How Guilty Should You Feel About Flying? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/17/climate/flying-shame-emissions.html <comment><USER3> It doesn't make sense to frame the issue as a matter of guilt, and neither is it relevant to look at the relative emissions of others.

The simple matter is that we have a carbon budget per person on Earth. If you're above that, you should voluntarily reduce yourself below it.

If you (we) don't, more aggressive mechanisms will eventually force us all to.

Fly as much as you want, but you must capture or offset the emissions.

This applies equally to all direct or indirect usage of fossil fuels. Driving, heating, goods, whatever.

It's basic mathematics at this point. Guilt and shame are one potential social mechanism for getting people to realise what they must do. Taxation is another. People dying out is another. Etc. I suppose in that lens it's probably the lesser of the evils.

But it's very much indirect, the shame is a sort of evolved potential solution rather than anything "real".

<comment><USER4> Emission offset is just a way for rich people to absolve their sins. If you release CO2 in the atmosphere that was previously sequestered in the ground it's out. Sure you can plant some trees, and they'll bind the carbon as they grow, but what happens when they get old and die? Bacteria and fungi release the carbon back into the air.

<comment><USER5> That doesn't sound like a well-informed opinion to me. Have you looked at rigorously certified carbon offset and capture programs? It is not just treeplanting.

<comment><USER4> I would be very interested in any programs that actually capture and sequester CO2 long term. Do you have any good links?

<comment><USER5> Here's a list of featured projects associated with the nonprofit I buy offsets from: [https://www.less.ca/en-ca/projects.cfm](https://www.less.ca/en- ca/projects.cfm)

<comment><USER4> I don't see anything about removing CO2 from the atmosphere, only spending money to prevent CO2 and methane being emitted elsewhere. While those projects are obviously good, they don't negate any fossil CO2 anyone else emits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> *Industry groups oppose such measures. "U.S. airlines are committed to reducing carbon emissions even further," said Carter Yang, a spokesman for the airline industry group, Airlines for America. "That effort would be harmed, not helped, by proposals that would siphon away into government coffers the very funds needed to continue investing in new, more fuel-efficient aircraft, sustainable alternative aviation fuels," and other innovations, he said.

The "lining government coffers" approach is tired and obvious.

Fuel efficiency standards for automobiles demonstrably reduce car emissions. Fuel efficiency standards for airplanes can drive down emissions as well.

The air travel industry is predicated on taking loans against society's future environmental health for profits today. If they poured their research into looking at truly low or zero emission options they could easily argue for exemptions to emissions-based taxing and clean up the competition at the same time.

It should be a race to be green, not a race to protect the green they're making on existing business models.

\- [https://www.universetoday.com/143720/nasa-has-a-new-all- elec...](https://www.universetoday.com/143720/nasa-has-a-new-all-electric- airplane/) \- [https://www.dw.com/en/ampaire-test-flies-worlds-biggest- elec...](https://www.dw.com/en/ampaire-test-flies-worlds-biggest-electric- plane/a-49098126) \- [https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/16/18625088/lilium-jet- test-...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/16/18625088/lilium-jet-test-flight- electric-aircraft-flying-car)

</comment><comment><USER7> I don't think this "you don't need to feel guilty if you're not a frequent flyer" narrative is useful at all.

A flight uses between 2 and 6 liters of kerosine per 100 km for every passenger [1]. You travel around 800-900 km per hour on a passenger plane, which means your rate of fuel use is fairly high (let's say 30 liters per hour). Putting it in these numbers allows you to compare it to filling up your car and puts some things in perspective.

Taking a flight now and then is not going to end the world. But it does provide an easy opportunity to reduce emissions.

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

<comment><USER8> The frequency argument seems reasonable as driving yourself to the same location is generally worse for the environment. What makes flying bad is the rate you can travel. You can fly 2 million miles far easier than driving an IC car that distance.

Of course this assumes commercial aviation, private jets are much worse for the environment.

<comment><USER7> _driving yourself to the same location is generally worse for the environment_

Curious what this is based on, taking road construction, car ownership, etc into the calculation? Because as for fuel consumption clearly it depends - <USER2> you're a family, taking 1 car is generally going to be more fuel efficient.

<comment><USER8> I was just assuming a single passenger thus 'yourself' and normal distance vs fuel. For a couple it's likely still true as the break even point for fuel would be around 40+MPG. That's assuming you're not increasing congestion and thus lowering others fuel economy and flying does not make this trip much shorter or longer.

A family is as you suggest likely better off driving unless they are renting an RV. But, IMO avoiding a 10-20+ hour road trip with a car full of kids is an excusable reason to be less fuel efficient.

PS: At scale things tip further to flying as roads have a separate set of issues.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Not guilty at all. I travel internationally. There really isn't a better option for traveling over the pacific. Yes, I recognize I could stay in one place, I don't consider that a viable option.

I think it's a boondoggle to attempt to shame people into changing their behavior when they do not have viable options.

<comment><USER6> "I think it's a boondoggle to attempt to shame people into changing their behavior when they do not have viable options."

It's perhaps a boondoggle to represent a person's life as having only a single option that requires such things.

If you want to have the sort of life that requires your flights back and forth, that's one thing -- but voluntary participation in that life is a different thing than suggesting that you're trapped by circumstance.

<comment><USER9> Anyone shaming air travel should first become carbon neutral least they be labeled a hypocrite.

<comment><USER10> Even if someone's lifestyle is emitting 1/10th the carbon of yours, they should still reduce it to 0 before criticizing you? Sounds like you're just trying to avoid feeling guilty and absolve yourself of any blame.

<comment><USER9> Certainly not. Being a hypocrite doesn't prevent ability to criticize. But it does weaken the argument depending on the level of hypocrisy.

I'm not avoiding feeling guilty and I know I'm not innocent. I'm trying to listen with an open mind and exchange opinions in a polite manner. (like everyone else here I hope)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > "Our climate just can't tolerate widespread frequent flying," said Dan > Rutherford, who directs the council's aviation program.

It would if we could control our breeding. How guilty should you feel about having large numbers of children?

<comment><USER12> It doesn't matter how many people exist if each is a net zero in terms of emissions. What would be better, having more children that each have a net negative impact on the planet, or having fewer?

Personally, I think the whole "reduce the number of humans" solution is terrible and completely misses the mark. We don't need to reduce the number of humans, we need to increase the efficiency of each human in terms of impact on the environment. We need more innovators, not fewer, and innovators need capital, so we should be encouraging more reproduction by those with means rather than less.

Personally, I think the most practical solution is to tax pollution. Wealthy nations seem to produce far more pollution per captia than developing nation's, and developing nations adopt our bad habits. Taxing pollution increases the cost of these bad habits and encourages green innovation. We saw a move toward smaller cars in 2008 when driving became more expensive relative to income, and the same thing can happen to other aspects of our lives if living green becomes less expensive than polluting. And that culture of living green (and the cost reductions associated with innovation) will propagate to developing countries, which will decrease the average political per capita.

I don't think reducing the total population significantly is workable, and attempts are only going to remove the people who have the largest chance of solving the problem generally.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Ideally, we should reduce flying, but in the short term, it is not something I get overly concerned about if there is not a reasonable alternative (taking the train for example). Yes, you could always choose not to make the trip, but that comes with varying levels of pain points (maybe you miss out on visiting family, for example).

The reason I take this position is because there is so much low hanging fruit that doesn't require significant lifestyle changes that we should be doing those things first and NOW before we get too worked up about lifestyle changes. I drive an electric car; for most purposes it is an exact replacement for a petrol/gasoline car. In many ways it is better (cheaper fuel, cheaper maintenance, quieter, better for air quality). In some ways, it is worse (lower range between fueling, though I find that is rarely a practical issue). My point is that, financial considerations aside, most people could easily replace their car with an electric one without seriously impacting the way they live their lives. There are many things like this which would have a huge impact without forcing people to change their habits too suddenly. Once these changes are well underway, we can look at whether and what major lifestyle changes are still needed.

</comment><comment><USER14> I am a swede and I am totally confused on why people in my country seems to totally have lost their minds. People only feel guilty about some things.

These are the same people that buy products from "hip" companies like Apple which are famous for making products harder to repair and practically forces people to buy completely new devices even if something is wrong on the current one and that it easily could be repaired. Yet I have never heard about any shame owning an Apple product, most likely it's the reversed.

My point is that people are irrational and only acts on stuff that either feel, sound or looks good. Like always when a headline starts with a question, the answer is probably going to be a resounding "no".

It isn't the act of flying that makes it bad. For example, a swedish company fly with partly renewable fuel ([https://www.flygbra.se/hallbarhet/boka-miljo- class/faq/](https://www.flygbra.se/hallbarhet/boka-miljo-class/faq/)) and I believe any issue can be solved with technology advancement.

We shouldn't limit ourselves because of climate change. We should instead improve the technology and make it better so it doesn't impact the climate in such a way it becomes unsustainable.

This is the core issue I have with the crazy people in my country. They complain but offer zero alternatives except "not doing that". Just compare Greta Thunberg (which is a person with zero suggestions) to Boyan Slat that actually tried to develop technology to clean up the oceans.

Greta is way more famous and have way more attention even if Boyan is far, far more admirable and actually tries to provide solutions for the future.

<comment><USER15> Apple is not the best example. First, their products are useable and updated for a long, long time. Second, they are very recyclable.

<comment><USER14> Sure, but it was just an example to illustrate my point. They hanven't been the good at all in recycling their products until pretty recently.

They still try and keep people from actually repairing their devices which are perfectly fine in many cases. So I believe it's still a valid point even if there could be better examples.

And honestly, you write

> updated for a long, long time

Are they really tho? A few years is not a long, long time in my opinion and even if you don't buy a new one for a couple of years and it's still updated they usually make it unbearable slow so that you cannot live with it anymore and purchase a new one. It is easy to update, but nearly impossible to go back to an older version if the new version turns out to be very slow.

