I'm developing a game and it burned itself into my display - <AUTHOR> During the development of my current game Tiny Thor (a beautiful 2D Retro Platformer, check out: http://asylumsquare.com/tinythor) I've implemented an invincible mode in our debug builds. To visualise it, I switched the rendering between normal and full bright with each frame - so a really fast flickering occurs on the players sprite when in invincible mode.
After using that feature for around 30 minutes on and off I suddenly noticed an inversed-looking Tiny Thor in the background of my text editor. I was very confused, so I moved the window around and discovered that the sprite was "burned" into my display over all applications, even after turning the display and the system on and off.
Here is a short video I took: https://youtu.be/oJHUqmtO6Gw
Seems like I have to do a softer effect on it if I don't want to destroy my display...
BTW: After turning the display off over night my lovely Tiny Thor vanished away. I'm missing him.... ;) <comment><USER2> Who is at fault in this situation? I would assume the monitor driver should be able to limit the max brightness to prevent this type of thing lol

</comment><comment><USER3> I've never seen such a distinct pattern for display burn-in. What monitor do you use? That's quite interesting.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's an LG 29EA93-P (LED Display).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> well after hearing that you managed to burn your screen with your game I'm not exceedingly inclined to try it to be honest :D

<comment><AUTHOR> I really need to put a big badge on my website saying "No warranty on physical damage" :)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Most reliable domain registrar - <AUTHOR>

My current registrar leaves me with a few concerns, so it's time to move.
I've Googled for "most reliable domain registrar" and there are thousands of hits, many of them just affiliates trying to get you to use their registration link.
The folks at HN are probably more able to judge this so I'm asking here for recommendations.  Low cost or ease of web interface isn't what's most important.  Reliable (ie can get help if needed, and my domain won't get stolen or lost, or the company won't go out of business) are the most imporant.
Thanks <comment><USER2> Marco Arment made a blog post this week ([http://www.marco.org/2011/04/14/why- is-it-so-hard-to-be-a-go...](http://www.marco.org/2011/04/14/why-is-it-so- hard-to-be-a-good-registrar)) that generated some chatter here related to domain registrars (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2448061>). The consensus seems to be that NearlyFreeSpeech.net is the one to go with.

<comment><USER3> Is anyone on here <from> NearlyFreeSpeech? In their FAQs, it says they are not really interested in being a domain register and that their registration services are essentially just a convenience for their hosting customers.

I have thousands of domains, and was considering using them - but I would not be using their hosting services, so it seems moot now...

<comment><USER4> I have used Moniker, GoDaddy and NearlyFreeSpeech.

NearlyFreeSpeech is the only one I would recommend.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I would highly recommend NameCheap unless you're holding hundreds, then Fabulous is the best.

</comment><comment><USER6> I've been very happy with moniker.com. I have 73 domains with them. They're inexpensive, I like their web interface, and I've had no trouble with them at all.

</comment><comment><USER7> gandi.net is awesome

</comment><comment><USER8> gandi.net

</comment><comment><USER9> 1and1.com

<comment><USER10> Based on my experience with 1and1 as a registrar and as a host, I recommend not depending on them for anything, ever. They have atrocious customer service. Which is fine, as long as everything works (and if they're just your registrar, things should be fine, most of the time). However, when things stop working is when you need good customer service, and that's the point at which 1and1 will fall flat on their face.</comment></comment>


The Worst Startup Idea - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/on-startups/db355566d8b7 <comment><USER2> Some ideas are legitimately terrible. But most ideas that are deemed bad are usually ideas that have a bad track record of poor execution.

FedEx, up until the point that they succeeded, was a phenomenally bad idea...one that received heaps of ridicule from academics to VCs. Now their hairbrained competitors are the ones that receive the ridicule.

Logistics is hard (I work in it), but it has a track record of crazy innovations that sweep the entire world in a matter of years. Think about it: Canals, Railroads, Containerization, The Automobile, Air Parcel Delivery. While I don't think an AirBnB for Packages would go anywhere, the idea has at least a semblance of merit: It is a new approach to sortation (probably the biggest problem facing logistics today). A _completely distributed sortation system_. If this company came packed with a few OpsResearch professionals and a few good lawyers, I would hold off on my ridicule.

<comment><USER3> Nothing you are saying really changes anything from the article. Indeed, you're only confirming the article and it's conclusions.

<comment><USER2> Only slightly. I interpreted the article as "gain some experience so you can come up with good ideas". He very plainly ridiculed the idea. All I was saying was the idea isn't stupid and that it addresses a real problem facing logistics today. I agree that execution and experience matter, but nothing the author wrote gave me the impression that he would ever think it was a good idea, even if Fredrick Smith himself was pitching it.

<comment><USER3> That its addressing a real problem doesn't make a difference. A modest proposal addresses a real problem. Who delivers the solution doesn't make it any better.

If Smith was delivering the solution, it would not be what was presented. And it would not be that idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "we skip entirely over the value of working for large, established companies before you create your own."

When I first started writing about startups, I believed this. I suggested that would-be founders work for a couple years for existing companies before trying to start their own. But the empirical evidence changed my opinion. You can learn things from working at an existing company, certainly, but you learn more from trying to start a startup.

<comment><USER5> Selection bias?

People who can get into YC at 20 are probably better off starting a company than getting a job. However what about the other 99.999% of 20-year olds?

<comment><USER4> There are two ways in which one might be better off starting a startup than going to work for an existing company: you might learn more, and you might have higher expected value. What I'm claiming (since this benefit of working for an existing company is what the OP is talking about) is that the former is almost always true. The latter, frankly, is never going to be true for more than a small percentage of people, regardless of age.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's a while ago now, but I said the million dollar website (the first of many) selling 10 pixels of advertising was a stupid idea and wouldn't go anywhere.

It'd sold about $600 when I said this. Unfortunately I said to my flat mate at the time I'd run round the block naked if it made a million bucks.

It was cold that night.

<comment><AUTHOR> What were your reasons why it would fail?

<comment><USER6> Obviously I'm not a marketing guru... because 'logic' said, very few are going to see it and even if it does get some airplay who's going to really look and soak up some propagandising goodness, i.e. will any sales be gained from it - mostly likely no, so 'what's the point?'.

So, yeah, I won't be making any grand announcements like that again, I'll leave it to the shiny people with impossibly white teeth and raging coke habits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've also been a Start-up weekend judge, and have seen this idea (P2P package transport) in various incarnations. I have three responses:

1: For me Startup Weekend is not about creating businesses, rather it is about helping groups of people understand and experience a compressed version of what it is like to start a company. The ideas are often very similar across events (it's rare to get anything truly new), but learning about connecting with customers, changing in response to feedback, building something (anything), working as a team and so on and on are valuable lessons. The group is invariably exhausted at the end, but in a good way, and many go on to build or help build something else.

2: As a judge I've made it a point for us to give positive feedback to every participant, not just the winners. It's an exhausting process being a judge, with back to back pitches and no time between to mull, but we owe it to the participants to understand as much as we can, ask hard questions and also to keep it fun and positive. In the sessions I've been a part of the panel has retired for 20-30 minutes or so, come back and given overall group feedback, positive feedback and key questions to answer for each team and then the winners in reverse order. Plenty for each judge to do in there.

3: I agree the idea is flawed as it stands. But then a lot of people thought the FedEx idea was flawed, and we all know countless other stories about crazy ideas that worked. In every crazy idea is often an element of a business, and as a judge or coach or advisor or founder our job is to help identify the bit of the idea that is doable and can be built into a valuable business.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree with everything you've said here, and it's possible that one could pivot the idea of ride-sharing for packages to something viable.

I think I could have made it clearer in the article, but my point was not that The People's Parcel was "the worst startup idea", but that "the worst startup idea" is that doing Startup Weekends and Y Combinator are the best ways for you to create a company that will help you climb the entrepreneur ladder.

<comment><USER8> But remember, as the parent said, Startup Weekend's goal isn't to create companies over the weekend - it's to teach people about all these tools they can use.

(Disclosure: I used to work for Startup Weekend)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I agree with the first conclusion, that this is a bad idea. Yes, AirBNB is able to compete because it is as convenient and provides a similar level of service to regular hotels. However, even as an outsider to the shipping industry, it's clear that UPS and FedEX have extremely complex systems to get a package across the country quickly, and reliably. And yes, it is very likely that crowd sourcing ride shares would never be as efficient. Additionally, my experience with receiving packages gives me very little exposure to how the system works. All I know is that I click buy on Amazon, and a box is at my door 3 days later.

However, I disagree with the second point, that one NEEDS to work in an industry to understand product/market fit. There are plenty of industries that can be studied from a distance. Perfect example being the AirBNB founders. (as far as I know) They did not work in the hotel industry - they merely participated as a customer, hated it, and spent enough time studying to understand it. In addition, staying at a hotel as a customer gives me much more exposure to the system than receiving a package. I check in, I see the maids, I see the food prepared, the room keys, the furniture, etc. Yes, working in an industry will give you an edge, and it may be nearly necessary in some industries (such as shipping, semi-conductors, most physical products), but plenty of founders have built/exited successful businesses without working in their market first.

