Keyless Cars and Their Carbon Monoxide Toll - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/13/business/deadly-convenience-keyless-cars-and-their-carbon-monoxide-toll.html <comment><USER4> I had a pretty scary run in with CO from my car once and it had nothing to do with the keyless fob. My car with gasoline direct injection had two bad injectors fail while I was driving home. It went into limp mode. When I got home I inserted the OBD2 scanner to diagnose the issue in the garage. Because it was in limp mode, the engine was running rich and I guess producing a lot of CO in my garage. In the roughly 5 minutes it took me to start the car, get the code, and shut it off, it had produced a dangerous level of CO. I left the garage and went inside. About 30 minutes later while I was in bed my Nest smoke/CO detectors alerted me to CO in the hallway connecting my house to the garage. I ventilated the entire house and garage and the alarm stopped. I did get a light headache from the short exposure.

Moral of the story, never run a car inside the garage with the door closed and always have CO detectors throughout the house. Nest probably saved my life that night from my own mistake.

If we want a more general solution, we should look beyond the keyless fob and just make CO detectors a requirement. You don't need fancy ones like Nest. Cheaper ones that cost 20 dollars still works.

<comment><USER5> Attached garages are really a terrible misfeature, which will be emblematic for future generations (as they already are for those overseas) of our poor taste and judgement. No matter how ugly the house, it would be a lot more pleasant without the garage. In addition to the dangers cited here, garages make houses less effective at their primary purposes: controlling the movement of air, moisture, and heat. The garage door itself is a big part of that, since every time it opens and closes it opens the house completely to the outdoors. Automobiles bring moisture, dirt, heat, and noxious chemicals into the garage and thence into the house. I've never rented a house and been sorry there was no attached garage. If I ever build my own house it won't have one either.

<comment><USER6> I completely disagree with you. It's an enormous convenience in poor weather, with very minor risks that are easily mitigated (I can't believe there is anyone that doesn't have a CO detector and smoke detector at least on every floor, it should be illegal not to have them) and they can be very easily insulated. I have had both and I'd never have a place without a garage or carport.

<comment><USER7> This forum has a lot of Californians, who either never have or at least no longer regularly feel 30F. Let alone -20F.

Also, as of 2011-ish, CO detectors are required by law in CA if you have an attached garage, a fireplace, or gas heat.

<comment><USER6> I'd also trade it for open space on my lot (since usually the attached garage has less driveway & structure footprint). But your point is well taken.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is certainly an interesting case study in the pitfalls of behavioral design, but one important detail that the story glosses over is how rare these incidents are:

 _More than two dozen people [have been] killed by carbon monoxide nationwide since 2006 after a keyless-ignition vehicle was inadvertently left running in a garage._

On average, that's two deaths a year in a country of more than 260 million passenger vehicles.[1] These accidental deaths are tragic, but it's actually impressive how infrequently they occur.

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

<comment><USER8> You are asking the wrong question here.

The right question to ask is how many CO deaths from accidentally leaving the car running in the garage were happening _before_ the introduction of key fobs vs. now.

The difference amounts to the multitude of easily avoidable deaths that lie entirely on the auto manufacturer's shoulders.

A dozen people is a dozen people too many.

Stopping the engine when exiting the car with a fob should be the default, as it is consistent with the old, physical key behavior - and will prevent someone from driving off with your car while you have the key (as happened to someone in the thread).

<comment><USER9> Stopping the engine when one exits the car is NOT consistent with the old physical key behavior. One had to actually turn the car off. I'm not sure how that is different today. Before you removed the key, nor you press a button. But you still had to take an action. It wasn't automatic

<comment><USER10> Maybe it's just because I'm used to physical keys but the reflex seems different. I've caught myself forgetting to turn off rentals that don't have a physical key. But I'm open to chalking it up to different habits.

<comment><USER11> By forget you mean you opened the door and instantly realised your mistake because of the alarm it triggered?

<comment><USER12> Wait, you can't open your door with keyless cars? What about in winter when your car is running to heat up and you get out to clear your windscreen?

<comment><USER13> You can, it just emits a loud tone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> >Toyota models, including Lexus, have figured in almost half of the carbon monoxide fatalities and injuries identified by The Times. Toyota says its keyless ignition system "meets or exceeds all relevant federal safety standards."

That's quite significant, and I wonder why that is?

I have a hypothesis:

Personally I've had problems with Toyotas (specifically, Prius GenIII and Camry XV50) where trying to shut off the car _too fast_ , eg using "muscle memory," results in the car not shutting off.

At first glance (and according to the manual), the steps to shutting off the Prius / Camry _appear_ to be:

1\. Shift the car into Park.

2\. Press the ignition button.

3\. Exit the vehicle.

Simple, right?

Well, it's not. If you don't _wait ~1 second_ between step 1 and step 2, the car has a race condition where it doesn't realize that you already put it in Park, so it displays a "Shift to Park" message and fails to shut down. To fix, you have to shift the car into Reverse (or really, Anything-But-Park), shift it _back_ into Park, and press the button again.

This sequence is extremely confusing, especially if you don't notice the error message. Neither conventional shifters nor conventional key-based ignitions make you wait -- when you put it in gear, it's in gear!

Toyota's system has _hidden state_ that's related, but separate from the physical movements of the shift lever and the start button (unlike a conventional key and shifter).

So if you want to reliably shut off the car, here are the _actual_ steps to shutting down a Prius / Camry:

1\. Shift the car into Park.

2\. Wait a beat (for the vehicle to realize it's in Park).

3\. Press the ignition button.

4\. Exit the vehicle.

The proper way for Toyota to do it would have been to buffer the inputs in order, so the same sequence of actions always results in the same result, and the mere act of speeding up one's muscle memory doesn't result in unexpected operation (ie, acting just like the old, more-easily-predictable physical controls).

<comment><USER15> Are you saying it's impossible to shut off the car while not in park? I find that odd, and will certainly have to try it on my mother's Toyota when I get the chance

<comment><USER14> >Are you saying it's impossible to shut off the car while not in park?

Yes! The vehicle faithfully ignores you when you press the Start button, beeps softly, and displays a message: "SHIFT TO P POSITION."[2]

As I said, in my experience there's a ~1s delay between shifting to Park and being permitted to turn the car off. You get the same error message, but it's already in Park. The result? Performing the same sequence of actions at a different speed results in a _very_ different outcome. And the Park button (yes I know) is very close to the Start button, so it's easy to perform the two actions in quick succession. Classic race condition.

Btw, you can't just press Start again. Even though it's now "in Park." It's in some strange, poorly defined, in-between state, not Park but not Not-Park. To recover, you have to press the Park button again, _and then_ press the Start button again. From a software perspective, this makes me uneasy.

It would be easy to miss such the subtle cues indicating an error (soft beep/message/IC doesn't down). Especially for older people who are hard of hearing, and just pulled into the garage from a sunny drive (bright pupil adaptation takes longer to dilate for older people).

From the Prius GenIII manual[1], pp549

> * Stopping the hybrid system

>Set the parking brake, shift the shift position to P and press the "POWER" switch as you normally do when stopping the hybrid system.

Setting the parking brake is optional, but shifting to Park is not.

There's also a confusing chart with all the warning messages that _should_ explain this behavior, but doesn't. It's on pp525, and it seems to have evidence of incomplete revision:

>The driver's door has been opened with the shift position in a position other than P and _without first turning the "POWER" switch is OFF._

There is no power switch, just a button, and the grammar is wrong. Hmmm...

Curiouser and curiouser.

[1] [https://priuschat.com/threads/2012-2015-prius-owners- manual-...](https://priuschat.com/threads/2012-2015-prius-owners-manual- combined-pdf.149300/)

[2] Btw, googling for "shift to P position" indicates that both Hyundai and Kia have this interlock. Whether they're subject to the same race condition is unknown.

<comment><USER15> Is this possibly a Prius only flaw?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> 35,000 people are being killed in the US every year by cars, but _now_ suddenly it's "Deadly Convenience," now that 2 people a year are dying from CO poisoning?

<comment><USER17> any time human lives are involved it's worth moderating one's outrage at such distortions, but the point you make is worthy of consideration: the number of deaths per year (21 in some unspecified time period is quoted in the article) seems to be relatively small compared to other addressable hazards.

the number of deaths and injuries per year from carbon monoxide poisoning by car is roughly on par with lightning strikes. we address that particular danger with a relatively straightforward technology, the lightning rod.

so i'd expect the response here would be of similar magnitude (rather than some convoluted rube goldbergian contraption). the auto-shutoff mechanism seems to fit the bill and some cars are already fitted with it.

so all in all, it's worth being aware of this danger and the solution, but not worth spending much more time thinking about it. it's much more fruitful to focus on reducing one's heart disease vectors, cancer risks and distracted driving.

<comment><USER18> If lightning strikes would really only kill two people a year and not cause property damage, we should not be adding lightning rods to buildings. That's probably fewer than the number of people who die while fitting lightning rods.

<comment><USER19> This. LIghtning rods are a very cheap insurance policy against the enormous property damage that lightning does to your building (think fire + widespread electrical damage).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Another issue negated by electric cars. No burning fossil fuels, no carbon monoxide in my garage.

Ironic that the only mention of EVs in this thread was about how Teslas turn themselves off and lock automatically. It's like everyone is complaining about having to do wiring at colos and some techs getting accidentally electrocuted, while I spin up another instance on AWS.

