Datapocalypso (RE: Eviction, or the Coming Datapocalypse) - <AUTHOR> http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1649

<comment><USER2> The good part is at the very end where he actually proposes some kind of solution.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm still not solid on what I think about private companies having the responsibility to provide your data for you if they're closing down, but his bit at the end about the archive team seems... well, brilliant. Hell, it could even be a paid service. Monitor the web for companies shutting down and download away. Of course, that's assuming that the data's not protected behind some sort of wall (if Facebook was closing, or something like that); in that case, contact the company and try and make a deal. You could get them to simply give you all the data, or (in case of privacy concerns, etc.) offer the closing company a solution where they commit to letting users get at their data for 90 days (or some similar number) and after that, you put up a page where people can pay to access the original site, or at least some sort of download page.

Of course, people could just back up, but some stuff is just hard to do that with, especially on the web.

</comment><comment><USER4> On the other hand, perhaps it's good to allow data to be lost occasionally... I've lost old emails, source code, and other documents that I _thought_ were really important (to me at least). Turns out I was wrong, I don't miss any of it.

It's a shame when people lose stuff for reasons other than neglect, but it happens. Start over or work on something new (and treat it like an opportunity, not a chore).

<comment><USER5> There's no reason to lose data. Space is cheap.

<comment><USER4> It depends on how you define "lose". To keep all your data for a _long_ time takes effort. Storage formats change. Disks die. Hosted storage bills need to be paid, billing needs to be updated (credit cards expire), etc.

You really need more than one copy in more than one place if you want to be really confident that your data won't be lost.

Is all your data worth the effort? Is it healthy to try to hang on to everything?

<comment><USER5> When I could simply offload to a drive and then throw that dive into storage? Sure it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Cross-posting:

Of relevance, Pownce had a similar shutdown recently. Pownce was bought and users were given 2 weeks to export their data before the service was shutdown and the data gone forever.

[http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/12/01/pownce-deadpooled- team-...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/12/01/pownce-deadpooled-team-moves- to-six-apart/)

</comment><comment><USER6> So losing the data you enter into some lame AOL web service because you forget to check your email for a few weeks qualifies as an _apocalypse_? After watching fat insane Brando in Apocalypse Now and buff ass-kicking Aaanold in the Terminator flicks, this "coming datapocalypse" doesn't seem very scary.

<comment><USER7> Dohn't you unduhsstahnd? Ohl ur daytuh veel bee losst!

<http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,317553,00.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The biggest problem I have with websites like hometown that shut down with insuficiant notice is that burned users are less likely to trust new websites... And as a webapplication developper I care about having users trust me with their contents....

</comment><comment><USER5> I fully support this idea and infact, I am already wondering how you'd go about implementing it.

I've been bitten by this before and didn't have sufficient backups.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well projects like dataportability.org are a step in the right direction (making the export of data easier), but then there's the issue of how much notice (if any at all) is given when a site is closing.</comment></comment>


DeepDream – a code example for visualizing Neural Networks - <AUTHOR> http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2015/07/deepdream-code-example-for-visualizing.html <comment><USER2> When it comes to visualizing neural networks nothing beats emergent! [http://grey.colorado.edu/emergent](http://grey.colorado.edu/emergent)</comment>


Xbox 360 Slim heading our way? Will it launch with Natal? - <AUTHOR> http://www.itworld.com/personal-tech/101411/xbox-360-slim-heading-our-way-will-it-launch-natal <comment><USER2> > "Xbox 360 Slim heading our way? Will it launch with Natal?"

And, more important, will news like these hurt sales of competing systems?</comment>


Trucks Are Killing Us - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/22/opinion/the-trucks-are-killing-us.html <comment><USER2> Driving on I5 from Seattle to Portland is now a long line of semis, one after the other. Trucks, even loaded to the legal limit, cause 9,000 times as much fatigue damage to the road as a car (fatigue damage goes up as the cube of the weight).

It's inefficient and environmentally absurd to use trucks that way. Railroad tracks parallel I5. The solution is to pick the container off the semi, put it on a railcar, do the intercity haul on the rails (which are made for heavy loads) with minimal fuel and manpower costs, pick it up and put it on a truck to do the last mile in the destination city.

So why isn't this done now? Highways are subsidized by cars (fuel taxes), and railroads are taxed. The incentives are backwards.

What I'd do is significantly raise the weight taxes on trucks on the interstates, and use that money to subsidize the rail right-of-way.

<comment><USER3> I agree that rail seems ideal and much more economical and environmentally friendly, but is the system designed to handle consumer shipping with its demands for quick delivery with tight deadlines? (Which I'd argue constitutes a large portion of truck-based freight)

How much longer does it take to load/unload a freight train versus a truck? How much slower is the train and how longer does it take to ship? (and how does that affect cost or product quality when shipping items that must be refrigerated in transit?) Is it a realistic option for same-day or overnight shipping required for services like Amazon Prime in the volume that is currently being carried by trucks?

For items where delivery is not urgent, I'm all for using rail, but with expectations from consumers for quick delivery, its hard to see how they will be able to compete on the current system for rail-based freight.

An alternative (at least in the short-term), might be to create truck-only traffic lanes or highways with tolls and fewer exits. (and other lanes or highways just for cars) The lanes could be built to withstand the additional weight from the trucks, and non-truck traffic would run more efficiently and safely.

<comment><USER2> If people are willing to pay weight fees that reflect the true cost of fixing the road damage, they can continue to use the trucks. But why should taxpayers pay for 2 day delivery instead of 3 day by rail?

<comment><USER4> I'd guess job creation, possibly with a side of union influence.

<comment><USER4> Do any of the down voters have another point of view they would like to share?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm all for the safety arguments being made by the author but he does paint the trucking industry as this huge money making business when that really isn't the case.

Trucking is a very low margin business. These guys live and die based on controlling costs. It's an industry where innovation is very hard because you really need to justify every dollar spent on R&D.

Quoting $700B total industry revenue and saying there's room to spend on safety is meaningless... Would love to see a more in depth analysis on the issue from a financial perspective.

<comment><USER6> The article bothered me because of the presumption that the author made about hours of service, and as a former driver, in my opinion the issue is not the HOS (hours of service) rules, its the way companies, especially many smaller ones dispatch their drivers - you can be expected to go from working days, to working nights instantly, and it can really fuck hardcore with your sleep schedule - so while you can be compliant with the HOS, you've still not slept any - because you just spent 4 days working days, and now you're expected to pick up a shipment at 11pm and run with it until out of hours for the day.. not practical or safe.

The other thing that irritated me was the presumption that trucks have no safety hardware - I personally wouldn't want to drive a truck with collision avoidance stuff, not unless I had a ton of time to spend with it to understand what it does in an activated situation - that said, most trucks do have ABS, airbags are meaningless in a truck, you're so much larger than the other vehicles that a driver doesn't need airbags to stay safe, and airbags do nothing to enhance the other drivers safety, they just add cost for no real benefit.

<comment><USER7> What would you think of a rule that said you could only continue driving if you have slept for at least 6 of the past 24 hours? (I'm not sure what the exact numbers should be, but you get the idea.)

<comment><USER8> Sounds like a sensible rule that is impossible to enforce.

<comment><USER9> In Germany, trucks are required to have trip recorders. The police can (and will) check them to see if the minimum resting times were observed. Don't american trucks have something similar?

<comment><USER10> Logs are kept, but the posts above are making the point that drivers should be required to sleep a certain number of hours of the past 24 hours. Logs do not help you with this, unless you are using a sleep tracking device.

<comment><USER11> If your legal standard is "no more than 10 hours driving in any continuous 24 hour period, and at least 9 hours of continuous rest period" you don't know for /sure/ that the driver will sleep in the 14 hours they're not driving, but why wouldn't he/she?

<comment><USER12> I guess it's because they might be shifting to a new schedule and it wasn't feasible to change sleep patterns? So if you get in at 00:00 one day, sleep until 08:00. Then you don't get a new assignment until 02:00 the next day day, you will have the necessary gap, but not have had any real way to have slept the right time. You would have needed to force yourself to sleep in the afternoon/evening, and, even with drugs, that is a hard thing to pull off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Self-driving trucks seem to have such great promise to improve the safety and efficiency of the trucking industry and our highways in general. Even if they're only self-driving during the long haul sections and human drivers take over for local deliveries it would make a huge difference.

Hopefully the various interested lobbies don't try to put too many artificial barriers in the way of self driving trucks becoming a reality.

<comment><USER14> I think that the trucking industry is one of the biggest employers in the US. Are you OK with devastating these people's lives for extra efficiency promised safety?

Before we push for more automation and job losses, we need to revamp the whole political/economic/social system to ensure a more egalitarian income distribution since the vast majority of the Earth's population are proletariat who exchange their labor in return for capital to make a living.

<comment><USER15> If everything was going to be automated all at once, this "devastation" might be the case. But it won't happen all at once, it happens over the course of a decade or two.

In almost every case in history, automation has increased jobs and increased the quality of life.

Your post reminds me of this story: "Prof. Friedman visited China in the early 1960s and was taken by a government official to see a public works project. Chinese workers were building a canal. Friedman was struck by seeing everyone digging the canal with shovels. Friedman asked the official, "why no heavy earth-moving equipment?" The official said, "oh, this is a jobs program." So Friedman then says to the official, "then why don't you just give them spoons instead of shovels to create even more jobs?"

<comment><USER14> Since you quoted that super villain Friedman, it's a futile exercise to discuss this issue with you but touching on the silly analogy cited by Dr. Evil:

Abandoning spoons to shovels ==> 1000X efficiency gain and net positive mass- scale job opportunities

Abandoning shovels to heavy equipment ===> 100X efficiency gain and net positive of mass-scale specialized job opportunities.

