Avro Arrow – The record-breaking jet which still haunts a country - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200615-the-record-breaking-jet-which-still-haunts-a-country <comment><USER3> Interesting to contrast with Sweden, a country of 10m people, having a domestic fighter program to this day.

Though at least the current Swedish fighter, the JAS-39 Gripen, uses a lot of 3rd party components like the engine and most of the armaments. Still, an impressive achievement from such a small country. Will be interesting to see whether they will create a follow-up to the Gripen, or will instead opt to participate in some next-generation common European thing.

Also similar to the Avro Arrow story is the British TSR2.

<comment><USER4> Small nations can occasionally do surprising things when they feel like it. Israel successfully developed nuclear weapons when they only had two million people in the country.

<comment><USER5> South Africa was in the same boat in needing a weapon of absolute last resort ... instead of Arab armies we had to contend with soviet supplied cuban troops on our border.

We had 4 devices by then and developed with help of Israel an intermediate range ballistic missile based on their Jericho-2.

Fortunately sanity prevailed in the end and the bombs and missile program got scrapped when a political settlement was achieved.

<comment><USER6> > weapon of absolute last resort

At least when Israel was developing its nuclear bomb, its neighbours were not particularly minded to compromise. Contrast, for example, the Freedom Charter (a fifties document!), which was so studiously nonracial that the PAC had to split off:

> South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white…that only a > democratic state, based on the will of all the people, can secure to all > their birthright without distinction of colour, race, sex or belief

At this point the possible threat was clearly domestic blacks, not nearby colonies, and compromise with them was clearly quite possible. CODESA didn't happen earlier because the Broederbond took so long to change its mind—had it, it could have happened decades earlier.

The SA army was also in conventional terms quite sufficient to prevent any foreign invasion. Even Rhodesia with P.K. van der Byl and the other ludicrous types who congregated in Salisbury hotels could manage for over a decade. Armscor on the other hand was world-leading, and none of SA's neighbours had anything like that.

> soviet supplied cuban troops on our border

They were on the Namibian border, which was from 1966 was no longer really South Africa's. In any case SA militarily held its own—it inflicted far more casualties than it suffered and maintained control of Namibia. It seems to make much more sense to interpret withdrawal as a political decision to cease the indefensible occupation of Namibia, instead of evidence that a nuclear bomb was strategically necessary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The Avro Arrow was a cool plane, but contra my Canadian aerospace nerd pals, it really wasn't all _that_ impressive. It was a pretty typical interceptor design of its day; interceptors basically fell out of fashion for obvious reasons -the Soviets never really developed a proper intercontinental bomber fleet, let alone a supersonic intercontinental bomber fleet, and the ICBM and SAM kind of made bombers expensive and irrelevant anyway in comparison. The last US designed interceptor ... arguably the A-5 Vigilante[1] (otherwise the F106 Delta Dagger[2]), and arguably pretty equivalent to the Avro Arrow. The F108 Rapier[3] concept was also interesting; many of its guts ended up in later planes like the Vigilante or SR-71.

It's amusing that the Soviets kept development of the interceptor for their PVO-Strany; coming up with very impressive aircraft which have no equivalence class in the West.

Anyway too bad Canadian aerospace didn't continue, but had they developed the thing, it wouldn't have been very useful.

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_A-5_Vigilante](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_A-5_Vigilante)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convair_F-106_Delta_Dart](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convair_F-106_Delta_Dart)

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_XF-108_Rapier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_XF-108_Rapier)

<comment><USER8> The biggest contribution by interceptors was arguably the MiG 25 which was badly misinterpreted by western analysts, prompting the creation of the F-15 to counter the perceived threat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> See previous discussions, e.g. [1, 2].

The Arrow was extremely ambitious and many of the technologies it used didn't exist and wouldn't for decades (e.g. fully active missiles, pulse doppler RADAR). The era of high-and-fast bombers was followed by low-level nap-of-the- earth flying and ICBMs, so the Arrow might have been an incredibly expensive white elephant if it had even been finished.

1: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21989392](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21989392)

2: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15256068](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15256068)

<comment><USER10> Russia's nuclear strategy still relies upon flying Bear bombers to the launch box and deploying cruise missiles. NORAD still sorties fighter aircraft to intercept these bombers somewhat regularly. Obviously not bombers _actually_ launching cruise missiles, but ones doing test runs of the same.

It would have had a critical role for decades.

<comment><USER9> Cool, but the Tu-95 now carries missiles like the Kh-55 with a range of 1600 miles while the Arrow was expected to have a range of 360 nmi. The Bear could have dropped its missiles and been long gone before the Arrow got anywhere close to it, never mind that the Sparrow II never worked.

<comment><USER11> The KH-22, with a range of 300 miles would be a more fair example, as it would have been a contemporary of the Arrow (1960-1980). The KH-55 was first produced in 1981.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, I was going to mention the Kh-20 (similar period, 240-370 mi range) - the Kh-22 was used (AIUI) in an anti-shipping role so probably wouldn't have been used in a scenario where it would be intercepted by an Arrow.

<comment><USER11> You're correct, I meant to put in Kh-20, and made a mistake, but will leave it as-is. Here are the Wiki pages for any other readers:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kh-20](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kh-20)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kh-22](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kh-22)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> One of my profs used to say that when it came to science Canada had a bronze medal mentality. We also cancelled a supercollider program in because it was more politically expedient to spend the modest grant required on low income housing for the more politically influential eastern provinces and did absolutely nothing to protect Nortel as they were slowly picked apart by Chinese intelligence.

[https://www.bcbusiness.ca/ubcs-particle-accelerator-what- cou...](https://www.bcbusiness.ca/ubcs-particle-accelerator-what-couldve-been)

[https://nationalpost.com/news/exclusive-did-huawei-bring- dow...](https://nationalpost.com/news/exclusive-did-huawei-bring-down-nortel- corporate-espionage-theft-and-the-parallel-rise-and-fall-of-two-telecom- giants)

<comment><USER13> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider)

The US has one too.

<comment><USER14> Hey cancellation of the Supercollider enabled me to hire my best engineer ever. So not a total loss.

<comment><USER13> Story?

<comment><USER14> He was a Japanese nuclear physicist working in the SSC, who had written some amazing graphics filters in his spare time. We hired him (cost $25,000 in legal fees to get him a work visa IIRC) and he instantly became one of our most valuable engineers. His products sold millions of dollars and supported probably a dozen of our employees.

Funny part is his English wasn't very good, so I never even had a full conversation with him. Great guy tho. Makes me want to tell my republican friends, do you want super talented people making things in Asia, or here?

<comment><USER13> I knew a guy who worked on the SSC. I was a teenager, and he was a friend of the family, so it's not like we got into depth or anything. He was of the opinion that cronyism killed the project. People brought their unqualified friends on board and drove up the cost.

It was pretty cool to see some bits and bobs from the project, like flat braided wire.

I also worked on some relocated houses that were moved off of the track of the SSC. They spent a LOT of money preparing the area.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> What haunts Canadians is that we developed world-leading aerospace _capability_ , which was discarded in an instant.

These engineers and technicians scattered to the wind, becoming leaders in dozens of successful aerospace projects, worldwide.

Canada returned to being hewers of wood an drawers of water. The specific details and capabilities/problems of the Avro Arrow are secondary.

<comment><USER14> It's like saying the US lost when it canceled the Space Shuttle. Both projects were massively expensive failures that never met operational requirements.

at least Canada canceled theirs before it drove the cost of space access through the roof and killed 17 people.

<comment><USER16> The difference is, US is replacing the shuttle with (privately made) US rockets. The transition is not complete yet, but ultimately both the manufacturing capability and profits are staying in the US. Can't say the same for Canada.

<comment><USER14> I can capture all the wild stallions I want, but as soon as I open the pasture gate they will be gone.

The idea isn't to temporarily feed them with some completely uneconomic project. You want to give them reasons to stay long term. So why is Canada such a poor place to build technology companies?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Sadly, this story continues to have a modern day version in the form of poor government support for domestic firms. Canadian education and talent is incredible and arguably world class but with greater opportunity in the south, many choose to leave. Perhaps some may have come back with the US politics but I doubt there's a mass migration back to Canada.

[https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/ibm-shared-services- contrac...](https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/ibm-shared-services- contract-1.4658682)

<comment><USER18> You can say the same about Europe generally having a great and free education system but the best and brightest move to the US.

<comment><USER19> I honestly don't understand or know anyone who would move to the US now. I have a few friends who were considering it but it's a very firm no at this point, and they all had offers from the big firms in Silicone Valley. Sure, your compensation in UK or Germany won't reach the stratospheric levels of US programmers, but as a competent engineer you can easily reach _very_ comfortable levels of living, buy a house, brand new car, afford to have a couple kids and save some money for fun. And you won't have to deal with the insanity of American healthcare, immigration or politics.

I grew up thinking that my dream would be to move to US one day - <USER2> there probably isn't an offer that would make me move there.

<comment><USER20> Isn't housing in the major EU cities (London / Paris / Berlin ) all very expensive and comparable to SF / NY in terms of multiples of average programmer salary? The healthcare is definitely a big advantage though.

<comment><USER21> Why is European healthcare an advantage for people in professional software engineering jobs? All such people have health insurance in the US.

<comment><USER18> Because it's not all about you. It's about your parents, your friends, your family who are not _:gasp:_ software engineers, and it's nice not having to worry about them going bankrupt or homeless if they need x life-saving medical procedure or they loose their job.

