The Tragic Beauty of Google+ - <AUTHOR> http://techland.time.com/2013/05/16/the-tragic-beauty-of-google/

<comment><USER2> Let me dispute the "beautiful" argument. I don't think Google does a good job at UI at all:

<http://i.imgur.com/MtqT2tF.png>

My first impression after opening this was "WTF is going on here?". It's floating panes atop floating panes, reinvented scrollbars, while the actual content is sparse. The same kind of nonsense that put me off using GMail.

But hey, that's what you get when you cram a desktop inside a desktop. I bet their new UIs work great on Chrome OS.

<comment><USER3> I find it interesting that Facebook actually had "beautiful" multi-column content first, but people hated it (citation needed) because it was hard to read while scrolling around. FB went back to having a single column on the right and showing only static information on the left.

Now _after_ FB has corrected its mistake, G+ insists on repeating it...

<comment><USER4> Under the 'More' menu at the top of your G+ stream, there is a 'Stream layout' widget that lets you switch from multi to single column.

Somewhat hidden, but at least it's there.

<comment><USER5> Oh thank-you, thank-you, Slackwise. You're my new best friend.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've recently given up Facebook due to realising it was almost a complete waste of my time, and I have the same feeling towards Google+.

With Facebook it was becoming that I'd log on each day and see a bunch of irrelevant content from people I hadn't spoken to for years (and in some cases, met only once or twice). Occasionally I'd end up having a meaningful conversation but the signal-to-noise ratio was just ridiculously high. And then there was the advertising and lack of concern for privacy etc. I could go on.

It may be just me, but sitting down together for lunch or (if the person lives elsewhere) chatting on phone or Skype seem much more pleasant and fruitful modes of social interaction. And of course HN for reading interesting discussions about topics of interest :)

<comment><USER7> Facebook, Google+, and any other social network or electronic communication is _what_ _you_ _make_ _it_. But you have to actively use the tools provided to curate your experience.

I don't friend people on Facebook that I haven't met in real life. I de-friend people if I'm no longer interested in what they post or what they do. I hide or throttle down posts from people who have a high noise ratio.

In return, my Facebook feed is pretty enjoyable, and keeps me up to date on what a bunch of people I _care_ about are doing in their lives. But it takes a little bit of work on my side, it doesn't appear automatically, and if you're indiscriminate about adding people as friends, your feed will be not be enjoyable. Simply walking away from it instead of curating it is a lazy solution.

<comment><USER8> What you say is obviously true, but there must be some curve between the effort needed to make it useful and the utility derived from it, based on which some people can rationally decide that it is not worth it for them, while others can decide the opposite. That doesn't make one of them lazy and the other one stupid (although some people might be better or worse in estimating the effort or the utility of the process) - notice that otherwise the same generic argument could be made for anything:

"X is what you make of it ... walking away from it is a lazy solution." where X could be nuclear weapons, hard drugs, etc. etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Journalists love to talk about how "beautiful" Google+ is -- first the mobile apps, now the web interface. But you are posting this link here, on a picture- free text-only website, because that's where we go for discussion. (Or to Reddit or Metafilter.) "Beautiful" does not enable discussion, it enables advertising.

Google+ vs Facebook misses the point. Having lots of random people chatting about random things isn't very profitable, as Facebook discovered. There's no point in emulating that. Instead, Google+ is the universal publishing & commenting platform for the highly profitable Google advertising ecosystem. Here's where Google talks to its actual G+ target audience:

<https://www.google.com/+/business/>

<comment><USER10> You are wrong - there is plenty of discussion on g+.

<comment><USER9> Not really, no. Most people post a couple of times and get few reactions beyond one-liners, if that. Over time, fewer and fewer people who aren't Google employees (1) bother posting anymore. Picture posts get by far the most +1s and shares. Completely incomparable to the text-based discussion networks.

(1) As well as anyone promoting a business, I should add. I've seen a couple of writers and lots of professional photographers using G+ for self-promotion. That seems to work quite well for them, especially the photographers given how image-heavy G+ is.

<comment><USER11> That's all true, but try the 'Communities' function for a given topic you are interested in if you haven't already. I use Google+ for that exclusively, after giving it up due to the same observations you made.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I still work and browse the internet with an asus eeepc 1000he and g+ is barely usable on that machine. Javascript and html(5) are gobbling my CPU to display images and snippets of text: typically post of maximum 3 lines and 7 displayed comments that are heavily dynamic for no real (imo) value for the end-user. Before that ajax everywhere and like buttons non-sense it wouldn't have been a problem.

The irritating point is that density of information hasn't changed that much. On the whole I think it's a regression of the web.

<comment><USER13> Time to setup goodold Mutt and subscribe to good old mailing lists, if you care about information density.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> "The conversations are less warm, personal and interesting."

So, Facebook feels more "warm, personal" to the author - and I would agree, for the same reasons: On Facebook I share with my friends and family, while on G+ I mostly deal with interesting people I don't know directly.

The funny thing is that Facebook _wants_ its users to interact more with people (entities) they don't know, for good monetization reasons, and exactly this could make Facebook much less warm and personal - and thus worse for its current users. Incidentally, I just wrote a post exactly about this (from a branding perspective): [http://danmaz74.me/2013/05/16/facebook-hashtags-when- monetiz...](http://danmaz74.me/2013/05/16/facebook-hashtags-when-monetization- clashes-with-branding/)

</comment><comment><USER15> My problem with G+ is they keep making it harder to read content. The new layout is terrible for that (arbitrary sized boxes in arbitrary alignments). Newspapers have done that but there is human supervision for the content (which is almost always longer than a few sentences) and the layout is human supervised.

The irony is that there is a product specifically geared towards towards reading productivity and following lots of sources. Google will be killing it in two months (Google Reader).

<comment><USER16> You can turn it into single-column if you don't like the arbitrary-boxes.

<comment><USER11> First thing I did. Unfortunately that doesn't seem to be available for the Communities pages.

<comment><USER17> Home->Settings->Accessability checkbox should fix community pages

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I have a _fairly_ good windows 7 machine. 64bit, 6gb. I opened g+ in chrome and it crashed, twice.

There are pop overs everywhere I move my mouse, making it even slower! I have a resolution of 1024x768 so everything is squished and hard to find/read.

I'll keep giving it a go, but I do wish they would add a 'lightweight' version, like the html only gmail for us people without top of the line machines that can run crazy amounts of javascript.

<comment><USER19> For a lightweight version you can try the mobile version <https://plus.google.com/app/basic/stream>

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Google plus is the Nokia Lumia of social networks. Solid, great looking and not better enough than the incumbent to gain a significant market share.

<comment><USER21> It's been two years of putting "more wood behind fewer arrows" and all they could come up with is a Pinterest-lookalike thingie. For an outsider like me it's really, really frustrating, they have all this data and smart engineers and all they can think about is winning every battle and not realizing that they're losing the war.

And just to make sure, "the war" is not against Facebook, Microsoft or any short-term, market-driven non-sense, "the war" and fight itself should be related to trying to reach the Singularity, trying to make us (the human species) less dependent on only one potential point of failure (this planet) etc.

<comment><USER22> Wait, your source of frustration with Google is that they're not doing enough to move the human race to another planet in the near future?!?

I just want to make sure I understand what you are getting at, here.

<comment><USER21> Yeap, got that right, they have some of the smartest guys on the planet as their employees and they fill up their time with what looks like gibberish. You do have to think big.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> For the past month, I've been checking on G+ before Twitter and other media or sources. Here is how I was dragged into it.

I had never used Facebook, and I had never used Google+. I guess I was too busy with Emacs.