Abandoning manual trucks to fully auto ===> ~1X efficiency (disputed) and net negative of job opportunities for the masses save for highly specialized super white collar jobs such as for engineers and developers like us.

Do you really think that it's OK from an economic point of view and not politically as this is almost settled to destroy the livelihoods of these poor & lower middle class people just to get an estimated albeit unrealistic 100% efficiency boost?

Are you ready to pay the price in terms of increasing crime rates and lower median quality of life and seeing decrepit hoods everywhere except inside your gated community where you plan to hide from all those poor people and truckers-turned-criminals on the street?

<comment><USER16> Look at this the other way - humans _shouldn 't even be doing this task_, the only reason we have truck drivers is because we didn't know how to make trucks drive themselves. Now we do, so there's no point in keeping humans doing what machines could do better.

Yes, this generalizes to all jobs and the entire economy. It's about time we accepted it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm the CEO of SpeedGauge - a safety and performance company that uses data from 3rd party GPS trackers to monitor and coach hundreds of thousands of commercial vehicles in the US. We use standard GPS tracking data to understand and improve driver speeding behavior - clearly the cause of the crash that critically injured Tracy Morgan and killed James McNair.

From our experience with fleet customers we can see that there is a split in the US trucking industry between those companies that eagerly spend to improve safety and fuel economy and those that think they can't afford it and therefore fight regulation and mandates.

Many companies are way ahead of the regulators when it comes to safety and fuel saving technology and practices. Just look at which companies voluntarily govern their vehicles to a fuel efficient max speed (say 62 mph) vs those that let trucks roll at higher inefficient speeds. Or, look at those companies that have invested in telematics to get improvements in safety, operations and fuel economy and those that resist any such mandate.

Police and inspection based monitoring system (ie. current US DOT CSA regime) allow effective comparison of risk patterns at the aggregate level for large fleets but statistically are invalid at the single driver level because of the paucity of data (even risky drivers don't get in accidents very often). Fleets need more granular data to evaluate individual drivers. Sadly in this incident, it was Walmart, who maintains one of the highest aggregate safety ratings in the industry, that failed to identify the granulal events that put their driver, and the driving public at risk.

Transportation is a tight margin business and solutions need to work within the capital and operational constraints of the market and the reality is that smaller and independent players often don't have the capital to invest (nor do many telematic solution providers direct efforts to micro-fleets). Our customers' experience is that safest drivers are the most profitable drivers (and the best paid). While I am a strong supporter of fair government regulation, I remain hopeful that technology can in fact lead that way by pointing out that safe operations are profitable operations.

<comment><USER18> Welcome to HN.

What are your thoughts on rail as an alternative to trucks?

<comment><USER17> I am a strong supporter of intermodal; trucks & trains have got to work together. I think that trains are part of the solution to truck driver shortage plus they have lots of other benefits (environmental etc..).

I think that there is a great opportunity to make intermodal more efficient and to create more truck/train interface points and to make them more efficient. A lot of work to do. Opportunity for big application of capital AND software.

<comment><USER6> I'm a former OTR driver now working in telecom and as a sysadmin (still with active CDL however).

How do you propose to solve the delay issues at each end of the rail journey, do you think shippers can be made to accept longer transit times? I'd love to see the median length for a TL trip come down to like 150 miles.

<comment><USER17> How do I propose to solve the delay issue? I don't have a solution but I think that there is a lot of value in finding one!

I guess that that is part of what I was hinting at when I said that the solution needed a lot of capital investment and software. There is a lot of work to do and a lot of investment to be made.

I wish that some of the effort that was going into self driving vehicles would go into making intermodal operations smoother. I think there would be a huge payoff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm not able to comment on all parts of the article, but one thing stuck out at me: deaths were up from 2009-2013, but so was the volume of freight being shipped: [http://www.transtats.bts.gov/osea/seasonaladjustment/?PageVa...](http://www.transtats.bts.gov/osea/seasonaladjustment/?PageVar=TRUCK). That makes that particular statistic quite dubious.

Disclosure: I work for a SAAS company serving the logistics industry, which is why I knew that. I don't really have an opinion about how regulated the industry is. My personal work doesn't deal with that, and I'm pretty ignorant of it. I'm quite willing to believe that this article is accurate at the big picture level.

<comment><USER20> While we're talking dubious statistics,

" _While heavy trucks accounted for less than 10 percent of total miles traveled in the United States during 2013, according to federal data, the N.T.S.B. recently reported that they were involved in one in eight of all fatal accidents..._ "

I would like to point out that "one in eight" is 12.5%.

<comment><USER21> They are also only using fatal accidents and not all accidents. I'm assuming that truck accidents are more likely to be fatal than non truck accidents but I have no data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> _The trucking industry... insists that it needs longer work weeks... so that more trucks will not be needed on the road, which it says could result in more accidents. That logic is laughable, but Congress seems to be buying it._

Yeah that makes zero sense. If drivers are driving more, trucks will be on the road more. The actual result of sane work hours would be that more drivers would share trucks and drive in shifts, which is already fairly common. If sharing trucks is somehow impossible, then the industry could buy more trucks, to be parked waiting for their drivers to become available. Neither truck sharing nor additional parked trucks are a danger to the public.

It's my understanding that drivers are typically paid by the mile. Therefore, it's difficult to see why trucking companies care about lower speeds or shorter work weeks. If a driver drives less, she'll be paid less. It's almost as if they're saying that there are no more drivers available at current mileage compensation rates. Since this is HN, I won't suggest higher compensation, but perhaps they could investigate the H-1B program?

<comment><USER23> You joke, but for years now certain corners have been trying to open it up so so that Mexican trucks/drivers to operate in the USA.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> > It has pushed to allow truck drivers to work 82 hours a week, up from the > current 70 hours over eight days, by eliminating the requirement that > drivers take a two-day rest break each week;

There was a different problem with the two-day rest break:

> Must include two periods from 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. home terminal time.

Because obviously the trucking industry shouldn't be working graveyard. That's the part that was suspended. It screws with scheduling. 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. is arbitrary.

[http://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/regulations/hours- service/summary-h...](http://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/regulations/hours- service/summary-hours-service-regulations)

> discouraged the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration from investing > in wireless technology designed to improve the monitoring of drivers and > their vehicles;

Either this is VERY recent news or just misleading. This is happening as far as everyone can tell. The mandate for electronic logging devices in all vehicles should be coming down late September, with a deadline of October 2017.

[http://www.ccjdigital.com/e-log-mandate-advances-fmcsa- sends...](http://www.ccjdigital.com/e-log-mandate-advances-fmcsa-sends-rule- to-white-house-for-approval/)

[http://www.overdriveonline.com/eld-mandate-poised-to- begin-t...](http://www.overdriveonline.com/eld-mandate-poised-to-begin-two- year-countdown)

<comment><USER16> Shouldn't the trucking industry be working _mostly_ graveyard? I mean, what's the better time for trucks to drive fast and safe if not night, when everyone else is not on the road?

<comment><USER25> The best time for _trucks_ is at night, but trucks don't drive. Humans drive trucks, and humans are diurnal animals.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> > Howard Abramson is a freelance writer who was an executive at American > Trucking Associations from 1998 to 2014.

So the same guy who wrote the piece has for 16 years been directly responsible for the lobbying he is decrying. Anyone know what's going on there?

<comment><USER27> Maybe he's realized the inevitability of the situation and decided to jump ship. Can't completely blame him, but makes it difficult to take his opinions seriously.

<comment><USER28> Be very careful with that line of thinking. It amounts to 'he's a bad person, so we should punish him by assigning him low status, and part of that is to refuse to take his opinion seriously.' It's instinctively appealing, but it's also an area where human instinct is terribly wrong.

A better way to react would be 'it looks like he's done bad things, so when he talks about those bad things, he knows what he's talking about and we should take his opinion very seriously. Whether he should be punished is a separate question, but if so, that punishment should take a form that doesn't cripple our ability to stop the other people who are continuing to do those bad things.'

<comment><USER27> Fair enough. Though again, I do sincerely sympathize with him. If my assumption is true, he did what he did for survival of a form. Fine in my book.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is why many people believe self-driving trucks will be even more significant than self-driving cars. Especially as we start to commute less as telepresence improves and more jobs can go remote.

<comment><USER22> OK, just as long as trucks aren't driven through telepresence. Drone operators in the trucking industry might challenge their military brethren in terms of innocent people killed.

<comment><USER30> If trucks were operated as drones, wouldn't that make managing hours and handing off from one driver to another much easier?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Driving while tired can be as dangerous as driving drunk. The occasional 14hr drive isn't horrible, but if you do that several days in a row, you're going to be really tired. So limiting the hours per day a truck driver drives seems like a good idea. As does "shift" driving.

Collision avoidance tech also seems like a good idea.

That said, I don't think we need the government to do anything.

Drivers can unionize and demand better hours. Insurance companies can require collision avoidance tech be installed. Etc.

And if you really believe the government needs to be involved, then it doesn't hurt to try both the government regulation route, and the self-regulation route at the same time. The latter could get implemented faster than the government....

<comment><USER32> > That said, I don't think we need the government to do anything.

I'm not sure how you come to this conclusion looking at this data.

> Drivers can unionize and demand better hours. Insurance companies can > require collision avoidance tech be installed. Etc.

Many things can happen, but they _aren 't_ happening, so...