<comment><USER22> It can be impractical to take your parents, your friends, and your extended family along with you to another country. It's certainly far more difficult than getting a job there as a software engineer, particular because of countries preferring to allow highly skilled, educated, and/or paid people in preferentially.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> You know what haunts me even more? That 60 years later, we still spend time and effort talking about this instead of doing anything.

Sadly, Canadians don't have the appetite for ambitious projects, whether military, civilian, terrestrial, space etc. Even when costs are reasonable (think of putting up $1billion in prize money to spur private investment X-Prize style) people will not tolerate attempts at risky things.

<comment><USER24> Yup. Another good examples are Nortel and BlackBerry. The government in Canada needs to be supportive about developing global leaders in expertise. Healthcare, once considered a world's top, isn't really today, but many Canadians still retain to the idea it is.

<comment><USER25> As a Canadian living in the U.S., I noticed a subtle thing that comes up when we Canadians lament the lack of global leaders in business. We often instinctively say "the government ought to do this or that" (I do this too). Whereas Americans tend not to bring up the government at all -- they go straight to private capital and get it done.

I'm a big government person (especially for society-wide services like healthcare, public health, education) but in business, I've come to realize that it's not helpful to have the mindset of relying on the government. (exception: defense, which almost always needs government funding. But almost everything else does not.)

I had a friend who was running a nascent high-tech commercial business and he spent a large chunk of his time writing proposals for government grants. Money is money, of course, but it's a little strange to me that even business people in Canada rely so much on the government instead of just going to the capital markets. And what's worse, a lack of government programs in a particular area is interpreted as a constraint. This should not be.

The 2nd largest company in Canada by market cap right now is Shopify, and it succeeded with no significant government support. We need to shift our people's mindset to not default to invoking the government -- instead we need to encourage non-risk-averse capital investment into bluesky projects from private parties. It is true that we are not awash in capital, being a small country and all, but we have enough (we're 16th in the world in GDP/PPP). Much smaller countries in northern Europe with smaller GDPs have done better than we have in establishing global business leaders.

<comment><USER26> I think we might not bring up the government in america because our government has not really had a problem getting big things done and has helped us lay the foundation for what the private sector has since built on. For all its faults, the government helped drive nuclear power, the space race, the internet, and biotech. I dont know where the US would be without the bomb, apollo, arpanet, and the human genome project. We had a private sector able to pick up from there to carry on the next steps, but our success is rooted in literal moonshots by out government as well. And we can argue all day about whether the private sector could have done all that more efficiently or whatever, but the fact of history is that the government did it. And, it did it in a way that involved the private sector through contractors etc that seeded talent outside government agencies and gave the private sector a good launching off point.

<comment><USER27> I think GPS also belongs in that list of government-developed revolutionary technologies.

<comment><USER26> I grouped that with the space race

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> > told to destroy the blueprints

What on earth compelled them to order that? That's just so barbaric. As if they were trying to destroy evidence of a crime.

Surely it makes more sense to preserve them?! You might even try to sell or license the design to recover some of the $250m invested?

<comment><USER29> My understanding is they weren't actually destroyed, the order was given but not obeyed.

[https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatoon/saved-avro-arrow- bl...](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatoon/saved-avro-arrow-blueprints- ordered-destroyed-1.5416554)

<comment><USER30> The article we're commenting on specifically mentions the blueprints being saved.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> > "The Arrow was an extremely high-performance, hi-tech fighter," says Coles. > "Its designers had made very few compromises to keep its costs down, and it > was very much the 'gold-plated' solution."

Sounds like this is a cautionary tale of what happens when you do what some people here suggest; doing everything the 'right/best' way, instead of realising that being engineer means making compromises.

</comment><comment><USER32> I remember our high school history teacher taking us to an aviation museum in Toronto. They had a section of the plane out on display and it was a beautiful piece of work.

But I'll never forget the way the tour guide described the story of the arrow and the hurt in his voice as he recanted the decision to scrap the plane.

For that generation of Canadian aviation geeks, it was truly a gut punch.

<comment><USER33> There's currently a full-size Arrow replica on display in Toronto, at the _Canadian Air and Space Museum_. I haven't gotten a chance to go there yet, but the _Canada Aviation and Space Museum_ in Ottawa currently has an original nose section on display, which I believe is the largest surviving piece. I can attest to the later being a very good aviation museum all around; I recommend it to anybody who's interested in that sort of thing. The nearby Diefenbunker museum is also very cool if you're interested in cold war stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Amy of YouTube 'Vintage Space' fame was who the BBC went to for the nuts and bolts of the article. She is Canadian and more into space than aviation. She is not a fan of the Space Shuttle so that isn't 'vintage Space' as far as she is concerned.

Her YouTube channel and book are recommended.

</comment><comment><USER35> Something I'm not seeing a lot of mention of was the fact that the Canadian aerospace program was absolutely riddled with Soviet spies.

I don't have references in front of me unfortunately, but if you choose to believe me, a good amount of the American resistance to the Arrow program had to do with direct technology transfer to the Soviet Union via their thorough penetration of the Canadian aerospace program. The Arrow represented a conduit of American aerospace knowledge directly to the Soviets, and had to be stopped.

<comment><USER36> Source please

<comment><USER35> _But until then his assignment was to become Soboloff so convincingly that nobody would ever suspect he was a Soviet spy. Eventually, he was given responsibility for managing five recruited agents, including a Communist Party of Canada member from Toronto who worked for the company developing the Avro Arrow and provided its engineering schematics to the KGB._

[https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/the-spy-named-gideon- bo...](https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/the-spy-named-gideon-book-tells- story-of-russian-illegal-sent-to-canada-and-betrayed)

That said, as noted I don't have references I can share for what I learned. Believe it or not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Yes, as Canadian, Avro Arrow does leave a "What if..." thought in my mind but having said that, I am proud of my countrymen as we have achieved quiet a lot since then (given our tiny population and difficult logistics):

Canada Space Arm, Blackberry (RIM), Bombardier aircrafts/subways/streetcars/trains, de Havilland aircrafts as well as other aircrafts ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_of_Canada%27s...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_of_Canada%27s_air_forces)).

As to why was Avro Arrow scrapped - sure there are explanations and the leading ones tend to indicate external political pressure coming from USA but I am not bitter at the reasons behind it because it is one thing to be cross at the decision but I don't have any clear idea as to actual reasons and the thought process of our leaders at the time.

<comment><USER14> It was scrapped because it was doomed to be a bad fighter plane. Speed isn't everything. The Vigilante, Delta Dart, etc all were expensive failures because you need a lot more than speed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Interestingly the cessation of Arrow development presented a huge opportunity for the Apollo program which actively recruited these highly trained engineers for the moon landings (this is discussed in detail in Charles Murray's fascinating history of the Apollo program).

</comment><comment><USER39> How about Canada funding Geoffrey Hinton's research in machine learning. [https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2015/04/17/how-a- toronto-...](https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2015/04/17/how-a-toronto- professors-research-revolutionized-artificial-intelligence.html)

Arguably, one of the most improtant breakthroughs of recent history, funded by Canadian citizens/taxes. This has much bigger social/economic impact, especially since we can outsource the job of overspending on military to our neighbours, and attempt to build a more socially just society on money saved.

</comment><comment><USER40> Oh, and let's not forget about Hydro-Québec's innovation with an all electric motor-wheel(early 90's!). Way ahead of it's time, and canned for suspicious reasons.

[https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=fr&u=https:/...](https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=fr&u=https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moteur- roue_d%2527Hydro-Qu%25C3%25A9bec&prev=search)

[https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moteur-roue_d%27Hydro- Qu%C3%A9...](https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moteur-roue_d%27Hydro-Qu%C3%A9bec)

<comment><USER41> The usual problem with wheel motors is unsprung weight, and the 90s was before batteries had decent energy density.

It sounds like something like a Prius, but with serial hybrid instead of parallel hybrid like the Prius was.

<comment><USER42> This is not true. Wheel motors have a ton of advantages in applications where unsprung weight isn't a big issue - electric bicycles and motorcycles for instance.

Wheel motors can also be surprisingly light as they can use the rotation in order to create cooling, and reduce a lot of rotational inertia which can be almost as bad as unsprung weight.

The prototype was also a plug-in hybrid, which was very doable at the time.

There is a reason why hub motors are so amazing in so many applications right now.

<comment><USER43> The context was clearly conventional automobiles. Nothing going over ~30 mph will ever be economically competitive with wheel motors instead of inboard motors. The physics are such that this will forever be true. Any materials advancement will improve both technologies and wheel motors can never catch up.

<comment><USER40> The prototype they had was on a modified 90's Intrepid.

[https://youtu.be/er8ufDV87nQ](https://youtu.be/er8ufDV87nQ)

[https://youtu.be/jHmxJPTWD-M](https://youtu.be/jHmxJPTWD-M)

It had comparable of not superior acceleration to it's original combustion engine.

<comment><USER43> And cost more and had worse handling. There's no advantage.

<comment><USER42> Except being electric and costing essentially nothing in maintenance?

Also, the handling characteristics were really not as bad as claimed from most all experiments conducted.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> For a moment I thought this is about some combination of Apache Avro and Apache Arrow for data serialization purposes.

<comment><USER45> exactly!

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> > _In a move which shocked Canada, the cutting up of the Arrow prototypes took > place in front of the silent factory. The moment was captured in a grainy > black-and-white photograph which continues to haunt Canada._

Is it just me or was this photo not included in the article? I tried a quick search but didn't see anything obviously it, either.