Then recently I had to hit Google+ to follow some community thread on the Deep Learning channel, <https://plus.google.com/communities/112866381580457264725>

Somehow, the researchers from the field did settle there. Next I started reading the Machine Learning community threads, then the C++ one, etc... Eventually I did post to the Machine Learning community, and I saw the hits on our website, a few hundreds every day, for a few days, not much, but I could tell the right people were visiting, because they were spending way more time than visitors from other sources.

So my current understanding is that G+ is worth for its communities, and the targeted traffic it offers... my 2cents :)

</comment><comment><USER24> Is there a way in G+ where we can follow only relevant topics from people we follow ?

Say if someone I follow posts something which he tags something ("tech", "travel" etc) and I can choose to follow only the posts that are tagged "tech".

This is something I cannot figure out and if its there, I'm sure it will avoid most of the clutter in G+.

<comment><USER11> The 'Communities' part of Google+ is pretty good for following particular topics. It's the only reason I use Google+.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I found Google+ great for collaborating with the maker community. The strength is use cases that involve discovery of pictures (&diagrams) + discussion of ideas/things, as the communities feature works well for this. Adafruit is making great use of hangouts as well. However, I find that Twitter & Facebook work much better than G+ as news feeds.

</comment><comment><USER26> I think a revelation I've had recently is that, in general, friends are boring unless they are doing something of interest. The information I find on Google+ and other non-real-life endeavors from people outside my real-life bubble is much more interesting, as a rule of thumb.

</comment><comment><USER27> there was a post that explained that what facebook did with timeline - put it into 2 line, so that people would not ignore sponsored posts on their timelines/feed. I wonder if google is trying to do the same. I find this feed quite distracting - my eyes keep on dithering between those columns. I suspect google is trying to do pretty much same thing as facebook.

It feels pinterest-y too, seems alot of social media sites have have had their design converge into what pinterest has realized with theirs.

</comment><comment><USER28> \- Facebook wants to know where I live so it can show me more advertising.

\- Google also wants to know where I live so it can show me more advertising. However, Google also uses that information to provide useful tools such as directions, search, etc.

\- I am much more likely to give Google my info because they give me all of these extra useful tools. Facebook provides nothing except a place for my mom to see photos of her grand kids. AS soon as she is on G+ I will be dropping FB.

</comment><comment><USER29> Didn't like G+ design. They really should copy twitter's style.

<comment><USER30> I struggle to find the similarities you are talking about do you care to share which bits you are referring to?

<comment><USER31> I think you have misread

>should

as

>shouldn't

although I find the parent comment equally baffling if I read it either way.</comment></comment></comment>


Unfolding the IKEA Effect: Why We Love the Things We Build - <AUTHOR> http://neoacademic.com/2011/09/22/unfolding-the-ikea-effect-why-we-love-the-things-we-build/

<comment><USER2> There's a flip side to the IKEA effect. I don't have a name for it but it has happened every time I've built something from IKEA.

Basically, it all goes together nicely... except for one defect. Sometimes there's a hole drilled in slightly the wrong location, a hinge is crooked, or there's a small gap between two pieces that should be flush against each other. No one notices. But I do. And it drives me crazy every time I look at those pieces of furniture: I walk into the room and ALL I CAN NOTICE is the tiny DEFECT in the piece of furniture that I built from IKEA.

<comment><USER3> This may actually be an obsessive compulsive effect.

<comment><USER4> I don't think it is. To me the frustration stems from having to put in my time and effort into putting a piece of furniture together only to have it turn out not quite as expected because of forces beyond my control such as sloppiness of the drill operator/machinery (holes drilled in wrong place anyone?).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have to admit, they seem to have been pretty thorough with their experiment, but I still think the main draw of Ikea isn't that you put it together yourself, but that it's so much cheaper.

I bought some barstools the other day for $20 each. And while technically I assembled them, that isn't why I like them. I like them because I was at a barstool store and the cheapest ones there were $300 each! (Which I was willing to pay, if there were some that I liked enough. There weren't.)

They only thing I can think that they didn't test would be whether or not seeing someone put the item together made a difference. If they just observed, but they didn't help. This would help determine if the draw was in knowing how (and how well) it was constructed, or that they did it themselves.

<comment><USER6> I agree, Ikea is popular because of the price.

Build-it-yourself and low price for Ikea furniture are related through these aspects: * It turns out assembly does not create nearly as much value as the other steps in the manufacturing process in furniture. I couldn't sell you the chips of wood that went into the MDF of your Ikea dresser for anything near the price of the dresser, though it's a major component. * The cost of assembling furniture on a large scale is greater than the cost of manufacturing the components. Putting pegs into holes using a machine is a hard enough engineering problem (that's one reason behind surface mount electronics), let alone the rest of the assembly. Of course, the way a piece of furniture comes together is different with machine assembly, but there is still cost here. * The volume of flat-packed furniture waiting to be assembled is a small fraction of the assembled volume. This impacts shipping as well as warehousing costs.

Both 'build-it-yourself' and 'low price' are true for Ikea furniture, and due to their correlation, it's easy to pick the wrong one as the cause of success. (Of course, correlation does not imply causation, but as I said at the start of this comment, I think price is causing popularity)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Another relevant example:

 _Minecraft is a game about placing blocks to build anything you can imagine. At night monsters come out, make sure to build a shelter before that happens. [...] So far 13,823,195 people have registered and 3,563,829 people bought the game._

</comment><comment><USER8> I noticed this when for the first time when I was playing with small children. Practically the only way to keep them from destroying Origami toys is to involve them in building them and help each to make his own toy. I had the impression it also raised their respect for similar things that others build, but the research suggests otherwise.

</comment><comment><USER9> I've been working on a cooking app and was concerned about the effect of helping people too much. Great to hear that the example is exactly the problem I'm concerned with, but it didn't prevent the adoption of instant cakes.

</comment><comment><USER10> I wonder if this applies to software craftsmanship as well.

Do people feel more connected when they build code from source, possibly tweaking the installation path or some other minor variable, vs doing an apt- get, yum, port, or other automated means of software installation?

Or is this a bizarre "I did it the hard way" bit of machismo?

</comment><comment><USER11> Presumably both the Ikea piece and the origami were built from plans.

The study should look into whether this applies to building one's own designs, or whether that triggers an opposite effect: builder's remorse.

</comment><comment><USER12> Does anybody have the link to the IKEA hacking info?

There was a site where people used multiple IKEA pieces that were never intended to be used together in new and interesting ways.

<comment><USER13> You might be looking for <http://www.ikeahackers.net/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It seems that people just add value of their work to value of their item and since they value their work much ...</comment>


Ask HN: Can you share any decision-making spreadsheets? - <AUTHOR> I'm interested in discussing tools and spreadsheets we currently use for decision-making e.g.<p>- What works well and what do you find unsatisfactory with them?<p>- Are you happy with the decisions you have made with them?<p>- Can you share any examples?<p>The background is that I'm building https://thorny.io - an interactive notebook for decision-making. I want to make the decisions and reasoning we face designing software and running businesses, fast and easy. You can post your examples here or drop me a line: duncan at thorny.io. <comment><AUTHOR> Here as an example to get us started from when WikiData were choosing a new graph database:

[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MXikljoSUVP77w7JKf9E...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MXikljoSUVP77w7JKf9EXN40OB- ZkMqT8Y5b2NYVKbU/edit#gid=0)</comment>


Ask HN: Which companies are hiring "real" (not US only) remote? - <AUTHOR> I'm looking for a new job, and I would love it to be remote. But almost all of the remote job postings that I come across are "remote (US)", and I live in Europe. Two of the companies that didn't mention this and I applied to ultimately told me that I should relocate to the US for a remote position (?!)<p>So my question is, which companies are hiring remote, or where is a good place to look for remote jobs that aren't US only? <comment><USER2> I think that unfortunately many "remote" companies are looking for US employees for legal and tax reasons, if they are already a US based company.