<comment><AUTHOR> I actually never argued (or at least didn't mean to argue) that one needed to have _worked_ in a particular industry--rather, I was arguing that one needs _experience_ with the particular industry. Experience can certainly mean (a) customer of the industry and (b) having researched the industry extensively. As you point out, receiving packages in the mail gives you little insight into the industry.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you squint at it just right, this is exactly the advice Patrick McKenzie has been giving people looking for business ideas on HN for the last several years.

</comment><comment><USER11> I've always thought spreadsheets were a great indicator of B2B startup ideas. Just find a spreadsheet that's key to a process that now involves multiple people, hasn't changed in a while and is relatively important and you probably have a SAAS right there.

The only problem is having the business agree to store data on your servers, something that's getting harder and harder these days thanks to the greed of some agencies

</comment><comment><USER12> I haven't participated in a startup weekend but from following what has come out of our local one "AirBnB for x" does seem the be the most popular starting point.

I would agree with the author that the idea is unlikely to hit on something that will actually work, given the way it goes against economies of scale for what essentially be a commodity service.

At the same time though, I think it is good that people are exploring these ideas. Sure after a month or 2 (or even just the weekend) they might realise that the idea isn't going to fly. In doing that though they may have learned something and stumbled on an even better related opportunity.

<comment><AUTHOR> I tried to make it clear in the piece that I think Startup Weekends are a really good and useful event. I think that everyone who participates in one, no matter what experience they have had to date, will learn something from one. I definitely did.

My complaint is more that our "startup society" pushes us far more toward the Startup Weekends of the world, and away from "boring" jobs at large organizations--and that's really silly, since (as I argue) a great case can be made that the most viable, most fund-able startup ideas will come from working at large organizations (mo' money, mo' problems, mo' moving-the-needle-a- little-means-big-returns).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm not really sure what's more prevalent now days... posts that are overtly idealistic and herald a "follow your dreams" mentality or posts that are ridiculously pessimistic and taut the "your idea sucks so give up" dogma.

I would never tell a graduate to just go "get a job." The cultural mindset to build something independently (interdependently might be better wording) is extremely important. The payment and reward of starting a start up transcends that of funding and exit - the god damned fucking journey, experience, relationships, and lessons are rewarding.

<comment><USER14> He's advocating getting experience from a job first, not getting a job instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Reminds me of the underground mail-delivery system, W.A.S.T.E., in Thomas Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49" ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crying_of_Lot_49](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crying_of_Lot_49)), which was also the name of a peer-to-peer app developed by Justin Frankel (the original developer of Winamp) while he was at AOL ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASTE](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WASTE)).

</comment><comment><USER16> Is this actually a bad idea? We won't know until someone tries it, and deals with the issues. The author's attempts at prognostication cloud what is otherwise a well written and perceptive post.

<comment><AUTHOR> I would submit to you that there are bad ideas that we _know_ are bad without having to throw money at them and watch them fail. (And, look--even if we do throw money at them and watch them fail, that's not a definitive disposition, since it could have been execution errors that caused the failure). I think I made a strong enough case as to why this particular idea was bad, even in lieu of having an actual case study of someone trying it and failing.

But I would be happy to be proven wrong, and I'd bet some cold hard cash on failure...

<comment><USER17> This is not a bad idea. It's all about the execution.

Your first point is spot on. It is going to be hard and fuck to figure out the logistics issues with this idea. But not impossible. Does it look like the The People's Parcel will be the people to do it? Probably not.

This idea already exists to a certain extent. Check out keychainlogistics.com.

<comment><AUTHOR> keychainlogistics looks like uShip--using existing professionals on the road. I totally buy that business model. I don't buy Alice and Bob transporting packages on their way to work.

As I said, though--definitely happy to be proven wrong. It would be pretty amazing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's funny because Walmart just started offering a service where customers can drop off packages to online customers on the way home.

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikamorphy/2013/03/28/about- wal...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikamorphy/2013/03/28/about-walmarts- idea-to-crowdsource-its-same-day-delivery-service/)

So some form of it may not be as bad as it sounds. As with every solution it's usually about figuring out where it fits in.

</comment><comment><USER19> Isn't this idea just uShip.com? They raised $18mm recently from Kleiner Perkins, although they are pivoting towards competing directly with UHAUL, from what I hear.

<comment><USER20> uShip appears to use accredited transport brokers. The pitch mentioned in the article suggests that Alice and Bob drive goods to each other.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right. The People's Parcel was essentially ride-sharing for packages (but packages can't move themselves to locations for pickups or deal with transfers or travel the last mile after getting dropped off close-to-but-not-quite-at their final destination).

<comment><USER21> They could if they were air lifted over the last mile by a drone. Maybe a flying box that can transport itself the last/first mile?

Taking it further, what if the flying box could rendezvous with a moving vehicle? Preregistered vehicles could then pick up / drop off parcels without deviating in any way from their already planned journey.

That sort of tech could even be useful for existing courier companies, as it would make pick up and drop off of small items very efficient. The truck would just drive a predetermined route, that passes within 1 km of each point of a city, without stopping.

It could make an interesting partnership with the local bus company. Each bus would have a roof mounted drone docking station. The drone would fly from its start point to rendezvous with the nearest bus, then hop from bus to bus until it is near its destination, and fly the last mile.

<comment><USER3> That wasn't what was pitched though, and what you are suggesting is not The People's Parcel. It also has it's own problems. It's a completely different idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> First, I have to echo PG's sentiment - the value gained from the experience starting a company will almost always trump the experience gained working for [insert company name here]. Second, it's not such an obviously hare-brained scheme, in my opinion - it's a packet-switched network, an idea which has had some success in the past.

</comment><comment><USER23> I've never seen any other forum (and very few publications) where members are so up front about potential conflicts of interest or biases. I see it daily, and I like it.

</comment><comment><USER17> "This is an awesome service…for transporting drugs" \- There can be safeguards put in and doesn't seem like this service would even benefit drug dealers. I'm mr. drug dealer and for some reason I want to trust a chain of 3rd party delivery people with my illegal substances. Not gonna happen.

<comment><AUTHOR> If your customers pay you before you ship, and they trust the shipper, it's definitely going to happen. Happens every day now already.

<comment><USER17> This same argument can be made for courier services and they seem to manage just fine.

<comment><AUTHOR> There was a courier service that had an office next to mine about 15 years back that took all sorts of precautions that they weren't shipping drugs. Here's an article that shows that those guys (Asheville Courier) weren't an isolated case: [http://network.yardbarker.com/college_basketball/article_ext...](http://network.yardbarker.com/college_basketball/article_external/akron_zips_starter_suspended_after_arrest_for_drug_trafficking/13082467)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Don't get me wrong, I always love VC-istan bashing, but I think the OP has some critical misses in it and, ultimately, comes out with some bad advice.

 _If you want to come up with awesome, fundable ideas, go work for large companies with deep pockets that have old and archaic processes and few highly-technical and dynamic problem solvers. Identify the inefficiencies, make friends with decision makers, and then leave, build your solution, and sell it back to them._

That doesn't work. The theory is that these deep-pocketed dinosaurs are just waiting to get some top-1% talent to tackle their hardest problems. It's like they're sitting on their hands just waiting for smart, energetic people to solve their problems.

There are a few issues there. First, the captains of those behemoths think they already _have_ top talent, because they can't recognize it, and therefore end up giving their ears to salesmen. Saying, "you should listen to me instead of that idiot, even though I'm 23, because I am an _actual_ 3-sigma talent" doesn't just work that way. Trust me. I've tried it. In an ideal world it would work, but that's not where we live.

You know how people hate "politicians" in the abstract (recognizing the incompetence of the class) but tend to be favorable toward _their_ local representatives, on account of interpersonal charm? That's why investors and owners get robbed blind by idiots and scumbags. _We_ think they just can't find people like us; in fact, those owners and investors think they already have people like us (even if they share our skepticism of management/executives in the abstract).

"Make friends with decision makers"? As if it were that easy. Smart people love to think that the people in power are just waiting for top talent to come and help them; in reality, the people in power think (usually incorrectly, but good luck convincing them of that) that they have more enough access to top talent as it is.

Genuine smart people have a hard enough time getting along in the Googles of world, which are still more tolerant of true top talent's idiosyncrasies than a typical MegaCorp. Just being smarter than the competition doesn't mean you automatically get put on some magical protege track and "make friends with the decision makers" and will be able to "better yet, get the company to invest in your new startup". Ha! If only it were that easy.

What built Silicon Valley back when it was great was a tolerance of people (true top talent, with the career-disrupting idiosyncrasy that implies) whom the current crop of VCs wouldn't give the time of day. Silicon Valley was built by people too talented and creative to survive a single year in the corporate culture that now dominates.

Okay... so that's the critical miss of the OP.

Now, onto why shitty ideas get funding, it comes down to this...

