Uber is Fucked - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@noahbarr/uber-is-fucked-long-term-3ed36a901d08#.ap6hfkf19 <comment><USER2> Uber _is_ in trouble, but not for the reasons cited here. Driverless cars are not coming as fast as the author thinks. Even in the example he gives, his friend has to drive the Tesla at some point. This means that it has a driver the entire time, even if he isn't doing much most of the trip. Widespread use of driverless (as opposed to self-driving) cars is still 10 years away. Uber's problem is not that they're going to get cut out of the driverless car business; it's that their customers are really the drivers, and Uber offers very little value to them for the cut they're taking. Uber is just a dispatch service, which is rapidly becoming a low-margin commodity business. To the driver, Uber is an app and a sticker. A driver just needs fares in their area, and as Austin has shown, with modern geo-enabled phones, it's easy to jump into the dispatch business to fill that need.

<comment><USER3> >Uber is just a dispatch service

I don't think you are taking into account UberPool. HN comments almost never do, perhaps because programmers are generally upper income and do not feel a need to trade money for inconvenience, but UberX is basically a legacy product and now presented as more of an upgrade if you're in a hurry, rather than the default mode.

UberPool is everything. A network of cars buzzing around the city dynamically routing from one task (transport passenger, transport package, deliver food, etc) to the next, and each task is cheaper because it can share ride segments with other customers.

That is where the winner-take-all argument comes from - the bigger the network, the more efficiently Uber can pack multiple tasks into the same driver-hours, with less delay (more jobs means the car doesn't have to go as far out of its way to share capacity).

Uber is more than dispatch - it's quality control, reputation, dispute resolution, capacity planning, payment escrow, (soon to be) routing (it bought a few mapping companies), commercial insurance (try buying that on your own), and increasingly, the efficiency provided by combining multiple tasks in each car.

When people call Uber a taxi service - when is the last time a taxi offered you a cheaper ride if you agreed to share the car for 5 blocks with a guy 10 blocks down the road?

Disclaimer: I used to work there. Throwaway because I'd rather keep identifying information off my personal account.

Opinion is my own, I do not speak for Uber, etc.

<comment><USER2> >Uber is more than dispatch

I still don't think that most of those checkboxes is terribly important to either drivers or riders. If I were an Uber competitor, I'd thank Uber for screening the drivers for me. Now I can offer them fares at half the price Uber can offer them for. You have a point about delivery, but in the end that's just another fare. There will certainly be good dispatch networks, and Uber may be one of them, but none of them will be able to maintain high margins, certainly not margins that would support Uber's valuation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Predictions will always look 100% certain if you presume the cause/problem will never be mitigated.

Search up "The horse manure problem:

"...In 1894, the Times of London estimated that by 1950 every street in the city would be buried nine feet deep in horse manure. One New York prognosticator of the 1890s concluded that by 1930 the horse droppings would rise to Manhattan's third-story windows. ..."

[https://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2011/03/29/the-horse- manure-...](https://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2011/03/29/the-horse-manure- problem/)

</comment><comment><USER5> Even if you accept the author's assumption that driverless cars are very close, his argument rests on the following premise:

 _Every single car manufacturer will launch their own uber-like app, market their app directly to the end-user, and maintain a fleet of taxis nationwide, in order to compete with Uber._

I find the above premise hard to believe. Why would a company like Nissan take on the massive marketing/logistics challenges required to run a nationwide taxi service? Do we really think the market can support 10+ car manufacturers each running their own Uber-like app?

It's so much more likely that each car manufacturer will simply continue trying to sell as much as possible, and let the buyers decide how they want to make use of the car. Even if they do decide to "put their inventory cars to work," they will do so by loaning the cars out to an aggregator like Uber, who will then use these cars in order to run a taxi service. The idea that every car manufacturer will decide to cut Uber out, and enter the taxi business directly, just doesn't sound plausible nor smart.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, the car companies are also fucked. Prepare for massive consolidation on that front. One or perhaps two or three car manufacturers will swallow the whole market as demand craters. (We all own our own cars because it's a necessity at this point. It won't stay that way in a driverless future. Nor will cars be the status signifier they currently are.)

I actually think the form factor most cars come in will become obsolete-- I think they'll be mostly vans and buses to cope with economies of scale on the rider front and to handle rush hour surges. Who makes the bus you last rode on? Do you know? I know I don't, nor do I care.

I mean, Uber is totally fucked if this comes down the pipe and they're not running things, that's undeniable. Their value proposition is running this two sided marketplace that's going to turn into a one sided marketplace. And yeah, putting together a mobile app is a completely different universe than becoming a major auto manufacturer, or a robotics manufacturer of unprecedented scale. (Or in reality, both.)

<comment><USER7> Demand may go down, but I don't see the car market necessarily consolidating (or going away) like you're implying here.

Technology and economic growth often _increases_ the number of "single person/family" consumer products, rather than decreases them. The "sharing economy" isn't necessarily the default goal that everyone progresses towards for all products (although it may seem like that at times, living in a tech bubble), and "cars" have historically been one of those products that people buy more of, rather than less, as time goes on. Whether this will hold true in the future, who knows? But I don't see it as a given that the market will drastically decrease.

People like customizing their cars, storing things in them, the familiarity of them, and treating them as a "home away from home" even if it's just going to the grocery store. My husband even gets anxious when he's away from home without his car (if, say, we're on vacation or we took a cab somewhere. He never takes public transportation). It's a guaranteed safe place, a way back home, and something he can count on. Sure, you may feel very differently, but you are not every person.

And when you say: "Who makes the bus you last rode on?" Well, I did't have the dubious pleasure of experiencing a city bus until I was 22. Sure, now I ride one every day, but I know plenty of adults who have _never_ been on a bus, much less have convenient access to a route. And while driverless vehicles may facilitate the expansion of public transportation to increasingly rural areas, at some point, you'll hit an absolute mathematical wall at which "the cost of the car transporting itself from customer to customer" will be greater than "the cost savings/reduced environmental impact of sharing the car"

Long story short: I think your assessment of the market is a little premature and somewhat egocentric. Sure, it could absolutely happen that way, but I could also see driverless cars becoming an even _more_ "single user/personal consumer product" than they are today. It's hard to say.

<comment><USER6> Cars are expensive. Cars are also mostly sitting idle. These are objective facts. For most of the country, the only bill bigger than their combined car payment/maintenance is their mortgage. That's a lot of money.

I think a combination school-bus-for-adults/carpool would have a lot of traction if you could automate it. How much is that gonna cut into the car market? Remains to be seen. But not nothing, for sure. And moving cars into a service model is, in my opinion, gonna make a lot of the pricing more transparent. You want an SUV, you'll have to pay for it per ride. You want your own private car, pay per ride. I think consumers, when faced with spending the extra buck on an a la carte basis, are going to start looking into cheaper options.

Rush hour surges are gonna be a big strain on the system, and I really think that school bus model is going to take off. Everybody going more or less in the same direction at the same time, get on the bus and save a ton of money.

Maybe it just turns multiple car families (the default) into single car families. But even that would be a seismic shift in the auto industry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> To me, #1 is classic "inside the Valley" thinking - not recognizing that the world outside of the Valley is vastly different. As a simple example, as far as I know, no one is currently attempting autonomous cars in any place with more severe or varied weather conditions (e.g. snow).

<comment><USER9> In fact, Uber is. They have a research center in Pittsburgh, which has plenty of weather and terrible roads. Cars are seen regularly dodging students around CMU.

<comment><USER10> They are, and very aggressively so. They bought up a ton of CMU's research department to do so[1].

[1]: [http://www.theverge.com/transportation/2015/5/19/8622831/ube...](http://www.theverge.com/transportation/2015/5/19/8622831/uber- self-driving-cars-carnegie-mellon-poached)

<comment><USER8> That's great to hear. Is the author's contention that Uber "doesn't have the tech" accurate?

<comment><USER11> The author mentions the CMU acquisition. I think their contention is that it's not enough, because Uber doesn't have access to the kinds of vehicle telemetry data its competitors do that would be necessary to train good self-driving car models. Google, and other companies with existing advanced vehicles on the road, have thousands of cars in the wild now with suits of sensors collecting telemetry and phoning home. Uber contracts drivers who drive their own cars, so it's not benefiting in a vehicle-telemetry sense from the drives it's arranging in the way it could be and its competitors do.

I think this is probably a solvable problem, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> _By the way, robotics teams have traditionally been steeped in rules-based AI's. Essentially enormous if-then decision logic tree. Even if they are using the most advanced self-learning algorithms, huge amounts of data are required to train, perfect, and ship such a system. Uber has access to essentially NONE of it._

Sorry but there's so much BS condensed in just these two sentences that it immediately disqualifies the whole article.

Of course robotics software isn't based on giant decision trees, wtf. Then what's a self-learning algorithm? Who says that Uber couldn't just license self-driving tech or data? And by the way the plural of AI is AIs, without the apostrophe.

</comment><comment><USER13> Isn't Google invested in Uber? Didn't Uber order 100,000 units of Mercedes vehicles to do something with? Isn't GM partnered with Lyft to accomplish a self-driving taxi service?

I don't know, I think Uber and Lyft are well aware of the progress in self- driving vehicle technology and their actions point more towards them behind involved in the process as opposed to being left in the dust. The only group of people that are "fucked" are the current drivers whose jobs will be automated.

<comment><USER14> Let's say that's true; the folks at Uber are smart and they'll figure out self driving cars. Why does anyone think Uber will be able to maintain an advantage with that? What's to stop anyone from buying some self driving cars and opening their own service? How does the whole industry not become a race to the bottom? Hell, given the price wars going on now, I'd argue it already has.