<comment><USER47> You can see it in this article [https://www.thesilo.ca/canadas-original-black- friday-cancell...](https://www.thesilo.ca/canadas-original-black-friday- cancelled-arrow-was-cutting-edge-1950s-jet-interceptor/)

<comment><USER46> Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Cancelled in 1959. Many of the Canadian engineers moved to the States and worked on the space program.

<comment><USER49> As is tradition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> They still have their own CANDU nucleur technology which is impressive for a country their size. Britain basically have up on theirs.

<comment><USER51> Well actually, we started selling that off to SNC and it's rotting now..

[https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/aecl-sold-for-15m-to-snc- la...](https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/aecl-sold-for-15m-to-snc- lavalin-1.985786)

<comment><USER12> at least we still have a few SMR startups like Terrestrial

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> _...a lot of the people who made the critical decisions in the Apollo-era were Canadian._

Was it easier for non US citizens to work in Aerospace in those days? e.g. I hear people gripe SpaceX can't hire internationally.

</comment><comment><USER53> This story reminds me of the British space programme which Tony Benn cancelled because he couldn't see the point of it.

...that was just before people started launching communications satellites.

</comment><comment><USER54> Just me, or is that Starscream?

<comment><USER55> I don't remember any pure delta-winged Starscream, but that doesn't mean there wasn't one.

All of the Starscreams I remember have prominent horzontal tail surfaces (the one I owned as a kid was very F-15ish but he's also been patterned after the Su-35, the F-16 and the F-22.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> > The record-breaking jet which still haunts a country

That's no exaggeration. For English Canada, the destruction of those planes was a trauma that lasts to this day because the Arrow represented the height of national pride, and their destruction the deepest low.

Similar but lesser feelings for the A220, sold by Bombardier for $1 to Airbus because Boeing lobbied for a 219.63% tariff on it.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A220](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A220)

[https://money.cnn.com/2017/09/26/news/companies/bombardier-b...](https://money.cnn.com/2017/09/26/news/companies/bombardier- boeing-cseries-delta-itc-ruling/index.html)

Canadians are polite, but they can kick ass when they want to.

<comment><USER14> Canceling the Arrow was probably the best thing to happen to Canada. Why tie up huge resources and your top engineers building a fighter that was far too expensive and poorly designed for battlefields of the future?

<comment><USER15> Yes, much better that these engineers and technicians mostly departed to other nations, or went on to build canoes or pots and pans, as good Canadians should.

<comment><USER42> Or now work for Pratt and Whitney Canada, for a wage inferior to that of US engineers, making engines that we then buy while the profits go to the US.

<comment><USER57> I don't see why they simply wouldn't go work in the US if that was the case. Unless they aren't qualified enough.

<comment><USER42> "just move", basically. This is an absurd argument at the scale of a country, and even more absurd at an international scale.

If they weren't qualified the industry wouldn't have been poached. Rather, this suggests that at least at some point they were significantly more qualified than those in the US.

<comment><USER57> They better get used to it: the current government had no problem pitching to Amazon that Canada was a cheap offshoring destination for engineers[1].

[1][https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/city-of-vancouver- criti...](https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/city-of-vancouver-criticized- for-boasting-about-low-pay-of-its-tech-workers-in-amazon-hq-bid)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> "but they can kick ass when they want to.

Obviously not when it comes to Arrow, Bombardier, and getting salary parity with US workers.

I say this unsarcastically as a Canadian.

<comment><USER59> If you get paid 20% more but spend 20% of your salary on services you wouldn't need to buy otherwise - isn't it parity already?

<comment><USER60> > If you get paid 20% more

I think you are possibly _massively_ underestimating how much it is possible to get paid as even an average software developer in the US. Like literally off by an entire order of magnitude.

I would guess it's more like 100%-400% more for equivalent jobs, and many people at. Plus your US job covers your healthcare etc.

<comment><USER61> doesn't that depend on where you live, though? A Software Engineer in the bay area gets paid a lot more than a Software Engineer with equivalent experience in the mid-west.

<comment><USER60> But there's almost nowhere in Canada or Europe where you can get the kind of $750k packages that you see fairly routinely for normal developers at ultra elite companies like Google in the Bay Area. How can Canada or Europe really compete with that?

<comment><USER62> In no small part by not being the US. Currently, no salary would be enough to motivate me to move there, f.ex.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Canada is a joke and will continue to be a joke until the economy collapses under the weight of a government run by sissies. (Edit: to be clear, that's all of them. Not just the current one. The culture of Canada's government is to be a leech.)

<comment><USER64> Yikes! Please don't post like this and [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23537637](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23537637) here.

I'm well acquainted with the effect that the Avro Arrow has on Canadian feelings, especially Canadian engineering feelings. But let's not go overboard.

<comment><USER63> Proof is in the pudding :-)</comment></comment></comment>


Googling 'black baby portraits' reveals yet another problem with AI - <AUTHOR> https://thenextweb.com/google/2017/07/07/googling-black-baby-portraits-reveals-yet-another-problem-with-ai/ <comment><USER2> This is white belt level Google Fu, try 'African baby portraits'.

Now you get lots of black baby portraits, but few African ones. Presumably because they don't have many 'portrait' studios in Africa. So just search just 'African babies', and you get plenty of Black African baby portraits.</comment>


Cheap Smartphone Dongle Diagnoses HIV And Syphilis - <AUTHOR> http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/cheap-smartphone-dongle-diagnoses-hiv-and-syphilis-15-minutes <comment><USER2> Was it really necessary to involve a smartphone at all?

> _color change [is] picked up by a set of photocells in the dongle, and the > results are then sent to an app_

The logic to discriminate a color change could have been handled by a 75-cent microcontroller. Add a cheap display or a couple LEDs to show the test result, plus a cheap AA battery, and you have a self-contained gadget for less cost than creating the smartphone interface.

Pregnancy tests and all sorts of sophisticated chemical test strips don't involve a smartphone.

I'm thinking that the smartphone hookup is either:

(1) a way to add future functionality like maintaining a database of the tests or uploading test results to somewhere (with all the privacy implications and risks of those), or

(2) a marketing ruse since we all know that a smartphone app that does X is way cooler than a old-fashioned self-contained gadget that does X.

An an example of how easily people fall for coolness of having a smartphone do something that doesn't actually need a smartphone, check out this comment to the original article:

" _I have been resisting the smartphone trend for years because they are expensive and there was no unique use for them: everything a smartphone did I ALREADY own a gadget for. This changes the game. Now I want a smartphone._ "

<comment><USER3> A couple thoughts:

1\. The comment you're talking about is from, essentially, someone who doesn't know what they're talking about. This isn't really meaningfully a "game changer" in terms of "Should I buy an iPhone?"

2\. Computers are already used to analyze many of these types of diagnostic tests. It may have been easier to port _those_ systems to a smart phone than to develop a new, bespoke microcontroller. Expertise is a cost.

3\. There are _massive_ benefits to having this hooked up to a smart phone, and as you have mentioned, much of it goes to extra functionality. During the Ebola outbreak, case reports often had to be dealt with in paper forms processed by hand, which slowed both reporting and contact tracing. From a public health perspective, being able to link test results (deidentified or not) with a central repository at a ministry of health is a big deal.

Imagine the use case of this not as one person and a smart phone testing themselves. Imagine it as one person and a smart phone testing 4 villages over the course of the week, in conjunction with actually getting people treatment.

<comment><USER2> > _1\. The comment you 're talking about is from, essentially, someone who > doesn't know what they're talking about._

Yes, of course, the person who made that comment is clueless about technology -- just like 90% of the population. The comment shows that most people think it's really cool that the diagnostic device uses a smartphone and don't realize that the smartphone wasn't needed at all.

> _2\. ... than to develop a new, bespoke microcontroller._

Nobody needs to develop a new, bespoke microcontroller. You use a tiny cheap off-the-shelf microcontroller (like the PIC) and _program_ it. Based on the information available in the original article, the program might be as simple as light the red LED (positive) if the color sensor indicates it's above a certain threshold and light the green LED (negative) if below a certain threshold. But even very complex algorithms can be ported to microcontrollers.

> _3\. Imagine it as one person and a smart phone testing 4 villages_

I did say databases and uploading were a possible reason for the smartphone, and do I agree that a smart phone does make sense for the use case of testing a whole village. This doesn't change my original point that a smartphone wasn't really necessary, not even to reduce costs, and might in fact be more expensive than a standalone device. The original article makes a big deal of the smartphone connection without explaining the real reason why the smartphone is there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> That reminds me of a parody of the lean start-up movement - a must-read in my opinion:

[http://theanorexicstartup.com/wp-content/the-anorexic- startu...](http://theanorexicstartup.com/wp-content/the-anorexic-startup.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER5> They were featured on the Science Friday podcast:

[http://www.sciencefriday.com/segment/02/06/2015/honey-i- shru...](http://www.sciencefriday.com/segment/02/06/2015/honey-i-shrunk-the- lab-testing-for-stds-on-a-smartphone.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> This pages talks about the false positive rate of some existing tests:

[http://mobile.aidsmap.com/Accuracy/page/1323395](http://mobile.aidsmap.com/Accuracy/page/1323395)

</comment><comment><USER7> False positive rate : 14% LOL !

</comment><comment><USER8> No dongle jokes, please...

</comment><comment><USER9> 1) To be pedantic, it detects your immune response (not the microorganisms directly)

2) "14% false alarm rate" => That makes it basically useless.