<comment><USER20> Drivers are frequently the ones complaining about the hours-of-service regulations. They get paid by the mile but many of their working hours are non-driving, so more hours on the road is more money.

Drivers unionizing (That would be the Teamsters, right?) to demand fewer hours seems roughly as likely as programmers unionizing to demand something better than _their_ 80-hour weeks.

<comment><USER31> Would an awareness campaign about the dangers of drowsy driving help?

As for unionizing, why mention Teamsters? Just have each companies employees get together and negotiate with management. (Yes, I'm being purposefully naive. Even if this really won't work, it should still be tried first.)

<comment><USER32> > (Yes, I'm being purposefully naive. Even if this really won't work, it > should still be tried first.)

Why should it be tried first? This kind of experimentation takes decades and meanwhile people are dying. How many times do we have to try waiting for corporations to do the right thing before we acknowledge that corporations are amoral and aren't going to do the right thing? How many unions do we have to try before we see that they don't really promote progress?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> It's rather disingenuous to compare truck crash fatalities to plane crash fatalities. Almost everything kills people more often than plane crashes.

<comment><USER34> Yes, so why is air travel so much more heavily regulated for safety than all the other things? The perception is skewed, and people just don't think about motor vehicle collisions as being a big problem, even though they kill tons of people every year (more than firearm homicides, too, for what it's worth). Pointing that out is reasonable.

<comment><USER35> It's because those people die all at once in a way they can't control or escape. With car accidents, people are perfectly content to believe they are skilled enough drivers to be able to avoid death.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> The author makes several good points, but never mentions fault. From a 1998 study on car-truck collisions:

> the car driver's behavior was more than three times as likely to contribute > to the fatal crash than was the truck driver's behavior. In addition, the > car driver was solely responsible for 70 percent of the fatal crashes, > compared to 16 percent for the truck driver.

[http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/safety/humanfa...](http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/safety/humanfac/04085/)

</comment><comment><USER37> The Solution is the Train - that I don't understand why has not dominated in US, though it being a big industry in earlier part of the 20th Century

<comment><USER38> The cost of running rail to supply all the routes currently served by truck now (and generally in the last 50-60 years) is so high that it's infeasible. The less populated and poor the destination, the higher the costs (and most remote areas are both sparsely populated and poor). I think you're seriously underestimating the vastness of the US and the remoteness of the majority of it. Sure, given enough investment and dedication, a nationwide rail network would have been possible but the decision to build America as a car/truck country was taken in the late 40's/early 50's and it's too late to reverse that, even at a governmental level. People expect to live in remote areas now and have all the comforts of a city. That's simply not possible with rail at a sane cost. Not only are cars and trucks more flexible, but the transportation expenses can be shared between commercial and personal transportation. People in America generally don't take trains (and don't like them) and outside of small regional areas, passenger trains are mostly a novelty that run sometimes _days_ late. Between the geography and people's attitudes/expectations, there is no room for trains in America and it shows.

<comment><USER39> Ah, but road transport isn't really shared between commercial and personal transportation. Road maintenance is in large part funded by fuel tax. Fuel use is roughly proportional to vehicle weight at low speed, or frontal area at high speed. While wear to the road is proportional to the fourth power of the axle weight.

So trucking is heavily subsidised by smaller cars. If the costs created by trucking were internalized, the market share in the shipping industry would likely shift considerably toward rail transport.

<comment><USER40> Which would be an issue as most major US rail corridors are already running at peak capacity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> > It has pushed to allow truck drivers to work 82 hours a week, up from the > current 70 hours over eight days.

Please tell me that's a typo. PLEASE tell me that's a typo. 82 hours a week is insanity. Driving any vehicle requires a lot of attention, driving a large one requires a LOT more attention. And I just have a strong certainty that, if it's anything like every other industry, it'll be 82 hours a week, every week, no breaks.

You want accidents and injuries? Make people drive more than 16 hours a day (5 days a week). Or maybe 13.67 hours a day (6 days a week), or even still 11.71 hours a day (7 days a week). Every week.

Wow.

</comment><comment><USER42> FTA: " _The trucking industry, through its chief trade group, the American Trucking Associations, insists that it needs longer work weeks and bigger vehicles so that more trucks will not be needed on the road, which it says could result in more accidents. That logic is laughable, but Congress seems to be buying it._ " .... and later:

" _Howard Abramson is a freelance writer who was an executive at American Trucking Associations from 1998 to 2014._ "

Gee, I wonder what's the backstory there?

</comment><comment><USER43> Man, I have always hated trucks, and this is yet another proof of why! But in all seriousness, this is yet another narrative of Congress' rolling back of regulations that prove quite beneficial by way of safety and overall welfare of the nation in favor of vicious profit margins for those warlords of industry. I certainly hope to see restored a body of lawmakers that can get their act together and promote the welfare of a healthy, vibrant nation before the end of my lifetime. We have too many clowns now who are willing to pass laws or not pass laws in downright stupidity, and I'm not sure if it's out of sheer corruption or debased philosophical convictions. For myself, this issue serves as an ideal example of where the government can and should intervene with laws and regulations and oversight in order to promote general safety and welfare, not to mention economic fairness, in preventing the exploitation of the have-nots by the haves. I'm just as weary of government getting too large and intervening in our private lives as anybody else, but who can argue that in cases such as truck driving and highway safety in general, the government cannot easily play a part in saving not only lives but tons of money?

</comment><comment><USER44> >More people will be killed in traffic accidents involving large trucks this year than have died in all of the domestic commercial airline crashes over the past 45 years

This is such a slimy apples to oranges comparison. Clearly commercial airfare is far safer than ANY road ground transit.

After this comparison, I don't feel like reading the rest of the article.

<comment><USER45> Yeah, I agree.

Maybe the author should have added the percentage of these truck accidents compared to all road accidents.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I have to drive an interstate on my daily commute. I always wonder why the state troopers, almost without fail, have a semi pulled over on the way in.

Also, I have noticed that truck drivers seem to be as dumb/bad as the average driver, and there is no particular need to single them out. People in general are fucking stupid behind the wheel.

</comment><comment><USER47> Until self driving machines become a reality, there are startups like Maven Machines in Pittsburgh that are tackling the problem of driver fatigue thru innovative use of machine learning.

Site: [http://mavenmachines.com/](http://mavenmachines.com/)

<comment><USER48> They might want to pivot into something that's going to be needed in ten years.

<comment><USER49> Why wouldn't something like this be needed in ten years?

<comment><USER50> Theoretically, self-driving machines will be traversing highways fairly accurately in ten years.

<comment><USER20> Theoretically, there is no difference between theory and practice. Practically, however, there is.

(Thanks for letting me use one of my favorite quotes!)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> > the N.T.S.B. recently reported that they were involved in one in eight of > all fatal accidents and about one-quarter of all fatal accidents in work > zones

Involved or at fault? It seems like these stats are including accidents where trucks did not even contribute to the fatalities but were simply part of the collateral damage.

<comment><USER52> There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.

Moose are involved in around 80% of fatal vehicle-animal collisions in the state of Maine over a five year period[1]. Clearly, moose are a menace, and we need to dramatically invest in moose-diverting safety features on our roads!

Except... moose-vehicle collisions were only 15% of all animal-vehicle collisions. Even a cursory look at the physics of what happens in a moose-car collision explains why moose collisions are disproportionately fatal. Look at a moose, standing next to a typical compact-to-midsize car[2]. Now look at what happens when that compact-midsize car hits a moose[3]. The animal's legs get swept out by the hood/bumper of the vehicle, and the animal's heavy body crashes down through the windshield and the relatively flimsy roof of the vehicle, crushing the driver.

A similar thing happens with semi trucks. In many cases, the front bumper of a truck, and the rear bumper on the trailer, are higher off the ground than the hood or trunk of a car. So if a truck is involved in a rear-end collision with a car in front, as often as not the truck goes right over the top of the car, crushing the occupants of the car underneath.. Or if the car is rear-ending the truck, the hood and engine mass goes underneath the trailer, but the windshield and roof is sheared off by the steel bumper and trailer deck, along with the upper portions of the car's occupants.

I'm not sure you're going to make those physics much safer.

[1] [http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5547a3.htm](http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5547a3.htm) [2] [http://boredomtherapy.com/wp- content/uploads/2014/06/animal-...](http://boredomtherapy.com/wp- content/uploads/2014/06/animal-size-comparison-8.jpg) [3] [http://cdn.wideopenspaces.com/wp- content/uploads/2014/08/las...](http://cdn.wideopenspaces.com/wp- content/uploads/2014/08/last-elknor.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> But no one wants to give up Amazon Prime & other forms of free or discounted shipping.

</comment><comment><USER54> I can't think of many worse jobs than truck driving. Long hours, low pay, threat to lose your job from self-driving cars, high risk... These guys deserve a higher salary and they should start looking for something else to do IMHO.

</comment><comment><USER55> As a cyclist I feel the same way about cars in general, and the stats are similar.

<comment><USER56> Actually, I don't think the statistics are remotely similar (at least in the UK).

In London, for instance, every single cyclist death in 2015 has been due to the cyclist getting crushed by a truck. [1]

I don't know about the US, but I suspect the statistics would be similar, at least in cities.

[1] [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/active/recreational- cycling/1...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/active/recreational- cycling/11702076/The-truth-about-cycling-safety.html)

<comment><USER55> Interesting, are they outright deaths tho? As far as I'm aware the most common result of car/bicycle collision is not death but some kind of head trauma for the cyclist, often resulting in brain damage.

