The problem with Facebook - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/fchollet/status/976563870322999296 <comment><USER2> [https://twitter.com/fchollet/status/976783608219279360](https://twitter.com/fchollet/status/976783608219279360)

He goes on to defend his work at Google, arguing that they're similar on the surface, but Facebook is truly dangerous where Google is not.

I'm not sure I agree with that. Google is quite a bit more distributed across products and platforms, so Facebook has a simpler loop centered around the newsfeed. That said, Google can track a user's behaviour across nearly every website on the internet.

Facebook can run these "reinforcement learning on a global scale" experiments through its newsfeed. Google, it seems to me, can run them across the web as a whole.

<comment><USER3> Facebook also tracks users across the web, isn't that what the like buttons are for?

<comment><USER4> Sure but how about Pixel. Or Google Analytics, Clicky, Alexa (analytics not the talking thing), Adroll , ... I mean the amount of trackers I can toss on a website is mind boggling and super easy, all hoovering as much data as possible. This is not exclusive to Facebook nor do I think they gather the most data.

After sorting through this guys first half dozen tweets I finally realized he's talking about AI and advertising. As an ecommerceguy here's my take. I'd love to be able to upload a product feed, have FB or whomever evaluate those products and push them to whomever the adbot/algorithm/ai/hall9k whatever we're calling it today; as long as it returns good ROI, happy customers and less work for me I'm happy.

This is already somewhat possible with Google Shopping Feed.

So again, besides this helped Trump, why the outrage? All I see is people freaking out at what has been public knowledge for years albeit obfuscated under a massive sheen of PRSpeak. FWIW I have always actively stayed away from Facebook as much as possible to the point I tell my sister to take photos off her feed of me. But here I am tangentially defending them.

I wanted to add a link to this site, It connects to over 200 trackers. [https://segment.com/](https://segment.com/)

<comment><USER5> I am not from US so I don't care about republicans or democrats, I am happy the people got outrage because of Trump connection because it has the side effect and pulling hidden things into light

Also the fact that you know how Facebook or Google makes money does not mean that the public knows, so my father does not understand why someone would put videos on youtube or would put fake articles about things, or click bait , most of the people do not know about trackers, about the fact that ads on pages make money for the website, that ads on the videos make money for publishers.

I hope this scandal will make some light on exactly what Facebook collect when I visit a webpage with FB buttons, I want us and the public to find out about the shadow profiles, about any experiments done on users, it would be good if we find if similar things happen in other countries elections and I am wondering how well this things work.

Also it would be good if we could get less crap on FB, I do not use it that much but I have people in my family that read articles posted in FB and most of them are fake news(not politics but other crap like medicine)

I hope we get some laws about tracking people outside your webpages and making shadow profiles illegal.

So even if you don't like Hillary or her party, I think you should desire the entire truth surfaces and we see all details, elections are done so it is nothing you can do now but maybe with more information the next ones will be better with less dirt and fake news in social media and more actual debates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> He's ignoring the fact that YouTube is as bad if not worse than Facebook.

They might demonetize some radical channels but they're still making money on users who get to YouTube through those channels.

[https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/opinion/sunday/youtube...](https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/opinion/sunday/youtube- politics-radical.html?referer=https://t.co/LLAotgmEoG?amp=1)

[https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/11/04/business/media/youtube...](https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/11/04/business/media/youtube- kids-paw-patrol.html?referer=https://www-avclub-com.cdn.ampproject.org/)

[https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/d3w9ja/how-youtubes- algo...](https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/d3w9ja/how-youtubes-algorithm- prioritizes-conspiracy-theories)

</comment><comment><USER7> The work Chollet is doing at Google is reaching an equally nefarious end. There are studies showing how manipulated search results have the same effects on perception, and YouTube is manipulating their feed in the same ways as Facebook.

His analysis is correct, but this:

> If you work in AI, please don't help them. Don't play their game. Don't > participate in their research ecosystem. Please show some conscience

is a clear cut case of the pot calling the kettle black.

</comment><comment><USER8> The Twitter essay is my least favorite thing about the future we live in.

<comment><USER9> Seriously. You can set up a blog in under a minute these days. There's no excuse.

<comment><USER10> the other sad reality is that on mobile, the number of people who read the tweets is arguably going to be higher than people who click to the blog, and a spam of tweets attracts attention and audience. I can't remember the study, but people are generally rather unlikely to navigate out of an app to read something, hence everything having a built in browser.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> [https://twitter.com/fchollet/status/976784465245515776](https://twitter.com/fchollet/status/976784465245515776)

>Essentially nothing about the threat described applies to Google. Nor Amazon. Nor Apple.

>It could apply to Twitter, in principle, but in practice it almost entirely doesn't.

I don't believe this for one second. Google does the exact same "algorithmic curation" with its search results. Different people get different results based on internal profiles that Google has built: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble). Over time that shift in search result content acts upon people in exactly the same way as the Facebook example he describes.

</comment><comment><USER12> A Google employee points out a problem with FB that's also very much a problem with Google. That's rich. Someone is about to receive a STFU email from HR.

</comment><comment><USER13> For the discussion we have to decouple that he works for Google.

But he is right we are at a crossroad and the path that will be taken is clear for me. Manipulating/controlling populations is where the money will go and people will create those tools because those jobs pay well, its that simple.

In the next elections we will see deepfakes videos of candidates instantly responding to problems or defaming videos will be put out were you cant judge on the spot if its real or not. The trend of echo chambers will continue as we see it right now.

The only thing i can see is education if we look back at the recent history going from only a certain amount of people can who read/write or have access to books to everyone has to learn and has access to libraries. This is the next level.

And on the other side we have to fight for our right of privacy and kill some business models on the way. Right now this is for me on the same scale as Atomic / Chemical Weapons.

</comment><comment><USER14> It saddens me that someone that brilliantly summarizing the problems of extensive AI-driven content organization in tech companies does not seem to understand that the company he works for suffer from the same exact problems.

The real question I am having reading this thread is: is this guy being very naive, or just dishonest?

</comment><comment><USER15> As someone mentioned in a comment section elsewhere, "It is very easy to sacrifice another person's job."

</comment><comment><USER16> I think the nefariousness is overblown. I present to you, a contender: an elementary school curriculum. No AI, and way more influence over basically everything you will hold as truth for decades.

</comment><comment><USER17> The problem with social media is that it isn't social. Telling me which article to read isn't social. Showing me someone's status isn't social. Posting a tweet and getting 2 likes is not social. Commenting on HN is probably the closest thing to social because someone might actually interact with me.

If you have all this data, make my life more fulfilling. I get more community out of IRC than I do on any of the major social media sites. They are really just media sites.

</comment><comment><USER18> I agree with everything. Going by that logic, I think we should all celebrate that Google Plus is not as successful as Facebook. But for all your concerns, Mr.Chollet, what assurances can you give us about Google being not involved in something similar?

<comment><USER19> For my past use Google Plus was far better than FB or Twitter, but I have no illusions about it. Anecdata:

[https://chorasimilarity.wordpress.com/2018/03/21/i-deleted-f...](https://chorasimilarity.wordpress.com/2018/03/21/i-deleted- facebook-twitter-and-entered-the-invisible-college/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> _We're looking at a powerful entity that builds fine-grained psychological profiles of over two billion humans, that runs large-scale behavior manipulation experiments, and that aims at developing the best AI technology the world has ever seen. Personally, it really scares me

If you work in AI, please don't help them. Don't play their game. Don't participate in their research ecosystem. Please show some conscience_

When Facebook does something awful, their defenders rush to say "what about Google, they're even worse!"

There's a lot of false equivalence in HN discussions, but these two are not in the same galaxy when it comes to abusing the privacy of their users.

</comment><comment><USER21> I can't take this genre of tech/opticon commentary seriously when they remove all human agency. Reading this argument, there's an implicit judgement that (1) humans have no choice but to be influenced by Facebook, and (2) other methods of information retrieval are somehow neutral. Sure, I agree that understanding power structures is important – what a novel and interesting point /s.

<comment><USER22> If you think understanding power structures isn't novel or interesting, it's surprising that you think discussions like this "remove all human agency." Agency doesn't mean you have the freedom to do whatever, it means you are acting in your own self-interest according to the limitations of your environment and your knowledge. When we acknowledge the agency of people in early states, for example, we are saying that they are taking part in the process of state formation, often to their own benefit, and that it isn't just one person magically creating a state. We are _not_ saying that they aren't to blame when they get burned at the stake by that same state because they had the "agency" to just say no.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I can never take seriously someone explaining something in detail over a long series of tweets. What ever happened to personal websites for god's sake?

<comment><USER24> The impact is also diminished by the fact that they're complaining about the idea of a powerful social media empire on Twitter.

<comment><USER25> > The impact is also diminished by the fact that they're complaining about the > idea of a powerful social media empire on Twitter.

Not really, if twitter is a good platform for him to get his message out, I'm all for it.

I also like the irony of using social media platforms to spread ideas that could hasten their downfall. Its sort of like in some martial arts where you exploit the weight and strength of your opponent to _defeat them_.

If you're arguing against social media, social media reaches the exact people you most need to reach.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> And Facebook is selling these capabilities to the higest bidder regardless of their moral or ethical standing.