Uber is in a low-margin business where the only way to really increase profit is to screw your customers or employees or both. If self driving cars are supposed to be the company's savior, good luck being the only organization on the planet that can use them. Having lived through Webvan, Groupon, Zynga, and countless others, I see disturbingly similar patterns in Uber.

<comment><USER15> You can basically just swap in any company in any industry to your comment...keeping up pace with technological changes, competitors entering your market, and maintaining a profit margin are just normal challenges that every business faces.

Let's see:

> Let's say that's true; the folks at Google are smart and they'll figure out > artificial intelligence. Why does anyone think Google will be able to > maintain an advantage with that? What's to stop anyone from buying > artificial intelligence tools and opening their own AI service? How does the > whole industry not become a race to the bottom? Hell, given the price wars > going on now, I'd argue it already has.

> Let's say that's true; the folks at Apple are smart and they'll figure out > personal computers. Why does anyone think Apple will be able to maintain an > advantage with that? What's to stop anyone from buying some computer parts > and opening their own computer store? How does the whole industry not become > a race to the bottom? Hell, given the price wars going on now, I'd argue it > already has.

> Let's say that's true; the folks at SpaceX are smart and they'll figure out > re-usable rockets. Why does anyone think SpaceX will be able to maintain an > advantage with that? What's to stop anyone from buying some re-usable > rockets and opening their own space travel agency? How does the whole > industry not become a race to the bottom? Hell, given the price wars going > on now, I'd argue it already has.

<comment><USER14> Google: They have an advantage in search that I think would be hard for a new entrant to overcome (mostly because of the amount of data they've collected). I don't think their advantage is algorithmic at this point so much as lots of data + they're a verb. Uber is practically a verb at this point, but I think their data is less valuable. I guess it would be comparable to Foursquare's data, but much more of it.

Apple: The whole industry _has_ become a race to the bottom, except for Apple which has built a phenomenal brand (also see Nike for example of a valuable brand). I don't think the Uber brand is worth all that much.

SpaceX: I think it's fair to say setting up a rocket company has significantly higher barriers to entry than building a taxi dispatching app.

But Groupon I think fits:

Let's say that's true; the folks at Groupon are smart and they'll figure out online coupons. Why does anyone think Groupon will be able to maintain an advantage with that? What's to stop anyone from hiring some web developers and opening their own daily deals website? How does the whole industry not become a race to the bottom? Hell, given the price wars going on now, I'd argue it already has.

In the case of Uber, I'm arguing that the barrier to entry for other companies will be buying several cars in a retail market, because various manufacturers will be selling them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Good luck for it to be legal that a drunk person can be in the drivers seat of a car. That's going to take 20-30 years. I'm sorry but there isn't "you can't operate an elevator while drunk" law and people in police elevators pulling you over to the first floor to give you a ticket.

Until they remove the ability for drivers to actually drive, they are going to be legally responsible. Uber is fine for the next 30-50 years.

</comment><comment><USER17> Aren't self driving cars good for Uber? My understanding is that Uber's plan in the event that self driving cars become practical is to have a fleet of them which can be summoned by users on demand.

<comment><USER18> That's assuming that the creators of the self driving car technology don't decide to operate their own network of cars and cut out the middle man.

<comment><USER19> Uber has aggressively invested into developing its own self-driving technology. This has been extensively discussed on HN.

See some nice photos here: [http://qz.com/688003/ubers-self-driving-cars-are- on-the-road...](http://qz.com/688003/ubers-self-driving-cars-are-on-the-road/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The conclusion at the end is that car manufacturers are better suited to benefit from driverless cars as Uber is not in the business of building or maintaining a fleet of cards. But by that same reasoning, manufacturers are not in the business of dispatching taxis.

I'm skeptical that manufacturers would be that nimble to capitalize on the inevitable. That's also not their business model. Building out such an effort in such a large organization would be a challenge. It would be much cheaper for car manufacturers to partner with or buy a company like Uber.

In regard to Uber not having data to create the machine learning models needed for self-driving cards, they could buy that data or start building it up themselves. Google doesn't have a monopoly on strapping cameras and sensors to cars. And Uber certainly has enough capital required. Besides, this is a core strategy for Uber while it's still a moon-shot for Google.

<comment><USER21> But it's way easier to enter the dispatch app business than the car manufacturing business, as is demonstrated by Uber's menagerie of competitors.

While car manufacturers are hardly the nimblest they're not brain dead and are already exploring related stuff (example: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/dr- gridlock/wp/2016/07/1...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/dr- gridlock/wp/2016/07/18/gm-launches-new-car-sharing-service-in-d-c/))

If we reach a day where there is some company, call them company U which has a successful dispatch app business, and another company, call them company C, which has just successfully demonstrated (and passed regulatory hurdles for) a self driving car, what do you think will be easier and cheaper and quicker? For U to develop/acquire/license self-driving car technology or for C to develop/acquire/license a dispatch app?

C could probably pay very little to license a dispatch app from any of the many vendors. Even if it's not popular before, it will be once it's the only dispatch app that dispatches SELF DRIVING CARS! But if U tried to license self driving from C, U would probably have very little leverage and end up signing a contract where U runs the show but ships most of the revenues to C. C would be like Microsoft in the 80s/90s, and U would be like a generic IBM PC compatible computer vendor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> > Self driving cars are coming fast. It's largely a solved problem.

Something about the Ninety-ninety rule seems appropriate here:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety- ninety_rule](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety-ninety_rule)

I think self driving cars are much closer to 10 years out than the "today" that the author asserts, but I think everyone agree's that we've reached the point where they are coming no matter what.

To give the author credit I went into reading this thinking he was absurd but he does make a good point, some of the points I think are over sold, like planned obsolescence but I think his thesis is sound.

One point I'll make on Uber's behalf......

Two of my all time favorite books are:

[https://www.amazon.com/Startup-Silicon-Adventure-Jerry- Kapla...](https://www.amazon.com/Startup-Silicon-Adventure-Jerry- Kaplan/dp/0140257314)

This history of Go computing.

and Ben Horowitz The hard thing about hard things.

[https://www.amazon.com/Hard-Thing-About-Things- Building/dp/0...](https://www.amazon.com/Hard-Thing-About-Things- Building/dp/0062273205)

Both do a very good job of bringing the reader into the chaotic environment that occurs when startups are in trouble and both have a very similar message. When startups get in trouble having very powerful investors and mentors can make a huge difference.

Uber has some very influential backers. See:

[https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/uber/investors](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/uber/investors)

If/When times get tough, they have people who have a vested interest in seeing them succeed. People who can get them talking to the correct people at the car manufacturers to convince them to use Uber's platform over an internally created one.

If self driving laws drag on many years before they are settled then Uber may be fucked in the end but there isn't any reason why they can't be a cash printing machine over the next 10- 20 years while self driving cars replace humans.

As to car companies cutting out uber, there is this.....

[http://qz.com/688003/ubers-self-driving-cars-are-on-the- road...](http://qz.com/688003/ubers-self-driving-cars-are-on-the-road/)

<comment><USER23> I had a hearty chuckle at the "It's largely a solved problem." line. It does seem like in the next 5 years or so we'll be about 99% of the way to fully automated vehicles that can pick you up and take you anywhere a 'normal' car and driver can go... But that last 1% is a bunch of incredibly difficult problems that could easily take another 10-20 years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> > There's a good reason cars start falling apart after their warranty period — > They have been carefully engineered to specifically have this happen, a term > called "planned obsolesce". Manufacturers want to sell more cars, and if > cars last longer, they sell way less new cars.

My experiences are vastly different. Neither my Mercedes nor my wife's Honda have "fallen apart" after the warranty period. MB is 216K miles and 18 years old and Honda is ~170K miles and 11 years old. Both have averaged under $200 in parts per year, mostly brakes and tires.

<comment><USER25> Indeed. Obsolescence does occur with cars -- just like most consumer items -- but it's either:

\- technical or functional obsolescence (eg. no rearview backup camera, carburetors replaced with fuel injection), or

\- style obsolescence (eg. station wagons, quirky headlamps) because styling is a subjective fashion statement. While this is arguably a sub-type of _planned_ obsolescence, it affects every single object that has visual presence, from clothes to smartphones to household appliances.

The kind of 'intentionally crippled engineering designed to fail after the warranty period' the author proposes does not exist, because new cars are perfectly capable of getting themselves sold on their merits, and not because all old cars have been intentionally crippled. In fact, selling secondhand cars is quite often profitable, while selling new cars, outside of the luxury/SUV segment, has notoriously low margins.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> > Car manufacturers will begin flirting with building, owning, and deploying > their own cars…via their own apps.

Music cos. were supposed to do something similar to iTunes etc. Didn't happen.

> Cars will appear when ordered through the app. They will drive off and > disappear when you step out of the car. When running low on fuel, cars will > coordinate trips to tucked away re-charging depots to be smartly refilled > with electricity.

You mean in about 20 years time?

> Then car manufacturers will drastically start reducing the cost of operating > these vehicles.

With magic?

</comment><comment><USER27> Ueber has strategic challenges as transportation solution provider. The way I see it Ueber

\- has few barriers to entry in it's business besides brand.

\- scaling up, maturing is dulling the brand

\- as a dominant player with a large war chest it may engage in price wars but as a dominant player it will risk regulatory trouble when overdoing it.