<comment><USER56> That's a good question, and an aspect that I didn't consider. I'd be interested in hearing the answer if you find it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> It might be unfair assume accidents involving trucks are necessarily due to truck drivers. I think self-driving trucks have many more benefits however other than possibly reducing accidents.

<comment><USER38> Over 90% of accidents are caused by human error. That doesn't mean it's necessarily the truck driver's fault, as there are other drivers on the road. But if it isn't his fault, it's the fault of another driver. Considering how long truck drivers drive for and in what conditions, I wouldn't be surprised if much of that 90% is actually attributed to the truck drivers themselves instead of other drivers.

<comment><USER23> Consider also though that truck drivers are the most thoroughly and professionally trained and strictly licensed drivers on the roads.

<comment><USER38> Considered, however that makes no difference when they've been up 12-36 hours driving. At that point, someone slightly drunk is a better driver.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> In the last cross-country trip I took, the interstates were bumpy and the country roads were smooth, no doubt in part due to semi traffic.

</comment><comment><USER58> I'm not convinced this guy isn't on some vendetta. He only quotes total numbers, not accidents per thousand miles / deaths per thousand miles.

If I understand the these DOT numbers[1,2] properly the number of truck miles from 2009 to 2013 has dropped, which would be especially bad if the number of accidents has ridden, but that doesn't jibe with a) the 2008 recession ending and b) increased truck sales over the past 5 years[3]. The trucking industry publications I've been reading are generally in agreement that trucking demand exceeds capacity, and that demand has been steadily increasing since 2008.

He's right that some of the safety regulations have changed recently, and to the layman it appears that they have changed to be less safe. For example, as of this past June, drivers hauling oversize/overweight loads no longer have to take a 30-minute break that was formerly required. However, part of that reasoning was that it can be _more dangerous_ for oversize trucks to be parked, especially at night, than it is for them to continue driving straight through[4].

The 30-minute break exemption has been granted in several other situations as well, for example when hauling HazMat that requires the driver to "attend," or supervise the vehicle even when it's stopped, since this is defined as an on- duty activity the driver would either have to eliminate the break, or stop supervising the load, so he/she would have to break a law no matter what, so it was decided that the 30-minute break would become optional.

About on-truck technology to make the road safer, it's a good idea, but it needs to work right every time. I've spoken to my business partner about it, (he's the one who's been through the whole trucking industry from driving right up to management), and in his other job, where he manages a trucking company, they've had demonstration units with all kinds of collision warnings, lane departure warnings, blind-spot warnings, and so on. They found that the alarms went off way too often when there was no problem - to the point where none of the drivers wanted to take these brand-new demonstration trucks out on a run. And the article's posterboy crash - the Tracy Morgan accident, was a new truck with those bells & whistles installed. The problem there was the driver's commute time to get to work.

Finally, the article reads as if the trucking industry wants to be unsafe. This is simply not true. There are jerks that drive trucks, just like there are jerks that drive 4-wheelers, but there's a culture of safety in trucking that really impresses me. Safety records for both drivers and companies, including inspection results, are tracked by the US government. If a driver's record is too bad no company will take them on, and if a carrier's record is too bad it will be prohibited from operating. Most of the "trucking industry" is truck drivers, and a truck driver's top priority is arriving alive and uninjured.

[1][https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2010/v...](https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2010/vm1.cfm) [2][https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2013/v...](https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2013/vm1.cfm) [3][http://www.ttnews.com/articles/printopt.aspx?storyid=37081](http://www.ttnews.com/articles/printopt.aspx?storyid=37081) [4][http://www.ccjdigital.com/oversizeoverweight-interstate- haul...](http://www.ccjdigital.com/oversizeoverweight-interstate-haulers- granted-exemption-to-30-minute-break-rule/)

</comment><comment><USER59> This is why drone technology is very interesting to me. If you have drones flying around that deliver things directly from docks to warehouses, or warehouse to warehouse, not only would it be faster, but potentially safer too (the drone could take paths that have no or minimal human population). There's probably a bunch of ways to regulate this as well, such that in the case of disaster, the cost of human life is extremely unlikely.

<comment><USER60> >the drone could take paths that have no or minimal human population

You mean like railways?

<comment><USER59> Drones have the capability of delivering directly to the final destination, unlike railways.

In fact,Amazon could redistribute their inventory between warehouses overnight depending on predicted popularity of various items. Or it allows them to have a gigantic single warehouse with every single item in it, and just worry about distribution centers as opposed to warehouses that hold inventory. Then every hour they could send the packages via drones from their central warehouse to distribution centers where they are immediately put on trucks and sent out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Something semi-automated like speedlimit signs that radio out info which the truck receives and enforces seems possible.

<comment><USER62> Signs like those could be a godsend to teenagers out for a prank. Steal one from a road with a speed limit of 25, and put it on the interstate where the speed limit's 55, or the opposite, a speed limit of 55 in a 25 zone. I guess you could potentially add geofencing to the signs, but that means tacking up a roadsign becomes a lot more difficult as you suddenly need to spend the time to reprogram signs when you post them.

<comment> jon-wood Theres no reason they have to be physical signs, just link it to the speed limit database companies like TomTom seem to have for their GPS units and use that. There's always the problem of keeping that up to date, but its no harder than the problems that would have to be solved for physical signs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Wouldn't it more effective to just help the natural process of these drivers being replaced by AI?

</comment><comment><USER64> > About a mile before the crash, the driver ignored work-zone warning signs on > the New Jersey Turnpike of likely delays

What was expected here, honestly? Should he have made a note in his notebook?

> About a half-mile later, the posted speed limit dropped to 45 m.p.h. from > the usual 65, which the driver also ignored.

Truly more often than not the people who do slow down are in the vast minority and arguably the bigger road hazard.

<comment><USER65> Highway construction crews must love people like you.

<comment><USER66> I'm sure it depends on local driving culture and varies from place to place, but there are many stretches of road where local drivers completely ignore posted construction speeds, except for a small percentage who cause dangerous backups and lane changes. Since worker safety is paramount, the best approach is using concrete barriers instead of orange barrels in these high speed zones, not just ignoring the majority of drivers.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do You Want to Use Your Skills to Save Rainforests? - <AUTHOR> I've seen quite a few posts on HN where people are asking what they can do to help the environment. One short answer is : donate to an organisation that purchases rainforests for conservation. David Attenborough said : "...it has more effect than almost anything I can think of"
Why? Because keeping rainforests intact not only protects the plants and animals within them but also sequesters carbon, regulates the climate and produces the air we breathe. There is no technological replacement for the multifunctional complexity of rainforests.
Another thing you could do is volunteer your coding skills and join our non-profit "Fend". We are taking land acquisition conservation to the masses by building an interactive site where visitors can purchase half acre blocks of rainforest. For every patch they purchase, they can zoom into our front page, choose a block to turn it green, and post their action on social media. Our goal is to turn the whole front page green, which is where we can leverage media/following interest.
Right now we need developers to help with all aspects of the build. Our most pressing challenge is implementation of the "block picking" functionality on the front page and how to load millions of blocks/cells in the canvas while maintaining a snappy to navigate browser experience. The second challenge will be taking a custom snap shot of the page that highlights the user's block/s, and then making it easy for them to get their snap shot onto their social media.
Can you help?
If so get in touch : firstname.lastname@example.com
(Download the PDF on fend.earth for further information) <comment><USER2> A bit of advice: don't put up barriers.

1\. Take all the information in the PDF, and put it directly on the website. One click will see less drop-off than two.

2\. Add links to your site on all social media posts. An HN user would have to copy-and-paste or type your domain name. Make it easy, like so:

[https://fend.earth/](https://fend.earth/)

Anybody that has done A/B testing for click-throughs and "engagement" and such knows these "minor" things matter a lot.

With regard to to loading and painting many, many cells in the browser: don't. Compress them into a quadtree. This assumes that acres are stored in a grid, as they appear to be in the mockups.

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

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm always interested in opportunities like this, so will look more deeply into it. One thing right off the bat, though: you don't have nearly enough info on your site about who you are. If you want serious volunteers, you need to show that you're serious too.

Also, your PDF is 10MB. Chrome has a very hard time displaying it. I just thought the pdf was broken at first. You should fix that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Points taken. Both will be addressed.

Happy to talk if you want specific info.</comment></comment>


Search for supersymmetry - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/abs/1503.03290

<comment><USER2> The relevant part:

" Two leptonic production mechanisms are considered: decays of squarks and gluinos with Z bosons in the final state, resulting in a peak in the dilepton invariant mass distribution around the Z-boson mass; and decays of neutralinos (e.g. ˜χ 0 2 → ` \+ ` −χ˜ 0 1 ), resulting in a kinematic endpoint in the dilepton invariant mass distribution. For the former, _an excess of events above the expected Standard Model background is observed, with a significance of 3 standard deviations_. In the latter case, the data are well-described by the expected Standard Model background."

<comment><USER3> Whithout pretending to be in the know by the least, I recall that around 3 sigmas in favour of the Higgs, Peter Woit was reporting about the rumorology on that discovery that later was confirmed, I think that the consensus target could be about 5 sigmas.

[http://kipac.stanford.edu/kipac/how- special-3-sigma](http://kipac.stanford.edu/kipac/how-special-3-sigma) [http://blog.higgshunters.org/tag/5-sigma/](http://blog.higgshunters.org/tag/5-sigma/) [http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=4772](http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=4772)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Whenever an arxiv link is posted this comes up: It is more useful to link to the arxiv page for the article ([http://arxiv.org/abs/1503.03290](http://arxiv.org/abs/1503.03290)), not just to the pdf file.

<comment><USER5> Thanks. We changed the url.

<comment><USER2> So maybe remove the pdf indication as well?