I have found (as in, was hired) true remote positions from [1]

I have heard of [2] [3] [4] and there are many language or technology specific sites that have a remote tag, e.g. [5] but you may have the same "US only" issue with some positions there.

[1] weworkremotely.com

[2] [https://remoteok.io/](https://remoteok.io/)

[3] [https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/remote-developer- jobs](https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/remote-developer-jobs)

[4] [https://angel.co/jobs#find/f!%7B%22remote%22%3Atrue%7D](https://angel.co/jobs#find/f!%7B%22remote%22%3Atrue%7D)

[5] [https://www.golangprojects.com/golang-remote- jobs.html](https://www.golangprojects.com/golang-remote-jobs.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> This sheet by Rudolphe Dutel at Remotive.io lists 900+ startups who are hiring remotely [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1TLJSlNxCbwRNxy14Toe1...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1TLJSlNxCbwRNxy14Toe1PYwbCTY7h0CNHeer9J0VRzE/edit#gid=1279011369)

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20083795](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20083795)</comment>


Larry Page and Sergey Brin wearing...suits. - <AUTHOR> http://paidcontent.org/images/editorial/_original/brin-page-o.jpg

<comment><USER2> When and where was it taken?</comment>


WhatsApp has a fake news problem–that can be fixed without breaking encryption - <AUTHOR> https://www.cjr.org/tow_center/whatsapp-doesnt-have-to-break-encryption-to-beat-fake-news.php <comment><USER2> Facebook is THE tracking platform and Facebook mines every word on it, and they STILL haven't fixed the fake news problem there.

Giving up encryption on WhatsApp in an attempt to "fix fake news" is going to be just as useless of a solution, at the very least.</comment>


MongoDB: How to Use the JSON Schema Validator - <AUTHOR> https://www.percona.com/blog/2018/08/16/mongodb-how-to-use-json-schema-validator/ <comment><USER2> I've never really gotten the appeal of "schemaless" databases. Your data has a schema, whether you're explicit about it or not, but being explicit allows you (and forces you) to reason about it at the right time at the right level of abstraction.

<comment> rooam-dev True, but all those migration scripts/patches/table locks add complexity and inconvenience (less agile).

<comment><USER2> > True, but all those migration scripts/patches/table locks add complexity and > inconvenience (less agile).

I don't think so. You could say exactly the same thing about maintaining tests for your code. Explicit schemas and constraints (and the effort that goes along with maintaining them) are very much like having tests for your data. They both help ensure that your code actually _works_ when it needs to.

<comment> rooam-dev Last time I worked with PostgreSQL, it would lock entire table while adding a new column. Imagine users table, then you have to schedule this kind of altering outside business hours... which impacts devs (they have to stay late and/or come early) and business potentially, it has to wait till next day to have a feature delivered.

All these are trade-offs and everyone decides what is more important for them.

<comment><USER3> > it would lock entire table while adding a new column

It does so for the entire << 1ms it takes to add the necessary metadata.

<comment> rooam-dev If that's the case, then one less problem to deal with, however I remember it was a matter of several minutes.

<comment><USER3> That's only the case if you add a DEFAULT value for the new column. Up until the soon-to-be-released v11 that required updating existing rows. Without a default it's essentially just inserting a single row in a row into an internal catalog table (pg_attribute). With a default in v11, we basically just store the default for a new column out of line, and reference it when the row is read.

In either case a lock has to be acquired on the table, which means if there's a longrunning transaction, you can end up blocking for a while...

<comment> rooam-dev Ah, yes, i think that was the case. Thanks for extra details!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Motif Window Manager - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motif_Window_Manager <comment><USER2> I've sometimes experienced odd visual glitches with _Mathematica_ under Gnome, this might actually be why...</comment>


How to Get a Free Domain Name for Lifetime – No Puzzle - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldSuD_czqCA <comment><USER2> Absolutely do not use .tk domain for your business - [http://www.techelex.org/why-not-use-dot-tk- domain/](http://www.techelex.org/why-not-use-dot-tk-domain/)

</comment><comment><USER3> NOT for life and they can ban a user account.</comment>


Building AR Apps with React Native and GraphQL Using Hasura - <AUTHOR> https://dev.to/hasurahq/building-ar-apps-in-react-native-powered-by-graphql-using-hasura-h9m <comment><AUTHOR> Published a blog post about how React Native developers can create simple AR experiences powered by GraphQL using hasura.io

\- Understanding basic building blocks of AR apps \- Setup HasuraHQ engine to auto-generate GraphQL and provide data for our React Native app \- GraphQL Subscriptions working in AR \- Markers and image recognition \- Cool portals to 3d worlds</comment>


The Truth About Brining Turkey - <AUTHOR> http://www.seriouseats.com/2012/11/the-food-lab-the-truth-about-brining-turkey-thanksgiving.html <comment><USER2> If you don't want dry turkey, stop overcooking it. It's as simple as that. So many people don't even take it out until it hits 180 degrees F. That's crazy! Not overcooking is one of the keys to pretty much anything you want to cook, actually. Also, use an oven bag, which traps all the moisture in the bag. Comes out great when I make it that way, no need for basting or anything. Learned about not overcooking from Mark Bittman:

> At least one reader has expressed concern that a turkey will not be done if > its internal temperature is less than 165, as the U.S.D.A. recommends. The > recipe calls for temperature of 155 because salmonella is killed at 140 (as > long as it's held there for 12 minutes). Further, if turkey is cooked to > 155, its temperature will rise to 165 or higher while resting. A temperature > of 165 isn't unreasonable, but the turkey's temperature will rise to 175 or > 180 before serving, and that's overcooked. If you're more comfortable > cooking to higher temperatures, feel free, but expect drier meat. [1]

[1] Mark Bittman - [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/18/magazine/classic-roast- tur...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/18/magazine/classic-roast- turkey.html?_r=0)

<comment><USER3> > If you don't want dry turkey, stop overcooking it. It's as simple as that.

I'll agree with that.

But for a food that most people cook maybe once or twice a year, in a woefully finicky home oven, on what many consider the most stressful day of the year, I consider brining/salting a very acceptable insurance policy.

<comment><USER4>
      > ... in a woefully finicky home oven ...

This is a very good point. Older ovens often have inaccurate thermostats. Getting a cheap ancillary oven thermometer can make a big difference.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> J. Kenji Lopez-Alt is easily my favorite food blogger. I read just about everything he writes because he ALWAYS puts in this level of effort and detail. Towards the bottom of this page is his list of posts:

<http://www.seriouseats.com/user/profile/GoodEaterKenji>

If you found this post fascinating, there are plenty more like it.

<comment><USER6> If you are not listening to Cooking Issues, even if you don't really cook much, you are _seriously_ missing out. Cooking Issues is amazing.

<comment><USER7> podcast?

<comment><USER6> Yep, Heritage Radio Network. Extremely great.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I like Kenji, but he's wrong about osmosis. Specifically, this claim "Moreover, if you soak a turkey in a ridiculously concentrated brine (I tested turkey in a 35% salt solution), according to the osmosis theory, it should dry out even more." is completely wrong.