\- established players will adjust e.g. Taxis orgs. with their app or regional/local public transport integration with car sharing

\- while self driving cars may be a little off the concept of ad-hoc renting a car without a driver is catching on in Germany. Like a taxi one rents a car by the minute and drops the car when arriving. Daimler/Smart, BMW and German public railways are all in. This seems also the proving ground for small electric cars - operating a fleet of your own vehicle is probably providing some insights.

Millennial car ownership is dropping vs. earlier generation. So the underlying fundamentals for new transportation solutions are strong. However it is far from clear what role Ueber will have in the medium term.

</comment><comment><USER28> Self-driving _cruise control_ is largely a solved problem, but 100% self- driving is a long time away. Ref: Boston winter, 2015.

</comment><comment><USER29> There are a ton of different regulatory jurisdictions that this whole self- driving tech will have to get through before I would worry.

</comment><comment><USER30> > Self driving cars are coming fast. It's largely a solved problem.

Come to Boston.

</comment><comment><USER31> It's extreme to say Uber is effed, but it would be reasonable to suggest that Uber is not a ~$60 billion business and that most of its long-term value will be as a dispatch service with an established customer base that gets acquired by a GM/Google self-driving fleet operator for less than its current value.

</comment><comment><USER32> > There's a good reason cars start falling apart after their warranty period — > They have been carefully engineered to specifically have this happen, a term > called "planned obsolesce".

I don't believe this, and I don't believe the author knows anything about cars, from reading this.

</comment><comment><USER33> This is a piece of amateur speculation making huge assumptions about advances in technology, and about Uber's ability to adapt to those advances.

One crucial thing to remember, when considering the threat Uber faces from traditional car manufacturers, is that Uber is a software company and they are not. It has a huge advantage in product development, and stands just as good a chance as they do of coming out with self-driving cars for ride-sharing.

<comment><USER34> Why is that even important, let alone crucial?

Anyone can hire programmers, children can ship products, MLB created a Netflix-like platform to offer media companies as a service, Walmart have made important contributions to open source etc.

The number of steps between Uber's competitors becoming as competent as Uber at software is basically "1\. decide to".

<comment><USER33> Attracting the talent to build a usable product is one of the most important steps in creating any business, or line of business in the case of a large company. That talent is scarce, and tends to prefer certain companies over others. I speak as a former recruiter and current employer, who has had to grapple with the difficulty of hiring good software engineers.

The software engineers I have known and tried to recruit tend to want to work for companies that are more like Google and less like General Motors.

The statement _Anyone can hire programmers, children can ship products_ is manifestly untrue. It's hard to get the right people, and it's equally hard to coordinate all their activities to get a successful product over the finish line.

The companies that have healthy cultures of software engineering and digital product management and design are way, way ahead of everyone else. And those companies are in the minority.

<comment><USER34> General Motors is another great example of a "non-software" company that effortlessly became staffed to rival Uber's employees -

[http://fortune.com/2016/03/11/gm-buying-self-driving-tech- st...](http://fortune.com/2016/03/11/gm-buying-self-driving-tech-startup-for- more-than-1-billion/)

<comment><USER33> You simply don't know what you're talking about. _Effortlessly_ , first of all, is false. Secondly, while the hiring of thousands of software engineers over the last few years was trumpeted, that doesn't mean GM knows how to manage them. That applies, even more strongly, to the acquisition of Cruise that you cited. That happened three months ago, so it isn't clear how much talent will stay for how long. But the fact that they had to buy it meant they decided they couldn't build it themselves in a reasonable amount of time.

<comment><USER34> Effortless was referring to how quickly they positioned themselves to compete in an emerging landscape with lots of startups - one deal staffed them up. Whether they can manage those people effectively or ship big projects ... is a problem startups face too.

<comment><USER33> Yes, but my precise point is that startups lure talent and iterate on product better than most large corporations, with enclaves and exceptions in a few large-ish companies, and virtually none any where else. $1B is the monetary expression of a lot of effort, and it's unclear whether they can actually do anything with what they bought. Most mergers and acquisitions are failures.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Self driving cars that are beyond simply assisted driving or and overseen autopilot are probably 10-20 years away. It would take quite a bit of additional improvement in tech and massive legislation for driverless cars to become a common thing. I don't understand why people continue to mix self driving and driverless those are 2 separate things. Autopilot or not I don't see most countries change the law of both hands on the wheel (unless you need to operate another system in the car in which case 1 hand might be taken off it) any time soon. Infact with autopilot becoming more and more popular you might see actually increased enforcement of this law because It's another revenue stream for local authorities.

Also if anything Uber is the one that stems to benefit from driverless car since they won't have to pay the drivers any more. With driverless cars I see their business model becoming something like "want to save 30% on your monthly car payments? sign up your car to Uber!", Uber can even offer financing options to people at considerably discounted rates in exchange for a mandatory opt in period. Heck Uber can go Zip car and simply manage their own fleet when driverless cars become a true reality, it might even be easier for companies like Uber to get a driverless car before the general population, they've already built their platform and have a user base, the drivers are this point are a necessary liability for them the minute they can dump them they will. And if the car makers would want to offer a similar service themselves well Uber can just come in as a service provider offer the car manufacturers access to it's user base and platform in exchange for a usage fee it would be even better for them since they could dump a huge chunk of their existing liability onto their partners.

<comment><USER36> As soon as there's strong evidence (from multiple credible sources) that self- driving tech reduces accidents and fatalities, the government conversation will switch from, "How shall we regulate this?" to "Oh! These are like seat belts. How shall we encourage them?" In other words, governments will _speed up_ adoption, eventually.

The owners of the car fleets will be the car manufacturers because they're the ones who can pay the least per car. They don't have to pay any markup!

The self-driving tech will come from Google, Tesla, Apple, or the like, not Uber. See the blog post for the reasons why.

<comment><USER35> >As soon as there's strong evidence (from multiple credible sources) that self-driving tech reduces accidents and fatalities, the government conversation will switch from, "How shall we regulate this?" to "Oh! These are like seat belts. How shall we encourage them?"

Only 34 states have a primary seat belt law and that took decades of legislature to push through. Legislation takes time, if you think it would be 10 years before we have enough data on autopilot you are fooling yourself, and going from autopilot to driverless will not happen overnight. If we take the US then again it's unlikely that the federal government would get involved on any reasonable time table, this means that the driverless car makers would have to lobby each state individually. Until the big car makers would have a foolproof driverless car Apple and Tesla can do whatever they want they will not match the power of the auto industry lobby just look at how much problems Tesla is having over dealerships.

It doesn't matter who's making the driverless car, Uber has the user base and the platform saying that Tesla is making a driverless car is meaningless unless you would want to make the same argument that Uber should only onboard drivers that drive a Honda or a Ford today because they their cars come in blue.

If Uber survives until driverless cars really pick up (and BTW the 10-20 year window isn't only my opinion, I don't think even Tesla thinks that their car would become driverless road ready or road legal before 2025) and is not torn apart but anti-Uber legislation and sentiment then the driverless car would be the thing to save it not kill it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> > Self driving cars are coming fast.

Yes, and Uber is working on them. On HN as the same time as this article: [http://qz.com/688003/ubers-self-driving-cars-are-on-the- road...](http://qz.com/688003/ubers-self-driving-cars-are-on-the-road/)

</comment><comment><USER25> 1\. Self driving cars are not coming fast enough, but _their impact on Uber 's business model is unclear_. They've been investing in self-driving cars [1], but they've also been expanding into parcel delivery, which needs a human to perform the actual contact with the customer [2].

2\. Like the article says, Uber indeed is collecting sensor data in Pittsburgh, to train self-driving algorithms. They may or may not be able to deliver an algorithm rivaling the quality of Google or other players. _It 's contradictory to say Uber has access to no car data, while pointing out that Uber is collecting car sensor data on their own._

The passengers who use Uber may not be very brand-loyal, but that assumes their business model is entirely predicated on customer fares. In truth, their business model is entirely predicated on burning VC money to establish first mover advantage and mindshare, and if they successfully pivot into profitability they will presumably alter business models. _Licensing self- driving tech, charging for rush parcel deliveries, providing concierge services_ \-- those are all viable directions in which they can pivot.

3\. Being in the business of fleet maintenance is not so fun, and location- aware dispatching, load balancing, etc, requires the sort of secret sauce that, among a few others, Uber has developed. Car manufactures won't engage in this as their core business; they're far more likely to partner with some startup Uber competitor, or Uber itself. But car manufactures aren't like airplanes where the cost of a single unit is so high that it's much more economical to lease indefinitely. Many people in fact own cars -- _the very, very profitable used car market_ is evidence of this, which unlike most new cars, actually has decent margins. While it's true that carmakers have subsidiary banks that offer financing, those instruments enable a larger portion of people to 'buy cars' than otherwise, increasing the total volume of cars delivered. _Extremely widespread, mainstream car-hailing on demand would drastically drop the demand for car ownership_ (in terms of raw numbers) across the board, making it an awful value proposition for car manufactures.

[1] [https://newsroom.uber.com/us-pennsylvania/new- wheels/](https://newsroom.uber.com/us-pennsylvania/new-wheels/)

[2] [https://rush.uber.com/how-it-works](https://rush.uber.com/how-it-works)

</comment><comment><USER38> An analysis of a business today doesn't mean much for the state of a business tomorrow. Companies and situations change. So, for the people happily working for Uber, probably don't quit your job as the author suggests.

</comment><comment><USER39> Uber does have access to car data - the cars Uber drivers use. I don't know if Uber is using this data to help adapt over the long term. But it's something they do have access right now.

</comment><comment><USER40> Fusion is also pretty much a solved problem. They even have that one experimental reactor in Europe. The power generation industry is fucked!