BTW, my two Nissan Leaf EVs have the a keyless fob thing, and like the ICE cars, they beep if you leave with the car on. It seems like manufacturers just can't come up with a sensible and intuitive way for the keyless fob and car state to interact. Maybe the idea of putting a physical key into the ignition was a better paradigm.

<comment><USER21> I'm still unsure how a country could switch from gas to EV. Could a city keep up with the power demands when everyone plugs in their EVs at night? I am assuming we'd have to build more power generation capacity, and what is the source? How do you transmit all the high capacity power to quick charge stations on the highway when you have 200+ cars an hour needing to quick charge?

It all sounds like an enormous infrastructure upgrade. Europe is already committing to EV and outlawing gas engines in the next 10-20 years so it will be interesting to learn how they plan to accommodate the huge electricity generation and transmission demands that go with that.

<comment><USER22> Ironically it is going to be easiest for places with the cleanest power (hydro, nuclear, geothermal, wind) because clean power tends to be non- burstable while fossil fuels are.

So in places like France or Ontario what will happen is that the cars will automatically charge when rates are low (at night) and may even help the grid by acting as remote batteries. For example, you could keep your car at a 70% minimum charge as a configuration then allow the power grid to pull from you as needed. This would passively reduce your overall power bill as you're selling at peak demand and buying at peak supply.

<comment><USER23> while also depleting the battery's lifespan.

sounds like a perfect opportunity to get careless car owners to destroy their own property for a company's revenue.

especially hilarious if the car owner doesn't use an expensive UPS between the grid and the car. I'm sure the next lightning storm isn't too far off - <USER2> some of the plugged in cars won't survive it.

I'm not against EV though. There'll however be a lot of growing pains as they take over the cities. (though thats still far off)

<comment><USER22> This can be modelled with net present value accounting. If, at scale, it is financially worth it for Tesla to manufacture giant batteries for the electric grid then it will also be financially viable for the electric grid to use spare battery capacity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Is it not normal for a keyless car to beep like crazy when you leave the car with the key inside?

My car does this. As soon as it detects the key is not inside the car it will beep and remind you the car is on. The other problem this solves is that you don't want to be driving somewhere without the key either, eg when you're dropping off your wife and she happens to have the key.

<comment><USER25> Same, and exactly; the car should just shut down when it detects the key is not inside the car. Could someone just get in and drive off?

I'm fairly sure this might be true for older models though.

<comment><USER26> The keyless car I owned would warn and beep like crazy about the key missing, but it would continue driving. Then when coming to a halt and shifting into neutral/park it would deny switching back to drive. So no danger while driving and no risk for stealing.

<comment><USER27> My Honda CR-V will periodically beep with "NO KEY" lighting on up on the dashboard(say I give my wife the key to get inside our home on a crappy day while I go park the car elsewhere), but doesn't make impose any restrictions on using the car while it's on, regardless of your current speed or gear. Once you shut the car off though, that's it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I would bet that collectively the time wasted due to mishaps exceeds time saved by this feature. For me personally, I don't think I will ever make the time up in my lifetime - I have accidentally killed a battery once because the car was in ACC mode and I didn't realize it, and another time I drove away without the key because I was dropping the owner of the car off at the airport.

<comment><USER29> These problems are not as bad with an electric car like a Tesla. I have left AC on but the battery was fine. I have been dropped off while the driver had no key, and it posed a slight issue once they stopped the car and got off the seat. Obviously, no CO poisoning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> There are certainly a large list of reasons a car should be automatically shutting off without the keys present, but I feel it's also important to put the article and the figures they use into perspective.

Check out the GM Ignition issues where the cars lose electrical power because the key ignition moves out of the "on" position. The owners own key ring adding additional weight increasing the chance of this happening. This literally created the opposite problem... Keyed ignitions causing accidents.

We are so used to vehicles that it's so easy to forget that they are large and heavy machines. Just driving the car to work every day puts you at risk.

The article reads like... complaining about the rain while a tornado is heading your way.

Anyhow. Don't get me wrong... getting out of your car with your keys should certainly make the car yell at you and then automatically shut itself off after a period of time. With the option for the user to manually turn these things off of course. (I am a firm believer that one should be allowed to shoot themselves in the foot if they explicitly go out of their way to make it possible). I am just a bit irritated at the article. :)

<comment><USER8> I really don't think the article is saying much more than you do.

A simple, silly, trvially fixable design oversight caused a number of deaths when the product became common enough. The only way to nudge the manufacturers to fix it is by raising awareness, which is what the article does - <USER3> would, hopefully, lead to proper regulation.

Additionally, we can only expect the number of accidents like this to rise as the number of newer cars increases. This article is also a PSA.

While a lot of people die in car accidents, I see it as an orthogonal issue. Using your analogy, it's like complaining about floods in TX while there's a tornado in KS heading North.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I wonder if these vehicles wouldn't benefit from an onboard CO detector? Automatic shutoff if the vehicle is stationary and CO hits a given threshold.

There's indubitably a bunch of reasons not to do it that way...

<comment><USER32> On a side note, it's a legal requirement in some countries to having a working CO detector in the home, certainly for rented properties in the UK. Also in some (30+) states by the looks of it [1]. A $10 detector would have probably saved the gentleman's life.

[1] [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221133551...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211335517300013)

<comment><USER14> >A $10 detector would have probably saved the gentleman's life.

True, but making the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards requiring the $5 sensor in that $10 detector in every vehicle equipped with keyless start (or perhaps, every vehicle) would lead to nearly 100% deployment as the vehicle fleet is replaced.

By comparison, despite decades of passing laws and funding public education campaigns, only 33% of households ("occupied units") having a working CO detectors[1], and 40% of "working" detectors failed to alarm in hazardous levels[2]. So overall, just 20% of households have adequate CO protection.

FTA:

> From news reports, lawsuits, police and fire records and incidents tracked > by advocacy groups, The Times has identified 28 deaths and 45 injuries since > 2006, but the figures could be higher.

Let's estimate they found 1/3 of all cases, for a total of 56 deaths and 135 injuries. Estimating $6m per statistical life and $3m per injury (some injuries, like brain injuries, can be _more_ than $6m for lifetime medical care and lost productivity, but this estimate is intentionally conservative). That's $61.75m annually, compared to the average of 13,532,750 annual vehicles sold in that time period[3], so about $4.5 of harm reduced per vehicle.

So economically it seems like a wash, and it prevents awful tragedies. Sounds like a good idea to me.

[1] [https://www.census.gov/prod/2008pubs/h150-07.pdf](https://www.census.gov/prod/2008pubs/h150-07.pdf), pp14

[2] [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3222366/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3222366/)

[3] [https://www.statista.com/statistics/199983/us-vehicle- sales-...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/199983/us-vehicle-sales- since-1951/)

<comment><USER33> Note that the scarily high 40% failure is heavily biased by people keeping units long past their design lifespan. If you have a 5 year old Carbon Monoxide detector, buy a new one.

The failures prior to 5 years in that test are disturbing, but they're not statistically significant on their own so it's hard to be sure how serious that would be in practice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> If you're reading this and you don't have carbon monoxide detectors in your home, please go buy some. They are generally integrated in modern smoke detectors, and the standalone units are pretty cheap.

I'd recommend having one in the garage if you have a gas water heater. But you should definitely have them in the house no matter what.

<comment><USER35> > _They are generally integrated in modern smoke detectors_

No they are not. Most smoke detectors do not have carbon monoxide detection built in. You can buy combination units but you should not assume a smoke detector has carbon monoxide detection just because it's new. Verify that the unit you purchase provides detection of both of you want both in one.

And replace your detectors if they're 10 years old (or don't have a date, in which case they're way older than 10 years).

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Tesla handles this quite well. You stop driving, then open the door. This puts the car in park and engages the parking brake. Other stuff happens like the door handles present and the stereo volume turns down. Then when you close the door (if nobody is detected in the driver's seat) the car shuts off, much to the chagrin of any children sitting in the back seat listening to the music. As you walk away, the car locks automatically.

The car then automatically wakes up as you approach it. Sit in, put on your seatbelt, and put it into drive to go.

It's certainly VERY easy to leave an internal combustion car running (even a keyed one) if you are used to that!

<comment><USER37> And even then the worst that can happen from leaving an electric car turned on in your garage is your battery getting drained. Even keeping the lights on this will likely take days when fully charged.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I feel like I read sometime last year 'DannyBee saying that modern cars were efficient enough that it was unlikely they'd be dangerous running in a garage.

Found it:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14705990](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14705990)

<comment><USER39> That's a pretty impressive memory feat.

<comment><USER38> It was a memorable claim!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Not mentioned in the article, but I imagine that this could be exacerbated by the fuel-saving 'auto engine off' behaviour of newer cars... you arrive home, engage the brake and the engine turns off automatically.

... only to automatically restart 15 minutes later when the engine sensors detect the oil temp is dropping.

<comment><USER41> This happened to me with a hire car. I parked the car and pressed the button to stop the engine. The engine cut out so I got out of the car, locking the vehicle with the remote as I walked away. After some time I was contacted by the security team of the company I was visiting to tell me the engine was running on my vehicle. The auto engine off had kicked in as i pressed the engine stop button, but because the engine had stopped I didn't hold the button for long enough to actually switch the engine off. When I locked the car the turn indicators flashed with a non-standard pattern to warn that the lock had failed (because the engine was not off) but because it was a hire car I did not recognise it. When I drove the car home the same thing happened at the end of the journey but this time I was expecting it and switched the car off properly.