The clear good ideas (such as nutrition planning for bodybuilders) have two issues. First, they aren't that good. They're things that obviously add value; that doesn't mean they're worthwhile businesses. They might not add value in a way that can make sufficient money to cover the costs. Many great ideas don't; that's why philanthropy and non-profits exist. Second and more importantly, they require some domain expertise (the "golden child" protege of some chicken-hawking VC can't run it; you actually need to know something to run the business-- one of the appeals of social media is that, because any idiot can run it, VC funding as a personal favor _works_ in that space, whereas it wouldn't in biotech). This also means that those businesses _have_ a well- defined domain, which VCs would denigrate as a "sandbox". In other words, lifestyle businesses. It will never be a billion-dollar concern, so why fund it? VCs aren't really trying to maximize their portfolio returns but their _career_ returns which are tied to visible tokens of social access. Those career-making extreme black swans come once in a decade. It's not making a return for investors. It's about getting "in on" those once-in-ten-years deals. That's why the disgusting culture of co-funding and (almost certainly illegal, and clearly unethical) collusive note-sharing exists.

Consequently, VC-istan ends up funding the "who knows?" projects-- not the obvious good ideas (whose maximum yields are usually below beeelll-i-ons) and not the obvious bad ones-- but those that are so vague as to have no obvious maximum. This means they end up funding based on personality cults and "track record" (read: how well someone as peddled influence and credibility in the past) because no one under the sun is capable of assessing these red-ocean gambits.

It's not that VCs are drawn to terrible startup ideas. It's that they're drawn for variance for variance's sake because the only thing that actually matters to a VC's career (i.e. making Partner, then lateral hops all the way to Sequoia) is getting in on those extreme black swans (as I call them, black albatrosses). Funding a good idea that will reliably 5x is useless from a VC's career perspective.

<comment><USER10> It's easy to refute someone's post by inventing arguments that the post didn't make and then knocking them down. I think there's even a name for that technique.

Two arguments that this post didn't make:

(a) That the correct path for starting any company is to convince venture capitalists to fund it. In fact, this post seems downright derisive of that idea.

(b) That the way to take advantage of on-the-job experience at BigCo's is to convince them to do things differently while you're on staff there. No, that's not why you make friends with decision makers; you make friends with decision makers to learn what it is they need. Then you _leave_ , and go build a product.

<comment><USER24> _(a) That the correct path for starting any company is to convince venture capitalists to fund it. In fact, this post seems downright derisive of that idea._

Sure. My notes on the problems with VC (specifically, the career incentives on VC-istan that make it suck) were to explain why bad ideas get funded. I didn't think he was arguing that, since he was clearly going out against the VC-istan mentality.

 _(b) That the way to take advantage of on-the-job experience at BigCo 's is to convince them to do things differently while you're on staff there. No, that's not why you make friends with decision makers; you make friends with decision makers to learn what it is they need. Then you leave, and go build a product._

He's still carrying the assumption that the dynamic, highly intelligent people who often end up in VC-istan (by default, because traditional corporate environments can't accommodate them) will be _so_ far above the competition in these stodgy dinosaur companies that they get magically put on a protege track and get to "make friends with decision makers" and acquire the trust (in that company, or later on, as you alluded) to solve their problems. I argue that it's not that simple.

<comment><USER10> That's not the assumption he made; that's a third argument you may have (accidentally?†) made up just to knock down. It's not the case that the only way to find problems that BigCos will pay you to solve is to be smarter than everyone at the BigCo. You will almost certainly have a different tolerance for risk than any senior BigCo employee. It's likely you'll enjoy product development more than they will. It's almost certain that you'll enjoy the trappings of "brand new company" more than they will; Matasano's "brand new company" trappings were "desk at a library", followed by "attic of a print shop with no air conditioning accessible only by a freight elevator".

You also don't need to acquire the trust of BigCo decision makers to sell them products. You can learn about problems BigCo's have just by having routine conversations with the right people, and you can sell anybody a product if the product solves a problem for them at the right price.

Scott Wensing solves the White House Situation Room's "tracking devastating storms" problem. How much do you think Barack Obama trusts Scott Wensing? He has an account in StormPulse.

† _I 'm a little pissy today_

<comment><USER25> _How much do you think Barack Obama trusts Scott Wensing?_

Barack Obama cited Matt Wensing by name as an American innovator solving American problems in a public speech, but to your point, several years ago the decision to use StormPulse in the White House was made by a GS-whatever with a nondescript .gov email address, and it was certainly not made due to StormPulse's superior access to the Valley in-crowd. (Disclaimer: I invested in them.)

<comment><USER10> Dammit. Matt. Not Scott. Sorry.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Patricia Ryan: Don't Insist on English - <AUTHOR> http://www.ted.com/talks/patricia_ryan_ideas_in_all_languages_not_just_english

<comment><USER2> TED infiltrated by the liberal left!</comment>


Ask HN: Anyone hiring entry level developers in NYC? - <AUTHOR>

Hi there I am leaving my current job a lot sooner than I thought and I am looking for something else.
I am scanning indeed and other job boards. Hope you guys can point me to some leads.
About Me:
I graduated college a few months ago with a BFA in Web Design and Interactive Media. I can't design but I have an eye and know about designing for the user.
Skills Advanced: HTML/CSS
Basic/Intermediate: PHP,JavaScript(and jQuery framework),MySQL
Really Basic/ Just starting: Ruby on Rails
CMS:
I am good with WordPress I can build custom themes from scratch and I am starting to delve into plugins. I have used Joomla! can't build custom themes yet but I know my way around it. I have been taking a look at Drupal! I am starting to learn to build themes and work with it. <comment><USER2> There is an unofficial HN jobs board at <http://jobs.usethesource.com/> you might be interested in looking over.

</comment><comment><USER3> I need a web development generalist right now and working remotely is okay. This is for an established (and profitable) company in the photography space.

Job is probably 75% HTML/CSS/JS/PHP and 25% Rails.

Email is in my profile.</comment>


Former Snapchat employee presses to unseal allegedly doctored usage statistics - schiller-silvio http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-pompliano-snapchat-20170404-story.html <comment> xkcd-sucks Snap's response essentially says the whole matter is none of the court's business because Pompliano agreed to binding arbitration. There's probably some advantage to only arguing the procedural stuff to get the case dismissed, but it looks really shady to a layman/investor.

Though, I wonder why P wants a career in social media growth hacking if his morals forbid inflating metrics and spitting bullshit.

Hopefully some interesting stuff comes out in discovery...

Anyone want to speculate on the gigantic redacted section in the middle of P's complaint?</comment>


Amazon blocks Statsaholic - <AUTHOR> http://www.webforth.com/2007/03/amazon-blocks-statsaholic <comment><USER2> This should come as no surprise. All Startups that are using "legitimate" means to get data (e.g. via APIs) are at risk. The API provider can block you at any time. Here are other examples: \- In May 2006, Ebay blocked Rapleaf's attempt at making seller reputations portable. Rapleaf was using Ebay's API. \- In 1999, UPS and FedEx blocked all companies that were using their APIs to display and transact best shipping methods. All of those startups were using UPS and FedEx API. This happened again in Jan 2006, when UPS blocked www.simpletracking.com and once again in late 2006, when UPS and FedEx blocked startup www.RedRoller.com Their website is still up, but without UPS and FedEx in there, it's evident that they are dying. Once again, RedRoller was using FedEx and UPS API. \- Startups using Google API are subject to the same issue..Google will block you as soon as you come in their radar screen. ...so if you are planning to use APIs, figure out your plan B in advance!

<comment><USER3> You would hope that companies would start to realize the advantage they gain from everyone using their api. Especially apis that embed their brand (and potentially ads) in other peoples pages. There are a lot reasons for api providers not to pull nonsense like this. Amazon clearly does not look very good here.

But ultimately, yeah, there's always some risk when you run off an api you don't control.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Update: It seems like Statsaholic wants to switch to other traffic data providers. Compete.com and Quantcast.com have already shown interest in providing their data."

Paul, you were very right about Amazon and their inability to foster, well, anything. They could have found a way to embrace this since Alexa's interface sucks (their data sucks too but that's something else). Now Compete and Quantcast will easily become the more popular metric.

</comment><comment><USER5> If your entire app relies on the api of a another company you should expect trouble. Not only can they cut you off at any point as has happened to statsaholic but you'll be less reliable. You'll be affected by your own downtime as well as the api providers. I saw this happen the other day when last.fm released a new beta that included flickr integration. At the exact time that they made the announcement the flickr search servers went down for a few hours. Luckily they'd designed the pages to degrade gracefully and still work without flickr being up.

Luckily if your a small startup you can adapt quickly and find another way :)

</comment><comment><USER6> Alexa let their technology stagnate and now there are quite a few startups about to run past them. Unless they buy out the competition Alexa will be totally irrelevant very soon.

This kind of big company coldness is just accelerating their demise.

</comment><comment><USER7> Be careful not to bet your whole company on someone else's data! Mashups beware!</comment>


Tesla Model 3 with Unplugged Performance parts breaks McLaren F1 track record - <AUTHOR> https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-model-3-vs-mclaren-f1-tsukuba-circuit/ <comment><USER2> Heavily modified Model 3 in track mode with tires Michelin calls "streetable" (they were designed to meet minimum DOT standards to allow you to drive them legally on the street... that's it. They come at a thread depth where you would replace your tires, degrade below 40F, hydroplane on any standing water at all and do not "do well on the street") beats the record specifically of a 30 year old super car

The article almost makes it sound like it beat the track record, which was set by an F1, but it's the record for the F1 on that track... on a rainy day.

