Ask HN: What motivates users to write Amazon reviews? - <AUTHOR>

I'm in the process of developing a review-driven site, and I'm wondering how so many reviews get written on a site like Amazon when there's no incentive to do so (from what I can tell.) The incentive on a site like Yelp seems to be badges and awards given by other users to your reviews. How do you get people writing reviews on your site? <comment><USER3> I have a review-driven site as well, RateMyStudentRental.com, so here are a few observations...

-People review for all sorts of reasons, but the largest reason students write reviews on RMSR seems to be simply to "give back to the community." In other words, they just like helping. However, keep in mind that my site helps students find suitable housing, so compared to product review sites (like Amazon), there's probably much more of a charitable motivation for RMSR.

-People like sharing and helping, but not _that_ much. If the review form requires too much info, they'll just say "ahh, fuck it," and leave. RMSR's review form is still WAY too long if you ask me, but I just haven't had time to change it. That actually leads me to a piece of advice: try to get your review form nearly perfect from the outset. If you have a semantic site that arranges data in a meaningful way from the reviews, the review form becomes difficult to change, because every change requires some data migration of all your existing data to the new common format. Not to mention the extra logic you have to add to the site. E.g. if you add a criteria on which to rate, do all the existing reviews get a zero? Obviously not, so now you have to add in some if-statement for "N/A" and get fancy with your AVERAGE calculations.

-When we started, there was a lot of fear (some from us, mostly from landlords and school officials that were on board) that the site would just be a landlord-bashing playground for tenants. Thankfully, rather than site around and try to invent rules, incentives, policies, etc, we decided to simply address it as it became a problem. This was one of the best decisions we ever made, because here we are 3 years later, and it still hasn't become a problem. Out of a 4.0 scale (like report card grades), the average rating for rentals on the site is like a 3.5 or something. This brings up another interesting point: they say reviews tend to display the extreme ends of the spectrum (either really satisfied or really dissatisfied). FWIW RMSR probably still has way more A reviews than C, D, and F reviews combined.

-At one point, I tried integrating some game mechanics, by giving badges and stuff for the number of reviews a student has written. But we ended up getting rid of it mainly because it added complexity and no one seemed to care. No one cared most likely because RMSR is a site that students use only a couple times a year. If you only use a site once every 6 months, why does it really matter? Note that I could be totally off on this, because our "badge" implementation was half-assed at best, so perhaps I just didn't try hard enough.

-To motivate students to write reviews when we first started, I wrote a promotion engine, where if students from a certain area of schools signed up and wrote a review, they'd get a print-out coupon for a free coffee from a local coffee shop. In return, the review would get the coffee shop's logo placed on the review for all eternity, which would link to the coffee shop's website. I wrote this such that it could work with any local business. It worked really well, but by far the hardest part is getting businesses to give stuff away that is actually worth the students' time.

-Some students leave reviews because their landlords asked them to, so that's perhaps a motivator specific to us. I've even heard reports of landlords waiving rent late fees in return for writing reviews (though I haven't seen any indication that it affects the quality of the review or rating, which I was afraid of when I first heard of it).

<comment><USER4> Quick Question: was there any fallout when your removed your "badge" implementation (from people who'd earnt a badge)? Fear of this makes me reluctant to try new things, but I think it's good to try them. Did you do something to handle this, or was it just a non-problem?

<comment><USER3> It wasn't really a problem. When I said no one really cared, I'm not exaggerating, they literally didn't care. I guess it could have been a problem, but I don't think there was a single user who had actually tried to earn a badge.

<comment><USER4> thanks. makes it an easy decision. definitely worth trying though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think Amazon reviewers are people with opinions, who relish the idea of sharing their opinion with the world. I don't think these people need any more motivation than that-- no badges or flair required.

However: I think that the reviewer-to-reader ratio is tiny, and this is masked a bit by Amazon's absurd popularity.

And, to make matters worse, this absurd popularity is one of the driving motivators (cf above, "share one's opinion with the world", not "share one's opinion with the 200 people who happen to follow my micro-site.")

If anyone knows any way out of this besides increasing the number of users by several orders of magnitude, I'd love to hear it-- I, too, have a site that allows reviews, and only a tiny handful of reviewers (so far.)

<comment><USER6> I think the main thing would be to build a community where people feel some need to belong. I don't know if Amazon really does this, and what you're seeing in terms of number of reviews on their site is probably just another reflection of their popularity. Some % of people will write a review, Amazon just has enough people that it ends up being a rather large number.

The problem then becomes how to encourage a greater % of your audience to contribute. Some people might be more willing to contribute if they could see that their contributions were valued. Can users rate a review (like Amazons X of Y people found this review helpful)? Some might be more willing if it increased their standing in the community - some people enjoy being seen as an expert - do you recognize people who take the time to leave reviews (perhaps magnified by review quality)?

Most of this will only really work if it is within a community, however. If lots of people just come and go then those tactics are fairly meaningless. If you have a niche site with a lot of repeat visitors that you can build a community around, this might be a good way to start that process.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > I'm wondering how so many reviews get written on a site like Amazon

I'm sorry to burst your bubble. The well-respected consultancy User Interface Engineering has come up with the magic number of 1 review for every 1,300 purchases.

"While only one in 1,300 purchasers of the product writes a review, the number who indicate a review was helpful is even fewer. For the Harry Potter volume, which is Amazon's best selling product ever, it was about 0.0014% or about one in 7,300 purchasers of the product. The most helpful review garnered only 566 votes, even though it was written on the first day the book was released and Amazon has sold more than 2,000,000 copies since."

<http://www.uie.com/articles/magicbehindamazon/>

<comment><USER8> Not everyone who buys a copy even bothers to read the review. If it's a book that the customer already knows they want (which is probably often the case with the _Harry Potter_ books), why read the review? Just buy the book.

And I know that I for one usually don't upvote a review, even if I did find it helpful. I don't mean to be intentionally rude, I just somehow haven't gotten in the habit of doing that. So the number of votes on a review isn't an indication of the number of people who found the review helpful, but rather, the number of people who both found the review helpful and took the time to vote it up.

That said, yes, Amazon's immense customer base makes even tiny percentages of users contributing out to be useful. But they weren't always so large. I've heard that the main way they became the prominant online bookseller was precisely because they offered a review mechanism, at a time when other online bookstores did not, or offered a more feeble review system. Since it's so easy to add a nice review system to an online store today, that feature alone won't be enough anymore.

<comment><USER7> > Since it's so easy to add a nice review system to an online store today, > that feature alone won't be enough anymore.

It's not the feature. I'm convinced it is is the sheer volume. Much like Arn from MacRumors says to monetize a website - first you need traffic. Traffic then monetization. Not monetization then traffic.

Target has the exact same software Amazon.com has - as the result of a 2000-era licensing agreement.

I had to sort by highest rated to even get a Harry Potter item with reviews:

[http://www.target.com/Potter-Half-Blood-Prince-Widescreen- Du...](http://www.target.com/Potter-Half-Blood-Prince-Widescreen-Dual- layered/dp/B002T6423Y/ref=sc_qi_detailbutton)

<comment><USER9> nitpick: "then" not "than" as in "Traffic then monetization". I don't mind it, but it is better to correct it as it is quite jarring to many people

<comment><USER7> Fixed it. Thanks.

Here's the article I was paraphrasing:

"The secret to success on the internet can be boiled down to one simple accomplishment: building traffic.

That's it. If you have a site that attracts a lot of visitors, you will be able to make money. On the internet, traffic equals power, which subsequently equals money."

-Arn, MacRumors.com

<http://normalkid.com/2008/06/26/traffic-power-money/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I find Amazon reviews fascinating for precisely the reason you indicate: they're incredibly widely used, despite not appearing to use many of the psychological tricks you see elsewhere.

I think there are a bunch of reasons Amazon reviews work so well:

1\. The audience. If you want your opinion to be heard, posting your review on Amazon is the best way to go - just like selling your stuff on eBay makes sense because that's where the buyers are.

2\. The high quality of the existing reviews. They set a standard which new reviews then attempt to match. That's the result of years of careful management of community expectations.

3\. The "Top 1000 reviewer" badges. They're relatively subtle as badges go, but offer a powerful incentive for the best Amazon reviewers to keep on reviewing.

</comment><comment><USER8> I've written reviews on Amazon; not lots, maybe in the dozens, but far more than I do for other shopping sites.

I think most fundamentally, I find a lot of value in reading Amazon reviews written by others, and I feel like it would be useful for me to write my own reviews. I don't tend to review every product I possibly can, but rather, I usually just write a review if I have something interesting to say, or if I feel very strongly about an item, good or bad.

I like to think by doing this I can help other people make more informed decisions about what to buy.

</comment><comment><USER11> As others pointed out only about 1 in 1000 are posting reviews on Amazon so they aren't doing anything particularly great, they just have volume.

I will share one trick that I use on my site UniversityTutor.com, to get more reviews. I saw this in an email that Google Checkout sent out:

1\. Firstly, of course you should send an email asking the person to leave a review a week or two later

2\. Do NOT require the person to login to leave the review (use a "one time login link"). Removing this hurdle can help.

3\. Embed the actual review form RIGHT IN the email. With a submit button.