<comment><USER42> It just occurs to me that this is probably only an issue with automatic cars since any shift car will just have the engine die immediately if you start it with the shift pedal unpressed.

<comment><USER40> No. (I drive a manual shift car in the UK). If you stop the car, put it into neutral and press the foot brake, the engine will stop if conditions are correct.

<comment><USER42> I have been taught to always put the first gear in when parking the car, that's where that idea comes from. If you leave it in neutral, I am indeed wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I'd rather see people install CO detectors within their homes as it is a more general solution to this problem. CO poisoning can occur with any fuel burning appliance in your home. It would be better to cover all sources instead of each one individually.

<comment><USER44> A lot of homes don't have any fuel burning appliances. It varies between countries and places.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> >a software change that it said could be accomplished for pennies per vehicle. In the face of auto industry opposition, the agency let the plan languish, though it says a rule is still under consideration.

Why the car industry would oppose such a minor fix is beyond me. If it does not even hurt the bottom line, why not make that change.

<comment><USER46> I'd think some drivers prefer the current behavior. Like if you don't have a garage and live somewhere with cold winters you probably want to be able to start it and walk away.

<comment><USER47> Sure, but 30 mins is more than enough time to warm up in situations where externally powered heaters aren't required. Surely there must be some safe ground that would not drastically affect most drivers, but still save lives

<comment><USER46> Yeah, that's fair. I drive a manual car, which makes it very hard to absent- mindedly leave your car running (at least if you park it in gear, but I think most people do).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> It's horrible that people have lost their lives... but I don't see this as an issue with the car. I actually think it calls for having more CO detectors in homes (along with fire alarms ).

I have a key less ignition car, and if I leave it running... I want it to stay running. With or without the key. However, the audible alert seems like it would be valuable. What about having the Fob vibrate periodically when outside the car and the car is running ?

</comment><comment><USER49> My 2015 Ford automatically shuts off after roughly 15 minutes of being without the key whether you start it from inside or outside of the vehicle.

<comment><USER50> That is a good thing since some newer Fords leak CO into the interior. I'm sure they wouldn't have added it if they could've gotten away with doing nothing.

<comment><USER49> Thank you for the tip! I am going to do research into my Taurus to see if it is affected.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Air quality sensors that would detect this any many other potential hazards would likely cost $5 or less. Even if lawsuits resolve this issue its interesting to see how its only resolved post harm.

</comment><comment><USER52> Sounds to me like a big part of the problem is that these cars are too quiet. (I call that a nice problem to have.)

My car beeps at me pretty loudly when I get out with the engine running.

<comment><USER53> This was my problem when I rented a keyless car for the first time last year. To preface, it was a v6 mustang which I wasn't actually _expecting_ to be quiet, but in comparison to what I'm used to it was practically silent.

Consider that cars have three usual running states: off, electrics on/engine off, everything on. How do you tell, quickly and conveniently, which state the car is in? With a key you can reach under the wheel and verify what state the car's in, in under a second. I haven't seen a keyless car system that was anywhere near that intuitive. Engine noise is usually the best indicator but as you've mentioned, cars are quiet now.

With the rental car it took me a good half hour to figure out all the nuances of the keyless ignition. Compare that to seconds, occasionally minutes, of getting used to "normal" cars with keys/fobs.

<comment><USER54> > Consider that cars have three usual running states: off, electrics on/engine > off, everything on. How do you tell, quickly and conveniently, which state > the car is in?

Glance at the tachometer, if it's at zero, engine isn't running.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> > Despite years of deaths, regulatory action has lagged.

In California at least, all new homes and all rentals are required to have CO detectors. It seems like that would be a good regulation to have nationwide, which would help with this problem as well as other CO related issues.

</comment><comment><USER56> I suspect if they looked at attached garages and their toll when cars are left running the incident will be higher. How many people have died because of attached garages? Folks can help mitigate this by having carbon monoxide detectors in their garage and in the house. Car manufactures tho should have this built in, if the car is not running and the CO level inside get's too high, shut it off and sound the car alarm. The only challenge is that CO sensors seems to need replacing more than the life of the car and of course the price of car will go up and those without the need will be upset.

<comment><USER57> I wonder how many people died because they locked their keys in a running vehicle in the garage, called a locksmith, but didn't think about CO entering the house while they waited.

At the rate of 2 per 100's of millions of people per year, these scenarios become plausible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> Why is the default is to leave the engine running with the fob out of range of the vehicle? I'd expect that the default would be to turn off the engine. If you really want to leave the engine running with the vehicle empty, that should take special action to set up.

Maybe that should only be available with the "remote engine start / preheat / precool" option, which would include interior and exterior CO detectors.

<comment><USER59> > I'd expect that the default would be to turn off the engine.

That would be very dangerous. For example, think about the following scenario:the co-driver has the key within his pocket, he leaves the car and the driver wants to drive around the corner to find a parking spot. So the driver accelerates and after a few meters the engine would turn off and his breaks would be completely manual.

That could cause some serious accidents.

<comment><USER60> Brakes usually work fine for 5 minutes after you switch the engine off. At least they do in my car.

Seems like an easier solution would be to turn off the car if it hasn't moved for 10 minutes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Has anyone compared the rates of carbon monoxide poisoning with and without keyless ignition? I could actually see an argument for keyless being safer: if people can leave a car and completely forget to turn it off, they can certainly do that and forget to take the keys with them. At least with the keyless ignition you have the _possibility_ of being alerted to your mistake (my Toyota beeps so loud that it would be pretty much impossible to ignore).

</comment><comment><USER62> Here's the thing: leaving a car running and unoccupied is, from an engineering perspective, completely stupid.

Running a car on idle for a long time basically slowly degrades it. It's just sitting there getting hot and wasting gas. Without adequate cooling, the engine will overheat. And if you have multiple catalytic converters, the car can explode from built up gases. Many manuals explicitly state not to idle the car for more than 10-20 minutes.

You don't even need to idle it. Many cars today have automatic engine shut off and start when the car is stopped at a red light. New cars could _easily_ add this to prevent idling.

Now consider the non-technical reasons not to let it idle. One, someone can steal it. Two, it's wasting gas. Three, it's pumping harmful gases into the atmosphere and creating smog. Four, someone could die from carbon monoxide.

The solution is simple. The default should be to turn off the car if the keys are gone after idling for 10 minutes, _with an override switch_ to let it idle for, let's say an hour. After an hour you have to flip the switch again.

Regardless of whether you think this is necessary, there are hundreds of such modifications already that add up to make cars safer and more reliable. You can't switch into or out of park or reverse without depressing the brake. You can't remove the keys without being in park. Your can't operate Bluetooth controls while the car is in motion.

So it's not like these changes are new or difficult. Automakers add them over time as they see the need. But when they don't act, it's up to us to pass legislation to require them.

<comment><USER63> > Running a car on idle for a long time basically slowly degrades it. It's > just sitting there getting hot and wasting gas. Without adequate cooling, > the engine will overheat. And if you have multiple catalytic converters, the > car can explode from built up gases. Many manuals explicitly state not to > idle the car for more than 10-20 minutes.

Do you have a citation for any of this? I think letting an engine idle for extended periods of time does run up the hours on the engine (if you've got the sort of engine where you would even think about adding an hour meter, anyways), but especially if not under a load, I would very, _very_ surprised if you incurred actual damage letting the engine just run. The cooling system on every car I've ever encountered is more the sufficient to keep the engine at the correct operating temperature indefinitely, even if it's real hot out.

<comment><USER62> A quick Google search has many different sources, none of which are scientific. One is all the manufacturers that warn against idling, for various reasons based on the particular model, probably. Two is the increased fuel mixture in cold weather, leading to increased wear on cylinder walls from running rich until the engine reaches temp. Three is that cars are designed to operate under median load, not idle: half of how a car cools its engine is air passing over radiator plates, and that doesn't happen when the car is stopped. The engine actually has to work harder to keep the fans going in hopes of keeping temps down (in hot environments it'll just run hard constantly). And in winter it's the opposite problem, with oil viscosity and antifreeze working at potentially the end of their design spec to both keep the engine lubricated and coolant circulating. If it had load it could keep itself warmer easier, rather than depend on all these extra factors to keep from damaging the engine. And all of this for gasoline cars; diesels have a much more difficult time, especially if they're supposed to be fuel efficient.

Now, obviously I'm not claiming idling your car is going to ruin your engine, cars idle all the time with no problem. It's just not _at all_ what the car was designed to do most of the time, and it will cause undue wear in various conditions over time. At the very least an hour of idle is equivalent to driving 25 miles (according to Ford Fleet) and your gas mileage will be worse.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> If the key leaves my KIA while the engine is running, an alarm sounds. Works perfectly well and if you ignore alarms without knowing what they are about... Well, then no system can help you.

So the real issue here, is that some cars do not seem to have such an alarm (probably should become mandatory) and that many owners don't know how to properly use their cars. After all, there is a reason why you need a license to drive those things.

</comment><comment><USER64> This would never happen in the UK or Norway as petrol costs too much and people just would not have a house big enough that they would not notice an automobile engine chugging away right next to them.