My father still uses a dumphone and a windows phone. They both work surprisingly well for him, especially the windows phone. I am actually pretty amazed on the longevity of the Nokia Lumia.

Making a phone last 2-4 years is not a long time. I believe many people could easily have the same phones for 10+ years if the phone makers were interested of making that happen. They aren't though and that is a bit of an issue.

Just compare a phone to most other products and you will soon notice people update their smart phone a lot more often than most other things. Sure it's an important device but not that many people would actually need the feature upgrade every version have.

Make a phone that lasts 20 years or more and I will start to believe that you are making good, long lasting products.

<comment><USER16> The issue is almost entirely software security. There's no way I could recommend someone use a Windows Phone today, and if they did, I'd strongly recommend they avoid doing things like internet banking and even logging into their email.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> How guilty do I feel? It depends on the day you ask me.

If you ask me when I am feeling like a pessimist, then I don't feel great about it. My attitude is that we're 7 billion all living under one bedsheet and guilting the people who pass gas. Eventually we will all suffocate. Living as though humanity needs palliative care is disturbing. It might be the most realistic, but I can't process it every day.

If you ask me when I am feeling like an optimist, then morbidly, I feel that we have embraced driving over a cliff, but that while we are airborne, we might design wings, test them, and learn to fly before plummeting to our deaths.

If you ask me when I am feeling like a cynic, then someone is going to bioengineer a population reducer, and 1% of us will inherit the earth before 2100. That would also solve the problem, but I won't get to be around to enjoy it.

Here's the rub, none of these require me to do anything differently. Now tell me how I can add a fourth option that I can genuinely believe has some reasonable metric for improving our chances. I'm having such a hard time finding it, and I think that people like me, left to compound their depressed thoughts, invariably turn into the enemy on this global effort. Anyone, please?

<comment><USER18> > 1% of us will inherit the earth before 2100. That would also solve the > problem, but I won't get to be around to enjoy it.

Not necessarily. If the 1% fly around in private jets regularly we'll be worse off.

> fourth option

The only solution is political and global. A carbon tax & tariff is the best option I'm aware of, but there are others.

[https://issues.org/climate-clubs-to-overcome-free- riding/](https://issues.org/climate-clubs-to-overcome-free-riding/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> We should feel guilty. Especially for any flights that are frivolous. We should also feel guilty for our excessive meat consumption, our excessive usage of cars, and for all forms of waste. And we should continue to feel guilty until we resolve the problem.

China has a population of 1.4bn people[1] and produces 10.87tn tonnes of CO2 per year[2], whereas the US has roughly 25% of the population[3] but produces 5.107tn tonnes of CO2[2]. We in the developed western world need to take drastic steps to reduce our impact, and then encourage other nations to do the same.

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China) [2][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions) [3][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States)

</comment><comment><USER20> So the better question is whether business meetings truly need to be in- person. With all the interest in remote work, and how common it is getting, perhaps the lessons we've learned about remote communications and collaboration should be shared more broadly, to help that 12% of travelers who are the frequent flyers stay home more often.

Travelling to see family or explore the world makes sense. As does large, intense meeting where the face-to-face benefits are needed. But travelling for small short meetings because you don't know how to use modern communication options does not.

On a side note, the discussions around reducing our carbon footprint have a disturbing trend of implying that we should only focus on our biggest problems, or the people who are the biggest problem. They tend to justify the attitude that, "That guy is worse than me, so I'm OK."

</comment><comment><USER21> Like $20/flight guilty, which you then promptly offset at Atmosfair or a similar service.

[https://www.atmosfair.de/en/](https://www.atmosfair.de/en/)

<comment><USER22> $20 is roughly Los Angeles - Las Vegas.

LA - NYC: ~65 USD

LA - Beijing: ~170 USD

LA - Frankfurt: ~155 USD

Add 20% for business class.

<comment><USER21> Huh. Intercontinental flights are pretty carbon expensive... still doesn't add _that_ much on the price though, not even twice as much even if you go for the cheapest flight conceivable.

I wish I could add carbon expenditure to flight price searches.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> With current world population and technologies, the sustainable level of CO₂ emissions per person is 3 tons per year. In Germany, with an above-average environmentally conscious way of life, I'm doing around 5 tons a year. In December, I'm flying to Vancouver for a conference, which will produce around 2 tons roundtrip (global warming equivalent). So while I don't feel ashamed, of course I don't feel great about it, shouldn't that be obvious?

</comment><comment><USER24> This is such a first world outlook on things. It's easy to guilt people when you live in Europe or North America and have easy access to everything you can need. Other people need to go to the other end of the world for education or their jobs. Why on earth should they be penalised with month-long voyages across the Atlantic?

</comment><comment><USER25> Flying is a stupid symbolic focus as a "luxury" if you are talking about airlines instead of your own private jet. It has better passenger mileage than cars but worse than a fully loaded bus.

Yeah you should look at better alternatives for viability but otherwise can we give this dumb meme a rest and focus on real solutions?

<comment><USER26> >Flying is a stupid symbolic focus as a "luxury" if you are talking about airlines instead of your own private jet. It has better passenger mileage than cars but worse than a fully loaded bus.

Except you generally aren't taking a car or bus across the country, or to another continent, multiple times a year because you want to check out this zoo or that beach or go attend your friends exotic destination wedding because they found cheap flights during such and such month or because you want to go to Antarctica to see the penguins. Go install a dating app, fire it up and start swiping women 20-35ish, you'll see photo after photo after photo of women with elephants or tigers or at this landmark and that landmark. This sort of travel simply would not exist without airplanes at a ton~ of CO2 per person per round trip.

So comparing planes to buses or private vehicles doesn't really equate. Cheap air travel has opened up far more travel opportunities for pleasure than have ever existed before and air travel is growing year after year. I also suspect that any given passenger's fuel usage might not be as efficient as it seems given most flights are NOT one stop to the destination and routinely involve 1 or more connecting flights which sometimes require you to actually travel past your destination only to have to backtrack on another aircraft.

And for the insane amount of business flights, nearly all of that could be handled via a telephone call or video chat. Take YC they make 'finalist' founders fly out to the bay area to interview in person at a ton or three of CO2 per person round trip when they could just fire up a Skype at a few hundred grams of CO2 per gigabyte.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> If americans could reduce their emissions, that would be a great start. The US emits a lot per capita compared to other countries.

I'm worried that in the future, eco-terrorism might actually become a thing...

</comment><comment><USER28> Guilty about flying, guilty about eating meat, guilty about having children. Are we trying to embrace some quasi-religion or are we deciding on actions for keeping the planet sustainable?

</comment><comment><USER29> I wonder how difficult it would be to build an airplane that runs off ethanol - until we get electric airplanes it might be a decent stopgap measure for the conscientious oligarch.

<comment><USER6> You might enjoy this discussion on the Aviation Stack Exchange site on that very topic:

[https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/26883/could- mos...](https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/26883/could-most- commercial-jet-engines-today-run-on-ethanol-without-any-problems/26887)

Tl,dr: ethanol has about 60% the energy density of jet fuel (so you need more fuel / weight for same flight), the extra weight may mean you actually have a negative available cargo weight (for passengers and their stuff) depending on the airframe, and it's a solvent that might melt the systems it's in, requiring an up-to complete retrofit of the drive and fuel systems for the airplane.

But maybe depending on the application, if you built an airplane from scratch to use it, there could be ways? It may be a very expensive airplane though, which could make it harder to run one to profit eventually.

<comment><USER29> I was envisioning a net-zero emissions private plane, a pure luxury item for frequent fliers where profit wouldn't be an issue - Depending on a celebrity's public position on climate change, that kind of signalling could be worthwhile.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Not guilty at all.

I live east of the Atlantic. My parents live west of the Atlantic. What am I supposed to do, never see my family again west of the Atlantic? Say goodbye to the life I've built east of the Atlantic and move back west again?

There are absolutely no alternatives. If it's such a big problem then force airlines to buy carbon offsets for every passenger and pass on the costs in the form of increased ticket prices. Get governments to pump more money into researching greener aeronautical alternatives. But don't try to guilt people into making morally impossible choices and pretend like you're sitting on some ethical high horse while you're doing it.

<comment><USER31> >There are absolutely no alternatives

Our greatest scientists will surely invent another means to travel over water.

Also _literally_ the second paragraph of the article covers your use case: "should most Americans really be ashamed of getting on a plane to see grandma this holiday season? Probably not."

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> > Each of these travelers, on average, emits more than 3 tons of carbon > dioxide per year, a substantial amount,

Conservative estimate puts every person at around 300-500kg CO2 emission by breathing. Just to put things into perspective.

Ships produce way more emissions then flying.

I really wish they stop producing those misleading articles muddling the water and focus on real polluters.

</comment><comment><USER33> After all the sharing economy talk we should introduce the guilt economy. I fear this becoming a growing trend.

<comment><USER34> The sharing economy. The hair shirt "environmental indulgences" economy. It's almost like someone wants the peasants to stay on their plantation and be happy with their cricket gruel.</comment></comment>


Samsung researchers build solid-state EV battery with 500-mile range - <AUTHOR> https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a31409442/samsung-solid-state-battery-revealed/ <comment><USER2> Yawn. Another battery breakthrough with x10 price...

Far more interesting is this [1]

> china-is-building-one-battery-gigafactory-a-week

> There are 136 of these super-sized EV battery plants in operation or being > planned: 101 in China and 8 in the USA.

[1] [https://www.benchmarkminerals.com/membership/china-is- buildi...](https://www.benchmarkminerals.com/membership/china-is-building-one- battery-gigafactory-a-week-the-us-one-every-four-months-simon-moores/)

Tesla of course is a premium brand with pricing power. But can Tesla sustain any sort of real battery manufacturing advantage over China?