Osmosis works not only for water, but for the solutes themselves. Water doesn't just (or even _initially_ ) move into the cells: salt, in fact, is what initially osmotes into the cells (they have membrane pumps for equalizing sodium concentration across the cell boundary), and then water follows, in order to equalize overall solute concentration. That's why you see the turkey take on water even when placed in a concentrated brine.

<comment><USER9> I wouldn't think any significant form of active transport would be going on in a dead bird. Also, I think the sodium-potassium pump pumps sodium out, not in, although you could be talking about a different pump?

In the absence of any pumps going on, I would imagine a 35% solution would be extremely hypertonic compared to the interior of the cells, and water would definitely flow out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> He didn't try what I always do. Mix salt with spices that I think I'll like, and dry-brine with that.

The bird tastes like a bird, retains moisture, and the spices get in. Personally I have a large enough fridge that I can afford to put a bird in a garbage bag in it, so that isn't a problem.

<comment><USER11> Most garbage bags are not made of food-safe plastic, so be aware that you may be ingesting substances you don't want.

<comment><USER6> This is probably mostly an issue if you heat the bag.

<comment><USER11> No, the USDA and pretty much anyone regulating food safety agree that storing food touching non food-safe plastics is always unsafe because the bags may be made with or coated with chemicals that WILL leach into your food. This is definitely accelerated by time (which brining involves) and temperature.

Ref: <http://lancaster.unl.edu/food/ftsep04.htm> <http://www.fsis.usda.gov/factsheets/big_thaw/>

<comment><USER6> The USDA link about garbage bags is in a graf about leaving foods to thaw out in the open; "garbage bag" is in the middle of a list including "basement", "garage", "dishwasher", and "kitchen counter". It's not discussing plasticizers.

None of the text on the UNL page contradicts my suggestion that the risk of chemical leaching is primarily caused by heating.

Definitely don't use garbage bags if they make you uncomfortable. For years, people have also been uncomfortable about doing low temp cooks in Ziploc bags for the same reason (it turns out that this is not a valid concern, but it was a reasonable one until recently). Also! I am sure there _are_ trash bags you definitely don't want to put food in. Some bags are scented. Some of them are stiff and sort of starchy. I'd also stick with big brands.

<comment><USER11> From the UNL page, under "Plastic trash bags for food storage":

"The use of plastic trash bags for food storage or cooking is not recommended by USDA '... because they are not food grade plastic and chemicals from them may leach into the food.'"

From Glad themselves: "We do not recommend using Glad Trash bags for food storage."

To each their own, of course. I'm happy to use zip-top bags for low-temp cooking (they are food-safe after all), but garbage bags will be reserved for use in the garbage can.

<comment><USER6> Ziploc bags are food-safe, up to something like 85C. I would not count on off- brand bags being food safe when heated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The best Thanksgiving turkey I ever had was not brined but was salted and then roasted at an incredibly low temperature (~250) for many, many hours. The result was delicious, but it ties up an entire oven for most of a day, which is simply not practical for many families.

<comment><USER13> Generally speaking, if you are working on poultry, lower cooking temperatures work better. Why?

Primary constraint:

\- Meat center at least safe-temperature.

Secondary constraint:

\- The meat should be at the lowest temperature possible.

Within these constraints, the hotter the environment is, the more the outside of the meat is going to exceed the safe temperature, and thus the tougher it is going to be.

<comment><USER14> Couldn't you initially microwave the turkey to bring it's internal temperature up to oven temperature and only then put it into the regular oven?

<comment><USER15> I don't think a microwave could effectively heat the center. The skin depth on a turkey is probably only a couple inches so a microwave could only heat the exterior.

<comment><USER16> Microwave ovens don't heat from the outside in, like a conventional oven. Microwaves are passed through the food, and the changing magnetic field causes water and fat molecules to move through a process called dielectric heating. The rate that food heats up within a microwave is completely dependent on what it's made of, not where it is.

<comment><USER15> You are mostly correct, but I'd like to agree that the rate food heats up does depend where it is. I know this intuitively, when the middle of my burrito is cold when the rest is hot. Microwave ovens do not cook food evenly, and it's not just due to wave nodes. See:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dielectric_heating#Penetration>

Part [0023] in particular: <http://www.google.com/patents/EP1991813A2?cl=en>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Judy Rodgers Zuni cookbook has great recommendations for salting vs brining. She brines poultry as well as pork in a low-salt solution for several days. I've found it to be very effective. She salts red meat for several days to tenderize and flavor.

For turkey, we've switched from the Alton Brown brining strategy to a method that involves salting overnight with a butter/herb mixture, and cooking the dark meat and white meat separately. Dark meat in a braise, breasts roasted. This has the added advantage of being able to braise the night before (even better second day) and roasting for just 1-1.5 hours the day of. We were able to completely prep for two days before this year, and I went for a bike ride Thursday morning with kids and guests, who called me a show off. Credit to David Tanis, former Chez Panisse chef for this technique.

[http://leitesculinaria.com/59625/recipes-roasted-turkey- brai...](http://leitesculinaria.com/59625/recipes-roasted-turkey-braised- turkey.html)

<comment><USER6> Curing red meat is probably a bad idea; it toughens and changes the color of the meet. When he was still at the French Culinary, Dave Arnold did a triangle test where he simply salted a steak prior to a low-temp cook --- he didn't leave it salting for days, just hours --- and all his tasters could identify the pre-salted meat and all preferred the non-pre-salted meat.

Another thing to bear in mind is that brining poultry will make the skin intractably flabby. You can air-dry the meat after your brine it (I had a fan setup to do that), or remove the skin prior to brining to compensate.

<comment><USER18> Well, the salient point there is "prior to a low-temp cook". In that post:

[http://www.cookingissues.com/2011/10/12/to-salt-or-not-to- sa...](http://www.cookingissues.com/2011/10/12/to-salt-or-not-to-salt-thats- the-searing-question/)

Arnold was using sous-vide on the steaks, which has much different cooking characteristics than high heat cooking.

I've generally found that liberally salting steaks with kosher salt up to several hours in advance of grilling or roasting improves the flavor and texture substantially. Serious Eats backs me up, here:

[http://www.seriouseats.com/2011/03/the-food-lab-more-tips- fo...](http://www.seriouseats.com/2011/03/the-food-lab-more-tips-for-perfect- steaks.html)

<comment><USER6> In what way would the cooking characteristics of a low-temp cook exacerbate the curing effect of salt on meat, apart from the fact that low-temp cooking takes longer?

<comment><USER18> Well, in the case of sous vide it would be in a sealed bag, under pressure, cooked longer. I would hypothesize that the increased pressure would help with brine solution penetration of the meat. The sealed bag prevents moisture loss to the environment. The lengthened cooking time would mean more time for the brine solution to effect the contracting muscle filaments, and more time for the solution to be pulled into the muscle cells.

This isn't what we want. We want the salt to effect the outside of the steak the most, the portion that will be exposed to high heat when searing, because that's where the most water loss will come from.

With a slow cook in a combi oven, the characteristics would be still different.

<comment><USER6> Steaks aren't typically cooked under vacuum pressure. Dave Arnold uses Ziplocs for steak.

<comment><USER18> Not when he's going to re-therm. Also, from the post I linked above:

      A rib-eye was salted, seared, placed in a vacuum bag,
      and cooked at 55 C for 1.5 hours, chilled, stored for
      two days, rethermed at 52C for one hour, seared, and
      served

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've used Alton Brown's brine recipe for the past two Thanksgivings and gotten rave reviews. In fact I may have been relegated to the "Turkey Cooker" :(

The salting method looks interesting, but I'm liking Sous Vide right now and will probably do that next time around. One bath for white meat, another for dark. Should be super moist and not lose flavor.