</comment><comment><USER27> Nah, fchollet just doesn't want pytorch to minimize keras:

[https://twitter.com/jekbradbury/status/976612114260357120](https://twitter.com/jekbradbury/status/976612114260357120)</comment>


Ask HN: Thoughts about this conversation? - <AUTHOR> This thread is on a public forum(Twitter) between two scientists.
Person1 - [Director of #AI #research @nvidia, Bren #Professor @Caltech, Fmr Principal scientist @awscloud] Person2 - Research Scientist at Deepmind
Both are entitled to their own opinions. Here's how the thread goes...
Person1(talking about her newly published work): DeepLearning is only good at interpolation. But applications need extrapolation that can reason about more complex scenarios than it is trained on. With current methods, accuracy degrades rapidly when complexity of test instances grows. Our new work aims to overcome this...
Person2: This tweet really downplays prior work. NTM, memory nets, Neural GPU, MANN, graph nets, and many, many other related methods also degrade gracefully. Your work looks like an important next step, but this rhetoric is unhelpful.
Person1: What you are doing is rhetoric and rude. We have mentioned all prior work in our paper. You don't want to engage in science. It is inevitable to get attacked online as a woman. #deepmind can engage in all kind of media hype that is unethical but I get attacked for stating facts. As a woman stating science, I get accused of engaging in rhetoric.
I personally feel this response by Person1 to be extremely out of the blue. Putting aside the fact that Person1 is a Director @ NVIDIA + some title at Caltech and Person2 is a scientist as well @Google, let's look at the simple conversation here. The thread started with a tweet about an interesting work. That was followed by a review directed only at the tweet being rhetoric. And it was then replied with something unimaginable. Am I the only one looking at this all confused?
Source post: https://twitter.com/AnimaAnandkumar/status/1194338388221972480 <comment><USER2> Person2 is out of line by chastising Person1 for commenting on the limits of DeepLearning. Person1 therefore is completely within their rights to call out Person2. I am not familiar enough with Person1's history to know whether they are universally a jerk or reserve that behavior when commenting on women's tweets.

<comment><AUTHOR> I myself am a woman and pursuing my graduate studies in this field. There's no gender bias here in calling out flaws in work that's deeply technical. I have given similar reviews to some enormous claims put forward by my peers(men and women). I agree that person2 could have been more subtle on a public forum. But not even for a second did I associate a gender dimension until person1 brought it into the context.

Since we are talking history - with some search - I found out that Person1 has recently put out a #metoo experience and called out some incidents at Caltech. Don't you think there's not even a little bias here against every possible "person2" who happened to be a male and just gave a technical feedback? Not like that's an invalid statement. He does have valid points in what he said(just the way he said it might not have been ideal). But it escalated very quickly!

<comment><USER2> So, Person2 acknowledges the importance of Person1's work but then publicly passes judgment on _the manner_ in which they presented it as a way of dismissing Person1's main point. Person1's behavior would be widely ridiculed and probably booed if this happened at a conference.

The more professional approach is to simply present one's case without commenting on the quality, style, or manner of the other's presentation.

My two cents, best of luck in your studies :)</comment></comment></comment>


Anatomy of Error: A surgeon remembers his mistakes - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/18/anatomy-of-error

<comment><USER2> Awareness of fallibility is an important driver of reliability.

I met my surgeon on a gurney just before a shoulder operation, and joked with him that we had considered writing "not this one" on the good shoulder. He smiled, and then handed my then-wife a pen, saying "Write that. Things like that happen all the time." And I felt that much more confident in him, because I think people who know they can do something stupid are so much less likely to actually do them.

<comment><USER3> I don't know how widespread this is, but when I went to get surgery on my foot (NHS in the UK) they literally drew an arrow on my leg with a marker pen to avoid operating on the wrong foot haha.

<comment><USER4> I recently had shoulder surgery.

One of the first steps the day of was the surgeon coming in, talking to me, and initialing the shoulder he was to operate on.

Every new person I met along the way asked me what shoulder it was, and then wanted to see the initials before continuing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't think entrepreneurs or developers can look back on their mistakes with the same regret as surgeons or medical people. Watching a startup fail or a complete failure of a payment system is probably nothing compared to the opportunity cost involved when its someones life.

I barely have the emotional maturity to handle a breakup -- never mind a mistake that cost someone their life or even a finger. Certain structural engineers or medical device engineers might face such decisions but the vast majority of devs and tech people don't.

<comment><USER6> Developers are less likely to be directly responsible for the sort of things that surgeons are, unless you write mission-critical software. However, if you write any kind of software that a lot (millions) of people depend on, there is a very good chance that you've ruined people's lives or even caused death.

I dread to think how many people's relationships have been destroyed because the developers of Facebook, Whatsapp, Telegram et al decided to implement read notifications/"last seen" on their instant messaging apps.

<comment><USER7> There are some cases in England of post office managers going to jail because the Post Office software audit trail made it look like those managers were defrauding the post office. It turns out there might be severe bugs causing these errors

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23233573](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23233573)

Suicide is complex and I don't want to ascribe a simplistic reason to suicide, but at least one post office manager died by suicide after a wrongful accusation.

A bungled software update left many people in the UK without access to their money for weeks. At least one person was imprisoned for that - they had to pay a fine by a certain date; they tried to pay but couldn't; even though this was totally outside their control the system wasn't flexible enough to cope.

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21280943](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21280943)

British Gas allows some people to make weekly payments as part of a payment plan scheme. But you have to pay exactly that amount on exactly the agreed day or their software does not recognise the payment as part of the plan. EG you agree to pay £10 every Friday. On Wednesday you start by paying £20, then on Wednesday you pay £12, and you continue to pay £9 or £12 every Wednesday. You're always actually paid more than your plan agreement; and your actual balance is in credit; but you'll be getting aggressive "red" letters from British Gas telling you that you have not kept up to date with your plan and that your account is in arrears. British Gas, and I say this as politely as I can, are fucking scum.

<comment><USER8> "At least one person was imprisoned for that" \- I initially thought you meant someone at RBS was imprisoned, which would have been interesting...

<comment><USER9> Sadly, the RBS debacle led only to knighthoods, bail-outs and taxpayer money being spent on bonuses so they could "retain world-class talent". Apparently, firing their asses would have been a Bad Thing due to their stellar performance to date (and since).

The very idea of prison time for RBS re-cycling the Enron ideas of debt vehicles is laughable.

Enron people went to jail and the banks (like RBS) then had regulators permit exactly the same debt-swap bullshit that killed Enron. Banks went on to trade in debt - an eventual cause of the financial meltdown. RBS was a major culpable party but their chairman, Fred Goodwin, managed to get away with returning the knighthood and a fraction of his pension, while protected by a super-injunction making it illegal to reveal to the public he was a banker[1]. He continues to enjoy 'Royal Family' level police protection, has his properties removed from Street View [2] and is granted a level of establishment protection no-one else could dream of if they had been responsible for any catastrophe of even a fractional proportion.

[1] [http://www.theguardian.com/business/2011/mar/10/fred- goodwin...](http://www.theguardian.com/business/2011/mar/10/fred-goodwin- superinjunction-banking) [2] [http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/20/fred- goodw...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/20/fred-goodwin- house-removed-from-google-street-view)

<comment><USER8> Not long after he left RBS I was crossing a zebra crossing on George Street Edinburgh and I noticed a chap in a convertible Ferrari waiting for me to cross and I thought the driver looked rather familiar.

Took me a few moments to realise it was our very own "Fred the Shred" out for a quick spin....

[95% certain it was him]

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I suspect a lot of this would be more difficult now. I had minor surgery not long ago and (while I was still conscious) everyone in the room (including me) had to agree what was about to happen, sound off about their part in it, and confirm that they had everything they needed for their part, before continuing.

It did make me feel more comfortable about he process.

<comment><USER11> There's a fair bit of evidence that -- regardless of how they might seem at first -- these types of "checklist" procedures really do reduce error rates. Much of it is cross-pollination from aviation safety, where use of checklists has been standard procedure for a long time.

This New Yorker article talks a bit about the early days of aviation checklists, and some attempts to apply them in medicine, including a hospital which tried checklists as a method of avoiding common causes of line infections with IVs. The result:

 _These steps are no-brainers; they have been known and taught for years. So it seemed silly to make a checklist just for them. Still, Pronovost asked the nurses in his I.C.U. to observe the doctors for a month as they put lines into patients, and record how often they completed each step. In more than a third of patients, they skipped at least one._

 _The next month, he and his team persuaded the hospital administration to authorize nurses to stop doctors if they saw them skipping a step on the checklist; nurses were also to ask them each day whether any lines ought to be removed, so as not to leave them in longer than necessary. This was revolutionary. Nurses have always had their ways of nudging a doctor into doing the right thing, ranging from the gentle reminder ("Um, did you forget to put on your mask, doctor?") to more forceful methods (I've had a nurse bodycheck me when she thought I hadn't put enough drapes on a patient). But many nurses aren't sure whether this is their place, or whether a given step is worth a confrontation. (Does it really matter whether a patient's legs are draped for a line going into the chest?) The new rule made it clear: if doctors didn't follow every step on the checklist, the nurses would have backup from the administration to intervene._

 _Pronovost and his colleagues monitored what happened for a year afterward. The results were so dramatic that they weren't sure whether to believe them: the ten-day line-infection rate went from eleven per cent to zero. So they followed patients for fifteen more months. Only two line infections occurred during the entire period. They calculated that, in this one hospital, the checklist had prevented forty-three infections and eight deaths, and saved two million dollars in costs._

[http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/12/10/the- checklist?p...](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/12/10/the- checklist?printable=true)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Economist/policy pundit here: christ, our profession needs to start doing this.