<comment><USER3> >But can Tesla sustain any sort of real battery manufacturing advantage over China?

We think a lot about developing better car batteries, but car batteries are fine -- if the world had to live with 300-mile ranges, it would probably not be the end of prosperity. What we need are grid batteries, which are the only realistic replacement for fossil fuel power plants -- sorry, nuclear alone, while a valuable part of a future grid, won't handle variable loads.

Grid batteries are a commodity. By contrast these increasingly efficient car batteries are basically a luxury product. Unfortunately capitalism won't normally allocate many resources towards something with low profit margins, but the Chinese government will. Whether or not Tesla can keep up with China at making toys, it is no remedy for the lack of action by our _own_ governments to provide technologies Tesla can't make money off of.

<comment><USER4> tesla is doing great making their own batteries with panasonic, that's a key reason they got this far. their new batteries coming in the us will cement their leadership. It's mass high quality batteries that keeps them ahead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> 500-Mile Range! Wow! /sarcasm

How long is a piece of string? As long as you need it to be (as long as you keep adding more string)

Samsung Press Release: [https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-presents- groundbreak...](https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-presents- groundbreaking-all-solid-state-battery-technology-to-nature-energy)

Concrete claims:

50% better volumetric efficiency for their prototype. No mention of pack or module volume.

> "the ultrathin Ag-C nanocomposite layer allowed the team to reduce anode > thickness and increase energy density up to 900Wh/L."

1000 charge cycles.

No information about: temperature range, cell voltage, material cost, manufacturing requirements, impact sensitivity, a million other things needed for a commercial product.

\---

I will believe in Solid State batteries when iPhones come with them.

<comment><USER6> Power to weight ratio is also interesting for a vehicle, not just power per volume. Some variant of the Rocket Equation must come into play because you need stored power to carry around your stored power.

<comment><USER7> "Rocket Equation", thank you! I've had a total brain-block on that term as I was literally just trying to answer a question related to this, on a Tesla forum, and I couldn't remember the name! The inevitable question of "Why can't they just add more battery for more range?" Like you mentioned it's some variant of this and I'm sure there is a name for it. I'm not a mechanical engineer. But again, dragging more mass requires more energy. In an automobile, you'd need a bigger and stronger car. My Model 3 is one heavy beast. More weight and it would need bigger (perhaps more) tires and a heavier/stronger drivetrain. The new Roadster was must have been planned for "some time in the future" production (not in production yet) because they have some formula that dictated a new battery was coming. A 620 mile range on a car that can do 0-60mph in 1.9 seconds (twice the range of my car) has to have some way of reducing that weight. Who knows. Fascinating problems. I wish I had gotten myself into that sort of engineering when I was young(er).

<comment><USER5> The Rocket Equation is important for rockets because they cannot pause and refuel like cars or even airplanes can. There's no compromise or trade-off in the rocket equation. For cars or airplanes you can have a smaller tank and more refuelling. Obviously for airplanes there is some minimal tank size where you can't actually take off, and some maximal tank size where your airplane doesn't have any usable cargo/passenger space.

\---

The limit for cars is almost always tires, as it is in this case. Or rather the interface between tires and the road. Weight always deforms the road surface, more weight deforms the road more, and at a certain point the road quickly breaks down.

Thus, governments put weight limits on vehicles [0]. In my state, it's 20,000 pounds for a single axle (it assumes you will be using a truck and loading the rear axle).

If we take that 20,000 pounds and subtract 2,000 for the cabin and the rest of the drivetrain, you could have 18,000 pounds of batteries. I think 18,000 pounds of batteries could take you a long long way.

As a cross reference, a Commercial Drivers License is only required at 26,000 pounds. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_driver%27s_license](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_driver%27s_license)

0: [https://www.txdmv.gov/motor-carriers/oversize-overweight- per...](https://www.txdmv.gov/motor-carriers/oversize-overweight- permits/texas-size-weight-limits)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> This research was published March 9 in _Nature Energy_ :

[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-020-0575-z](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-020-0575-z)

It appears that the key advance is to prevent dendrite growth on the anode by covering it with a layer of silver-carbon composite. No idea why silver was chosen, but it seems to be in small enough amounts not to drive up the cost of the battery. Manufacturing this battery at large scales will require scaling up the process of producing the anode, which could take a while.

It is still essentially a lithium-ion battery with the usual (cobalt- containing) cathode materials, but I see no reason the same anode technology couldn't be used with a cobalt-free cathode, should such cathodes ever catch on.

</comment><comment><USER8> Link to paper here: [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-020-0575-z](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-020-0575-z)

</comment><comment><USER9> From the article:

> The battery they built has a 500-mile range

Cool!

> ...and can be recharged more than 1000 times.

Wait, what? That seems like a very small number to quote. I mean, I assume when a company quotes a number like that, the real number isn't _much_ higher than the number they do quote. Let's say, 1200 or so. I'd really like some clarity on that number. If 'charging' in this context means going from say 80% -> 100%, That's less than 4 years if you charge it that much every every night, which may be very close to typical. What happens after 1000 charges? I assume at that point there is some loss of capacity as is typical, but it'd be helpful to know how much loss.

<comment><USER10> If that's 1000 full charge-discharge cycles, that'd be completely acceptable (assuming that the usable capacity is still close to 100% at the end of the lifespan) for a car which typically has a lifespan of 150,000 miles or so.

(1000 * 500 miles / charge) = 500,000 miles

<comment><USER9> Agreed. It'd be nice if we could have some kind of confirmation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> ...in a lab. I wish battery articles would include in the title whether they are commercialized or just achieved in ideal conditions.

</comment><comment><USER12> The Tesla Model S currently has a 400-mile range, so this would represent an incremental improvement.

Personally, I can't see driving that distance without a break (at a supercharger) somewhere in the middle, so the incremental range benefit is definitely not a game-changer.

A more important breakthrough would be in cost-per-watt-hour. If we saw much cheaper batteries with the same capacity, it would go a long way toward reducing our use of fossil fuels, both in vehicles and in electricity generation.

<comment><USER13> 50% smaller is nothing to be sniffed at.

<comment><USER14> double the range 2x400miles - pound for battery pound.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Comparing in mileage seems terrible to me. Surely Elon could make a 5000 mile range EV with a big enough "battery" right?

<comment><AUTHOR> The mileage is just for the headline. A better stat mentioned in the article is that this one has a 50% smaller footprint than Lithium

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This article is from March and is referencing this research paper: [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-020-0575-z](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-020-0575-z)

The research looks interesting, so the question is whether they can develop an inexpensive mass manufacturing process. If they can, can they do so before other batteries upstage them? These batteries appear to be about 23% more energy dense (volumetrically) than Tesla Model 3 batteries, with some possible safety advantages as a bonus. However, by the time these batteries hit the market (2-3 years minimum, I would guess) Tesla will probably be at or above that energy density level. The safety advantages will probably make it competitive for at least some applications, though, and they may be able to increase the energy density even further, so we will have to wait and see.

</comment><comment><USER17> I don't get why people still fall for the miracle battery announcement. Maybe it's because I am more interested in batteries than the average person, but I've seen dozens of vaporware battery announcements and see very little reason to believe that this is not one.

Sure, it might be better in some dimensions, but it's almost certainly not the immediate revolution, because there is almost always some way in which these supposed miracle batteries fatally suck (life span, temperature sensitivity, energy efficiency, weight, self-discharge, volume, material cost, mass- producability).

My view is pretty in line with Elon Musk's here: In the mid term lithium-ion batteries will keep being the best compromise. I'll really believe that a new technology is not vaporware when I hear Elon talk about or Tesla invest in it (this has happened with Maxwell capacitors, for example).

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't think anyone's quite claiming the technology in the article to be revolutionary. The subtitle literally says "but don't expect to see it anytime soon"

The fact that it isn't a panacea for all energy ills shouldn't preclude us from discussing it as an incremental development, agreed?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> >> Plus, the battery pack created during the research was 50 percent smaller than a conventional lithium-ion battery.

...so if you put the same pound for pound battery size (Tesla Li-ion 400miles) you'd get 800-1000miles per charge?

</comment><comment><USER18> good lord, you all are tough customers. It also takes up 50% less space and charges faster (though doesn't say how by much).

i would say their scientists and bean counters know better than to throw money away.

</comment><comment><USER19> They should put some in self bricking Bluray players [https://hackaday.com/2020/06/26/ask-hackaday-what-can-be- don...](https://hackaday.com/2020/06/26/ask-hackaday-what-can-be-done-with- your-bootlooping-blu-ray) , or exploding smartphones.

</comment><comment><USER20> "Plus, the battery pack created during the research was 50 percent smaller than a conventional lithium-ion battery."

So can we just keep the battery the same size and now it has 1000 mile range?

And - (knows nothing about EV battery technology) - these batteries are liquid cooled, no? Is there no solvent they can run through the battery to "clean off" the crystals that develop?

<comment><USER21> The battery in a Tesla is about 25% of its weight. So, going to a battery that's 50% of the current battery's weight (assumption #1: smaller = equivalently lighter) would cut about 12% of the car's weight in batteries alone.

I guess designing the car around those lighter batteries can get you a total decrease in weight of around 20%.

If so, and assuming that's a similar decline in energy used per kilometer, a 50% smaller and lighter battery already can give you 25% more range.

(disclaimer: back-of-the-envelope calculation by a non-expert)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> >Yawn. Another battery breakthrough with x10 price...

>I will believe in Solid State batteries when iPhones come with them.

Wow this community is full of assholes who vote each other to the top as to avoid or derail conversation.

The title itself says it is about research, if you don't care until the technology is packaged into a product which is then packaged into an iPhone please just shut up, go elsewhere. Find an article about iPhone accessories to comment on.

