Mark Zuckerberg Interviews Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen - <AUTHOR> https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/mark-zuckerberg-interviews-patrick-collison-and-tyler-cowen/ <comment><USER2> The most interesting part of the talk is what is avoided.

Like the positive effect of government policy. The US Anti-trust policy was very effective at times.

Temporary National Economic Committee (TNEC) 1938-1941 forced licensing of tens of thousands of patents.

When AT&T Bell Labs invented transistor it was forced to allow anyone to use it's knowledge. People went to Bell Labs and they were taught how to manufacture transistors. Massive industry spurted overnight. If transistor was invented today, the inventor would have a monopoly for transistor 25 years and generate huge profits.

<comment><USER3> In their public-facing work, Cowen and pc talk primarily about the importance and upside of progress and growth [1][2]. As someone who leans left, I find these writings both novel and compelling - some of the most compelling market- oriented thinking I've come across.

At the same time, pc, Cowen, and Zuck are in the thick of the SF "conservative libertarian" milieu. Thiel was a/the first major investor in FB, Stripe, and Cowen's "Emergent Ventures". Cowen's Mercatus center has deep ties (that I don't fully understand) with Koch industries and the federalist society. Etc.

I'm _far_ less impressed with the policies actually advocated for by these groups.

I'd actually be really interested in hearing the three of them discuss opportunities for government policy to have significant positive impact. I'd be surprised if pc wasn't a fan of at least some aspects of the FAA / NTSB [3], and I know Cowen advocates for public increases in basic research / R&D investment [4].

As "libertarian conservative" "public thought leaders", I wonder where else they might agree that government intervention can be net very-positive.

[Edit: sorry about the labels. There are real clusters of thinking and people here that need names, but I'm sure that they'd prefer different labels]

[1] [https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/we- need-...](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/we-need-new- science-progress/594946/)

[2] [https://www.amazon.com/Stubborn-Attachments-Prosperous- Respo...](https://www.amazon.com/Stubborn-Attachments-Prosperous-Responsible- Individuals/dp/1732265135) \+ thorough review/interview [https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/tyler-cowen- stubborn...](https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/tyler-cowen-stubborn- attachments/)

[3] [https://twitter.com/patrickc/status/1021995602970923010](https://twitter.com/patrickc/status/1021995602970923010)

[4] [https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/02/th...](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/02/the- public-funding-of-research-and-development.html)

<comment><USER3> Conversely, I'd love to read a Vox editorial that looks for opportunites for government deregulation/step-back.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What I was most struck by in the conversation is that Zuck is actually _doing_ some of the things Cowen advocates - policy experimentation, taking on long- term projects with uncertain payoffs, etc. at CZI.

I'm a huge fan of Patrick Collison and know that Stripe is also doing tons of experimentation and product innovation, but I was struck by how much less like an academic Zuck sounded. I don't know if it's a good or bad thing, but Cowen and Collison seem to focus on what _everyone_ should be doing, while Zuck's focus is on what he, personally, can get done (again, caveat being that Collison is simply so well-read that he comes off as an academic, while I'm aware that in reality he's doing a ton himself as well).

<comment><USER5> > _What I was most struck by in the conversation is that Zuck is actually > doing some of the things Cowen advocates - policy experimentation, taking on > long-term projects with uncertain payoffs, etc. at CZI._

I'm a big admirer of what Mark is doing with CZI (which is part of why Cowen/I agreed to the interview). Stripe is still a private company, but maybe I'll be able to intervene more directly over time. If I do, having CZI as precedent will be very helpful.

<comment><USER6> I don't want to sound like I am trolling or something. However, I find it hard to take anything Mark Zuckerberg does seriously. For that matter, I am so biased that I have no interest in these interviews at all (maybe to your detriment).

How do you see this? You say that you are an admirer of CZI. In my experience with obnoxious CEO types, they are happy to be philantrophic or "build" things when it suits them, and only then. Do you think it's a net positive? Wouldn't someone else (like Gates or even Buffet) be a better leader for these initiatives? I'm sure that if Mark did not get so successful with FB, it would have been the WA founders, otherwise someone else yet again.

Sorry if this is a steriotypical reaction, but I am sorry; I just can't trust something from camp Zuck.

<comment><USER4> If you went back 25 years, Bill Gates was considered by many (if not most) the "obnoxious CEO", but you're now using him as an example of "someone else I'd take seriously".

<comment><USER7> Interesting point, although I hesitate to see this as an effective counterpoint. People change, perceptions of people change, and those who were once maligned can become beloved, while those who were once beloved can become maligned. Bill Gates has followed the maligned to beloved arch over the last 25 years - it's easy for me to see how Mark could follow this same trajectory given that he's relatively early in his career.

<comment><USER8> I wouldn't call Gates "beloved", at least not in all circles. I consider his work with his foundation as basically table stakes in society for someone who has made his fortune from illegal, anti-competitive practices that damaged an entire industry.

Beyond that, while I'll certainly admit that government has a ton of problems, I'm not sure that the best model for funding -- for example -- research into various diseases is to put decisions under the control of rich people in the private sector, no matter how "reformed" and generous they seem. Or that super-rich people deserve to have praised philanthropic legacies because they managed to game the system during some point in their lives at the expense of income inequality and unfair markets.

Granted, Gates doing good with his money is orders of magnitude better than him sitting on it doing nothing, but I don't think he deserves all the praise he's been getting, given his background.

<comment><USER9> I agree. It's amazing how easily people slip into the ends justifying the means.

Yes, he's contributing now. Doesn't excuse the practices that got him there.

<comment><USER7> It's a tough thing you're hitting on - definitely something I wrestle with personally with respect to people who follow career arcs similar to Gates'. Personally, I don't believe the ends ever justify the means, although in admiring Gates today for the work he does I don't feel that I'm doing that nor excusing him for his past. Would I ever look to young Gates as a role model? No. Gates of today, yes. I imagine I could think of Zuckerberg the same way one day if he has a long enough career.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It seems that naturally with technological progress and population increase, we are doomed to always zero out our gains in the minute with losses in the aggregate. How is it that science and technology move forward but crop yields remain constant? Cowen mentions that it seems to be a "last mile problem" for delivering scientific research benefits to all. Collison has a cool list of "Fast" completed projects on his site of big tasks in human history on the order of hundreds of days. Zuckerberg's main focus is to invest in medicine research because he believes the long term eventuality of such investment is a definite decrease in healthcare. Overall, it seems that the questions focus on the global population in aggregate or nations as wholes, and on long-term or permanent solutions to emergent issues. I disagree that Zuckerberg's major impact will be on medicine, human opinion is much more influential than hard science in the shimmering parallax of annals of dimly lit human history backwards into the ages. I'm glad they are talking about such matters: the intellectual hubs of Vienna and Silicon Valley, the research (or lack of research) in coming to understand Human Progress. One thing that seems to be ignored the whole time is the progress of the individual, the progress of the family, and the progress of the tribe. We can measure in aggregate all day, but the only true test of progress is if our newer generations of humans shine brighter and are more illuminated than we are.

<comment><USER11> >but crop yields remain constant

Some, not all, crop yields have been stalling in recent years. I think Tyler's point was maybe the increasing cost of research and effort to keep moving the yield curves up, such that it may be stalling progress there.

Data on crop yields here: [https://ourworldindata.org/crop- yields](https://ourworldindata.org/crop-yields)

<comment><USER6> >> crop yields remain constant

> some, not all...

Good that you made this correction. In 1960 the average yield for tomatoes was 50 ton/ha or less in the area where I am from. [1]

In 2019, the yield was 100 ton/ha, but in the most optimal areas you get 140 ton/ha. If you use nets you get 250 tons/ha.

>> How is it that science and technology move forward but crop yields remain constant?

This is bordering on conspiracy theory; I have experience in tech in agriculture and the progress the last 50 years is nothing short of a humanitarian miracle. The miracle is far from complete though.

[1] First hand knowledge.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "What's interesting and, anyway should be concerning, is that for almost every conceivable applied measure we seem to be getting at best constant returns. But that's really bad because we see exponentially increasing inputs and constant return outputs."

Ironically, in terms of innovation, the yearly output of companies such as Facebook and Stripe has seemed somewhat constant, despite those companies getting many orders of magnitude bigger!

Maybe MZ and PC should investigate this issue at their own companies, and perhaps even begin to fix it. After that, they'll be better able to look at fixing innovation in the world at large.

<comment><USER13> I had been listening to some "Game A" vs "Game B" podcasts - Schmachtenberger, Hall (Greenhall), Rutt, etc, just before listening to this podcast. For example: [https://soundcloud.com/venturestories/game-b-in-a-silicon- va...](https://soundcloud.com/venturestories/game-b-in-a-silicon-valley)

These thinkers propose a common constraint for stagnant growth in education and medicine: a philosophy of science. There is much more to it, and unfortunately it's not a concise explanation. However, I find this conceptual frame much stronger than the education/medicine problem "commonalities" described by Zuck, Collison and Cowen. Further, the "Game A" insight seems to predict the shortcomings of an applied meta-approach of "the tool-building which comes from having the experience building engineering teams."

Game A: ("hill climbing") invest in better microscopy tools, even though "right now, the actual technology of microscopes is ahead of scientists' ability to process the data".

Game B: ("valley crossing") invest in a philosophy of science to better understand complexity management, causality and sense-making in the domains of education and medicine.

"And as engineers.. you really want to get into the code and step through it to see where the thing is breaking down" (Zuck). But whats 'broken' at FB? is it a server infrastructure? monetization? or is it interpersonal psychology of user relationships? Mistaking our tools' observation for reality, and optimizing for only what we can measure can build profits, but it has limits to make sense of complexity - and undefined/unmanaged complexity is common to the nature of education/medicine problems.