</comment><comment><USER13> A dentist once pulled the wrong tooth. I could not really afford a crown, so I was going to have it taken out (long time ago). Thankfully it was a wisdom tooth (I have room for them).

The look on his face after the procedure was one of shock. He gave me a free root canal and crown for the original bad tooth.

</comment><comment><USER14> Here is another attempt to try and get health care systems to learn how to deal with fallibility. In this case a woman died unnecessarily during a minor operation, however her husband was an airline pilot and he is now trying to teach the UK National Health Service the lessons that airlines learned long ago: [http://www.newstatesman.com/2014/05/how-mistakes-can-save- li...](http://www.newstatesman.com/2014/05/how-mistakes-can-save-lives)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for posting this...surgery is one of the few professions that I think about, and then think, "Nope, no way, not even in the wildest dreams in an alternative universe, that I could ever be a surgeon"...but I get the sense that so much pride is tied up into the skill of a surgeon, such that mechanical ability and intuition are almost inextricable. I have no problem with the assertion that a human expert is needed to make decisions as the cuts are being made. But it's astonishing to me that so much of the success of surgery relies on a near-superhuman ability of muscle control and focus, an ability that surely declines with age, even as the surgeon's wisdom and experience grows. I would love to read more about "autopilot"-type advances in medicine (though too much of the coverage focuses on, "Will robots replace your doctor?" rather than man-and-machine working together)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I liked where he had to track down one patient because he had left the keys to the summer condo inside after they fell in during the operation! Makes you think...

<comment><USER16> Dick! - you obviously haven't had family who've gone through major life- threatening operations ... and come out alive.

<comment><USER15> My name is not Richard, or any abbreviations of it! But yes, I do actually know people who have have to have subsequent ops, where material was found from an earlier op. Not as uncommon as you would think, sadly.</comment></comment></comment>


Why Stack Exchange Isn't in the Cloud - <AUTHOR> http://blog.serverfault.com/post/why-stack-exchange-isn%e2%80%99t-in-the-cloud/ <comment><USER3> Given the introduction, I thought we were going to see a fantastic breakdown of cost estimates; capex and opex expenses, 95% percentile bandwidth pricing vs. Amazon's fixed rate per-byte pricing.

A real analysis would have even dug into the question of sysadmins vs engineering staff, and the potential for "the cloud" to allow programmers to actually program infrastructure, eliminating internal sysadmin staff completely (and outsourcing all the remaining sysadmin work to Amazon).

Instead, we got bizarre platitudes about how they "love computers". How boring. Early in my career, I spent a lot of time in the hot/cold, blaring fan world of data centers -- sometimes late at night, when a hard drive failed or a switch's fans went out. Anyone that thinks that it's pleasant to spend time in a data center is insane; whether or not it makes sense in terms of cost was the answer I'd hoped to get from this article.

<comment><USER4> It was a real analysis that went beyond just counting the beans. As a privately held company, getting rid of passionate people doesn't make the stock go up, increase anyone's bonus, or benefit their long term goals - <USER2> blogging about their values certainly cannot hurt in attracting top notch talent.

<comment><USER3> If you remove any rational analysis based on productivity, developer time, or finances, then we're only left with a question of personal taste -- and it's impossible to argue against personal taste.

An evaluation based on personal taste is useless. If I say "I like orange because it's a great color" -- then either you already like orange, in which case my analysis does you no good, or you don't like orange, in which case my statement can simply be ignored.

The same applies here, in that the article could have been coalesced to a single sentence: "We don't use the cloud because we don't want to. We like dorking around with hardware and data centers, just like someone else might link tinkering with their car or collecting bottle caps"

Possibly interesting -- but not useful.

<comment><USER5> Instead of 12 physical cores, 96GB of RAM and a 2TB SSD Array pushing 1M IOPs on dedicated hardware for my PostgreSQL database servers, I'd need 1TB of RAM in an AWS box because I'll be lucky if I can even break 10K in IOPs.

Does the price make sense then?

I have yet to see any significant AWS deployment that doesn't feel like it could be done better, more reliably, and much more cheaply as a co-located setup.

<comment><USER6> You can't really create a massive co-located setup on demand for big jobs, then tear it down ... use the right tools for whatever job you're doing. EC2 being more expensive for your Postgres deploy doesn't mean it is an expensive toy

<comment><USER5> I don't think I could say it better: <http://twitter.com/#!/dhh/status/133656040561577984>

If you really have a need to setup and teardown a bunch of cores for the occassional large batch, nobody's questioning that the cloud is an economical way to do that.

But I've _never_ had to do that. Not in a way that would make the development time involved economical anyway. Wait two hours for this once-in-a-blue-moon processing job to finish, or spend a day setting up a process to handle such jobs quickly in the future?

It'd really take something exceptional (again, with low IOPs demands) to have that make much sense unless I was already hosting in the cloud and had invested money in making such a task quick and cheap.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What a silly argument. "If you just want to use someone else's computers, it means you don't love computers — at least not every aspect to them."

Uh, don't they use Dell? If they love them so much, why not build their own? Why stop there? I love software and programming languages, but it doesn't mean I'm going to use my own compiler or run a company on my own libc.

<comment><USER8> There is always the question of degree and practicality. So in terms of libc / and custom compilers that is perhaps ad absurdum. There really wouldn't be any practical benefit taking it to that far for most companies. However, people that love programming languages often probably wish it was practical and that they had an excuse to write compilers at some point.

As far as Dell goes, I honestly have mixed feelings at this point. When I started at the company there was less than 10 people, so the idea of having centralized firmware updates etc seemed practical. I'm not sure I really feel this way any more -- I go back forth. But sticking with Dell seems to make sense at this point so we have more uniformity in hardware and management.

<comment><USER9> The practicality argument doesn't apply when they already say they're doing more than necessary _because they love computers_ and if you don't that you _don't really love computers_.

When someone says that you don't love computers because you did whats most practical or cost effective for you, how can they say that they love computers when they do or don't do something else because its most practical or cost effective to them?

If it saves my time, is cheaper or easier to use amazon rather than running my own data center, that doesn't mean I don't love computers. If they love computers so much that practicality is out the window, then why aren't they using their own operating systems and libc's?

<comment><USER10> Clearly there's no difference in effort between a day installing and configuring a Dell server and several thousand person years of writing a solid, scalable operating system, so your question is perfectly reasonable.

<comment><USER9> I understand that what I'm saying is a bit of a stretch, but when they claim people don't love computers for not doing that they're doing, they may as well take it to the extreme. People have written operating systems, maybe these people should say everybody else doesn't love computers.

I mean, obviously I don't expect anyone to build everything they use. My argument was aimed at the "you don't love computers" statement and not at the fact that they don't write their own OS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The reason I'm still wary of the cloud is that the abstractions are still too leaky (to borrow Joel Spolsky's turn of phrase). When you start abstracting away core system calls (like fsync), things work great 99.99% of the time. But when that .01% bites you, it bites _hard_. We don't expect core system calls (like fsync) to fail. And when they fail, the fact that our code is two or three levels levels of abstraction higher means that we often have no way of fixing the issue. The cloud will be at a disadvantage to "real servers" as long as its abstractions are leaky enough to be distinguishable from real hardware.

<comment><USER12> In what way does fsync work differently in the cloud?

<comment><USER13> Because there's an extra virtual layer between you and the hard-disk, fsync() does not do what it says it does, which means that a database cannot actually guarantee that a transaction was successfully completed.

In case your traffic is huge, this can cause big problems that are very hard to fix. And it did cause problems for Reddit, as EBS is notoriously awful in this regard (and others, like big latencies on access).

Basically when working at big scales, nothing beats having complete control over your infrastructure. It may be tough and time consuming, but at least you can identify the problem and fix it.

It is my opinion that something like Google's search cannot be built on top of Amazon's AWS.

<comment><USER14> Saying that because fsync() doesn't work in AWS that it won't work 'in the cloud' is much like saying that because you can't take a cheap sedan to the bush that a 4wd can't possibly exist.

Google can't exist (well) on top of AWS as AWS is designed for the deployment of (qusi)stateless applications. Saying that you can't build a data intensive application on top of it is like saying that your machinegun sucks at grating cheese.

OVM was designed to run a search engine origionally (darkmatr, now defunct due to lack of comparitive profitability), so you could quite easily build google on top of it. It wouldn't surprise me if google would work really well on top of that stack.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Poorly written argument full of red herrings. From what I can tell, their answer to the "why aren't you in the cloud" question is that they "love computers so much that they want to do it all themselves because it's so fun".

<comment><USER16> If I asked you why you were eating pizza and you responded "because I like pizza" would you still consider that a red herring argument?

All they are saying is that they are not in the cloud because they don't want to be in the cloud and because they quite like not being in the cloud. It works for them. Why is that expression at all controversial?

If they'd labeled their blog "Why being in the Cloud is a bad idea" or "Why being in the cloud would cost Stack Exchange a lot more" or "Why nobody should ever use the Cloud" then I could see the reason for the dispute. Then their arguments would be very unconvincing.

It is certainly valid for Stack Exchange to make a choice because it fits within their culture and then explain that that is why they are doing it. You might think it's a dumb decision and that's fine. But they clearly are not trying to convince you that they've made the best possible decision. They're just saying that good or bad, they've made the decision that they want to make. And it's clearly a decision that has been working well for them so far anyway. So why do people keep bugging them about it?