Cheap petrol in the USA means that people are in the habit of doing things like starting their car remotely to 'warm up' or 'cool down' before they then have a shower, brekkie and what not before finally getting in their car. Usually the car is on the driveway and not the garage in these scenarios, however, that is something that would not happen in the rest of the world, where petrol costs real money in part because a U.S. dollar has to be bought in order to buy the oil that is always priced in petro-dollars.

Given that people do suicide themselves by connecting some hosepipe from the exhaust to the interior of a car I am actually surprised that there are not rules regarding CO detectors already. CO can not just kill the occupants, you could have a big pile-up on a motorway due to CO poisoning. This happened a few times with police cars last year and 3/4 of all CO deaths are due to vehicles, not central heating or other sources.

<comment><USER65> > CO can not just kill the occupants, you could have a big pile-up on a > motorway due to CO poisoning.

Do you have a source for this? I would be interested in reading about it.

<comment><USER64> There are many stories, Google 'carbon monoxide police ford explorer' to start. Holes drilled in the vehicle for the flashing lights and other accessories were given as the cause in those police incidents, of which I think there were a few.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> Another problem solved by electric cars. The transition can't come soon enough.

</comment><comment><USER67> A City Car Share used to park behind my house and I had to call the company a half dozen times because someone left the keyless hybrid running after they dropped it off. I had them unlock it so I could turn it just so there wasn't a running car next to my back yard. This was exasperated by people who weren't familiar with the car but it was a real enough problem that I knew to listen for it.

</comment><comment><USER46> I guess one advantage of driving a manual car is you won't make that mistake after violently stalling your car a few times.

<comment><USER68> I learned to drive in a manual transmission truck made in 1987, with a clutch interlock. But I bought an '87 car with a manual transmission last year, and to my surprise, it _doesn 't_ have a clutch interlock. So I have inadvertently started it in gear once or twice.

As it happens, I also have a 2016 car with a manual transmission and it is keyless - I haven't had any problems with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> I assume people start their cars to warm the cabin. I expect there are much more efficient ways to warm the cabin than using excess heat from an internal combustion engine under the hood. Perhaps the solution is to provide a way to warm the cabin (including seats and steering wheel) very rapidly when the car starts, or provide a way to warm the cabin without starting the engine.

The latter solution requires an energy source. Perhaps a hybrid car's batteries are it - not an option until recently, but hybrids are now relatively common - and the energy could be used efficiently: Ambient air heaters, of course; plus heaters directly in seats and steering wheel to warm them more efficiently than the ambient air would; plus of course sensors to shut down heaters when things are sufficiently warm.

OT: Did the NY Times change their layout recently? For the first time, IMHO, it's gone from functional to appealing.

<comment><USER70> This was one thing I really liked about driving an electric car in the winter - you can start the heater remotely through the app. Since it's an electric heater it warms up way faster than ICE. If it's plugged in, it will not even drain the battery.

<comment><USER71> My old diesel car had an electric heater for the cabin. (The engine just didn't produce enough waste heat, I assume. In winter, the bonnet would still be icy after a 20 minute drive.) Such a great feature! The heater didn't start until the engine was running, or anything clever - it was a late 90s design, so nothing fancy - but you'd still get noticeably hot air within 2 minutes of setting off, and, with controls set appropriately, the cabin would become uncomfortably hot and dry, like a sauna, after about 5 minutes.

I've got a petrol car now, a later model of the same line, and the designers clearly decided that there was no need for any trickery, and they could just use the heat from the engine. Big mistake! It's absolutely rubbish by comparison.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> Lexus is noted in the article as being one of the problematic cars, but mine beeps fairly insistently if you get out of the car with the keys with the ignition still on. I get that people are mentally on autopilot sometimes--I certainly am often--but I feel like what it does already should be enough to snap you out of it.

The line has to be drawn somewhere. I think it's unreasonable to count on computers to warn and protect us about every possible mistake people might make.

<comment><USER73> Isn't one of the major benefits of computer automation that such adjustments (e.g. adding a safety feature that uses existing hardware) can be made with little cost/effort? If a few lines of code will save 2 lives a year, is it worth it?

I get where you're coming from and you ask a very interesting question: where do we draw the line? I think a good place to draw it is after we've eliminated accidental fatalities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> I wonder how many deaths there are per year due to remote start. A kid (or another key in your pocket) presses one button on the dongle twice, and the whole household dies.

</comment><comment><USER74> Something does not add up in this article unless I am missing something. So safety features such as alert tone if engine kept on running for some time might be missed by older people who might have difficulty to hear but I assume that if a home has a garage to park the car then it should have and usually has a Carbon Monoxide alarm inside the house as well. Would not it start making loud alert noise when CO is increased at harmful levels?

<comment><USER75> Florida (where at least one of these deaths occurred) only recently began requiring CO detectors and only for new construction.

 _Requires that every building for which a building permit is issued for new construction on or after July 1, 2008, and having a fossil-fuel-burning heater or appliance, a fireplace, or an attached garage shall have an approved operational carbon monoxide alarm installed within 10 feet of each room used for sleeping purposes._

[http://www.ncsl.org/research/environment-and-natural- resourc...](http://www.ncsl.org/research/environment-and-natural- resources/carbon-monoxide-detectors-state-statutes.aspx)

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> I think this is actually a stronger argument for sealing the garage off from the house, detached if possible. There are any number of bad things being stored in many garages that make it useful to seal your garage well away from the house.

</comment><comment><USER77> Pretty easily solved with a $15 carbon monoxide detector. They are required by rental codes around here, and are just a plain good idea. Unlike smoke detectors they rarely fault out due to smoke from toasters/etc.

</comment><comment><USER78> I'd think this would be more common with remote start.

</comment><comment><USER79> Keyless ignition over complicates the solution to a simple problem. I've never liked them on those grounds alone, and I hadn't even considered the risks for injury. Then again I've always felt that more bells and whistles on a car are just more opportunities for breakage and repairs.

<comment><USER80> Most keyless systems have a physical key backup in case stuff fails. So if the system breaks you're no worse off than a car that has a physical key. Also, in my experience, keyless systems are pretty reliable, I've never had one fail on me or anyone in my family.

I also really like the convenience they provide in being able to lock, unlock, and start my car without needing to take anything out of my pocket. If I can help it, I'll never buy another car without a keyless system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> How do you not know your cars engine is running?

<comment><USER82> The victims all seem to be elderly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> NY Times loves to run articles on secret dangers of modern conveniences.

</comment><comment><USER84> Let's talk about real killers, which kill far more. [https://on.cc.com/1hCMleQ](https://on.cc.com/1hCMleQ). Falling Coconuts kill dozens of times more people but no one is seriously looking at active countermeasures.

<comment><USER85> Not sleeping under coconut trees?

Vehicles kill 3000 people a day, that's before the pollution they cause.

</comment></comment><comment><USER86> I've certainly often forgotten to turn off the Prii [1] I've used.

[1] [http://content.usatoday.com/communities/driveon/post/2011/02...](http://content.usatoday.com/communities/driveon/post/2011/02/toyota- prius-prii-prium-priuses-plural-james-lipton/1)

<comment><USER87> I've forgotten to leave with the keys, several times. Not so bad at work, which is in an office lot in suburban sleepytown, but kind of scary when I get back from paying a social call in a higher-petty-crime area like the Mission district.

<comment><USER68> My car (a Honda) won't lock with the button on the door handle if the key fob is inside, so I don't forget it.

<comment><USER87> I don't have a button on my door handle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER88> While tragic, I don't want my government protecting me from myself. I mean, where does this end? What about leaving the stove on? What about using my barbecue indoors?

There have been cases where government intervention to help may have actually been worse than that original problem, such as the rise in cases of forgetting children in rear seats on warm days after laws were written forbidding car seats in the front where parents find it harder to forget their child.</comment>


Study: It's Better to Be Born Rich Than Smart - <AUTHOR> https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/schooled2lose/ <comment><USER2> In other news, water is wet.

Jokes aside, it's always good to have studies done on this issue.

</comment><comment><USER3> >In short, the system conspires against young people from poor families, especially those who are Black or Latino Shouldn't they adjust for SES in order to make race-specific claims, when race and SES are correlated? The paper switches between using SES and race, but at no point adjusts for either, so information about which of these two factors correlates with the outcomes is not actually provided. While both may correlate multiplicatively in some way, it's not enough to infer single-variable causality firstly because two variables are being used instead of one, and secondly because causality is a large jump from observing correlations).

<comment><USER4> They did look at this in their full report, although I agree that it's less evident from the summaries. See "Race and ethnicity interact with socioeconomic status to affect students' likelihood of achieving and maintaining academic success" in the full report below.

[https://1gyhoq479ufd3yna29x7ubjn-wpengine.netdna- ssl.com/wp-...](https://1gyhoq479ufd3yna29x7ubjn-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp- content/uploads/Born_to_Win_Schooled_to_Lose.pdf#page=32)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you want a real answer to this question, look at how well adopted kids' incomes correlate with their adoptive parents', compared to kids raised by their biological parents.

</comment><comment><USER6> Is think the evidence in 45 would be enough...

<comment><USER7> A single example doesn't prove it, but he's certainly the embodiment of it.</comment></comment>


The Product Engineer - <AUTHOR> http://essays.davidchouinard.com/product-engineer <comment><USER3> Was hoping this would be about hiring, because I've been thinking a lot recently about how shitty hiring is for these people.