<comment><USER14> What exactly does it mean to invest in a 'philosophy of science'? I broadly interpret that as efforts geared towards gaining a big picture understanding of a problem, its subproblems, and interdependencies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> They discuss the fact that we are seeing linear gains from exponential investment in several fields (healthcare, semiconductors to name a few). This is a fascinating problem.

<comment><USER16> They discuss healthcare & higher education in parallel, and I do think the cost explosion in both is worth noting... But the differences are as important as the similarities.

Some big healthcare cost increases come from increased consumption. It's not _just_ incentives, bureaucracies and inefficiencies that caused cost increases.

Once upon a time we had less medical care to consume, fewer procedures, cancer treatments and other such costly stuff. Medical care costs were mostly clinical, doctors salaries and such. Prenatal care once meant occasional visits to a doctor or nurse. These days, it also means ultrasounds, genetic testing, more blood tests & such. That costs more.

There are just more available treatments to treat patients, especially the already high-cost stuff like cancer treatment, surgery.... These are new things that the medical industry are doing, and cost money. It's at least partly a "we buy more" situation, not just price inflation.

A sociology degree, OTOH, is not different in a than it was in the 1950s. There are nearly no non-efficiency related cost increases in higher-ed. No new, expensive stuff is being used to teach these students. Prices just increased, and most of that got observed into administration.

In terms of ROI at a societal level... Idk if it's usefully measurable, for medicine at least.

There definitely aren't massive, healthcare-related increases I gross life expectancy and such. Does that mean bad ROI? This gets philosophical.

<comment><USER17> > It's not just incentives, bureaucracies and inefficiencies that caused cost > increases.

This might be true if there weren't stark counterexamples, e.g. Singapore at 1/4 the cost, with better outcomes. Notably there, government dollars flow through to consumers who choose among competitors by price and quality.

<comment><USER18> There is also a lower focus on end of life care in Singapore, which makes up the vast majority of spending in the American system.

These issues are cultural, not just political or economic. I am looking forward to seeing what PC and TC can come up with for a common framework. This seems to be a tough problem.

<comment><USER19> The healthcare sector constitutes 18% of our GDP, a truly insane amount. That is 7-8% (~1.5 trillion) more than it should be. Excessive end-of-life care explains almost none of that. The two biggest issues in American healthcare are:

\- Zero price transparency

\- Payment through intermediaries like insurance companies and your employer, who often pays half of your insurance premiums and other healthcare expenditures

With no price transparency, prices are just made up with little connection to actual value delivered. Because of the middlemen, most patients don't feel the full cost of healthcare. Patients in aggregate still pay for the full negotiated cost, just indirectly in the form of higher premiums and forgone wages (marginal premiums paid by the employer).

At this point, Medicare for All is our best hope. A true market-based healthcare economy, as great as it may be, is a pipe dream. With Medicare for All, the government would set reimbursement rates in stone. Most doctors who want a substantial amount of patients would have to accept those rates. Unlike insurance companies, the government would not be able to aggressively increase its "premiums," or taxes, every year and it won't get kickbacks from hospitals for high cost care. The government would also set empirically backed standards of care that lower their cost burden with no impact on average lifespan.

We could potentially allow for parallel "luxury care" purchased by the patient if they want to be able to expedite their non-emergency knee replacement from 6 months to 2 weeks. The government would be incentivized to launch health initiatives and laws that help lower the rates of obesity and diabetes in the population. Lastly, the government would also be incentivized to increase the supply of doctors. There are multiple instances in the past when medical organizations lobbied or misled Congress into over-limiting the supply of medical residencies. They also had a hand in restricting the number and size of medical schools. So yes, overpaid, scarce medical professionals are a big part of the cost burden, and their representative institutions are making sure they stay overpaid. Only recently have medical organizations lobbied to increase the number of residencies again. That's just damage control.

The American people should not accept compromise on healthcare any longer. That's what the ACA was, and it did not do enough. Medicare for All will bring us in line with the rest of the developed world which has better health outcomes at a much lower cost. We can save >$1 trillion and put that money towards things like a national high speed rail network, anti-poverty efforts, government-subsidized corporate internships, and an accredited national online education and retraining platform with the best professors on every subject imaginable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I loved this interview, and generally have a lot of time for Tyler Cowen's podcasts and blog.

This topic is one that Peter Thiel has been talking about for over a decade. I have a general theory that whatever smart people are talking about now, Thiel was discussing 10 years before. This is why I always try to find out everything I can about what Thiel is talking about today - it's like getting a glimpse into the future.

<comment><USER21> it's likely Thiel influenced both of them (is invested in both)

> what Thiel is talking about today

what he said 10 years ago is more actionable

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm always cautious about Cowen as he receives backing from the Koch network.

[https://macro.economicblogs.org/naked- capitalism/2018/05/sco...](https://macro.economicblogs.org/naked- capitalism/2018/05/scofield-tyler-cowen-koch-brothers-funding-mercatus-center- george-mason-university-academic-freedom/)

<comment><USER23> The Kochs have also funded stem-cell research and gay rights initiatives -- are you similarly cautious about those things?

<comment><USER22> They also fund widespread climate denial, federal court stacking, and the tea party (probably not this anymore), likely at many times the magnitude. So yes I am cautious.

<comment><USER24> To be clear: You are also cautious about stem-cell research and gay rights initiatives, because those have been Koch-funded?

<comment><USER22> No I've never encountered those efforts and have had no reason to evaluate them one way or another. Maybe they are too small to have reached any appreciable public notice? (or at least my notice).

To be honest though, I feel the opinions and speech of billionaires are amplified in our media so one should always be more critical and cautious of any of their projects, because money gives the ability to shortcut a more critical vetting of the effort.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> > Collison: when we sort of talk about the phenomenon of "progress," you know, > I think GDP or GDP per capita is a pretty good first approximation measure > of it and it correlates strongly ——

I got confused when Collison said that there was scientific evidence that business productivity increases with improved management practices. That's the thesis of business schools and management consultants. What's the new idea here?

1) What's the difference between "Progress Studies" and economics?

2) When businesses acquire their competitors, does this accelerate or inhibit progress?

<comment><USER26> He's referring to research by Nick Bloom, an economist at Stanford. They've worked together.

Ctrl-F management on his research page ([https://nbloom.people.stanford.edu/research](https://nbloom.people.stanford.edu/research)). In one paper, they randomly assign consulting services from a management consultancy to manufacturing plants in India and found a 17% increase in productivity.

<comment><USER27> not sure that means it generalizes to all countries or types of business

<comment><USER26> Oh, definitely not! As with all RCTs, gotta worry about generalizability.

He has a lot of other work showing correlations between management and productivity at much more scale, but this was the one attempt (that I know of) trying to establish something more causal

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> there is also a video version of the interview at [https://about.fb.com/news/2019/11/a-conversation-with- mark-z...](https://about.fb.com/news/2019/11/a-conversation-with-mark- zuckerberg-patrick-collison-and-tyler-cowen/)

</comment><comment><USER29> > Collison: But even if technology solved that, I guess my worry would be that > the socio-institutional dynamics that have ruined cities or made them less > effective or whatever, probably also generalized and applied to other > domains.

Reminder that Stripe _as a company_ put out a position opposing Prop C. The hypocrisy, I guess.

Someone needs to update pg's 'founders should live in the future' to specifically include FAGSLC as the future, because otherwise we're just wasting heat.

<comment><USER30> >Fully Automated Gay Space Luxury Communism

For those having trouble parsing that acronym.

<comment><USER31> I'm afraid to ask, but, in what community is this phrase spoken frequently enough to warrant an acronym?

<comment><USER30> Satirical-edgy leftist meme pages

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> "So for example, if you look at the U.S., productivity growth mid-century or say between, you know, 1920, 1970, was maybe about 1.9% a year. Now most economists think it's much lower, maybe around sort of .4% a year, something like that."

Isn't this just because the US was riding off of the coattails of two world wars and being _the_ global superpower? I wonder what the data says about the rest of the world in that period, probably not so good?

</comment><comment><USER33> Why don't we ever see Larry Page doing such things? Don't even remember when I last saw news about him.

<comment><USER34> He has a vocal cord disorder and speaking is apparently a hardship for him.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Tyler makes a compelling case in his book[1] that economic growth is responsible for most of the biggest improvements in human flourishing over the past century. He concludes that economic growth is a moral imperative.

All three participants in this interview discuss the "exponential inputs, linear outputs" problem/slow-down that industries face as they scale and mature.

Question: how far does ROI have to fall for the growth of an industry to cost more than its returns to society are morally worth? Is this even possible? Or is there an assumption that the market would somehow fix/prevent this scenario?]

[1] Tyler Cowen, Stubborn Attachments, 2018

</comment><comment><USER35> Mark Zuckerberg takes it for granted that the most important things in the universe are productivity growth and the number of people citing your publication and talks about ways we can make these numbers go up more in this podcast.

Are those really our biggest priorities right now? Should they be? How many more decades are we supposed to pretend the pie getting bigger will cause all problems to ~ _magically tricklesolve themselves_ ~, because this there is lots of evidence that this is not happening.

<comment><USER36> Maybe a growing pie is not perfect, but it is greatly preferable to a shrinking one. For a simple example, take a company that looses some contracts and stops growing; you get new conflicts or old ones become critical, ppl start leaving, etc. As long as the pie is growing, it can hide or solve by default many existing problems which would be very difficult or costly to fix otherwise.