<comment><USER6> Cooking low temp mitigates the brining requirement because there is little chance of overcooking the meat. Also, the juices from the meat are going to be held next to it for the whole cook, and none of it will evaporate. You don't need to brine a low temp turkey.

Curing (what Kenji Lopez-Alt calls "dry brining") works just fine with a low temp cook. It's also faster.

Alton Brown's turkey brine is chock-a-block full of aromatics and spices. Kenji Lopez-Alt and the Serious Eats crew looked into this a year or so back; those flavorings do impact the very outer layer of the meat (esp. if you don't rinse thoroughly) but don't work their way into the meat; their molecules are just too large to make it through cell membranes. I brine/cure with salt and sugar and nothing else now and haven't noticed much of a difference.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Why would you brine a chicken breast for 24 hours!? Wouldn't this account for the difference in texture? With the surface area to mass ratio as one breast has that would be like brining a turkey for a month (maybe more).

Everything I've ever read says that 30-60 minutes is plenty for a breast. Even Alton Brown's fried turkey recipe [1] recommends 8-16 hours for a whole 13-14lb turkey.

The other thing not addressed in the article is the target cooking temperature and rest time. Did he pull them at the USDA-recommended 165° or did he pull them earlier and let them come up to 165°? Were the cuts allowed to rest?

1: [http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/deep-fried- tu...](http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/deep-fried-turkey- recipe/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER21> WRT brining turkey vs aging beef it is an interesting hack that you can either dry up and intensify flavor or moisten and water down flavor using a little food science.

It is interesting that in the culinary arts there's a fixation on watering down your turkey flavor yet drying and strengthening up your beef flavor by drying/aging. An obvious next experiment would be brining up a beef steak and seeing if you like steak when its all watered down. Or a comparison run, watery beef vs dry turkey, which is "better".

Something that I think is missing is many of the traditional turkey dinner side dishes are often pretty watery, compared to traditional steak side dishes. So a dry bird is actually pretty good dining contrast with some wet homemade cranberry sauce or inherently watery green bean and almond casserole or moist mashed yams. A dinner made entirely of mush is a boring texture.

On the other hand, if you want watery poultry, experience it the easy way with ground turkey chili or diced chicken taco meat, or chicken/turkey soup. I like those too, perhaps partially because of the contrast between them and roasted meat.

Not to reopen old wounds but I probably eat more turkey dinner / steak dinner type food due to my sons medically diagnosed food allergies and my general affection for a paleo diet and coincidentally the example I usually provide in person of "what in the world is left for you to eat once you exclude everything" is usually something along the lines of think of a stereotypical thanksgiving dinner (or steak dinner) and take away the bread and you're pretty much on the right track. In that line of thinking if you don't want a dry bird you're much better off simply using a modern electronic thermometer to make sure its not over (or under) cooked than spending endless hours home processing your food. If a factory brined birds, there would be an outcry about processed foods, but its somehow better if you do it, supposedly. Actually its probably better from a contamination and food poisoning standpoint to fool with the bird as little as possible while its raw, regardless of any culinary science experiments or dietary beliefs.

</comment><comment><USER22> That weight over time graph should really be a bar graph and not a line graph.

<comment><USER23> It's a spline graph, which is even more misleading than a line graph. Note how the control group has a small increase in weight before it's cooked.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> There was a Nova episode about creating the perfect turkey. [1] They concluded that the two keys to cooking a tender and flavorful turkey were 1) brining and 2) browning the outside of the meat.

The recipe is available here: [http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/insidenova/2012/10/the- science-...](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/insidenova/2012/10/the-science-of- thanksgiving-dinner.html)

[1] <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/can-i-eat-that.html>

</comment><comment><USER25> I brine chicken all the time; I think that for any white meat, it's critical in getting a result that people actually want to eat. However, brining turkey has never been an option; we're typically running up to the day on thawing the meat properly, and I don't have anything large enough to brine it in. We inject and fry it anyway, so it's plenty juicy and the flavor comes from the injection. Which can be too much flavor sometimes, but I've never had complaints... especially when you compare it to the typical oven option.

I'll definitely be trying the salting method next time, and on my chicken too. I do think this article is a bit misleading with all the bezier curves for weight loss; I imagine that came from 3 discrete data points, so buyer beware. But, if the end result is at all similar, it would definitely be the way to do turkey.

I've also heard good things about rubbing the turkey down with mayonnaise and herbs while it cooks in the oven. This apparently creates a skin texture more like fried turkey, which helps in retaining juices. I imagine this method combined with salting could produce a very tasty oven-cooked turkey.

<comment><USER6> Won't mayonnaise just break in the oven? Wouldn't you be just as well off basting the bird in oil?

<comment><USER26> I've got a great recipe for mayo/sour cream-covered halibut or other white fish, oven-roasted. Not sure how well it holds up for a 5-hour turkey roasting, but at least for 1-1.5-hour cook times, mayo seems to hold up ok.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> While this article piques my geek sensibilities, its conclusions on taste simply don't match my experience - brined turkey is delicious and gets rave reviews every time either I or someone else who's hosting a turkey dinner serves it.

</comment><comment><USER28> An upvote simply for a cooking/food related article on HN. Most of us are involved in tech on a regular basis and sometimes we need a break. For me, one outlet is my garden, cooking, exploring food.

</comment><comment><USER29> All that charting and analysis into the moisture content and none of the same into the actual taste.

<comment><USER30> The moisture charts he generated using a kitchen scale. To generate valid charts for taste, he would have to use a blind panel of skilled human tasters, which would have been much more expensive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Maybe this comment will be totally out of the context, but please, Turkey is a country whereas turkey is an animal. Please be a bit more respectful. Thanks

<comment><USER32> Context or not, I doubt disrespect was intended. The capital casing in the article title is a recognized norm in the written English language.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalization#Titles>

<comment><USER31> I intentionally did not use the word "disrespect". Thnx for the link.

<comment><USER32> If one needs be "more respectful" then one is lacking in respect. The literal dictionary definition of disrespect is a lack of respect.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Rolling your own cloud phone system - <AUTHOR> https://gocardless.com/blog/rolling-your-own-cloud-phone-system/ <comment><USER2> This is cool stuff -- also shows how far things have come in the past decade.

I'm running my company's phone system on a cloud-hosted Asterisk system -- it's basically the same thing that we've been using for years, and works quite well, though we're still tied to physical desk phones.

Curious if anyone has good resources for working with an Asterisk core for an app like this. I recall seeing a Rails framework for Asterisk out there somewhere, but no clue if it's any good. Would love to hear thoughts...

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed - Twilio is awesome purely because it allows you to integrate with the phone networks, which are basically a legacy system, naturally within your applications.

I've not really played with Asterisk. How is it to configure, and what has your experience been like? We outsource the PBX side of our system to a SIP provider called Voipfone ([http://voipfone.co.uk](http://voipfone.co.uk)) but it would be appealing if we could do this in-house and have even more flexibility.

<comment><USER3> Asterisk is very cool and relatively easy to get started with. It's successor, FreeSwitch [1], is also a beautiful piece of software!

[1] [http://www.freeswitch.org/](http://www.freeswitch.org/)

<comment><USER2> FreeSwitch isn't really a "successor" to Asterisk -- Asterisk is still very much in active development (as is FreeSwitch - I think). More like a competing (in a good way) project. See:

[http://www.freeswitch.org/node/117](http://www.freeswitch.org/node/117)

<comment><USER3> Thank you for clarifying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> OP here. If you have any questions about building this kind of thing, feel free to comment or drop me an email at tim [at] gocardless [dot] com.