Basically all this is about reducing the hurdle to leaving a review as much as possible. The "archive" button is just to easy so if they have to leave the email or login you've already lost people.

Submitting forms doesn't work in all email clients so you'll have to also include the one time login link for anyone who can't submit the form right from their email. But it does work much of the time. To generate the HTML for the email form that works across most email clients, the easiest way I've found is to create a new form in Google Docs, and email it to yourself as a starting point to copy from. The HTML they generate is pretty well optimized from what I've seen.

I still don't have tons of reviews on that site though. So it is definitely tough to get people to engage.

Also - the simpler the review the better.

A pulldown will get filled out more often than a free form text field.

Radio buttons will get filled out more than a pulldown.

A simple thumbs up thumbs down will get filled out more often than 5 stars.

And only a thumbs up (or like) will get more than thumbs up or down.

When I moved from a 5 star thing to just up/down on BuyersVote.com it helped a bit with engagement.

</comment><comment><USER12> I've written a single Amazon review. I spent hours finding an external USB disk enclosure that would support S.M.A.R.T. and I wanted google to shorten other people's search process.

</comment><comment><USER13> I find myself motivated by the extremes. Either a product was so fantastic that I felt the need to reward the manufacturer with something more than my money or it was so terrible that I felt the need to get back at the manufacturer for taking my money.

<comment><USER14> The latter wouldn't happen if you read the reviews ;).

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I do not think people participate on Yelp to get badges. That is ridiculous. I have a friend who recently fell in love with Yelp. She uses it to figure out what restaurants she wants to go to in New York City. She likes reading the reviews, good and bad. She feels like she's become good at figuring out what places she will like, even when they have bad reviews. Reading between the lines on Yelp has become a kind of sport for her. Even more recently, she began contributing reviews. I think for her it is a way of sharing with others what she likes, and participating in the Yelp community, which is a community that she likes. The question is sort of similar to "Why do you have the friends that you have?" Why are any of us drawn to one group of people, and not some other group of people? Or why do we go to some show, some party, follow some musicians? We get something out of it, but it clearly isn't badges or money, or merit points, or anything ridiculous like that.

</comment><comment><USER16> Reasons people will post reviews of a product on Amazon:

1) That's where they bought it -- sometimes when I buy something at Amazon I get an email from them asking me to review it

2) Sharing one's opinion is its own reward

3) Lots of people visit Amazon, so your opinion is going to be meaningful. What's more, your review will appear on the page for the product itself.

4) If you use Amazon a lot, you look at the reviews before buying. This means you are aware that they exist -- you trust them, maybe. Having the chance to add to a corpus of reviews you use and respect is a powerful incentive.

I'm not sure a plain-vanilla reviews site will be able to compete successfully with Amazon reviews. Maybe find some niche, like IMDB (movies) or Harmony Central (musical instruments) or KVR Audio (music software).

<comment><AUTHOR> I just want to clear this up: I'm not developing a competitor to Amazon - <USER2> already have a niche for the reviews, but without the reviews the site loses much of its value.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> A large number of reviewers on Amazon are rewarded for good reviews by publishers sending them free stuff.

That's what an Amazon engineer told me: the real name program and the top 1000 badges were designed to encourage this, even though it creates a reward for very shallow, positive reviews.

</comment><comment><USER18> I've thought EXTREMELY long and hard about this - also because I run a review driven site. I wrote up a blog post talking about some of the more abstract/theoretical concepts revolving around motivation: [http://mysimplemindedworld.wordpress.com/2009/04/16/a-framew...](http://mysimplemindedworld.wordpress.com/2009/04/16/a-framework- for-understanding-motivations/)

So under my framework I'd say the major motivation is that the people contributing reviews are those that are passionate about the Content/Topic. And the simple reason why they get so many is because 1) ridiculous Amazon volume that somebody already mentioned, and 2) Amazon is the place where you voice CAN have the most impact (if you're one of the top).

</comment><comment><USER19> I write reviews under a pseudonym because I either really like the product I purchased (rare) or someone really pissed me off (common, half my textbooks) and I want the entire world to know about it but I don't want it coming back to haunt me. :)

</comment><comment><USER20> You know that people will read your reviews on Amazon. If I write a well- reasoned bad review, it might actually have an effect on sales.

<comment><USER14> Congratulations, you've just discovered the purpose for consumer reviews!

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I write reviews for things I purchased occasionally if I think there's not enough good information about the product in the reviews section, there was something I couldn't figure out until I'd purchased the product, or I really like (or hate it). I'm not expecting much, although the idea that other people might read it and find it useful makes it worth it.

</comment><comment><USER22> I was motivated by just how god-awful the ending to the Battlestar Galactica TV series was.

</comment><comment><USER23> Many Amazon product pages are the de-facto location for product data in a variety of verticals. When was the last time you read a great book and sent someone a Borders/BN link? If that page page becomes the default home for that product, posting a review at Amazon becomes natural. This also leads to weakness in other areas, and I'd argue that for product categories where Amazon is not the natural choice, the review quality isn't fantastic (e.g. outdoor gear, etc.) If the goal of the review is to inform as many people as possible about your product experience, Amazon is a natural outlet.

</comment><comment><USER24> I think for the same reason people like to comment on HN. people with knowledge have an opinion, and they like to be heard.

Also, I think most people like to be help.

</comment><comment><USER25> Amazon and Newegg both email me after I make a purchase requesting that I review the product. They do this a little after the product is delivered--to give me a chance to use it.

I almost always respond to these requests, because I find the reviews helpful in my buying process and that motivates me to contribute back.

</comment><comment><USER26> I've posted maybe two. The one I'm sure about was for a very handy O'Reilly book that got a bad review that was undeserved on the merits and made a passing reference to the author's politics. I thought the book better than that and the politics (confined to the dedication) not relevant to the book's worth.

</comment><comment><USER27> I bought logo design love (book) and was emailed by the "author" asking me to write a review...so i did

</comment><comment><USER28> In some cases, reviews are a matter of Internet Forum Argument. This happened a lot before they added actual forums--the reviews for anything by Ayn Rand dissolved into Ayn Rand arguments.

</comment><comment><USER29> Some people write positive reviews to reinforce their purchase decision. It helps justify why it was a good idea to spend their money on something.

</comment><comment><USER30> I suspect that most reviews are pissed off customers that are simply looking for an emotional outlet. I am actually amazed that so many products on Amazon have a high rating.

Amazon could probably increase reviews 10 fold by creating an incentive program (e.g., coupon codes for reviewing products).

Or, though it's a little spammy, I wouldn't be opposed to receiving a Netflix/Ebay style email a few weeks after I order a product asking for me to give a star rating on it.

<comment><USER23> I think incenting people to review products defeats the whole point of what Amazon has to offer--genuine opinions about products from actual users. As mentioned above, no other e-commerce site has volume of reviews that Amazon has and few look poised to overtake them. Epinions took the incentive route and I think the difference in value is pretty apparent. Once you start compensating users for submitting "something", the value of that "something" is going to be pretty minimal.

<comment><USER30> Yeah - but putting an incentive behind the process would remove the obvious self-selection biases. Right now, there are two reasons that people would post a review:

1) They had an exceptional experience with the product and feel the need to react to that. 2) They are the type of person that likes to tell the world about their experiences.

Unfortunately, both of those are a very small subset of total purchases and, most likely, highly overlapping. Which means you won't get the proportionally accurate number of reviews in the middle range. And you won't get reviews from Luddites or online recluses.

If you put an incentive behind the review system, perhaps you'd have people gaming the system, but at least you'd have a better shot at hitting a wider demographic of product reviewers.

You are probably right though. Amazon, like Google, is very, very good at analyzing piles of data to make market decisions. They may well have already piloted review incentives. Regardless, I suspect they've already got numbers that back up their current process.

<comment><USER23> I think the incentive compounds the self-selection bias. For someone who is an expert in say audio equipment, a small monetary reward isn't going to encourage him/her to post a review (assuming they have a decent amount of disposable income). However, for those who could greatly benefit from that incentive, they'll post reviews like there's no tomorrow.

Another great example of how Amazon has succeeded with user generated content is Listmania--genuinely helpful product lists, all provided for free. I don't completely understand the psychology of why these are created, but I value the content greatly because I know that contributors are not compensated for their suggestions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'm not sure that it's users who write the reviews.

</comment><comment><USER32> astroturfing</comment>


Getting to simple (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://alarmingdevelopment.org/?p=766

<comment><USER2> There is a lot too learn. Part of the problem seems to be that docs are really hard to parse for a lot of technologies (or possibly non-existant). Things would be a lot "simpler" if, after the requisite core knowledge accrual, these concepts could be quickly applied. However, when forced to learn/execute on a granular level for some new concept/framework/library the docs make this difficult.

It would be much more efficient for programmers if docs were more than an afterthought. If you are making a new hotNewJavascriptFramework, first, consider not doing it, second, please make your docs extremely easy to understand and search.

</comment><comment><USER3> The easiest way to get to simple is through specialization. Rather than focus on trying to learning it all, focus on a core competence, and build from there. Having a computer science or software engineering degree is a great first step, but I think people need to specialize, gain mastery in a single topic, and then build from there.