<comment><USER10> False negatives are very bad. False positives not so much. Worst case is you send someone to a better test to find out if it's true. This is what they aim for with home pregnancy test kits, afaik, for pretty good reasons.

<comment><USER3> That very much depends on the disease in question. For _these_ diseases, false negatives are bad. For diseases with intensive and dangerous treatments, false positives can be actively harmful to population health. This is commonly a problem in cancer screening.

<comment><USER11> Disease and plan. Almost every rapid HIV test out there is spoken about in "negative" or "maybe positive" terminology. If you get the two dots instead of one dot, you're referred to a physician who will administer a 4th gen test and probably a western bot, you aren't immediately started on ARVs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> So, assuming the medical industry in the developed world gets out of the way (which I don't think is a foregone conclusion...it will take years, and possibly too many resources, to bring this to market in the US for a variety of good and bad reasons related to our regulatory environment), this is potentially one of the biggest revolutionary changes in healthcare in my lifetime.

This makes detection of both viral and bacterial infections possible with very low-cost tools; the fact that it can detect both makes me believe that detecting practically any infectious disease (or at least any infectious disease that has identified biomarkers in blood, or other easily obtainable bodily fluid) is on the near horizon.

One could buy this dongle, or one like it, and new diseases could be added via software upgrades (or by in-app purchases for the diseases you want to check for). This would potentially make doctors office visits obsolete for all but serious disease and chronic conditions. No need to go get checked for strep when you have a sore throat (of course, getting the antibiotics to treat it is another regulatory hurdle people in the US would face), lower need for cities and universities to provide STD testing, though treatment and education would still likely be within their perview. It allows better self-management of HIV, hepatitis, Lyme disease, and other chronic viral illnesses through more rapid and frequent testing.

Even if this doesn't evolve to include other types of detection, I would still happily pay several hundred dollars for a re-usable STD testing tool. I like to get tested every 6 months, but the hassle and cost of going to the doctor or Planned Parenthood or online testing lab is high (free or low cost testing is available, but you trade much more hassle for the lower cost...among my friends who get tested at the city health center, they usually spend an hour or two waiting, which is not a cost I'm willing to pay to save a couple hundred bucks). If I could test for HIV for free before every new partner (and, hell, make it a practice to test with every partner), that'd be fantastic.

Another article about this was posted a week or so ago to HN, but it didn't get any comments or many upvotes, which was disappointing, as this seems like entirely revolutionary technology, to me. And, it makes me want to go into medical tech because of how huge the potential is (but it would be an entirely new field for me, so my ability to be productive in it would take a while to develop).

<comment><USER13> You cannot _possibly_ software update a device like this. The actual detection mechanics are chemical. The advance is in miniaturizing and automating tasks which used to take a laboratory and staff to do.

<comment><USER12> Is it? I don't know the mechanics. How about genetic testing, is that also a chemical process that is unique for each marker? Seems like a genetic sequencing tool could be programmable once the DNA/RNA has been analyzed. The best HIV test available is an RNA test, which can provide results as early as six days after exposure. This is obviously not my area of expertise, so I don't know how realistic it would be to downsize such a thing.

Also, how does this device perform a test for a viral infection and for a bacterial infection, if the tests are unique and chemical? Does it use a particular substance for each test, which has to be refilled per use? (Again, I have no idea how this stuff works.)

I know that 23andme continues to produce new information about my genes as new studies are done to find genetic markers for various diseases and traits, which is pretty cool. If there were a device that detected viral and bacterial RNA/DNA, would that be software extensible?

<comment><USER3> Yes, the tests are unique and chemical. You either need bespoke antigens that will react to the presence of specific pathogens, or primers and other components for DNA/RNA based tests.

Beyond that, these testing systems probably can't manage the sensitivity and specificity of a properly run diagnostic lab. That's _fine_ for the setting they're being considered in, because those labs don't exist, are hard to reach or can be easily overwhelmed in an outbreak, but for a developed world setting? I don't really see it. Home diagnostics for infectious diseases over a broad range of potential pathogens is a really hard technical challenge with no real payoff - you still need to go to the doctor.

<comment><USER14> If you have accurate test results that show you need medicine and can obtain it without a gatekeeper then you don't "need" to go to a doctor. That's one hell of a payoff.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, there's no way you're getting prescription antibiotics or antivirals without seeing a doctor because "My iPhone says I have pertussis".

Lab results alone do not a medically responsible treatment plan make.

<comment><USER14> Its unclear who "you" means, most people on earth can actually buy antibiotics without this. Also unsure as to how you define what is "responsible" for them.

<comment><USER3> The post at the top of this chain makes it abundantly clear we're talking about the United States.

And, as an epidemiologist, the ready availability of antibiotics without any interaction with a doctor is something I'd be pretty comfortable classifying as inherently irresponsible.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Surprising Power of Impulse Control - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/02/the-surprising-power-of-impulse-control/

<comment><USER2> Great article. Many thanks!</comment>


Ask HN: Pandora like station creation alternatives on other services? - <AUTHOR> My Pandora subscription is expiring and given their delays in bringing premium to the desktop, I'm looking to move on to a service that plays on the Echo in addition to the desktop.
I've looked at multiple other services and cannot find the ability to create a personalized station by seeding it with a few groups I like. On Pandora, you create a station, give it some names and Pandora learns from there what you like by the thumbs up and down. You don't have to manage it past the thumbs up and down.
I just like to set it and forget it.
Every other service I've looked at lacks the ability to introduce new music automatically and/or personalize the station.
Spotify offers the ability to create stations, but you have to manually add music. Amazon automatically adds to stations, but you cannot save them as your own. Google Play has a feature like this, but doesn't play on Echoes.
What have I missed? <comment><USER2> I tried them a long time ago, but maybe Jango or Deezer?</comment>


Star Wars toy photography - <AUTHOR> http://geektyrant.com/news/2011/10/3/star-wars-toy-photography-is-truly-amazing.html

<comment><USER2> Great pictures. I'm going to guess that the photographer used flour as the snow? Maybe not, it seems almost too white for flour.

Most appear to be Star Wars Lego but the third- and second-to-last images almost look like cosplay (almost).</comment>


Ask HN Mods: Why did my last post vanish - <AUTHOR> Recently I decided to log back into my HN account and posted a few articles I wanted to share with the HN community; I do this exclusively for the conversation that can happen.
Today I posted "I wanted to understand why racists hated me. So I befriended Klansmen" and it was getting good traction with plenty of excellent comments. I went to lunch, came back and checked the comments and noticed they suddenly stopped.
I then went page by page until the bottom of the homepage list searching for 'befriended Klansmen' and my user name. I never found the article, or my username other than the top bar.
So explain to me oh mighty censoring HN Mods why my post was removed? It wasn't flagged, it's just gone. Also, it isn't political, it was about a human trying a new approach at understanding racisim, and how he overcame our differences - which is the bulk of the comments thread focus too.  But the article is gone... so am I to assume the mods of HN are racists jerks that don't want to spread knowledge that can make the world a better place? Or perhaps the reason is more petty and personal? Either way you guys look bad and I guess the message is received again - I am no wanted or welcome around here anymore. Got it. I guess thanks for the reminder... cya. <comment><USER2> No moderator touched that submission, or even saw it before I randomly ran across this one. Users flagged it.

It seems to be some kind of hard-wiring that makes people assume that (a) if they see X on HN, that means we did X; and (b) that means we're Y (racist, etc.). It has to, right? What other explanation could there be?

For someone who has posted 6000 stories it might be a good idea to reread the site guidelines: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). They specifically ask you not to post moderation questions (let alone rants) to HN, but instead to email us at firstname.lastname@example.com, where your question will actually be seen instead of most likely lost in the flood.</comment>


Magicians fought over an ultra-secret tracker dedicated to stealing magic tricks - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.de/inside-art-of-misdirection-ultra-exclusive-private-torrent-tracker-magical-pirates-invites-2016-11 <comment><USER2> If I want to know how a classic trick is done I'll look at the Wikipedia page. It often won't reveal the secret directly, but if you check the page history you'll find an edit war between magicians which exposes exactly how it works.

<comment><USER3> now this is interesting! what exactly is the rationale used by those who would prefer it remain secret? i assume it's for the preservation of their job or hobby, but i doubt that would fly on its own.

<comment><USER4> A culture of a magician never reveals his secrets.

With the secret unknown it's 'magic'. With the secret known it becomes just a simple trick.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > The site is a trading post for stolen, pirated and unlawfully copied tricks, > which are covered by copyright, trademarks or other intellectual property in > much the same way that TV shows and films are.

A video or whatever may be copyrighted, but it's not really possible to protect a "trick". You can patent a process, but of course this reveals it to the public.

Most of the described contents of the tracker are commercially released products. That's really not "stealing tricks" in any way.

<comment><USER6> > A video or whatever may be copyrighted, but it's not really possible to > protect a "trick".

Interestingly, this isn't quite true. People are trying to exert copyright over the specific motions under choreography protection.

<comment><USER7> I wonder how this would go down in a court of law, in that the specific motions they are claiming copyright on were /obfuscated/ or downright /concealed/ from view. I wonder if you can legally be considered to have _copied_ something you have not seen..

<comment><USER6> I suppose what you'd end up copyrighting is the final effect, not how it's achieved. Which is, I guess, the point.