</comment><comment><USER41> Uber has volume and the correct branding, both important parts which a company like Audi will need.

</comment><comment><USER42> I think the author's spellcheck is fucked. Probably also their chain of reasoning.</comment>


Ask HN: Why is switching to IPv6 so hard? - <AUTHOR> Encountered a situation where IPv4 addresses were exhausted on one segment.
Brought up the idea of IPv6, and was summarily dismissed... and told it's a long-term goal, but not possible right now.
Admittedly, this is something I don't know a lot about. I want to better understand, though.
Why is switching to IPv6 so hard?
What all is involved in the process?
Why do some companies put it off as long as possible, with all the resource issues that seem to be coming up?
Thanks.
Edit: clarity <comment><USER2> Several reasons:

(1) IPv6 is a usability disaster. Addresses are not memorable, hard to type, and annoying to cut and paste. DNS solves some of these issues but is another system that can break. Network engineers deal in IP addresses because networks are IP-based, not DNS-based.

(2) Networking is a curmudgeonly field that clings stubbornly to old ways of doing things. Vendors like it this way because it helps them sell complexity and then sell more complexity to ease dealing with that complexity.

(3) IPv4 and NAT are huge sources of complexity and thus revenue for vendors (extending #2).

(4) A lot of old software still doesn't support it. A lot of legacy systems will never support it.

(5) Security superstition and cargo cultism. Many people think NAT is a security feature and fear IPv6 "exposing IPs." NAT was _never_ about security and if exposing an IP is a security risk you have major security problems.

(6) A lot of ISPs and major cloud providers (Azure, Google) don't offer it yet, making full support across everything difficult. Until they do you'll have to maintain dual stack or ugly V4/V6 NAT hacks.

(7) IPv6 doesn't solve all the problems. It has no inherent mechanism for authentication, micro-segmentation, or encryption (IPSec is a usability nightmare) and you still get delegation issues. For example if you delegate /64 to your network then /128 to each host a host cannot delegate a /128 to a VM. You could bridge the VM but this is sometimes problematic. This is a huge oversight in standard IPv6 address assignment practices, which should much more liberally delegate addresses.

</comment><comment><USER3> I manage it deployed on a large WAN. It's not hard.

Okay, it's kind of hard for the network administrator. There's a bit of a learning curve and you'd better understand how IPv6 requires ICMP, and how RA works. But, if you do your job right, end users probably won't notice. Everyone is still gun-shy about IPv6.

</comment><comment><USER4> Because IPv6 from user point of view it is 128 bit address and nothing more. From technical point there will be always that golden switch/router witch have problems with IPv6 and it is hardware bug, because router golden nobody will be new device for big chunk of money.</comment>


Virtual Windows - <AUTHOR> http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2009/11/virtual-windows.html

<comment><USER2> Awesome idea. The main reason things like this are inferior to actually looking through a window at the other person is that you have no eye contact. You either look at the camera (causing the image on their screen to look directly at them) or you look at their eyes on the screen (causing the image to look away). Humans are very good at seeing these subtle shifts in gaze, and this is what happens in videoconferencing settings. It's possible to work around this, but to do it you have to mount the camera on the same optical axis as the screen. It has been done with one-way mirrors and beamsplitters before, and it's disgustingly realistic. Would be very interesting to have that sort of window to someone.</comment>


Moral Greyzones - <AUTHOR> http://scrivle.com/2010/08/02/moral-greyzones/

<comment><USER2> Two types of people: _those who are willing to cross that line, and those who are brave enough to call the exception and dive into the moral greyzone when the need calls for it._

I have trouble with the statement of this article. I'm not perfect. Through my experience, I've had times when I've blundered into that gray-zone, I've had times when I declined to cross that line. In the end, I think I've been pretty successful in my endeavors but the more experience I have the more I realize how many different paths there are to reach an end. And in hindsight, I'm most proud of getting things done by putting in that extra effort to think of a way to achieve something without undermining integrity. We're human so I think we've all had this experience but I think I'm mature enough now to have the patience and understanding that solid values coupled with work ethic can trump a lot more problems than a lot of people think.

That said, I can understand the author's argument if what he means is that moral gray-zone of not right vs. wrong, but right vs. right decisions. Now that is a tough one. :-)</comment>


Pecking order: What chickens teach us - <AUTHOR> http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=410238&c=1 <comment><USER2> Another interesting thing is that birds represent an evolutionary road not taken. All modern birds are descended from a small theropod dinosaur, possibly _Velociraptor deinonychus_ itself -- a more plausible candidate for the star of "Jurassic Park" than _V. mongoliensis_, although it was only re-classified as a velociraptor in the late 1990s. It probably ran, fought, and foraged like a crane (although this is convergent evolution, as cranes probably evolved from small shorebirds called rails), and may have looked like something halfway between a crane and an eagle.

Of course, no intelligent birds exist, but we can see enough of the personalities of some species to get a sense of how an intelligent bird might act. They'd probably be less tribal, less extended-family-oriented, less self- serving than humans, more aloof and self-reliant, more like a startup founder... but also much more violent and warlike, as no avian however large has the same instinctive reluctance to kill a member of its own species that all large mammals share.

I don't know nearly as much about the _other_ path not taken, the cephalopods -- but I've read enough about the behavior of Humboldt's and giant squid when confronted by an unfamiliar sight to get the impression that there is a reason why nature didn't manage to take it. Unlike squid, octopodes are not psychotic, but they're easily bored and they have a malicious sense of humor. The urban legend of the octopus who waits until the lights are out and the aquarium-keepers have left, then crawls out of the water and goes over to the neighboring fish tank to have a snack before slipping back to his own tank before the morning, has happened any number of times.

Little-known medieval trivia point: if St. Thomas Aquinas was right about a certain speculation, the study of avian and cephalopod behaviors is probably a prudent one. Aquinas believed that if other worlds capable of supporting intelligent life exist, they _would_ be populated by intelligent beings, since God wouldn't let a perfectly good dwelling-place for souls go to waste. The only question, to the medieval mind, was whether such worlds existed (and, secondarily, whether Christ would have come to them separately had they fallen, or whether it would have been necessary to convert them to Catholicism; for more on this mindset, read C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy and perhaps Poul Anderson's _The High Crusade_).

</comment><comment><USER3> Money quote:

 _Now, I've hardly done much to refute charges of anthropomorphism - but am I bovvered? I'm not projecting human characteristics on to dumb animals - I'm saying I really don't see that much difference in their hopes and fears, behaviour and petty foibles. If one actually lives with chickens, it's a lot harder to treat them as mere objects.

Their preferences are astoundingly obvious, so what possible excuse could there be for giving them any less? If they like greens, why give them pellets? If they like sunbathing, why pack them into a tiny, noisy, smelly place with no natural light? If, as I suspect, the answer is something to do with the "efficiency" of food production, then the notion of efficiency is horrible, incompetent, brutalised and brutalising, and it's certainly not in the interests of chickens at all. And I'm not sure that our ethical notions are all that more advanced than chickens'._

<comment><USER2> I think I know the answer that a market-economist or an American conservative would give to this; so I'd answer that answer by observing that, as a serious Catholic, I find this article's author to be closer to the truth than those who think that chickens only exist to benefit humans.

Aristotle discovered or taught (I'm favoring "discovered") that all creatures have an end for which they exist; the end of a chicken is to live the life of a happy, fulfilled chicken. Human beings have a right to distort that under certain circumstances (domestication, for example, is acceptable), but we must not sacrifice all other considerations for profit. Eating meat is acceptable, at least grudgingly; raising stock animals in cruel conditions to wring more money out of them is not. The American way of life _is_ negotiable, in contrast to what a certain US President said, and was not handed down on Mount Sinai. (Actually, everything handed down on Mount Sinai _also_ wasn't handed down on Mount Sinai, in the sense of being eternal and immutable -- or else Jesus Christ would hardly have run roughshod over the Third Commandment.)

There's something else I want to mention about chickens, but I'll put that in another post for ease of up/downvoting; in the meantime, I just wanted to emphasize that touchy-feely liberals aren't the only ones who believe that a chicken's happiness is worth something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I really appreciate this article. I absolutely adore chickens, and understand that they are far more complex and intelligent than they are generally given credit for.

</comment><comment><USER5> This post makes an interesting point about the nature of co-operation in competition. It sounds very much like the Nash equilibrium in game theory.</comment>


The Beef Programming Language - <AUTHOR> http://beeflang.org/ <comment><USER2> Impressed so far. I like all the memory debugging stuff without all the irritating handholdy solutions commonly used such as garbage collectors and just not being able to work with raw pointers in general.

With all the focus on runtime compilation and the deliberately stripped pre- processor, I wonder if we could get something like JAI where you can run code at compile time.... (Code that can be selectively omitted from the actual final binary)

</comment><comment><USER3> I tried this about 1 month and half ago.

It was interesting, but there were some issues with the IDE that caused it to crash in certain scenarios.

It very much has an alpha feel.

I'm looking forward to seeing what a later version has in store.

</comment><comment><USER4> Looking forward to this. Inspired by C#. Compiles to native binaries, no GC, custom allocator support, memory leak detection, hot compilation etc. Lots of neat features for sure;

</comment><comment><USER5> Feels like C# to native ;) will give a try</comment>


Meet the professor who says facial recognition can tell if you're gay - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/07/artificial-intelligence-can-tell-your-sexuality-politics-surveillance-paul-lewis <comment><USER2> even I can tell that... they are so much more happier.</comment>


MPEG LA Announces Call for Patents Essential to VP8 Video Codec - <AUTHOR> http://www.mpegla.com/main/pid/vp8/default.aspx

<comment><USER2> Good. This will hopefully force the matter and get all the patent claims out in the open. I doubt that actual holders of patents will play their cards close to their chests here because the upside of the cut of the bundle license for their patents through MPEG LA will be so large.