</comment><comment><USER4> I've been learning Haskell for the past year. You wanna talk about a lot to learn...

I still don't understand category theory, or Arrow aside from the two canonical ones (functions and Kleisli). Monad transformers I would not call myself fluent in. Even with those gaps in my knowledge, I'm still more productive in Haskell than I would be in almost any other language. (Clojure might be comparable, because macros are much more approachable than Template Haskell.) I think we're reaching a point where complete knowledge of _anything_ is impossible; we're just going to have to learn to be productive with a "merely good: level of knowledge.

I would like to see a more condensed "common core" of computer science. I feel like it'd take a 9- to 12-year educational program that'd have to be concurrent with actually working as a programmer in some context. But in a more ideal world, it would exist.</comment>


Peter Norvig's review of SICP - <AUTHOR> http://www.amazon.com/review/R403HR4VL71K8?ie=UTF8&*Version*=1&*entries*=0 <comment><USER2> My brother is starting to learn a bit of programming, and was looking for books to read. I suggested SICP, so he went to Amazon and immediately picked up on the fact that almost all of the review scores were 1 or 5.

Interestingly, he didn't bother reading the favourable reviews--just the unfavourable ones. His argument was that in reading the unfavourable reviews he could better pick up what the book's strengths were: what did it teach that many people weren't ready to learn?

<comment><USER3> I wish my peers were like your brother.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> SICP really changed the way I look at computer science. So enlightening: data and commands are interchangeable etc. I was surprised to see so many bad reviews on amazon. Although flipping through them, it seems they just don't 'want' to understand the book :(

<comment><USER5> _it seems they just don't 'want' to understand the book :(_

I think it's more that some brains are wired for that kind of abstraction and some are not. Those who love the book are mostly the ones whose are.

A similar (if not the same) phenomenon is that there are far more mediocre programmers than good ones... a simple fact which determines nearly everything about the software industry.

<comment><USER6> _some brains are wired for that kind of abstraction_

In my experience if someone can't program it's not becuase they have the wrong static structure, it's that they're unwilling to dynamically metaprogram their thought processes and fundamentally reshape their mental models.

 _far more mediocre programmers than good ones_

Same goes for actors and boxers and cops. This seems, almost tautologically, true of any industry. Why is this meme so prevalent?

<comment><USER5> _In my experience if someone can't program it's not becuase they have the wrong static structure, it's that they're unwilling to dynamically metaprogram their thought processes and fundamentally reshape their mental models._

Either way, the point is the same: 90% of people (if not 99%) are averse to the kind of abstraction we're talking about. I have no idea how many are unable and how many merely unwilling; I'm not even sure the distinction matters or how you go about deciding it. (By the way, where did you get that phraseology? It sounds like NLP.)

 _Same goes for actors and boxers and cops. This seems, almost tautologically, true of any industry. Why is this meme so prevalent?_

It's because the demand for programs vastly exceeds the supply of good programmers, which is the fundamental theorem of software economics (at least in our lifetime) and skews everything about the industry. Obviously the mediocre outnumber the competent at any activity, but that usually doesn't become the dominant fact about that activity. For example, there are many more bad musicians than good ones, but the demand for music doesn't vastly exceed the supply of good musicians. If it did, Lord knows what sorts of contraptions people would call instruments and mass-distribute. "We can't have pianos around here - how will we hire 100 musicians to play them in the future? And if guitars are so great, how come they're not more popular? Better to be a blubby-music-box shop like everybody else! Our clients expect it!"

<comment><USER6> _the kind of abstraction we're talking about_

You know, I wonder to what extent it's more the peripheral hassles than the actual abstractions. There's no way in hell I'd be a programmer if it meant working with punch cards; it'd be above my irritation threshold. There might be a lot of people out there who would enjoy programming, but installing and configuring a compiler and editor, for instance, are simply too frustrating/boring to them.

There weren't many photographers when you had to develop your own film. (I think I'm paraphrasing a Steve Yegge essay... I'd look it up if I weren't on my iPhone at a volleyball tournament :p )

 _where did you get that phraseology? Sounds like NLP._

That and general semantics I believe. I haven't read much of the primary works in either (yet), but picked up some of the concepts/terms from Robert Anton Wilson.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I recently came across SICP's amazon page and based on this and Paul Graham's reviews, I decided to buy it and work my way through it. It arrived yesterday and now I am about halfway through Chapter 1. So far its a pretty good review and I've gotten a much clearer understanding of some things.

I finished school almost 2 years ago, so a lot of things I found confusing and odd about Scheme when I first used it in school have had time to settle in my mind (lambdas, first-class functions, etc). Hopefully it will be worth my time.

<comment><USER8> I started working through my copy about a month ago and have no regrets about spending a lot of time with it (still have 1 chapter to go). While I might not have felt very enthusiastic about working through all the exercises, they're VERY helpful and a central part of the book.

I found that SICP helped hone my skills in finding elegant solutions to certain problems and improved my coding style. On the downside, I switched back to C++ tonight and found myself putting parenthesis in all the wrong places for the first hour. It's a small price to pay.

Enjoy!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Norvig is head of research at Google and the author of a leading book on AI.

<comment><USER10> Leading != canonical.

<comment><USER11> What's the canonical book? Norvig has, IIRC, written two widely-appreciated books on AI.

<comment><USER10> I wasn't clear. Norvig has written canonical books on AI, but they are not leading edge.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Why is this book so expensive? The cheapest used copy on amazon is ~$60.00...

<comment><USER13> Particularly when it is available online for free at <http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html>

<comment><USER14> Particularly _because_ it is available online for free.

For a normal book, you have cheapstake buyers, and then buyers who will pay a premium for a nicer book (hardcover, newer, etc). Now take the cheapstake buyers out of the market because they're all accessing it online for free. Economic magic does its thing, and the market price is now much higher.

<comment><USER15> The word is cheapskate not cheapstake.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


New Reactor Designs for Revival of Nuclear Energy - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612940/the-new-safer-nuclear-reactors-that-might-help-stop-climate-change/ <comment><USER2> Interesting, Bill Gates recently had an interview where he talks about new reactor designs, including the traveling wave reactor (commercialized in a prototype phase by a company he founded - TerraPower): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1EB1zsxW0k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1EB1zsxW0k)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, BG is into Nuclear; the trade war with China has had an impact:

[https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/amp25728221/...](https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/amp25728221/terrapower- china-bill-gates-trump/)</comment></comment>


Printing null in Java - <AUTHOR> http://www.csc.kth.se/~snilsson/print-null-java/ <comment><USER2> Here, let me save you the research funding:

char[] is an array of primitive chars, which cannot be null because they're value types rather than reference types.

I recommend looking up a Java tutorial or two on the difference between reference types (objects) and primitives.

</comment><comment><USER3> "With some more research funding I might be able to figure this out!"

come on ...</comment>


Bush hid the facts (bug) - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_hid_the_facts

<comment><USER2> I'm not saying it isn't true, but the article has problems.

> The bug appeared for the first time in Windows NT 3.5, released 1994, but > was not discovered until early 2004. Older versions of Notepad such as those > that came with Windows 95, 98, ME, and NT 3.1 do not include Unicode support > so the bug does not occur there.

Problem is that Windows 95, 98 and ME post-dated Windows NT 3.5. They are newer, not older. Are they saying that Windows NT 3.5 in 1994 had a newer version of Notepad (with Unicode support) than any until ... when? The next paragraph says,

> The bug exists in all successive versions of Windows until and including > Windows XP, but was not present in Windows Vista and afterwards.

What successive versions? It wasn't in Windows 95, 98 and ME. So why does it say, "until and including XP". Wikipedia edit time!

<comment><USER3> _" Problem is that Windows 95, 98 and ME post-dated Windows NT 3.5. They are newer, not older. Are they saying that Windows NT 3.5 in 1994 had a newer version of Notepad (with Unicode support)..."_

Windows 95, 98 and ME did come out after NT 3.5, but they might indeed have had an older version of Notepad, since these versions of Windows were descendants of the Windows 3.1 codebase, not NT. XP was the first consumer- oriented version of Windows that was based on the NT kernel, and Notepad would have been re-written for NT to support Unicode.

 _" What successive versions?"_

The successors to the NT 3.5 codebase were NT 4.0, Windows 2000 (NT 5.0), Windows XP (NT 5.1, 5.2), Vista (NT 6.0), etc.[1]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT#Releases](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT#Releases)</comment></comment>


Rising Car Prices Are Sending Even Strong-Credit Buyers to the Used Lot - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/13/your-money/used-cars-credit.html <comment><AUTHOR> I don't understand why people buy $35,000+ non-electric cars, instead of three-year-old used cars. For electric cars like Tesla, high initial costs make sense, given environmental impact and lifetime TCO.</comment>


Ask HN: Does anyone know sources for UPC information? - <AUTHOR> I am trying to find a site or service that will let you query UPC codes in the food and beverage space and pull out product info.
Does anyone have any leads or suggestions on how to accomplish that? Most sources I have found only seem to have matches for a handful of codes I tried.
Thanks. <comment><USER2> Semantics3 does what you want I believe.