Sorry about the coarse language but its much more civil than a lot of the supposedly enlightened takes I see here, and its only gotten more snotty in time.

</comment><comment><USER23> July's issue of "Battery Tech Hopium" mag came a few days early. Nice, nice.

</comment><comment><USER24> Is it the same Samsung whose batteries were banned on flights just a couple of years ago? I think I'm gonna wait and see on this one.</comment>


Welcome to Quakelahoma - <AUTHOR> https://news.vice.com/article/welcome-to-quakelahoma

<comment><USER2> Would any building damage caused by these artificial earthquakes be the subject of a class action lawsuit against the fracking industry?

<comment><USER3> From the article:

 _".. at the end of June, there was a legal earthquake: Oklahoma's highest court ruled that people could sue oil companies over the earthquakes ... But there's a difference between knowing how the quakes are triggered and proving which well set it off — and it may not be hard for lawyers to take advantage of that gap.

"You could say that 'I'm injecting, but there's a lot of reasons it's not all me, or not me at all,' " Halihan said.

A Stanford University study published in June found that the quakes may occur miles away from an injection well and long after its use. Even if all of those wells were shut down immediately, the quakes could continue for months or years, it found.

"If I was paid by a couple of shifty lawyers to say one of those options, I could set up an argument using peer-reviewed literature on any of those and try to push that as the reasonable case," Halihan said. Without more in-depth data, "It's going to be a fuzzy case."_</comment></comment>


Getting Orwell Wrong - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/09/getting-orwell-wrong/

<comment><USER2> There exists a sweet spot in prices where if the book sells for less, it sells more copies and then brings in more revenue.

Amazon's Kindle model charges a percentage of each sale, so it is in their best interests to price books lower so that they will earn more income. The Kindle store does not make very much money, in fact Amazon does not make much money from selling things because they sell them as cheap as they can almost at cost or in some cases below costs like their Kindle tablets. They try to make up the selling tablets at a loss by income from Kindle and Amazon Market Appstore Android app sales.

We've already seen a price war on mobile apps going as low as 99 cents and in some cases free with in-app purchases or a freemium model. Ebooks are heading that way as well.

Walmart does this, lower the price and make it up by selling in large numbers. Get people into their store for the low prices and then sell them more things when they are in the store. At Amazon a person can buy a Kindle book and then buy a few more books or go buy some products from the Amazon store or pay for a Prime membership to watch videos, etc.</comment>


Forensic Analysis and Anonymisation of Printed Documents [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=3206004.3206019 <comment><USER2> This paper provides background for their software, recently discussed here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17392977](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17392977) / [https://github.com/dfd-tud/deda](https://github.com/dfd-tud/deda)

</comment><comment><USER3> NB: I find download forbidden unless accessing it via:

[https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=3206004.3206019](https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=3206004.3206019)

<comment><USER4> This works: [http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/3210000/3206019/p127-richter...](http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/3210000/3206019/p127-richter.pdf?acc=OPEN)

<comment><USER5> No, it doesn't. You can test such links in a private/incognito browser window.

<comment><USER3> Are you saying that the article link doesn't work or the one I provided doesn't?

I've had success with the latter, none with the former.

Browser, wget, and curl, all fail with the article link.

<comment><USER4> Yes, getting it via [https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=3206004.3206019](https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=3206004.3206019) does work.

And yes, The PDF link is:

        https://dl.acm.org/ft_gateway.cfm?id=3206019&ftid=1981299&dwn=1&CFID=4...3&CFTOKEN=b...F

And the fetched link is:

        http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/3210000/3206019/p127-richter.pdf?ip=184.108.40.206&id=3206019&acc=OPEN&key=4...7&__acm__=1...9

And I cut too much in my testing. I did test in new private tabs, but not in new Firefox windows. Not really worth the hassle. But damn, why do the need to put the bloody IP address in the URL?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


This is a next generation laser ranging/image sensor - <AUTHOR> http://www.signal.co.jp/vbc/mems/index_e.html

<comment><AUTHOR> These are supposed to be a several hundred dollars as opposed to the several thousand that a Sick LIDAR will set you back.

If you can find the videos that are embedded in the Flash header thing they are worth a watch.</comment>


Show HN: My new product is finally launched - <AUTHOR> http://www.salespanelpro.com/

<comment><USER2> well, for starters:

        Invalid address: sadasaYou must provide at least one recipient email address.
        Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /srv/www/salespanelpro.com/public_html/demo/control/libraries/phpmailer/class.phpmailer.php:464) in /srv/www/salespanelpro.com/public_html/demo/control/autologin.php on line 62

I got that by giving you a bogus email address in your "see demo" thing. I understand why you want an email address, but I'm not interested in giving one up. Not yet, anyway.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm, I actually don't get that if I enter the same input. Do you get it consistently?

<comment><USER2> If I clear my cookies and reload the home page, then I can consistently repro it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Alright, I see it now. Made a temporary fix that will cover most usual input.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hey, you've got it finished! For those that don't get it, think analytics for mobile app vendors. (I hope that's a proper description).

<comment><USER4> So it answers the question "How are my mobile apps selling on various marketplaces"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It looks great! Congrats on releasing! I'd definitely give it a try except I have to finish and release my iPhone app first.</comment>


Microsoft Touch Mouse for $15.25 on Amazon - <AUTHOR> http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-3KJ-00001-Touch-Mouse/dp/B004HYGU18/

<comment><USER2> Windows only? No wonder it's on sale.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't believe it's Windows only. It works and scrolls with Mac, but the other gestures don't work.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Spongedown – markdown renderer with ascii diagram support - <AUTHOR> https://ivanceras.github.io/spongedown/ <comment><USER2> This is cool! Though, it still leaves me with my biggest problem: I have no idea how to efficiently draw the diagrams in the first place. Ascii diagrams are not easy to draw (for me, atleast).

The best i've seen is a GUI tool that creates the diagrams. That tool really is awesome ([https://monodraw.helftone.com/](https://monodraw.helftone.com/)), but it's a GUI tool and frankly supports complexity/features far greater than i really need most of the time.

I'd love a project that took some type of simple text based flow notation, and converted it to ascii flow diagrams. Eg:

        main: something -> other thing -> [ thing a, thing b, thing c]
        thing a: thing a -> thing b
        thing c: thing c -> thing b

In this mockup, my desired tool would take this simple non-artistic notation and convert it to a flow diagram showing a `something` object leading into an `other thing` object, which branches to three objects called `thing a`, `thing b`, and `thing c`. Each of those have their own flows as well, as noted by their own respective definitions. `thing a` leads over to `thing b`, `thing c` to `thing b`, and `thing b` doesn't actually do anything.

I love ascii diagrams, but i never want to construct them by hand. Writing them out in some simple notation like above would be awesome! Also note that i'm not expecting this to be insanely feature packed.. it sort of defeats the purpose of a simple notation. But being able to just construct them quickly as a starting point would be awesome. Advanced tools like Monodraw can take the complicated work.

<comment><USER3> Have you ever tried GNU dot? [http://www.graphviz.org/pdf/dotguide.pdf](http://www.graphviz.org/pdf/dotguide.pdf)

I know you said you don't want to 'draw' ASCII diagrams, but if you use Emacs, there's a package called artist-mode which I've found helpful.

<comment><USER4> GraphViz/dot isn't GNU.

<comment><USER3> Huh. I'm not sure why, but I was almost certain it was.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is an iteration of my previous submission[0] with improvements from the comments and feedback. It is now embeddable in a markdown, and the generated SVG is now optimized to it's size.

[0][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12621680](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12621680)

</comment><comment><USER5> This looks very cool.

Do people actually manually write ASCII diagrams like that?

This is a great place to use Mermaid ([https://github.com/knsv/mermaid](https://github.com/knsv/mermaid))

<comment><AUTHOR> I wrote some simple ascii diagrams inline with readme and code, but never too serious. I wrote this tool to enhance the rendering of the diagram, and publish it opensource. I never did expect some people use it seriously [https://github.com/ivanceras/svgbobrus/pull/6](https://github.com/ivanceras/svgbobrus/pull/6)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Is this designed to be used or just a proof of concept? If the former then maybe some installation hints in the readme would be a good idea. As someone with no exposure to rust I have no idea what to do with this.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a library written in rust. I will have to write the CLI soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> My favorite take on this is Markdeep:

[http://casual-effects.com/markdeep/](http://casual-effects.com/markdeep/)

</comment><comment><USER8> Looks nice, but an opposite tool would be more interesting for me.

<comment><USER9> [https://monodraw.helftone.com](https://monodraw.helftone.com) is what you're looking for.</comment></comment>


Dev Giving Away $12K in MSDN Subs to Unemployed/Non-Profits - <AUTHOR> http://visualstudiomagazine.com/Blogs/Data-Driver/2010/07/Good-Deed-for-Those-In-Need.aspx

<comment><USER2> _Project criteria is listed as:

Client is a USA IRS 503(c)3 non-profit, school, or church, OR a Canadian CRA registered charity

Solves a problem or satisfies a need for the client

Client desires the project and is supportive

Uses any combination of .NET 4.0, Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, or Windows Phone 7

May be a new software solution, or an upgrade to an existing software solution._</comment>


Google Stadia's latest free game only has a few thousand total players - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/google-stadias-latest-free-game-only-has-a-few-thousand-total-players/ <comment><USER2> The author used one game as the indicator of the success of the whole platform. Doesn't seem to me as a good reasoning.

However the Stadia platform doesn't seem to be gaining a lot of traction, mostly because of -- I guess -- the network bandwidth requirement, and the limited library?

</comment><comment><USER3> I hope this leads to a fiery death. Thin client architecture leads to even more loss of control for the individual user.