<comment><USER3> The above is a highly skewed, and one-sided, comment that cherrypicks things in an apparent attempt to tear down what has been achieved. Readers should read the original article and decide for themselves.

For example compare this quote from the actual article:

"It was even equipped with OEM tires from a Porsche 911 GT3 RS (997), which are good on the track but also great for regular driving."

to what is said by the parent about the tires. That's a pretty wide gap to bridge. And that's just one example.

<comment><USER2> What on earth are you talking about?

First off, describing Cup Sports like that is incredibly dumb, it's like saying "I drive a 911 with a V12, standard equipment on a Ferrari" when you're talking about setting track records

They are not "great" on the street. They're not even OK. They're the legal minimum to be legally sold as an on-road tire, and immediately after you use them on a track they don't even meet that limit.

Now the following probably sounds like obsessing over a nit if you don't know better and aren't aware just how much tires matter for lap times.

Tire technology accounts for a vast portion of the insane increases in acceleration we've seen in modern sports cars.

-

The F1 run Best Motoring did is like record number 30 something on the circuit, yet only 4 seconds from the top listed outside of race cars.

When you're talking about 4 seconds, driving tires which are _actually_ good on the street would _easily_ cost you seconds.

The version of this tire which is "good on the track but also great for regular driving" actually exists by the way... it's the Pilot Sport 4S, which is what I usually run on the car I track these days.

It easily loses me 3 seconds on a 1:50 lap compared to the RE-71Rs I used to run (an equivalent to the Cup Sports), and I'm not even close to the fastest on the track. A better driver could squeeze even more out of better tires

The GT3 RS is not a normal car, even by 911 standards, which is why it comes with tires which start losing traction before the quoted 40 degrees where they start degrading...

-

When you're talking about less than 4 seconds separating 30+ cars, street tires you can track vs track tires you can Street is a _huge_ difference.

-

Now what else about my comment is wrong?

No one in the motoring world talks about records the way the title wants to.

If I say "I beat the GT3 RS's record at my local track", people would assume I meant I beat the overall track record, held by a GT3 RS.

Here it was meant to mean it beat the record for the F1... there were 64 F1s ever made for road use!

No one would really compare their track record to the one set by a TV show running a 1 of 64 supercar on a rainy day. But if they did they wouldn't do it with the wording they used.

-

The car was also heavily modified, again to a layperson if they didn't change the power output who cares?

But when you're talking about tracking a car, suspension and aero bits are extremely important, to the point they're restricted by really complex rules in each racing class.

-

For the record, I also have a Volt, and I'm not anti-EV.

I'm anti-lightly veiled aftermarket manufacturer puff pieces, which the performance driving field is rife with.

<comment><USER3> >Pilot Sport 4S, which is what I usually run on the car I track these days.

Yep I have the same tires on my daily driver. I don't track though, too much of a n00b. I'll admit you're much wonkier than me on this stuff.

But I found the original article much more balanced with the negative and positive, and it did fully disclose that the car was heavily modified, where your comments imply that it didn't.

And I'm pretty skeptical that the (yes rare) road version of the F1 had no differences from the track version, but your comments didn't mention any, as if there were none. Which made me think your presentation of the facts is tilted beyond what's warranted.

<comment><USER2> My comments don't imply that they didn't mention it, my comments reiterate it as part of why this article reads like a puff piece.

The catch when it comes to stuff like this is always in tiny details like runouts, special tires, weirdly specific records that move the goal post from what you'd expect.

It all ends up sounding like a bunch of nits from the outside, but again, under 4 seconds separate the that F1 run from the 30+ cars that did it faster (ironically a 911 GT3 has the fastest hot lap)

Honestly to me the title alone is the biggest hint. It sounds kind of insane to say this, but there is nothing truly special about a car being faster than an F1 on that track, it's much more about the driver, and to me that's what would impress (but wouldn't let you right an advertisement for Unplugged...).

In fact, you can watch the original F1 run separately and see that in action: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcRY15toko0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcRY15toko0)

To the untrained eye sliding = pushing it, but if you look closer, you can clearly see they were not pushing it. Especially by Best Motoring standards. And who can blame them? Damp track, skinny tires, irreplaceable car, on a track with an unforgiving layout

Many other cars in the price range of their modded Model 3 could have beat that lap (for reference, their front brake kit alone is almost 10k. All their aero upgrades and body mods also cost well over 10k in total, they also have a 15k wheel package for sale...)

> And I'm pretty skeptical that the (yes rare) road version of the F1 had no > differences from the track version, but your comments didn't mention any, as > if there were none. Which made me think your presentation of the facts is > tilted beyond what's warranted.

Also don't know what this is supposed to be saying.

The F1 and the F1 GTR were immensely different cars, and the F1 GTR was obviously not what set that record.

I haven't brought up the GTR (which would be the "track version") at any point, so why would I bring up the differences?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Fox's 8-Day Delay on Hulu Triggers Piracy Surge - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/foxs-8-day-delay-on-hulu-triggers-piracy-surge-110822/ <comment><USER2> The 8-day policy never made any sense to me. Let's say I have a show I regularly watch live on Monday nights. Then one week, I miss it. Since I don't want to watch the episodes out of order, I can't watch new episodes live for the rest of the season _unless_ I grab a pirated copy so I'm caught up before the next episode. Otherwise, I just skip one week and watch the rest of the season on Tuesdays via Hulu.

This just smells like corporate bureaucracy, and it is unfortunate, because it helps no one.

<comment><USER3> The entire business model is based on people paying extra to watch "now".

If you look at the cost to watch a movie, the earlier you want it the more you pay.

It starts with theaters, then pay per view, then buy it, then expensive rentals, then cheap rentals, and finally tv movie. You have b-list theaters somewhere in the last as well, and I may have missed some other places.

If you are willing to wait to watch your shows you will pay a LOT less for them. But apparently most people are not willing to wait, otherwise this model would not work.

<comment><USER4> It's rather annoying when the rules are changed in the middle of the game. That's basically what happened here, with the final episodes of Master Chef (my current guilty pleasure) suddenly going to an eight day delay after the first 95% of the season was available on a one day delay.

I accidentally stumbled upon the winner of the show during my eight day wait for the episode to come to Hulu, and now I have no incentive to watch the final episodes and give Fox/Hulu whatever ad revenue they'd get from that.

The Hulu comments have been filled with angry viewers, some of which are listing the sites where people can go to pirate the show.

<comment><USER5> > I accidentally stumbled upon the winner of the show during my eight day wait > for the episode to come to Hulu, and now I have no incentive to watch the > final episodes and give Fox/Hulu whatever ad revenue they'd get from that.

So why watch the show at all? Wait until the end of the season and read the results on the Internet.

If you find yourself about to object, then perhaps you do have an incentive to watch the final episodes. Otherwise, I just saved you 12 hours of your life. ;)

<comment><USER6> There's a reason they are called "spoilers": They ruin much of the impact of the actual show without providing a corresponding reward.

Your suggestion is similar to saying, "So you've eaten five pounds of cupcakes and now you don't feel like eating a proper dinner? Either you don't need a proper dinner at all, or you really do want to eat this vegetable platter!"

<comment><USER5> My point was that the purpose of watching this kind of TV show isn't to gain specific knowledge; it's about the progression of events towards the goal.

I just finished "Star Trek: Voyager", so I'll use that as my example. In the first episode, they get stranded far away from home. You know they're going to make it home because that's how stories work. Does that make the show spoiled? Well, they saw reason to make 7 seasons of 24 episodes, so I'm guessing it wasn't spoiled.

Actually, studies[0] have shown that spoilers make stories more enjoyable.

[0] [http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/08/spoilers-dont- spoi...](http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/08/spoilers-dont-spoil- anything/)

<comment><USER7> I find it hard to believe you don't understand why alanfalcon was ticked off (regarding the spoiler). Your example has nothing to do with the issue.

<comment><USER5> I honestly don't understand.

<comment><USER8> You can't draw solid conclusions from a single study with undergraduates.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Do these people realize that there are a lot of pirates that _pay_ for their ability to pirate things? Between seedboxes, or usenet, or a faster internet connection, or extra disk space...some of these people are paying as much to download this stuff illegally as they would if they just bought a cable subscription.

And, honestly, the lack of ads is a bonus, it's not the sole reason pirates pirate.

How the hell the media companies continue to screw this up is baffling. They've got a product that people want really bad. And yet...they don't really want to give it to people?

Huh?

If people were banging down my door to use a product that I had created, I think I would probably be working my ass off to facilitate their ability to pay me for it.

For places like FX, which carries several shows that I like: why on earth can't I just stream FX from your website?

<comment><USER10> I pay about $15/month for my _legitimate newsgroups access and search engine_. I think that's more than we pay for Netflix and Hulu, combined.

But my cable/Hulu/Netflix streaming bill isn't where Fox's revenue comes from - it comes from their advertisers. If they sell me their shows in a convenient .avi format, they're gaining me at $10/month, but they're losing every single company that pays for me to watch their commercials.

<comment><USER11> How much are you worth to Fox's advertisers on a monthly basis, then?