[https://www.semantics3.com/](https://www.semantics3.com/)

<comment><USER3> See also: [http://opendata.stackexchange.com/questions/562/](http://opendata.stackexchange.com/questions/562/)

And the blog post by Semantics3: [https://blog.semantics3.com/why-the-u-in- upc-doesnt-mean-uni...](https://blog.semantics3.com/why-the-u-in-upc-doesnt- mean-universal-a1a675eea0ea)</comment></comment>


PG - "The Papa Bear" - on BusinessWeek's list of most influential people on the web - <AUTHOR> http://images.businessweek.com/ss/08/09/0929_most_influential/7.htm

<comment><USER2> No list there. Here it is:

1\. Steve Ballmer -- microsoft.com

2\. Mitchell Baker -- mozilla.org

3\. Jeff Bezos -- amazon.com

4\. Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Eric Schmidt -- google.com

5\. Jeff Clavier -- softtechvc.com

6\. Paul Graham -- ycombinator.com

7\. Arianna Huffington -- huffingtonpost.com

8\. Joi Ito -- joi.ito.com

9\. Steve Jobs -- apple.com

10\. Jonathan Kaplan -- theflip.com

11\. Loic Le Meur -- Leweb3.com, seesmic.com

12\. Jack Ma -- alibaba.com

13\. Matt Mullenweg -- Wordpress.org

14\. Rupert Murdoch -- myspace.com

15\. Craig Newmark -- craigslist.com

16\. Gabe Rivera -- techmeme.com

17\. Kevin Rose -- digg.com

18\. Sheryl Sandberg -- facebook.com

19\. Jon Stewart -- thedailyshow.com

20\. Peter Thiel -- clariumcapital.com, thefoundersfund.com

21\. Maria Thomas -- etsy.com

22\. Anssi Vanjoki -- nokia.com

23\. Jimmy Wales -- wikia-inc.com

24\. Evan Williams -- twitter.com

25\. Jerry Yang -- yahoo.com

<comment><USER3> OMG, Sergey Brin counts for only 1/3 a man for BusinessWeek!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I like this picture better :)

<http://danhau.posterous.com/our-fearless-investor-paul-gra>

<comment><USER5> That picture always reminds me of this: <http://www.boreme.com/media/yr2006/crazy-mean-baby-1.jpg>

<comment><USER6> They grow up so fast.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Note to fellow HN readers: while this is a good post, the article is NOT WORTH READING. Just note that PG appears on Businessweek and move on. Do not read his profile or that of other people unless you want your brain to hurt.

<comment><USER5> Why is it important to you that others don't read it?

<comment><USER7> I can't back this up, but I'm doing this out of good will. I want to spare other HN readers. At the end of the day, the bottom line is: Because it sucks.

From the OP: "Since Mark Zuckerberg co-founded Facebook in his dorm room at Harvard University, the social networking giant has been dominated by a freewheeling culture of young, mostly male computer engineers. That all changed in April when the company hired former Google executive Sandberg to become Facebook's chief operating officer. Sandberg, 38, was brought in to provide some adult supervision and help Silicon Valley's hottest startup to grow up—and make oodles of money."

Not cool, BusinessWeek. I hope you get a[nother] hundred hours of downtime for dissing hackers like this. I hope you try turnaround after turnaround as new market entrants eat your lunch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Congratulations PG. This is a well-deserved honor.

</comment><comment><USER9> i can't believe they put Facebook's COO in the list instead of Mark Zuckerberg

<comment><USER10> I was surprised RMS wasn't on their list.

<comment><USER11> RMS?

<comment><USER12> Not sure why you got downmodded. google Richard Stallman.

<comment><USER13> ...or google RMS!

<comment><USER14> Root mean square! (At least in the flavour of Google that is served here.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Papa Bear?

<comment><USER8> I think that seems fitting. Personable, nurturing, etc.

<comment><USER15> Bears are godless killing machines.

<comment><USER16> Spoken like a true YC alum. ;-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The only thing I learned from this article is that the tech/web scene needs some good headshot/editorial photographers.

</comment><comment><USER18> Now that he got a Businessweek plug, it looks like all of PG's efforts with YCombinator have finally paid off ;)</comment>


We're about to hit phase 3 of ARIN IPV4 rationing - <AUTHOR> https://www.arin.net/resources/request/ipv4_countdown.html <comment><USER2> There are a ton of /8 still assigned to companies that don't need them.

Ford, GE, IBM, AT&T (x2), Xerox, HP (x2), Apple, MIT, CSC, Eli Lilly, Nortel, Prudential Insurance, DuPont, Cap Debis, Merck, SITA.

All of those can return their /8\. That's 18 /8 potentially available.

And does the DoD really need 12 /8's? I get that they want to network every person, gun, ship, tank, truck and plane. But none of those need to be on the public internet. (Well, maybe the people do - but 1 /8 should be enough for that.)

<comment><USER3> Can those companies sell their IPs on the open market when the normal pool has run out? Is that allowed?

<comment><USER4> Legally it's an allocation, not ownership. The registry could simply revoke your allocations if it caught you selling them (though whether it would is another question).

<comment><USER5> Exactly, its more like a lease. You can't actually sell an IP because you don't own them, but you are given a lease/license to use them.

Frankly, the only way to truly transfer an IP block between companies is to have one company buy the other, then the IP addresses can be reallocated to the new owner. You can't just transfer an IP block to another entity according to ARIN's registration agreement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Meanwhile, in Europe, RIPE ran out of IPv4 a year ago[1], and people have been happily implementing IPv6 ever since. In Sweden, there is a government directive[2] that all state infrastructure should implement IPv6 and DNSSEC by this year (2013) at the latest.

1) [https://www.ripe.net/internet- coordination/ipv4-exhaustion](https://www.ripe.net/internet- coordination/ipv4-exhaustion)

2) [http://www.regeringen.se/sb/d/15234/a/177127](http://www.regeringen.se/sb/d/15234/a/177127)

<comment><USER6> Found an english version of the directive (PDF):

[http://www.government.se/content/1/c6/18/19/14/70f489cb.pdf](http://www.government.se/content/1/c6/18/19/14/70f489cb.pdf)

Page 40, _Actions_ , first paragraph: "In addition, all authorities should make use of DNSSEC and be reachable with IPv6 by 2013."

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> ... And as the foredeck of the Titanic sinks below the water line, we enter phase 3 of deck chair rationing ...

<comment><USER8> The band is still playing. I think that means everything is fine, right?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Bah. All this IPV4 "exhaustion" stuff can be simply solved. Almost overnight. Right now, most of the space is underused and simply being hoarded.

Want to free up 90% of the IPs? Easily? Then _charge_ for them!!!

If MIT had to pay $1/mo for each IP address ($16 million per month), it would immediately give most of them back.

If MIT had to pay $1/year for each IP address ($16 million per year), it would immediately give most of them back.

And yet for people like me, paying (in round numbers) $50 / month for Internet, $1/year or even $1/month would be "in the noise".

So how many hundreds of billions of dollars will instead be spent on the designed-by-nerds very-difficult-to-implement not-very-backward-compatible solution of IPV6?

<comment><USER10> Such policy would lead to an explosion of fragmented patterns in routing, expanding the global routing table. That mean latency and costs would go up while throughput would go down.

If I remember right, there doesn't exist hardware for backbone networks that can handle a fully fragmented global routing table at the required speed of today. They are thus unlikely to also handle the increased speed of tomorrow without quantum computers.

<comment><USER11> Making ipv4 a second class citizen working like an low performance compatibility layer for legacy seems like a great migration plan to me. Especially if performance would go down progressively.

<comment><USER10> The backbone network is unlikely separated by hardware for IPv4 and IPv6. If one drains resources, the other gets effected.

They could start to charge differently for IPv4 traffic and IPv6. If peering Terms of IPv6 interconnection agreements was free/radically lower than ipv4 (by say, increasing ipv4 charge rate), ISPs would see a direct encouragement to move to ipv6. Its not a unique concept, as similar suggestion has been made in 2011 ([http://www.canscouncil.net/presentations/CANS2011/china_ipv6...](http://www.canscouncil.net/presentations/CANS2011/china_ipv6-KC%20Claffy.pdf))

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> And news.ycombinator.com is still IPv4-only.

<comment><USER13> The main argument for migrating existing websites to IPv6 in the near-term is merely to aid the policy goal by showing "Hey! IPv6 is in actual use!".

On the technical side, there are various transition mechanisms that can ensure even "IPv6-only" clients will be able to communicate with most legacy IPv4 services for years to come. HN is not holding up progress.

<comment><USER6> No, such a thing does not exist. At least not automatically. There are stories[1] about large corporations getting complaints from end customers in Asia about not being reachable - and it turns out the customers only have IPv6. IPv4 FAIL.

(Note: APNIC ran out of IPv4 addresses more than _two years ago_ [2], and has had _rapid_ internet expansion in the mean time. Asians are heavy IPv6 adopters.)

Such a thing you imagine could conceivably be implemented, but it would be an extra thing for the IPv6-only ISPs to implement, and they do not have the incentive to do so. The current companies with servers _do_ have an incentive to be reachable by IPv6-only customers, and are the only parties who can reasonably solve the situation, by implementing IPv6.