<comment><USER4> Hey Tim, big phone geek here.

I'm assuming this is a quasi-call center environment. Have you thought about how you're going to implement manager eavesdrop and other things of that nature? What you've done is cool, I'm curious about where you're planning to go from here :).

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Josh - I'm the same. Building solutions to these kinds of problems is really interesting.

We've not implemented that yet, but I've spoken to another company doing similar things with around 100 agents and they've managed to implement this using Twilio's conferencing facility. It's easy to drop in and out of a conference silently, which is perfect for this.

Our support is certainly not at scale, and lots more features will become appropriate as we grow, from letting people schedule callbacks to manager eavesdropping to more sophisticated management of waiting calls.

Have you built anything like this?

<comment><USER4> Well,

I work at 2600hz, so we're building stuff like this but for big operators and Fortune100 companies. I'm just curious about what tools you have at your disposal when it comes to building complex applications. I'm a big fan of Twilio because they've really lowered the barrier to entry in the market to basically 0.

So, have I built anything like this: yes, but it's a little different.

I think Twilio's conferencing is the way to go but I'm not familiar enough with their API to know how mute and deaf control states work. Those are pretty essential to a good eavesdropper experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How has the call quality been?

<comment><AUTHOR> We've generally found it to be decent, although (naturally) variable. We use Twilio alongside a UK SIP provider called Voipfone ([http://voipfone.co.uk](http://voipfone.co.uk)) which is how we actually get our calls through to PSTN.

Twilio Client ([https://www.twilio.com/client](https://www.twilio.com/client)) seems to provide better quality, but we really like the convenience of hardware phones and built-in PBX functionality.

<comment><USER6> Interesting. I've always had much better quality using Twilio to bridge to PSTN than through Twilio Client.

I keep coming back to Twilio Client because the idea of a softphone (and a web based one at that) is so alluring compared to having to deploy more hardware.

If I recall there was also a cost advantage to using Twilio Client (you only have to pay for one leg of the call instead of both legs).

But every time we've tried to deploy it there have been quality and usability issues which have forced us to fallback to PSTN. Never the less, I'll keep trying it every couple of months... :)</comment></comment></comment>


Older Americans Are 'Hooked' on Vitamins - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/03/well/older-americans-vitamins-dietary-supplements.html <comment><USER2> I compliment my regular nutrients with multivitamins, chelated magnesium, enzymes, amino acids, probiotics, omega-3 fatty acids and medium chain triglycerides. My health has been steadily improving over the years. I look and feel younger today than I did 10 years ago.

My only regret was not starting this much sooner.

</comment><comment><USER3> If you're going to take a daily multivitamin for "insurance" then make sure it's not a megadose. In fact taking a children's vitamin isn't a bad idea.</comment>


Pagination with rel="next" and rel="prev" - <AUTHOR> http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html <comment><USER2> I haven't thought about rel="next" and rel="prev" since the middle of the last decade, but I recall that the blogging community used these attributes in semantically different way. Instead of marking parts of a single unit of content, rel="next" and rel="prev" were used to mark the _next document in a chronological series_.

IMO, this latter usage is consistent with both HTML 4 and HTML5 semantics. I suppose Google's approach can be read as consistent with the specs, too, but either usage takes a different interpretation of "a document" and the relationships in a series of documents.

<http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/types.html#type-links>

[http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#sequential- link-t...](http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#sequential-link-types)

<comment><USER3> I agree with you, the HTML 4.01 specification says that "next" refers to the next document in a linear sequence of documents. A sequence of documents ordered chronologically would be a linear sequence, like the sequence of blog articles published on a certain blog. The individual articles could be regarded as "stand alone" documents and do not require the other articles in the sequence for some "completeness".

The Google article talks mainly about paginated content and mentions that it comes in different forms. The examples given in the article suggest that here we have a sequence of pages where we should or could have only one document, like in the example of the forum thread: it may consist of many pages, ordered in a linear fashion, but individual pages of the thread might be somehow incomplete. The whole thread is the document. I think that this interpretation is different from the interpretation of next/prev indicating a chronologically ordered sequence.

The article mentions also "The first page":

>>The first page only contains rel="next" and no rel="prev" markup.<<

"The first page" means that there is only one. Could we have more than one first page as entry point into the sequence? Like a story with different possible beginnings converging to a common end?

<comment><USER4> Is this just a matter of the definitions of "page" and "document"? I haven't read the specification, but I wouldn't be surprised if it called webpages "documents".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> An interesting aspect is if Google's treatment of these links incentivizes publishers to add them, then browsers (or browser extensions) will also be able to use them to defeat the purpose of pagination in the first place, e.g. by having something like Readability slurp all the pages into a view-all page.

<comment><USER6> Well, not just that. I imagine browsers implementing keyboard shortcuts that automatically go to the next or previous pages.

<comment><USER7> Opera has that already — Forward button becomes "Fast Forward" and if you use Spacebar to scroll to the bottom, it will automatically follow "next" link.

Ironically, HTML5 recently dropped bunch of link relationships because of lack of browser and search engine support.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Google continues to leverage its power to provide a better experience for their users as they click on links they find through search. This is one example, and First Click Free is another.

The flip side of this is that publishers are now offering an inferior experience to users who navigate directly to their sites. If I type in NYTimes.com and start browsing through articles because I'm a big fan of The New York Times, I'm treated worse (I have to deal with an article limit and pagination) than if I stumble on their articles through Google. Google is giving more and more value to brands, while creating an atmosphere that rewards people who have no brand loyalty (except to Google).

Google has been strong-arming publishers for a long time. Generally it has made the Internet a better place, but it still makes me nervous (especially as a publisher). Google seems to be pushing to eliminate more and more tactics that are profitable for publishers (and generally bad for users). I doubt that Google will kill the goose that laid the golden egg, but you have to think that publishers are going to start to push back if it goes much further.

<comment><USER9> Making the search experience better for their users by utilizing a feature the website provides (full page view versus pagination) is not strong arming publishers. The websites already give that same experience option, Google is just attempting to make the web a smarter place. What's wrong with that?

They could be utilizing their search dominance to do a lot more harm than good. However, almost everything they do helps make the web better, even if it does push their bottom line. That's business.

Most businesses don't care about your loyalty to other brands. Why should they? Google, on the other hand, has made a lot of strides toward giving big brands benefits in the search results. I'm not sure whether this is good or bad, but saying they reward people who have no brand loyalty is untrue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> i implemented these on a site a while back after an opera user requested it, because apparently opera has a keyboard shortcut or something to automatically go to the next/previous pages that use these tags.

what i found was that opera started doing a pre-fetch on them as soon as i added the tags, so every time an opera user would visit the site, they would fetch two pages. i had to remove the tags to cut down on the resource usage.

<comment><USER11> What was your percentage of Opera users, if you don't mind me asking? If it's only a very small percentage, was the increase in resource usage really that significant?

<comment><USER10> it was a small percentage, but the pages being requested were accessing external resources that i had to pay for on a per-view basis. paying for those views without actually showing anything to the user was wasteful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is there a good reason to paginate anything these days? The fact that publishers make people click on a 12pt link to read the next "page", and thus view more ads, is pretty insane.

If you aren't using infinite scrolling, chances are you're doing it wrong.

<comment><USER13> Web comics, documentation, anything where clicking 'back' should get you to the position you were browsing last without waiting for an ajax call, etc. These all benefit from pagination.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Another plus with adding rel="next" and rel="prev" is that you can easily add keyboard navigation to your pages with a script like this: <http://vemod.net/rel-keyboard-navigation>

</comment><comment><USER15> will_paginate has been using these attributes for quite a while.

