it points to the idea that we need to at least consider the carbon cost of manufacturing.

<comment><USER14> But again, that's the thing. There is only 1/Y work to do in the day; it's batch work. The work in this case is constrained on the input side, not the CPU resources side; building 1 or 2 or 1,000 nodes to do the work won't decrease how expensive it is to do the work (in fact, building more computers than you need will make it cost more!).

... so why does Google build more computers than they need? Keep in mind that at Google scale, they're always and forever building "As many computers as we can possibly afford to" under the assumption that there will always be work for those machines to do. You and I may need to consider cost of manufacturing; _Google_ doesn't. They always have the "Build datacenter infrastructure" cranked to an 11 (more accurately, they are following an N-year plan of construction that is extremely expensive to modify).

That's the breakdown between Google's way of thinking and the way of thinking that you've presented: Google's cost of manufacture is fixed. Those computers will be built, whether or not they're going to also then run green-streamlined batch jobs. The limiting factor on the batch work is only so much work is generated in a day, and the rate the work is completed is already good enough that completing it in half the time yields no marginal value. So may as well complete it using sun instead of coal.

<comment><USER13> > Google's cost of manufacture is fixed.

That may well be the way you (and most likely Google) currently look at it, but the argument presented seems to be that everything other than where you run some batch tasks is all fixed.

Assuming everything else is fixed does make the optimisation easier, though surely nearly everything is up for debate if we're actually talking about minimising the overall footprint of a compute task?

Using fossil fuels rather than allowing these fixed costs you mention to sit idle - there is a point where your carbon/CPU cycle would actually go up by not using fossil fuels some of the time (though I am assuming less carbon emitted for a unit of power than manufacture cost).

I appreciate they are ever-expanding and predicting where non-movable workloads are going to need to be run etc etc, and I'm not suggesting there are easy answers.

<comment><USER14> Is the question on the table whether, all other things being equal, this change would decrease carbon output per unit work completed, or is the question whether Google is greener after this change?

For the latter question, we have insufficient data. Google's datacenter infrastructure is huge and complicated, and if one factors in all the interdependencies and purchased carbon offsets, one needs way more data than this announcement blurb gives out to answer that question. Maybe they have an additional process to determine whether their most carbon-negative datacenters can be switched off during peak coal-use and this work unblocked them from enabling that feature? We don't know.

For the former question, yes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> FWIW, for the build2 project we host our own CI servers on premesis and the power supply is supplemented by a solar array. We have configured our daily package rebuild window to coincide with the maximum solar output so that on a sunny day it is all done using renewable energy.

</comment><comment><USER17> (Off-topic, but regarding this site)

Am I crazy or is this website capturing down-button clicks and ignoring them? I typically use down and up to slowly scroll as I read an article. This page is driving me nuts.

<comment><USER18> bizarrely it's only the down button (not the up button)

<comment><USER19> Yeah, was able to replicate this on Chrome 81.0.4044.113 on Windows. Weird.

<comment><USER20> PageDown still works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Seems like an intuitively good idea to me! It'd be great to see how effective this change was.

Regardless of this change, I wonder if they share their forecasted non- renewable energy needs with their energy supplier so that the energy supplier can prepare for changes to the expected base load.

Do any factories or other energy intensive operations do this?

<comment><USER22> It's probably not at the same level of granularity that Google is trying to accomplish here, but I believe that power-hungry commercial systems have tried to move to when power is cheapest for many years now.

Aluminum Foundries in particular are extremely power intensive and have been run during off-peak times (or are built in areas with cheap plentiful electricity like nearby hydro-electric dams).

Still, i'd love to see this concept made a lot easier for the average consumer. Many people already have smart thermostats, why can't that talk to my power generation company and allow me to over heat/cool when the impact is lowest? Why can't my dish washer run automatically when it would impact the world the least? Why can't my EV automatically charge when power is most available?

I know most of those things are possible, but they sure as hell aren't easy, and IMO they won't truly have an impact until they're on by default and don't require the user to do much of anything.

These things seem like they are easily doable, but we just need the different industries to work together to come up with ways to have all of this stuff interoperate.