1) [https://www.iis.se/blogg/ipv6-nar-sent-inforande-kostar- peng...](https://www.iis.se/blogg/ipv6-nar-sent-inforande-kostar-pengar/) (Swedish)

2) [https://www.apnic.net/publications/news/2011/final-8](https://www.apnic.net/publications/news/2011/final-8)

<comment><USER13> IPv6 doesn't exist automatically, either. If an ISP is going to move their customers to it without setting up the requisite transition mechanisms, I don't see how that's any different than failing to meet the myriad requirements for provisioning a functional IPv4-only network in the modern age. Whom do you blame when an ISP forgets to configure BGP on their routers?

<comment><USER6> You might think such a scheme is "requisite", but the fact remains that there is insufficient incentive for the ISPs to do them, and they plainly don't do them, as my cited example shows.

You can assign blame however you like, but it won't help your IPv6 customers/users to reach your servers.

<comment><USER13> I really don't know what your example shows, because I don't read Swedish, and the Google translate version is predictably mangled and difficult to parse. To the extent it says anything, it's very vague and seems to recount a single, unique incident. This and your apparent inability to provide case studies in English leads me to the belief that the problem is rare.

I'll also add that I've been in the employ of a company that does business exclusively in Asia for years. We've as yet not encountered this problem.

<comment><USER6> If you have experience with Asian ISPs, could you then maybe report on how common it is for them to have IPv6-only versus IPv6-plus-transition-mechanism?

This data would be better than my anecdotal story about an unnamed company, so please provide any you have.

<comment><USER13> In my experience? Exactly 0% of ISPs are strict IPv6-only. That doesn't mean there isn't one anywhere, we don't have millions of users throughout the continent, mostly Taiwan and (to a lesser extent) China. But we've yet to find one.

When I say the issue has not arisen, I mean it. We have two infrastructures, one is basically 8 years old, the other is about three. At the time the latter was setup, our provider wasn't even ready to deploy IPv6 widely, they were still learning and testing with a handful of select customers.

Both legacy and modern run solely on IPv4, and we've not had cause to revisit the issue.

When we get reports of network problems not attributable to simple user error, the cause is almost always either misconfigured routers breaking path MTU discovery, or ridiculously strict firewall rules that don't even allow port 443 out.

I don't even know how many of our users have IPv6 at all. I have no reason to know nor any good way to measure it short of calling all the ISPs or sending people to our customer's homes to check.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'd really hoped we'd have more support for IPv6 by now. It's funny, every so often there's a big "We need IPv6" push with lots of media coverage which is forgotten about shortly afterwards.

As far as I know there's only one ISP (Internode) here in Australia which offers IPv6.

<comment><USER15> There is some network effect in there and I've experienced it myself.

In a product we make, we can go the extra mile and start supporting IPv6 but the libraries we use, the rest of the echo system we play in, don't support it. So we feel like it would be wasted effort at best and it would break things at worst.

A good way we found to force others to configure and bother about IPv6 support is if we deliberately add extra and better features only tied to IPv6.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Unless I'm misreading it. The rationing rules in effect during Phase 3 are exactly the same as Phase 2.

So why the distinction at all?

<comment><USER17> There is now a 60 day payment window that wasn't there before. And a review of previous procedures that could result in various minor revisions. So it is different, but not a lot different.

<comment><USER18> The 60 day payment window was added in phase 2

<comment><USER17> Oops, the order didn't match up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> There's always been a vocal group who maintains that the IP addresses that are not visible on the internet should be returned. There are a number of problems with this argument.

Firstly, there are legitimate business reasons for having assigned, non- RFC1918 addresses that are only used internally. Interconnecting private networks belonging to different organizations that have overlapping 10.x addresses is a painful process. Sure it's possible to NAT, but given that the IP addresses are effectively an asset of the organization, why not use them? I'm not implying that this is right, but it's how the system was in the past and the cost of changing internal networking and applications could be very high.

Secondly, how do you prove that an IP address is accessible on the Internet? Many IPs do not respond to pings and I can easily set up a device that will answer for all IPs behind the corporate gateways.

<comment><USER20> I'd rather just see the massive corporate reservations returned.

Why does Xerox need an entire A block, why do Apple, BMW?

<comment><USER21> > Why does Xerox need an entire A block, why do Apple, BMW?

They don't, but retroactively taking away their /8s would be extremely complicated and expensive for them, not to mention that there is very little benefit from prolonging exhaustion by perhaps 1-2 years at most.

<comment><USER20> They could buy the ranges back if they really desired. The results from the Carna botnet show just how sparse the usage of the allocated ranges is. It's practically empty for the entire left upper quadrant.

[http://internetcensus2012.bitbucket.org/images/hilbert_icmp_...](http://internetcensus2012.bitbucket.org/images/hilbert_icmp_map_lowquality.jpg)

<comment><USER22> A lot of IP addresses are used but not visible from the public Internet.

<comment><USER20> Oh I realise, I just have a hard time believing that Ford even has a tiny portion of their block allocated to anything.

<comment><USER23> Ford has multiple design centres in different countries plus a lot of subcontractors who may need to connect to stuff from outside.

I can believe that they are using a large part of an /8.

<comment><USER24> And normal people and smaller companies need their addresses even more.

<comment><USER22> Then they can bid for them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> What's the time lag until we run out of IPv4 addresses at the VPS/hosting provider and broadband ISP level?

I see the situation getting progressively more dire, and presumably these notifications are there to try and get people moving to avoid the wall; but assuming everyone keeps operating as close to the status quo as they are able, how long before we truly hit the wall?

<comment><USER6> [http://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2013-08/when.html](http://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2013-08/when.html)

Currently the estimate indicates September 2014.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Some good information on this from Geoff Huston: [http://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2012-08/EndPt2.html](http://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2012-08/EndPt2.html)

<comment><USER12> This article looks a bit more relevant. Also, it's from the future: [http://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2013-08/when.html](http://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2013-08/when.html)

<comment><USER26> Awesome thanks! I hadn't read this yet :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Its not really so bad. Its not like end users need IP addresses. All you need is addresses for all the major servers, and then like a couple dozen for each ISP, right?

<comment><USER28> Carrier NAT has lots of bad consequences.

It means that NAT-punching may stop working (because there may be two or three levels of it).

It makes fraud detection harder.

Plus, it's error prone -- once in a while, you'll get data that happens to look like your IP address, and you'll find that you can't send that precise sequence of bits in a packet ever because it'll get mangled by the NAT.

<comment><USER29> > once in a while, you'll get data that happens to look like your IP address, > and you'll find that you can't send that precise sequence of bits in a > packet ever because it'll get mangled by the NAT

How so? Those bits should only matter to the NAT logic if they are found in their expected position in the IP header, not in the payload portion of the datagram.

<comment><USER30> Some cheap NAT devices rewrites stuff that "looks like" the internal IP addresses inside the TCP payload, in a hackish attempt to "fix" things like FTP and other protocols that send addresses in the payload. A really stupid and dangerous way to do things, but it's been known to happen.

<comment><USER29> Crazy. Has that been observed in carrier-grade NAT boxes, though? Or only in el-cheapo residential devices? It seems an incredible risk to the carriers to do things that way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Time to go around to Fortune 100 companies and say "use it or lose it".

<comment><USER26> Recovering additional IPv4 space at this point only prolongs the inevitable problem. The solution is IPv6.

<comment><USER32> Five (or ten) years ago, NAT was "the solution" – which helped and worked for longer than the doomsayers predicted.

Today, I suspect SNI will be the important stop-gap measure. There's a whole bunch of websites out there on shared hosting with dedicated IP(v4) addresses for their vhost just so they can use SSL certs for https connections. If we can ignore Windows XP users and IE6 users, SNI allows SSL certs on shared IP addresses - if I can think of a few dozen "unnecessary" IP addresses this little web development firm consumes, I suspect big hosting companies could probably find thousands or tens of thousands of similarly used IP addresses.

(Having said that, analytics still shows a startlingly high number of WinXP and IE6 users out there. It'd be interesting to see if any of them ever "convert" in ways that'd require SSL certs? I understand why the use of pirated XP and 10 year old hardware are rampant across the 3rd world, for _my_ clients that demographic is almost certainly not likely to be ecommerce customers... That's a bit of a personally skewed perspective though, there's no good argument to be made that says wikileaks/twitter/gmail users on old hard/software shouldn't get ssl protection, but I suspect high-end bed linen online shops wouldn't be hurt at all by using SNI and thereby increasing friction for IE6/WinXP users…)

<comment><USER33> > I can think of a few dozen "unnecessary" IP addresses this little web > development firm consumes, I suspect big hosting companies could probably > find thousands or tens of thousands of similarly used IP addresses.

That's the problem. A few million addresses would stretch things out by a couple of months.. But the cost of getting a few million websites onto SNI would _far exceed_ any benefit.

<comment><USER32> Perhaps. As well as "returning" a few million addresses, it'd also plug one of the drivers behind demand for new addresses (I've got no idea if it's just my blinkered little web-dev worldview talking here - anyone actually _know_ what the big consumers of new ipv4 addresses are doing with them? Is SSL certs for websites a significant consumer?)