<comment><USER4> Thin client architecture allows people to use into products they otherwise wouldn't have been able to. Loss of control is only bad for an individual if they used to have more control. As someone who doesn't have a high-end rig, I never had control in the first place. With Stadia, I might now have an option to try the latest games. I can't help but feel that "Stadia bad because centralized" is a poorly thought-out argument.

There's room in the world for both centralized and decentralized services. Which one you use depends on your situation.

<comment><USER3> The mass production of high end gaming rigs is only going to continue if the market continues to buys them. If thin-clients become the new standard, they will cease to become an option. If you have a hard time ponying up for the funds for a high end gaming rig today, think of what it would take to buy a million dollar super computer because all the high end PC manufacturers have all gone out of business.

Calling my argument "poorly thought-out" is rather rich when you haven't thought about the ramifications of a the success of a thin-client model, and the bust of the PC market.</comment></comment></comment>


An "Intro To ClojureScript" interactive preso in ClojureScript and [:enfocus] - <AUTHOR> http://ckirkendall.github.com/cljs-prezo/resources/public/

<comment><USER2> I clicked around randomly on the first page until I found out that the center logo was the link to the next page. I gave up at the second page.</comment>


Smartphones May Soon Replace Credit Cards - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_33/b4191037299913.htm <comment><AUTHOR> I'd like to see credit card send instant notifications that you can reply to reject the transaction. Assuming they can do it quickly enough, this could make it very difficult for even a clerk to use your card for anything but your purchase.

</comment><comment><USER2> The first paragraph then says

"Smartphones may soon displace some of the estimated 1 billion credit and debit cards in American wallets."

which is a rather different and less drastic change; they're no more replacing credit cards than credit cards replaced money</comment>


Plants produce 'green vaccine' against norovirus - <AUTHOR> https://biodesign.asu.edu/news/plants-produce-%E2%80%98green-vaccine%E2%80%99-against-norovirus <comment><USER2> FYI, one of the authors of the study, Andrew Diamos, is a popular twitch streamer, CarlSagan42. He streams a lot of Mario levels created by people that are often puzzle or troll levels. During his stream he'll talk a lot about science, including some of the work he's done in this study.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is kind of a game-changer if it's effective. Being able to immunize against norovirus cheaply (and at all) would save a lot of lives.

<comment><USER4> There's a norovirus vaccine which just completed stage 1 trials[0]. Cool part about it is that it isn't an injection, just a pill you swallow.

It is worth noting that norovirus and rotavirus aren't the only common "stomach bugs" but being immune against both is still a big win.

edit: Just want to add, I'm not dissing on this research. The more separate efforts there are for a safe effective norovirus vaccine the less likely they are to ALL fail. I've just been watching this space closely because I want to be the first in line when someone's vaccine ships.

[0] [http://outbreaknewstoday.com/norovirus-vaccine-oral- tablet-p...](http://outbreaknewstoday.com/norovirus-vaccine-oral-tablet- phase-1-clinical-trial-results-published-81466/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Our family has gotten norovirus two years in a row and it's an absolute _nightmare_. Sign me up for whatever trials you have!</comment>


Show HN: My first web app. Shiftfrog.com - <AUTHOR>

I've spent the last couple weeks working on getting this up and running. It's my first web app.
The use case it is designed for is for shift workers who work x days on, y days off. So if you ask them "Are you going to be able to go to my wedding on July 15, 2012" they have no idea. This helps solve that problem.
Feed back as always is appreciated. <comment><USER2> Nifty idea, but it needs to export to .ics or some other widely accepted calendar format. Also, have you considered implementing this as a Facebook app? That's where most of my non-work event invitations show up. Also, it looks like you could do the functionality client-side in Javascript, which would reduce server load at scale. Still, though, definitely a step forward for people who work block schedules.

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome stuff. I've added the calendar format to the list of features.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Link: <http://shiftfrog.com>

Great name and looks useful. Make it work on any mobile phone and it will be really useful. On my Samsung S8300, the submit button is invisible.

On the calendar, you should clearly label on and off days. It's not immediately obvious.

Your site mentions you've developed an algorithm. What does it do apart from adding days and accounting for holidays? :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> It does the same on my HPtouchpad. We'll be fixing that.

We have that on our todo list.

Honestly, nothing else yet. The designer put the text in there. Trust me my algo is nothing like developing an algo for netflix recommendation or google search.

<comment><USER3> You don't need clever algos to make something useful. I just wanted to know if there was something non-obvious I was missing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A very neat, useful application.

I second some of the other feedback here (saving details, better labelling of on or off days, .ics export).

One extra feature you might want to add: ability to check a date in the future without having to scroll through the calendar months. So, in your wedding example, I could put in my shift details, the start date, and the date I'm checking, and it would tell me whether I'm free or not.

<comment><AUTHOR> That was my original intention, but we designed for the general case instead of the specific. I think we will add this in eventually.

<comment><USER4> I see. I wouldn't consider it a priority request. And don't get me wrong: I think the site's functionality at the moment is great: quick, simple, straightforward. I've already emailed it to the three people I know who work shifts :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is very cool, I love the idea, and the implementaion is great too.

My only comments are:

It should save what you enter, eg: I put 4 days on, 4 days off, and while it did show the right shift info, the fields reverted to 4 days on, 3 days off.

The date field would benefit from a date picker.

Out of interest, how (if at all) are you planning to make money from it?

<comment><AUTHOR> I worked with a designer on this and the project had a few goals, but the last of them was to make money.

1\. I wanted to learn ruby + sinatra. This was just to see what I could build acting as the programmer + sys admin.

2\. The designer and I both want to work together on bigger and bigger projects. This was a test to see if we could work together well and not hate each other at the end.

So there never was any plan to make money off of it. If you have any suggestions I'd be open to them.</comment></comment>


Palantir worked with Cambridge Analytica on the Facebook data it acquired - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/27/palantir-worked-with-cambridge-analytica-on-the-facebook-data-whistleblower.html <comment><USER2> I wonder how confident Thiel was of a Trump presidency back in May 2016, when he started being open about his support for Trump. Perhaps he was operating with more knowledge than available to the general public and national pollsters? I wonder how involved he was with CA for the purpose of the election. His $1.25 million donation in October 2016 seems even more interesting in light of all this.

I took out a bet on Trump when Thiel became open with his support. It was driven by my belief that he was operating with deeper knowledge about the state of the nation precisely due to his association with Palantir (mostly) and Facebook. I feel dirty about winning that one.

<comment><USER3> I've always thought of it in terms of asymmetric risk – something Thiel seems to have a preternatural intuition for. In other words, what he stood to gain with a Trump win far outweighed what he stood to lose with a Trump loss. Most business leaders were throwing in with Clinton. If Thiel had done the same, and Clinton won, he'd be one voice in a crowded field. By being one of the few to publicly back Trump, he all but guaranteed a prime seat at the table. This is exactly what played out post-election, with Thiel ushering in tech leaders in the lobby of Trump Tower.

Had Trump lost, Thiel would have probably diminished his standing with the Clinton administration significantly. But, due to the crowded field, it would have been a small standing to begin with.

And here's the crux: Thiel has held controversial opinions for a while. He probably figured his association with Trump wouldn't really move the dial on his likability much, and he seems to enjoy being contrarian anyway.

So, anyway, there's my theory. Risk asymmetry. A lot to gain in the event of a Trump win, little to lose in the event of a Trump loss.

<comment><USER4> I don't think thiel and palantir would have lost that much if Clinton won. If the bulk of palantir revenue comes from DoD and intelligence community (IC) contracts, he cares about whoever will increase the DoD budget in general. No matter whether it is Bush or Trump or Reagan, a republican president almost always increases defense and IC spending and green lights new toys for them to play with. Defense contractors who don't care about Democrat or republican ideology simply care about their bottom line.

<comment><USER5> True that the Republicans usually increase defense/IC spending, but the Democrats support them just as much. Feinstein is almost always pro IC operations. Clinton pushed for US involvement in Libya and Syria, and in a speech before the Democratic Convention was sabre rattling at China. Clinton also, according to Seymour Hersh, was aware of CIA gun running operations out of the US consulate in Benghazi. Obama's support for DoD/IC activities should be common knowledge.

Not making a partisan argument, as I don't affiliate with either party, just stating that both sides exhibit support for DoD/IC activities and both were likely to support equal, if not increased, levels of spending on them

<comment><USER4> Probably the biggest recent example would be the size of the DoD budget shrink during 8 years of Clinton:

[https://www.google.com/search?q=clinton+presidency+dod+budge...](https://www.google.com/search?q=clinton+presidency+dod+budget&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-b-1)

And then the massive DoD budget increases under Bush, post 9/11 and Afghanistan/Iraq related which kept a lot of large and medium sized defense contractors riding the gravy train for a very long time.

As best I can remember Obama did not significantly shrink the DoD budget as a whole, though it did drop a bit from the 2006-2007 peak under Bush, though some programs were cancelled.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> And CA was introduced to Palantir by none other than Sophie Schmidt, the daughter of one Eric Schmidt. It's turtles all the way down, and anyone who thinks their private data is not being abused elsewhere (wink, wink) needs to perhaps think again.

<comment><USER7> That's pretty amazing if true. Eric Schmidt and Google seemed to be pretty firmly behind the Clinton campaign in 2016

<comment><USER6> Their CFO, Ruth Porat, publicly wept at the weekly company meeting when Clinton lost. Google also heavily censored their otherwise automatic search autocomplete so it doesn't bring up negative suggestions for HRC. No such courtesy was afforded to Trump. Bing, to their credit, did not censor either.

<comment><USER8> Can you back this up with sources that others will find credible? This topic really doesn't need more loose claims.