<comment><USER12> A 30-second time slot in a medium-sized market will cost roughly $5 per 1000 viewers (<http://www.gaebler.com/Television-Advertising-Costs.htm> )

This means each user is worth $0.01 per minute of commercials. The average American watches ~4 hours per day, 25% of which is commercial advertising, which comes out to 30 hours per month of commercials. That's 1800 minutes of commercials.

Answer: _$18/month_ , average. Roughly.

<comment><USER13> I am in this business. The CPM (cost per thousand impressions) actually varies quite a bit by daypart (time of day) and channel (broadcast, syndicated or cable). Primetime CPM is around $20-30. For daytime or cable TV it can be less than $10.

And then CPM for online video like Hulu is totally different as well - due to a number of factors, such as the smaller number of spots, the difference in attention paid, the quirks of Nielsen ratings on the web, and the clickthru opportunity.

There was some hubbub a while back about how CPMs for a 30s spot in the Simpsons on Hulu was actually going for more than a new episode of the Simpsons on Fox (something like $60 vs $30).

Most of the TV you watch on Hulu is prime content and even though it is online, you can expect a CPM of $25-50.

<comment><USER14> Very interesting. If I were to want to read up on this type of info (advertising, new media versus old, etc.) with actual dollar examples, are there any sites in particular you'd recommend?

<comment><USER15> The rate card can change as often as the ratings are released. From an "old media" perspective, pricing is pretty volatile.

<comment><USER14> I understand, but I was curious if there was any leading site for such news? Not necessarily like HN or reddit, but, an industry blog that does a good job of keeping people informed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I pay for Netflix and Hulu Plus streaming (the latter of which _still_ comes with ads). If it's not on there, I feel like I've done my due diligence and have no ethical dilemma with pirating.

<comment><USER17> Viewing videos is not a necessity. It is possible not to watch something at all.

<comment><USER18> When you pirate something, you're sending the message that you want the content. Whey you don't watch something, the producers can't be sure if it's because it's simply not to your taste, or that you just don't like the mandatory delivery mechanism. Network middlemen aren't interested in "alternate" distribution mechanisms, but the people that actually want get paid for producing content are. Every time you pirate something, the world is one step closer to one where you can just visit a TV show's website, pay $1, and download this week's episode. Let's get there faster.

And anyway, is it even piracy when it was already broadcast into your house? (Anyone can watch Fox for free with a big enough antenna.) I can pay someone to clean my house; why can't I pay someone to videotape my TV shows?

<comment><USER19> > When you pirate something, you're sending the message that you want the > content.

That, I think, is an undervalued point here - Piracy as a signaling mechanism is, I think, why an awful lot of what's currently out there for digital delivery (Hulu, especially) exists.

The industry's still not entirely sure what a viable market model looks like - that's part of the reason why Fox pulled their 8-day move. Bittorrent's shown people will do it for free, Hulu's shown more people will do it if it's easier even if they have to watch ads, Netflix has shown people will pay for it (though recently they've shown the selection needs to be bigger), but nobody's hit the magic bullet that both consumers and industry will accept yet.

In the mean time, piracy is certainly a valuable signal for the industry that demand exists - it's just that the price and mechanisms aren't right yet. (I'm sure the content producers feel the same way /s)

<comment><USER20> "In the mean time, piracy is certainly a valuable signal for the industry that demand exists - it's just that the price and mechanisms aren't right yet. (I'm sure the content producers feel the same way /s)"

If you can get a show in HD quality, very fast, without commercials, and at no cost..nothing will compete with it that costs money.

Content producers shouldn't have to consider pirates the competition.

At this rate, the answer will be a forced monthly fee/tax through all of the major Internet providers.

<comment><USER21> The present article suggests the opposite, if you replace "costs money" with "has ads". Else, why did piracy rates drop significantly when Hulu was launched, and spike again as shows were pulled?

Also as counterexample, lots of people pay for Netflix.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Since many of these comments discuss piracy and content distribution, allow me to give you an unprompted insight from a country which is in a _worse_ situation than the USA. As of today, the country I live in offer very few legal content distribution platform for movies and television shows, and none of them has neither _tolerable_ pricing and acceptable DRM policies nor non- laughable title selection, proper listing & metadata—for example, I would not be able to know in which quality I am renting a movie. Anyway, most of the movies simply do not hit digital distribution. Physical movie rental is dying quite rapidly for most obvious reasons, which means that the few remaining services are starving and offer nothing but the safest-hitting movies.

As a remarkably honest biped (who, e.g., bought _two_ Adobe Suite licenses, one for his PC & one for his Mac, and has _purchased WinRAR_ ), I am thus being put in the hilariously paradoxical position where not only I am hardly incentivized to legally purchase content, but I am _unable_ to do so. I am _struggling_ to do so, and I can not; this is such a tragicomical condition that my fruitless effort to legally retrieve movies&shows has become a running joke within my circle of friends. Adding insult to injury, every single major firm persists on sticking to this ridicolously unreasonable regional distribution paradigm—which adds basically no value even from a job-creation standpoint— whereas I would be absolutely happy to throw money at them by purchasing non-localized content.

P.S. To be clear, I live in European first-world country, where the value of the movie market is more than big enough to justify sensible business investments.

<comment><USER23> What prevents you from bit torrenting the content you want, and then sending appropriately sized cashier's checks to the content producers?

<comment><USER24> I would be interested to see what happened if someone did that. My guess would be that the content producers (movie industry) would begin legal action as while you paid for the content you didn't pay for it in the manner they dictated.

<comment><USER23> The point of the cashier's check is that they don't know who you are. I have a hard time believing that someone who paid market value for the content and didn't even require distribution service would be in a worse position than someone who pirated the content and paid nothing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> For me, HBO Go does it right. My parents have cable and I pay for their HBO just for the HBO Go subscription. It comes with their ENTIRE archive of TV shows, every single episode of all their shows. Not to mention, I was able to watch Game of Thrones episodes as they came out the next morning before spoilers could make it to me, not much different than waiting for a show that airs in the east coast to hit prime time west coast.

Fox's problem is that they did this mid-season and they started with a FREE business model and then took it away. You can't give someone something for free and then half way through take it away and make me pay for it. It wouldn't make sense for me to want to pay for it, of course I would resort to something else.

<comment><USER17> HBO Go is not available to those of us without cable even if we are willing to pay for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> And this is for 8 days. Imagine now people in the EU, who have to wait _months_ to get a badly translated version or the original dvds, despite the fact that they understand english perfectly (and even if they don't, amateur subtitles are often available the next day).

<comment><USER27> Almost everyone simply downloads or views it illegally. The thing is it not only takes month for the series to arrive here, the DVDs are released only after the series has been shown on TV.

That is if the series is actually popular here and relatively easily available. Dexter, Weeds, Lost, Sons of Anarchy are a couple of series I can think of that are unpopular and therefore not as simple to come by.

<comment><USER17> Television shows on HBO and Showtime (Weeds from your list) are usually not available in the US until the DVDs come out, which is usually shortly before the next seasons starts.

I am aware of HBO Go, but it is not available unless one already has cable and HBO.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> It's important to mention that for MasterChef, this was the season finale.

</comment><comment><USER21> I have a proposal for advertisers to reach the audience most likely to skip advertisements and stream or download shows:

Instead of expecting viewers to put up with 18 minutes of mindless advertising for every 42 minutes of actual content, just show a ten second long list of sponsors at the beginning of the show (along with their general product category), after the opening credits.

Example:

      We would like to thank the following corporations
      for sponsoring the production of this show.  Please
      consider thanking them as well, by purchasing their
      products.

      PanCorp - Maker of fine non-stick cookware
      Net Net - High-speed ISP, gigabit speeds
      ...

Then, the creators of the show would plead with uploaders to leave that ten second clip in. Advertisers could then count every download as a successful impression, and geeks like me who aren't significantly influenced by traditional advertising would learn about potentially interesting products and services.

<comment><USER29> I really don't think you understand how advertising works. I prescribe four seasons of Mad Men. (It's streaming on Netflix right now, y'know!)

 _geeks like me who aren't significantly influenced by traditional advertising_

Do you _really_ believe that you're magically superior to the things which influence the rest of the human race?

(If you do, then I know exactly how to make an ad to manipulate you already -- tell you what you want to hear by appealing to your sense of superiority.)

<comment><USER21> _Do you really believe that you're magically superior to the things which influence the rest of the human race?_

No, not magically, _rationally_. I deliberately disregard anything that is demarcated as an ad and look for and comment on things like product placement within shows. I've never seen a beer commercial with scantily-clad dancers and thought, "Man, I'd sure like a cold one." Cheap cable TV ads with flashing lights, out-of-gamut colors, and an 800 number repeated over and over just make me tune out and change the channel. I try to counteract the effect of logo and color familiarity by buying brands that look different from what I'd expect. Any time I learn of another subliminal advertising technique, I add a counterattack to my defensive arsenal. On top of that, if I record a show I use MythTV's commercial detection to skip ads entirely, and anyone who downloads their TV won't be seeing commercials either.