If my view is even vaguely supportable - I see things happening that give me some optimism - WHM/cPanel, a fairly significant webhosting management system, rolled out SNI support earlier this year (a few months behind schedule, but it's out now and it works). I assume Plesk and other webhosting management packages are doing the same thing. Perhaps this'll stave off the ipv4 apocolypse by longer than expected? (Or perhaps I've got no idea about what's really going on out there…)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Future of Marketing: Your Face? - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/singularity/2012/08/08/billboards-and-tvs-detect-your-face-and-juice-up-ads-tailored-just-for-you/

<comment><USER2> companies like adidas and kraft should be ashamed of using this invasive technology. no respect for privacy. should consumers boycott companies that use this?

<comment><AUTHOR> You are absolutely right. However, It could also be interpreted as digital salesperson. When I entered a store and a salesperson pitch to me about products based on my face and facial expressions. We need to learn about how to deal with ourselves. They was and they will always be intrusive.

<comment><USER2> true... but once data is stored in databases and combined with other data... privacy nightmare!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Get used to it. It's going to get worse.

<comment><USER2> we must exercise consumer power while we still have it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Had no idea this much was going on, but privacy is dead anyway, let them mine our data</comment>


At What Point Did 'Personal Home Page' Become 'Professional Home Page'? - <AUTHOR> https://marc.info/?l=php-internals&m=151489772804825 <comment><USER2> Approximately when transitioning from PHP 3 to PHP 4, making that 2000-ish.</comment>


Google propels Linux to the top - <AUTHOR> http://www.techrepublic.com/article/google-propels-linux-to-the-top/ <comment><USER2> Meh, Android is a locked-down OS that happens to use the Linux kernel. ChromeOS is a crippled internet-only OS that happens to use the Linux kernel.

Sure, this makes a lot of people have "Linux" in their hands, sort of, hidden away where they'll never find it and where it doesn't matter. I'm not sure this is much of an "open source" victory.

<comment><USER3> Everyone says how great Google is for Linux, but nobody talks about how good Linux is for Google.

Not that I think Google is exploiting the free software movement or anything, but Google would have never had a chance with Android without the Linux kernel. The Google play stack is the opposite of a free software victory.

I'm tired of hearing all the things Google has done for Linux. Maybe we could talk a little more about how free software has facilitated the growth of one of the top tech companies on the planet.

<comment><USER4> > I'm tired of hearing all the things Google has done for Linux. Maybe we > could talk a little more about how free software has facilitated the growth > of one of the top tech companies on the planet.

I think the case can be made that both are true -- Linux desperately needed a way to win public acceptance, Google needed an unencumbered foundation for various projects.

Also, we mustn't forget the snowball effect -- when an operating system gets to a certain point in installed base, it becomes _the_ operating system. All signs are that Linux will get to that point, and Google will have been one of the primary reasons.

<comment><USER5> Quite so: It took a company with the resources to give Linux a modern touch- based managed language userland to make it popular. If you want to know where the next Ubuntu is coming from, look to fully open Android distributions like CyanogenMod. With their deal with Oppo, you can make a good case that Cyanogen has done better than Ubuntu in making OEM deals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm constantly surprised at how Google drags its feet with getting Android out to more uses. I mean, we've seen 3rd-party hardware manufacturers sticking Android on All-In-One PCs, netbooks, HDMI sticks, mini-PCs, video-game consoles, etc. Even Android support for tablets came out well after manufacturers had released hundreds of Android-based iPad clones.

In spite of its various UI failings, android is well-positioned to be the next Windows, and with it the Play Store could take over the world. And yet Google sits in their hands and sticks to phones and tablets.

<comment><USER5> Android is already 60% of all interactive devices: [http://www.telirati.com/2014/03/who-makes-how-many-of- things...](http://www.telirati.com/2014/03/who-makes-how-many-of-things-we- code-for.html)

Google was correct to focus on dominating handsets. If you dominate handsets, you dominate devices as a whole.

Android also has a very strong position in embedded UI in "appliance" devices.

There is an argument to made that Google sucks at marketing tablets, and gave iPad too big a lead in the market. But overall execution is hard to find fault with.

<comment><USER6> Devices sold each year is not the same as devices in use at any given moment. Because of the break-neck pace and carrier subsidies, consumers replace smartphones faster than anything else. So obviously you're going to see fewer set-top boxes, portable gaming devices, notebooks, etc. devices being sold. But Google doesn't care how many Android devices are sold, because they don't make a dime from sales. They want the OS to be _used_.

<comment><USER5> Android's dominance in sell-in in handsets is not new, so you won't find a large lag between sell-in and the installed base.

<comment><USER6> No, but my point is that most people still have a PC that doesn't run a Google OS, they just don't buy a new PC every 2 years - but that PC may see equal or greater use than their phone.

<comment><USER5> I don't want to argue because we agree completely that Android has more potential that it has yet accessed. And I have been sharply critical of how Google has handled marketing of Android in some contexts. But they're not bunglers. They got 90% of the task 90% right, and Android is on track to have a multi-decades dominance, surprisingly similar to how dominant Windows was.

Criticism has to be tempered by reality and the reality is that Andy Rubin made the right first moves and executed about as well as possible. And if that makes Google late to an enterprise focus, which will get more love in the next version of Android, that's a relatively small price to pay for total focus on and crushing what really matters. Also, embedded Android isn't completely out in the cold in terms of becoming "Google logo" products. The newer Android- based cameras from Samsung have the Play store. These are real Android cameras, with a fully Google-blessed, general-purpose Android OS in them. in addition to sharing photos to any app, you can edit your Drive documents on your camera.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Android/Linux is not the same as GNU/Linux.

From the perspective of users, a proprietary userland with a free kernel is not meaningfully different than an entire proprietary OS.

By this article's logic, OSX is a massive victory for FLOSS because, hey, it uses the XNU kernel.

<comment><USER8> True enough, but the article's main premise was that Google's products propelled _Linux_ to the top of the OS heap. That only indirectly benefits FLOSS.

<comment><USER7> > the top of the OS heap

Fair, but again to be specific, _Linux_ isn't an OS--it's a kernel. When people talk about "Linux" as an OS, they typically mean some variant of GNU/Linux: RedHat, Ubuntu, Debian, etc.

Android (as promoted by Google) is not a member of that club. Maybe ASOP is, but more and more of Google's development effort is shifting to Play Services, and away from ASOP.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I do agree with what the article states, but I feel the author misses on a key point.

Google was based on linux and grew around it. As Google grew, they needed more linux boxes and started to develop more. They built their entire infrastructure around linux OSes and contributed most of their knowledge back to the open source world. Examples: MapReduce, GFS,... Google build it for internal, people redevelop for open source, and therefore Linux grows in usage.

However, the growth in Linux could also be attributed to the boom in software/app development which theses days mostly runs on Linux anyway. Think of a big-name web or app company that doesn't use linux. Not too many I can think of.

<comment><USER10> I'm not quite sure what AngularJS, a JavaScript framework, has to do with Linux.

<comment><USER9> touche...removed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> rkuykendall-com I'm surprised nobody has mentioned the next big Linux distributer: Valve.

I had my doubts about how well SteamOS would do, until recently when the Unreal and Cry engines were opened to licensing and both touted SteamOS support as a major current or upcoming feature. People seem to be taking this seriously.

<comment><USER11> Mark my words, SteamOS will do for the desktop what Android did for mobile.

<comment><USER5> There is an interesting symmetry there: ChromeOS is taking traditional notebook form factor devices away from Windows. Steam OS might do the same for gaming PCs. With the high price of current-generation consoles, people will increasingly ask "Why not a PC?"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > [ChromeOS] is gaining ground faster than any operating system ever has, > thanks to dirt-cheap hardware and an amazingly simple interface.

Citation seriously needed on that. I'm not aware of any sales figures on ChromeOS, but at least the usage numbers still appear pretty pathetic, 3 years after the launch of the first commercial devices. By what useful and publicly available metric would ChromeOS be growing faster than any OS ever?

</comment><comment><USER13> Linux is easily the most used OS for servers. Linux has been at the top for awhile, just because the consumer doesn't run the OS natively doesn't mean that they are not using Linux machine. I disagree that google "propelled" linux to the top.

<comment><USER14> No, Windows is if you count individual deployments. Any big enterprise runs countless Windows file and print servers.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_system...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems#Servers) (look at the second, smaller table)

<comment><USER13> Accordingly W3 Tech...[http://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/operating_system/al...](http://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/operating_system/all)

<comment><USER14> That's only web servers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Ugh ... the prose and overall writing style .... not for me.

<comment><USER16> And the content..

Android is the most popular mobile platform?!? Who knew?!? /s

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> What a bullshit! The user has no idea that there is a linux under the hood and the user cannot use the power and freedom of linux. Would Android be a proprietary system nobody would care (besides some cyganogenmod users). So Android is not about linux from the end users view point.

</comment><comment><USER18> What is the Linux market share across all platforms?

<comment><USER9> Take a look at this wiki article. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_system...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems) Basically: desktop wise linux is small, but smartphone/tablet it is huge.