While I wish you couldn't patent software or algorithms we cannot ignore the fact that you can by simply willful ignorance and wishing that the patents go away if we just not think about them.

At the end of this process the thread from submarine patens will be vastly reduced and hardware manufacturers and companies like MS and Apple have a realistic road to supporting VP8.

<comment><USER3> I predict that Apple will say "why should we pay to use VP8 when we've already paid for a superior codec?"

Once VP8 costs money, it has no benefit over H.264.

<comment><USER2> presumably it may be less because the bundle will contain less patents but that wouldn't be an unreasonable position to take, you are right.

<comment><USER3> IMO it doesn't matter whether VP8 costs one cent or one dollar; if you've already paid for H.264 then even one cent for VP8 is a waste of money. And those who aren't willing to pay (Mozilla and Opera) are not even willing to pay one cent.

Historically every new codec has been cheaper (despite containing more technology), so I expect VP8 to be cheaper than H.264, but H.265 may be cheaper still.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is great. It will limit FUD. MPEGLA have called, and people need to show their cards. If we hear nothing, then that shows that the MPEGLA doesn't know of any patents that affect WebM/VP8, and they can stop all this "don't use VP8 cause of patents!" FUD.

If however there are patents on WebM/VP8, we can get them out in the open and look at them and then see.

<comment><USER5> The MPEG LA will most likely look at a ton of patent claims on WebM in the next 5 weeks, accept any with even a tenuous grasp on reality as legitimate, count how many they have, and announce a number of infringements essential to WebM. They will then file a number of lawsuits in a shotgun fashion, perhaps a few hundred, half of which will be against Google, and the other half against various companies using WebM; these will serve to gain royalties in settlements (minor gain) and discourage adoption of WebM (major gain). The suits against Google and whichever minor players don't settle will be appealed by the losing party and drag on for years.

This isn't the end of the FUD, or even the beginning of the end, but it is perhaps the end of the beginning.

<comment><USER6> > They will then file a number of lawsuits in a shotgun fashion, perhaps a few > hundred, half of which will be against Google, and the other half against > various companies using WebM

And then we'll finally get to see what Google has up their sleeve, because they're not dumb and surely saw this coming.

Maybe there will be a counter-suit, because h.264 violates some of Google's patents.

<comment><USER7> Could the MPEG-LA be sued if Google has patents that cover h.264? I'm not sure it could and if so we'd see a divergence between the interests of the MPEG-LA (who need to maintain control) and the groups contributing patents to them (who are afraid of a patent war).

<comment><USER4> I believe the MPEG-LA has a patent pool, where all companies that have patents on it pool them together. They don't sue anyone who's in the pool and they aren't sued by anyone in that pool.

If this is the case, then google could sue MPEG-LA users, but they might get sued themselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So is this being driven by people working on the VP8 codec or the WebM project? Or is MPEG LA just trying to show that VP8 really is just a patent encumbered at h.264(and protect/add to their revenue stream?)

<comment><USER9> Since google's adoption relies heavily on their claim that WebM isn't patent encumbered, it's a pretty safe bet that this is being done by the h.264 patent holders for competitive reasons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I have a few questions.

1\. Does this mean that MPEG-LA has concluded it has no existing patents in the H.264 pool that are essential to what VP8 does? If they did, wouldn't those be the seeds of this new pool? Or maybe even obviate the need for a new pool?

2\. Does Google have anything in its royalty free patent grant that says "If you sue us or otherwise challenge our VP8 IP, you can't get a free license from us"? If so, wouldn't that kill any possibility of a successful MPEG-LA pool? Who would license some percentage from MPEG-LA knowing they couldn't get a license for the rest from Google.

3\. Couldn't Google just buy who ever steps up and says "I have essential patents"?

<comment><USER3> _Does this mean that MPEG-LA has concluded it has no existing patents in the H.264 pool that are essential to what VP8 does?_

Rather than reading tens of thousands of claims to find ones that apply to VP8, MPEG LA has outsourced that work to the patent holders themselves. If you want your patent to be included in the VP8 pool, _you_ have to speak up.

 _If they did, wouldn't those be the seeds of this new pool?_

Yes, I would expect that the VP8 pool will basically be a subset of the H.264 pool.

 _Who would license some percentage from MPEG-LA knowing they couldn't get a license for the rest from Google._

Google could get in antitrust trouble for refusal to license VP8 patents after claiming that VP8 is "open".

 _Couldn't Google just buy who ever steps up and says "I have essential patents"?_

You mean like Sony, Philips, Fraunhofer, Mitsubishi, Columbia University, etc.? <http://www.mpegla.com/main/programs/AVC/Pages/Licensors.aspx>

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> And now the true FUD campaign begins...

<comment><USER12> Just because you want WebM to not infringe and to succeed, that doesn't make any possible facts or remarks that potentially conflict with that wish FUD.

<comment><USER11> My point is that just because MPEGLA contains a pool of patents that they have deemed applies to WebM, doesn't mean those patents will hold up in a court of law, but it will certainly make for an excellent scare tactic against those who wish to utilize WebM in their projects. Before now, it was just vague remarks about how WebM may not be patent free, but after this:

"We have X number of patents in our pool that we say WebM infringes on; pay us and we won't sue you." It'll practically negate the entire purpose of using WebM instead of H.264.

Edit: Until a court of law has ruled that WebM infringes on patents held by MPEGLA, what they're doing is quite literally the definition of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. They want you to Fear a lawsuit, because you're Uncertain about the legitimacy of their claims, and Doubt that you could either afford the costs or even defeat their claims. You can't possibly tell me that FUD is inappropriate for this situation.

<comment><USER13> WebM exists at all because Google has tried to create FUD with H264. Fear royalties going up by some crazy amount, because you're uncertain what this well-established organization (MPEGLA) will do, and doubt that you can afford the costs of crazy royalty fees in 2016.

This despite the fact that MPEGLA has been licensing for ubiquitous technologies like MPEG-2 for over a decade.

So I guess FUD meet FUD.

<comment><USER11> Or perhaps people just don't want to have to pay a central licensing entity to use a video codec? I'm sure Google stands to save a lot of licensing fees if they don't have to pay into MPEGLA's patent pool. It has nothing to do with FUD and everything to do with wanting an unencumbered format.

Edit: This is the same reason that most video games these days use Ogg Vorbis for their music and sounds, because they save a lot of costs by using an unencumbered audio format.

<comment><USER3> Paying $133M to avoid paying $5M/year is indeed creative business on Google's part.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's now at least $6.5 Million a year, for another 20 year so the maths isn't that bad. Particularly if it prompts H.265 and any other future codec to be royalty free. I guess the idea is to spur on web video and make money from that though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've never understood the objection to MPEGLA.

I'm neutral on patents* but this is probably the best environment for patents in the entire world. MPEGLA is a licensing agency, so there are no personal or political issues. They make money by increasing the number of licensees. Those who submit patents to them ofload a lot of work that they otherwise would have to engage in for marketing the patents.

Finally the patent pools allow for standards to be created and propagated under fair terms. Fierce competitors like Microsoft and Apple can participate together and have an incentive to contribute patents to the pool.

And as was otherwise mentioned the existence of the pool mitigates risk that there might be a patent you don't know about.

Everybody who participates in the pool wins, and the pool is a much more efficient mechanism of licensing patents than doing it one by one in an environment of uncertainty, or doing it at the end of a long litigation that you have lost and are thus pushed over the barrel.

Further, I don't understand why the risk of patents for VP8 is called FUD. I'm certain a good chunk of the patents in the current MPEGLA pool cover VP8 because of the nature of patents (they have to be broadly written) the nature of our patent system (things have to be patented, because even if you invented it, someone else can patent it if you don't) and the nature of video encoding (you're essentially forced by the nature of video and the desire to compress to recognize features of images that exist in multiple frames and then encode based on them, this is an essential component of MPEG-4 video & h.264, and unless a fundamental patent for this has expired, and all derivative improvements have also expired, which I doubt, h.264 patents are going to cover VP8 encoding, unless VP8 somehow does not use any feature extraction.)

Thus, MPEGLA will have a pool that people can go to license the VP8 patents. If google wants to contribute their patents (assuming they have some) to the pool then they will get licensing compensation. If they don't then that doesn't change the fact that MPEGLA is legitimately protecting the rights of the patent holders for patents that VP8 infringes on.

That VP8 infringes on patents is pretty much a sure thing-- unless I'm fundamentally misunderstanding how VP8 works, and even still, there are patents on many other aspects of video and video containers.

Don't be mad at the patent holders for protecting their work- they published it for everyone to benefit from in exchange.

\--

* If you've got a better idea for how intellectual property should be protected or not, then, please start a political movement. Don't go after people following he laws as they are. Given the existence of the system, companies must patent and defend their patents. And given that this is the state of the legal framework in the country, suing people for patent violation is perfectly legitimate. The patent is a trade- you reveal your solution in exchange for legal protection. If you cannot sue, then you are not getting the compensation you are promised in this system for revealing your invention. If you wish to go to a system whereby there is no patent system, then recognize that people wouldn't be revealing their inventions, and thus things like android couldn't exist, because they wouldn't have a source of technology to copy.

<comment><USER15> _things have to be patented, because even if you invented it, someone else can patent it if you don't_

This is an incorrect statement.