</comment><comment><USER16> Great, this will just encourage pagination in online articles.

<comment><USER17> I don't think _this_ will make any dent in the use or expansion of pagination. Pagination in order to increase ad impressions have already done the most damage.</comment></comment>


Autopsy of a deep learning paper - <AUTHOR> https://blog.piekniewski.info/author/admin/ <comment><USER2> That's incredible, thanks to the author for dissecting that. I wonder how many lower-quality DL papers are produced in a similar manner.</comment>


Tesla appears to defy Bay Area shutdown, plans to operate Fremont factory - <AUTHOR> https://electrek.co/2020/03/16/tesla-fremont-factory-shut-down-shelter-in-place/ <comment><USER4> Personally, I think this is incredibly irresponsible. Elon told his workers to stay home even if they feel "slightest bit ill or even uncomfortable" [0]. Yet, according to the CDC, symptoms may not appear until 2-14 days after exposure [1]. So Tesla employees may be spreading the virus to each other, and the rest of the world, without knowing it.

In the Alameda order which describes what "essential businesses" may remain open, the closest loophole I can see that might allow the Tesla factory to stay open is for "Airlines, taxis, and other private transportation providers providing transportation services necessary for Essential Activities and other purposes expressly authorized in this Order" [2]. I think it's more than a stretch to say that building new cars counts as transportation services. Repairing existing Teslas, sure. But I don't think Tesla should be allowed to keep building new cars. And I think if Elon cares about his workers' safety, and the safety of the world, he would ask his employees who are building new cars to stay home.

[0] [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus- tesla-...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-tesla- factory/teslas-u-s-factory-to-stay-open-as-coronavirus-lockdown-begins-report- idUSKBN2140Q8) [1] [https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/symptoms- testing/s...](https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/symptoms- testing/symptoms.html) [2] [http://acphd.org/media/559658/health-officer- order-shelter-i...](http://acphd.org/media/559658/health-officer-order- shelter-in-place-20200316.pdf)

<comment><USER5> Judging from the full body of his email (which I'm guessing plenty of people read before it even reached the news judging from how many of my friends sent it to me), it seems like he really _doesn 't_ care about his staff.

Choice quote:

> I will personally be at work, but that's just me. Totally okay if you want > to stay at home for any reason.

If this isn't the most peer-pressure-y way to tell people to show up, I don't know what is. The head of the company choosing to keep showing up to the office in the middle of an outbreak is the exact opposite of the precedent he should be setting right now.

Shoot, he can even tell people he's going to work from home and still secretly come to the office; people would understand. It's his company. Or he could've just not mentioned his plans at all. But by mentioning his plans, his direct reports will still show up, their direct reports will largely still show up, and anyone who doesn't want demerits on their performance reviews will all still show up. No different from an unlimited leave policy where people take no leave.

This is absolutely wrong. And hopefully illegal. And I definitely did cancel my Tesla order (RN112815329) because of it.

<comment><USER6> I suspect people with vulnerable household members will probably not show up, regardless of their reporting structure.

<comment><USER7> Not if they also want to put food on the table.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "Alameda declares Telsa an 'essential business,' factory allowed to operate under cornavirus orders" [https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Alameda- declared-Telsa-a...](https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Alameda-declared- Telsa-an-essential-business-is-15137716.php)

<comment><USER9> How is an electric car factory an essential business?

I hope someone follows the money and prosecutes Elon if he exercised any financial influence here.

<comment><USER10> Without commenting on whether it is sound, the logic seems to be that transportation (particularly private transportation) is essential. Thus, auto repair and supply businesses have been exempted as "essential businesses" (they are specifically called out in all 6 Bay Area county orders).

Taking this one step further, auto repair businesses can't very well repair cars if there are no parts available, and those parts come from Fremont. Therefore, the Tesla factory would (at least in part) theoretically already qualify for an exemption under the existing order.

One could also make the argument that (given that private transportation has been deemed an "essential" service) replacing worn out or destroyed cars is essential, and thus manufacturing finished cars qualifies for an exemption.

<comment><USER11> Your argument can be extended infinitely. It's pretty easy to understand that Tesla (and any other assembly plants that fit in this window) is simply getting special treatment here.

The factory that makes hydraulic fluid for Tesla's presses that stamp out car parts is also part of the transportation supply chain, As is the oil refinery that supplies feedstock to the hydraulic oil vendor.

<comment><USER12> Honestly, your point is valid except for the part about special treatment. From what I've heard, window tint shops are staying open too based upon the same exemption. Its a confusing time and the regulators haven't fully thought this exemption through.

(Just to be clear, I'm not defending Tesla here. They have the choice to shutdown regardless of government order or exemptions)

<comment><USER13> If a business owner wants to skirt the regulations by following the letter of the law instead of the spirit of it, that's fine and we can consider them all assholes. The rules are to keep people from getting sick. I hope all of his employees go on strike like the Mercedes and VW ones.

<comment><USER14> People worship him, no one has guts to strike at Tesla

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Yuck, leadership at its worst. It's tough to shut down factories - <USER2> are sensitive - so it makes sense to allow a skeleton crew. That's not what's happening. This looks like obvious local corruption in the face of a public health crisis. Not thrilled to be "shelter at home-d" next to these pricks with a wife who works at an area hospital and someone elderly at home: this is quite the FU to the community that keeps bailing this government-funded company out.

I've been keeping a tally of companies and leaders who force people to come to the office or use this as a marketing opportunity (vs data4good), and Tesla is now on the shortlist for evil.

<comment><USER16> _> government-funded company_

Has Tesla received taxpayer subsidies for anything in the last year or two other than customer incentives to buy zero emission vehicles?

<comment><USER15> That's a myopic view of the largely tax-payer enabled Tesla/SpaceX/SolarCity conglomorate. I don't expect a company largely bootstrapped by massive US gov program awards & free passes+subsidies to give equity to the gov despite the massive capital investment, but backroom calls to circumvent public health policy is somewhere between "far below baseline expectations" and "evil".

I'm happy we have real civic-level project funding for people who get results, and private citizens reaping massive profits from them. In fact, I think the real genius of Musk & Thiel is to be self-enriching versions of FDR, and the DC prime etc. mess has forced their need. But that doesn't excuse evil - <USER3> are real lives involved,.

<comment><USER17> How do you feel about GM keeping factories open? Or Boeing?

<comment><USER15> I -- and governments -- are for skeleton crews keeping most factories open to avoid machine breakdown, and essential businesses at whatever they can do safely.

Consumer car companies, casinos, and other special interests don't make sense to me beyond the obvious answer of "knowing corruption" and "institutionalized malignant ignorance."

<comment><USER18> The Alameda county order only allows for construction of replacement parts, which can be obviously argued is necessary. People need cars to get to work; people like doctors and nurses and grocery store clerks on the front lines of this pandemic. A shortage of replacement parts for their cars would only make it harder for them to fight this.

<comment><USER17> Anticipate an amendment to the health order to clarify one way or another.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is consistent with Tesla's safety record both for its own employees [0] and for its customers [1]. Government is all too happy to allow Elon to keep testing the boundaries.

[0] [https://www.revealnews.org/article/inside-teslas-factory- a-m...](https://www.revealnews.org/article/inside-teslas-factory-a-medical- clinic-designed-to-ignore-injured-workers/)

[1] [https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a31093282/ntsb- autopilot-t...](https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a31093282/ntsb-autopilot- tesla-crash-ruling/)

</comment><comment><USER20> The asymmetry of outcomes here is sickening.