<comment><USER37> Is growing pie sustainable?

<comment><USER38> Why wouldn't it be? Humans have infinite wants and needs. These change overtime in terms of taste/perception as well. So the counter point should be made as to how this isn't the case and that a "growing pie" is actually against human nature.

<comment><USER39> It's the compound interest problem. If you keep compounding growth, like growing GDP at 1-2% a year, within some few thousand years you've grown bigger than all the resources within a sphere the same number of light years in radius. So clearly, growth is not sustainable and must eventually slow down until it approaches zero.

To be clear, we're far away from that today. But the parent is mathematically correct, the best kind of correct.

<comment><USER39> A lot of people nitpicking at the argument here, about resource substitutions, efficiency improvements, etc.

So let's simplify this argument a little. It's not possible to have infinite growth in a finite universe. By definition infinity > not infinity for arbitrarily large values of not infinity.

Therefore the limit of growth as time approaches infinity is 0.

At some point you reach the physical limit of the system and exponential growth ends. This is true even for digital systems if the digital good involves some physical resource like energy, storage space, bandwidth, etc.

For example, if we keep growing energy usage at the historical rate of 3% a year, we would cook ourselves with the waste heat within 400 years. It doesn't matter where the energy comes from. Now we can get around that by moving off the earth, which buys time, but eventually, also in short order, we'd use all the available energy from our star. We could get around that through nuclear energy sources or widening the area to encompass more stars. But there is only so much matter and energy in the universe. Eventually the show stops.

I challenge you to find a theoretical counter example.

<comment><USER40> > At some point you reach the physical limit of the system and exponential > growth ends. This is true even for digital systems if the digital good > involves some physical resource like energy, storage space, bandwidth, etc.

At some point well before that, the sun will go red giant and swallow earth, so that's sort of beside the point. In the meantime, if we continue to fuel GDP growth via inefficient use of non-renewable natural resources, we'll have big problems far sooner than any astrophysical limit sets in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> For those seeking the direct audio link:

[http://traffic.libsyn.com/forcedn/cowenconvos/CWT-BONUS- Zuck...](http://traffic.libsyn.com/forcedn/cowenconvos/CWT-BONUS- ZuckerbergCollison-podcast-v1.mp3)

</comment><comment><USER42> What is the software package that MZ references at 55:21? It sounds like "nepariu"?

</comment><comment><USER43> > U.S. life expectancy is basically going up in linear fashion. But if you > look at expenditures, we used to spend a few percentage points of GDP on > healthcare, and now it's about 18%. So we've gone up to 18%, and we're not > even boosting the rate. I'm not saying it's the fault of any one group of > people, but something has gone wrong.

(US life expectancy actually declined for a 3rd straight year due to "deaths of despair" like drug overdoses and suicides)

But as for the 18% of GDP on healthcare, medicine is an inelastic good that has severe supply side restrictions (AMA + legislation) and no price transparency. Companies are profiting greatly, it's great for GDP and terrible for people.

Similar for the other "cost disease" areas mentioned: education and housing (though for different reasons).

Slatestarcodex has a good overview on cost disease too: [https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on- cost...](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost- disease/)

</comment><comment><USER21> there's a video of the conversation in zuck's facebook page

</comment><comment><USER44> The self-importance of pretty much everything in this interview is literally unbearable.

I will give you the precis: I think X is important, why doesn't everyone think X is important (usually about five sentences of escalating grandeur about the importance of X), because I think X is important and "no-one is talking about X" you know that I am a real genius...on and on.

Cowen is also an utter ignoramus. He seems to confuse being an economist with having knowledge about literally everything (the mistakes Collison makes can be forgiven, there is no reason why an economist shouldn't realise they aren't an expert on literally everything). Btw, afaik, he is the only economist who has actually tried political philosophy too (again, the ego on this guy)...he made the same kind of trite insights and tried to pass them off as signs of his genius there too.

<comment><USER45> > He seems to confuse being an economist with having knowledge about literally > everything.

Cowen does have knowledge on almost literally everything. If you listen to his podcast he will get into the weeds with experts in a diverse array of fields. When he interviewed Kareem Abdul-Jabbar he asked about specifics of his basketball career and also his writing and political work, when he interviewed an Asian food writer he asked specifics about cuisine in different regions of China. He always seems to have studied the entire body of work of every guest he speaks to every week. He reads and travels extensively. You may still think Cowen's ideas are bad, but he is obviously well-informed on the issues he discusses.

<comment><USER44> I am sure that Cowen prepares for those interviews. But he doesn't have knowledge "on almost literally" (this isn't a phrase that makes sense btw) everything.

I am not going to do a line-by-line but several things he says in the interview are just inaccurate. That is fine, I am specifically saying that no- one knows everything. The issue is that he goes on to make other points based on stuff he doesn't understand.

As I pointed out too, his career is somewhat chequered. And he has a history of writing grand papers on subjects which he knows nothing about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Patrick should take some oratory lessons. As a CEO it is important to be able to speak slowly, be brief and on the point.

<comment><USER47> Only on HN will you find randos confidently telling a founder-CEO who grew his company from $0 to $35B what's "important" about being a CEO.

<comment><USER48> I'm pretty sure I've seen this phenomena on Reddit, Twitter, and Medium, too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Mark Zuckerberg is too full of himself. Not only does he have a track record of not having an imagination, he seems to have got it into his head, that if he reads two books on Economics and Sociology over the summer he needs to be at the policy making table. WTF seriously? I have no idea why he is being entertained. Hand the cash over to experts and fuck off.

<comment><USER4> > Not only does he have a track record of not having an imagination, he seems > to have got it into his head, that if he reads two books on Economics and > Sociology over the summer he needs to be at the policy making table.

The latter is at least arguably true if one assumes that's all the thought he's put into things, but the former statement is just wildly false

<comment><USER49> The road to hell is paved with good intentions. He is not qualified to be in the room. The problem when people like him with a big chequebook show up, is the majority of "experts" will just pander to get the cheque which has many unintended consequences. Fact of life.</comment></comment></comment>


C2: Why We Hate Lisp - <AUTHOR> http://wiki.c2.com/?WhyWeHateLisp <comment><USER2> Archived copy that doesn't require JS:

[https://archive.fo/Cm3DR](https://archive.fo/Cm3DR)

</comment><comment><USER3> Because we don't understand it, period.</comment>


YouTube auto-censors some phrases that criticize Chinese government - <AUTHOR> https://reclaimthenet.org/youtube-auto-censors-phrases-criticize-chinese-government/ <comment><USER2> Previous discussions of YT censoring some chinese terms in the last 14 days:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23223219](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23223219)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23221264](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23221264)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23172564](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23172564)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23310889](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23310889)

</comment><comment><USER3> Can we talk about why you can't even mention a specific person's name without getting banned? This goes for YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. "Eric Ciaramella"

<comment><USER4> Or even "Communist bandits", "Pooh Bear"!</comment></comment>


Elon Musk: A thermostat-sized box may one day power your house - <AUTHOR> http://www.marketwatch.com/story/elon-musk-a-thermostat-sized-box-may-one-day-power-your-house-2014-09-17?mod=googletopstories

<comment><USER2> "50 gigawatts of battery storage by 2020".

It's as if the the weatherman on TV said the temperature is 3 hours tomorrow.

Reporting is practically useless like this.</comment>


Temporary solution to Google Verbatim search - <AUTHOR> http://codestruggle.blogspot.com/2011/12/google-verbatim-search.html <comment><USER2> I wonder how well his site works in less-than-modern browsers - doing "curl [http://codestruggle.blogspot.com/2011/12/google-verbatim- sea...](http://codestruggle.blogspot.com/2011/12/google-verbatim-search.html), for instance, returns no actual readable content. (I wonder how well it would work with Instapaper?)

<comment><USER3> Works on links (you have to click through to non-js version); but links is a modern web browser.

I'm guessing he/his host is using mod-security and blocking curl; or something similar.

<comment><USER2> Nope, I grabbed the source and made sure all links pointed to <http://> etc etc, and it loaded the page fine.

The dependence on javascript to load your resources seems dumb in this instance. Whatever happened to being able to degrade gracefully? With noscript, his page would be completely blank.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Now if only verbatim search entirely worked. On a search of [["everything wrong" crossfade]] verbatim cuts the number of results somewhat but they're still mostly bogus results that only contain the phrase "everything's wrong".

</comment><comment><USER5> Very helpful, thanks...

In Chrome I also have the language set to English with "hl=en" (since it always seems to want to hand me German results instaed). Adding the verbatim search flag resulted in the following search engine string for me, FWIW.

[https://www.google.com/search?{google:RLZ}{google:acceptedSu...](https://www.google.com/search?{google:RLZ}{google:acceptedSuggestion}{google:originalQueryForSuggestion}sourceid=chrome&ie={inputEncoding}&q=%s&hl=en&tbs=li:1)

</comment><comment><USER6> something's screwy with blogger. in firefox 3.6.23, i get nothing at all on any of your pages--just blank white--unless i add `?v=0` to the URLs (something i figured out by trying in IE7, which advised me that

> Dynamic Views in Blogger require the use of a modern browser, and are not > currently supported on mobile devices.

which is a dumb error message, as it looks at first glance like it's assuming i'm on a mobile.

</comment><comment><USER7> Anyone know how to do this in Chrome? The field to alter the search parameters is disabled

<comment><USER8> I use gooverbatim, a userscript that adds a "Yes Really" button to search results. You don't get verbatim all the time, but have an easy way to get them if Google guesses wrong. It installs in Chrome like an extension. <http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/118203></comment></comment>


Helicopter Game using HTML5 (Canvas / font-face etc) - <AUTHOR> http://arandomurl.com/2010/08/05/html5-helicopter.html

<comment><USER2> Great game and great code.

daleharvey - your javascript is a pleasure to read sir. I'm trying to learn js/canvas more and its good quality stuff like this that really helps.