<comment><USER5> Sure.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Forget the cool kids. Geeks are now shaping new products and services - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/business/21702183-forget-cool-kids-geeks-are-now-shaping-new-products-and-services-be-nice-nerds <comment><USER2> Except the definition has changed entirely. A beautiful women throws on intentionally thick glasses and posts to Instagram #geek.</comment>


Speak Up America – Alexa skill that calls your rep by voice - no lookup or dial - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/joaquin.beltran/posts/10215254631631513 <comment><AUTHOR> Speak Up America is an Alexa skill that connects you straight to your congressperson without the need of looking them up, finding contact info, or dialing — Speak Up America connects your phone straight to them. Download and demos (same video, different platforms) below:

Download: [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07J2HT7Q2/](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07J2HT7Q2/)

Facebook: [https://www.facebook.com/joaquin.beltran/posts/1021525463163...](https://www.facebook.com/joaquin.beltran/posts/10215254631631513)

Twitter: [https://twitter.com/joaquinlife/status/1050544508717285376](https://twitter.com/joaquinlife/status/1050544508717285376)

Linkedin: [https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:ugcPost:64559704...](https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:ugcPost:6455970442690859008)

<comment><AUTHOR> Update: You can now hear your candidates for congress, US senate, and governor, and candidate statements (where available). Demo below [https://twitter.com/SpeakUpAmerica_/status/10572773500883681...](https://twitter.com/SpeakUpAmerica_/status/1057277350088368133)</comment></comment>


Show HN: 9cloud, Photoshop Bridge in the Clouds - <AUTHOR> http://9cloud.us My project is 9cloud, an aims to do all the things that Photoshop Bridge does on the desktop, except in the cloud. I've been at this for a few months, but I've reached a crux where either I'll go full time developing it or move onto other things. <comment><AUTHOR> My project is 9cloud, an aims to do all the things that Photoshop Bridge does on the desktop, except in the cloud.

I've been at this for a few months, but I've reached a crux where either I'll go full time developing it or move onto other things.</comment>


Do Brands Look Better Stripped Back? - <AUTHOR> http://insights.askattest.com/brand-minimalism-do-brands-look-better-stripped-back <comment><USER2> Gee, it's almost like brands spending hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising and product packaging know what people are going to buy better than a Dribbble designer having fun on a week-end project.

</comment><comment><USER3> FYI, Stripped Back = minimalist designs = refined and clean look = more modern design = simple, elegant pared back designs.</comment>


Such a cool way to explain logic gates (with water) [video] - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/page_eco/status/1188749430020698112 <comment><USER2> Cool! As a kid (1982) I read the children's cartoon book "Resi and Transi banish the mysteries of electronics", which was very cool as it depicted/explained all electronics components using water models.

I can't find pictures, but this is the book: [https://www.worldcat.org/title/resi-and-transi-banish-the- my...](https://www.worldcat.org/title/resi-and-transi-banish-the-mysteries-of- electronics/oclc/244302593)

<comment><USER2> Ouch. Finally another case for me where Google search beat DDG. Here are some images: [https://blog.adafruit.com/2013/01/20/resi-and-transi- banish-...](https://blog.adafruit.com/2013/01/20/resi-and-transi-banish-the- mysteries-of-electronics/)</comment></comment>


Lithium find in Cornwall spurs hopes of regeneration - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/sep/17/significant-lithium-find-spurs-hopes-of-cornwall-regeneration <comment><USER2> If anyone's wondering why lithium is a somewhat-rare element (only 25th-most abundant in the Earth's crust) in the first place—given that, by Big Bang nucleosynthesis, it "should" be the nearly as abundant in the universe as hydrogen or helium: we aren't really sure! It's an unresolved problem in physics:

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

(We _do_ know that stars can "destroy" lithium baryons at high-enough temperatures, and that does explain _part_ of lithium's rarity. But even given that, it "should" still be 3x more abundant than it is; or rather, the Big Bang should have _produced_ 3x more lithium than it did, given our current models of it.)

</comment><comment><USER3> I didn't know Cornwall was a mining center. I thought, "I wonder if there are any good collections of old mining structures and machinery" and then found this [1]. Thanks, old internet! I hope you don't get killed by the walled gardens.

[1] [http://www.cornishmineimages.co.uk/](http://www.cornishmineimages.co.uk/)

<comment><USER4> One definition of a mine was "a hole in the ground with a Cornishman at the bottom", and Cornish pasties were supposedly miners' lunch. See also the Camborne School of Mines.

Edit: s/is/was/ and hear Steve Knightley's song "Cousin Jack".

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> If someone is familiar with the exploration or mining industry:

Does this suggest that lithium rich brines could be found elsewhere as well and maybe in which environments they might be expected?

Why does it take half a decade to get going in such a case?

<comment><USER6> I expect most of the time is spent on getting financing, permitting, mineral rights, building needed infra, finding buyers for it, and also more testing on the size of the find and potential rate of extractions.

<comment><USER5> Whenever I see timelines like this, I think it must be possible to do this in half of the time.

<comment><USER7> Maybe, but it will actually take double the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hopefully we can ditch our ICE cars if the price is right. I long to buy a EV car that does 300+ mile range and can charge at 150kw+ for 20k-25k GBP.

</comment><comment><USER9> It is strange to see the concepts like "regeneration" and "mining" in the same sentence

<comment><AUTHOR> It sounds like this is extraction more than "mining" \- the source brine is also being used for geothermal energy. A few more details in this article: [https://www.insidermedia.com/news/south-west/globally- signif...](https://www.insidermedia.com/news/south-west/globally-significant- find-for-cornish-lithium)</comment></comment>


Baking Bread: The Chemistry of Bread-Making - <AUTHOR> https://www.compoundchem.com/2016/01/13/bread/ <comment><USER2> Most of that is oriented toward yeast breads, but as a minor point that was confusing to me for awhile:

At least in the US, there is no technical legal definition for baking powder. So companies vary widely in what is included in baking powder. Ideally, baking powder would include a dry acid and base that react only in typical baking temperatures, but this is not the case. Some are very similar to baking soda in formulation, and others use different ingredients that require heat to react to any substantial extent.

There's an article somewhere I found that has a really great discussion of the issues, with history and reviews, but I can't find it. This is a sort of abridged version that smooths over some of the differences you'll run into:

[http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/12997/baking- powder](http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/12997/baking-powder)

<comment><AUTHOR> For sourdoughs, the story's roughly similar. Soda breads use alternate leavening, chemical (baking soda) rather than biological (yeast).

Flatbresds remove leavening entirely.

And alternative (gluten free) flours require either forgoing the gluten-based network structure providing dough integrity (say, with cornbread and some ricecakes), or substituting alternative binding agents (as with xanthan gum), also mentioned.

The piece does. not discuss much of proportions -- baker's percentages, measuring by weight rather than volume, hydration), dough working and formation (kneading vs. stretch and fold or slap and fold), fermentation and proofing methods, steaming, baking temps, covered vs. uncovered baking, scoring, all of which I've been playing with for the past week or so.

But it's a good quick intro.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Does anyone know some similarly good source on food science? This is interesting.

<comment><AUTHOR> There was a book published ... years ago ... author interviewed on Fresh Air circa 2001. Let me see if I can track it down....

Russ Parsons, _How to Read a French Fry_ , 2001.

[https://www.worldcat.org/title/how-to-read-a-french-fry- and-...](https://www.worldcat.org/title/how-to-read-a-french-fry-and-other- stories-of-intriguing-kitchen-science/oclc/804799372)

Interview: [https://freshairarchive.org/segments/los-angeles-times- food-...](https://freshairarchive.org/segments/los-angeles-times-food-editor- russ-parsons)</comment></comment>


UVoid – a simple platform where users can securely trade favours with the world - <AUTHOR> https://www.uvoid.co.uk/ <comment><USER2> How about a high contrast mode? Light gray on white is hard to read.</comment>


Coronavirus: Spain nationalizes all private hospitals - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-spain-nationalises-private-hospitals-emergency-covid-19-lockdown-2020-3 <comment><USER2> Nationalization is bringing something under public ownership. What Spain does is bringing them under public authority, but not under public ownership. The term "nationalization" is not correct here IMHO.

</comment><comment><USER3> How does nationalising work in the real world in a scenario like this? What happens to the private facility owners?

<comment><USER4> It's temporary. The United States and tons of countries have done it before. Central planning helps allocate resources more efficiently in times of crisis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> that is the first smart non-obvious move I've seen someone do. (off the top of my head, there might have been other ones that skipped my mind)</comment>


Intel ultrabooks - Numbers not good, says analyst - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-57470755-92/macbook-win-ultrabook-fail-numbers-not-good-says-analyst Intel has spent at least $500M to date on their Ultrabook concept, while only selling an estimated 500,000 units across all Ultrabook vendors globally. This implies that a $1,000 per-unit subsidy is failing to move sub-$1,000 products off shelves.<p>What is going wrong here? <comment><USER2> The takeaway ...

"We might hit a million [ultrabooks] this year. The future really lies in 2013 and how well it jells with Windows 8," Chou added.

I believe that Windows 8 will face obstacles running on ordinary ultrabooks because this convergent OS is designed primarily for touch screens. People who can afford what ultrabooks cost are very likely the same people who favor Apple products!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here's the discussion I want to have:

Intel has spent at least $500M to date on their Ultrabook concept, while only selling an estimated 500,000 units across all Ultrabook vendors globally. This implies that a $1,000 per-unit subsidy is failing to move sub-$1,000 products off shelves.