Also, Mark Shuttleworth closed Bug #1 for Ubuntu: Microsoft has a majority market share. It really depends on how you count market share though. [https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1)

<comment><USER19> ISTM that bug should not have been closed. From the bug:

        Steps to repeat:
          1. Visit a local PC store.
          2. Attempt to buy a machine without any proprietary software.

These conditions still obtain.

<comment><USER9> This is true. Very, very true.

But then again, go visit a Verizon/ATT store and count the amount of Android vs. Windows phones. Its all about how you count market share.

<comment><USER19> Sure the market has changed so that PC numbers aren't quite so important. But even Android phones have some "proprietary software", don't they?

<comment><USER20> Android is really a Dalvik VM that runs Java bytecode. You could port it to any OS, and BlueStacks runs it on Windows [http://www.bluestacks.com/](http://www.bluestacks.com/)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Joke's on Louis C.K. - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/07/arts/for-louis-c-k-the-jokes-on-him.html?hpw&pagewanted=all&_r=0

<comment><USER2> He has been wearing a black shirt and blue jeans for as long as I've followed his comedy.

For the first time, in the "Oh My God" HBO advert, he wore a purple shirt, with a black suit.

In a picture in the article, he was wearing a blue polo. Blue.

I conclude he just overcame depression...or just got a sense of fashion.

Yes, I realize this comment is all over the place.</comment>


Grocery-Delivery Startup Instacart(YC) Cuts Pay for Couriers - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/grocery-delivery-startup-instacartcuts-pay-for-couriers-1457715105 <comment><USER2> I'm not sure how Instacart plans to retain quality shoppers and couriers after this type of dramatic pay-cut.

</comment><comment><USER3> Piece of shit paywall. Please cut and paste text here.</comment>


Insights into atomic structure of next-generation superconductors - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2017-09-insights-atomic-next-generation-superconductors.html <comment><USER2> regarding superconductivity, is there now a new theory, possibly an enhancement of BCS- theory?

<comment><USER3> No.</comment></comment>


Longest single word domain name in the world - <AUTHOR> http://llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.com/

<comment><USER2> My mom was Welsh and could actually pronounce that.

The last bit sounds like you're barfing up breakfast....</comment>


HN, can this be true? Charger that turns itself off when phone is not connected - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/encompass/asmo-charger-the-worlds-first-truly-intelligent-ch

<comment><USER2> This can be mostly true already. If you look at Ken Shirriff's analysis of chargers here:

[http://www.righto.com/2012/10/a-dozen-usb-chargers-in-lab- ap...](http://www.righto.com/2012/10/a-dozen-usb-chargers-in-lab-apple- is.html)

The best charger that he analyzed was a Samsung oblong charger that had a vampire draw of 18mw. At 18mw, if it was plugged in all year without doing any charging, it would consume a total of .12 kilowatt-hrs of electricity. $0.01/yr is pretty close to zero power use. There's no theoretical reason that figure could not be improved upon.

However, it is probably the wrong end to optimize on. From the same post, you'll see that the BEST of these chargers was 80% efficient under load, meaning when it's actually in use, it's only putting 80% of its draw into the device. If it were charging only 1 hour per day, at its in-use draw of 2.4A, 21 kilowatt-hours are lost per year doing the actual charging, at a cost of $2-3 per year (in the US).

</comment><comment><USER3> Note that 'dumb' USB chargers don't use anything close to their charging power when idle. See Ken Sheriff's fantastic USB charger teardown - [http://www.righto.com/2012/10/a-dozen-usb-chargers-in-lab- ap...](http://www.righto.com/2012/10/a-dozen-usb-chargers-in-lab-apple- is.html)

In that article, he measures the idle power usage of a bunch of chargers. Some use as little as 19 milliwatts. The electricity cost of leaving that charger plugged in all year is miniscule.

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't see any reason it couldn't be true. Just put a relay inside the charger, and when the phone is plugged in, steal enough power from the phone to set the relay. When the phone is unplugged, the charger's circuitry detects that, and sets the relay. Of course this wouldn't work with a completely dead phone battery. There's probably a clever way to get around this, maybe by utilizing the resistance between pins when a phone is plugged in, but I doubt that's worth it in practice (edit: I read the page more closely, and it turns out they just have a manual button for this; clever indeed).

</comment><comment><USER5> What is the problem being solved which makes it possible to do this? Or, in other words, why don't we have this as a standard way for chargers?

Is it cost? I understand nothing about electronics really, but I'd guess at least one way to do this would be a microcontroller polling the wire and controlling a relay to turn the device on/off, no? I repeat, I understand nothing of these things. :)

<comment><USER4> I would guess cost and the fact that normal chargers use very little electricity when in standby.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Well, it can be true. It would be in fact not to difficult, but the issue is, of course, cost (and maybe turning it on again when the device is plugged again)

Also, a regular charger does not use the same amount of energy with the device charging as it does with the device off, it's wasteful, surely, but not as much as people think.

</comment><comment><USER7> IANAEE, but regular switching power supplies use negligible power when nothing's drawing current.

</comment><comment><USER8> At least ASMO charger is firesafe, unlike dumb chargers. And good to see Oulu on the map too, backed this one.</comment>


Jeff Bezos' guide to life - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/05/jeff-bezos-guide-to-life/ <comment><USER2> Last time it got submitted it got overwhelming negative responses [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15681256](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15681256)</comment>


Germany will require all petrol stations to provide electric car charging - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-germany-autos/germany-forces-all-petrol-stations-to-provide-electric-car-charging-idUSKBN23B1WU <comment><USER2> Seems like policy written by petrol car drivers and not well thought out. In the future electric vehicle world 95% of charging will be done at home, or in some facility near your rental building. Most EV drivers have no need to visit charging stations unless they're going on an extended road trip, and then we need a particular _kind_ of DC fast charging station.

I mean... I have an EV and I could count on two hands the number of times I've even used a public charging station. I charge at home, commute to work, charge up some there sometimes, and then return home and plug in. I have a "gas butler" [1] at home. Stopping at a gas station is a thing of the past for me, unless I need to pick up windshield wiper fluid.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nf7Y3OmHsck](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nf7Y3OmHsck)

<comment><USER3>
      Most EV drivers have no need to visit charging stations [...]

You do realise that we're talking about Germany here, don't you? You cannot apply US standards to a foreign country with 7x the population density and only a ~50% home ownership rate...

The fact of the matter is, that half of German households cannot charge their vehicles at home, because they live in a rented apartment.

In cities in particular (you know, the places where EVs make the most sense), many people don't have a garage - often not even a dedicated parking spot.

This is an actual problem that prevents many people from owning an EV in Germany.

<comment><USER4> You are totally correct, yet OP's point is still reasonable - this was written from the perspective of a petrol-car driver; moreover, it's a missed opportunity to think differently. Petrol stations require big tanks underground to store the petrol; we don't have pipelines through the city carrying petrol. On the other hand, we do have a massive network of wires carrying electricity. EV charging can so easily be distributed, that there is simply no need for 'petrol stations.' Put charging spots directly on the street and other parking places, with an app/API to show availability. Monitor demand, and add more in hotspots.

<comment><USER5> What would be a good use of gas stations for electric cars is battery swapping. It is too early to make this mandatory but I think it might be time to start working on this idea. (It has been looked into before.)

<comment><USER6> Battery swapping was an idea that made sense when battery tech wasn't as good and ranges weren't as great, but its window has passed. You might be thinking of Better Place, which actually launched a battery-swap station. It made sense (some) sense at the time to spend 5 minutes on a battery swap that would otherwise take 6 hours to charge for 111 miles of range. But today, right now, you can spend 20 minutes to get 174 miles of range at a supercharger.

<comment><USER7> ...which is also why it's a bit frustrating to see people saying "Oh, this is from the perspective of gas guzzlers!"...no it isn't. this is a huge win, we're not trying to replace all infrastructure overnight, but it lowers the inconvenience of a marginal EV greatly...174mi in 20 min is damn good, that's 4 of my loooong commutes

<comment><USER8> Only if they put in fast chargers, though. If they put in L2 (i.e., 8 hours for a full charge) chargers, it's worse than useless.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> While I'm all for a future full of electric cars, I wonder what kind of financial burden this will put on petrol stations or even if charging stations fit the same paradigm as gas pumps since they take much longer to charge

<comment><USER10> Petrol stations in Germany make almost no money on petrol. I think it was something along the lines of 2-3 cents/liter. I am quite sure that they will be happy to have customers stay in their shop for longer.

<comment><USER11> That's still quite some decent margin. It takes about 5 minutes for me to fill my 40L tank, which would be about 1€. Everything is automated, there is absolutely no human involved, and it works 24/24.

<comment><USER12> There are extreme construction costs for petrol stations. It's highly regulated due to the fire risk and other issues. You can't even lead surface water into the gutter without prior filtering.

[https://www.abwasser- analysezentrum.de/branchenuebersicht/mi...](https://www.abwasser- analysezentrum.de/branchenuebersicht/mineraloelhaltiges-abwasser)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This begs a larger question of how petroleum mega corps are going to weather the transition to electric vehicles. Looking at BP, margins are really poor. They have $22 Billion in cash vs. $11 Billion operating expenses and $24 Billion in debt.