Well done.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks that is really nice to hear.

I have spent a long time writing some really big applications with javascript and still find it such a strange language, every time I think I have found "the style" I hit a reason why I shouldnt be doing it that way, luckily its really fun at the same time.

<comment><USER3> You've got me curious: What type of big js applications do you spend that time writing? Anything game related, or is this purely a hobby?

<comment><AUTHOR> I was a cofounder of an online spreadsheet company funded by seedcamp, the ui was entirely in javascript(15+kloc), and I have some chat clients + some other things that arent complete.

The game stuff is purely a hobby (for now), they are quite fun to play and to program, and I learn a lot from it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well done. Have you considered submitting this to the 10K contest? (<http://10k.aneventapart.com/>)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks I hadnt noticed that contest, It should certainly be able to squeeze into 10k

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Fun game and great proof of concept, though the aerodynamics aren't very realistic and whenever I've flown a helicopter through a cavern it's never never seemed that quite that blocky.

Neat easter egg at the end though.

</comment><comment><USER6> Shameless plug: also check out my "floor" game, it's written in processing.js.

<http://nuwa.madk.org/game/floor.html>

<comment><USER7> Shameless indeed. Your game doesn't seem to work in firefox (or at all) from what I can tell.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> You need to tweak the speed - this is completely unplayable on my Macbook with 4GB of RAM and an SSD hard drive. Copter crashes in a second before I can do anything. But looks cool!

<comment><AUTHOR> thats strange, its a fixed and low framerate and it isnt maxing any cpu so it shouldnt really get any faster on a faster machine.

I have been told between this and pacman that I make the games a little fast, but I do like them on the fast side.

<comment><USER9> Is there any technical reason for the 19fps framerate or is it just something you used to balance the speed?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeh I started it at 30fps and it was nice and smooth, but as it got harder I needed to slow it down, 19fps was the slowest that didnt look terrible, just reminded me to fix up the code so I can speed up fps while slowing down the play, it was running 30fps with no problems or lag.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Nice! It's a bit fast, but fun. Coincidentally, I just finished my version about a week or two ago. I used SVG, HTML5, CSS3-Fonts, etc. Check it out:

<http://www.jacobrossi.com/tech/helicopter/index.xhtml>

<comment><USER11> Your game crashed my FireFox, FYI.

Version 3.6.8 On Windows 7 64 bit

<comment><USER10> I just tested it in 3.6.8 on Win 7). No crash for me. Though Firefox has a hard time rendering it (~30FPS, or about 1/2 the frame rate of Chrome, IE9 Platform Preview 4, Safari, or Opera!). Try another browser perhaps ;-)

Also, if you have a lot of add-ons/plugins it could make it even slower (some of these try to modify the page every time it changes).

If you get any error codes, I'd love to know the details! Thx

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Holy fuck, that is difficult, played for a little bit and got 366.

<comment><USER13> I got something similar, too. (Then I tried again and got something slightly over 800m. The tunnel is getting smaller.)

If you like the concept, you should also have a look at Canabalt (<http://adamatomic.com/canabalt/>).

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Nice!

I once had a go at making the same thing:

<http://petegoodman.com/labs/js-canvas-copter/>

</comment><comment><USER15> My HTMLcopter goes schwaa schwaa schwaa schwaa schwaa...

Nifty game. Gravitational acceleration constant should be tweaked so my HTMLcopter doesn't go CRASH because I wasn't ready for the game to start. Great proof of concept nevertheless.

Here's one I wrote (but was "designed" by Shinji Kobayashi, a humorous character of mine):

<http://www.parodycheck.net/shinji/cannon/>

<comment><USER16> I couldn't control it with the mouse reasonably at all, control seemed laggy compared to enter key.

<comment><USER17> For some reason, I was able to control it with the mouse for 6 seconds, then it became too laggy and also had to use enter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is addictive in the way Canabalt is. Well-played, sir.

</comment><comment><USER19> Fun game and impressive script!

Personally, the game was too fast (speed wise) in Chrome. However, FireFox and Safari 5 played at a much more reasonable speed.

While, I was expecting the speed to be a bit slower in FireFox, I was curious about the difference between Chrome and Safari (a V8 vs SquirrelFish difference...??)

<comment><USER20> > javascript:alert(Heli.FPS=10);

obviously just swap 10 for your desired FPS

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I remember playing a game like this back in 2001 on my Palm. I think it was called SFCave. Very addictive.

</comment><comment><USER22> For @font-face in canvas, I find that if I use the font on a page element, and defer my drawing until onload() it works reliably. Not ideal, but workable.

</comment><comment><USER23> I got a version of this helicopter game for my iPhone (iCopter) over a year ago and I still play it. It's mysteriously addictive.

<comment><USER24> The version I found for Android is called ThrottleCopter, if anyone else wants to destroy their productivity. It appears to be a fairly faithful port of the common flash version I've seen (blue helicopter, green cave), although with better hit detection. My best so far is 23470.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Never thought I'd say this so soon, but this HTML5 game is too fast. Great game/code though. Now we need a 3D tunnel version.

<comment><USER20> > javascript:alert(Heli.FPS=10);

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This reminds me that I should really get my finger out and finish some of my HTML5/Canvas experiments at some point.

</comment><comment><USER27> Woohoo 410meters after 5 plays (probably not much).

The instructions should say HOLD enter key, not PRESS.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you are right, updated

<comment><USER27> 722m :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Your games don't load in Chromium from the dev channel, could you please fix that?

<comment><AUTHOR> I will check it out. strange that any of the feature tests would be failing.

<comment><USER28> I'm on Linux btw, that might be part of it too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Seems I do much better if I hum the Airwolf theme tune. How does that work?

</comment><comment><USER30> It works quite well under Opera 10.61.

</comment><comment><USER31> Can't see it on my Nexus One. Too bad

</comment><comment><USER32> what are the keys? it didn't seem to work with the arrows???

<comment><USER33> Enter

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> for reference, my personal record: 693m

<comment><USER35> I beat you, 1017m

<comment><USER36> 1106 :-)

My productivity, on the other hand, seems to have gone firmly into negative territory...</comment></comment></comment>


Homeland Security: Don't use IE due to bug - <AUTHOR> http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/usanow/2014/04/28/internet-explorer-bug-homeland-security-clandestine-fox/8409857/

<comment><USER2> Wait, how do we know that DHS is serious here?

I mean, they may be saying not to use Internet Explorer in order to put pressure on Microsoft to give the DHS a backdoor, or use an encryption method that the NSA can crack, but we can't. Seems very suspicious to me, a lot like when the US government was opposing Google and Yahoo cooperation, to drive Yahoo into Microsoft's more compliant arms.</comment>


Cassandra cluster monitoring tool - <AUTHOR> http://www.datastax.com/products/opscenter

<comment><AUTHOR> It's free for production use now...</comment>


World Energy Hits a Turning Point: Solar That's Cheaper Than Wind - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-15/world-energy-hits-a-turning-point-solar-that-s-cheaper-than-wind <comment><USER2> I have high hopes for ARES [1]. just a heavy train on a hill with a regenerative break. Add lots of tracks, multiple trains per track, solar above the rails. Avoids needing all the water for pumped hydro storage. none of toxic stuff to deal with when batteries have reached their end of life. Zero carbon emission (aside from whatever is required for manufacturing) is just hugely appealing.

If solar prices continue as they have for another 3-5 years, the question is going to be pretty clear, how do we store all of this insanely cheap power. I'm a little mystified we're not taxing carbon emissions and subsidizing storage. But hey, there are clearly powerful forces at play, that don't agree with me.

[1] [http://www.aresnorthamerica.com/](http://www.aresnorthamerica.com/)

<comment><USER3> I'm extremely skeptical that ARES will ever be cost efficient. Potential energy is proportional to mass * g * d_height - any reasonable grid storage option will need to be moving truly enormous amounts of mass.

Back of the napkin here:

California consumes 9.54 * 10^17 Joules of electricity / year, or 1.09 * 10^14 Joules / hour.

Suppose we wish to hold in storage enough energy to supply to grid for twelve hours, since the sun does not shine at night. Assume we have a 100% efficient method of recovering potential energy stored on a train. Suppose we find a suitable mountain with a 1000 meter height differential. Then according to e = mgh, we would need to shift a load of 1.33*10^11 kilograms to supply twelve hours of electrical demand.

Let's assume we use the cheapest rock we can to fill this mass. I assume you can get wholesale pea gravel for $8 a metric ton.

Then the cost of gravel alone is $1.07 billion.

That doesn't sound so bad, but remember, this project will need ~1333500 100-metric-ton freight cars. Suppose they cost $120,000 / ea. Then suddenly, the cost of the train cars is 160 billion.

This is on the order of magnitude of the entire California yearly state budget. And also ignoring a bunch of other cost factors that will increase the total price by another 1-2 orders of magnitude.

Pumped storage hydroelectric is viable precisely because the reservoir holds your water for essentially free. Train cars are far, far more expensive.

<comment><USER2> There is a very good chance i've screwed up my math, but my silly back of the envelope calculation says,

9.54 * 10^17 Joules/ (3.6 *10^9 Joules/mwh) = 265000000 mwh. Levelized cost, [1] (operating + construction + financing) works out to around $72 per mwh, over 30 years. (going with the cheapest average option) So if we were to throw away everything today, and be required start fresh, I get about $570 billion.