<comment><USER23> Some power companies are integrating with your smart thermostat and may pre- cool in some case. Example, APS in Arizona... \--- During an event, how will my thermostat be adjusted?  At the start of an event, your thermostat temperature will be automatically adjusted up a few degrees above the current temperature.  Each event will typically last an average of 2 hours, and will typically occur between 3 p.m. and 8 p.m. Events typically will not occur on holidays.  In some cases, your thermostat temperature may be adjusted down a few degrees prior to the event to pre-cool the home and ensure your comfort during an event.  Once the event is over, your thermostat will return to its normal set point and/or schedule.

<comment><USER24> ComEd in Chicago can do this with Nest thermostats as well. At the time I had a Nest thermostat, they actually paid people to enable this. And I basically made back most of the cost of my Nest that way. (Before selling it off for a less cloud-connected thermostat.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> COO from Tomorrow here (who provides the CO2 forecast data to Google). Happy to answer any questions!

<comment><USER25> Great collab with Google! They've been probably the most serious corporate wrt getting all-renewable offsets for their operations... this is helping them reach the next milestone where the renewable offsets are time-matched. Great example of being serious about this stuff rather than just greenwashing.

It sounds like this project is for their own operations. Have you guys thought about how to offer this closer to a turnkey cloudops SASS / API? What kinds of abstractions would you present to developers building non-time-critical compute loads?

Could be a great differentiator for GCP vs. AWS (I have heard of some companies choosing GCP over AWS due to Google's green energy cloud). And for you guys, the only thing better than Google being a customer is all of Google's customers being your customers.

<comment><USER25> Also, how can we avoid the potential for unintended consequences where this tech makes Google "greener" while GCP users become less green?

If a data center has (roughly, to a first-order approximation) fixed compute capacity at any point in time, and we assume that any capacity not being used by Google themselves is made available to GCP, then wouldn't Google reserving the "green" hours for themselves drive the remaining "dirty" hours onto the GCP spot markets?

Is there a cloud market design that addresses this tension between maximizing utilization and having desirable or 'premium' compute hours?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> While the green angle on this story is definitely good to highlight, I wonder if they're seeing any cost savings too?

Solar and wind on the grid increase supply, which should drive down price per KwH (of course, the equation isn't _quite_ that simple, since demand in most of the world near human population centers is also highest during the day).

<comment><USER26> The pessimist in me says that they're only doing this in case a carbon tax passes, they'll be able to keep their pricing competitive.

<comment><USER27> I think this has very little to do with a carbon tax and everything about external and internal marketing. They are committed to using renewable power.

<comment><USER28> They bought enough carbon credits to offset their emissions but it still left a bitter taste because data centers run 24 hours a day.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> globular-toast I've had an idea for the longest time that we should get rid of all the processes we've put in place to deliver everything "on-demand" and instead work with nature to get what we can.

What I mean by this is that instead of deciding "I want to drive 200 miles to the beach" and buying a tank of petrol, you would instead wait for favourable wind/solar conditions in order to "save up" the energy you need such that you can afford to drive to the beach. If you are unfortunate one year you might only end up with half of what you need, but you'll still be able to do something.

This goes for things like food too. Stop demanding the same food year round. Instead work with the seasons and eat what is available locally at that time of year.

This would be such a huge boost to happiness. You can't see light if it's light all the time. We just don't know how great our lives are because we simply expect it to all be available at all the time. Expectations are simply assimilated and become invisible very quickly. Not only that but it turns out that meeting these expectations comes at a huge price. Let's instead take what nature gives us, but no more.

</comment><comment><USER29> Interesting! Although there aren't any metrics on how much load is actually balanced this way. The only plot doesn't have y-axis labels.

</comment><comment><USER30> I frequently criticize Google harshly for everything from search becoming more and more useless to pushing Chrome way to hard.

Seems some people at Google still hasn't got the memo yet that the "not evil" days are now a thing of the past. This looks amazing and more like something I would expect from old Google.