<comment><USER9> Of course not, it's all conspiracy theory BS

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If Cambridge Analytica violated (a) the CFAA [1] or (b) federal election law [2][3], Palantir could be--best case--dragged into years of lawsuits. If they knew about said violations and did nothing, it could be more serious. Either way, I'd write off the near-term odds of their managing an IPO.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act#C...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act#Criminal_offenses_under_the_Act)

[2] [https://www.politico.com/story/2018/03/26/cambridge- analytic...](https://www.politico.com/story/2018/03/26/cambridge-analytica- investigation-request-484866)

[3] [https://www.blumenthal.senate.gov/newsroom/press/release/blu...](https://www.blumenthal.senate.gov/newsroom/press/release/blumenthal- calls-for-fec-investigation-of-cambridge-analyticas-reported-illegal- interference-in-american-elections)

<comment><USER11> If Palantir had staff donating their expertise to CA free of charge then it could also be considered an unreported donation in kind, and therefore a violation for the FEC to investigate.

<comment><USER12> FEC: "The Commission is made up of six members, who are appointed by the President of the United States and confirmed by the United States Senate. Each member serves a six-year term, and two seats are subject to appointment every two years.[1] By law, no more than three Commissioners can be members of the same political party, and at least four votes are required for any official Commission action." \- Wikipedia

Given the Republican's enthusiasm for pursuing Trump pecadillos, nothing will ever come from there.

<comment><USER10> Every state has election laws and an Attorney General to enforce them. They have already taken an interest in Cambridge Analytica [1]. Palantir shouldn't expect partisan protection.

[1] [https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cambridge-analytica-state- attor...](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cambridge-analytica-state-attorneys- general-send-letter-to-facebook-ceo-mark-zuckerberg/)

<comment><USER11> And in fact the DOJ itself has been picking up the slack long kept flaccid by the FEC: [https://www.brennancenter.org/blog/justice-department-now- ca...](https://www.brennancenter.org/blog/justice-department-now-campaign- finance-beat)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wonder if anyone is really surprised by this.

It became pretty clear right after Trump won the election (as early as December 2016) during this meeting: [https://youtu.be/oX_9yD2lN2g](https://youtu.be/oX_9yD2lN2g). Trump met with 13 tech company giants and somehow Alex Karp (CEO of Palantir) is at the table. The rest of the executives are from companies with market caps well into the hundreds of billions.

<comment><USER14> Let's not forget Thiel gave Trump money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> FWIW Palantir gave a pretty ironclad denial on the record for this article:

> A spokesperson for Palantir told CNBC the company has never had a > relationship with Cambridge Analytica and has never worked on any Cambridge > Analytica data. Cambridge Analytica was not immediately available for > comment.

<comment><USER16> Does that include SCL and Emerdata and any other entities in this intentional warren of shell companies?

<comment><USER17> Yes, this. It seems SCL associates have exploited the commercial veil very effectively and we need to look behind that veil to work out what happened. I would also say that SCL has very cleverly exploited the difference between equity and contract payments to subvert spending caps. Invest a business...no spending cap.... I hate these guys. I'm a proud Brit, I do biz globally, and these guys have trashes Brand UK. I'm sometimes close to tears at what these guys have done.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> We need to treat illicitly obtained data like narcotics, incriminate everyone that touches them. Then, we need to stop doing that with narcotics.

<comment><USER19> I've had a suggestion like that in my profile here at HN since sometime last year.

Only I think all user data, legally obtained or not, and compare it to nuclear waste.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The sad part isn't that CA mined the data or that Palantir helped build models, it's that those 50 million people believed in the campaigns they were fed. If a few powerful people can influence the masses to achieve their objectives, what good is democracy bringing to the table? More importantly, how different is mental manipulation compared to physical manipulation as commonly seen with dictatorship?

<comment><USER21> Back when propaganda was first being developed as a field, particularly between the two World Wars, it was greeted with a great deal of excitement by the powers that be precisely for this reason: It provided a non-physical means of coercing the will of the masses. There is plenty of material from those days about the wonders of propaganda, that it would enable the ruling elite to guide the caprices of the people while avoiding physical conflict (win/win!). It was always a half-baked idea, and the other shoe dropped very quickly (Nazi Germany was very forward thinking in its use of propaganda), but nothing changed.

I doubt that you can remove all social inequality, and it seems throughout history there have always been people who have exerted their wills more in order to accomplish their ends in society. The deep issue that we face is that there is no ingrained morality. Imagine if wealth and power were viewed as a weighty responsibility rather than a privilege--as the holder is responsible for using it to accomplish what they will, the choice of what one does reflects the quality and worth of the person. That's the reality in any case, but imagine if that were universally ingrained as how we, as a society, defined success....

<comment><USER22> It goes back farther than the world wars.

Fake News used to be called Yellow Journalism. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism)

<comment><USER23> No;

Fake news is the specific phenomenon observed recently of websites, operated primarily by Romanian citizens, which made up events entirely to drive ad click revenue.

The sites were made to look like they were for legitimate news papers, but there were no actual newspapers with those names in existence.

Soon after the term was coined it was co-opted by president trump to mean all media, leading to the blurring of its meaning.

Fake news is neither journalism nor politically motivated. It's pure avarice sans morality.

Yellow journalism was still about news and journalism. The root of fake news is hard to even put into words.

It's people who didn't care about news, they just a/b tested text and saw what got the most shares and likes.

Then they conned people into believing it was a legitimate source by putting it under a news site like banner.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Ha. I was just talking here the other day about how my friend at Facebook would always say that Palantir has even more data, including just about everything from Facebook, and a commenter responded that they couldn't see how Palantir would actually be able to scrape up Facebook's data...

<comment><USER25> > including just about everything from Facebook

So all those half-joking "conspiracy theories" about Facebook being a collection tool for three-letter agencies isn't that far off.

<comment><USER26> Ultimately, every American company is a collection tool for three-letter agencies, and through allies, most non-American corporations too.

I like to think FB is how they check the accuracy of their other data sets.

<comment><USER27> Coincidentally FB and CA are are both only one letter I away.

<comment><USER22> CIA spooks put the "boo!" in "Facebook"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Perhaps companies contracted to provide data processing services should be required to check that the source of the data was legitimate and within the allowances of data protection regulations.

Just like AML rules, where companies processing large amounts of funds have to check the source of the funds to ensure they were obtained legitimately.

</comment><comment><USER29> What I want to know: who were the ones who took that data and did the ad buys, picked/wrote the rage-bait content, etc? I don't think I have seen that detail anywhere. Did I miss it somewhere?

(follow the money, etc)

Psychographic profiles/privacy issues aside, to me it's the tension-stoking- Willie-Horton-propaganda tactics that deserve public scorn, if, alas, not prosecution. Unless it was (also) Russia.

<comment><USER30> Could be a company in Texas named Harris Media was involved in the Kenyan election at the behest of CA according to the Channel 4 investigation. They also are a prime choice for republican campaigns in the US.

Their list of clients seems pretty much aligned with CA's client list.

[https://www.harrismediallc.com/](https://www.harrismediallc.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This title really should be updated. Even the title in the linked story says that this is "alleged," and there is zero evidence in the story other than the say-so of one media-hungry individual. Further, Palantir has issued a flat out denial, yet this headline appears on HN as a statement of fact.

</comment><comment><USER32> Article leaves out that Palantir's co-founder Thiel is on the board of Facebook, and donated to a PAC which funded the Cambridge Analytica campaign.

<comment> wu-ikkyu FTA:

"Thiel is a well-known supporter of Trump and donated over $1 million to his campaign. He is also on the board of Facebook."

<comment><USER32> Whoops, guess I missed it. Or, it was revised.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Not at all surprised that Palantir sees itself as being more powerful than national governments.

The upside is that Palantir and Mr. Thiel will suffer the same fate as most business associates of Mr. Trump, out of the money and with a permanently tainted reputation to boot.

</comment><comment><USER34> Is anyone getting the sense that Palantir, Cambridge Analytica, and Facebook aligned on a rather coherent political axis, with Google and Apple staking out an opposing axis, and Amazon is staking out a sort of arms-dealer neutrality?

<comment><USER35> no because the headline here is wrong, the CEO of Palantir is a known Trump critic and CA isn't even prominent enough to be on the same level as any of these other companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> And Palantir worked with HBGary to infiltrate and destroy Wikileaks in 2010:

[http://www.businessinsider.com/palantir-wikileaks- apology-20...](http://www.businessinsider.com/palantir-wikileaks- apology-2011-2)

</comment><comment><USER37> Does this even come as surprise?

</comment><comment><USER38> "Mr. Wylie said that he and Mr. Nix visited Palantir's London office on Soho Square. One side was set up like a high-security office, Mr. Wylie said, with separate rooms that could be entered only with particular codes. The other side, he said, was like a tech start-up - "weird inspirational quotes and stuff on the wall and free beer, and there's a Ping-Pong table.""

Source: [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/us/cambridge-analytica- pa...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/us/cambridge-analytica- palantir.html)

</comment><comment><USER39> Thiel also gave money to a PAC than then paid Cambridge Analytica:

[https://mashable.com/2018/03/22/facebook-peter-thiel- cambrid...](https://mashable.com/2018/03/22/facebook-peter-thiel-cambridge- analytica/)

</comment><comment><USER40> Right or wrong, 'Palantir' is a great name for this kind of company.

<comment><USER41> Side question, why is it legal to take a name from "Lord of The Rings"?

Wouldn't the Tolkien Estate have a copyright on that?

Could I start a newspaper tomorrow called "The Daily Bugle"...(which is where Spiderman works)?

<comment><USER42> They disingenuously claim it has roots in Latin without mentioning LotR at all:

[https://www.palantir.net/blog/palantir-philosophy-or- what-s-...](https://www.palantir.net/blog/palantir-philosophy-or-what-s-name- anyway)

Even if it does, and I'd love to see more details about that (Google translates 'openly' as 'palam'), it's clearly a LotR reference.