That's clearly a stupid thing to do.

However, my big point is, if solar falls another order of magnitude (which is a pretty big if), we can afford to spend a lot on storage. I think solar is now competitive with coal, but it's not dispatchable.

I'd argue solar would probably need 4x the amount of production of a similar coal plant, it's only going to work really well part of the day, and there are losses in storage (ares claims 20% loss, which is comparable to batteries)

there's not much weight difference between gravel and packed dirt. I figured they'd just use whatever mass is handy when they're building the track.

I don't know if $120k is a fair price. the cars have to have regenerative breaks, which are likely expensive. Just building something strong enough to support 100 metric tons can't be cheap. I don't know if there are any special features of regular freight cars that can be abandoned to cut down costs. On the other hand, if you're building a million of them, the costs would likely come down a bit.

Perhaps solar has reached the end, and any improvements will be slow. I don't believe that, and i do believe some sort of efficient storage will be the big focus in energy going forward.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#United_States)

<comment><USER4> IF solar falls another order of magnitude, it will be far cheaper (which only has the conversion efficiency problem) to go for power-to-gas technology that has the additional advantage of being able to use gas (not gasoline) powered cars with normal range.

<comment><USER5> IIRC one of the big ideas behind ARES is to make money by supplying peak power for consumption and possibly even by taking peak power production off the grid.

Basically a grid scale AC capacitor equivalent.

I only have education in electronics and no other experience with High Voltage or big grids so I might be very wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a really great mini-documentary about solar from May this year. They talk about the tumbling price and interview investors and manufacturers in China. The eye opening moment for me was the fact that they already have 2M people in China manufacturing panels, and production is still ramping up.

It looks like solar is starting to become an inevitability.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmyrbKBZ6SU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmyrbKBZ6SU)

<comment><USER7> ... until import tariffs with China end the solar revolution here.

<comment><USER8> Lots of places around the world not the US. Those buyers will continue to drag the price of solar down.

The US election doesn't mean a thing for the energy market. We'll be dragged along with the rest of the world by market forces.

<comment><USER9> Furthermore, there is a world market for other energy sources, which are all somewhat fungible. So if solar takes off around the world, fossil fuel demand will slack and prices will continue to drop making their extraction less viable.

Hopefully we also start to see some significant replacement of fossil fuels used for transportation.

<comment><USER10> We need to use solar to pay for the extraction and transportation of fossil fuels.

<comment><USER11> LOL, very good point. Maybe for the back of the classroom you could clarify?

It is clear that the calculation or real EROEI is very hard when you start counting all externalities and dependencies.

Do you have any good sources of anylsis on this that you could recommend?

<comment><USER12> What do those terms mean?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The good thing about solar is that it leverages off the semiconductor industry, whereas other renewables do not. For example, in the case of smartphones, before they existed accelerometers and GPS IC's were crazy expensive, but now they are cheap. Solar probably has years and years to go before it is as cheap as possible. I would not be surprised if solar hits $0.10/watt in 10 years. Basically because as the demand picks up and money is being made, more companies will be saying, "if we can just increase our efficiency by 20% or so, we can lower the price and win huge contracts.." so they will be trying things like multilayers, changing the structure to improve efficiency as the panel heats up, coatings, lenses, etc that can all be done in low cost ways. Definitely would be interesting to compare how much it costs to run/maintain a solar farm vs. a natural gas power plant. Basically you have to deliver the fuel to the plant, maintain all the stuff, pay for the workers to make sure stuff doesn't blow up, etc. Seems like with a solar farm you basically need a guy with a truck and a leaf blower.

<comment><USER14> The big difference between solar PV and microelectronics is that there's very little miniaturization achievable in PV. More power requires more area; light conversion efficiency increases only slowly over time. The sunlight-to- electricity conversion efficiency of common solar cells has not even doubled since 1980. There's less than a factor of 4 left between the efficiency of panels you can buy for your rooftop today and the _maximum efficiency permitted by the laws of nature_. That's quite a difference from the past trajectory of microelectronics, where Moore's Law doubled efficiency over and over.

That's also the short explanation for why companies with deep experience in microelectronics manufacturing, like Intel, TSMC, or Texas Instruments, did not come to dominate solar PV manufacturing. PV is a very different game. It's about producing huge quantities of doped silicon wafers with little patterning across their surfaces.

However, it is true that PV has made enormous strides in reducing manufacturing costs, though aggressive miniaturization was not how it was done. In sunny regions PV now has the lowest O&M costs of any new-build electricity source.

<comment><USER13> interesting.. would be interesting to listen to your explanation while listening to some of your music mr. glass. :-)

<comment><USER14> :-) Philip K Dick meets Philip Glass: I combined two of my favorite Philips for my nom de plume.

<comment><USER15> Are you in the renewable energy industry in the US? If yes, send me a message on the e-mail in my profile please.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The really interesting thing here is what this means for all the coal-warriors making their resurgence (or thinking they will): they're not going to find investors for new plants.

If solar is cheaper, and scales well (i.e. you can just keep deploying it, pretty much anywhere, and have it get cheaper the more you do) then all the smart money is going to go to building as much PV as quickly as possible. There'll be no one willing to invest in coal-plants because they'll be looking at the on-going costs, looking at the up-front costs, placement issues, build- times, risk of actual action on carbon pricing and saying "you know what, let's build out solar instead".

<comment><USER17> This scenario is already playing out and it's largely due to market forces. More people are employed in the solar industry now than are employed by the coal industry. Simply put, coal in the US is dead because it can't compete with gas, solar, and wind. That is why it is silly when people say we need to prop up the coal industry. We would much better off by just training those workers to install solar panels or become wind turbine technicians because there is actually a growing market there.

<comment><USER18> Coal working jobs are more dangerous but pay much more than solar panel installation. The issue the coal workers and uneducated middle class have faced recently is a loss in earning potential (with existing skill set) moreso than absolute unemployment.

The internet suggests the average hourly pay is $23 for coal to $16 for solar installers. That's a big hair cut, plus solar installers likely have to live in or closer to cities, generally increasing cost of living and providing one more obstacle that makes it hard to switch careers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Solar and wind are so different that comparing them doesn't really make any sense. Generally a combination is optimal. The news in this article though is that solar prices have tumbled in the last few years - whereas wind prices have declined at a more expected rate.

Comparing the photo-voltaic capacity installed in 2016 with wind capacity is a bit misleading, as wind typically has a much higher capacity factor than solar - so the 59GW of wind will almost certainly produce more electricity than the 70GW of solar.

<comment><USER20> > _59GW of wind will almost certainly produce more electricity than the 70GW > of solar._

What do you mean? These are not some peak figures, they are expected energy production figures.

<comment><USER21> Capacity factor means "take the amount of MWh actually produced by the plant, divide by the number of MWh that theoretically could be produced if it generated its maximum output 24/7/365." 70GW of solar refers to the maximum instantaneous production (note that it is measured in GW not GWh). So while in full sun, all of that solar is generating 70GW of power per unit time but at night, it generates 0W. Average that over a year and it generated about 28% of it's maximum power over time.

Hydro plants have huge ranges of capacity factors depending on other restrictions on the dam like if it is used for flood mitigation, if it is operated as a peaker plant, and if it snowed a lot the past winter. Nuclear Plants generally have capacity factors in the 90% range to account for swapping out fuel periodically. Fossil fuel plants have capacity factors of >90% unless they are used as peaker plants.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> If perovskite pans out -- and it is starting to look like it will -- then solar is about to get a lot cheaper still.

See [https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/10/161020142037.h...](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/10/161020142037.htm)

</comment><comment><USER23> Just couple of days I saw this documentary by national geographic about world's largest solar power plant in India completed in ~8 months.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gM-0lrIxCnE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gM-0lrIxCnE)

</comment><comment><USER24> i am really happy that the "green" energy production is in such a price war. It's Solar vs. Wind not Solar vs. Coal. I don't care what's cheaper as long as it's not Coal!

<comment><USER25> There is sadly a fix for that, which is to lift carbon tax and relax requirements for having carbon sequestration systems - and coal would be quite cheap again.

<comment><USER26> Why would we ever do that?

Remember that the untaxed price of coal isn't a real price for it. Without a tax the market does not take the externality of its environmental effect into an account.

Economically speaking, a high tax on coal/other fossil fuels is simply forcing the market to consider its full and actual price.

<comment><USER27> I'm very confused by this conversation. What taxes are you guys talking about? They don't exist as far as I'm aware. I am aware of some subsidies, but not taxes on specifically carbon/coal/etc.

<comment><USER28> I'd guess he's talking about this: [http://ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/ets_en](http://ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/ets_en)

P.S. I agree about the comment regarding negative externalities not being accounted for unless something like this is in place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This does not include storage costs to offset the cyclic nature of solar.

<comment><USER30> For smallish amounts of solar, you need stabilization but not storage -- when it's sunny, there's more air conditioning usage.

For large amounts of solar, sure, there's a lot of work to be done on storage.

<comment><USER31> Sun doesn't shine for ~50% time everyday.

<comment><USER32> Yes but peak demand is 9PM in the evening. Wind is down at that time as well.

[http://energyclub.stanford.edu/wp- content/uploads/2013/06/ka...](http://energyclub.stanford.edu/wp- content/uploads/2013/06/kavousian-2.png)

Solar+wind don't have to provide 100% of the mix. They has to reduce the daytime fossil fuel generation.

<comment><USER33> Any idea why wind is up or down on a particular time? I would've thought it's extremely random.

<comment><USER32> No, it's definitely not random.