<comment><USER8> Without knowledge of the finer points of copyright law (IANAL), is this (the final effect) even copyrightable?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> These aren't exactly big secrets. Anyone can get copies of The Linking Ring, the magazine of the International Brotherhood of Magicians, and see ads for many of the tricks that require special props. (There used to be a competing publication, the "Magic-Gram", but it may be defunct.)

Realistically, if there's a video of a trick, you can usually figure it out. If there are multiple videos from different angles, it's easier. For that matter, there are explanatory videos for most of the big tricks on YouTube now.

I once saw a professional magician having a miserable time performing on the stage on the Santa Cruz beach. He was doing a levitation, and in brilliant sunlight it was embarrassingly obvious how it worked.

<comment><USER10> There are many videos of hans moretti's cardboard box trick, but I still have no clue how it's done...

</comment></comment><comment> loup-vaillant This hints at a more general problem: how does one gather a high-quality repository of knowledge on any given subject? How do you get enough stuff? How do you keep the noise down?

I believe some subjects make the problem harder than others. Programming for instance is full of hard to check claims. Even established techniques are hard to assess. Say you need to parse stuff. Will you go recursive descent? LALR? Earley? PEG? Might depend on what you want to parse, which environment you're working in, how much time you may invest… Or say you write a compiler. Will you use OCaml/F#/Haskell for the ease of handling recursive data structures? Or do you want C/C++ because of the speed, and you know tricks to avoid recursive data structures anyway?

One tempting solution is to start a secret society dedicated to hoard knowledge on the chosen subject. It would be hard to get in, but once there you'd only get quality stuff. (Or you might have gotten into a self-delusional sect…) The idea is, maybe if knowledge was visibly scarce and hard to obtain, instead of merely buried under a mountain of noise, we would treat it with the respect it deserves.

<comment><USER11> Had something like this debate with manager at last job. Came to a head in my annual review.

Manager: "As senior developer, you lack sufficient knowledge of our most important application."

Me: "Wait. I am the one who wrote most the documentation that is in our knowledge base for that application. I am the one who set up the knowledge base."

Manager: "That is not knowledge. Knowledge is what is in your head."

Me: _blinks incredulously_

I departed the company shortly after this exchange.

But I think you're right. It was certainly the manager's idea that if knowledge was visibly scarce and hard to obtain, his position would be treated (and generally was, among his superiors) with the respect he felt it deserved. But I'd have to assert that this secret society dedicated to hoarding knowledge was a self-delusional sect.

That's generally been my experience.

<comment><USER12> That's so bizarre. Was he trying to create some kind of official narrative on paper that he had the knowledge and you didn't? Or was he trying to tell you to document less and hide information?

<comment><USER11> > Was he trying to create some kind of official narrative on paper that he had > the knowledge and you didn't?

Yes, this. We had actually worked together amicably for several years, he as senior, I as mid-level. Then we both got bumped up. As part of my new responsibilities as senior, I tried to surface issues and confront them transparently. I was mindful not to point fingers or show anyone up but rather identify them as shortcomings in our practices or policies.

For cultural reasons, I think he felt threatened by this and assumed it was his responsibility to hide issues and save his own face. It fell apart pretty quickly. It sucked but I've used it as a career lesson.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Who's up for starting a comp sci secret society? We'll share the best ways to split a cake. The optimal algorithms on how many kittens to have to improve moods, and, best stats how to not forget important anniversaries while trying to boot up a Vulkan pipeline.

:)

<comment><USER14> The open source secret society

<comment><USER15> Perhaps we could name it: F Society

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I have been interested in magic for a long time, and have subscriptions or accounts at most major magic retailers in the world. I am not the best at performing magic tricks (mainly because I don't have that story telling personality that is needed to execute most tricks), but I love learning them and practicing them in my spare time.

No need to go to the dark net though - 99% of magic tricks are now readily exposed on Youtube public channels, and I am not just talking about the original instructions videos being leaked on there. A myriad of kids stand ready to either perform tricks so badly that they give away the techniques, or else outright show how things are done.

Still though, it is like seeing how a commercial airliner is flown. Watching hundreds of hours of video footage is no substitute for formal training and real like practice.

Also, one of the biggest draws of magic to me is hearing of the origins of most tricks, and researching guys who came up with these things over a hundred years ago.

</comment><comment><USER17> Any if this on the darknet?

</comment><comment><USER18> Sounds like the music industry.</comment>


America's largest milk producer files for bankruptcy - <AUTHOR> https://edition.cnn.com/2019/11/12/business/dean-foods-bankruptcy/index.html <comment><USER2> > That's not the only problem Dean Foods has faced. Walmart (WMT), which was > one of Dean Food's biggest customers, dropped them last year after building > its own dairy plant.

Burying the lead here... I'm sure that had an outsized impact on them.

<comment><USER3> I think you meant "lede".

<comment><USER4> Perhaps.[0]

Or perhaps not.[0]

\-----

[0] [https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2019/lead-vs- lede-...](https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2019/lead-vs-lede-roy- peter-clark-has-the-definitive-answer-at-last/)

<comment><USER5> Really, just, not. You can spell it either way; if you're writing for (or as) an editor, or just for the affectation of knowing editor jargon, "lede"; if in conversational English, "lead".

(I write "lede" all the time, and it is totally an affectation).

<comment><USER6> I notice you tend to use semicolons more than anyone else I know. Is that also an affectation? I mean, are you sometimes reformulating your thoughts in order to avail yourself to the opportunity of using a semicolon? Because me, rarely does a thought come to me in a way which would be best communicated with the usage of a semicolon, but maybe that's just me and my thinking style.

<comment><USER7> Semicolon usage could be an affectation or preference; it is generally used in place of a regular conjunction like "but" or "and".

There isn't any usage that I can think of where it would be the only "correct" way to write something; it's stronger than a comma but weaker than a period.

(I don't ever use semicolons normally. Was just trying to show some examples.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This has much less to do with the rise of plant-based milk than the article implies. USDA checkoff programs force diary farmers to fund marketing while USDA marketing orders set minimum dairy prices. The result of this meddling is an enormous oversupply of dairy products. The USDA buys surplus cheese to encourage domestic cheese production. They buy surplus milk and give it to food banks. The oversupply caused by this bizarre fixation was noticed decades ago and a warning was published in the Federal Register in 1983:

[https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-1983-08-02/pdf/FR-198...](https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-1983-08-02/pdf/FR-1983-08-02.pdf)

<comment><USER9> > _The oversupply caused by this bizarre fixation was noticed decades ago and > a warning was published in the Federal Register in 1983:_

> > [https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-1983-08-02/pdf/FR-198...](https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-1983-08-02/pdf/FR-1983-08-02.pdf)

...starting on p. 13, for interested parties.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The articles indicates that Dean Foods owns the Organic Valley cooperative, which is not accurate. There is a 50/50 partnership between Dean and Organic Valley called Organic Valley Fresh, but Dean certainly does not own Organic Valley.

<comment><USER11> Thanks for that info, I was curious

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's not surprising at all. Dairy industry has for long time pushed various flavoured milk drink on schoolchildren and now with war on obesity it stopped being viable. There was long lasting myth about milk preventing bone fractures and osteoporosis and when someone finally decided to do a study on it [0][1], these claims fell apart too. Vegans are another factor. People drink milk now because they actually like, instead of drinking it for some dubious health benefits. And that's fine.

[0]: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9224182](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9224182) [1]: [https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/1769138)

</comment><comment><USER13> I read elsewhere that there is a massive overcapacity of milk right now. It's part of the trade arguments between the US and Canada.

So I suspect very low milk prices probably didn't help.

Anecdotally it seems to me the market these days is for milk products like Greek yogurt and aged cheeses.

Also, I was bored one day and watched a lot of dairy farm videos - it's become very automated, where just a couple of people can manage an enormous herd of cows, and the cows even have better living conditions than at typical farms.

So that probably drives the massive overproduction as well since it's so easy to have a running farm.

<comment><USER14> And the Greek yogurt and cheese don't see to be getting cheaper. I understand like with 20 months aged parmesan that the warehouse time and labor probably far outweigh the milk as input costs, but yogurt cmon, I've made it myself for way cheaper (without economies of scale) but its still expensive for brand names at the grocery store (like $8 for big jar).

<comment><USER15> The weirdest thing about Greek yoghurt is that it is so hard to find any that isn't ultra-low or nonfat. The only brand that seems to sell full-fat yoghurt is Cabot, at least that I've seen. It's wildly better, and usually far lower sugar.

<comment><USER16> Fage has a full fat variety that is stocked in just about every grocery store: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fage)

<comment><USER15> Fage tops out at 5% fat. It'll do in a pinch, but it's nowhere near as good as the Cabot 10%.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Let them go. It's the consolidated milk marketers that, in my opinion, have driven most of the problems in the dairy industry.

<comment><USER18> To be fair they filed for bankruptcy and arranged a loan to help keep the pension in place.

I thought it was a nice gestures.

Most story like these I've seen the tax payers end up footing the bill for the pension. A particular coal company that John Oliver's cover recently did the same thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is great news. Dairy, although it tastes incredibly delicious, is pretty bad for people's health. Dairy is very closely linked to Liver Cancer (the landmark china study), ovarian cancer, prostate cancer (very closely linked), diabetes in children, etc. In forks over knives they even sited one study that showed Dairy proteins (casein) could actually feed and active growth of cancerous cells. In experiments they were able to turn on and off the cancerous growth just by chaning the percentage of casein protein.