"But you're not in their target demographic." _No kidding._

I'm not saying that I can't be reached by advertising -- I gave explicit directions for how to do so in my original post. I'm complaining that advertisers continue to reach to the same old bag of tricks, tricks that appeal to the lowest common denominator of animalistic behavior and consume 18 minutes of every programming hour. I'm saying those tricks _don't work on me_ because I tune them out, skip them, block them, etc. I never answer surveys, I'm not a Nielsen participant, etc. I've tried contributing to media metrics with my Hulu viewing and rating habits, but Hulu continues to recommend shows from the same network rather than the same genre, and networks continue to alienate online viewers by delaying shows (Fox) or pulling them entirely (Syfy).

I'm offering a viable alternative for advertisers to earn money on someone like me, but advertisers seem to think they know better. In the mean time, I'll continue to apply whatever selective pressure I can to get advertisers and content producers to evolve.

 _(If you do, then I know exactly how to make an ad to manipulate you already -- tell you what you want to hear by appealing to your sense of superiority.)_

I make a conscious effort to avoid this type of influence as well. [Edit: and I'm not motivated in this regard by a sense of superiority, either. The only sure way to influence me is with hard data demonstrating a high quality and utility of whatever product you're offering.]

<comment><USER6> Even if you can be reached by advertising (which, judging from the pride you take in averting it, I doubt), targeting _you specifically_ would have a horrible ROI. You are not going to spend enough to make up for the loss of all the other people who respond to normal advertising.

<comment><USER21> This is the fallacy that is, IMO, killing online video. I am a tech guy with above-average lifetime income potential and influence on the high-tech purchasing decisions of my friends and family. I have money and want to spend it, but it seems nobody is selling what I'm looking to buy. I am not alone.

<comment><USER6> You're not alone, but are there as many of you as there are other people? Even if you and a hundred people like you spend 75% of your income on everything that's advertised according to your specifications, that's much less money than 5,000 people who make half as much as you do spending 5% of their income.

<comment><USER21> I don't expect anyone to give up the average consumer. I'm talking about earning money in venues in which there's a higher than typical concentration of geeks (e.g. online streaming of science fiction, P2P downloads). Sure, 5000 * .05 * x > 101 * .75 * 2 * x, but focusing on the first only gets (in this example) 62% of the available revenues. Why not capture some of that other 38% for significantly less effort than the 62%?

However, I do believe that manipulative advertising is a net detriment to society, regardless of how effective it is at reaching the average consumer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> What sad times we live in that this is called "piracy".

</comment><comment><USER31> Interesting. Any data on how many more users signed up for Hulu+ in the same period?</comment>


The Three Providers Who Decide Whether You Will Be Hacked - <AUTHOR> http://www.securityweek.com/three-providers-who-decide-whether-you-will-be-hacked

<comment><AUTHOR> But of course they aren't the only ones to worry about!</comment>


Airbnb Farmed Craigslist To Grow Its Listings, Says Competitor - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2011/05/31/businessinsider-airbnb-harvested-craigslist-to-grow-its-listings-says-competitor-2011-5.DTL <comment><USER2> I don't see a problem with it. You need to get the word out there somehow and the email doesn't seem spammy at all.

<comment><AUTHOR> It is, a) in violation of Craigslist's terms of service and b) in violation of the user's stated intent to not receive messages not directly related to the rental of said property

<comment><USER2> The posting is related to the rental property. They are asking them to list it on another site.</comment></comment></comment>


Terry Fox - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Fox <comment><USER2> We were taught about him in Canadian elementary school (it feels like every school year). I guess I assumed he was known just in Canada for this reason, but didn't realize he even had reach outside of Canada.

<comment><USER3> Pretty much every city in Canada has a "Terry Fox" public school as well.

<comment><USER4> I grew up in his home town of Port Coquitlam.. I didn't go to his high school (The Terry Fox Senior Secondary), but my library was the Terry Fox library.

Annually there are "Terry Fox runs" this time of year. I haven't heard anything about dates etc this year. I suspect the funky start of the school year and COVID19 will overshadow it. I sure hope this doesn't kill it into the future.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> ainar-g I actually learned about Terry Fox relatively recently when I was binging through J. J. McCullough's YouTube channel. He touches on the subject in his video[1] about historical events and people mentioned on the background of the pages in the Canadian passport. Do watch it if you're interested in Canada.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=astJLpEVa9c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=astJLpEVa9c)

</comment><comment><USER5> Here's a 1981 documentary about Terry Fox: [https://youtu.be/xtrUHkACvO4](https://youtu.be/xtrUHkACvO4)

</comment><comment><USER6> I live in Thunder Bay myself, I may go see the monument sometime.</comment>


Rare brain-eating amoebas killed woman who rinsed her sinuses with tap water - <AUTHOR> https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/health/rare-brain-eating-amoebas-kill-seattle-woman-leave-doctors-bracing-for-possible-repeats/ <comment><USER2> Sounds like she was using a neti-pot. I thought most of the neti-pot products made it pretty clear that you're supposed to use previously boiled or distilled bottled water. Maybe they need to make it more clear that the consequences of using tap water can be pretty dangerous.

<comment><USER3> They do, but I am never sure how that is supposed to be practical. You need to use warm water, which is easy with tap water, but hard to do quickly with distilled or boiled water.

I know it has risks, but I still use normal tap water. From what I have read, all of the cases are from people using well water, never from city provided, chlorinated water. It actually says this in the article, too.

<comment><USER4> Can you explain why you use a neti-pot? I don't know anyone who uses one and I don't really understand the reasons behind it.

<comment><USER5> Reduces incidents of mild sleep apnea in conjunction with nasal strips and sleeping on my side. (I determine occurrence of sleep apnea by checking if waking happens between or during sleep cycles.)

Also helps with voice work (I am a voice coach), makes for clearer mask resonance.

<comment><USER5> (An in-hospital sleep study confirmed my self-diagnosis of mild sleep apnea.)

<comment><USER6> What do you mean by mild? I did a study and had an AHI of 28, my doctors put me on CPAP. I'm not overweight and the machine is set to give hardly any pressure but it still seems to eliminate the issue, at least according to the machine's own counts. If I could fix it with just some nose strips and a neti pot, that would be amazing.

<comment><USER5> "Mild" used by doc prescribing me Modafinil after study. There were insurance cost concerns as well so I pursued other options.

I have to work at keeping my mouth closed, and some nights don't work out well, but most do. I also use alternating combinations of sedatives, and take them in stages (e.g. sometimes a partial pill embedded in a softgel taken after 3 hours of sleep). I'm overweight, and it did start for me after I gained weight

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I don't get the scare mongering in this discussion. People are saying to always boil the water, to not cook with hot tap water, etc. Don't these people bathe in hot tap water? Don't they drink cold tap water? Do they all live in areas with super unsafe tap water?

Or is there a specific danger that comes from the water going up your nostrils? (Which can easily happen while bathing)

What am I missing here?

<comment><USER8> There is a specific danger associated with the water going up your nose. Things that go up your nose have better access to the blood brain barrier. Don't snort unboiled water kids.

<comment><USER7> Source? 'access to the blood brain barrier' sounds odd. You make it sound like the BBB magically starts in the nostrils and is somehow weak there. That's not how the BBB works. Sure, your nostrils are closer to your brain than, say, your teeth, but not by much.

<comment><USER9> I'm fairly sure that different body parts do provide easier access to the blood brain barrier. In this case, I would guess that it's because of the mucous membranes in the nasal cavity. There must be a reason people snort cocaine rather then just rub it on their hands.

<comment><USER10> Great comment. They don't dissolve it into water and gargle either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm stunned at how many people are commenting that they will continue using untreated water. You can end up having your brain eaten and die, I can't think of a PSA any more convincing.

<comment><USER12> There's been ~100 cases in 40 years. That's less than 3 people per year, so it's very rare.

There's about 10 shark attacks per year in the U.S. Now that you know that, will you stay out of the ocean forever? Or will you maybe take the risk and go for a dip if you go on a beach vacation?

 _edit_ Plus, of those 40 cases the vast majority are from swimming in lakes. So there's only a handful of cases where the infection was due to neti-pot usage. I could only find 3 confirmed cases. That's extremely rare.

<comment><USER11> Also, it might be incredibly rare because most people follow the instructions, and/or the people who follow instructions poorly live in areas with highly treated water (essentially the entire urban population). In warmer rural areas, using rainwater or borewater, it is likely to have significant growth of Naegleria fowleri. Children are particularly susceptible.

[https://healthywa.wa.gov.au/Articles/A_E/Amoebic- meningitis](https://healthywa.wa.gov.au/Articles/A_E/Amoebic-meningitis) [https://www.cdc.gov/parasites/naegleria/pathogen.html](https://www.cdc.gov/parasites/naegleria/pathogen.html) [https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-03-20/professor- encouraging...](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-03-20/professor-encouraging- rural-communities-to-treat-their-water/9567366)

There is a similar problem where cleaning contact lenses with untreated water leaks to Acanthamoeba infection, leading to possible blindness of loss of an eye.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wash my nose in such a way frequently because I have an extreme sensitivity to airborne chemicals and fragrances. It's so uncomfortable to be doused with air freshener, diesel exhaust, cleaner fumes, laundry fragrance, plastic odor or perfume that I rinse my nose out with whatever water is available, which includes taps and drinking fountains. I've worried about such an illness happening to me, evidently with good reason.