</comment><comment><USER31> Not sure I'm very impressed by the plot they show here. The results during the day looks ok, but then they only translate two nightly peaks (low carbon) into one slightly larger... couldn't even more of the work be done at night... also it is strange that there is a dip in both ends of the plot (maybe they just plot one 24h period, ignoring the previous day's load and the next day's load... I think it would be more appropriate to consider previous/day as well, as a 24h snapshot over a multiday view)

A more interesting measure would be the actual reduction in CO2 emissions.

</comment><comment><USER32> Does anyone know of a good estimate for how much energy and emissions a typical Google search requires?

</comment><comment><USER33> Everyone wanting to really understand what is going on with the new green economy and these platitudes should watch Michael Moore's nee documentary he just released free on YouTube called Planet of the Humans. [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE)

<comment><USER25> This documentary is without nuance and without pragmatism. And it criticizes without proposing a path forward -- it's a bunch of cheap pot-shots, and it demands perfection instead of proposing progress.

Yes, there are valid criticisms. Wind turbines are made of unrecyclable fiberglass. It takes energy to build them (truck rolls to the site, concrete for the foundations), and it's important to make sure the energy return on energy invested is net positive. We use fossil fuels to produce these renewables technologies. That's all true, but not insurmountable.

They say battery storage makes up only a tiny percent of the needed capacity to overcome renewable intermittency. Sure, but it also omits how solar has dropped two orders of magnitude in price over the last few decades as we've built more of it and gotten better at making them (the "learning curve").

It follows a group of Vermont hikers hiking to a wind turbine site and then being NIMBY about it, but none of them talk about where their energy SHOULD come from.

Look, it raises a lot of critical questions. But it also seems to expect a single magic pill that just doesn't exist. 2/3's of the way through they talk about the misrepresentations in biomass and point out how many organizations seem to be both for it and against it. "Which side are they really on?" says the classic accusatory documentary voiceover with scary music. Well, it's complicated! Clearly you don't want to burn all the forests all at once. And yeah, if you burn pressure-treated wood, those chemicals go into the local community. At the same time, wood does grow back. The nuance that's missing in this documentary is questions like "how many acres of rotationally-harvested woodlands are required to power a 1MW biomass plant sustainably in perpetuity? And can such projects exist in practice?"

Biomass isn't a panacea solution, and the HN startup mindset of "can I scale up a technology to dominate everything" doesn't apply because biomass has limits to it's scalability. It's just one of many tools, and the problem about this documentary is it can't envision a future where many tools are used together. When a Sierra Club exec is questioned about biomass, they kept the part where she says their "position is nuanced", but then they cut to something else without explaining that nuance. That's lazy documentary filming.

The complicated thing about energy is there is no silver bullet. This documentary finds the bad in each technology without considering how all the pieces _could_ fit together. It presents the bad sides of each technology as if that should disqualify the tech instead of asking how can we improve each over time. There aren't easy answers to these questions, but this documentary just wallows in how bad everything is without asking the hard questions about how things can be made to work or what the alternative of doing nothing is.

<comment><USER34> > Yes, there are valid criticisms. Wind turbines are made of unrecyclable > fiberglass. It takes energy to build them (truck rolls to the site, concrete > for the foundations), and it's important to make sure the energy return on > energy invested is net positive. We use fossil fuels to produce these > renewables technologies. That's all true, but not insurmountable.

These turbine blades can be broken down into pellet insulation or used as feedstock for cement kilns. It's a supply chain and economic incentive issue, not an unsolved technology issue.

I can't speak to Moore's beliefs, but his documentaries (IMHO) are designed to inflame, not to have an intelligent discussion about complex problems that require complex solutions. They are "clickbait" disguised as objective information.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Our data centers now run slower when it's cloudy and there's no wind.

</comment><comment><USER36> Imagine climate modeling super computers that are carbon neutral.

</comment><comment> qu-everything Just a marketing device. Carbon neutral since 2007? Let me laugh in CO2, "green energies" are nowhere near carbon neutral. See planet of the humans by Moore.

</comment><comment><USER37> I like the animated illustration; very pleasant.

</comment><comment><USER38> That headline reads more like a bug report than a press release.