What is going wrong here?</comment>


The side effects of an unfinished internet - <AUTHOR> https://neilpatil.me/2020/02/15/Unfinished-Internet.html <comment><USER2> For a few years there we talked and talked about how GDP can't continue to grow forever. Or at least not as long as we are a single planet civilization. Higher growth means higher consumption until everything is gone.

Just as other tech has delayed Peak Oil for decades by finding more, and using what we find more efficiently, I think virtual goods should be able to reduce the resource burden of goods and services. Whether that has happened I am not equipped to say.

<comment><USER3> Higher growth does not necessarily mean more materials consumed. For example, if you could invent a gas engine that got 120 miles per gallon, it likely wouldn't take much more physical materials to produce, and it would decrease demand for gas. Likewise if you can increase crop yields, or food produced per acre, the end result will be less farm land necessary to feed the population. Productivity is all about doing more with less.

<comment><USER4> > For example, if you could invent a gas engine that got 120 miles per gallon, > it likely wouldn't take much more physical materials to produce, and it > would decrease demand for gas.

This is not true in general. Much higher gas efficiency lowers the amount of gas that existing uses need. (Sending one cruise ship to the Azores takes less gas!) That reduced requirement means reduced demand. But it also raises the value of gas. (One gallon of gas does much more work than it used to!) That increased value means increased demand. Maybe we should start sending more cruise ships to the Azores!

<comment><USER5> The government could tax it to prevent that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> How many businesses started in what America calls the third world that feed products and services into the first?

I think this article misses the massive amount of real world growth that has occurred were Twitter users cant see it.

</comment><comment><USER7> As the author says, you could argue both ways - either that the internet is a great tool with a net positive effect on people (those who know how to use it and can ignore the noise) or that we have adopted it so quickly and blindly that the internet hasn't caught up with humanity, causing these harmful side effects. Sometimes I think the internet was actually better 15 years ago, all things considered.

However if we expect it to become our sixth sense, we better a) evolve faster as a species to increase our bandwidth, and/or b) humanise the internet, educate ourselves to use it better, and consume information in a more natural way. Since the former is nowhere near, I'd like to see a Richard Hendricks appear and introduce Internet 2.0 for humans. But just like the author I don't know what that "better version" really means, or what it would look like...

</comment><comment><USER8> I find it hard to have discussions at a higher level on the internet ([http://owensoft.net/v4/item/2559/](http://owensoft.net/v4/item/2559/)). Everything is a beginner JavaScript tutorial catered to noobs but it never goes beyond that because going beyond that noob-stuff is difficult and the audience is smaller. So I end up digging deeper and deeper into the internet which wastes more and more of my time. And probably the worse thing about the new internet is that if you point this out the defenders of internet will attack you for being negative and looking beyond the curtain of low hanging fruit which they constantly postulate about. I agree wholeheartedly with the article but I do not see how it can be fixed. There are just 2 internets and if you want to be creative you should just avoid the new internet altogether because it consumes everyone it touches.

<comment><USER9> > This issue [with a recently trendy Javascript framework] was posted 5 months > ago. why has no one responded?

...

> It would seem to me that no one wants to tackle the hard problems. The > difficult-physics breaking walls. This is probably why we still do not have > flying cars or floating cities.

I don't know whether to be impressed or appalled by the rapid extrapolation from "nobody cares about this React.js rendering glitch" to "this is why we can't solve Hard Problems in physics."

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> A lot of the new businesses and associated jobs and growth that the Internet could have enabled have been made illegal, often by people too scared and short-sighted (or greedy) to envision a world very much different than the one before the internet.

Just look what happened with Uber, with that broadcast TV re-streaming service, with internet radio, with online banking and microlending, and especially with cryptocurrencies, for a few examples. Billions upon billions of opportunity and new wealth creation strangled in the crib. Pretty much wherever there is a big new opportunity, there are new heavy-duty restrictions on what you are allowed to do with this new communications tech.

People don't give up wealth-creating income streams and associated power in society without a dirty fight.

Try starting an ISP or a telco to see how much of the promise of the future has been robbed from us by government overzealous to protect existing greedy and inefficient businesses.

Even the ones they thought safe to let roam free that wouldn't affect them, social media, are now in danger of getting the hammer brought down on them because it turns out that anyone being able to talk to anyone _is_ insanely powerful and disruptive, and they're going to start regulating the kind of communications you are allowed to have there; either directly via public policy, or by veiled threats that cause the resulting winners (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter) to self-censor to be allowed to continue to exist.

<comment><USER8> it is often the case with these "new internet" businesses that they are parasitic on top of well established legacy businesses. offer convenience with no guarantees and provide no fallback except for the business they feed upon. if your bread start-up runs out of bread the local baker is your fallback. As the bread startup grows it does so on the backs of the local bakers who lose direct business because the start up is more convenient. the local bakers start to complain which creates a pushback against the startup.

<comment><USER10> > _parasitic on top of well established legacy businesses_

That's how business works. You aren't entitled to your customers. Either they come to you, or they go to someone else. Ultimately, it's _their choice_.

You say it's parasitic, but really all it is is customers making a different choice. The whole concept of the status quo is an abstraction. A customer that bought from you yesterday is not "your customer". She may make a different choice tomorrow.

> _As the bread startup grows it does so on the backs of the local bakers who > lose direct business because the start up is more convenient._

If you aren't constantly working to make life easier for your customers and deliver more value, someone else is going to. You can't just wake up and bake bread the same way for 30 years and expect it to yield you the same amount of revenue it did years earlier. The world is changing and people participating in it need to adapt and grow, or get left behind.

Everyone in a market needs to actively level up or get out of the way of those who are. It's always day one.

<comment><USER8> That is going to be a hard business strategy for the people doing business in the real physical world

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Thank you very much sharing a very helpful article and the thing controlled like boom.

</comment><comment><USER12> "Twitter is magical"?</comment>


Insane Clown Posse Is an American Institution - <AUTHOR> https://theoutline.com/post/7093/insane-clown-posse-fearless-fred-fury-juggalos-whoop-whoop?zd=1&zi=jkif2dyp <comment><USER2> Speaking as a partisan of Detroit, who has never heard an ICP song, I must intervene to mention that Faygo is never "soda". It's "pop", thank you very much.

<comment><AUTHOR> Important point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> such metacontrarian</comment>


It's Time We Stopped Rewarding Projects with Crappy Documentation - <AUTHOR> http://www.cforcoding.com/2009/08/its-time-we-stopped-rewarding-projects.html <comment><USER2> When people say "we need to all stop doing X and do Y", I am tempted to reorder the statement into a question:

Q: _WHY_ do we reward projects with crappy documentation?

Heinlein had a statement: "any time people ask a question that starts with 'why', the answer is usually 'money'".

For values of "money" == "value", this is the answer to why we use projects with crappy docs.

If using a good codebase with crappy docs delivers more bang for the buck than using a crappier codebase, then it is in everyone's best interest to use that great codebase.

Instead of issuing blanket cries for unified action, a better approach is to figure out

(a) what the actual issue is, and then

(b) [ if I may allow my inner capitalist to vent ] come up with a way to increase value for everyone by fixing the issue in return for some mutually beneficial trade.

Part of the Free Software idea is that free software generates follow on work. Perhaps some of that follow on work should be "the un fun task of generating docs".

<comment><USER3> In this case, I'm fairly certain your last sentence gets to the heart of the issue. The biggest motive of most people writing OSS stuff is: Fun. Documenting is un-fun. Since there is 0 obligation on the author's part and any benefit gained by others is a side-effect, documents won't get written, particularly to appease people who come in an demand better docs without offering any compensation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The time-tested market solution to this problem seems to be that a bunch of 1337 hackers create a solid open-source package that you can download for free, then an author comes along, writes a thorough set of documentation for it, and publishes it through O'Reilly for $30 per copy.

Why do people put up with this model? Maybe because nobody expects any better, maybe because $30 is short money for well-written documentation. As a rhetorical question, have you ever worked on a project (open-source or closed, internal or external) where documentation writing was anything other than an after-thought?

<comment><USER5> * maybe because $30 is short money for well-written documentation.*

For sufficiently complex and powerful software and sufficiently well written documentation, it is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Otherwise I'm just not interested anymore.

I'm afraid your article rubs me the wrong way. Could you explain further why an independent developer (who has written code in their own time to satisfy their own need) has _any_ obligation to satisfy your desire for better documentation? I can certainly understand why one wouldn't choose to use undocumented code, and why one wouldn't recommend it to others, but I don't understand the sense of entitlement.

Further, what greater obligation does the original author have that you as a user of the code do not? Why should the author be expected to sit down and write documentation intended solely for the use of others, whereas you, now capable of doing the same, do not? Your 'duty of care' argument falls short for me, and instead I see a favor not being returned.

I don't mean to be too negative (your writing style itself is great, for example) but I really don't understand the underlying sentiment.

<comment><USER7> You might as well ask why an independent developer has any obligation to release code that actually works most of the time.

No, in the broadest sense, there's no moral or legal obligation. However, in the social sense of interacting with people that you're offering software to, you're not doing a favor to anyone by releasing crappy code or putting up lousy documentation.

You may be confused by the level of the argument - it's not at the level of "must", but "should".

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> That reminds me of a three year old blog posting of mine: [http://www.jgc.org/blog/2006/07/open-source-elephant-in- room...](http://www.jgc.org/blog/2006/07/open-source-elephant-in-room- source.html)

<comment><USER9> Excellent article. I literally laughed out loud when I read the 59% of projects had negative scores.