<comment><USER15> You're correct about alternative titles for the blog post. However, the assumption is that on a technical blog, readers would expect technical answers --at least I did. You're not going to tell your boss that the next product should be developed in Java because you like Java. They want concrete reasons.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I suspect that this is part of the problem with many big manufacturing companies these days. Ford was a leader for so many years was because their leadership was passionate about engineering and manufacturing. Henry Ford was an engineer for the Edison Company before he was a manager and is famous for obsessing about every detail of the manufacturing process. That sort of spirit infected the company up through the 1960's and 70's when the MBA's took over and everything was reduced to a column of numbers.

It appears that many early tech companies (TI, HP) have headed in the same direction. Maybe 30 - 40 years is the limit before the accountants take over.

<comment><USER18> A Ford bought today is less expensive, considerably safer, more efficient, and more reliable than a Ford from the days of Henry Ford.

Meanwhile, today's manufacturing companies routinely make objects – like the processor driving the machine that you are reading this on – that are orders of magnitude more complex than the most advanced technology of 1959.

And all of this was done by companies that employ lots of accountants. I'm not sure why you think that accountants and engineers don't routinely coexist, or that Henry Ford didn't employ plenty of accountants back in his day. Being able to manufacture good stuff in bulk at reasonable prices is a major exercise in accounting, and always has been.

<comment><USER19> The current CEO of Ford, Alan Mulally is an engineer by trade. I attribute a lot of their current success to him.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> One key reason I suspect is that you haven't been able to get SSDs in the cloud so their scaling up approach would be more difficult. Having your own servers means you can "NewEgg your way out of it" (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3243133> :-).

</comment><comment><USER21> Past article 'Coding Horror: Scaling Up vs. Scaling Out: Hidden Costs' [http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/06/scaling-up-vs- scali...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2009/06/scaling-up-vs-scaling-out- hidden-costs.html)

Although it's not quite the cloud, one of the founders prefer vertical stacks due to several reasons including licensing costs.

<comment><USER14> You scale out hardware layer by finding optimal hardware and scaling out on that.

The major problem with their 'scale out' chart is that that particular hardware is far from optimal hence costing far more then it should.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm growing to understand "the cloud" not as AWS/Rackspace/Heroku/whatever, but as a mindset where: 1) you're not tied to hardware 2) your application scales horizontally 3) you can easily (and dynamically) add (computational) resources as needed, preferrably managed by your application. 4) you build fault tolerance and redundancy into your application

This article basically takes the approach that "the cloud" is AWS.

</comment><comment><USER23> OT: I've heard claims that dedicated servers beat cloud VPS (i.e. AWS) in cost. But most of the dedicated servers I've seen cost $100 and up for a month. Is there a comparison on the cost/computing_power with benchmark for review?

<comment><USER14> What you care about at any reasonable scale (ie. the point at which costs matter) is $/serviced request. That usually ends up being dominated either in $/cpu cycle or $/iop. The current problem is that most cloud platforms suck iops which makes them far more expencive then they really should be.

Cloud vs. dedi vs. colo in terms of raw prices though, depends entirely on your price of money and the price you can negotiate with your provider.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> So for cultural reasons?

Is it not perhaps because there's much less competition for .NET stack cloud platforms, therefore less quality?

<comment><USER25> Amazon has very good .NET support. So does Rackspace. So does Azure (obviously). In my personal experience the quality of cloud platforms has been comparable for both Linux and Windows environments. Is there any evidence that .NET cloud platforms are of lower quality? I'm genuinely interested. Please elaborate.

<comment><USER6> Personally, I doubt there is a real quality problem with those platforms. But running .NET on those platforms looks unnecessarily expensive to me. If I were married to Microsoft (as SO is) then I would avoid 'the cloud' for that reason.

Given that one wishes to use Windows/.NET, I feel the decision follows pretty naturally from an analysis of costs - no vague argument about culture necessary

<comment><USER25> I would say cost (referring to license fees) is more relevant in deciding whether or not to choose the .NET stack in the first place. You're not going to avoid license fees by avoiding the cloud.

Their culture argument is a funny one. But I have no beef with it. If owning and tinkering with the hardware makes them happy, more power to them.

As an aside, I've been using Azure lately for my .NET projects. MSFT has done a nice job with that platform and don't get enough credit for it IMHO. I especially like SQL Azure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I think we are overanalyzing here. This is like a car company that maintains a garage to attract people who like to look under the hood. It's taking a strategic people decision when hard data isn't easily available. Everything about sys admin job descriptions seems like a digression.

</comment><comment><USER27> Indeed the cloud has no soul

</comment><comment><USER28> It's because they are a performance hungry company. I thought it was quite obvious by now.

</comment><comment><USER29> Why is everyone attacking this article? So what if their reason is subjective? They want people who enjoy working on the whole stack. They have fun doing that, and that's all the reason they need.

They aren't saying that "people who use the cloud don't care as much". It's just their thing.

They're the masters of their own company, and as such, can do things however they like. One of the benefits of a private organization.

<comment><USER30> I think the reason most people are disappointed is that from the title they expected the article to be something that it wasnt.

I personally thought I going to get a break down of the pros and cons of being cloud hosted vs running your own servers.

The article ended up being completely non technical or quantitative and boils down to "we like to build our own computers".

Chalk it up to high expectations that weren't met :) That's not the authors fault.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: At what company were you happiest and why? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER3> Honestly? This warehouse where I was repacking lumber. The lumber would come from the sawmill on a big flatbed truck. However, the lumber would be stacked in a formation that made it impossible to fill up the shipping containers optimally for shipping the lumber overseas. So my job was to (with a bunch of other guys):

1\. Unpack the lumber. 2\. Restack the lumber in a formation that would allow for maximum lumber loaded into the shipping containers. 3\. Rewrap the lumber in plastic and staple the plastic in place.

It was mindless work where I didn't have to think about anything, had no deadlines, and I got physical exercise to boot. It paid $12 Canadian per hour. Long-term, it would have sucked because the wage was too low. But short-term, it was exactly what I needed at the time to recharge my batteries.

In terms of real career work? Just after I graduated from university, it was a team of young hotshots that made custom .NET apps for improving work processes at a telecom company. Ton of freedom, ton of competence, ton of stuff that got done. Still possibly the best team I've ever worked with.

<comment><USER4> I really miss my first job after school. I was working in a factory. No responsibility, no thinking, just some mindless labour. I worked physically hard enough to be tired at the end of the day and got to talk to my coworkers while the job was pretty much done on autopilot.

But the pay was not great and the career options were non existent.

But I don't think I'd be able to be very happy outside of work on that sort of money now days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Autonomy, relationships and mastery.

Its never about the company or the work.

You'll be happy if you have a boss who trusts you completely and colleagues that aren't a-holes. If you have this you will find the work thats interesting.

<comment><USER6> Amen. I'm on my third job move in the last 6 yrs to try and harness this elusive situation. Hope I've found it this time.

<comment><USER5> Its very hard to find such situations.

The only way that comes to mind is knowing someone well enough in a company that needs your skills when you need a job. Its a very small intersection in time/space/relationships.

I've always lucked into these situations. And honestly I never really realized how lucky I was because I didn't have anything to compare it to.

Not joining teams with bad bosses is one way to go about this. This is also very very difficult because these guys will offer you a ton of money.

Honestly, the best advice I think is to follow your best boss when he moves once you've found one. (Again this advice only "works" in SV where there are a massive number of growing companies where people move very frequently).

<comment><USER7> >I've always lucked into these situations

Given that you know to look for a good boss and you know to resist offers purely based on financial terms, I think you are helping yourself to make your own "luck" :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As a teenager during the summers working for my father driving frontend loader. I sat in a AC cab and screened top soil all day. I went to work at 7am and left around 4pm. I didn't have a care in the world after 4pm.

It wasn't just because I had no bills to pay, I just didn't worry about work. I knew the pile of dirt wasn't going anywhere and the area we were digging out was going to be the same when I got back to work.

I never brought work home. It took me a good 14 years to re-learn that in tech.

<comment><AUTHOR> I always find it somewhat ironic that I spent all this time preparing myself to get a good career in tech when repetitive manual labor seems to be the happiest

<comment><USER8> couldn't agree more.. 10 years ago I was at the Apple store in Manhattan with my wife getting an iphone. There was this guy who's job it was just to sweep the stairs going down to the store.

I told my wife.. If I could somehow make a tech salary doing what he does, I'd do it in a second. She questioned me like why? I just said what I said before. I could come home and not worry about anything.

<comment><USER9> What are some of the worries you bring home?

<comment><USER8> I do ops work so it was always worrying about i'm on call 24/7 since I mostly worked for startups.

Are the backups working. Is that new HA solution I rolled out working. I have this lingering problem with disk latency I can't get to the bottom. List goes on and on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> My first industry job back in my home country (I live in America now). The company did outsourcing work for a large multinational technology company, and for me it struck the perfect balance between having to be too emotionally involved with the product and getting step by step specs of what needed to be done.

The work was like this: they gave us access to the product's source code and a set of high level requirements (i.e. support standard X, write a new tool that enables automation of Y, add feature Z, etc.). It was up to me and my team members to figure out how to actually implement those things according to the requirements they gave us.

I absolutely loved that setup and really, really miss it. It was challenging in the sense that I had to learn a code base, learn new stuff, read RFCs, and figure out real solutions to real problems. But the problems were handed to me - I didn't have to come up with them.