<comment><USER43> Palantir.net is not the same Palantir everyone is talking about here. Palantir.net seems to be a website consultancy for drupal-based sites.

Palantir.com doesn't seem to have anything referencing the source of the name.

<comment><USER42> Ah! Thanks for the correction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Deleted

<comment><USER44> Deleted due to lack of context

<comment><USER45> tbh, your posts read like the ramblings of a paranoid schizophrenic.

<comment><USER44> Deleted

<comment><USER46> Could you repost your original comment please? People seem to think any and all outrageous tales where X told Y some shady Z was happening means schizophrenia.

<comment><USER44> It probably was schizophrenia. Sorry for wasting bandwidth.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: any good tools for tracking hours spent on one task? - <AUTHOR>

the popular book 'Outilers' stated the 10,000 hours make a talent, do any hackers here track the hours spent on the way to be a hacker? what are the good tools for tracking the time on task? thx. <comment><USER2> Back when I was on Windows (Went 100% linux about a 18 months ago), I had one favorite tool that I still miss to this day called TimeSnapper [1]. The underlying concept is pretty simple. It takes a screenshot every x seconds, allowing you to track and play back everything you do on your computer. It also allows you to filter the time spent on tasks according to app titles and browser URLs.

I used it to track my time on client work for a couple years. After a couple weeks of playing back my day and adjusting the filters, I found it to be fairly accurate in tracking what I was doing at any point in the day - including tracking how much time I slacked off or researched subjects and so- on. The passive nature of the tool along with the filters and timeline made it one of the most useful time tracking tools I've ever used.

I have no affiliation with the app or developer besides being a satisfied customer.

1: <http://timesnapper.com/>

</comment><comment><USER3> I can't stress how happy I am with rescuetime.com since I added it last week.

It is a ycombinator project. You should give it a try.

</comment><comment><USER4> I can recommend hamster-applet.

<http://projecthamster.wordpress.com/about/></comment>


Pepe the Frog's Creator Goes Legally Nuclear Against the Alt-Right - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/8x8gaa/pepe-the-frogs-creator-lawsuits-dmca-matt-furie-alt-right <comment><USER2> I'm skeptical that a copyright can be pressed at this point, seeing as no action was taken for years as Pepe memes were created and used on 4chan and elsewhere. The creator is on record as having knowledge of their use for quite some time, if I'm remembering correctly.

</comment><comment><USER3> Couldn't this backfire? The more the author protests exclusively against "alt- right" usage of his creation, doesn't the use of the logo become fair use as political satire?

</comment><comment><USER4> I've never read the original comics while Pepe as meme is spammed through chats at compsci uni (because it's fun), it's very popular as meme.

The majority of racist and sexist memes are used as way to ridicule virtue- signaling of positive discrimination for people of color, women, etc.

</comment><comment><USER5> I find this pretty funny. I never got the pepe popularity but this is a good outcome IMHO.

</comment><comment><USER6> The careless bundling of everyone under the sun into the "alt-right" category is getting out of hand.

I don't care what you think about the shitposters on r/The_Donald or Mike Cernovich, but they aren't anything close to advocates for the white identity politics advocated by the "alt-right".

<comment><USER7> I don't see on what axis you could meaningfully separate Cernovich from the rest of the "alt-right" \- the hateful conspiracy theory stuff aside, he says things like "diversity is code for white genocide."

<comment><USER6> How about on the axis of "believes in white racial superiority"?

The claim of the "alt-right" is that Western civilization is intimately tied to the white race. Here's a video of Jared Taylor explaining the "alt right": [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhnDm7OxuU4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhnDm7OxuU4)

It's also worth noting that alt-right wasn't even well-defined until 2016. As it became clearer, plenty of people (including Cernovich) publically denounced and distanced themselves.

None of this is a broader defense of Cernovich, who I maintain is creepy and lacking in substance, but the careless lumping in of mainstream conservatives, nationalists, internet trolls, Pepe the Frog, etc into the "alt-right" bucket is not helpful.</comment></comment></comment>


En svensk tiger - j-james https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/En_svensk_tiger <comment><AUTHOR> In Switzerland during WWII, the population was advised to be suspicious of anyone not speaking the local dialect, especially of they asked for directions. The army removed all traffic signs in case of an invasion [0] and stores did not sell road maps anymore. Swiss German is (as most dialects) notoriously difficult to learn in later life for speakers of other dialects.

(Slightly related story: some years ago, I traveled back to Germany by train. A few minutes past the border, German border control went through the train and asked me for my ID card. I then realized that I had left my German ID card in the scanner at home a few days earlier because I needed a copy of it. The border control then naturally went through my backpack, which (what I then realized with horror) contained ca. 30 packs of matches. A few weeks earlier, we had a BBQ at a local lake and realized on the way that we had no matches to lit the fire, so we went to the next supermarket and just bought the cheapest offer, which happened to be a pack of 30. So there I was, crossing the border with no identification and nothing on me but a backpack full of matches. When they asked why I had so many matches on me, my 20-year old brain went into full self-destruction mode and I stuttered the following: "He-he-he, its not enough to build a bomb, isn't it?".

Luckily, I have an accent which makes it absolutely clear that I grew up around a major city in my home state. After asking me some questions about my birth town, other personal facts and making some calls, they didn't even fine me. I am quite sure that this would've been slightly more complicated if I had spoken perfect standard German, or had a foreign accent.)

[0] [https://ulis- buecherecke.ch/pdf_infos_zur_schweiz/die_schwei...](https://ulis- buecherecke.ch/pdf_infos_zur_schweiz/die_schweiz_1939-1945.pdf)

<comment><USER2> As recently as 2003, Swedish citizens abroad were sometimes forced to sing the Swedish tune "Små grodorna" at the Swedish Embassy to prove they were indeed Swedes. ( Source: [https://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/a/BJWj4l/tvingades- sjunga...](https://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/a/BJWj4l/tvingades-sjunga-sma- grodorna) )

Now, not even two decades later, Sweden's population is comprised of 18% born outside Sweden and 24% with a non-Swedish background. (source [https://www.migrationsinfo.se/fragor-och-svar/hur-manga- utri...](https://www.migrationsinfo.se/fragor-och-svar/hur-manga-utrikes- fodda-sverige/) )

<comment><USER3> I was born in the heart of Sweden in 1985 and I've lived in Sweden my entire life. I don't know the 2nd part of Små grodorna.

Små grodorna, små grodorna, så lustiga att se. Små grodorna, små grodorna ...???

And the next thing I remember is that stupid noise they make as they dance around the may pole.

<comment><USER4> 2x: Ej öron ej öron och svansar havar de -

Born 94, I believe this is the second part.

<comment><USER5> Almost right!

 _Små grodorna, små grodorna är lustiga att se.

Små grodorna, små grodorna är lustiga att se.

Ej öron, ej öron, ej svansar hava de.

Ej öron, ej öron, ej svansar hava de.

Kou-ack-ack-ack, kou-ack-ack-ack,

kou-ack-ack-ack-ack-kaa.

Kou-ack-ack-ack, kou-ack-ack-ack,

kou-ack-ack-ack-ack-kaa._

<comment><USER4> Considering I've never read it I would give myself an E+ at least.

Cheers for remembering that last weird bit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In the early 2000s I made a t-shirt print with someone holding a seagull in front of a Swedish flag. The caption was "En svensk håller truten", which means both "A swede holds the seagull" and "a swede shuts up".

I gave it away and a random stranger online that was a bit more entrepreneurial than me printed it and made what 17-year old me considered a fortune.

Googling I think I actually found it:[https://i.imagefra.me/88bf68ck](https://i.imagefra.me/88bf68ck) It is too long ago for me to remember how it looked exactly and the quality leaves things to the imagination, but iirc I actually drew that in an ancient version of gimp.

</comment><comment><USER7> Question to all the non-swedes: why do you find this interesting? Is it the play on words? War propaganda in general being interesting?

<comment><USER8> Hej, a non-Swede: I was incredibly disappointed in the wiki article and don't find this remotely interesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Not to be confused with Swedish lion: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion_of_Gripsholm_Castle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion_of_Gripsholm_Castle)

<comment><USER10> Better picture : [https://recondito.org/2017/05/12/lion-at-gripsholm- castle/](https://recondito.org/2017/05/12/lion-at-gripsholm-castle/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Didn't think I would see Swedish on HN, awesome! I never heard about this when growing up in Sweden during the 90's so it's interesting to learn about it here.

<comment><USER12> I saw it several times when growing up in the 80's, but I was apparently too stupid to see the pun. I just kept thinking "Tiger? We don't have any damn tigers, this makes no sense."

Oh, I wish we'd had Wikipedia back then, so I wouldn't have had to feel like a complete moron when the penny finally dropped...

<comment><USER13> I think about the line from Sverige, by Kent:

En tiger som skäms

And of course the cover of that album (Vapen och ammunition) being a black and white photo of a tiger.

<comment><USER14> I thought it was a regular (as in color) photo of a white tiger.

<comment><USER13> It's probably a black and white photo of a black and white tiger.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> When I first started my job in Stockholm there was a printout of this tiger logo with the saying that 10-12 were quiet hours, I knew about the saying but I didn't know about the history behind it, quite interesting!

</comment><comment><USER16> Aron Flam & Henrik Jönsson recently talked about this on Dave Rubin [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpRBfoQRdpY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpRBfoQRdpY)

</comment><comment><USER17> If you enjoy this, there is a more recent version you might appreciate:

[http://i.imgur.com/16N9R.png](http://i.imgur.com/16N9R.png)

</comment><comment><USER18> I didn't see mention of the obvious double "entendre" in the design as well, with the rather clear implication that prison awaits those that dare not comply.

</comment><comment><USER19> Could it be that Kent references this tiger in their song "Sverige" [1]? Ber om ursäkt from Swedish persons ITT if the question sounds stupid.