<comment><USER14> You can safely use bottled water, that would probably be a easy alternative :)

<comment><USER15> how is bottle water better? where I live the tap water is usually of higher quality than the bottled water, just a bit harder.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I still don't quite understand how tap water in a neti-pot is significantly more dangerous than swimming in local lakes, swimming pool or the ocean. Certainly, you get water in your sinuses from that, right?

<comment><USER17> Yes, and people get from it from swimming [0] [1] [2]. That's typically how people get infected. It doesn't affect that many people because people typically don't intend to fill their nose while swimming.

The issue is that a neti pot is that you're intentionally putting water deep into the sinus cavities. This amoeba is exactly why they tell you to only use sterilized water in a neti pot and to clean and sterilize your neti pot regularly.

[0]: [https://www.theepochtimes.com/surfer-dies-from-brain- eating-...](https://www.theepochtimes.com/surfer-dies-from-brain-eating- amoeba-after-swimming-in-texas_2675565.html)

[1]: [https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2392917/Hope- Kali-H...](https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2392917/Hope-Kali- Hardig-12-contracted-deadly-brain-eating-amoeba-Arkansas-water-park.html)

[2]: [https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/brain-eating- amoe...](https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/brain-eating-amoeba-lurks- warm-summer-water-n156551)

<comment><USER18> Beyond just that, I have to question how many non-lethal non-brain-eating infections come from injecting untreated water into your face that don't make the news.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> FDA: "Is Rinsing Your Sinuses With Neti Pots Safe?" [https://www.fda.gov/ForConsumers/ConsumerUpdates/ucm316375.h...](https://www.fda.gov/ForConsumers/ConsumerUpdates/ucm316375.htm)

Highlights:

* "...usually safe and effective products when used and cleaned properly"

* "Tap water isn't safe for use as a nasal rinse because it's not adequately filtered or treated."

* Neti Pots are FDA regulated medical devices

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm a little confused. Was the tap-water untreated (that is, well water)? Can these damn things survive chlorination? They're a known danger swimming in southern (US)- meaning warm- fresh-water lakes and ponds. But- damn, this is scary. Probably because I also use a neti-pot.

Neti-pots are often used to help alleviate the symptoms of sinusitis. My neti- pot came with packets of salts that you dissolve in the water, which I use. But I didn't think that was required to kill stuff in treated water. I thought it was to reduce irritation when using it- and maybe help kill the bacteria you are trying to rinse away.

<comment><USER21> The salts _are_ to reduce irritation. Plain water is extremely uncomfortable in your sinuses, but saline is fine. As far as I know they do nothing to reduce contaminants in your water or harm bacteria.

<comment><USER22> And yet the article mentions distilled OR saline, which definitely raises the question.

If I wake up feeling like crap, it is far easier to use a salt packet than to go to the store for distilled water. The article implies that is fine (but the article may be misleading)

<comment><USER23> Perhaps they meant premixed , sterile saline solutions ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Here's the paper: [https://www.ijidonline.com/article/S1201-9712(18)34525-9/pdf](https://www.ijidonline.com/article/S1201-9712\(18\)34525-9/pdf).

</comment><comment><USER25> Ouch. I've taken to using the Arm&Hammer spray cans, even though they're quite a bit more expensive.

</comment><comment><USER26> A more common problem is eye infection. This is an issue for contact lens wearers, and amoebas can also get in your eyes when you go swimming.

[https://www.allaboutvision.com/contacts/acanthamoeba- keratit...](https://www.allaboutvision.com/contacts/acanthamoeba- keratitis.htm)

</comment><comment><USER27> Distilled water certainly is the safest way but tap water mixed with salt in countries where it's safe to drink tap water in most cases should cause no harm either.

Salt works as a disinfectant when dissolved in water. When rinsing your sinuses you'll want to use saline water anyway because fresh water will hurt the mucous membranes in your nose.

<comment><USER28> That's bad advice. Common saline solutions are around 9g/L and won't kill most protozoa.

[http://www1.nencki.gov.pl/pdf/ap/ap574.pdf](http://www1.nencki.gov.pl/pdf/ap/ap574.pdf)

Even at seawater-like concentrations of over 30g/L, it can take over 72 hours to sterilize water containing fresh-water protozoa.

Boiling is the only practical way to sterilize water.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I wonder if it's things like this that make people feel like their tap water isn't safe and then they buy bottled water or "natural" or "raw" water, instead of understanding that tap water is pretty safe. By historical standards we have superior water, compared to most of history.

</comment><comment><USER30> So, these medical people did not consult House? [https://house.fandom.com/wiki/Henry_(patient)](https://house.fandom.com/wiki/Henry_\(patient\))

</comment><comment><USER31> Well great, I just did this last night. Goodbye HN.

</comment><comment><USER32> I use a product like this, and I'm paranoid enough to buy distilled water, boil it, and then add a saline mixture before doing the deed.

</comment><comment><USER33> How hard would it be to design a microwave water still? I steam things in my microwave all the time. It's not really my area of expertise, but I imagine it wouldn't be super difficult to design a glass (or similar) vessel that would collect condensate after the microwave shuts off.

</comment><comment><USER34> It's not clear after reading this article the source of the victim's tap water. Was it from a well? I suspect the tap wasn't using filtered, and possibly chemically treated water.

</comment><comment><USER35> This happens every ten years.

<comment> rv-de And millions of people every day suck in tap water through their noses to clean them - and still this infection happens virtually never.

But it seems that even the rational and sophisticated HN crowd isn't immune to overresponding towards news that is basically just gross on a visual level while completely irrelevant from a statistical perspective.

Having said that I once while tripping immersed my head in water and got some of it quite far up my head through the nose. That water was in a warm, lenitic and rather dirty pond - the optimal breeding conditions for this terrible little creature. I was worried for at least a week about having my brain eaten :D

But that was in middle Germany and it seems these amoebas don't really like it here so much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Does UV-C irradiation work to kill these little buggers?

</comment><comment><USER37> Don't swim with contacts either.

</comment><comment><USER38> I'm seriously shocked by how much push back rational thought is getting in this thread.

</comment><comment><USER39> Rough.

<comment> rv-de I think this is one of the most on spot and reasonable comments in this thread. The rest is writing about how worried they are or convincing others how unlikely it is.

Some folks here down vote faster than they can think it seems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Person dies under unusual, rare circumstances. Happens every day, there are nearly 8 billion of us. Why is this news?

<comment><USER41> Neti pots and nasal rinse methods in general have become fairly popular. If reporting on this could save other people from becoming victims, it's worth covering.

<comment><USER42> Sounds like the easiest way to avoid becoming a victim is not to use the product.

<comment><USER43> Yes, except then you would be forgoing the benefits, which are significant for situations like sinus infections or colds. Instead, you could simply avoid using it with untreated well water.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Startupbootcamp and Rockstart Accelerator compare - <AUTHOR> http://startupjuncture.com/2013/03/07/how-startupbootcamp-and-rockstart-accelerator-compare/

<comment><USER2> Great to see a comparison between the two, maybe some more insights into their previous classes and their successes would have added to the piece.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree, yet as a first step it is already helpful for people that are not yet informed.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Make the HN Top Nav Bar Sticky - <AUTHOR> This is a question as well as a suggestion for HN.
Threads with lots of interest grow big (duh! :-))
Then, we keep scrolling down and down reading, and the top nav bar (orange) scrolls along with the page.
Then it becomes kinda painful to scroll back to the top.
My question/suggestion is, can it not be made sticky, or another option - can it not be shown again in the footer?
That would make for a better UX, at least for me. What do you all think? <comment><USER2> It depends on the medium. On the desktop it's not a huge deal - I just hit the home button and I'm back to the top.

If we're talking about mobile, I agree with you partially. In fact, there is a whole lot of improvements to be made for mobile devices, not just scrolling. The recent addition of undoing your vote is a direct result of not having a mobile interface at all, since the arrows are too small to finger. So, instead of creating a mobile version of the site, they "patched" the UX problem.

And so a sticky header would only patch the UX problem - the problem being a complete lack of mobile design. It baffles me why a site that is _the_ source of bleeding edge technology news for many of us can't design a mobile site.

</comment><comment><USER3> You're certain to be able to do this with a single keypress - probably the home key.

Although this might be more convenient for mobile users, I can see it being rejected on the basis of not being minimalist.</comment>


Score matching with Langevin Sampling: a new contender to GANs - <AUTHOR> https://ajolicoeur.wordpress.com/the-new-contender-to-gans-score-matching-with-langevin-sampling/ <comment><USER2> Alexia is one of the most original researchers working on GANs: she invented the relativistic discriminator (a brilliant and obvious idea in hindsight: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.00734](https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.00734)) which is one of the easiest tweaks you can make to instantly boost your GAN results.

<comment><USER3> There's gotta be a better word for this than "obvious."

The key thing about ideas that are "brilliant and obvious in hindsight" is that the world was already ready for them, and so nothing needed to change for them to happen; i.e., they don't have any prerequisites that aren't already in place. They "just" needed someone to actually notice that there were some pieces that could be fit together in a novel way.