Every job I've had since then comes with the IMO unreasonable expectation that I be super involved with the product and come up with new ideas and features for it as if I owned it somehow (which I don't). I absolutely loathe that - <USER2> I wanted to have that attitude towards work I'd start my own company (which I haven't since I have no business ideas). I'm much more of a "tell me what's the problem and I'll fix it" kind of person, but I haven't been able to find any jobs like that after my first one.

</comment><comment><USER11> I have never been happier than I was in grad school (the Space Systems Lab at the University of Maryland).

Which might sound surprising, given the pay and work hours... but there's a lot to be said for working with a group of people you love with all your heart, who have your back, in a field you are passionate about and have been since you were a kid.

Grad school was incredibly hard work, and the pay sucked. But I wouldn't give back a single day of it.

<comment><USER12> Probably PhD work for me, too. It's a slightly different experience in the UK, I think, but did afford me quite a bit of autonomy. Has been hard to match since.

(I get the impression that the trend has been gradually towards more structure and less autonomy in "doctoral programs" \-- from my point of view, that's sad).

PS. did you follow Akin's Laws?

<comment><USER11> I am the source of one of Akin's Laws.

37\. (Henshaw's Law) One key to success in a mission is establishing clear lines of blame.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Justin.TV during the first 3 years or so. Honestly, because we were in "cowboy mode", and that's what I enjoy the most. The site was growing and changing so fast it was often hard to keep up, and we were all just doing whatever it took.

<comment><USER14> Cowboy mode sounds horrible to me (no offense). What did you enjoy about it?

<comment><USER15> It's not for everybody. It's for certain types of people, and even certain stages in their lives.

I also worked in a hypergrowth unicorn from the early days and I would also call those first couple of years there my happiest job, even though it was tons of work and full cowboy mode.

That was when I was in my mid-20s and single. I am 100% sure that I wouldn't enjoy that right now in my current stage in life. (mid-30s and married now)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> At my current company (Aha!). Fully remote which is great for me because I'm a night owl. Interesting and technically challenging work in my favorite stack (Rails/React). We use our own product so I get to see my new code/features in front of me the next day. Great environment to learn about running a seriously profitable and successful startup from the inside. And the engineering culture is right in the sweet spot -- independent and self-directed but with brilliant colleagues available to bounce ideas when I get stuck; committed to quality but pragmatic about reality for a large codebase; forward-thinking and open to new technologies but cautious about balancing value and benefit vs. the inherent risks introduced by change.

</comment><comment><USER17> Sorry to digress - What I want from life keeps changing over time. Maybe evolving as I grow/change as a person. While I was happiest at certain roles/companies in the past, I don't think I would be as happy there now.

<comment><USER18> Yeah, and memory is a fickle thing. I want to say "job X" but then as I really think about it, I realize I am disregarding some bad times there, too.

<comment><USER19> I think it's really important to analyse the current situation and think about what's good. We (or at least me) only ever seem to know what we have when it's gone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not working at all is my happiest. I don't like working for money. It's always a compromise. Working for fun is something different.

</comment><comment><USER20> I was pretty happy in my first job as a system administrator for a small B2B ISP in my hometown. Full autonomy, engaged coworkers and challenges that kept increasing.

Unfortunately, I like getting paid and I've been let down in that regard. I was there for 5 years and left for a job at a big 3-letter corporation and then some other corporations. I've been soul searching for a decade now.

<comment><USER5> Autonomy, relationships and mastery. Yep

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Right now: self-employed as a software consultant. Flexible hours, working on average 20 hours per week. As a single parent I'm there for my kids when they need me. When I'm working it's very intense and focused. I'm more productive with my time than I have ever been in my career.

I went through a period 15 years ago where I would work 60-80 hour weeks and be on call 24/7\. I learned a lot from that experience and it helped get me where I am now--but it was difficult.

</comment><comment><USER22> Apple was the most rewarding in many ways, but I was happier working retail at Nestor's sporting goods in Quakertown, PA. I was young and full of vigor, we went camping together many nights after work, rode bicycles together every Sunday, and all was well in the world (year: 2000).

</comment><comment><USER23> I used to get paid surprisingly well to play capture the flag and hit children with dodge balls, then we'd do stuff like make electric pianos out of 555 timers and paper clips, and popsicle stick trebuchets that could throw a rock several hundred feet.

Easily the best job I've had.

</comment><comment><USER24> Microware Systems Corporation--it was fun to work with really good people on compilers for an operating system that, at the time, was one of very few pre- emptive multitasking OSs one could get for relatively inexpensive computers. It didn't require memory mapping hardware, and thus couldn't use compilers that presumed knowledge of some absolute address where code and data lived (or could be made to appear at with memory mapping). Probably the most fun was modifying the compiler to take advantage of the "as if" rule by avoiding the "usual arithmetic conversions" where possible. I kick myself periodically for not trying to get that published.

</comment><comment><USER25> My current company, because it's 100% remote and I can work on my own schedule.

<comment><USER26> Sounds cool, but is the salary ~SF Bay Area?

<comment><USER27> I thought the question was about happiness?

<comment><USER23> Wasn't there a study published recently showing that money really does buy happiness, up to a certain point of diminishing returns?

<comment><USER28> The one I recall being referenced is from Angus Deaton and Daniel Kahneman (of _Thinking Fast and Slow_ fame):

[http://www.gallup.com/businessjournal/150671/Happiness-Is- Lo...](http://www.gallup.com/businessjournal/150671/Happiness-Is-Love- and-75K.aspx)

<comment><USER25> I can attest that I was much happier at $80k than I was at $30k, but not much happier at $110k or $140k, less happy at $155k, miserable at $175k (becoming director of engineering). Now I'm at $200k but it's the remote part that makes me happiest.

<comment><USER26> wow, that's an amazing salary for remote. what company?

<comment><USER25> The company is Surge, LLC ([https://www.surgeforward.com](https://www.surgeforward.com)), and they offer developers for hire. It is 1099 contract work with at least 40 hours a week guaranteed.

<comment><USER29> Just curious, what tech stack do you use?

<comment><USER25> You get matched to projects based on skill set. I only advertised myself as PHP and Node, so that's what I've been assigned to (75% node/angular/mysql, 25% PHP/angular/mysql).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Bell Lab: a private office with a secretary.

These days, every office is open office. Kids so crazy.

</comment><comment><USER31> First four years of my career I worked in seismic oil exploration. I worked in Sudan for about 18 months, then Nigeria for about the same. Also worked in Tanzania. In Nigeria we lived on house boats. In Sudan aircon trailers. In Tanzania we slept in tents besides crocodile infested rivers and lakes.

Mostly I drove a LandCruiser through all kinds of conditions, checking cables and geophones and swapping out telemetry boxes. Occasionally I would get a week or two in the "Veribo" \- which was an air-conditioned room full of automated test equipment. There were long sessions of component level troubleshooting, swapping out components like voltage regulators and power transistors and so on. I became a Senior Observer and moved to the "DogBox" where the main telemtry system was and operated and troubleshot from there - it was much less fun than "running line".

In the rainy season in Sudan we were flown to work every day (and returned home) by an Vietnam Vet who I'm pretty convinced thought the war was still on - attack take offs, landing in clearings with only a few inches between rotors and trees.

It was my first job out of Polytechnic, back in 1984. It was a HELL of a lot of fun. Some great friends made, and sadly lost, in those years.

</comment><comment><USER32> Square was great. During my time there, the company doubled in size, tripled in valuation, built a plethora of new products, and experienced all the chapters in the adolescence of a successful startup. Everyone was intelligent, most of them treated their coworkers well, and nearly all felt a sense of camaraderie and loyalty to the company as a whole. Left for YC, but if I had to do it all again, I might choose to stay! Those were good times.

<comment><USER33> I was there, too, but I wish I had left earlier. I really didn't enjoy anything about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> My work at a coding bootcamp. I found that I find teaching about programming a lot more enjoyable than actual programming. The reason for that is:

1\. Much more interaction with people

2\. If I didn't sleep too well on a particular day I can still teach but with programming I'm not productive enough

3\. Deadlines and pacing is easier

4\. Much more free time when students are doing an exercise or don't need you that much anymore (after 2 months)

<comment><USER35> How was the pay, relative to what you could have got coding fulltime?

<comment><USER34> More or less the same. It was a standard junior freelance rate that would be acceptable in The Netherlands [1].

[1] The source is in Dutch but Google Translate works good enough to understand the gist, see: [https://uurtarief.tips/nl/zzp/ict/uurtarief-ict- zzp-freelanc...](https://uurtarief.tips/nl/zzp/ict/uurtarief-ict-zzp- freelancer)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I worked as a summer camp counselor and I loved every second of it. We ran a competitive sports camp with kids aged 8-13 years. It was well-run, action- packed, and my co-counselors included some close friends that I still keep in touch with. We laughed, cried, sweated, and laid it all on the line for our weekly team of kids, which was re-drafted every new week. Team loyalty was fierce and the competition extended to include team spirit, sportsmanship, and being a good citizen.

We had enough time to really connect with and influence the kids. I also keep up with a lot of "my kids" on facebook, and they are all grown and many are married with children of their own. I'm very proud of so many of them.

Working with children is incredibly rewarding, but there was no obvious career path where I was. When I was promoted I hated it, and quit.

I was young though, and I didn't care about the money at all while I worked with the kids. It was the best time of my life, so far. Development pays better, but it's really drab by comparison.