Off shore you get 24 hour constant wind, the synoptic wind. When we race to Hawaii, first you HAVE to get past the Farallones the first day and into the synoptic wind. If the inshore wind shuts down, you're bobbing all night with 0 wind. Get to the synoptic wind, set the spinnaker and it's a downhill sled race to Oahu.

At the coast, you get marine layer driven winds in the afternoon, dying off in the evening. Stockton heats up midday, creates a low pressure and sucks in the marine layer. It cools off in the evening, shutting it down.

Now, as to the wind chart, that's CA as a whole. Dunno. But wind is definitely not random by geography and season. Basically, it's solar driven.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Thank god, this can't come soon enough.

</comment><comment><USER35> Saying that solar is less expensive than nat gas is misleading. It's and apples to oranges comparison. To make a valid comparison you need to compare solar + batteries to natural gas. There is value to electricity production that has an on/off switch because it helps keep the grid stable.

<comment><USER36> There won't be many "batteries" when renewables are supplying most power. We have fairly cheap solutions for large-scale energy storage like hydroelectric with pumps.

<comment><USER37> You're far from correct. Large-scale energy storage is one of the biggest unsolved problems today, and there are numerous startups in the space. LightSail is an interesting one, and is using compressed air combined with micro-droplets of water to ensure stable, efficient energy transfer.

Renewables success is heavily tied to battery technology. The wind isn't always moving and the sun isn't always shining, so you need to store that energy. Right now with existing battery tech, most of the energy is lost in a storage process due to heat or battery wear/tear.

If energy storage was solved today, the oil/gas industry would be on their knees.

<comment><USER38> China is installing an 800MW-h vanadium flow battery:

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/12/13/vanadium-f...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/12/13/vanadium- flow-batteries-the-energy-storage-breakthrough-weve-needed/)

The cost claimed for a small installation coming online in Washington is $0.05 per kilowatt hour. That might not be cheap enough to beat out fossil fuel generation, but it is cheap enough to run the world on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> OK, I can't resist:

[http://www.northeast.railfan.net/ashley_planes.html](http://www.northeast.railfan.net/ashley_planes.html)

[http://www.mtn-top-hs.org/ashley_planes.htm](http://www.mtn-top- hs.org/ashley_planes.htm)

</comment><comment><USER40> "The average monthly cost of living in the United States for a single adult with two children is $4,820. This adds up to an average annual cost of living of $57,851."

What would the cost of living fall to if energy costs were $0?

<comment><USER14> A decent rule of thumb is that the cost of residential electricity is half for transmission and distribution, half for generation. So save 50% on your home power bill if electricity became free to generate but still had to be delivered from centralized plants.

If household solar and small-scale storage get ridiculously cheap, grid defection may be cheaper than buying large-scale renewable output from the grid, but utility scale solar plants can generate more real output per nominal watt and cost less to build per nominal watt. Unless your local electricity system's history is weird (unneeded grid capacity built in Australia being paid for by households, Energiewende that shifted costs away from big industrial customers and toward individuals in Germany) then grid defection probably won't be the lowest-cost option in the next 5 years.

<comment><USER41> What you call grid defection might very well happen in currently developing countries though, just as they never adopted telephone lines or stable postal services.

In most developing countries the grid is the problem, not the production. They often lose more than 50% of the electricity before it gets O the point of use. They also need to make large scale coordinated upfront investments, which i difficult with weak governments.

In a way, solar + cheap storage could become an economic and social democratisation force.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> This is such good news. Can't wait until we abandon fossil fuels altogether.

</comment><comment><USER43> I think flow battery technology will be a viable grid storage option, it makes sense in terms of scale, simplicity and durability

</comment><comment><USER44> Coal town Trump voters come to mind.

</comment><comment><USER45> Back in the early 70's, I worked for a government (HUD/ERDA) sponsored project to promote alternative energy use. It was the first flowering of OPEC, gas prices at the pump were rising over ( _gasp!_ ) $1/gallon, and there was a sudden massive interest in reducing dependence on foreign oil.

What my shop was pushing was using solar collectors to heat hot water. That was about 20% of the average residential energy bill, had a relatively low up front cost, and a relatively short payback period. We were aware of and tracked a variety of alternative energy sources including photovoltaics, but expected them to get niche pickup at best because they were simply too expensive. To a large extent, that's still the case.

Another point to note is that energy usage isn't _just_ electricity. Back then, a national energy budget divided roughly into quarters, with industrial heating and cooling, residential/light commercial heating and cooling, transportation, and electricity making up the demand. The total amount of energy consumed is rather larger, but that breakdown is still pretty much the same. I don't see solar electric power addressing things like heavy duty heating and cooling, nor most transportation.

One thing I got convinced of back then is that the form of energy used will be the _cheapest_ that will do the job. Energy from fossil fuel still predominates because it _is_ still cheapest.

Solar is still essentially a niche market, though growing, and lower costs are the driver. I was grimly amused a while back over the woes of Solyndra, an effort to create large scale photovoltiac production in the US, that got about half a billion in government funding. The underlying notion was creation of US jobs.

Photovoltaics is semi-conductor electronics, the Chinese jumped in with both feet, and started turning out solar cells at prices domestic producers _couldn 't_ match. In fact, some Chinese producers came to grief. They dove in based on demand estimates that were unfounded, produced a glut on the market, far lower prices for buyers, and failures among firms that were late to the manufacturing party. Solyndra couldn't compete.

People went on about US jobs, and I thought "Drive on the NJ Turnpike, and every other pole has a solar cell array generating power to help run the Turnpike. _Somebody_ has the contract to design, produce, install and maintain those arrays, and those jobs by nature will be local. Decreasing costs for the raw materials used to produce the arrays made it possible to sell the end products cheaper, and increased the demand. The Chinese can do it cheapest and can _have_ solar cell production. The money is in moving up the value chain and making things people will buy that use those solar cells."

I'm delighted to see solar electricity costs dropping to the reported levels, but anyone who sees it as a solution for overall energy woes isn't looking at a big enough picture. ______ Dennis

<comment><USER17> You are really downplaying the growth of solar over the last 10 years. In many places in the US, utility scale solar is the cheapest power you can buy. Prices have gone down from ~$100/W in the 1970s to ~$0.30/W today. The amount of solar installed in the US is growing exponentially. The growth rate will likely slow a bit, but the US already gets 0.5% of its electricity from solar. When factoring in exponential growth, there will be a very significant amount of solar installed in the next 10 years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Back in the early 70's, I worked for a government (HUD/ERDA) sponsored project to promote alternative energy use. It was the first flowering of OPEC, gas prices at the pump were rising over ( _gasp!_ ) $1/gallon, and there was a sudden massive interest in reducing dependence on foreign oil.

What my shop was pushing was using solar collectors to heat hot water. That was about 20% of the average residential energy bill, had a relatively low up front cost, and a relatively short payback period. We were aware of and tracked a variety of alternative energy sources including photovoltaics, but expected them to get niche pickup at best because they were simply too expensive. To a large extent, that's still the case.

Another point to note is that energy usage isn't _just_ electricity. Back then, a national energy budget divided roughly into quarters, with industrial heating and cooling, residential/light commercial heating and cooling, transportation, and electricity making up the demand. The total amount of energy consumed is rather larger, but that breakdown is still pretty much the same. I don't see solar electric power addressing things like heavy duty heating and cooling, nor most transportation.

One thing I got convinced of back then is that the form of energy used will be the _cheapest_ that will do the job. Energy from fossil fuel still predominates because it _is_ still cheapest.

Solar is still essentially a niche market, though growing, and lower costs are the driver. I was grimly amused a while back over the woes of Solyndra, an effort to create large scale photovoltiac production in the US, that got about half a billion in government funding. The underlying notion was creation of US jobs.

Photovoltaics is semi-conductor electronics, the Chinese jumped in with both feet, and started turning out solar cells at prices domestic producers _couldn 't_ match. In fact, some Chinese producers came to grief. They dove in based on demand estimates that were unfounded, produced a glut on the market, far lower pricers for buyers, and failures among firms that were late to the manufacturing party.

People went on about US jobs, and I thought "Drive on the NJ Turnpike, and every other pole has a solar cell array generating power to help run the Turnpike. _Somebody_ has the contract to design, produce, install and maintain those arrays, and those jobs by nature will be local. Decreasing costs for the raw materials used to produce the arrays made it possible to sell the end products cheaper, and increased the demand. The Chinese can do it cheapest and can _have_ solar cell production. The money is in moving up the value chain and making things people will buy that use those solar cells."

I'm delighted to see solar electricity costs dropping to the reported levels, but anyone who sees it as a solution for overall energy woes isn't looking at a big enough picture. ______ Dennis

</comment><comment><USER46> Interestingly, everything organic is already powered by solar energy so by far, solar is probably the greatest energy source on the planet.

The Photosynthesis enzyme in plant leaves captures photons that are converted to electrons with energy stored chemically in carbohydrates. Animals eat the chemical energy created by plants as well as other animals. Animals use oxygen to oxidize the carbohydrates to create energy.

</comment><comment><USER47> Do solar panels produce more energy that the amount required to create and operate them? (including mining the materials)

<comment><USER48> The term is EROI (energy returned on energy invested), for renewables its currently roughly equivalent to fossil fuels and getting higher as the technology improves. As oil and natural gas get more expensive and energy intensive to extract, their EROI is going down.

<comment><USER49> Yep. Many forms of petroleum are also very convenient for energy storage. So even an EROI less than 1 they would still have utility.