"Here's a barge full of coal. Maybe you can fix it with that."

</comment><comment><USER39> This is beautiful.

</comment><comment><USER40> what a pity to know that they will be mining more of our personal data when we are chilling with the sunshine.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h They're doing exactly the same amount of work, just time-shifted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> So Skynet will now prefer very sunny weather with strong consistent winds?

</comment><comment><USER42> Hope they crash some day too so you can stop tracking people :). How long does it take until this get -votes

</comment><comment><USER43> Good idea, but I can't help but see this as marketing spin over the alternative title of the same story

"Google: Data centers now perform LESS when the sun is not shining or the wind is not blowing"

<comment><USER44> I don't see your point. That alternative title is exactly as accurate, so it seems like a good idea to pick the version that sounds a bit better and is easier to understand.

<comment><USER43> Of course its a better idea to pick the version that sounds better. That's what I said; I know both are accurate.

My point is that by tying performance to environmental factors, you get a boost when things are great but then can have troubles when things are not great. Anyone familiar with solar panels already knows this, but if the correlation is obscured, it could be surprising. The article didn't mention a specific performance gain, but if we say you get an X% performance gain when the sun is out, it also means you get a similar X% performance loss when the sun is not out. Users of the system will get used to the improvement, which becomes the new standard, and then a particularly dreary season comes in with weeks of cloud cover, and suddenly there is concern about the degradation of service.

(Like I said, it's still a good idea, it's efficient use of resources, but the PR is funny, that's all.)

<comment><USER5> Encouraging and incentivizing compute/electricity demand to be time flexible provides the opportunity for cost savings and emissions reductions.

The greater the flexibility, the greater the savings when demand can be smoothed out to better allocate resources and allow easier forecasting.

If compute jobs that are run on demand can be deferred a few hours and run during a time period, that allows resources to better utilized. Like charging an EV overnight, but better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I hope this doesn't add to much cost to their cloud customers' bills.

They've worked so hard to sell their AI solutions to the fossil fuel industry, lately, so they can help them extract and burn more oil and gas[0].

[0] [https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/1/3/21030688/google- amazon-a...](https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/1/3/21030688/google-amazon-ai- oil-gas)

<comment><USER46> Why would AI solutions help the fossil fuel industry burn more oil and gas? The fossil fuel industry sells oil and gas to others to burn, it doesn't light the stuff up itself for fun.

<comment><USER45> Almost all the oil we extract must be burned. There's far too little need for oil as a non-energy source, and there's a very good reason why the price of WTI is so low these days. The industry simply cannot find enough customers to burn it.

How can Google, while helping others extract as much oil as possible, can still pretend it may not end up being burned?

It's like a a drug dealer saying "I'm definitely not helping anyone _taking_ drugs. I'm only _selling_ it, they stay them somewhere if they please. Don't blame me".

<comment><USER46> You can make this argument more general (and IMO, even more ridiculous):

Fossil fuels are global commodities. Anyone who reduces their oil consumption is reducing demand for those global commodities, which makes them cheaper. Making them cheaper makes renewable energy less competitive, which discourages investment, which means as a society we keep using fossil fuels for longer, which means in the end we produce _more_ carbon.

Ergo, anyone who tries to reduce their fossil fuel consumption by not flying, not driving, or turning off the A/C, is actually _more_ responsible for destroying the planet.

<comment><USER45> You're making the argument that reducing your demand for something does not reduce the demand for that thing, because demanding less of something makes others demand it more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> While the story is very positive and encouraging --

Unfortunately an unintended side consequence of these kinds of efforts (unless you're very conscientious about maintaining the correct incentives, generally through pricing) is sometimes that the gains in energy efficiency and savings are clawed back by an _increase_ in overall energy consumption because it's gotten effectively cheaper to operate for the same number of compute cycles.

Just like with energy efficient LED light bulbs, although the overall energy use goes down, often it doesn't go down as much as it could have ideally, because people start lighting places that _didn 't_ have light before, because it's gotten so much more affordable to do so!

Or like when you add highway lane capacity, traffic gets worse...