Another plus for this article (that you probably didn't have in mind when writing it) is that it gives readers an idea of what open source projects are good choices for practicing reading code. So many people recommend reading code, but no one ever recommends what to read. Kudos for giving me a starting place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I agree with most of his points, but let's be honest people, writing good documentation is no easy task. And not many programmers are good communicators either.

<comment><USER11> Writing good code is both difficult and all about communication. If you can write good code, you're probably capable of writing good documentation (low level technical documentation in your native language, at any rate) if you really want to.

<comment><USER12> By "no easy task" he doesn't mean it's some kind of intractable problem. (Though it _is_ much harder for some than others.) The problem is that it takes non-negotiable amounts of time. Writing is _work_.

Even if you're one of those rare people who can just sit down and type press- ready copy ( _cough_ Isaac Asimov _cough_ ) it takes time to physically _type_ it all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Writing documentation is NOT fun.

Writing really cool code is...

What you're asking is that people turn projects that are "fun" into projects that are "work" and still do it for free?

Really? Because I'm perfectly content using software that works, works really well (better than the costly alternative in some cases), and is 100% free. I'm totally fine with having to find some of the devs on IRC or a mailing list instead of having to look through some docs.

Yeah, documentation is really nice, but suggsting that we stop using projects that have poor documentation is a bit silly.

</comment><comment><USER14> I would bet that any popular open-source project became popular _before_ it had any decent documentation (assuming it has any now). The biggest block, for me, when writing documentation, is that I'm writing for a mystery audience, I don't know what their problems will be, or what questions they will ask. But once your project is used widely, documentation is just a matter of refactoring the mailing lists. And that's an itch some developers are willing to scratch - nobody wants to answer the same questions over and over.

</comment><comment><USER15> Would you rather have a good library with no documentation or a bad library with great documentation? I don't say that because I disagree with the OA in any way, but just to point out why people "reward" projects with crappy documentation, and why it might be a hard problem to resolve by peer pressure.

<comment><USER7> I'll bite...When's the last time you've seen crappy open source code with "great documentation"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> So what's it going to take to draw UI and documentation people to open source?

<comment><USER17> Money?

Seriously, I don't know too many people whose idea of "scratching an itch" is writing documentation. There aren't a lot of documentation-hobbyists out there, as far as I know...

<comment><USER18> I've found the feeding infants a mixture of milk mixed with 25% pulverized IRS forms and 10% pulverized army field manuals, results in a 65% chance that by age 8, they will be obsessed with writing documentation.

By next year, we'll have an army of 1,000,000 tech writers ready to serve the emperor and rebuild the empire, errr, or at least document it's rebuilding.

<comment><USER19> I'm curious, is your user name supposed to be Robo-Trout or Robot-Rout?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


GNU Wget2 1.99.2 (Beta) - <AUTHOR> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnu/2019-09/msg00001.html <comment><USER2> I didn't even know that there _was_ a Wget2…what's the development progress on this? Can (or should) I be using it instead of Wget?

<comment><USER3> It can download faster due to using more modern features (parallel downloading, If-Modified-Since) but the main focus is to make a cleaner codebase which is built around a reusable library, so it's easier to add features and make other code which uses those features, and so the libcurl monoculture gets a little fire under its ass.

<comment><USER4> Does libcurl need a fire under its ass?

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h Every monoculture does.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> > In many cases Wget2 downloads much faster than Wget1.x due to HTTP2, HTTP > compression, parallel connections and use of If-Modified-Since HTTP header.

This appears to be offical: [https://gitlab.com/gnuwget/wget2](https://gitlab.com/gnuwget/wget2)

Which has this wiki: [https://gitlab.com/gnuwget/wget2/wikis/home](https://gitlab.com/gnuwget/wget2/wikis/home)

> The idea is to have a fresh and maintainable codebase with features like > multithreaded downloads, HTTP2, OCSP, HSTS, Metalink, IDNA2008, Public > Suffix List, Multi-Proxies, Sitemaps, Atom/RSS Feeds, compression (gzip, > deflate, lzma, bzip2), support for local filenames, etc.

> Some of these feature have been built into Wget in the meantime, but some > other are really hard to implement into the old codebase.

<comment><USER5> Another feature not mentioned in there is support for verifying GPG signatures of binaries you download.

If a gpg signature file exists, Wget2 will automatically verify the binary against that signature file

<comment><USER6> With a .sig or. asc extension? gnu differs from gpg here.

<comment><USER5> Configurable. Default extension type is sig. However you can specify a list of extensions and it will attempt to verify against the first it finds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I see a MingW64 build in the pipelines for continuous integration builds [1], but they only seem to be making Debian artifacts. Besides using wsl, are there any releases for officially anywhere, or are there any unofficial places?

[https://gitlab.com/gnuwget/wget2/pipelines/80747921](https://gitlab.com/gnuwget/wget2/pipelines/80747921)

</comment><comment><USER8> so will you explicitly need to specify 'wget2' in a package manager, or is this replacing wget. i certainly hope it's not the former!

<comment><USER9> If they replaced 'wget', and you need HTTP2 support, you might be using the old 'wget' without HTTP2 support, or the new one with it. You would have to wrap all your commands with a version check, and ask people to install the newer, different software package, to get HTTP2 support.

 _Or_ , call 'wget2' to get HTTP2 support. You can then either install both 'wget' and 'wget2', or the package maintainers could install a symlink for 'wget' backwards compatibility, so you'd only need to install the newer 'wget2' package.

From the package maintainer's perspective, they're literally different software projects, and changing an established package name to be different software would break many systems.

<comment><USER10> This could be solved with wget1 for Wget 1.x, and wget/wget2 binaries (linked) for Wget 2.x. Only thing that does is break scripts.

<comment><USER9> > Only thing that does is break scripts

That's not really an acceptable change... Would you like all the scripts you run on your Linux distros to break every time you do package updates? I wouldn't touch such a distro with a 100 foot pole

<comment><USER10> Who said there's no grace period? Python 2/3 is dealt with the same way.

On 1) a rolling distribution not called NixOS 2) which mindlessly installs wget2 3) and does not use their own power to install or name the binaries according to their own view, sure 4) nor use a grace period and badly informs the user(s) which something like Homebrew would... then yes, it is a problem.

On a distribution which has stable and LTS releases such as Fedora/Ubuntu/Debian it is no problem as long as users would read the release notes.

It could be a problem on Arch and Gentoo, but whenever those users run into trouble you could argue PEBCAK or go fix it yourself. Same for those running -CURRENT on *BSD.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Anyone know if/when this will filter down to the distros?

<comment><USER12> FYI - Debian 10 Buster (and thus also Devuan 3) uses wget2 1.99.1, so not far behind.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It looks like the biggest new feature is support for http2. Will http3 be in wget2 or a "wget3" though when it eventually happens?

<comment><USER5> Nope.

Wget2 was required since we wanted to break some backward compatibility with Wget 1.x releases. So we decided that a major version bump is warranted.

It is also an entire rewrite of Wget in order to support HTTP/2\. But this won't be required again when HTTP/3 or other protocols come out

<comment><USER14> > we wanted to break some backward compatibility

examples?</comment></comment></comment>


Front End Newsletter: Issue #1 - <AUTHOR> http://frontendnewsletter.com/issues/1#start <comment><USER2> Looks cool. Congrats on starting the newsletter! They're fun, can be very rewarding when you build an audience, and professionally useful too.

<comment><USER3> Do you have any tips on running a successful newsletter?

<comment><USER2> Full disclosure: mine isn't especially successful, although it's growing. That said, I subscribe to several _very_ successful newsletters -- Stratechery Daily Update, Today in Tabs, for example -- and what I've observed is that 1) they're consistent and 2) they have very particular personalities. Differentiation is an important part of deciding what content to include and how to present it. For what it's worth ~</comment></comment></comment>


An analysis of censorship in Chinese open source projects - <AUTHOR> https://citizenlab.ca/2018/08/an-analysis-of-censorship-in-chinese-open-source-projects/ <comment><USER2> Speaking from what I know and have read, the Chinese govt. keeps things intentionally ambiguous and doesn't directly apply censorship on Chinese web apps and mobile apps like Wechat unless there is something critical or someone popular is saying censored words. They however do issue instructions and specific lists of social and political keywords that need to be censored, although as noted by Citizen Lab, content critical of the govt. can still exist which keeps things confusing.

Thus, what the Chinese govt. does instead is that they expect the companies to self-censor by hiring their own censorship department or content moderation department that includes political censorship to meet the Chinese govt.'s censorship rules. As well, adding to this, the Chinese govt. usually only establishes ambiguous guidelines that encompass wide range of things like can not offend "Chinese culture" or "Socialist values" so that companies usually over-enforce and over-censor to make sure they don't get fined or their operating licence revoked. Essentially if they get fined or punished, either the app/website shuts down because they can't meet the censorship standards or they remove the users creating the offending material or change a lot of things until they meet censorship standards (although they or the users involved would likely still be "banned" for several years to make an example).

Citizen Lab also points out that censored keywords on different Chinese corporate internet platforms differ likely due to the company's own approach and censorship department. Quote: "We compare our dataset to previously extracted keyword data from chat applications used in China and find very limited keyword list overlap within SVPs and between other platforms. This result substantiates previous findings that suggest companies are only given general directives from authorities and have a degree of flexibility in the implementation."

Thus the difference in the documents could largely be explained by the fact that open-source projects from developers and companies follow the same standards where company employees/content moderators or volunteer moderators compile their own lists or the lists are compiled depending on company or organization policy and purpose. Likely because these organizations do not want to be fined or shut down due to breaking censorship.