I've been interviewed for a lot of these ostensibly "product" positions this year. A lot of it has to do with the company not even understanding what they're hiring for. Initial screeners would be all about product, product, product, but then they'd give me a new grad programming trivia test about rearranging chars in a string. Such a weird mismatch of aspirations vs. reality on the interviewer's part, and, most importantly, I've never come away from these interviews feeling the interviewer has a solid understanding of what I might bring to the table.

I'd push more for it before leaving the interview, but by that point the interview itself has soured me on the company overall.

I think this is exacerbated in the startup world in particular, because even "straight technological" roles in a sub-10 person team will inevitably include a ton of product decisions throughout the course of fast-paced development, and I worry too many startups focus on these type of algorithmic hiring tests being some sort of qualifier for these people when it's not.

<comment><USER4> What should we be asking/looking for/testing?

<comment><USER3> It depends on the company, but I'm a big fan of pairing with a developer on something they're working on for an hour or so. The dynamics of the interview completely changes from "I need to figure out hidden knowledge that the interviewer knows already" to "I need to work with this person to find out a solution together", which I think is quite a bit less stressful. You're also working on real problems that — though they might not be a glamorous interview question — will be much closer to what "real" work at the company will be.

Put another way: I've probably done a dozen or two product interviews this year, and have still never seen a full stack web request. I mean, I haven't seen a controller action, or a view, or even a model for that matter. And that's the area that's my entire job, really: I build screens and hook things together and make things work for users. As much as feasible, I'd like to be able to demonstrate those types of talents in the interview process.

<comment><USER5> In general, anything that moves the interview from adversarial to collaborative is a big win. In many ways, interviewing is a lot less about assessing skill and a lot more about creating affection between two strangers.

<comment><USER6> That fits -- it's difficult enough to recruit people, let alone people that you can work with, or building out a gelled team that can work through on a lot of challenging things (and not all those challenges are technical).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This really resonates with me. There seems to be a trend of frowning on these types as 'generalists' who don't have sufficiently hard tech skills, but 'creates great products from the ground up' is a specialization in itself, and an extremely critical one. Someone who will do (and learn) whatever it takes to put out high quality work is someone who will be a top performer at almost any company, regardless of how they would do on a Google algorithms quiz.

This mismatch was part of what motivated me to build MakerSlate [1], a résumé optimized for just this type of creator.

1: [https://makerslate.io](https://makerslate.io)

<comment><USER8> It's a good post and a good thought.

Software is a giant LEGO set with no instructions, and it takes a good mixture of how to build things and knowing what you can build.

A lot of times people want to reduce product management to "visit customers, ask what they want, make a spreadsheet", but I think it's more than that. To do it well, you have to know the possibilities the existing stack could grow into, and also what it can't easily grow into, and set a vision that is well beyond what the masses point at. And you also have to know the industry enough to know how to build things that make sense to end users.

In maybe 80% of the jobs I've had, non-technical product managers have been probably the single most powerful force to get me to leave an organization, because I always get very invested in a product and want to see it do the right thing, and I want to work on and design the right things. Working on the wrong things - features nobody is going to use, features that won't work, features that don't take advantage of a great opportunity or make a product great to use - can be demoralizing. I want to work on the thing that will make the most difference -- and then be able to witness that difference in hearing those stories from userland.

And the second you take the design out of it (and reduce software down to implementation), for me, the fun parts are gone (unless there's some heavy C.S. or architecture parts, which in CRUD stuff is rare) and it's just implementation.

Also - I will say, having done it, product management is always one of the most misdefined and potentially most disliked positions from the outside. It's the easiest to please no one while still trying incredibly hard to do the right thing, and probably the most important make or break function - <USER2> a company is totally viewed by what it decides to create. Further, a good PM can be made powerless if he can't get engineering do anything, and frequently organizational lines are set up so that he cannot. It's a position that needs to be elevated because it's so important, but instead almost gets lumped in with project management and viewed as easily interchangeable; the result is bad PMs make it hard for good PMs to get any respect. There's a huge standard deviation.

Product management can also get in a bad spot when you give a few people absolute product control, and you ignore the ideas from developers and others throughout the company. So even if you are in this spot, and it's respected, you have to give voice to the entire company and try to focus sometimes hundreds of laser beams all pointed in different directions.

The C.S. I majored in was about designing things, a lot of software engineering is about implementing features out of canned components other people have already designed. I think there's a lot of lost possibility in that, and we should encourage everyone to be more creative and blur the lines more in how we define software positions.

<comment><USER9> A technical Product Manager would be a Product Engineer but the inverse might not be true. In my mind a good Product Manager is also responsible for guiding the product roadmap in the direction that addresses user's wants rather than features that are cool to implement but don't really address a user's wants or needs.

<comment><USER8> Yep, definitely. As a really bad analogy, if you are in the ice cream business and ask a customer, they will recommend you changes in flavors, but if there was, say, a huge chance in a new kind of popsicle, they'd never tell you about that. There's also a dichotomy between the things they'll ask for and what you need to get them to stay with you, or get other users sold. You can make an existing user really really happy (which I approve of), but in doing so, you might not be expanding market. Just trying to retain them is not a good solution, but there's a balance there.

But yeah, the customer is not usually going to tell you the world takeover strategy.

I kinda wrote something about that here - [http://michaeldehaan.net/post/118860078737/the- rockpaperscis...](http://michaeldehaan.net/post/118860078737/the- rockpaperscissors-of-product-management)

<comment><USER9> Your article is spot on. I agreed with all the different product management strategies. I was going to make the argument that building what the users tell you they love is great when that thing is making you money. However you made the point much more eloquently in your article. That's a nice read. Thanks for the link.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Product Engineering as a role is also critical in hardware companies, where discipline-focused engineers such as mechanical, electrical, firmware, etc. need to implement the features of the product. Many times, they fall into the trap of making an impressive feature set work and then thinking they can start selling the product.

What is missed are critical design elements such as:

\- Cost of materials/assembly

\- Power consumption and distribution

\- Reliability of the system

\- Durability of the system

\- Supply chain integrity and robustness

\- ...

It seems that a lot of the new robotics companies and many KickStarter projects fall into this trap: under-budget the product development, both in time and resourcing, and release their product prematurely.

This is all quite obvious to people who have participated in successful consumer or enterprise hardware companies, but young companies are still vulnerable. Advice would be to get it all working as a prototype, then, expect another major project of turning it into a Product before releasing.

<comment><USER5> Hardware teams have been explicit about this role for a long time. I wish I had first-hand experience of hardware product engineering, but it's certainly an inspiration for this essay.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I consider myself as a product engineer too and the traditional interview process is definitely broken for someone like me. I think @holman nailed the current interview process with this statement "I need to figure out hidden knowledge that the interviewer knows already". I'm glad to know there are others who share my frustrations.

Having said that, I think for my next interview I am going to go in telling them who I am. I will own the Product engineer title and let them know what a Product Engineer is and what we excel at. If that is something they are interested in then we can continue otherwise it will be a waste of time for everyone.

If I were to design an interview process for someone like me I would come up with a simple product. It can be something as simple as a List web app ala Trello. Then have them design the product for individual use, then layer on collaboration requirements and then layer on sharing requirements, if time permits. This will allow me to know how they think about the product. If they suggest collaboration when designing for individual use then that's awesome because it tells me they are already thinking about where the product can go.

</comment><comment><USER11> Kudos on hitting the ethos behind product first engineers who build w/ code for the love of creating things rather than just the code. Code is the tool you wield to build great things, not the only source of beauty.

</comment><comment><USER12> Do people think the product engineer can be trained? One issue I run into is one of expectations. I think product engineers are treated like some sort of unicorn (a designer/coder).

I can see why that might have been true in 2000. But a lot has changed since then.

For one, being a product engineer could be considered a hack for picking up tech skills quickly. It's often much easier to learn by doing and product engineers define themselves by the product they're trying to build.

Plus, software got so much easier to build. What is your reaction to that? Do you go deeper and more esoteric than you used to be able to go? Or do you go broader?

Broader makes sense to me--that's the product engineer. But to what end? Do you go broader in order to save on team size? An engineer/designer means you can skip a design hire. Or do you go broader because you can have more autonomy?

To me, product engineers are the natural outcome of software getting easier (and design to some extent). People can have more autonomy because you can develop the skills to get more done on your own.

But I don't think management has caught up. There's still an assumption that these skill sets don't go together. Autonomy is killed when you have specialist designers and specialist engineers.

And that's why I led with the idea about training product engineers. I want to be able to create a culture at my company that assumes that you're a product engineer. Junior product engineers just work on smaller problems.

</comment><comment><USER13> Does anyone have any advice finding these roles? Most of my main projects have included me building products up from the ground up with successful releases. I've been cramming technical interview questions because its seems like the only foot in the door, but this kind of position is where I know I'll thrive.

Where do I look for Production Engineering positions? How does a new grad w/ a CS background move into one of these roles with relevant experience?

<comment><USER14> If you want to work at a startup, the earlier they are they more likely that every engineer is a product engineer. The bigger companies get, the less generalists are relied upon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I recently wrote about the gap between product-motivated and technically- motivated engineers: [https://medium.com/@ericwleong/the-product-technical- spectru...](https://medium.com/@ericwleong/the-product-technical- spectrum-d3e76aa8bff7#.5x6avaz8l)

Certainly startups are interested in hiring engineers motivated by product, but technical interviews obviously don't look for that.