And, lets not forget milk increases the chance of osteoporosis and bone fractures. prolonged ingestion of dairy leads to metabolic acidosis which causes the body to leach calcium from the bones increasing the rate of bone fractures. All that calcium in the milk can't be absorbed by the body anyways, it just gets pissed out of the body: they've demonstrated this in labs by measuring the amount of calcium that leaves the body after drinking milk. It's much better to get your calcium from natural sources. there's so many foods that are naturally high in calcium: [https://kale.world/c](https://kale.world/c) (set the bar for calcium) leafy green vegetables, Oranges, potatoes, kidney beans etc.

<comment><USER20> Your claims are dubious. The Forks Over Knives study was on rats, not humans. That milk increases osteoporosis or causes the body to leach calcium from the bones are decades old myths that have no basis in science. Please check Dr. Michael Greger's videos or lookup what some vegan dietitians who follow science have said. Myths like these cause more harm and eliminate trust. I say this as someone who doesn't want animals to be harmed.

<comment><USER19> the connection between dairy intake and bone fractures is undeniable. the countries with the greatest milk intake also have the highest number of bone fractures. And the links between dairy and cancer (especially prostate cancer) are also very strong: there are numerous studies making this connection ~ check out what Dr. Milton Mills has to say on all this, he knows what he's talking about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> >> Once a staple of the American refrigerator, milk has slowly fallen out of favor with consumers as they seek less-sugary or plant-based alternatives.

Call me a clueless European bumpkin but I was a bit shocked about that. Milk in the US has sugar added to it.

Another comment explains that it's particularly low-fat milk that has sugar added to it. But that's pointless. Supposedly one prefers low-fat milk because it's more healthy. What's the point of adding sugar and making it less ealthy again?

<comment><USER22> All milk has sugar in it naturally (Lactose).

I don't think even in America they add sugar to it (I just chcked on walmart's website and none of their milk lists added sugar in the ingredients)

<comment><USER21> Yes, I thought of lactose, but the CNN article says consumers are looking for "less-sugary" milk. Is that really what they mean by "sugary", that it has lactose? I would have thought that "sugary" means, well, tasting of sugar, as in sucrose, i.e. sweet.

For the record, this is the other comment I refer to:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21522662](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21522662)

But there seems to be some disagreement about its accuracy.

<comment><USER22> It's saying plant-based milks are a less-sugary alternative. That doesn't imply that cow milk has added sugar, just that it has more sugar naturally than e.g. oat or soy milk

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> "Conventional white milk"?

When is milk any other color?

<comment><USER24> Also "less sugary"?? Do they add sugar to shelf milk in US?

<comment><USER25> Yes they do, especially in lower fat milks like 1% or non-fat.

<comment><USER26> [citation needed]

I've never seen this, or heard of it happening. (Except chocolate or strawberry milk.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Well, that buried the lede rather thoroughly. Walmart - it did throw them under a bus.

<comment><USER28> Wait why is Walmart a bad guy here? Walmart isn't obligated to keep these folks in business, relying on one customer is risky.

<comment><USER27> ... I was typing up a long reply about the excessive power and influence of companies like Walmart, Amazon, or Apple (the app store) and the effects of companies pursuing vertical monopolies and monocultures, but, seriously, do I need to explain this?

<comment><USER28> Yes, but try to stay specific to this situation. How is Walmart obligated to buy milk from one specific supplier forever?

You seem to want to go wide with this, but the question isn't a generic one; it's very particular to Walmart, milk, and the claim that Walmart is somehow _supposed_ to buy from Dean Foods, or else they're acting immorally.

<comment><USER27> The issue here from the article, specifically, is Walmart cut them out of the supply chain after building their own dairy plant - the buried lede, and literally the last sentence.

So it follows: Walmart dropped Dean as a result of its continued efforts to vertically integrate its supply chain. This kills Dean.

And given we are talking Walmart here, I feel pretty safe assuming it's the key actor in this situation, not the 50 some million dollar almond milk industry :P

<comment><USER28> Yes, those are the facts, but _why_ is that a problem? _Why_ is Dean the responsibility of Walmart?

<comment><USER27> That is a profoundly complicated question. The simplest answer is they aren't responsible for Dean's bankruptcy, even though they might be _responsible_ for the direct chain of events that lead to it. Walmart has caused a lot of similar events in the past.

So, my position would be: Walmart is a paperclip optimizer and a bad neighbor, and deserves to be called out for it whenever it does its thing.

<comment><USER28> Again, you went wide. Specifically, Walmart is _not_ responsible for Dean's bankruptcy, which was all we were discussing.

<comment><USER27> Between being forced to reduce margins to meet Walmart and other grocery stores price points and then the sudden loss of 4% of their sales volume. I feel pretty comfortable in the assertion.

/me shrugs.

<comment><USER28> That's because you're ignoring the actual article and the discussion around the article and going on a tangential rant.

You're basically "feeling comfortable" derailing a conversation to talk about what you want to talk about instead of the actual topic.

Classy.

<comment><USER27> It's pretty trolly to draw someone into a conversation, continue to ask for responses, and then accuse them of going off on a rant?

<comment><USER28> What's trolly is to derail a conversation, repeatedly trying to get on your soapbox to parrot word association rants about a company that you agree did nothing wrong in this specific situation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> The artificial increase in milk production by injecting cows with hormones takes its toll after how many years? 30-40?

It did not matter that they (for your sample of 'they') caused health problems to cows - including mastitis - and it also did not matter that the side- effects of these hormones on human consumption were not fully considered.

One commercial that I clearly remember was by one of those "farmers" saying that if you as a farmer do not inject your cow to increase milk production, you are simply leaving money on the table.

</comment><comment><USER29> > "accelerated decline in the conventional white milk category."

Overall it's not looking like people are drinking less milk, they simply want more variety and this company seems to be having a hard time in all area's from Walmart to slowly upcoming alternative milk replacers.

Seems also in part they haven't innovated enough in new types of product to draw more customers.

<comment><USER30> Variety like what? Other non-milk white liquids? I think that is exactly what they mean that "conventional" milk is on the decline.

<comment><USER29> Other non white milk type products, like milk based drinks with fruit flavors, protein drinks or breakfast replacement options.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Skip the cows and just sell bottled water. Bottled water can cost more than milk.

</comment><comment><USER32> As a vegan I rejoice. Consumer's reduced interest in dairy is going to reduce cow's (and bull's) suffering significantly.

Hurray! I look fwd to many more animal-cruelty-corp bankruptcies.

<comment><USER24> Cows need to be milked or they will suffer.

Animal cruelty is when you inject them with hormones and cause them mastitis as a justification to increase milk production.

<comment><USER33> Cows need to lactate when they have calves. They're not unending milk machines. They're like other mammals: they lactate to help their young survive. If you don't take away their calf and beat it to death, it'll drink all that milk and the mother cower won't suffer one bit. So is it just the hormones that make this cruel? What happened to the calf and why isn't that cruel?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I love cow's milk but only buy local so I imagine this hurts large factory dairy farms.

With that said, I doubt I could ever bring myself to stop drinking ethically sourced milk. All of these plant based milks are overly processed, expensive, and fortified with a bunch of nutrient junk that is lacking.

<comment><USER35> Sorry but there is no such thing as ethical consumption of cow milk.

<comment><USER36> How? My aunt has a cow(a single one) that lives next to her house, has access to a pasture nearby, and by literally any definition you could pick it lives as happy life as a cow can do(unless you subscribe to the idea that no animals should be ever kept by humans, but I am not convinced that would lead to a measurably better life for the cow). It produces a lot of milk that my aunt uses for herself and her neighbours take some of it as well. How is that not "ethical consumption of cow milk"?

<comment><USER37> It depends on where you place things on the moral scale.

For example for the cow to lactate, it needs to be inseminated. Every 4 years I think. When the calf is born it's taken away from the mother. Does a cow mother suffer emotionally from having their baby taken away?

Cows are sociable animals so a single cow would probably feel lonely?

I don't have the answers. It seems like research uncovers more and more human- like emotions associated to animals so it doesn't seem completely out of question. Humans also have a tendency to objectify things so they can shut off empathy.

<comment><USER38> There is a rare practice where you (for example) separate them just for the night and milk the cow in the morning. During the day, the calf will take the milk. Yes, you lose a lot of the milk that way, but apparently your vet bill also goes down because the calf will be healthier.

Another option is to pool several calves to one cow and foster them for more natural suckling behaviour. This is a bit more common.

Interestingly, apparently cows can choose to either give the milk or not which makes the logistics more complicated.

I can currently only find sources in German for this though ('muttergebundene Kälberaufzucht' / 'ammengebundene Kälberaufzucht').</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


One-Day Company Setup (Ops and IT) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.steelandsilicon.com/2010/02/11/operations-and-it/

<comment><USER3> _There are still some major operations details up in the air:

# I've talked to one bank about business banking, checking, credit cards, and so on, but need to check out a few more.

# Accounting system: This is a big question. Quickbooks? An online system like Outright or Freshbooks? I need to talk to an accountant first.

# Final decision on legal structure (LLC vs. LLC taxed-as-S-corp vs. S-corp) and registration with the IRS, the state, and so on.

# Benefits planning (health insurance, 401k) and thinking about future tax implications.

# Various legal questions I'm working through. _

Respectfully, those are the difficult things. We "all" know how to set up Google Apps for your Domain.

<comment><USER4> Certainly, I agree (I'm the author of the linked blog, I didn't even realize someone had posted it here).