<comment><USER16> Suppose for a moment that you invent something, but don't tell anyone. Then someone else can obviously patent it.

Suppose you publish something on your blog. The patent examiner doesn't read blogs, so someone else can obviously patent it.

Suppose you publish it in a well-respected journal of computer science. The patent examiner doesn't read journals either, so someone can obviously patent it.

Now obviously, none of these patents are valid, but that is not how the patent system works.

<comment><USER15> Or suppose someone else is trying to patent the exact same invention that's already patented by you. The patent examiner makes a mistake and issues a patent.

<comment><USER17> Oh, you mean that patent on the stick as a dog toy? Yeah, that one sucked. I can't believe it took four years, a reexamination by the USPTO Director and referencing no less than two prior patents as prior art to invalidate all of its claims:

<http://www.scribd.com/doc/49521/Worlds-Craziest-Patent></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Against Flatten the Curve: GetToZero [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sf5ZRImyb8U <comment><USER2> I don't get the point of this critic. The advice from flattenthecurve.com seems reasonable to me, even though they don't present any numbers - it's a qualitative analysis.</comment>


The Chicago Tylenol Poisonings - <AUTHOR> https://www.talkmurderwithme.com/blog/2018/11/9/the-chicago-tylenol-poisonings <comment><AUTHOR> Posted because it's a reminder of what can happen when our supply chains are insecure. (As a result of this incident, tamper-proof packaging on over the counter meds became a thing …)</comment>


Twitter's (Big) Problems in Pretty Pictures - <AUTHOR> http://ryanspoon.com/blog/2008/05/30/why-twitters-problem-is-social-findability-twitter-in-pictures/

<comment><USER2> Following "juci" now - poor kid, I know how it feels to talk into a void...

<comment><AUTHOR> Hysterical... I thought about following Juci until I saw those updates!!

<comment><USER2> She is not really flooding my message stream, though. And the updates are kind of cute ("eating cake") - not so much different from the average tweet? I just subscribed to Jimmy Wales' updates and he wrote "dinner with friends".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> And btw - I believe the scalability issues are platform / design based. All of these improvements are just that, improvements. The system needs to be built to scale first

</comment><comment><USER3> I like the phrase 'social scalability'</comment>


Linus Torvalds finds GNOME 3.4 to be a "total user experience design failure" - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/linus-torvalds-finds-gnome-34-to-be-a-total-user-experience-design-failure/11127

<comment><USER3> This is just a transcription of a Google+ post. Is that really what ZDNet has come to? Can't even email the guy to get a quote first and pretend to be doing journalism?

(edit: fixed link:) [https://plus.google.com/102150693225130002912/posts/UkoAaLDp...](https://plus.google.com/102150693225130002912/posts/UkoAaLDpF4i)

FWIW: I'm using Gnome 3 and don't hate it. It's thrown lots of stuff out the window, but I find many of the new idioms pretty nice -- the vertically stacked automatically expanding virtual desktops are amazingly great, for example. And the things that don't work (the app launcher basically sucks, "app" switching instead of "window" switching with Alt-Tab is a total fail when you have a dozen console windows open, nautilus doesn't manage icons on the desktop...) are easy enough to configure around or ignore. The biggest specific complaint seems to be the very poor multiple monitor support, but I use a laptop screen full time and am not affected.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, it's started growing on me once I learned about what's possible via extensions. At some point as long as they expose the APIs to build the right thing it stops mattering to a degree how the defaults work. Witness things like Conkeror (<http://conkeror.org>) being built initially as a Firefox extension due to the fact that all the extensibility to build a better UI was there from the start.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> But he also writes in a subsequent comment:

 _"And for all the people wasting everybodys time with "Why don't you use Unity/KDE/xfce/xyz" - I've tried them. They are even worse"_

[https://plus.google.com/102150693225130002912/posts/UkoAaLDp...](https://plus.google.com/102150693225130002912/posts/UkoAaLDpF4i)

So Gnome 3 is officially the best Linux desktop.

<comment><USER6> He wasn't moaning when GNOME 2 was around, so why exactly doesn't he like MATE?

<comment><USER5> He was. He called the Gnome 2 developers "interface nazis": [http://www.itwire.com/opinion-and-analysis/open- sauce/9680-i...](http://www.itwire.com/opinion-and-analysis/open- sauce/9680-interface-nazis-in-torvalds-line-of-fire)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I couldn't agree more with Mr. Torvalds. I'm relieved to know I'm not the only one - I was thinking maybe I was too picky, or too dumb to set Gnome 3 up the way I wanted it. I spent a half hour searching and Googling to find where they had hidden certain settings only to discover they had removed them, as if to say "This setting you depend on everyday, we don't think you need it - <USER2> bad!" I don't mind tinkering with things that may or may not break when I'm at home, but I've got to work at work, so I back-peddled to Gnome 2.32.

</comment><comment><USER8> I've never understood who exactly is the target audience of Gnome 3 (and, to a lesser extent, Unity). It seems like these things would be great on an iPad or something like that, but what Linux users are really running Fedora or Debian on a touch device?

Not only that, I think many of these designs don't make sense to novice users either. I recently let me wife try a few live discs to see which one she liked best (she is very non-technical but was sick of Windows running like maple syrup). She ended up liking Mint's LXDE remix the most because it was simple and very fast. Unity's unifed menus and Gnome's app-not-windows design just confused her. Granted, she's just one person, but if it's not for me (the nerd) and it's not for her (the non-techie), who is supposed to be using Gnome 3?

What confuses me is that Gnome is community driven, and somehow a consensus of intelligent developers decided that this is the direction they want to take the project, despite Gnome's poor track record on mobile platforms and that the design paradigms don't accurately reflect the hardware on which the software is run. You'd think someone might have raised a hand and said "um, this design makes more sense on cell phones, which people are not running our product on."

<comment><USER9> > It seems like these things would be great on an iPad or something like that, > but what Linux users are really running Fedora or Debian on a touch device?

What you just described, sir, is a classic chicken/egg problem. Why would they design Gnome or Unity for multitouch users when there are none? But why would anyone use Gnome or Ubuntu on a multitouch device when the previous UIs were so mis-suited for that environment?

<comment><USER10> This is exactly the reason they shouldn't even be trying to get into that market. Competing with Apple, Microsoft and Google, why?

There will always be workstations. It would have been a great opportunity for Gnome to make the best damn workstation UI that ever existed (and they where on the right track with Gnome 2) but instead they jump on the touch screen band wagon in the hope of being adopted by device manufactures while in the process of doing so they're alienating their existing user base.

In the end, everyone loses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I use Gnome 3 daily, and I have to say that some of the points do have validity.

However, it's only a matter of time until these minor issues are fixed, and I happen to think that the general design is excellent.

<comment><USER3> Gnome 3 has been shipping in Fedora for over a year now, and they just pushed the third such revision. I'd say they're running out of their matters of time and entering the realm of "long standing breakage" at this point.

Here's my biggest personal peeve: keyboard navigation in the overview screen has never worked. The gnome-shell process in that mode steals events from gnome-settings-daemon (which normally handles hotkeys). This means that if you like to do things like launch apps from the keyboard (I mean: who wants to launch an app when in the overview/app-launcher screen?!) it just doesn't work. Combine that with the fact that the overview screen pops up automatically when you close the last window on a screen (I mean: who wants to launch an app just after closing another one!?) and it drives me up the wall daily.

Three times now I've straight up decided to fix this, but it's a non-trivial codebase and I always give up before making it work. The core folks really need to look at this problem, but at this point I doubt they ever will. Consistent keyboard navigation is clearly not a priority.

(edit: this is the issue in question: <https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=643111>)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> My major concern with gnome/unity/xfce is that the default font sizes look too big and really ugly. I guess choosing the right font sizes is not so trivial given various resolutions, but on fonts, every bit of effort will be paid off. And this can certainly be achieved. I am happy with the default system fonts in Mac and Windows nearly all the time.

</comment><comment><USER13> I wish someone would make a Gnome 2+, that would be cool again. Good performance, very configurable, doesn't slow my games down.

<comment><USER14> Honestly, I hope that GNOME fork (based on 2) panned out. I didn't follow it closely, but after having Linux Mint for over 3 months now running "GNOME Classic", I don't think I can go back to GNOME 3 proper, every now and then I'd switch to Cinnamon, but the Compiz effects (or maybe just GNOME 3 in general) screw with my ATI video drivers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Even if it does not fit the Gnome agenda, there is a way to make everyone happy: just add an annex section in Gnome documentation describing how to configure all the tweaks asked by Linus. This "Linus section" would be useful for many people to understand how to configure gnome to their wish.

thanks

<comment><USER16> Only if these tweaks work on every Gnome release.

And I can virtually guarantee they won't... extensions.gnome.org is full of obsolete, incompatible extensions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I still can't believe Linus doesn't use Arch, or LFS or some sort of custom setup. The great thing about Linux is that you don't have to put up with the crap some distro gives you. Just remove Gnome and try something else.

<comment><USER18> 15 years ago I'd have agreed with you. However, there comes a time in your life when playing with your tools becomes less fun and you want to just get down and use them.

I've gotten to the boring stage of my life when I am happy with Ubuntu LTS, because it means I can opt-out of a week of less productivity every six months when a new version comes out and breaks my workflow by forcing me to work around some "clever new idea" that won't last another couple of years.

I'm sure Linus is even busier than I am, so I'm pleasantly surprised that he takes the time to experiment with and evaluate new distros and environments as much as he does. That's probably not what he wants to spend his time doing though, and not where he's most productive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Too bad desktop is only a minor part of Linus needs, if he was a graphic designer he would have invented dit long ago.