1 L of diesel has about 39 MJ of energy. That's about 10 kWH (a Tesla Powerwall) in the size of a Nalgene bottle.

<comment><USER48> Most definitely, chemical energy storage is fantastically dense.

I think that as intermittent renewable energy sources get cheaper and cheaper, in addition to time-shifting of arbitrage from batteries, energy storage in chemical bonds may make sense. Methods to create synthetic fuels from electricity are in their very early days, and all of them are terribly inefficient; most go through hydrogen and that step alone results in a huge loss of energy.

So for applications where energy density is needed, e.g. jets, the fuel costs will just be that X% higher than being able to use straight electricity + battery.

I can definitely imagine a world where creating synthetic fuels from excess grid energy is cheaper than fossil fuel extraction, but it involves tons of research and development in those synthetic fuel methods, and many decades of improving renewable technologies at their current rate.

<comment><USER50> From what I understand, for electric generation storage, at present the technology with the best promise seems to be flow batteries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> >In early May, speaking before a cheering West Virginia crowd filled with miners wearing hard hats or holding "Trump Digs Coal" signs, the then- Republican nominee pledged: "Get ready because you're going to be working your asses off."

Guess not.

<comment><USER52> An implication you do not like Trump is uninsightful and OT.

An implication Trump doesn't like clean energy is uninsightful and OT.

The, us against them (in this case miners, not exactly the 1%) is not healthy and OT.

<comment><USER53> Trump is the president-elect, and it's our civic duty to call out elected officials making misleading or outlandish claims, just like we've been calling out Obama for his stance on surveillance and whistleblowing for years now. This is especially true for the long-debunked claim that coal jobs can be brought back, despite the perpetual coal pandering of every politician under the sun. And I say that as someone who spent the first two decades of his life in Appalachia, though mine was a crumbling former oil town rather than a crumbling former coal town.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Renewable energy accounting is shady (no pun intended). This is more accurate (original source EIA):

[http://www.safremaenergy.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/11/LCOE...](http://www.safremaenergy.com/wp- content/uploads/2013/11/LCOE-2018.png)

... and also why natural gas will always win, and why coal is getting shut down.

<comment><USER55> That graph puts solar at $150/MWh, while current contracts are reaching < $30

<comment><USER15> That graph is not from a credible source, it is from a company trying to push tidal power generation. Sure enough - according to the graph, tidal power is the cheapest. In reality, tidal power is WAY more expensive than wind turbines.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Comparing the costs of two renewables is like comparing the cost of a new Mercedes to a new BMW: both are great to have, but neither one is affordable for most of the world. "World energy" has not "hit a turning point," though this kind of misleading headline seems to be the norm at Bloomberg. One expensive thing became a little less expensive than the other expensive thing. It doesn't change the fact that in most of the world, neither solar nor wind is even remotely competitive with conventional sources. Hopefully they are one day, but today is not that day.

<comment><USER57> The article claims that today is that day, at least for new installations:

> That's record-cheap electricity—roughly half the price of competing coal > power.

<comment><USER58> Storage not included. To run an AC in Florida at night you'd burn through a Tesla wall unit in a few hours. You want that AC at night. So you'll need probably 3-5. At $8k per unit, $24k-$40k total.

I like solar. I like wind. I like the grid because the best way to handle the power storage from over production during the day is in a centralized fashion.

<comment><USER59> Or you just insulate your house and use heat exchangers with controlled airflow to avoid the need for any AC at all.

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

<comment><USER60> That Wikipedia article explicitly says that making this concept work in a tropical climate (we're talking Florida, right?) is so far an unsolved problem, and that the one example in Louisiana does in fact have an AC.

Not needing AC by having decent insulation in Germany or Scandinavia (which is where most passive houses are located) is a _much_ easier problem than not needing AC in Florida. Of course not needing _heating_ is a big problem there, and is what the passive house designs are mostly aiming to deal with.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Self taught programmer, first job interview - <AUTHOR> I'm in my late twenties and until now I've only worked for my parents retail distribution business. I handle all the IT and I built our custom inventory management system. I've also built a couple of iOS apps for fun.
I have an interview with the BBC as a junior software engineer but I'm worried that I lack commercial experience (exposure to agile) and computer science theory (algorithms, design patterns etc).
What do you think I should read up on or learn about besides these two things? What do you look for in a junior developer?
Thanks <comment><USER2> The best thing you can do is demonstrate your enthusiasm and ability to self- educate and grow.

"Studying for the test" is more likely to backfire, as you'll try to bluff your way through on things you don't know and get found out.

The best way to answer questions where you don't know the answer is to say "I don't know but here's how I'd go about figuring that out".

It might be that they just want someone who has the paper credentials - that's always a risk with big established organisations. If that's the case, try not to worry if you miss out this time.

The best thing to do is keep self-educating and working on interesting projects, and keep applying for positions, particularly with teams that care more about determination than paper qualifications.

The most important thing to remember is that the best way to be in demand (by potential employers, clients, friends, partners alike) is to have a lot of options (aka "social proof"). If you think and act like this is _the one and only big opportunity_ you're more likely to get nervous, and that makes everything harder.

But if you patiently and methodically work towards having more successful projects under your belt, and keep seeking gradually more challenging opportunities, good things will happen for you with increasing frequency.

Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! Lots of food for thought in this post. I have started applying at other places too. I'll follow your advice and keep trying to build up my skillset.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Congratulations, getting interviewed is a big deal. I think it's worth the perspective that you have no idea what the person hiring you is looking for...but the most likely case is that they looked at your CV and thought, this might be the person I am looking for. It's also worth the perspective that the person who wrote the job description did not think the job required a CS degree and the people deciding on candidates didn't think it was critical in this particular case either. That's why you've got the interview.

In terms of agile, a little academic knowledge from googling is just basic interview preparation. Unlike "algorithms and data structures," agile is reasonably bounded and what an interviewer expects someone with zero experience know is not going to vary less...I mean some interviewers consider A* and red-black trees too easy and others too hard because algorithms are math.

Good luck and congratulations again.</comment>


Ask HN: Is there a place to discuss "meta" relating to HN comments? - <AUTHOR> I'm relatively new to HN comments and just noticed for the first time that one of my comments has down votes. I'm curious why it was down voted and would love to hear from people why they downvoted (note I don't care about the score. I understand that people may disagree and I don't take any offense. I'm just curious.)
I considered asking in reply to my comment with the typical "why the down votes?" But that seemed a little off topic for the overall thread.
I'm not trying to ask about a specific case. I'm just curious if there is a meta discussion somewhere. <comment><USER2> Looking at one of your downvoted comments, I'd reciommend reading the guidelines. The healthiest thing to do is to treat downvotes as feedback on how your audience as a writer responds to your writing as a writer. This can help anyone improve their writing.

Part of what makes Hacker News Hacker News is the way it differs from other places on the internet.

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Yes feedback is always welcome. I was just hoping to get some more quantitave discussions beyond up/down.

Is there a particular particular the guidelines you are referring to? I didn't comment in the downvoted thread per: "Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading."

<comment><USER2> My memory may be wrong, but I think the guidelines once said something about comments like "This!" and "+1" and not to sign them with your name. If it did and the guidelines have been changed it is perhaps because those things have become less of an issue over the years...or I am just imagining things. Anyway, comments like "This!" and such will tend to attract downvotes because they add nothing to the conversation...if it's "This!" use the up arrow. That's the way the community operates.

As for meta-discussions, they are generally less intellectually interesting than what gets submitted. Popular meta-discussions occur from time to time, but it limiting them helps keep Hack News from focusing inward and backward (in time) too much.

[Edit: Per the Wayback Machine, it looks like I am probably wrong about the guidelines including don't do "This!" and "+1". I guess it has just been an unwritten rule of the community.]

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the thorough follow up.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


In memory Key/Value store in go using gRPC - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/knrt10/gRPC-cache <comment><USER2> Live design review: never use type "string" for keys and values in protocol buffers. Always use "bytes".

<comment><USER3> > never use type "string" for keys and values in protocol buffers. Always use > "bytes".

What are "keys and values" with regard to protobuf? Surely you don't mean maps as bytes can't be "keys" anyways. And why shouldn't you use string as a field type?

<comment><USER4> I think they're referring to this app, which uses Protobuf strings to represent its keys and values.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm more interested in DB's that store protocol buffers, and can expose their innards (like spanner, bigtable, etc.). What's good to use/try on the outside?

<comment><USER2> > (like spanner, bigtable, etc.)

Neither Spanner nor Bigtable has this feature. If you store a protobuf in a Bigtable column, that's your own business. Bigtable itself won't notice.

<comment><USER6> Internal Spanner does support protobuf columns.

<comment><USER2> That's neat. Just it just blow it up into a struct?

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure what the internal representation is. Spanner is aware of the proto type through some mixture of DDL and build rules. Updates to proto types get pushed when updated schemas are pushed. You can use deeply-nested fields in various query clauses, create indexes, etc. But I believe updates must replace the whole object. Much like JSONB columns in other RDBMS.

This is from memory. I'm not at Google anymore.

<comment><USER5> My memory too ;) - Left middle of 2017, here is some article that mentions it - [https://www.nextplatform.com/2019/01/15/spanning-the- databas...](https://www.nextplatform.com/2019/01/15/spanning-the-database- world-with-google/)

also some bare mention here - [https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...](https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/46103.pdf)

"... The effort to standardize our own implementations both covers gaps in the SQL standard where details are unclear or left to the implementation and covers our own Google specific extensions. Before defining our own SQL dialect, we did consider other options. Using the front end of an open-source SQL processing system, such as Postgres, would have accomplished several of the same goals including filling the gaps left by the SQL standard and ensuring uniform syntax/semantics across our systems. We ruled out this approach because internal systems at Google make heavy use of Protocol Buffers in their applications, and we wanted Protocol Buffer message and enum types to be first class types in our SQL language"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Internally, google had best-practices (but could be outdated), that each RPC service function should take unique input message, and unique output message, and never reuse one, even if empty, or having same structure, at the cost of more writing.