</comment><comment><USER16> I've had plenty of product based experience but found the person interviewing doesn't seem to realize that he should be pitching why I need to be there.

As an illustration of how clueless these recruiters are they start off by asking technical interview questions. I just say 'im sorry didn't know you relied on rote memorization to build your product'

</comment><comment><USER17> > And the technical interview falls flat. The product engineer isn't > intrisincally interested in software — programming is merely the tool for > maximal leverage on the world.

Yes... but we can't let you off the hook too much. I consider myself a Product Engineer as well, but to be able to creatively evolve a product you need to have some serious professional tools under your belt and many of these are technical, I'm afraid.

To use his analogy: "Song designers are musicians first." I wouldn't trust a song designer that couldn't answer some of the relevant technical questions.

There is a very real question as to how to recruit and interview well. This self-proclaimed "Product Engineer" claims "I'm the test case you want to turn green," but the real question is: how can we tell he's the real deal from the next guy? (Hint: it isn't JUST take his word for it.)

</comment><comment><USER18> The core point of the essay, that product design is a different skill to software development, is obviously true, but to me this feels a bit like the title "Software Architect" was 10 years ago; i.e. people who want to design software products without the pesky whole writing software part.

Like being a dev manager, defining the vision, design, etc requires a different set of skills from development. However, a person can do those jobs much better if they have spent time in the trenches. They understand costs and tradeoffs better, can better sell the ideas to the team, and so on.

<comment><USER19> Let me give you a counter-point. I was hired by my current employer as a software engineer. I love writing software. Unfortunately, in our team, we didn't have anybody who was good at managing product development. Features where thrown in willy-nilly, design often not well thought through because designers weren't given enough time and developers could just go develop.

I was/am the worst Software Engineer in the group (these guys are seriously awesome), so they had me take over product management and only spend part of my time coding.

I'm not an 'architect', I don't design the technical systems. I design the product systems, and implement features along with the rest of the engineers, but my time is split between managing the product and doing the development.

I fell into the role because I like considering the user/marketing/etc as well as doing the software development.

I've been putting "Product Manager/Software Engineer" on my email signature because I didn't know that "Product Engineer" existed..

As I work for a technical organization, I think they'll appreciate the product engineer label more.

<comment><USER18> I agree with you. A product manager doesn't need to be a great developer - they just need sufficient experience with development to assess the impact and complexity of changes, and to better understand where there might be opportunities. You have that plus passion for the role, which is a rare combination. Hopefully your employer recognizes the value of it!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> As a candidate you might have better luck with companies that embrace Holacracy [0]. On the recruiting side, I have a hunch that the best way to get more Product Engineers is to have the Product Engineers in your org conduct interviews in addition to the pure technical ones. A requirement for this is that the Product Engineer's title is made explicit, otherwise "wtf, why is this person always doing the interviewing."

[0] [http://www.holacracy.org/how-it-works/](http://www.holacracy.org/how-it- works/)

</comment><comment><USER6> A friend had sent this link. It dawned on me later, there is an interesting intersection between that article and this one about the Product Engineer:

[http://amasad.me/2016/01/03/overcoming-intuition-in- programm...](http://amasad.me/2016/01/03/overcoming-intuition-in-programming/)

</comment><comment><USER21> Bingo. I'm a product engineer as well. I build products in 1/4 the time of an entire team, with unit/integration tests. It's also technically correct--that is, as technically correct as it needs to be to ship, scale, and see if it gains traction.

Waste my time white boarding a sorting algorithm and I'll turn down the job (well, unless the money is insane).

But designing the flow/architecture of a new product idea? That's my catnip. I'll white board THAT.

<comment><USER22> So... isn't that an architect, or UX guy (if front end)? Why do we have to invent a new job title?

<comment><USER23> Software Architect in general implies a high-level (in terms of abstraction) technical position within an engineering team. This person is usually in charge of the design of the software, as in "use a queue here instead of a database", "this data should not go to the UI, but instead be requested on demand", "here's what the API should be for these 2 components to interact". You wouldn't expect a software architect to be particularly knowledgeable about business needs and users.

UX positions are usually design centric (people in these positions usually hold HCI or Design degrees). These people usually lack the engineering knowledge to be able to quickly assess the viability and cost of the solutions they propose, and therefore work very frequently with people that have complementary skills.

I am one of those types with a mixed business/engineering skillset and work in Product Management these days.

The "Product Engineer" as described in the article seems like a great position for a small company, or for a small team within a company. It's what a founding CTO would usually do at the early stages of a company.

In my experience, as companies grow, it's hard to know both the customers, the users, and the technical details in intimate detail, so the position seems slightly doomed unless the product is very technical (say, mostly an API).

That being said, broad skillsets can be a blessing when things need to move rapidly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Product engineers are sought after, and for companies that build flag-ship products they should be core to development. Product developers are often founders and should guide the vision as they have the product itself at heart and mind.

[https://data.triplebyte.com/who-y-combinator-companies- want-...](https://data.triplebyte.com/who-y-combinator-companies- want-c1880a08ac88#.zdwdvsa5j)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This really hit home for me. I was recently looking for a job so these ideas are fresh on my mind.

What I have been trying to figure out, is it better to work for a company that has a good product strategy, or an other wise good company without a product strategy? At the time, my thoughts were to find a company that needs a product minded developer. A company that has everything else figured out but product.

<comment><USER25> A company that hasn't prioritized product strategy isn't going to suddenly start prioritizing it once you get there. You are more likely to be ignored.

Go somewhere that does product well, especially if you're early in your career.

<comment><USER5> There definitely exists organizations lead by smart non-product people who recognize their shortcoming and are enthralled to support it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Reading this I'm wondering what the difference is between a "Product engineer" and a "UX Engineer"?

<comment><USER9> I would differentiate them in the following way:

Product Engineer: Focused on creating something that fulfills users' need or want

UX Engineer: Focused on polishing the product to make sure the user's need or want is fulfilled with the least amount of friction.

<comment><USER27> UX is not about polish. UX is the product -- literally, from the user's perspective. I don't think there is a meaningful difference between Product Engineer and UX Engineer.

<comment><USER9> The X in UX is Experience so indeed a UX Engineer's role would be to improve the user's experience of the product not necessarily define what the product should be. It's unfortunate that UX is being confused with Product. Let me illustrate with an example: Consider a product with 20 features, 10 of which will be helpful to the user once they have been using the product for a while. The UX engineer's job is to identify this and provide a user flow of progressive disclosure of those 10 features based on user's actions. This improves the Experience for a user by not overwhelming them with all 20 features when they are just starting to use the product.

A Product Engineer's job is to identify the 20 features because they are useful for users.

<comment><USER23> In terms of conventional job titles, that's the job of the Product Manager.

<comment><USER9> True. And I mentioned in a comment above that a technical Product Manager would be a Product Engineer. However a non-technical Product Manager would not be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Everyone that walks around with a touch screen computer in their pocket thinks they are a genius of product design. But if you actually want to design products the first step is to become an expert in the code. So stop day dreaming that you're the new Steve Jobs and get coding.

<comment><USER29> Everyone that has a car thinks they're a great race car driver. But if you actually want to be a great race car driver the first step is to become an expert in building the car. So stop day dreaming that you're the new Mario Andretti and grab a wrench.

That sounds as silly to me as your assertion. And yes I can code and have for a very long time.

I'll take the person that can figure out what will resonate with users and doesn't know a line of code over a guy that can code but isn't good with products. The skill sets are orthogonal in many products. Sometimes being able to code may give you important insights that a non-coding product person won't have, but I wouldn't count on it as a sustainable advantage for all but the most complex of products (e.g. enterprise/plumbing software), and even then a great product person will figure out what they need in order to arrive at the salient product decisions.

Sometimes having the ability to code is a hinderance to building a great product.

<comment><USER28> Yes, everyone, including coders, thinks they are the best product designers. The difference is that top-level coders actually have the influence to implement their ideas, whether they're good or bad. That's how you get your foot in the door. Walking in to a startup wanting to be the one that tells everybody else what ideas they should be implementing is not going to get you far. I'm not saying that product managers are not useful, but good product managers are data driven and their main job is to gather and summarize the available data and enable a conversation within the company about the product direction, not to be the grand visionary that hands down ideas from on top.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Nice.

For me it always seemed as if there are consulting engineers and product engineers.

A few of my friends are devs at agencies, who worked at different projects for many clients, those were the consulting engineers to me.

I always worked for companies who sold software products, so I considered myself a product engineer.

</comment><comment><USER31> This is me! Feels so good to be understood. I'm currently identifying myself with _product management & user experience_ because I recently came to this conclusion.

</comment><comment><USER32> I wholeheartedly feel product engineers are best suited to start their own companies. I literally do not know any company that can give them the kind of experience they seek.

</comment><comment><USER33> Thanks for making this a 'thing' as I figure out how best to position myself.

</comment><comment><USER34> I'm in a bit of a similar position as the author.

I've been interviewing for a while now, and have had the fortune of many companies approaching me for positions after coming across my profile on HN/AngelList/LinkedIn or discovering Toc Messenger ([http://toc.im](http://toc.im)).