</comment><comment><USER20> I just learned that 'forced fallback mode' is still available in gnome 3 on fedora 17.

</comment><comment><USER21> While he does raise some good points, it still feels a little like the pot calling the kettle black what with the UX nightmare of git.

</comment><comment><USER22> It would be interesting if Linus finally broke down and developed his own desktop.

<comment><USER5> First he should fix that horrible Tcl/Tk based Git GUI.

<comment><USER6> Maybe he likes Tcl/Tk, he is old school after all. :P

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> On a slightly related note: Kudos to Linux Mint for showing the way forward. Thanks a bunch guys and keep up the good work.

<comment><USER24> Mint is cool. Firefox in Mint ships with Duck Duck Go as the default search engine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> "I'm really tired of the f*cking old "just use the keyboard shortcuts" crap."

Amen. This is the same bullshit you hear from Apple apologists whenever they're confronted with some glaring functionality omission in the Mac UI (or keyboard, as in the case of Apple's missing Delete keys).

<comment><USER26> Fn+Backspace

And cmd+arrow keys for home and end.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Linus is spoiled; he uses a MacBook Air.</comment>


Classified Information Nondisclosure Agreement [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.gsa.gov/forms-library/classified-information-nondisclosure-agreement-0 <comment><USER2> Assuming this is posted re: the civil litigation against Snowden, and is meant to initiate a debate.

I'll bite: If he signed this, it's pretty much open and shut that he has to forfeit all proceeds from any sales of a book or other medium containing said secrets. However, if the medium does not actually contain any secrets, but is rather about his ordeal and experiences as a whistleblower, well that's not covered by this document. Hence why the state is suing instead.

<comment><USER3> That would need to be settled in court. Which I guess is the point of the NDA case. And it will almost certainly tie up any income from a book until resolved.

Otherwise, I doubt that Russia will care any more about this than they've cared about extradition demands. But even if his book was published in Russia, global distribution would be difficult. While I'd actually prefer to pay with Bitcoin via Tor, that wouldn't work generally.

<comment><USER4> The book can be distributed; he can't make money from it.

<comment><USER3> The option of publishing in Russia would be letting him make money from it. With a suitable cut to Putin, of course, in compensation for his kindness.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In criminal cases involving leaks, agreements like these often cited in complaints as foundation the defendant knew and acknowledged the sensitivity of the information.

\- Jeffrey Sterling: [https://fas.org/sgp/jud/sterling/indict.pdf](https://fas.org/sgp/jud/sterling/indict.pdf), [https://fas.org/sgp/jud/sterling/](https://fas.org/sgp/jud/sterling/)

\- John Kiriakou: [https://www.justice.gov/archive/opa/documents/kiriakou- compl...](https://www.justice.gov/archive/opa/documents/kiriakou- complaint.pdf)

Like Snowden's case, they tried to work around the Publication Review board and all spoke to journalists.

There are mechanisms for people in the situation to file complaints without going public: House and Senate Intelligence Committees, or to the CIA's Office of the Inspector General. (Jeffrey Sterling's case mentioned this, [https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-4th- circuit/1639333.html#foot...](https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-4th- circuit/1639333.html#footnote_ref_1))

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is the agreement that assigns royalties to the United States.

<comment><USER6> Not exactly - classified information is already effectively "owned" by the USG from a stewardship perspective (not ownership). USG is supposed to protect and safeguard said info - said info is still technically public domain (owned) - it is just restricted due to national security implications.

SF-312 clearly specifies to the person receiving classified information that they have unique requirements for handling and disclosure.

That said, given SF-312, I think Chelsea Manning had a lot more downside exposure than Edward Snowden does. Ms. Manning shared the classified information in a very vindictive and dangerous way. Mr. Snowden was very careful in what and how he leaked with regards to the data in question.

Both acts are still technically violations of SF-312 (among other stuff, like criminal law), but the extent of risk and damage done to the USG interests is always evaluated.

(Have signed SF-312 multiple times in my life.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Having read some NDAs now, this is a doozy. Ctrl-S.

<comment><USER8> it covers everything that needs to be covered and no doubt it has been tried and tested in many court cases. It's not like USA doesn't have lawyers able to write 350 page NDAs</comment></comment>


Orange juice exists due to climate change in the Himalayas millions of years ago - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/7/16984460/citrus-fruits-genome-sequencing-himalayas-evolution-breeding <comment><USER2> This is a particularly clever form of clickbait. The article describes how citrus, generally migrated from the Himalayas due to climate change. The title says orange juice.

Notice the subtle bait and switch here.

Citrus exists due to climate change in the Himalayas millions of years ago

Oranges exist due to climate change in the Himalayas millions of years ago

Orange juice exists due to climate change in the Himalayas millions of years ago

You want to click on the last one because your curious why they are so specific in the title, even though the article is about the general case and mentions the specific only in passing, almost as an excuse.

<comment><USER3> User-engagement optimizing "tricks" used by social networks and news sites will stop working eventually, and leave users with a bad taste of your company. Using data mining and A/B testing we are basically enrolling all users in a constant social science experiment so they can help us better hack their own brain. But following it blindly is incredibly short-sighted.

Yes it works, but every time you trick someone it ekes away at their trust and happiness using your platform. But this occurs over many such interactions so it won't show up in your metrics until much later, and then only in general stats so it's nearly impossible to measure the effect with the time scales that we actually record and test. Heck, the users themselves probably won't even notice anything specific but just have a slowly growing distaste for interacting with your platform.

Anecdotally, I've noticed this happening to me and people I know on many news and social sites. (Though, my sensitivity to this is turned up really high.) But this effect can help explain the cyclic nature of social networks, and perhaps Facebook's recent decline in the US.

Do your users come away from your site feeling good about their engagement? Assuming more is better may be hurting you in the long run.

<comment><USER4> A problem is that reputation is increasingly defunct, at least in my limited experience.

After getting curation & comments from hn, reddit, etc., my mobile browsers reader mode strips the design.

I had to look up the source after reading your comments. Therefore I'm not sure reputation will solve clickbait eventually.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The article mentions that the himalayas grow by about 1cm per year, and that it has been growing for millions of years. Wikipedia says it is more like 5mm/year.

So I'm assuming a growth rate of 5km/My, while Everest is only about 9km.

I understand _what_ has been limiting height: gravity, rock strength, erosion, sinking into the mantle... But since there is growth now, obviously these processes are not in short term equilibrium. So how does this play out? Are there apocalyptic landslides every million years or so? Or just periods of growth alternated with periods of shrinking?

<comment><USER6> Punctuated equilibrium[1] — growth followed by sudden collapse — could be the umbrella term for the scenarios you are thinking of.

The phenomenon, originally from biology, shows up in sandpiles and avalanches as well; it could explain the growth (or lack of it) of mountains too.

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

<comment><USER7> For any particular mountain or mountain ranger there could be a number of processes, some of which may dominate for periods of time.

It could be slow / fast growth followed by slow / fast sinking / decay / collapse / asteroid impact / weathering.

I image there have been a number of sequences that have played out in various locations over time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The region never ceases to amaze. I have spent most of my adult life around Yunnan, and I am writing an ancient history of the area. It has significant historic links with India, Tibet, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, Iran, Vietnam and China. It's the most biologically, culturally, linguistically, climatically and culinary diverse area of China and possibly the world. If you find yourself with time, cycle touring the area is one of the best things you can do anywhere on the planet.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is kinda like saying my iphone exists because a fish decided to walk on land millions of years ago

<comment><USER10> The headline may read that way, but the article doesn't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Easily the worst thing you can drink on a regular basis. I use to think OJ was healthily and drank it a lot. I stopped completely at some point a year or so back and over about 6 months lost over 20 pounds of weight I could never lose, even though I play hockey 2-3 days a week and workout pretty much every day. I went from 205, my college hockey weight, to 180 now.

There is a reason they use to give you a tiny juice glass for OJ, and I'd bet even that is pretty terrible for you daily.

<comment><USER12> You read the title, saw it had OJ in it, and rushed to the comments to rant about it?

Edit: And then you doubled down?

> hahahahaha keep knocking down glasses of OJ fatties !

Might want to be a little more professional when you have your professional website in your profile, Rick.

<comment><USER13> > You read the title, saw it had OJ in it, and rushed to the comments to rant > about it?

It seems to be a strange quirk of HN lately. You see this often with facebook posts. "I quit facebook and it cured my cancer". There was a post about tea being good for you and someone chimes with something like, "I quit tea cold turkey and it helped me get a raise!".

Seems a lot of people on HN attribute their successes and failures to arbitrary things and something in a headline clicks and they have to evangelize.</comment></comment></comment>


Is this the best name for a boat? - <AUTHOR> http://www.irishexaminer.com/examviral/science-world/is-this-the-best-ever-name-for-a-ship-rrs-boaty-mcboatface-is-leading-the-vote-as-public-name-new-polar-vessel-388444.html <comment><AUTHOR> Moral: Don't let the public name your £200m boat unless you want it to have a fun name.

<comment><USER2> > you want it to have a fun name. reply

It would be really cool if they did. It would garner some publicity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The Wisdom of Crowds.

</comment><comment><USER4> Perhaps someday it will meet Mr. Splashy Pants.</comment>


Optimizing the restaurant sales receipt for maximum tips - <AUTHOR> http://maxsavin.com/posts/receipt.html

<comment><USER2> This is a fine idea, but if the amounts are too high, then it could backfire.