Those are all things I'm working on in parallel and want to be more careful to take some time to do right, so I've been talking to a number of people I know who've started businesses to get their feedback.

What impressed me was that it's so easy and fast (compared to, say, 7 years ago when I last did consulting) to set up all of the medium-priority operational items on the cloud, without committing to long-term contracts or needing to buy server hardware or install my own software.

And while I'm sure everyone in the audience of this site knows all about Google Apps and so on, I still meet many small businesses who think Outlook, Exchange, Quickbooks, a dedicated phone system, and an office lease is "the way" you have to start a business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> My deviations would be:

\- Use Basecamphq.com and/or ActiveCollab.com for project management and client doc sharing, bug reports, etc.

\- Use several TK6000.com units, mixed with Grasshopper.com and analog phones, to provide VoIP numbers and a virtual PBX for very little money. Comes with advanced features beyond a typical PBX such as converting vmail to email. This reduces use of mobile minutes to some degree.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the comment (I'm the author of the linked blog, I just now noticed someone had posted it here). I'll check those out, as I'm not sure the Google Voice voicemail approach will scale beyond a 1-person company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think there's more that goes along with setting up a company - <USER2> procuring customers, relationships, and so on. On your to do list at the bottom, I'd pass on benefits planning, credit cards, tax planning and accounting before really starting to build out your business.

<comment><USER4> Hello-- I'm the author of the linked blog (I didn't even realize someone had posted it here until I saw my traffic jump).

Yes, certainly-- I didn't talk about that because I already have a strong network of relationships and contacts from my past 6 years consulting in the field and involvement in various industry events and groups. Not that it's ever easy to build business (especially now), but this sort of network building, sales, and closing contracts is something I was doing recently at another organization.

It's the somewhat mundane operational and setup details that I needed to do for the first time, which is why I summarized them. Cheers!</comment></comment>


Proof of code with pointers now possible in SPARK using pledges - <AUTHOR> https://blog.adacore.com/pointer-based-data-structures-in-spark <comment><USER2> This sounds like the inclusion of Rust's lifetimes in Ada: is this just academic or is it actually used to replace what I assume is "normal Ada"?

<comment><USER3> SPARK is a subset/superset of Ada. That is, the code is compiled using usual Ada rules, but to pass the SPARK verification checks requires passing some additional rules. Ada's access types (pointers) are traditional; to use access types within SPARK requires some addition rules, which are lifetime rules.

The "previous post" mentioned in the original article goes into this some more:

[https://blog.adacore.com/using-pointers-in- spark](https://blog.adacore.com/using-pointers-in-spark)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Unrelated to OpenBSD's pledge(2).</comment>


American Diabetes Association hazardous to your health - <AUTHOR> http://blog.sugarlog.com/post/4024984508/american-diabetes-association-hazardous-to-your-health

<comment><AUTHOR> hey guys, this is a short post in a series about a great book on diabetes care: [http://www.amazon.com/Dr-Bernsteins-Diabetes-Solution- Achiev...](http://www.amazon.com/Dr-Bernsteins-Diabetes-Solution- Achieving/dp/0316167169), the author's ideas haven't penetrated as far as they need to, and I'm trying to fix that</comment>


Circuit building: stop using antique parts (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://sensitiveresearch.com/DoNotTIP/index.html <comment><USER2> This is bad advice based on emotive arguments. Components that were designed in the 1970s aren't a priori bad. E.g. 78xx and LM317 regulators are at least that old, almost as cheap as the sand from which they are made and very reliable.

Instead of throwing perfectly good parts away, better advice would be to properly understand their behaviour and to choose the right part for the job.

<comment><USER3> He can have my 555 timer when he pries it out of my cold, dead...well...you know the rest...</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Does anyone know of a REST API for monthly precipitation in the US? - <AUTHOR> I'm looking to create a web app around precipitation in the US by state or zip code in at least a month, but bi weekly or even weekly would be fine too. Does anyone know of any public REST APIs that would have this data? I've been scouring data.gov and can't seem to find any usable REST API.<p>Also, does anyone know of a already existing service that does this well? If so feel free to let  me know. <comment><USER2> [http://www.programmableweb.com/api/noaa-climate-data- online](http://www.programmableweb.com/api/noaa-climate-data-online)

[https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/u-s-hourly-precipitation- da...](https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/u-s-hourly-precipitation-data)

[http://www.wunderground.com/weather/api/d/docs](http://www.wunderground.com/weather/api/d/docs)

[http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo- web/webservices/ncdcwebservices](http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo- web/webservices/ncdcwebservices)

[https://data.noaa.gov/dataset/u-s-15-minute-precipitation- da...](https://data.noaa.gov/dataset/u-s-15-minute-precipitation-data)

Note some maybe datasets, so you may have to import them into a db and then just use something like

[http://www.slashdb.com/](http://www.slashdb.com/)

to quickly publish your own api.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good call! Didn't think about importing them into a lightweight database.

<comment><USER3> Actually here is a more detailed writeup [http://apievangelist.com/2015/11/04/slashdb-created-the- rank...](http://apievangelist.com/2015/11/04/slashdb-created-the-ranking- digital-rights-corporate-accountability-index-api-i-was-asking-for/)</comment></comment></comment>


Conan O'Brien on Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://twitter.com/conanobrien <comment><USER2> _Bio: I had a show. Then I had a different show. Now I have a Twitter account._</comment>


Row blows up over ownership of 'space marine' term - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21380003 <comment><USER2> Previous discussion of original story: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5176820>

</comment><comment><USER3> The really absurd thing about the issue is how it is possible that someone gave they the exclusive right to use what in the end is just two standard english words stuck together.

<comment><USER4> You mean, like 'Internet Explorer'?

[http://news.cnet.com/Microsoft-settles-trademark- case/2100-1...](http://news.cnet.com/Microsoft-settles-trademark- case/2100-1001_3-212931.html)

<comment><USER5> I would have gone with "Windows" since it was a common term for a UI element at the time.

<comment><USER6> And you're still free to call the UI element by that name.

<comment><USER5> Yep, but don't use it in part of your product's name.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A nifty revenge would be for the net to repurpose the term "space marine" as a synonym for some disgusting activity, like vomiting. For example, IP lawyers makes me space marine all over my carpet.

<comment><USER8> A much more nifty revenge would be to have Games Workshop stripped of all their trademarks, not to use a SciFi staple into nonsense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> A quote: "The claim emerged when it was used to _get_ an American ebook about the futuristic soldiers _taken_ off Amazon."

Surely there's a way to construct this sentence that doesn't move two key words so far apart. The distance between the related words "get" and "taken" is seven interloping words -- this isn't world class (for that one needs to learn German) but it's definitely a contender.

How about "The claim emerged when Amazon was forced to pull an American ebook about the futuristic soldiers"?

There was a time when publications employed as many editors and proofreaders as writers. _(sigh)_

But apropos the topic, I was once forced to stop using the title "Sun Computer" for my sunrise and sunset computer page. The complainant? Sun Computer, of course. My page appeared before theirs in search engine listings, so they hired a lawyer to write and object to my use of the word "sun". After trying to apply common sense, I gave in.

The full story: [http://arachnoid.com/lutusp/sunrise/index.html#The__Sun_Comp...](http://arachnoid.com/lutusp/sunrise/index.html#The__Sun_Computer__Story)

</comment><comment><USER10> We better trademark the terms "Space Rangers", "Space Seals" or should that be "Speals"?, "DeltaSpace", "Space force", etc..

</comment><comment><USER11> By the way, this is a timely reminder.

If you have a brand that you want to protect, go get a trademark registered. It'll cost you a few thousand dollars at most. Less if you play not-a-lawyer- lotto and do it yourself.

<comment> tech-no-logical another reminder : if you're starting a brand, DO NOT simply throw together two generic words and expect to be able to hold on to your trademark.

this is just silly.

<comment><USER12> Common words like "face" and "book"? "My" and "space"? "You" and "tube"? "Fox" and "news"? "Seven" and "eleven"? "Virgin" and "records"/"atlantic"/ ... ?

<comment><USER13> Those are common words used in an uncommon way.

Using "space" as a prefix is a cliche in science fiction. "Spaceship", "space station". "The spacelanes have been packed with spacetraders this whole space year. The space police should send some space fighters on space patrol."

<comment><USER12> I was commenting that the g'parent poster's assertion was incorrect, and not about the term "space marine."

From the NewsRadio episode "Space": "Your space pod is so cold and drafty." "Fine, I'll get a space heater." <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NDiBCD55-Y#t=10m40s>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Wasn't at all surprising to me. Have they never heard of Warhammer 40,000?

<comment><USER15> This got quite a lot of discussion or reddit the other day and someone supplied a link to term used in fiction from the 30's. it predates this company by about 50 years.

<comment><USER15> Well, apparently prior art has nothing to do with trademark. So, to paraphrase The Big Lebowski, they're not wrong, they're just assholes.

<comment><USER6> The problem is not prior art, but the descriptive or generic nature of the term.

Just because there's a software company selling music or even a music label with trademarks on 'Apple' doesn't mean I cannot call a song about apples 'Apple Song'. See the case cited in section b of [1] as to why 'space marine' might not be the best choice if you want to put a trademark on a book's title.

'Prior art' is helpful insofar as it establishes the nature of the term in question. The term 'space marine' is not as widely used as I initially believed (eg it's neither used in Starship Troopers nor Aliens, and might not be in Starcraft - did not verify with the game itself and online sources are ambiguous).