References: [http://www.indexoncensorship.org/2010/10/china-the-art-of- ce...](http://www.indexoncensorship.org/2010/10/china-the-art-of-censorship/)

[https://citizenlab.ca/2015/08/every-rose-has-its- thorn/](https://citizenlab.ca/2015/08/every-rose-has-its-thorn/)

[https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1003390/for-chinas-web- platfo...](https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1003390/for-chinas-web- platforms%2C-the-future-is-sanitized)

[https://citizenlab.ca/2015/06/jason-q-ng-on-chinas- censorshi...](https://citizenlab.ca/2015/06/jason-q-ng-on-chinas-censorship- of-online-sexual-innuendo/)

[https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1003310/the-people-paid-to- he...](https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1003310/the-people-paid-to-hear-pillow- talk)

[http://www.sixthtone.com/news/751/internet-star-papi- jiang-c...](http://www.sixthtone.com/news/751/internet-star-papi-jiang- censored-for-foul-language)

[https://citizenlab.ca/2018/08/cant-picture-this-an- analysis-...](https://citizenlab.ca/2018/08/cant-picture-this-an-analysis-of- image-filtering-on-wechat-moments/)

[http://www.sixthtone.com/news/1000440/chinas-online- multimed...](http://www.sixthtone.com/news/1000440/chinas-online-multimedia- sector-bans-portrayal-of-homosexuality)

[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/06/21/china_pact/](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/06/21/china_pact/)

[https://citizenlab.ca/2013/07/using-the-china-chats- surveill...](https://citizenlab.ca/2013/07/using-the-china-chats- surveillancecensorship-keyword-list-analyzing-blocked-terms-search-result- numbers-and-overlaps-of-censored-terms-between-services/)

[http://www.sixthtone.com/news/1001621/chinese-people- trust-t...](http://www.sixthtone.com/news/1001621/chinese-people-trust-their- media-much-more-than-youd-think)</comment>


Percentage of Europeans Who Are Willing to Fight a War for Their Country - <AUTHOR> http://brilliantmaps.com/europe-fight-war/ <comment><USER2> This is the actual reddit thread in which the map was posted: [https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/5q433o/percentage_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/5q433o/percentage_of_europeans_who_are_willing_to_fight/)

There were some questions about the exact question, and the choice of color to represent the answers.</comment>


Announcing Visual Studio Dev Essentials - <AUTHOR> https://my.visualstudio.com <comment><USER2> Redirects to login, right url with information about this offer: [https://www.visualstudio.com/products/visual-studio-dev- esse...](https://www.visualstudio.com/products/visual-studio-dev-essentials- vs)</comment>


A Guide to Distributed Teams - <AUTHOR> https://increment.com/teams/a-guide-to-distributed-teams/ <comment><USER2> I am someone who did not enjoy remote work, because I felt lonely. I'm lucky enough that now my commute is a 25-minute bike ride in Amsterdam, and I thoroughly like being between people all day, having in-person interactions. It's also nice to leave the office, knowing that most of my workday is done.

It might be an old school way of thinking, but as long as I can have a short enough commute, an office where flexible work is the norm (eg WFH is fine on some days, there are no fixed hours etc); I would choose this over full remote, anytime. While my team is local and large, I do end up working across time zones, with other engineering teams.

I get it that this is highly dependent on personality and situation: there are those that thrive on remote. It's just not me. How do others feel about this - and what do you like/dislike about remote work?

<comment><USER3> I spent 3 months fully remote, and by the end I was fully depressed. There's something about looking at the same walls of my apartment for 14 hours a day that just did not work for me at all. I would occasionally go to coffee shops or whatever but it didn't change the isolation. I had no idea how much I leaned on being in a shared physical location with my coworkers. It's hard to know until you try it; I think you need to be in a very specific work situation and have a certain disposition for it to work well.

<comment><USER4> Recently started a FT WFH job with a semi-flexible schedule. Prior I was self- employed (consultant / freelance) and made my own schedule, etc.

The adjustment to the new schedule wasn't too bad per se. That said, at the first opportunity possible I'm going to ask for some budget to get a day (or two) per week at a co-working space. For me and how I'm wired that would make a massive difference.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> +1 on the sync and async discussions.

This is super important, not just at work but every day life. I find that sometimes I don't want to text someone when I'm having a passionate discussion, I'd rather video call or call them. If I can't do that, then I'll go for async messages (like voice clips).

Really awesome newsletter, and amazing collection of tips.

This stuff is crucial to any distributed team.

</comment><comment><USER6> The culture bit is what I think makes remote teams more productive, more engaged and in the end happier, when nailed in the right way. This is why I am building a platform [1] to help alleviate the cultural challenges around remote teams.

Not being in the same place, at the same time, not having the kitchen conversation by the coffee machine is something that _can_ be worked around by using the right tools and implementing the right processes where those types of conversations can happen.

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

<comment><USER7> And as a counterpoint, I have worked in organizations that were on-site but everyone was so stressed about heads down work and looking busy that we didn't have those random small conversations anyway.

It was one the most depressing work periods of my life.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is a good collection of tips. Being deliberate with distributed team culture and expectations is crucial to healthy teams. I particularly agree with their advice about asynchronous vs. synchronous communication:

> Healthy distributed teams blend synchronous and asynchronous styles. Because > what doesn't have to be synchronous is better done asynchronously, default > to asynchronous communication for nonblocking items and help team members > review them on a cadence.

I've managed distributed teams for several years now. One of the biggest and most unexpected challenges has been orienting new hires to healthy expectations about remote work. A lot of people are drawn to remote and distributed teams for the wrong reasons. You need to be careful to identify and correct bad behavior or misaligned expectations as early as possible, for the sake of the employee and the rest of the team. Specifically:

\- Some people are drawn to remote work because they want to be as isolated as possible. They don't like interacting with, communicating with, or coordinating with other team members. These lone wolf employees can work in very narrow, specific job roles, but most tasks require teamwork and cooperation. Don't try to cater to individual's isolationist tendencies if it's not a good fit for your workload.

\- Distributed teams can attract bad actors who see remote work as an opportunity to escape supervision and get as little work done as possible. You need to find a healthy way to follow individual's productivity without being overbearing or nagging them frequently. Address performance issues early and often.

\- Watch out for the side hustler. Remote listings attract a lot of wantrepreneurs who want benefits and a paycheck while they prioritize their energy toward their own startup, contracting gigs, or other side hustles. I make it very clear that our hires need to prioritize company business as their full time job. In theory, I don't care if someone is taking on side work on the weekends or in their spare time, but in practice most people can't juggle competing priorities effectively.

\- If employees are in similar time zones, I encourage a "core working hours" policy where everyone is expected to be online and working. 3-4 hours of overlap is enough to cover any synchronous discussion needs while still leaving plenty of schedule flexibility for most people. I've had night owl employees try to work opposite schedules from everyone else, but this quickly turns into the isolationist problem I mentioned above. Set the expectation of some work hours overlap, then let people decide when/where/how they do the rest of their work. It's a small price to pay for the increased communication efficiency.

\- Group chat is fun, but don't let it become a constant distraction. The article mentions memes, gifs, and humor as a plus, which is fine, but be careful not to let the culture degrade into all-day distractions. If people feel like they need to read your #random channel all day long to avoid missing something important, consider gently reshaping the chat culture with dedicated focus hours or other expectation setting.

\- Watch the private vs. public message ratio of your group chat. There is no magic number, but it can hint at communication problems. If you have 95% private messages and 5% public messages, you might be at risk of cliques and silos. On the other hand, if you have 95% public messages and 5% private messages where everyone is in every channel, your group chat might be too distracting. Lead by example with "Let's take this offline" when conversations get too chatty in shared channels, and also by following DM conversations up with summaries and decision announcements in shared channels.

\- The article mentions budgeting for in-person meetings, which I strongly encourage. Meeting someone in person creates a much healthier bond. However, keep the in-person trips short and focused. A 2-day off-site retreat once a year is reasonable for most people. However, asking everyone to fly out for a week-long off-site from Sunday night through Saturday morning twice a year is likely to generate resentment from people with children. Find a healthy balance and keep it short and sweet. Don't burn your remote workers out on travel.

\- Finally: Distributed and remote work is great when it works out, but it's not for everyone. Practice healthy expectation setting, performance management, 1:1s, routine feedback, training, and other guidance. However, if someone can't handle distributed work then it's not helpful to try to force it indefinitely. At scale, you need to be prepared to let some otherwise excellent people go if they can't handle the distributed environment. It's always sad to let them go, but it's better for everyone if they're allowed to find a better fit elsewhere.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a great set of advice, and matches my experience as a remote manager. It seems that remote work seems to attract two types of people (to grossly oversimplify):

1\. Professional hard-working people that are really focused on getting stuff done and free thinkers that don't tolerate a lot of waste. So a commute and other ceremonies seem dumb, and they love remote work, love being trusted, and get a lot done if you help them.

2\. People that want to figure out how to work 2 jobs, or get away with not doing a lot in 1. Or who are really good at getting jobs, and are hoping that the overall immaturity of your company, you as a manager, or remote work itself, will allow them to work 4 hours a day and do the absolute minimum.

Remote work if managed well exposes #2 pretty quickly, but it is more of a challenge than the general population in my experience. You have to put a great focus on hiring and testing people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The hardest thing for me is actually remembering peoples names, faces and roles

That's why I made me an app to keep track of this (and enable others to update the team's info)

Sry if this looks like spam!

[https://collaborativegroups.blogspot.com/2019/11/today-is- re...](https://collaborativegroups.blogspot.com/2019/11/today-is-release- day.html)</comment>