[1] [https://kent.nu/latar/sverige/](https://kent.nu/latar/sverige/)

</comment><comment><USER20> In addition to being printed on posters and similar public media it were also printed on letter paper, suitcases and envelopes.

</comment><comment><USER21> a tiger is not an animal i associate with quietness.

a swedish fox would make more sense.

<comment><USER22> I have always thought that this slight cognitive dissonance was deliberate:

"A Swede stays silent" as one meaning, while suggesting "a Swedish roaring aggressiveness" as the other meaning. In wartime, I think both these would make perfect sense, and combining them into one in a simple three-word message is very effective.

<comment><USER21> thinking about it more, perhaps this was the intent; being a noncombatant country, silence among the citizens was perhaps promoted as an act of fortitude in furtherance of their self-preservation, which could be associated with the character of a tiger.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> so Tiger of Sweden clothes are actually for really quiet people?

<comment><USER24> You are probably joking, but in case you are not the play on words only works in this particular configuration (present tense, "a Swedish tiger" vs "a Swede [keeps] quiet".

<comment><USER25> Could one also say "Tig er av Sweden?" :P

i.e., Hush, y'all!

<comment><USER26> Sadly no, but good effort! What you wrote would literally translate to "Silence your of Sweden". If you want hush, I'd probably use "tyst" instead of "tig" as the former is more colloquial. If you squint and have a bit of an open mind, maybe you can construe your sentence as something like "Silence, you Swedes!" but it's a bit of a stretch.

<comment><USER25> Nära skjuter ingen hare!

Inga ordvitspoäng för mig idag då. Varken särskrivningspoäng eller ordvitspoäng :P

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I want to comment on this but...

</comment><comment><USER28> Did the Swedish actually fight in world war II? Didn't they just roll over and let the Germanys roll through to Norway?

And if that's true, what was there to keep secret?

<comment><USER29> Unnecessarily hostile comment. Sweden remained neutral through the war and did not partake in the fighting, as far as I know.

They didn't allow troop movements into Norway, but did allow troops to move through from Norway, into Finland. They allowed off-duty German soldiers to travel between Norway and Germany, and sold iron ore to Germany.

They also shared intelligence with the Allied forces, helped train Danish and Norwegian troops to liberate Denmark, allowed Allied forces use of its airbases, took in a lot of Jewish refugees from Norway and Denmark, The Swedish Red Cross sent buses to evacuate concentration camp inmates, and RAoul Wallenberg used his diplomatc status to save tens of thousands of Jews in Hungary as well.

<comment><USER28> I didn't mean it as hostile - it is just a statement of fact.

To the original point, if they were "neutral", then what secrets did they have to hold?

What does "off duty" even mean in a world war? Not destroying Sweden but allowing them to bring ammunition through to pound Norway?

And if they were "neutral", why were they helping the Allies?

All in all, your comment does not add up.

<comment><USER30> Could you explain why you think a neutral country would not have secrets? E.g. currently being neutral doesn't mean you don't have preparations on what to do if you get attacked (indeed, both sides in WW2 considered an invasion of Sweden) and would like to keep those secret. You want to keep your diplomatic strategies secret to avoid them being exploited against you. Being neutral does neither necessarily mean "you allow everyone to do whatever they want in your country" nor "you do not interact with the warring parties at all".</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Flat HTML - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/samsquire/flat-html <comment><USER2> What has the world come to if this mess is considered easier than writing some nested html tags? (Perhaps I'm not plugged into the SPA scene well enough to appreciate this project. I hope it is useful to some.) In fact, reading the examples made me check to see if the first commit to this project was today, April Fools...

<comment><USER3> The link was shared here by someone with the same username as the github repo owner - presumably it was a pre-planned April Fools day joke for Hacker News.

<comment><USER4> It looks like the owner has shared it three times in the last 2 weeks, which suggests it isn't a joke.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Bravo, this is exactly what April Fools' jokes should be. Right on the line where you can think "Well, someone really _could_ be crazy enough to propose this seriously!", where it's close enough that many of the replies here I can't even figure out if _they_ are serious or joking.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h I personally prefer the ones that are obviously jokes, but then you look at it for a second and think, "wait, that could actually work..."

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think the idea is a little rough around the edges but it has good bones. I think a better name might be something like "procedural HTML" since I think you're envisioning something like

        add paragraph "content"
        push division
        add image
        add attr src "https://..."
        add attr alt "cute cat"
        add paragraph "more content"
        pop division
        ...

But obviously with much terser syntax. Everyone seems to be on the declarative train these days that it's nice to see some interesting procedural work.

Such a thing composes pretty nicely too since basically any sequence of statements grouped together can be used as a component.

</comment><comment><USER7> Congratulations on re-inventing Emmet (and a bunch of other tools) very badly, I guess? :)

For anyone interested, the equivalent of the first example in Emmet is:

        div>h1{My Post}+ul>li{I am list item $}*3^ul>li{I am a different list item $}*2

It's a lot terser, but since it uses a CSS-like syntax, it's slightly less bizarre than at first glance and not that hard to pick up. Fun tool, more powerful than it looks, and supported by a ton of editors (I believe it's enabled by default in Jetbrains IDEs, for example...).

[https://emmet.io/](https://emmet.io/)

<comment><USER8> Congratulations to yourself as the author reached his target audience and I'm sure the author is happy with your response :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I don't think this is a joke, but an attempt of innovation. I think it is just rude to assume it is or make fun as it was.

Years ago I made an attempt to reinvent forums, with comments ordered horizontally instead vertically. It was very interesting to think about, but the end result had a lot of issues. I wouldn't appreciate people just making fun of it.

Some attempts to innovate might generate weird results, but there is no gain to society in pointing and laughing at the weird results. Thoughtful comments on why it's bad in anyone's point of view are much more helpful.

Different people have different perceptions of what is cleaner, or easier, or simpler. It is healthy to have this in mind while criticizing different approaches to a problem.

<comment><USER10> Completely agree with you. I'm at least always interested in alternative ways of representing and manipulating a tree structure, so it was a nice find even though I'm never going to use it.

It's fascinating how these projects are intriguing enough to reach HN front page with positive votes, but then get bashed in by masses. Reading all the comments here leaves me with bad taste in mouth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> What's with everyone's obsession with treating html like assembly: "Only people with long white hair and beards, magic wands and capes know html... Like... Like Gandalf, bruh!"

General question, it's been my main criticism towards all the modern js "frameworks" like react, vue and whatnot. Seriously, what gives?

</comment><comment><USER12> This is the best April fool's joke this year, bravo

<comment><USER13> > this year

As opposed to the jokes being told all those other April 1st we're going to have this year? :P

<comment><USER14> I think that meant not the set of all April 1st days, but the set of all April 1st jokes this year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Why go through the effort of embedding it in JSON? Why not just send plain text back and forth? If the goal is minimal markup anyway...

That being said, it reminded me of HAML[1] - but that uses whitespace to determine nesting.

[1] [http://haml.info/](http://haml.info/)

<comment><USER16> Or this-

[https://github.com/pugjs/pug/blob/master/README.md#syntax](https://github.com/pugjs/pug/blob/master/README.md#syntax)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think markup languages need improvement, but as soon as I saw the syntax in JSON and how it was formatted it was an automatic turnoff.

Have you though instead about just developing a new markup language that has advanced HTML features?

</comment><comment><USER18> Beats JSX. Why have a render() method with all that complicated JSX. Just store this stuff in state. This could be the next hooks. You could add callbacks to this structure too.

        "data": [
            "-h1 =My post",
            "^ul li = I am list item 1",
            "ul li = I am list item 2",
            "ul li = I am list item 3",
            "-ul li = I am a different list item 1",
            { xpathish: "ul li = I am a different list item 2", doer: function() {alert();} }
     ]

</comment><comment><USER19> This is great – however, there's space for improvement, namely, flattening the JSON. Readability may also benefit from the addition of a few backslashes added by this procedure. A further step of x-www-form-url encoding or base64 encoding (maybe even as a data-URL?) may also add another as pleasing as satisfying step to you tool chain!

<comment><USER19> Personally, I'd prefer a more explicit declaration, which is also legitimate CSS, as in:

      html > body > h1 { content: "Example"; }
      html > body > h1 + p { content: "First Paragraph"; }
      html > body > h1 + p + p ( content: "Second Paragraph"; }
      html > body > h1 + p + p + ul > li:first-child { content: "A List Item"; }
      (etc)

Mind how missing content or copy text, like the second paragraph being omitted, may be easily detected!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> [https://github.com/pugjs/pug](https://github.com/pugjs/pug)

</comment><comment><USER21> I don't think I get the point? It's even more convoluted than haml, which is already pretty well established, and the syntax is subtly different enough that I can see myself tripping repeatedly while trying to write this.

Is this an exercise? Is there an actual project somewhere doing it?

</comment><comment><USER22> "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you. I think.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Bahah that was fun. Also someone should totally make a brainfuck html generator.

All tags could be in alphabetical order and you cycle through them in brainfuck. Pop in class names and id's and you're onto a winner!

</comment><comment><USER24> I think author haven't seen Slim or Pug templating languages

</comment><comment><USER25> I think the author needs to lookup what xslt is

</comment><comment><USER26> April fools?

</comment><comment><USER27> Is this a joke?

</comment><comment><USER28> you could also just write html

[https://html.energy](https://html.energy)

</comment><comment><USER29> wow, this looks horrific.

</comment><comment><USER30> why?

</comment><comment><USER31> Re plugging scala-tags. Type checked html where you can close and hence match brackets.

</comment><comment><USER32> I would like to see this joke continue until it is indistinguishable from satire.

</comment><comment><USER33> Reminds me of these similar projects:

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

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

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

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rascal_Flatts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rascal_Flatts)</comment>