</comment><comment><USER37> My current company - Formlabs. I get to build really good hardware (3D printers), working with ~seven different engineering disciplines. Smart people, high levels of autonomy, and very little politics. People are there to build great stuff.

<comment><USER38> If you don't mind my asking, what field are you in? I've been fascinated with 3d printing for a while(built my own printer etc) but haven't quite found the right place to apply and you are certainly selling the formlabs experience!

<comment><USER37> We do Software (embedded, desktop, web), mechanical, electrical, process, systems, optics, and manufacturing engineering. It's a pretty fun mix.

Since you asked, I personally work directly with all of the above (as a product lead). My expertise is in software, mechanical, process, and systems engineering.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> With few exceptions it's always the place I'm currently working, because happiness in work is a big priority for me, so when I move from place to place I always try to make an improvement in how much I enjoy work.

When I'm unhappy, I ask myself why, and how much effort I think it will take to change what I don't like (which often is something I can change in myself, rather than expecting the environment to do it for me), and if I think it's worth the effort to change (myself or my surroundings) I do.

Otherwise I stay where I'm at until I can figure out how to improve things.

</comment><comment><USER40> My first real job at an ecommerce company in Sri Lanka. It had a trifecta of awesomeness. A team that cared. A company that at least at the start had a cohesive mission and till my final day there I had a 95% autonomous role. Obviously there were certain overrides but I never felt rank was pulled on me except by 1 person in that entire time. Funnily enough that 1 person was largely responsible for the downfall of the company culture, something that he too admitted.

Regardless, that was easily the most creative period of my life. I would work on one project after another, investing into productivity tools. The company was at the time doing daily deals. I wrote a suite of tools that would take a word doc which was the terms of agreement with the merchant, and convert it to the relevant HTML blocks to be pasted into our ecommerce CMS. After that was done it would cross-check the site against the doc to see if everything was pasted in correctly, and then use a set of defined resources to generate newsletters.

I passed that autonomy down to the rest of my team and it resulted in people tweaking workflows to be more efficient and learning things and taking on other jobs around the company without having to consult me.

Easily the best work of my life for now. By far.

</comment><comment><USER41> Danger, Inc. Good people, making an important thing (the Sidekick), under hardware constraints that were neither too limiting nor too generous.

<comment><USER42> German user here, I loved my Hiptop/Sidekick phones! IPhone functionality way before Apple got it!

Loved also the skiing game easter egg. Had the first and second phone, was crazy in love with them. Still have them in a box somewhere, was thinking about resuscitating them for hipster purposes.

Seriously, I loved these phones, one of my best gadgets I ever had. Unbreakable, full of functionality, clever design... i hated to see them go. Had a Nokia Blackberry clone afterwards that I couldn't stand.

Nice to see someone from Danger. Whatever happened to the company, rumour was it was bought up by Apple? I also heard Steve Wozniak was somehow involved?

<comment><USER41> Steve Wozniak was on the board of directors, so we met him once at an all- hands meeting. (The other major celebrity appearance was from Thomas Dolby, who was involved with the Beatnik Audio Engine that we used for sound.)

The SnowBored easter egg was the subject of some internal controversy because it wasn't part of the standard QA testing process. There were initially some bugs in invoking it from localized keyboards where the asterisk wasn't on the 8 key.

The company was bought by Microsoft, and the Kin was the ill-fated result. Many of us went to Google and made Android; others went to Apple and made the iPhone; still others went to Palm and made the Pre.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I've been at Segment for 2.5 years, and it's been pretty amazing. The founders have done a good job of establishing a solid, but not cultish, culture. Karma is a value, and it's pretty well expressed. Yes, there's plenty of room for improvement, but it's been a terrific ride, and I'm excited for more. #datkoolaid

Secondarily, every time I've volunteered my hard skills, it's been a lot of fun (and oftentimes has a positive payoff down the road). Eg back in Atlanta, I volunteered at a local private school for a couple of months which turned into a $50/hr * 20hrs/week gig.

When I first moved to the Bay Area, I met with a friend of a friend, and when he said he had kids, I casually mentioned that I'd be happy to tutor them if they ever needed any help. This blossomed into a great relationship, and this person is now a good friend and mentor that I've kept up with for the past 6 years.

I suspect one reason that volunteering is so fun is because it's low stress because you can't really get fired, and if you do, it doesn't matter because it's not your primary livelihood. I might sort of say the same thing about some second jobs (in that it doesn't really matter if you lose the second job); however, if the second jobs pays really well (or you really need it), then that stress of keeping the job can creep in.

Driving for Lyft was also a lot of fun. I only did it part time for a few months, but it was great meeting people and exploring the city. The limited- time casual conversations are very interesting because people are more willing to overshare because chances are you'll never see each other again. Back when I drove, it wasn't as mainstream, so the clientele was mostly tech-savvy early adopters, so most conversations were very interesting. I wish I had done it for longer so as to better learn the city's nooks and crannies and also to meet and chat with more people.

</comment><comment><USER44> The outfitter that I used to work for. I taught whitewater kayaking. Great people, play outside all day, interesting clientele, sense of accomplishment at the end of the day. It never once felt like work. The pay was not good by software industry standards, but it ticked every other box you could imagine for a great place to work.

</comment><comment><USER45> When I was working as a lighting director at my university.

It was mostly student staffed, but probably one of the best, most professional crews I've ever worked with in a technical production capacity. The equipment was also pretty top notch. It was probably one of the better-equipped venues in Los Angeles.

My coworkers/fellow students and I were pretty dedicated. A lot of us worked full time on top of taking a full course load because we loved what we did. We also socialized a lot and partied together a lot. Most of the friends that I still retain post-college are those folks.

I've really been missing and seeking out that kind of tightness among a group of coworkers ever since. I don't think I'll ever find a dynamic like that ever again, and that's okay. People in the "real world" have their families to go home to and other social lives.

</comment><comment><USER46> I've had a few jobs that I was really happy at. In fact, most of my jobs have been on the happy end and the ones that weren't, I've moved on quickly. I generally like smaller companies where there's a "family" atmosphere.

1\. My current company has been pretty good to me. During the 2011 Super Outbreak [0], when my city lost power for a week or so, they took all the employees and their families and put us up in hotels in Nashville for a few days until things stabilized and we could return home. We didn't even have to work if we didn't want to. After a stressful day of tornadoes and a few days with no power, a nice hot shower was very welcome. Stuff like that is pretty normal here. They take good care of us.

2\. I worked for a company that did e-learning materials while I was in college. Our product was basically a self-contained website with videos, subtitles, tests, etc, distributed on CDs. This was the early 2000s, so pretty bleeding edge then.

The owner was a business professor full time and this was his side project. We were always small, and him and his wife always took an interest in all the students that worked for them. Getting a home-cooked meal and a night of poker once a week was a nice perk for a poor college student.

The cool thing, though, was there was no pressure to stay. They knew we were students, they knew we were going to graduate eventually and take jobs elsewhere. It was a mutually beneficial scenario where they got relatively cheap labor (but compared to my friends I was making bank), and we got good experience before heading out into the world.

3\. I was a park ranger for the NPS in Yellowstone for a few seasons as well. And that was a _fantastic_ job. I wrote about that in another HN thread [1].

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Super_Outbreak](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Super_Outbreak)

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14390927](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14390927)

</comment><comment><USER47> My first job as a junior. I worked with really smart coworkers. I got to build things that were used, and things that made money.

Most other jobs after that I ended up building things that were never used, or used to get some kind of grant or impress investors, and wasn't even what the user wanted.

A lot of the more senior jobs I get, I end up doing a lot of management and getting little work done. Sometimes when someone else does the hiring, I get complete idiots in my team, the kind who typo variable names, spend 3 days discussing specifications, but don't do them, refuse to use source control.

I would really love to get back into a job where I can just build things that people use, with smart people.

<comment><USER48> Have you thought about getting into consulting? A lot of companies, to me, have the kinds of problems you describe. Being an employee at one of them is a no-win situation.

<comment><USER47> I've been doing that for nearly 3 years. Part of the problem is that usually the client cares more about getting grants or ticking off some buzzword like "machine learning" or "uber for X". But things get better throughout the years as I learn which projects to avoid.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> My current company (Snap). I have the opportunity to shape huge things and effect millions of dollar worth of changes every year. I personally believe in the innovation potential here. The perks/package etc. have been pretty great as well. I work out of Seattle and fly into LA once in a while. Again, two of my favorite cities in US.

To be fair, for most of my career it has been my current job: Whenever it got to a place where I wasn't happy (mind you - not even unhappy, just chronic normalcy or lack of exciting work), I usually left either the team or the company. It has worked out so far :)

</comment><comment><USER50> 4DK. A cool startup later acquired by Radius Networks. That's where I got the "bug" for coding. It was sometimes stressful and occasionally caused a great deal of anxiety. But everyday, I felt challenged and engaged to the max. Plus, I loved flying out to Chicago to meet the rest of our small dev team and drink beers. It was more about camaraderie than anything else. It was just us, 5 developers and a UX director, against the world. People were trusting me with their livelihoods. And I still feel honored to have been a part of the 4DK team.

</comment><comment><USER51> None. Haven't found a company that would meet my standard. And we're talking about class A companies. I should try to start my own company, I think it's the only way to get what I want.

<comment><USER52> What do you want?

<comment><USER51> Less micro micromanagement, room for innovation over productivity, freedom to move from dev to product to design, etc. Ability to work from home whenever, communication skills over whiteboarding skills when hiring new folks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> At every single company! But that lasts for about 1 week to 12 months. Then everything is automated or routine and becomes boring really fast.