There is time: in March, 2% of new vehicles sold in Europe were BEV. On the other hand, the total spend on electricity per mile driven is 1/3 that of petrol. That means a complete transition would ultimately yield 1/3 the revenue. In order to remain even, the companies would need to see 3x the gross margin on the electricity than they gain on petrol. Is that possible? BP's gross margin is 7.5% (TTM). Can they get <20% gross margin on electricity?

Maybe. But the real killer is people charge at home, over night. So, no. Electric charge stations will not supplement petrol station revenue. They are toast. They'll need to find entirely new businesses to invest in to survive.

<comment><USER14> Looking at just gas stations, they could spin it into a benefit since the customer will be required to stay at the station for a significant amount of time (~30 mins?) to charge instead of a few minutes.

You lure them in with the electricity then push all your high-margin crap on them like drinks and snacks. It would massively increase foot traffic to quick-service restaurants, cafes and other activities on or near the premises as well.

People will go to stations less, but they will spend more time there. Current EV utilization of paid, away-from-home chargers shouldn't be expected in future when EV owners can't just rent a ICE vehicle for any trip greater than ~400km roundtrip.

<comment><USER15> In my country this is how the petrol stations stay relevant. Prices for fuel are pretty consistent between them (unlike say Italy, where there can be a 20c/litre difference if you drive 100m to the next station) so they've had to branch out to provide additional services.

All petrol stations that have a store have a selection of hot drinks and food, and various other things you would expect form a corner shop. The prices are lower than coffee shops, and in some cases better quality too (especially for food). I saw one brand recently started selling their food on delivery services as less people were travelling during quarantine.

Most of the automated stations (i.e. you can only pay at a machine, not they fill up the car for you :D) share the premises with a fast-food restaurant.

Most EV chargers price their electricity at quite a bit higher than you would pay at home, so in the short term I guess they can jump on this bandwagon. But as range increases and cities start installing more on-street chargers that model will fail too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's part of a bigger stimulus package for EVs, which of course is a thing that German car manufacturers are investing in heavily. Effective or not, Germany is preparing for a mass roll out of EVs over the next years and it's a bit behind on charging infrastructure compared to neighboring countries. All this is about pumping money into the local economies while helping the car industry, which has been hit hard by the double whammy of Tesla eating their lunch and the Corona crisis.

But of course it's doubtful that people will be using charging stations the same way they use petrol stations. Mostly, it's more optimal to charge while the vehicle is parked (at home or some place with a charge point) since it takes a while for vehicles to fully charge. Also, you would not typically run these things dry and instead charge to top up when convenient (i.e. not in a hurry trying to get somewhere). And if you are really going to charge for 30minutes to an hour, do you want to be stuck at some gas station if you don't have to? I'd probably opt for some more interesting places if I had the choice.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'd really wish there was a standard for large-size battery packs an a simple, open protocol for the battery to advertise charge/load limits as well as charging method.

This would totally change the dynamic of EVs.

Go to a station, just hot-swap the batteries and be gone. Charging time becomes irrelevant: the stations can be as small as they're now (parking wire), they just need storage for hot batteries and chargers. Because that's how you use anything _serious_ which is electric right now such as power tools and drones: you don't wait for charging.

The idea of "waiting for charging" is something which is fine at home, or to charge the secondary battery pack.

Batteries in modern e-bikes are almost that already. The battery itself includes a controller which advertises what the batter can do often regulates both charge and discharge. This allows the battery to be changed and upgraded in the future.

The limiting factor is that currently every company that does this (f __you bosch) wants to keep this as closed as possible, meaning that we essentially can 't escape the vendor lock-in or even fix your own battery pack.

This needs to die. If I know I can get a charged battery at every station and be paying for delivered power I wouldn't care less about having my own. This would also put more incentives in keeping those packs as efficient as possible, which in turns is incredibly good for the environment.

</comment><comment><USER18> Political and ideological planning.. indeed what a wonderful idea as many others that the world has had seen... except, as dictated by physics the reality is not going to cooperate. Wrong economic signal crating overcapacity where not needed and deficiency where needed. The goals under which this folly is enforced will not be meet. And, the car industry, which will abuse the "game" (as they should) will to push for further and prolonged subsidizing.

</comment><comment><USER19> The large perspective is that the transition to ev's is happening, with a thousand steps along the way. My guess is that by 2030 a considerable majority of new car sales will be ev's, and governments are going to have massive buy- back programs to get all the ice's off the road.

</comment><comment><USER20> Why would you charge an electric car at a gas station? I thought the whole point was charging at home

<comment><USER21> What if you are going somewhere 800km from your house?

<comment><USER20> Fly I guess or rent a gas car. definitely not an application electric cars are meant for given current technology

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Seems like a sensible move to improve charging capabilities in the country and to reduce worry of potential customers, as gas stations are easy to find and well distributed. Over time the charging should probably be implemented elsewhere.

</comment><comment><USER23> This is a great start, but maybe they should do something about their use of lignite coal. It kind of defeats the point of an electric vehicle if the power it uses is being produced by burning about the dirtiest fuel out there..

</comment><comment><USER24> How that would work? I park my car in the petrol station and return 8hours later?

<comment><USER25> My Model S charges in 20 minutes at a Tesla Supercharger when not at home (very occasionally 40 min if I'm on a road trip and am charging to 100% state of charge). One of the grocery stores we frequent has a Supercharger station. Mandate DC fast charging.

<comment><USER26> In europe most the cars don't support proper (>100kW) fast charging, and even those that do have a myraid of incompatible standards.

<comment><USER25> Which is odd! Tesla has covered most of Europe with Superchargers, and supports 250kw charge rates in many locations. Curious why other automakers don't support higher charge rates.

<comment><USER27> Die hohen Herren der heiligen Karre schätzen es nicht von einem Emporkömmling getrieben zu werden.

The high Lords of the holy car dislike to be driven by some upstart/newcomer.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoNxS-s9nKQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoNxS-s9nKQ)

<comment><USER25> I'm enjoying the schadenfreude.

<comment><USER27> Good :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is like requiring gas pumps at horse stables.

The cool thing about charging stations is they don't require big underground tanks or really any more space than the parking spots. Put them where there's already parking.

</comment><comment><USER29> It makes more sense to require chargers at places people park at, like parking garages, malls, theaters, workplaces, restaurants... Many businesses in the US already need to comply with parking regulations.

</comment><comment><USER30> Gas stations are not completely obsolete, they have other uses, mini mart, restroom, tire/window maintenance, potentially electric. Some portion of them should continue to be useful.

</comment><comment><USER31> Doesn't seem practical for small gas stations with limited apron space for cars to be loitering around.

</comment><comment><USER27> V-Plus! Virtually ripple current free ultra smooth fast loading!

Prices can vary by time of day and demand in our network. Consult our App. (further conditions apply)

<comment><USER27> What? I didn't even mention the battery reconditioning by magical modulation!

edit: Thinking further about it I missed some "anti-sparqz".

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> This seems a bit unfair/cruel considering electric cars will probably decimate petrol stations. Most people will charge at home, or when parked at their destination (like work).

Edit: Curious to know why this comment is unpopular?

<comment><USER33> Those petrol stations are going to cop it eventually anyway. This just encourages them to hang a cable out the window to provide some incentive for EV owners caught short.

In preparation for the end of pumping gas as we know it, petrol stations in Australia have replaced the corner shops, delicatessens, etc. We don't have a single 7/11 in South Australia.

<comment><USER32> It would make much more sense for Germany to pay for (or mandate) the installation of electric car chargers at supermarkets and at strategic parking spots in cities. Petrol stations will cease to exist, along with all those mandated chargers.

> petrol stations in Australia have replaced the corner shops

Are petrol stations somehow responsible for consumer habits? What about sky- high residential realestate prices that make cornershops too expensive to open? Or low density housing that Australian cities are known for?

> We don't have a single 7/11 in South Australia.

There are plenty of convience stores in Adelaide, including ezimart and nightowl. Perhaps 7/11 franchisee fees are too high?

<comment><USER33> 7/11 exists in WA and the eastern states so it might not be franchise fees. In Adelaide, OTR is a dominant brand, putting a petrol station in a corner location along with quick essentials, coffee, fast food, etc.

Yes, of course real estate costs and subsequently rent make small business difficult here.

City chargers with a time limit would make sense also. I've seen them in various places here and abroad. One advantage of having them at petrol stations (convenience stores in the future) is that people don't hang around as long.

Last year when I was at a shopping centre in Century City LA, there was a line to use the superchargers that would've been 10+ cars long. They might need to add dozens of chargers to deal with future demand if people are shopping for 90 minutes.

<comment><USER34> Superchargers charge idle fees if you leave the car there for more than 5 minutes after charging finishes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> IMO when electric cars self ignite, it can be a very dangerous ignition source of gas stations

<comment><USER36> You realize every ICE vehicle that drives into the gas station has little explosions going on inside of it, right?

<comment><USER37> You know internal combustion engines have spark arrestors by regulation.

Your point still kind of stands: ICE engines aren't without fire risks.

<comment><USER36> And yet, engine fires still happen, and yet gas stations reason for existence is literally so gas powered cars can come up to it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>