Or in this case, the Google video engineers come up with new useless filters and resolutions to occupy the newly freed-up compute capacity.

Just something to be aware of. The people who do this have to monitor and put in place controls so that the outcome is what they intended. Otherwise people are more clever than you think.

<comment><USER48> If it is still an improvement in both end usage and utility isn't that letting the perfect be the enemy of the good?

LEDS have to be one of the worst possible example for claims of induced demand as a bad thing given that the efficency gains outstripped proliferation of additional always on devices and a cellphone per person.

While Induced Demand may exist it too has its saturating limits of diminished returns.</comment></comment>


TunnelBear Publishes Security Audit - <AUTHOR> https://www.tunnelbear.com/blog/tunnelbear_public_security_audit/ <comment><USER2> Report PDF: [https://cure53.de/summary- report_tunnelbear.pdf](https://cure53.de/summary-report_tunnelbear.pdf)

The test looks good, down from 3 criticals and 3 high to just 1 high. I'd be interested if they could expand on the 4 medium findings found. It's not the full report.

<comment><USER3> It appears to be down from 3 criticals and _3 high_ , not 1 high?

<comment><USER2> Fixed, thanks :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Some time ago, decompiled the Windows client and presented my findings here: [https://hackernoon.com/poking-the-bear-is-tunnelbears- client...](https://hackernoon.com/poking-the-bear-is-tunnelbears-client-safe- to-use-5960f756f4ea)

<comment><USER5> I still have issues with a VPN provider who insists on using their VPN client.

<comment><USER6> Are there any nice free VPN Clients out there? I haven't been very lucky in finding any in the OS X realm

<comment><USER7> You can use the MacOS Network settings to connect to most types of VPN (hit "+" and fill in the forms to add a new connection). For free, open-source clients, Tunnelblick is very common.

<comment><USER8> macOS and iOS don't support OpenVPN with the built-in client. You can use strongSwan-based VPNs (e.g., as would be deployed through Algo) or Cisco, but for OpenVPN you'll need a custom client which, unfortunately, very likely brings along its own .kext.

<comment> X-Istence TunnelBlick comes with a tun/tap kext that is signed. This is not required on systems where Apple already has tun/tap support compiled in (not sure when that started, but it's been a long time)

From the known issues page:

"If you are running on OS X 10.6.8 or higher and using OpenVPN 2.3.4 or higher and using a TUN device, the default Tunnelblick setting to "Load Tun Automatically" (on the "Advanced" settings window) will avoid this problem by not loading the tun kext — OS X's built-in "utun" device will be used instead of a "tun" device."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Can official binaries be independently reproduced from published sources by members of the public?

If no, then an audit has little to no value as it still implies trusting the vendor not to fudge the binaries or, more broadly, be malicious.

<comment><USER10> I think your judgment is too harsh.

Very few software deployment systems make it possible for binaries to be independently reproduced from published sources by the public. AFAIK, it's limited to systems like Nix, Guix, recent Debian, and other participants in the Reproducible Builds project.

However, even within those systems, if you are downloading a compiled binary instead of building it yourself, how can you be sure that you get the "right" binary every time? Does the binary download system periodically "challenge" the binary provider by building from source and comparing with the downloaded binary? If so, does it report its findings anywhere?

It seems to me that even within a software deployment system that enables users to reproduce binaries, you still end up trusting whoever runs the deployment system, because there are no methods of challenging the reproducibility in a meaningful way. The systems I mentioned above sign the binaries, which means that you implicitly trust the holder of the signing key to send you the right binary. But it doesn't mean anything about the relationship of the binary to some source code.

Having said that, if I am using some program by downloading binaries, I am trusting whoever provides the binaries. If I trust them, then a source code audit is valuable to me, even though I can't be sure the compiled binary is related to the source code.

<comment><USER9> There's NO value in 3rd party vouching for the security (read, quality) of some specific version of the software, because this opinion will be rendered null and void with the next software update.