Later this allows one to change things independently.

<comment><USER2> Wait but what about EmptyMessage and Any? Yes they're both terrible choices for any circumstance, but also widely seen.

<comment><USER5> I dunno. I'm simply recalling what I remember as best-practices by memory, could've been wrong about some of them, but for my own protobufs that I use I keep the same practice.

<comment><USER7> No, you're right. EmptyMessage exists but you shouldn't make it an input or output to an RPC if that RPC might ever in the future accept or return arguments. Since people are super bad about predicting the future, just call it WhateverRequest and WhateverReply and if there are no arguments today, don't put any fields in those types.

I would also not use Any as a request or reply type, but Any, in general, is fairly common in practical use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have been poking around building an eerily similar example[1] service. I am trying to come up with a good pattern, using go-micro, where a team can quickly and easily leverage the protobuf IDL for gRPC/REST interfaces across large teams. It sounds like it should be easy, right?

The tooling around pulling in protobuf at compile time is a huge pain in the ass. I've been spending an hour or so every night over past few weeks searching issues to figure out why things aren't working. This is a great reference point for me, thanks!

[1]: [https://github.com/johnbellone/cache- service](https://github.com/johnbellone/cache-service)

</comment><comment><USER9> I am hearing more and more about gPRC lately, can anyone give me a run down on why its useful and what it solves?

<comment><USER10> It allows you to execute code on another machine. Your code makes a function call that returns a status / error, except the function runs on another node. It's another RPC framework and there are more caveats like what guarantees a framework makes. Did the function execute exactly once, at most once or at least once.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> We have tons of in memory KV stores, I assume this is implemented for fun? If not advertise the killer feature better

<comment><USER12> this was implemented as a take home assignment I guess</comment></comment>


The Admin. Office of the U.S. Courts Just Deleted Decades of Cases from PACER - <AUTHOR> https://www.pacer.gov/announcements/general/webpacer.html

<comment><USER2> See also [0],"PACER, RECAP, AND THE MOVEMENT TO FREE AMERICAN CASE LAW", with memories of Aaron Swartz.

[0][http://blog.law.cornell.edu/voxpop/2011/02/03/pacer-recap- an...](http://blog.law.cornell.edu/voxpop/2011/02/03/pacer-recap-and-the- movement-to-free-american-case-law/)

</comment><comment><USER3> this is bonkers!</comment>


Show HN: PixelBlock – A Gmail extension that blocks email tracking - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pixelblock/jmpmfcjnflbcoidlgapblgpgbilinlem

<comment><USER2> Chrome plugins pose a HUGE security problem. This one, for example, gets access to your GMail account. Do you want that? What else could this plugin do since it can read your email? Do you trust the author not to steal your GMail cookie?

Are you installing this at work? What kind of trade secrets could you potentially leak? And how does it affect your corporate compliance requirements? If your email is subject to HIPAA regulation, then you may be leaking protected health information. That's pretty bad.

I, for one, rarely install plugins. I've written plugins for my own amusement that can do some very bad things, and it's just too easy. Think twice people.

<comment><USER3> I really really really want a better security model for chrome extensions. As an example, I'd be happy to install this extension if it didn't "have access to" my gmail content, but was somehow able to add DOM matching and mutating callbacks that were run under Gmail. The matching part would be under my control and couldn't be updated by the extension. For example I'd be happy to let this extension mutate any img tag. I'm sure you can find a million holes in this idea, but it would be better than what we have today.

<comment><USER4> Maybe if the permission was something like "Let this extension read and mutate stuff on the page but don't let it make any ajax requests". Would that be sufficient?

<comment><USER5> Not the person you were responding to, but this could be easily worked around by sticking `img` tags into the page with urls that are crafted to share information.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm wary of installing an extension that can access my data in gmail. Is the source code available anywhere?

Edit1: Found a chrome extension that lets me view the source code of chrome extensions[1]

Edit2: The inclusion of bootstrap.css is changing the appearance of some things, namely the "show original" message view. It also doesn't seem to detect the tracking image included by yesware

Edit3: Could I break this by adding "safe-img" somewhere in my tracking pixel url?

[1] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chrome- extension-s...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chrome-extension- source-v/jifpbeccnghkjeaalbbjmodiffmgedin/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I understand your concern, but chrome extensions for gmail are widely used even across business/enterprise.

If it's any consolidation, I do not store/scan/save any data. It just blocks images that people are using to invade your privacy (ie track your email opens).

p.s. There is no oauth access required for this extension/app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Does this even work considering Gmail pre-fetches all the images nowadays?

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here, yes it does. Meaning, email tracking still works regardless of gmail pre-fetching. But accuracy may be slightly off

I'll add this as well, several companies have built products just to allow people to do email tracking in Gmail (boomerang, signals, streak, banana tag). So yes it does work

[Edited x 2]

<comment><USER8> I think what he meant is - does TRACKING even work since google now pre- fetches images.

<comment><USER9> I'm not the author, but tracking doesn't work at all – this extension is 100% redundant.

<comment><USER10> Tracking still works. Tracking _multiple_ opens doesn't work since Gmail will cache the image, but the first load of the image can still be tracked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Another potential solution to block 'read receipts' is to turn off image loading by default. Its not ideal - because you don't know what images will load until you load them so you may be tempted to load images when you think there may actually be some image content there.

The benefit of this approach is that all marketing email won't be tracked as well.

disclosure: i'm a co-founder at Streak and we offer read receipts for gmail.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Aleem! This is Omar from Waterloo (your co-founder's friend). Big fan of you guys and what you've done with Streak. Contrary to some of the comments, some chrome extensions inside of gmail are very very very useful. Streak is definitely one of those

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Here is an article explaining gmail new caching of images. [http://blog.mailchimp.com/how-gmails-image-caching- affects-o...](http://blog.mailchimp.com/how-gmails-image-caching-affects-o..).

Tracking still works and this extension is useful as long as you trust the author.

</comment><comment><USER12> When I wrote email tracking software about 7 years ago, I dropped the 1x1 pixel, because of spam filters tripping over them. I just used any image in the email to track you and assigned it an unique URL. How do you propose catching that one?

<comment><AUTHOR> At the moment I just scan for the most commonly known sources of tracking and then things that seem to be tracker images. The logic is quite simple, definitely can be improved to pick up a lot more tracking sources. But for now it works quite well :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Personally, I find this very simple and useful. Great Job!

</comment><comment><USER14> Why?

<comment><AUTHOR> I prefer not letting people know I'm reading their emails. It's a privacy thing :)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why So Limited Options for Web-Based Video Editing? - <AUTHOR> I'd love to be able to do video and/or audio editing on my Chromebook.
I would have thought there would be a decent PWA that deals with offline files so you don't have to 'upload' them to work with them. It would be awesome to render and export in the cloud without having to do any local heavy lifting.
Anyone know of anything that already exists? Or is this not available for a reason? <comment><USER2> Have you tried WeVideo ? [https://www.wevideo.com/](https://www.wevideo.com/) Youtube also have some basic video linear editing tool

Not sure if Chromebook are powerful enough for web based video editing, but I think overall it's a good idea to create this kind of tool.

I actually already thought about that years ago, using GLSL shaders to create visual effects and transitions. One bottleneck would be creating previews of the current editing (precomputing everything so that the preview is realtime and not laggy), Youtube does this by computing the video on their server (not on their clients) and displaying it like a regular video.

</comment><comment><USER3> Why not use a laptop where you can download a good video editing tool and use that ? Video editing on the cloud is not a trivial task and hence you don't see too many options. Also, if you don't want to upload anything, then it defeats the purpose of cloud. We are not quite there yet with PWAs specially for things like video editing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, obviously you would have to upload at some point to get them into the cloud, but I was thinking the files could be manipulated locally first then the files + a script could be uploaded and processed remotely.

There definitely would be some cost to processing in the cloud, but I think it would be worth it.

I just look at apps like Adobe Photoshop CC that can be run on a Chromebook and I'm wondering why it's not being adopted more widely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> first : How could you render and export in the cloud if you don't upload them ?

Second : A browser can't deal with local files easily

Last: There is probably none free because it is very expensive to edit video files

<comment><AUTHOR> 1: Sorry, I wasn't clear. I was thinking the files could be manipulated locally, and then the files + a script could be uploaded and processed remotely.

2: Have you used Google Docs / Other PWAs offline?

3: Yes. Not sure if PWAs have the power to edit locally yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I.. think the problem is you by having a chromebook ..

<comment><AUTHOR> I use my Chromebook for 90% of my personal tasks (email, writing, and light web code editing). It'd just be nice to be able to use it for 100% of my tasks!

<comment><USER5> I use my Laptop for 100% of my tasks ..</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: iPhone copy/paste library for web? - <AUTHOR>

Is there a (jQuery?) library for the web that operates mostly like iPhone copy/paste?  It would let you select one or more areas of text, potentially modify an existing selection, provide contextual buttons, etc. <comment><USER2> Sorry to ask this but why? Copy/paste isn't so difficult that people need a new way to do it, do they? I mean - let's say that you write/use this great jQuery library and deploy it to your site. Now, everyone who uses your site has to unlearn how to copy/paste just for your site. Seems weird to me.

<comment><USER3> Sorry I accidentally down voted you.</comment></comment>