However, it can still be found in a lot of places:

Misfit by Heinlein, Grayson Space Marine Corps in David Weber's Honorverse, Doomguy and the Quake marines, the Star Blazers TV series, Death of the Daleks, the movie 'Space Marines' from 1997, Colonel Scott of the US Space Marines from Moonraker, to name the ones I could come up with.

[1] <http://www.copylaw.com/new_articles/titles.html>

<comment><USER16> Using the term _inside_ a work might be less dangerous than using it in the title. IANAL, but GW might be able to argue that using it in a title is going to trick consumers into think it is an officially sanctioned GW book.

<comment><USER6> Look at the link I gave:

""" Noting the inherent weakness of plaintiff's title, the court commented that the words chosen by Random House [the defendant] were an apt description of its book, and therefore in the public domain. Rejecting plaintiff's unfair competition claim, the court further noted that because of the weakness of plaintiff's title, _combined with the differences in the overall look and feel of the two books_ (including Random House's prominent use of its distinctive logo on the spine and back jacket) there was no likelihood of confusion. McGraw-Hill Book Company v. Random House, Inc., 32 Misc. 2nd 704, 225 N.Y.S.2d 646, 132 U.S.P.Q. 530 (1962). """</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


WebAssembly in the Linux Kernel, with Faster-Than-Native Performance - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/wasmerio/kernel-wasm/blob/master/README.md <comment><USER2> > Since WASM is a virtual ISA protected by a virtual machine, we don't need to > rely on external hardware and software checks to ensure safety

famous last words...

> faster than native

if you used a static compiled (and safe) language in-kernel i would assume that would be faster still than wasm or am i missing something...?

<comment><USER3> There is _absolutely_ no way that a more abstracted piece of software is faster than a less abstracted piece of software, unless there is some defect in the latter. Even the hypothetical equal performance is more like a holy grail (though I have had professors swear to me that they have seen it reached in isolated circumstances, so maybe a little less hypothetical than that).

<comment><USER4> I don't think that's a 100% accurate statement. My understanding is that JIT techniques do often allow non-native code to run faster than native code by taking advantage of information during the programs runtime for optimization, in addition to specific hardware features that the compiled binary version may not have taken advantage of for compatibility reasons.

<comment><USER5> In other words, it's possible for a non native program to be faster than a native program provided the native program is less optimized for the execution platform.

This is not exactly news.

<comment><USER6> A VM can also optimize for the workload and the configuration of a program in ways that a compiled-once program cannot (profile-guided-optimization can help there)

A simple example is

      log.debug("foo:" + bar + "(" + baz + ")")

A native C++ compiler would have to do the string concatenation and must call _log.debug_. A VM can (sometimes) detect that "log.debug" is a no-op, and skip computing its argument and calling it, and can even recover when "log.debug" stops being a no-op. It can even do that if the code for _log_ get loaded dynamically at runtime.

<comment><USER3> What this means in short is exactly what was already said, but in more words and in such a way that it seems like that wasn't what was already said. You've described a native program that wasn't optimised competing against an optimised non-native program. It's already been established that this is a scenario where the latter might be faster.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> WebAssembly in the kernel faster-than-native reminds me of the comedic talk by Gary Bernhardt, "The Birth & Death of JavaScript" [1]. Great foresight

[1] [https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and- death...](https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death-of- javascript)

</comment><comment><USER8> How to debug wasm? I previously tried compiling llvm into wasm, and the debugability was very poor. I could only rely on limited stack trace and logging.

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't see how WASM could possibly be faster than native as somehow it has to be translated into native with native first right?

<comment><USER10> There are a lot of ways that install-time or JIT compilation can have advantages over static binaries. For the theory see partial evaluation, feedback directed optimization, dynamic recompilation etc.

But yes "faster than native" is not precise enough wording for this, should say "faster than conventional statically compiled C" or something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> > Faster than native (partially achieved)

So, bogus then.

</comment><comment><USER12> Yavascript!</comment>


Famous Logos Optimized to Be Eco-Friendly - <AUTHOR> http://ecobranding-design.com <comment><USER2> Companies are very very very specific about their logos, how they are to be used, what backgrounds they can have. It's not unusual for their to be a branding "bible" thats hundreds of pages. Why does this matter? Because the background is on white. They're going to require that if the logo design looks best on white, that there must be white.

So all you've done here in introduced ANOTHER color to be printed in a lot of cases. Ok, it works fine on a Starbucks cup and on a webpage... but in most real life cases? Way way more complicated. The McDonald's Arches are prominently lit on the front of their buildings. Now instead of one lighting loop, there needs to be two.

And while I do like the design of some of these logos, like Coke. The Apple logo is TERRIBLE. Some logo's this High School design class of "lets make some of the logo white", just doesn't work.

<comment><USER3> Companies already have multiple versions of the logo: print/web/monochrome/glyph etc. Since this only affects print, it would only affect the printed versions of the logo. The Brand guidelines could be reflected for the same.

The complete logo could still be used in print scenarios, but if it is something that is very print specific (brochures, magazine ads, newspapers), then you specifically pick the "eco" logo, as per your branding bible.

I agree on the Apple logo being terrible though. It could have been a bigger bite.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Does this take into account the cost of commercial ink vs consumer ink? I don't know but I would bet the ink used on a drink cup is cheap.

At best, I think this is misplaced concern. At worst, I think this is a cash making scheme by guilting people into buying their design services which they advertise at the bottom of the page.

EDIT: I thought about it some more and the cost savings don't take into account the costs of redesigning your logo, retooling your printers or replacing your storefront signs. In either the ecological or economical sense.

<comment><USER5> Brands change/tweak their logo fairly often. It'd probably make sense to incorporate eco-thinking (if it actually does make a difference) when you're otherwise doing a brand/logo update to avoid duplicating those costs.

<comment><USER4> Certainly wouldn't be a bad idea, as you can then brag about how "ecological" your logo is. Even if the actual benefits are marginal.

<comment><USER6> Something like how Google turns their web page background black on Earth day?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I really can't imagine that the ink required to print a logo is large enough of a cost to justify messing with something this important to a business - neither from an ecological nor an economical standpoint.

Let's say the "thinner" McDonald's logo saved a few million per year. If it decreased their sales by just .1% due to decreased brand recognition or just being less attractive the losses would probably far outweigh the benefits.

It's an interesting idea, but I doubt any company would risk something like this. Unless they use it to try to make themselves look more green perhaps, but that would be more about marketing than about actual cost savings.

<comment><USER8> And what happens with the McDonald's logo on say their brown McCafe cups. Does the lessened yellow become brown then or do we now have to print white onto that cup? I think there are many ways companies could go "eco" and changing their logo is really far down on that list...

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Clearly I am not understanding the artistic value, I would call that "remove central areas of solid colour filled regions of logos to save ink", which shows how better than me Mr. Boyer is at naming things.

That printer ink costs double than Chanel N°5 is a statement that would need IMHO some background, I don't think that most logo's are printed with a technique involving high cost ink (such as that of inkjet printers).

Anyway, Chanel N°5:

[https://www.chanel.com/en_US/fragrance-beauty/fragrance- no5-...](https://www.chanel.com/en_US/fragrance-beauty/fragrance- no5-no5-88173)

US$ 210 for 15 ml

Epson Ink (for EcoTank Inkjet Printers):

[https://epson.com/InkFinder/i/C11CF73201](https://epson.com/InkFinder/i/C11CF73201)

US$ 12.99 for 70 ml

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a Tank not a cartridge. Ink is really expansive: [https://www.fastcodesign.com/3021290/why-printer-ink- should-...](https://www.fastcodesign.com/3021290/why-printer-ink-should-be- packaged-like-chanel-no-5)

<comment><USER9> Sure it is a tank, it is _ink_.

Do you believe that professional printing uses inkjet printers with cartridges?

I believe that largely not even inkjet printers are used in professional printing (unless maybe for some low number, large formats), as said, but if they were actually used, they surely would not use "cartridges".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Less ink is not necessarily better, is it? Some patterns are harder to print, depending on the type of printer, no? I like the line of thought here though.

</comment><comment><USER11> Pattern diffusion would be a much better option. These compromise the integrity of the design way too much. I appreciate the idea, but do not believe the stats and feel like it is an attempt to get work more than it is to save resources. Also print is less common nowadays and I expected this to be something that talked about digital application of logos.

</comment><comment><USER12> I actually really like the way the H&M logo looks with this. It stands out much more.

</comment><comment><USER13> "-X% less ink", LOL. Negative numbers, how do they work?

</comment><comment><USER14> That animated Nike swoosh looks like nightmare fuel.

Like a psychotic clown at the moment when he realizes you know he has you trapped and this is the end.

</comment><comment><USER15> -34% less ink. So 34% more ink.

</comment><comment><USER16> You spelled skeuomorphism wrong.

</comment><comment><USER17> Saving mill _I_ ons! ;)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Visibility is hugely important to brands, which is why they want to see their logo everywhere, but there's a price to pay for such widespread exposure, not just financially but ecologically as well. As you can see on the link, there's a simple way to reduce these costs, and that's by using less ink. The idea, called Ecobranding, is a new conceptual experiment created by a Parisian Designer named Sylvain Boyer that aimed at making brands more eco-friendly while at the same time saving millions of dollars in production costs. From McDonald's and Apple to H&M and FedEx, the streamlined examples you can find here maintain the essence of each specific logo while simultaneously making it more cost-effective for both the manufacturer and the environment. How do you think they compare to the originals?</comment>