There is some value in 3rd party verifying the system design (the architecture, the protocol, etc.) and general engineering practices in the company, but this still hinges on the need to trust this company not to be (or being coerced to be) malicious. TunnelBear hasn't established the latter, so - yes, there's little to no value in former. There is some marketing value in it though.

PS. Zimmerman's original secure VoIP project was rooted in the idea of reproducible builds. It was open source, but with a license that prohibited any use except for verifying binary builds. It was 20 (?) years ago.

<comment><USER11> "NO value" is a huge stretch IMO. Sure, it's entirely possible for gaping security holes to be introduced in future releases, but if past versions have been consistently vouched for as secure, that's still going to increase my confidence in future versions being secure. Or if I'm paranoid, then where possible I can just stick to a specific version which has been vouched for as secure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> TunnelBear is a great product, one which I've been using for a few years, and I trust them with my business. I wish services like Netflix didn't blacklist their IPs, but it's easy enough to get content off alternative sites when I'm traveling outside the US.

Thanks for the good work!

<comment><USER13> What do you do when you want to watch Netflix while traveling outside of the US?

<comment><USER14> I just used Cloak while in Poland a few weeks ago with HBO Go (don't think i watched in any netflix).

<comment><USER13> thanks - I'm going to try that. I'm in Italy right now and a show I was watching isn't available!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The claims of transparency would be a bit more meaningful if they simply published their source code. It is hard to imagine anything too precious to disclose in the code.

Instead what we have is a pdf (4 pages long) with the title "TunnelBear Security Assessment Summary 07.2017" and an equally long web page claiming how awesome and transparent this is.

</comment><comment><USER16> Never trust a 3rd party VPN for anything sensitive ever, period. Words of assurance and "security audits" are completely meaningless. HTTPS interception and forwarding is a trivial thing to do. For the public who are unable to setup their own VPN, they will have to accept that everything they do is being monitored by a random internet company rather than their ISP now.

There can be some use for these services if you are very careful with everything you do while connected. But the risk of transmitting usernames, emails, passwords, and CC numbers accidentally while still connected is too great IMO.

<comment><USER17> I'd rather give my internet traffic to a company that doesn't sell my info versus my ISP, which almost certainly would sell my info.

<comment><USER18> A VPN provider is no different than ISP.

Seriously. Both get paid and provide Internet connectivity. Both have incentives to do something to your traffic, would it have no negative consequences (financial, legal or just moral) for them.

The only non-technical difference is that VPNs have a lot of competition (so free market actually works) and _in some countries /areas_ telcos have near- monopolistic positions.

That doesn't mean that VPNs are universal friends of your privacy and ISPs are its foes. Just that there is some disbalance.

<comment><USER17> Yeah, I agree. I don't think there's an intrinsic good guy/bad guy. But I have pretty much zero faith in ISPs in Canada. Maybe it's better where you live.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Tunnelbear is a dead-simple VPN (like, "so easy Mom can do it" simple) and their branding is killer. Who doesn't love cuddly privacy bears?

</comment><comment><USER20> GetCloak has also done a 3rd party audit, and is planning their next one: [https://support.getcloak.com/faq/technology/#have-you-had- an...](https://support.getcloak.com/faq/technology/#have-you-had-any-third- party-security-audits)

<comment><USER17> Are there results anywhere? Can't seem to find anything on their link to [https://www.securityinnovation.com/](https://www.securityinnovation.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Great, what happens to the release iterations between now and when the next test is going to be conducted? Show me the build logs, what changes, etc.

</comment><comment><USER22> Is there some way to be notified of a TunnelBear ownership change? For example, if Facebook buys them, how would we know?

<comment><USER23> Google news alerts. Alternatively you can pay someone to do it for you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> OFFTOPIC: Does anyone know whether TunnelBear will be available for Linux (or at least Firefox) one day?

<comment><USER25> [https://www.tunnelbear.com/blog/linux_support/](https://www.tunnelbear.com/blog/linux_support/)

Their Linux support is limited (ie no client), but it is there. You just need to do the configurations (somewhat) manually. Works pretty well when I used it a few months ago on my Mint box.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Ironic, I cant even enter the tunnelbear website in my country. (Turkey) :/</comment>


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