Without exception, the next steps in the interview process for all these companies included some kind of an hour long technical interview that grilled me on my ability to solve, under severe pressure (time and otherwise), abstract algorithms and data structure problems that had no relevance to the product engineering positions _they contacted me for_. I haven't spent nearly as much time as some of my new grad peers on solving these types of problems, as I generally prefer to spend my time actually building things and learning new technologies and approaches to help me build things in a better way, and the difference is really starting to show.

In my experience, any half-decent developer with a proper CS education can usually solve these problems (So far, I've never encountered a single problem I couldn't solve within an hour or two in the zero-pressure setting of my own dev environment at home, including the ones I had trouble finishing during actual technical interviews). Solving these problems _quickly_ , however, is a skill that tends to come with practice. [1]

Practice is unfortunately something I sorely lack at the moment, but that's been improving lately due to the sheer number of these interviews I've done so far. However, I still don't plan on spending any time outside of actual interviews to begrudgingly improve a skill that I'll maybe get to use a handful of times _throughout my career_ when I need to switch jobs.

Software development is a seller's market right now, and there is no shortage of companies that want to hire great developers. To those who want to interview me in the traditional way, I'll gladly play along with your flawed process, but please note that this process is very good at weeding out product-focused developers like me. And if you do weed me out this way, no hard feelings, because I'd at least gotten the extra practice I needed to beat this flawed system.

[1]

There are exceptions, of course. I have a few friends who seem to have a natural gift and interest for these types of problems, and most of them are working at Google/Facebook right now after acing all of their interviews and receiving multiple offers. But in the large majority of cases, the people who ace your traditional technical interviews are the ones who have spent countless hours reading books like "Cracking the Coding Interview" and practicing solving technical problems to the point that they can probably solve any problem you can throw at them in no time.

I don't mean to belittle the talent/efforts of these kinds of developers or their potential value to your company, especially if you really need someone to tackle the hard technical problems in your field of business. However, I do want to question the wisdom of assuming these same technical developers will be the ones who are best able to iterate on and improve your product.</comment>


I was given some old BBS session logs and I scanned them - <AUTHOR> http://silent700.blogspot.com/2014/12/is-this-something.html?m=1 <comment><USER2> Wow this is awesome. It takes me back to my own BBS days from when I was only 6 years old+!

What's a shame is how much people in the beginning created to share with people -- it cost money to run these BBSes let alone call into others. The Internet as a whole was built similarly where protocols like email allowed a diversity of providers and people to talk regardless of implementation/account.

Now I'm seeing a complete commercializations of all communication, from Facebook owning a giant chunk of social to now even with slack I see on product hunt some list of semi-public channels replicating what IRC has done for years. Attempts as decentralized social networks haven't gone anywhere because it's been protocol first, implementation & network effect later (not to mention all trying to clone fb or Twitter versus having a differentiated experience). Plus everyone in a mobile non-html world just wants to own the next big thing.

We need more Mozillas out there doing things beyond the web to get communication out of the hands of individual companies and into the greater public. With blockchains, oauth, json, and cloud storage the tech is there to do interesting stuff. We need now someone that already has the network to step forward.

<comment><USER3> In all fairness, there was also a lot of commercial BBS activity around that same period--or at most a couple of years later: Compuserve, Delphi, AOL. And some of the bigger non-corporate BBSs became commercial as well (and later became some of the early regional ISPs).

It's interesting stuff though. I suspect that relatively little has been saved from the BBS days in part because it was so decentralized--although I'm not aware of Compuserve and the like ever having made archives public either. The situation is a bit better on the early Internet side but even there Usenet archives are incomplete--and were very nearly even more incomplete.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You can watch the documentary about BBS

[http://www.bbsdocumentary.com](http://www.bbsdocumentary.com)

The documentary really brought back a lot of great memories about how one dials in, some of the software used, what one does online, etc. Plus the producers went out their way to make sure the set was captioned after I asked. (I heard of this documentary prior to its release so I got lucky)

</comment><comment><USER5> Randomly flipping though, message 7811 is to John Gilmore[1] thanking him for the pointer to this new thing called public-key encryption.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gilmore_(activist)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gilmore_\(activist\))

</comment><comment><USER6> Working for an OCR company. Dot Matrix is a pain..

That said, would it make sense to give it a try here? Would need to separate the pages/create a TIF file, but I could send this through a good number of engines, I assume. I cannot promise some miracles, but.. worth a try, perhaps.

<comment><USER7> I attempted OCR with Acrobat, which you can inspect by downloading the PDF. Then archive.org does their own OCR (I believe with ABBY?) which is what you'll see if you look at their .txt version. I haven't had a chance to compare them yet.

I wouldn't expect much from OCRing dot matrix, though I'd be happy for others with access to other engines to give it a try.

 _Someday_ I'd like to get all the messages into a browsable form on a website. Hell, we can crowd-source transcription if we have to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> After reading a couple of pages of this, I had one of those moments where I feel sort of like the earth is shifting beneath me, and everything feels unreal for a moment. It struck me (hard) that in my lifetime, I have watched technology go from these printouts, to what we have today. I used my first BBS in around 1986, and it hadn't yet evolved terribly far from where it was when these archives were produced.

It's both amazing and terrible (in the "extreme in extent or degree; intense" sense) to think about. In 1980, that was a pretty impressive piece of machinery, but it was not even in the same league as a smart watch today. But, raw numbers (32k, 1.5MB disks) don't begin to express how different the world we live in today is. At the time this BBS was almost unique. A few thousand people in the _entire world_ used an online messaging system like this. Today about 3 billion people are online somehow, and the majority of people under 30 in the developed world use some sort of online messaging every day. Long distance telephone calls were expensive enough that few people made them more than occasionally. International communication was an _extreme_ rarity except for the richest and most powerful. (And, 12 year old me had to break the law to communicate across the country, using stolen calling cards to call BBSes in other states.)

The 8BBS software, unique and impressive for its time, was positively simplistic by today's standards. The BBS I ran back then operated on a similar system (BASIC plus an assembly communications core) called Color 64, and some little games and tweaks were the first real independent programming I ever did. Thinking back, I'm struck by how simple the system was--I printed out the entire BASIC source code on a small stack of paper, to study it--compared to the codebase I'm working on now (500,000 lines of code spanning four programming languages and 15 years of development).

The world of computing was so small back then, and it is now probably the single most important industry in the world, touching billions of people's lives daily, in both good and bad ways (mostly good). I carry multiple supercomputers with me almost everywhere I go; my phone dwarfs the power of the first dozen, or more, computers I owned. And, equally importantly, it is connected to the world via satellite and cell tower at speeds beyond imagining in 1980. The first modem I used was 300 baud, and I could read the words as they came down the line. Now I can download a 1080p movie in 30 minutes, and when Google Fiber arrives, the same download will be almost instant.

All of this change has happened in _my lifetime_ ; heck, I was old enough to participate in BBS culture a few short years after these archives began. And I don't even feel that old. I've got a few grey hairs in my beard, but I'm not a grey beard, yet.

Moore's law predicted (and maybe even drove) the increasing transistor count, but couldn't have predicted the vast difference in what computers would become and where they would reach. 12 year old me wouldn't have believed in the stuff we have today.

It's not jet packs or personal space ships, but it's pretty neat. And, despite the general silliness that seems to pervade our industry lately (so many toy web apps consuming so much effort and brain power and investment), I suspect the general trend is accelerating rather than decelerating. We are constantly on the cusp of revolutionary change, and have been since most of us have been alive.

It was suggested by some in the 19th (and 20th) century that invention had peaked and that it would only be a process of improvement from then on. I suspect people are still suggesting that, or thinking it. I even find myself in that mindset now and then, and I _know_ better.

I know I'm rambling here...but, the history in this archive is fascinating. I probably won't read more than a couple dozen more pages, as I feel vaguely like the best thing I can be doing is getting back to figuring out what the future is going to look like and figuring out how I can best be a part of it. I may not have as many years left ahead of me as I have behind me...it would be easy to let nostalgia win my mental bandwidth.

<comment><USER9> Just recently I had a chance to visit the Computer History Museum out in Santa Clara. It was amazing to me to see so much of my childhood and so many areas of the technology I grew up with sitting behind glass. I really didn't get very heavy into computing till early 90s, but when you step back and realize the progress from even that period until now, it is unimaginable. I truly think those of us who grew up during the computing explosions of the 80s/90s owe a great deal to that time period as it really seemed to breed a huge hacker/tinkerer type of culture where nothing was unexploreable or off limits. It feels nowadays so much is spoonfed, there just isn't that same opportunity. Or maybe I'm just getting old and crotchety like the PDP/mainframe folks who walked before us??

<comment><USER8> The Computer History Museum is one of my favorite places. When I lived in Mountain View (which is where it is located), it was the one place I would _always_ take any family or friends who were visiting, and they always enjoyed it, no matter how technically inclined they were.

Hearing about the technology _from the people who built it_ , is amazing, and it's an opportunity we won't have much longer in the case of these original systems. The guy who built the first computer game (Space War), and helped restore the PDP/1 on which it runs, presented it on a couple of the occasions when I went there. They have docents that can tell you, with deep personal experience, about the Cray supercomputer, the PDP/1, PDP/8, UNIX, IBM mainframes, etc. But, they're all getting up there in age, and many of the founders of our field have passed away in the past couple of decades.