</comment><comment><USER54> As a contractor, building 3D simulations for the military. It was for man-in- the-loop simulators where we simulated various kinds of ground vehicles and an assortment of sensors (IR, visual, I^2) and our simulation entity had to interact with and/or engage other man-in-the-loop as well as computer- controlled simulation entities.

Had to quit because I was moving out of the area.

</comment><comment><USER55> Best temp job: Cycle courier. I liked cycling and it paid well (for a guy in high school that is). Winters were a bit harsh though.

Best full-time job Consultant for embedded systems software, mostly prototypes, short projects (2-3 months), jack-of-all-trades work, often going to cool places. Long hours and often in horrible places, away from family and friends, too though.

</comment><comment><USER56> I worked for a small digital marketing and PR agency in NYC. We worked with clients mostly in the music industry. The environment was very collaborative and it felt like a family in many ways. The work was creative while also being relationship driven. Overall I'd say it was the environment that made me enjoy the job most.

</comment><comment><USER57> My current company - Asana. They just have an awesome work-life balance that I never had to worry about work at home.

</comment><comment><USER58> Stratum Security was my best experience to date. They're very welcoming and provided a lot of guidance. I became a better programmer after working with them. And the way I was let go after the project ended, with a glowing LinkedIn recommendation and a bonus MacBook Pro... beats words.

</comment><comment><USER33> I was happiest when I was working for someone who I really liked as a person

(that's only happened the once, though)

<comment><USER59> self employment?

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Working at a non profit in SF. I had almost full autonomy doing both tech support and dev, and by the time I left I had the job down pat. People liked me, and I liked working there.

Alas the obvious downside was not making nearly enough to live on remotely comfortably in the Bay Area.

</comment><comment><USER61> [https://quickrep.vn](https://quickrep.vn) This is a website of our company, its size is quite small with 10 employees. However, we often talk to each other a lot about work and life. Everyone is quite friendly and fun!

</comment><comment><USER62> My most recent job at the Canon Innovation Lab in Kitchener made me the happiest because of the people I worked with. Incredibly dedicated team that were great to be around and working with University of Waterloo students kept me young at heart.

</comment><comment><USER63> My second job with Snappydata Inc. Best work environment and great people

<comment><USER64> I second this. Was short but sweet. Fun while it lasted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> Clerk at an art supplies store. Fun colleagues. Low stress.

</comment><comment><USER66> Funiture delivery.

Load truck with furniture, take furniture off truck.</comment>


Zoom Call with Israelis Lands a Gaza Peace Activist in Jail - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/10/world/middleeast/rami-aman-palestinian-activist-arrested.html <comment><USER2> Given the current news cycle, this headline heavily implies that Zoom's lack of privacy/security was somehow responsible for the activist being caught, but I couldn't find anything about that aspect in the article itself.

The story is significant in its own right, but I'm exhausted by NYTimes' accelerating descent into clickbait.

<comment><USER3> It was a public chat. Anyone could participate/watch/monitor.

The blame lies not with Zoom. The blame lies with Hamas - the group which arrested the people.

<comment><USER4> You want to know what happens to Israelis who are "suspected" of talking to Palestinians, or foreigners who arrive or leave Israel and are suspected of having done that?

<comment><USER5> Given the sheer number of both Israeli and foreign NGOs and activists that do it on a daily basis and that quite a large number of non-Jewish Israeli residents and citizen have families in the territories - nothing.

Heck before the situation in Syria had escalated out to an all out war it wasn't unheard of for Israeli Druze to wed Syrian nationals.

[https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.haaretz.com/amp/1.5104073](https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.haaretz.com/amp/1.5104073)

There is much more nuance to the situation in the Middle East than you think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Zoom townhalls with people of differing opinions and cultures is a brilliant idea.

</comment><comment><USER7> ... bridge-building initiative it calls "Skype With Your Enemy." uses Zoom</comment>


Nobody really knows why the London Tube is getting less and less crowded - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.co.uk/article/tfl-finances-transport-for-london-deficit-passenger-numbers <comment><USER2> There might be a few reasons.

The population is aging. People less opportunity to work for wage that can support the price especially if its anything like the Netherlands, paying to much to go from a place you don't want to be to a place you don't want to be either sucks. Even with traffic jams public transport can't compete unless you like torture.

Might just be the people who were key riders just aged or fell out of income bracket that can use it.

I ride a motorcycle year round instead of using 2 different public transport vehicles and walking that makes my journey 55 minutes instead 20 at a good time of day.

Costs me nearly nothing in fuel, no parking cost while the public transport is up to 10 euros a day.

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed when we lived in London I could earlier walk, then get a bus and then get a tube and that would take about an hour to get to work. Or I could cycle for 35.mins sure I had to have a shower when I got there, but I would anyway at home and was great to get some air before work and clear my head. Even if it was fume filled air.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Added London to the title to make clearer for international reader.</comment>


Commerce Guys lance Drupal Commerce 1.0 - <AUTHOR> http://www.drupalcommerce.org/

<comment><USER2> is that "lance" a typo for "launch"?</comment>


New GitHub Explore Features - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/blog/1712-more-explore-features

<comment><USER2> If github is reading this, I would love to be able to explore by ``genre''. I'm not really interested in a lot of the popular repos on github that are flashy js libraries or whatever.

It can be harder to find repos that are, for example, Security related (that aren't the big famous ones like metasploit, SET).

edit: To clarify...since typing ``security'' into github obviously yields so many results. It's hard to weed out the junk I guess..but I guess that's the very nature of the Search bar.

<comment><USER3> This is difficult, because it relies on people to set a genre for their repo. The things they did to explore here, and the ability to explore by language, are based on data they have.

But there does need to be a way to view/manage all your (and others) starred repos. I have many dozens starred in many different categories, that I no longer have a use for stars because there are so many. I am residing to maintaining my own list of projects elsewhere grouped into buckets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you enjoy using the Explore section of GitHub, you might also like this (free) iPhone app I made which lists the popular Repos built using the languages that interest you: [http://appstore.com/repo](http://appstore.com/repo)

</comment><comment><USER5> Anything that makes it easier to find repos I might be interested in makes me happy.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, I wish the search supported wild card search though, that would make repo discovery even easier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> For a "social coding" site it still surprises me that they don't have a more obvious way to browse users.

</comment><comment><USER8> The "starred by people I follow" feature is exactly what I have been waiting for.</comment>


Ask HN: Twitter-like dating site. LAMP. As an idea? Scale? - <AUTHOR> http://www.TalkAboutADate.com

<comment><USER2> +1 for a new approach to online dating... no one else has got online dating to work for heterosexual dating. Remember that you need to target women. There are a lot more men using online dating than women. [1] Online dating right now works incredibly well for homosexual "dating", particularly casual sex for men who like men, but Craigslist has the network effect already.

Honestly I'm really curious why no one has cracked it on facebook yet. There is a lot of potential there.

<comment><USER3> Doing a dating app on Facebook would be difficult for two reasons.

First, the privacy controls. If I am already Facebook friends with someone I fancy, we would just correpond via the messaging system - no app required. For an app to introduce me to a potential date whom I am not already friends with, we would both have to agree to let the other see our profiles. This agreement would be based on the Facebook mini profile - a photo and location. This sounds like speed dating without the speed date bit.

Second, segmentation of one's life. Facebook profiles are not anonymous blogs about one's sex life, or conversations with friends about a Saturday night party - they are public faces. Even in the real world, dating is done in private: alone, with few facts shared until the relationship is official. People are not going to want to muddy their public Facebook face with their dating life.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's why I suggested a simple app first. Say, something that puts you on a list of 'looking for a date' - which other people can look at. Anyway, I'm not taking the Facebook route - too many problems, two of which you've pointed out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm down with taking the twitter idea and applying it to different areas of interest, but blatant copying of their site design/layout is kinda lame, imo.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right now I'm a little more concerned with scaling the app. The site just launched - I'm sure it's going to change over time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Little bit a Twitter but idea is nice :) I'm also separated and 35, but I don't think you can start a startup only in 21 :) Keep running.

<comment><USER6> You are never _too old_ to start a startup!

<comment><AUTHOR> There is only ever the present moment. Time does not exist. :)

<comment><USER5> For many people here it's alfa and omega :)) ask PG.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


SublimeText UI proposal with Chrome tabs - <AUTHOR> http://hansifer.github.io/sublimeTextUIProposal/

<comment><USER2> What makes those chrome tabs? The extra wasted space?

You may be able to do that in Sublime Text 2 with a theme (not positive, but I use themes that modify the tab appearance now).

edit: Here's a theme that has what looks like "Chrome tabs" to me: [http://devthemez.com/themes/zenburn](http://devthemez.com/themes/zenburn)

<comment><USER3> The tabs being in the title bar, I guess

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> As a vim user, what is so special about "chrome tabs"? I thought SublimeText already had very chrome-like tabs. Am I missing something?

<comment><USER5> It's more about merging the tabs and the window title bar together (and putting contextual menus and navigation items underneath)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think the focus is less on the tabs being Chrome-like, and more on the file path and menu integration. Click the buttons on the bottom of the page to check them out.

Seem interesting. Sadly, the "bookmark bar" menu wouldn't really work for OSX but it could just use the file path instead.