If things work out for Tesla and they don't have a Covid-19 outbreak among their employees, a small number of people stand to benefit greatly (Elon Musk especially).

If things go south for Tesla, not only do Tesla employees have to deal with the fallout, but also their families and their communities.

<comment><USER21> It sounds like he's being a shrewd businessman who has discovered cheap convexity. Don't hate the player, hate the game.

<comment><USER20> We _may_ have it in our power to change the game around - vilify Musk and show him that this convexity is just a mirage.

Not sure if that will work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Marin county resident here. The details of the lockdown permit essential businesses and services. Automobile repair, parts, and services fall under that category.

<comment><USER23> Alameda granted Tesla an exemption

<comment><USER24> Which smells a bit of "they're essential because they're employing a significant portion of the population".

<comment><USER18> Well how many hours are they even working? Who the hell is buying $50,000 cars right now?

<comment><USER25> Maybe not this month, but things will go back to normal and people will want their $50000 cars

<comment><USER18> Things will not be normal for a long time. This is going to be a severe global recession and thats going to depress auto sales a lot. Also, oil is $24 a barrel, which makes electric cars at even more a disadvantage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Interesting that they post an update/correction late in the article, but retain the misleading title, which was a weasel word anyway. Classy.

</comment><comment> Funes- I find that while Musk appears to be more than competent on a number of things, his opinions and stances on many subjects are, to me, downright dumb.

<comment><USER27> If I'm playing chess with a guy who is known for making good decisions in (i.e. winning) many chess games, and he makes a move that looks dumb, the prudent conclusion is not that the move is dumb, is that I'm dumb and I need to figure out what the motivation was.

<comment> Funes- Very flawed analogy. You're talking about qualitatively-different decisions _in the same "game"_. I wasn't, since I was critizising him based on his decisions regarding public health (handling covid-19, to be precise); I explicitly acknowledged his seemingly outstanding competence with regards to other matters (what you would refer to as "chess" in your analogy).

If he made a decision that appears to be wrong or stupid regarding Tesla cars or SpaceX, I'd be more cautious to call him out. But my comment wasn't even close to be about that. I hope you can understand what I'm saying here.

<comment><USER27> I don't think it is, though. You can subdivide life infinitely and claim different domains and how one can be smart in soda business but dumb in candy business, but I don't think that's justified. He made a decision about how a factory should operate given the environment; I think, as his many other decisions about business before, this one is solid.

<comment> Funes- Alright, Elon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Already under discussion at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22606140](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22606140)

</comment><comment><USER29> I'm not excusing Musk's decsion, but I will say that lots of places are ignoring the shelter in place request. Residential construction workers are still putting up drywall, laying tiles, etc. Parts of the city have the usual number of people on the street you'd expect on a weekday. Tourists are walking around. High end coffee shops are still selling $6 lattes.

I went to the doctor and the pharmacist and was surprised at the amount of people milling about. Definitely no 6 feet of social distancing either.

While the public works construction crews are exempt from this, maybe they can fix Van Ness while everyone's cooped up?

<comment><USER30> > I'm not excusing Musk's decsion, lots of places are ignoring the shelter in > place request

Wow, really? Let's take a look at your examples.

> Residential construction workers are still putting up drywall, laying tiles, > etc.

Residential construction is exempted.

> High end coffee shops are still selling $6 lattes.

coffee shops are exempted for take-out and delivery.

> the doctor and the pharmacist and was surprised at the amount of people > milling about

Doctor's offices and pharmacists are exempted.

<comment><USER29> > coffee shops are exempted for take-out and delivery. > Residential > construction is exempted.

That's some very essential services there. My point is that the number of exclusions make this policy a joke. It's not a serious effort. It's half-arsed at best. It's not going to work.

> Doctor's offices and pharmacists are exempted.

I know, that's why I went.

<comment><USER30> > My point is that the number of exclusions make this policy a joke

Bullshit. You are changing your stance once it was called out as wrong.

These were your examples for "I will say that lots of places are ignoring the shelter in place request". Doing things that are exempted from the request isn't ignoring it.

<comment><USER29> Wrong, and let's try to keep things civil. You clearly missed the point and are dying on a hill not worth it.

I'm not alone in my disgust about people's activity during the lockdown: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/03/18/coronavirus...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/03/18/coronavirus- cnn-sanjay-gupta/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The new apartment complex near the (old) Fremont BART station still had people actively working at it this morning. It doesn't seem to be on the essential list from what I saw from the official Alameda County order.

<comment><USER32> That sounds like it would be covered under item 10d:

> For purposes of this Order, individuals may leave their residence to provide > any services or perform any work necessary to the operations and maintenance > of "Essential Infrastructure," including,but not limited to, public works > construction, construction of housing (in particular affordable housing or > housing for individuals experiencing homelessness), airport operations, > water, sewer, gas, electrical, oil refining, roads and highways, public > transportation, solid waste collection and removal, internet, and > telecommunications systems(including the provision of essential global, > national, and local infrastructure for computing services, business > infrastructure, communications, and web-based services), provided that they > carry out those services or that work in compliance with Social Distancing > Requirements as defined this Section, to the extent possible.

Source: [http://acphd.org/media/559658/health-officer-order- shelter-i...](http://acphd.org/media/559658/health-officer-order-shelter-in- place-20200316.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Here is the actual shutdown order for Alameda county where the Tesla factory is located[1].

[1][http://acphd.org/media/559658/health-officer-order- shelter-i...](http://acphd.org/media/559658/health-officer-order-shelter-in- place-20200316.pdf)

<comment><USER34> Who's the sheriff? Up to them, ultimately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> [https://twitter.com/ACSOSheriffs/status/1240062681635123201](https://twitter.com/ACSOSheriffs/status/1240062681635123201)

Apparently under county order they cannot make any new vehicles, only replacement parts.

</comment><comment><USER35> Unless Fremont factory is 100% automated with robots, this sounds reckless. However, the Gigafactory 3 in Shanghai has been reopened and working in full speed (except when it's bottlenecked by upstream suppliers)

</comment><comment><USER36> I used to support Tesla but can't help but think recent successes (including the astronomical rise in stock price) got to Elon Musk. I hate to say it but they're 2-3 quarters away from possibly filing if the virus continues at current pace in US and EU.

</comment><comment><USER37> Send home all the elderly people and anyone with a preexisting condition. Most people will get sick anyone. Vaccines take a least a year to make. Elon is openly saying people are overreacting

<comment><USER38> Couple of trials are already underway for Covid-19. So, it may not take a year

<comment><USER18> Stage 1. That's the easiest stage to get approval for, and many of these trials might not go into Stage 2 or Stage 3. Drug trials take a long time to figure out all of the possible side effects.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I believe the factory workers are hourly. He should just shut it down for two weeks. Not a huge cost.

</comment><comment><USER40> Is anyone surprised? Elon is notorious for burning through people to achieve his vision.

</comment><comment><USER41> Even Apple Employees are attending work

</comment><comment><USER42> Because money.

</comment><comment><USER43> Part of me wants to say, "oh we've overreacted a bit, we should keep working while observing safety precautions like distancing and hygiene." The other part of me is doomsayer permabear saying that even giving humans the chance to mess something up will result in catastrophic failure. At the end of the day, I certainly wouldn't want to be the one responsible for killing someone's mother or father.

</comment><comment><USER44> And what exactly the problem with that? We have a biggest hysteria of the latest 10 years. Thanks for the social media and news. And now our economy is basically on free fall, thanks for that. I would like at the end of hysteria to make some analysis: How many millions of dollars we just spend on each death case.</comment>