As for being spoonfed, I don't believe that's true. The depth of knowledge required to truly innovate is much higher than ever. Making the early steps of learning about technology easier doesn't make working with the _vastly_ more complex systems any easier. I feel overwhelmed pretty much every day, when I try to stay ahead of the curve in my field and try to stay at least abreast of what's happening in other fields. Things are moving faster than ever, and it's always going to require being at the front edge of that to actually innovate.

The people building the future today don't have it any easier than the people who built the future we're living in now.

That's not to say we shouldn't teach kids about what came before. I believe the Computer History Museum is really important in that regard. This is the most amazing time in history to be alive, and it's because of the things a few hundred people built 30-50 years ago. I just watched the American Experience film on Silicon Valley (which chronicles the earliest days of the integrated circuit). It's really incredible how far we've come in such a short time. Seeing people who are still alive today telling the stories of the inventions that have re-shaped our entire world in unbelievable ways is inspiring and intimidating.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The link to the pdf on archive.org:

[https://archive.org/details/8BBSArchiveP1V1](https://archive.org/details/8BBSArchiveP1V1)

But I like the narrative in the original link.

</comment><comment><USER8> Now that I've had a chance to read more, I see that casual misogyny in the tech world is definitely not new. So far, I've seen a half dozen messages, and multiple people, calling someone named "Susan Thunder" a whore, bitch, etc. Example:

        Message number 7168 is 4 lines from John Billings
        To SUSAN THUNDER at 14:30:49 on 12-Mar-81.
        Subject: YOUR LAST MESSAE
        YOU LEFT ONE THING OUT OF YOUR
        DESCRIPTION OF YOURSELF,
        WHETHER YOU CHARGE BY THE HOUR
        OR THE EVENING?

And, I have seen no polite messages directed toward anyone with a female sounding name.

Given that 90+% of the messages are from people with male-sounding names, and every message, so far, that I've seen directed to a woman has been overtly hateful, it puts some things in perspective about why there are so few women in our industry today. I can't say that, as a 12 year old, I was treated with respect by the BBS community at large, but at least I wasn't on the receiving end of veiled rape threats.

I'm hoping I stumbled on the few really hostile messages in the bunch. But, I've bounced around a bit...I fear further study will only be further disheartening.

<comment><USER10> You're missing the context.

Susan Thunder is [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Headley](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Headley). She was a prostitute. She was an adversarial figure in the phreaking scene at the time.

I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but this is a small slice of a much larger scene.

<comment><USER8> Interesting. But, still, the threats of violence and general dehumanization of her by several people is pretty horrible (someone has suggested she got someone arrested, but I don't see confirmation of that or an explanation for why...if they threatened violence against her, as several messages in the archive do, I wouldn't begrudge her for reporting those threats to police, for example).

<comment><USER10> Really it's a bunch of people trying to impress and out-do each other. "Dave Starr", "Susan Thunder", and "Roscoe Dupran" tangled with each other through almost any format available to them.

Here's more old-school sources of all this rivalry: [http://www.flyingsnail.com/missingbbs/](http://www.flyingsnail.com/missingbbs/) [http://phrack.org/issues/10/2.html](http://phrack.org/issues/10/2.html)

<comment><USER8> It takes a truly epic troll to span decades...impressive, in a way. Embarrassing, too.

<comment><USER11> Could be reusable handle(s) in an extended psychology experiment. One person could use multiple handles, or one handle could be used by multiple people.

<comment><USER12> [http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=5370](http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=5370)

A recent-ish example of someone using multiple handles...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Cool. I think I first posted here in 1979, found a lot of useful phreak info.

I don't see any of my posts, but do see my name (pseudo) mentioned by others a couple times.

<comment><USER7> You're the 8BBS first user to speak up. Any stories?</comment></comment>


Corn biofuels worse than gasoline on global warming in short term - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/apr/20/corn-biofuels-gasoline-global-warming

<comment><AUTHOR> There seem to be limits on both sides of this debate.

What is 'news' here is not that one-side or the other has 'won'.</comment>


No Code of Conduct – We are all adults, after all, aren't we? - <AUTHOR> http://nocodeofconduct.com/ncoc

<comment><AUTHOR> I think there's a place for Codes of Conduct, and there's places where they don't make sense.

In a large organizational ecosystem, you probably need them. In a close group of friends, you can probably discuss religion and politics, and even display your favorite type of bigotry, without getting anyone mad.

In communities where people can build reputations, whether quantified (like online social network "karma") or unquantified (like real-life networks or facebook), people with stronger reputations tend to be better behaved.

You don't really _want_ a code of conduct. It's just that some communities aren't well insulated from jerks, so in some cases, you need those rules to get jerks to either behave or leave.

What you _really want_ is a community where people act like mature adults.</comment>


Finally: Macbook Air w/Sandy Bridge - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/11/apple-boots-sandy-bridge-based-macbook-air-into-mass-production/

<comment><USER2> My laptop is my primary coding machine. I also walk to/from work (well, not all the way, but quite a distance) which makes laptops with 15" and larger screens a bit unsuitable for me. Because of my recent back problem (no more heavy messenger bags!), I decided to sell the 13" MacBook Pro I've had since last year and instead get a top-of-the-line Air (though a refurbished one). Which I did three weeks ago. This was an absolutely correct decision. The Air turns out to be not only lighter than the Pro, but also (1) its screen is significantly higher-resolution -- the 13" Air actually has the same effective display size in terms of pixels as a regular 15" Pro, which is great for text/coding, (2) the screen is noticeably less glossy than on the Pro, which makes it easier to work in cafes or other places where I cannot control the lighting, and finally (3) even the charger is a bit more compact.

During the three weeks of use so far, I've never once needed an optical drive. Definitely laptop nirvana so far.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I waited a long time for Sony, Dell, or Toshiba to compete with the Macbook Air. Finally, they did and even with Sandy Bridge. Unfortunately, every single one of them settled for shitty 1360x760 displays forcing me to get an Air.

The Air has been perfect, though installing ubuntu without a superdrive or external cdrom was a preposterous nightmare.

<comment><USER3> You should've waited a bit longer for Samsung's Series 9 (if you went for the high-end Air)

<comment><AUTHOR> I did wait for the Series 9, but it had 1366x768 :(

Hilariously, Sony omits this tidbit on their own page. See it here: [http://techdraginfo.blogspot.com/2011/01/samsung-9-series- ul...](http://techdraginfo.blogspot.com/2011/01/samsung-9-series-ultra-slim- notebook.html)

<comment><USER4> Is the difference in resolution that discernible? (Serious question btw)

<comment><AUTHOR> Ya, huge difference imo. Macbook Air has a decent 1440x900, which amounts to an extra 17% vertical increase.

<comment><USER5> and 23.5% increase in "pixel area".</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: DeepDiff 5 is Here: Delta, Deep Distance of any Python objects and more - <AUTHOR> https://zepworks.com/posts/deepdiff-5-released/ <comment><USER2> Just awesome stuff. I use it in almost every diff based tool. Works seamlessly.

</comment><comment><USER3> The numpy support is super impressive, thanks for the great write-up!

</comment><comment><USER4> DeepDiff makes my life complete.

</comment><comment><USER5> Looks awesome, Thanks Zep Works

</comment><comment><USER5> Looks awesome, thanks Zep Works

</comment><comment><USER6> Awesome!

</comment><comment><USER7> Looks very useful. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER8> Cool stuff

</comment><comment><USER9> damn this looks awesome!</comment>


R.I.P. David Blackwell - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/17/education/17blackwell.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=david%2520blackwell&st=cse

<comment><USER2> Incredibly great quote from the article: "Basically, I'm not interested in doing research and I never have been," Professor David Blackwell said. "I'm interested in understanding, which is quite a different thing. And often to understand something you have to work it out yourself because no one else has done it."

</comment><comment><USER3> That is an amazing story. It should remind us all of how ridiculous society can be, especially when it comes to denying advancement to a truly talented person simply because of their race. Thank you for submitting this to HN.

</comment><comment><USER4> Thank goodness we live in the now. Imagine all you want to do is study mathematics, and people are constantly pushing you here and there because of the color of your skin.

Equality really is a great thing.

<comment><USER5> Racism is still _very_ much alive today, yes, thank goodness we live in the 'now', but there is lots of work to be done in this respect, and skin colour is unfortunately not the only factor that people will use to discriminate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The following is probably the best-known result bearing his name:

<http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Rao-Blackwell_theorem>

</comment><comment><USER7> Tangentially related, _The Souls of Black Folk_ , by W.E.B. Du Bois, the first black American to have gotten a PhD. from Harvard, is not only a great window into the struggles of black Americans in the generation after the Civil War, but also some of the finest writing in the English language:

 _I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swing between the strong- limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil. Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America? Is this the life you long to change into the dull red hideousness of Georgia? Are you so afraid lest peering from this high Pisgah, between Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the Promised Land?_

<http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Souls_of_Black_Folk>

</comment><comment><USER8> Why is it acceptable to mention his race at all in an article like this?

<comment><USER9> Dr. Blackwell was born in 1919. If you are unaware, at this point in US history there was both de facto and de jure segregation in the United States. As the article states, he was initially denied an invitation to become a faculty member at both Princeton and Berkeley due to his race.

Although society is more colorblind today, the United States was a racially biased society for most of its history, and most of Dr. Blackwell's life.

<comment><USER8> But maybe he would want to be remembered for his academic accomplishments only.

<comment><USER9> Sure.

But the historical context of his achievements is an important part of his life story.

<comment><USER10> Especially working for RAND with his background.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>