</comment><comment><USER7> Are Sublime's tabs not sufficiently "chrome-like"? They can be pulled away to create a new window, moved between panes and windows, and reordered, pretty much exactly like Chrome's.

The only real difference is how ctrl+tab works, but that's not that big a deal.

</comment><comment><USER8> This directly breaks groups/panes (viewing several files in parallel with their own tab lists).</comment>


Robotic 'trees' can turn CO2 into concrete - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/2018/09/11/robot-trees-co2-into-concrete-climate-change/ <comment><USER2> Seriously, everyone suggestions a crackpot idea for sequestering carbon should do the basic arithmetic for how much annual human emissions are (40 billion metric tons).

I like [https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/life-unbounded/the- craz...](https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/life-unbounded/the-crazy-scale- of-human-carbon-emission/) for the perspective it offers: current human CO2 emissions are equivalent to the entire continent of Africa being covered in coniferous forest and burning to the ground in forest fires, every year.

 _If_ there is any way we save ourselves from this, it's from reduced emissions.

<comment><USER3> How is that possible? Surely the volume of fossil fuels being burnt isn't remotely comprable to the volume of that forest.

<comment><USER4> I don't know if the math is correct, but oil and coal are far more energy dense than wood which may account for the discrepancy.

<comment><USER5> > _oil and coal are far more energy dense than wood_

In addition, a block of wood is a lot more dense than an acre of forest, which is a lot more dense than the difference in carbon content between an acre of forest and an acre of charred burned forest.

While reading the article, I mentally substituted "a forest the area of Africa" with "an oil tank the size of Africa and as deep as a forest is tall", which is clearly unreasonable. And they mention "4.81 tons" in passing - a ton is a lot, and surely 4.81 tons is a huge volume of gas, but how much?

We need to run the numbers. Crude petroleum has a density of about 0.8 g/cc = 0.8 ton/m^3 and a carbon composition of 85%.

        4.81 tons of carbon x (1 kg crude / 0.85 kg carbon) x (1 m^3 / 0.8 ton crude)

= 7 m^3 of crude. Looking it up, a typical tractor-trailer tanker truck might carry 40 m^3 of crude...so this can be stated as mankind burning a yearly volume of one truckload of fuel for every 6 acres in Africa, which is a lot more believable.

Going back to the oil-per-acre analogy, an acre is a little more than 4000 square meters, so (assuming it's all oil - ignoring coal, natural gas, and other CO2 producers like, I don't know, human-initiated forest fires) _this is a film of oil over the continent of Africa 1.7mm deep._ That's a lot more believable than imagining a towering petroleum forest.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for doing the maths! That gives an intuition more in line with what I would have suspected.

Equivalently it's the anount of oil needed to cover Costa Rica to a depth of 1m. Still quite a lot!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wish more people realized the concrete thing is snake oil.

When you make cement, you heat up natural CaCO3 -> CaO + CO2. The heat itself also requires combustion, so more CO2.

Some cements have perhaps 10% CaCO3 added to their mix. It's not so much desirable as cheap filler.

What the media fails to realize is pumping CO2 into curing cement reverses the CaO reaction. In other words, every CO2 molecule you capture releases 2 or more. You'd be better off using less CaO and more CaCO3 to begin with.

<comment><USER7> Read the page of the company doing it, that's not exactly what they're doing (which you correctly point out it would be pointless) - [http://www.blueplanet-ltd.com/](http://www.blueplanet-ltd.com/)

<comment><USER6> I read it again, twice. That _is_ exactly what they're doing.

Their starting material is CO2-source cement, not some natural "rock".

Counterexamples are substantially more helpful than downvotes.

<comment><USER7> It seems they're not replacing the quicklime, but the gravel. The left column is confusing, the right column is better.

> A rock particle is coated with our synthetic limestone, forming a carbon- > sequestering coating that is 44% by mass CO2.

That's where the CO2 goes, not in curing the CaO

<comment> 08-15 But where does the Ca come from? Obviously not from limestone...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I have a hard time taking an article seriously who uses an image of water vapor coming off nuclear cooling towers as an example of carbon emissions from energy production.

<comment><USER9> Those sort of cooling towers aren't just for nuclear power. They're the most efficient way of cooling anything, unless you're next to a river. Judging from the railway and storage around it, I think that's a coal plant.

<comment><USER10> Indeed it appears to be Drax coal-fired power station in Yorkshire ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drax_power_station](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drax_power_station)), Britian's largest emitter of carbon dioxide.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Every time one of these articles come up I wonder about the price per tonne of CO2 removed by simply growing wood and not burning it. I'm not really sure what that price is, but it seems to be around $20-$40 per tonne? Does anyone have a more accurate number?

<comment><USER12> If the purpose is carbon sequestration, you'll have to include the cost of storing that wood. Indefinitely. Won't be cheap.

<comment><USER13> You could sell it, maybe trick people into doing stuff with it, like making buildings or durable goods.

<comment><USER14> This was interesting: [https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_green_why_we_should_build_...](https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_green_why_we_should_build_wooden_skyscrapers?language=en)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Unless we stop burning fresh carbon, this makes no sense. The power has to come from _somewhere_ , and if that isn't renewable energy, it's going to be a net loss. If it is, we should be substituting it in for fossil fuel instead of spending it on capturing carbon.

<comment><USER16> Also nuclear, unless you're counting that as renewable.

In any case, this process also produces concrete, and regular concrete production accounts for 5% of our CO2 emissions. So this reduces our emissions on top of absorbing ambient CO2.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> "Climate change is killing our planet"

I wouldn't go that far. Sure it's making it less hospitable for us and much of the complex life here. But life will go on without us.

<comment><USER18> I guess you're being downvoted for pedantry, because your statements are accurate.

<comment><USER19> More like sensationalism. I don't downvote, but the comment is absolutely ridiculous. Even the absolute worst case scenarios for climate change are not species ending events _with current technology._ And we have many decades ahead of us yet where can solve the problem with future technology yielding a negligible overall impact.

That said even the mild effects are undesirable and seeing how close we'll come to the worst case scenarios is not really a very smart experiment to be carrying out, but somebody stating climate change is going to kill off humanity is a perfect example of the horseshoe of idiocy that's affecting people as they surround themselves only with agreeable voices. It's how some people today can still try to argue that the climate isn't changing. It relies on echo chambers that all agree to ignore all facts and just go further and further off their respective deep ends.

<comment><USER18> You seem to have read a lot more into the parent comment than I did. I read it as a simple rebuttal to the articles opening statement saying climate change is killing the planet. While it's impossible for climate change to kill the planet, it is possible to render it too hazardous for humans if left unchecked.

<comment><USER17> That is all I was trying to say

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> With costs of $100/ton and up Direct Air Capture should be researched but not deployed today. We should first concentrate on more cost effective solutions. We'll likely need DAC eventually but there's lower hanging fruit.

</comment><comment><USER21> In order for non-biological CO2 capture to be workable, we'll need to ramp up energy production maybe 5-10 fold. Without releasing substantially more CO2. Covering the Sahara and US Southwest with PV (and wind farms, where appropriate) might make the nut. But if we manage to dig too huge a climate change hole, we'll likely need more like 20-100 fold more energy. Maybe fusion, or massive orbital solar arrays.

<comment><USER22> I read some encouraging recent reports that a Sahara PV project would not only generate about 5 times the energy requirements of civilization, it would also increase rainfall in the Sahara and probably lead to greening. Meanwhile offshore wind in the North Atlantic could also supply multiples of the energy we need. These combined would be sufficient to free us from fossil fuels, future proof us against the increase required from electric vehicles for a decade or two and have plenty left over to power carbon capture projects.

<comment><USER21> Yes, thanks :) That's what I was thinking of, and ought to have mentioned it. It was on HN within the past week or so.

And yes, that could be a great outcome. But sadly enough, I suspect that the situation will get a _lot_ worse before the US, at least, does anything substantial.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> So, this $600/ton plant sits on top of... an incinerator. So uh, they're literally starting a fire for the sole purpose of capturing SOME of the carbon and shuffling it off to... be released into the atmosphere again elsewhere in greenhouses which will not capture it.

Ugh. 𐑜𐑸𐑚𐑩𐑡 𐑐𐑰𐑐𐑳𐑤.

Why do people like this take the future of our species for granted? This isn't funny.

</comment><comment><USER24> Grow these on top of hills and mountains, then use the tech from the other thread[∆] to lower the blocks and generate electricity too.

[∆][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17958700](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17958700)

</comment><comment><USER22> I've read a lot about carbon capture lately, and this is one of the most promising approaches. Another very interesting idea is simply splitting the CO2 into oxygen and carbon monoxide

</comment><comment><USER25> If only someone would invent something that could be stuck into the ground that would just suck CO2 out of the air. Hmmm...

<comment><USER26> ... and never release it again, unlike trees.

<comment><USER25> It doesn't need to be stored forever. As trees die and are farmed, they are replaced by new ones. Large forests in conjunction with reduced CO2 emission and renewables is the best answer to climate change, not some band-aid to mask the problem.

Land usage is abysmal, and there's a lot of waste. Stop cutting down trees and stop urban sprawl.

As a side effect we might just be able to stop a mass extinction due to loss of habitat.

<comment><USER22> I agree there's a lot of waste but with the population expected to go up by 3-4 billion in the next decade that urban sprawl is not going to stop, and we're going to need 2x more land for food, especially as we're overfishing our acidified oceans _today_. Bio capture it's just not feasible because of the land required</comment></comment></comment></comment>