For example, some people tip 20% regularly, but 25% tips are nearly unheard of -- AFAIK. It seems to me that your options will tend to drive customers toward 15%. (EDIT. See the comment by bostonpete for an example.) But if the three were 15%, 20%, and 25%, then I imagine you'd get a lot of people picking the middle option. Maybe even with 15%, 21%, and 27%.

Also, as a legal matter, don't credit cards require the final amount to be explicitly stated? It would probably work if you included both the tip and the final total in the option to circle. You'd also need to include a blank to write the total in, for people choosing their own tip amount.

</comment><comment><USER3> I generally tip 20%. If I got that receipt I'd probably be so annoyed at the blatant attempt to trick me into tipping more that I'd circle 15%.

<comment><AUTHOR> The percentages were just made up - it could be tested to see which makes people more comfortable. Maybe 10% / 15% / 25% would be more effective.</comment></comment>


The Origin of Foo and Bar - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EztTIYVa1E <comment><USER2> Foo & bar are terms found in programming used for generic placed holder references.

It originates from the military slang FUBAR (fucked up beyond all recognition/any repair/all reason) and dates from World War II.

The Oxford English Dictionary lists Yank, the US Army Weekly magazine (1944, 7 Jan. p. 8) as its earliest citation: "The FUBAR squadron. FUBAR? It means 'Fouled Up Beyond All Recognition'.</comment>


The double factorial  - <AUTHOR> http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2010/09/21/variations-on-factorial/

<comment><USER2> I don't like the notation. If one is not familiar with double factorial and encounters n!! one will think it means (n!)!.

A good mathematical notation should be easily recognizable by someone not familiar with it as something new.</comment>


Tasmania is burning - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/05/tasmania-is-burning-the-climate-disaster-future-has-arrived-while-those-in-power-laugh-at-us <comment><USER2> Full title: "Tasmania is burning. The climate disaster future has arrived while those in power laugh at us"

<comment><USER2> _Five years ago I was contacted by a stranger, Prof Peter Davies, an eminent water scientist. He wanted to meet because he had news he thought would interest me. The night we met Davies told me that the south-west of Tasmania – the island's vast, uninhabited and globally unique wildland, the heart of its world heritage area – was dying. The iconic habitats of rainforest, button grass plains, and heathlands had begun to vanish because of climate change.

I was shocked. I had understood that climate change's effects on Tasmania would be significant but not disastrous; the changes mitigated by Tasmania being surrounded by seas that were not heating as quickly as others: the island's west would get wetter, the east a little warmer and drier, but compared to much of the world it didn't seem catastrophic.

But it wasn't so. Tasmania's sea waters were warming at two to three times the global rate. Davies' work, with that of other scientists, was revealing the warming and drying of Tasmania's west and highlands, and the growing impact this was having. The highland lakes of Tasmania would, for example, in the next 70 to 100 years see between a 10% and 20% drop in rainfall, coupled to a 20% to 30% increase in evaporation. By the end of this century a significant proportion of these lakes and wetlands will cease to exist or be largely dried out much of the year._

It gets worse from there.

<comment><AUTHOR> Money quote for me was:

 _Those faces contorted in weird mirth are the grotesque masks of a great and historic crime, deriding not just their political opponents but mocking the future with that pure contempt of power, daring us to remember beyond the next news cycle, to care beyond the next confected outrage, to see past the next lie. It is the image of our age: power laughing at us._

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Anyone who has spent time here knows that the summer holiday has a very particular place in Australia's cultural heart. This is particularly true for people who grew up here - it's a vivid representation of joy & freedom.

This sense is rapidly being displaced by summer being a period of hellish heat, fire & flood.</comment>


Coding fonts from FontLibrary.org - <AUTHOR> https://fontlibrary.org/en/search?category=monospaced <comment><USER2> What font(s) do you guys use when coding?

I use roboto mono primarily, though sometimes I will use source code pro.

<comment><USER3> I prefer the consolas/Inconsolata ( with a slight preference for Inconsolata ), mainly for the font appearance, but also for the presence on slashed zero, which improve the readability. I also tried source code pro, which is a great monospace font, but probably less suitable to small display compared to inconsolata.</comment></comment>


Send anonymous ephemeral texts to people around you - <AUTHOR> http://ephemerapp.com/

<comment><USER2> OK I'll admit it: I don't really know what "ephemeral" means in this context, and it's apparently your killer feature. You might want to include a cool- looking dictionary definition thing or something on your landing page.

</comment><comment><USER3> would be nice if it explained why texts being ephemeral matters when they're sent to people around me. Otherwise it just sounds like "Hey ephemeral messaging is popular nowadays, and so is location based services, so i will build an ephemeral location based service!"

</comment><comment><USER4> You didn't like the term temporary?

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm wondering if this will ever have the necessary density of use for any to get any texts at all (except in SOMA). Anyone have any ideas on how they might mitigate this problem?

</comment><comment><USER6> It sounds like a good idea, but it won't be very fun if no one uses it. I imagine having some difficulty explaining "ephemera app" to a wide audience.

</comment><comment><USER7> I wonder if an anonymous app like that can actually exist? I mean, couldn't it be used for terrorism or to organize riots?

</comment><comment><USER8> Did I miss something or is there absolutely nothing to see here (yet)?

</comment><comment><USER9> "Ephemeral Texts" = "SnapChat for Text Messages"

</comment><comment><USER10> This sounds like Snapchat tailored for a non-photogenic userbase

</comment><comment><USER11> Sort of like omegle but with different features.</comment>


ChessBase is 25 - <AUTHOR> http://chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=7229

<comment><AUTHOR> I've shortened the title, to remove the commercial spammy message which takes away from such an interesting article. Two very interesting points that make this suitable for this group:

1.) The first connection between a computer programmer and a chess world champion, which pushed ChessBase towards commercialisation. Today ChessBase is the essential tool for chess preparation 2.) Fredric Friedl, the owner of ChessBase, sent Kasparov a computer disk for his BBC Acorn. That disc included the game Elite (by David Braben and Ian Bell).</comment>


Ask HN: Why submissions automatically getting dead? - johnx123-up

Though my previous submissions are not flagged, new ones are automatically getting killed. Whom to contact for this? <comment><AUTHOR> Contact pg.

I'm looking at your list of recent submissions with showdead on, and I see only one dead submission out of the most recent 30 (up to 164 days ago) --- and that's #24 from 131 days ago.

Which web sites are you submitting that are getting autokilled?

<comment> johnx123-up Thanks for the reply. I deleted them once they're autokilled. These are the websites that I tried submitting:

<http://designmodo.com/the-bricks/>

<http://theoatmeal.com/comics/tesla>

<comment><USER2> I might be able to save you the trouble:

theoatmeal.com is banned at this site. it is the very definition of something that shouldn't be posted here, as it would lead to endless nerdrage debates.

i've never heard of designmodo.com, but i wouldn't be surprised if it is also on the banned list. that article you submitted is a thinly veiled ad, which is also not a good submission candidate.

<comment> johnx123-up Thanks for the insights</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Clicking pdf link opens it in application without asking to save it - <AUTHOR> https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=668738 <comment><USER2> Not nearly as bad as last year's bug where Chrome would randomly and silently drop characters from a printed document. That lasted for almost a month [0].

[0] [https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=658606](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=658606)

</comment><comment><USER3> Truth be told, I actually prefer PDFs opening in browser compared to downloading the file, opening the file, reading it, and then having to delete file (unless I actually want to save it.) If it's a file I want to keep, I right click and save or save the already open PDF. Most of the time I'm just looking for information in a datasheet and don't want to actually download the PDF.

<comment><USER4> This bug only applies to people who have disabled Chrome's built-in PDF reader, if I'm reading it right. (And pdfium is probably the world's best in- browser PDF reader; it works reliably, it's well-sandboxed, and it's free software despite being based on the proprietary/commercial Foxit codebase.)

<comment><USER5> I don't think so. I have the Chrome PDF reader enabled on a Mac using Sierra and sometimes it just downloads the PDF and opens it in Preview.

<comment><USER6> If the web server throws a "Content-Disposition: attachment" header with it, you will download the file, no matter the mime type or file extension.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What's newsworthy about this? It seems like this is a bug in Chrome 56, the current beta version (not stable), in a non-default configuration (the built- in PDF plugin disabled), and the Chrome team is treating it as a bug because it's been assigned to someone to work on. What am I missing?

<comment><USER7> I assume someone didn't think their problem wasn't getting enough attention, social media to the rescue!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It does that with HTML files as well.

</comment><comment><USER9> Well, so does Microsoft Edge (soon).

<comment><USER10> Source?

<comment><USER9> Fire up edge mobile and see for yourself. It will let you use Reader but tells you that you should use Edge and that Reader is going away soon(IIRC)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Maybe it's me, but the way the title is written ("now") makes it sound like it's made on purpose...

<comment><USER12> Thanks, we've reverted the title from the submitted "Chrome now opens pdf files without way to opt out".</comment></comment>


Why LÖVE? - <AUTHOR> https://eev.ee/blog/2017/03/23/why-love/ <comment><USER2> Surprised that the author didn't check into Torque, the engine that powered the excellent Tribes 2 and a handful of others. MIT license and can be compiled for all major platforms.</comment>


The Zettabyte Era–Trends and Analysis - <AUTHOR> http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/collateral/service-provider/visual-networking-index-vni/VNI_Hyperconnectivity_WP.pdf

<comment><AUTHOR> This (apparently) is an oblique lobbying effort, at least in part.

see, the last para of eg:

[http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/06/10/us-internet- consume...](http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/06/10/us-internet-consumers- cisco-systems-idUKKBN0EL15E20140610)</comment>