There's no word I know of that captures this idea of "the world being ready for" the idea, though. Is the idea "incremental" in hindsight? "Elegant" in hindsight? "Free" in hindsight?

<comment><USER4> Apposite?

<comment><USER5> Apposite: apt in the circumstances or in relation to something.

Neat, I learned a new word.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In short, this is a super cool approach to replace the discriminator in GANs with something that doesn't need to be trained and provably converges to the correct result.

"256×256 images cannot be done reliably without 8 V100 GPUs or more!"

That's quite sad because that means this approach is far out of reach for any hobby researcher and for most universities.

<comment><USER7> AWS has V100's available so most Universities with a decent budget should be able to swing this.

<comment><USER6> Except that cloud-ified V100s are significantly less powerful than if you have direct access to the hardware. Last time I checked, in AWS they're actually external devices mapped in over GBit ethernet, which is significantly slower than the 8GB/s that PCIe x4 has.

<comment><USER8> I routinely switch between AWS 8x V100 instances and on-premise 8x V100 servers and I observe no difference in speed (time per epoch).

<comment><USER9> Presumably that depends on maximum PCIe bandwidth consumption before your workload bottlenecks elsewhere? A 2018 benchmark ([https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/hpc/PCIe-X16-vs-X8-with-4-...](https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/hpc/PCIe-X16-vs-X8-with-4-x-Titan- V-GPUs-for-Machine-Learning-1167/)) seems to indicate that x8 isn't generally a bottleneck for common (at the time) workloads. x8 is a far cry from the claimed gigabit ethernet though!

<comment><USER8> AWS is tricky in terms of how storage is provisioned - I don't remember details, but it's easy to put your datasets on storage that is connected to your GPU servers over 1Gb link. That could easily become a bottleneck. Datasets should live on Elastic Block Storage or something like that, over high speed links. Again, it's been a while since I looked into that, so I don't remember the details.

<comment><USER9> The earlier comment claimed that the GPUs (!!!) were located elsewhere on the network; I suspect that the scenario you describe is what they intended to refer to.

(IIRC AWS offers compute optimized instances with a volume that's guaranteed to be backed by blocks on a local NVMe drive.)

<comment><USER10> I think they are confused with AWS Elastic Inference. That is a different thing which does have network attached accelerators:

 _Amazon Elastic inference accelerators are GPU-powered hardware devices that are designed to work with any EC2 instance, Sagemaker instance, or ECS task to accelerate deep learning inference workloads at a low cost. When you launch an EC2 instance or an ECS task with Amazon Elastic Inference, an accelerator is provisioned and attached to the instance over the network._

[https://aws.amazon.com/machine-learning/elastic- inference/fa...](https://aws.amazon.com/machine-learning/elastic- inference/faqs/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Reminds me of JEMs from Grathwohl et al last year [0]. They train a generative model by treating it an an Energy Based Model using stochastic langevin gradients. I'm curious as to how it relates to the models in this post.

[0] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.03263](https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.03263)

</comment><comment><USER12> From the Pascal Vincent link : "Beware that this usage differs slightly from traditional statistics terminology where score usually refers to the derivative of the log likelihood with respect to parameters,whereas here we are talking about a score with respect to the data."

</comment><comment><USER13> I wish this essay wasn't littered with emojis :(

<comment><USER14> I learned something new and valuable today. The emoji make no difference at all to me, as they do not affect the quality of what I have learned by any discernible measure.

<comment><USER15> If Geoff Hinton or Francois Chollet add emojis to their writing, it is visually less pleasing in my opinion but I agree with you overall. When it's someone I don't know though, it makes me trust the writing less because I can't strictly verify the contents of what is being discussed easily for work like this, so it does make a difference because I guess it's less "professional" in a way.

<comment><USER16> I've noticed it more and more in the ML research community, I think it's mostly the influence of twitter and medium articles. For a blog it really is fine though and I'm comfortable with language evolving in an imprecise fashion as long as the emojis don't try to do much more than add flavor.

<comment><USER17> Most math heavy content is written very drily. Seeing emojis makes reading it feel more comfy and human. If someone maps the greek alphabet to emojis, you could enjoy the integration on a deeper, more intimate level. The math of emotion!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Someday the field will figure out that not all images of interest are squares. That will be a great advance. I realize some people have hacked up personal branches of projects to support non-square rectangles but it really needs to become mainstream or else we're going to stay stuck in this "AI square winter."

<comment><USER8> I don't get it - is there anything preventing you using non-square images today?

<comment><USER18> Just the massive inconvenience of having to track down and implement the changes necessary to add non-square image support on most platforms. So if you think that is a minor thing that can be dismissed as nothing, then no. Or one can always crop, or resize, both of which throw away information, or pad, for which the underlying behavior is undocumented. I just don't think any of these are great options. Do you?

If the answer is "you can always write your own" that is true, but it's just underlining my point that the problem is not yet solved.

<comment><USER8> _support on most platforms_

What do you mean by "platforms"?

<comment><USER18> Deep learning frameworks: Keras, Pytorch, Tensorflow, Core ML, etc.

<comment><USER8> You might be confused. There's nothing in any of those platforms that dictate you use square images.

<comment><USER18> It's possible I am confused, yes. But I'm just going by what is in all the documentation and tutorials I have encountered.

It may have been solved in a lab somewhere, but the solution hasn't made it out into code usable by mere mortals, as far as I can tell. You may be applying a very special meaning of the words "nothing" and "dictate" it's just that it's very well hidden how to do this.

I'm not alone. Here are examples of other people struggling with non-square images and not succeeding:

[https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/240690/non- square-...](https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/240690/non-square- images-for-image-classification)

[https://github.com/tanakataiki/ssd_kerasV2/issues/10](https://github.com/tanakataiki/ssd_kerasV2/issues/10)

[https://github.com/allanzelener/YAD2K/issues/51](https://github.com/allanzelener/YAD2K/issues/51)

[https://github.com/eriklindernoren/PyTorch- YOLOv3/issues/277](https://github.com/eriklindernoren/PyTorch- YOLOv3/issues/277)

[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49893741/tensorflow- cnn-...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49893741/tensorflow-cnn-for-non- square-image)

[https://github.com/ml-hongkong/keras-transfer-learning- for-o...](https://github.com/ml-hongkong/keras-transfer-learning-for- oxford102/issues/3)

<comment><USER8> You are confusing platforms with individual models. A platform, such as Pytorch or Tensorflow, does not care what shape is your input. You design and train a model for the whatever inputs you want. On the other hand, if someone trained a specific model architecture (e.g. YOLOv3 or Resnet-50) on some dataset of square images, then yes, this particular pre-trained model will expect the same input size and shape as what it was trained on. Does it make sense? If you take a beginner level course on deep learning (e.g. Stanford CS231n or FastAI course) you will immediately realize there's nothing (in any sense of the word) that prevents you from using any input shape to train your model.

If you don't want to learn the tools you use, you will need to find someone who will train a model on your images. If you're willing to pay for it you will find plenty of help. However, if you want to neither learn nor pay, then what exactly are you complaining about?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: BlastEm – A highly accurate and moderately fast Genesis/MD emulator - <AUTHOR> https://www.retrodev.com/blastem/ <comment><AUTHOR> Happy to answer any questions about BlastEm or the Genesis/Mega Drive more generally</comment>


Porsche Disrupts Itself with Taycan - <AUTHOR> https://www.autonews.com/sales/porsche-disrupts-itself-taycan <comment><USER2> OT: The cookie preferences dialog is a thing to behold:

[https://i.imgur.com/Tv7PXL1.png](https://i.imgur.com/Tv7PXL1.png)

[https://i.imgur.com/Mb2YYLK.png](https://i.imgur.com/Mb2YYLK.png)

<comment><USER3> If you want to get even more enjoyment out of this, open your network tab. Hundreds of requests are made.

Also, I was treated to this message after it was finally done:

"This page transmits information using https protocol. Some vendors cannot receive opt-out requests via https protocols so the processing of your opt-out request is incomplete. To complete the opt-out process, please click here to resubmit your preferences."

<comment><USER4> > cannot receive opt-out requests via https protocols

well, that's instilling confidence any data they have is secure and safe

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I can't find the quote, but reportedly either Hewlett or Packard said: "We have to put ourselves out of business every six months, or somebody else will". People on HN have probably heard something like that before, and readers of autonews probably haven't, so it might be understood differently.

</comment><comment><USER6> Every SV CxO that hates seeing 220 other Teslas like theirs upon entrance to their parking garage needs this to be redeemed.

Only there will be 220 new Taycan owners to redeem themselves as soon as orders go through and everyone unilaterally upgrades to the most expensive save the planet car like their iphone the same day.

Back to same old dirty stares in the facilities gym.

<comment><USER7> I don't know about you people, but I don't want to live in a world where someone else makes the world a better place better than we do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> From a design perspective, I couldn't be more excited about the Taycan. Teslas leave me cold, especially in the cabin. The Model S is particularly homely and uninspired in that department.

With the Taycan, I feel that Porsche has achieved something magnificent. They've proved that cars can be filled with screens and be art also. I don't think I've seen any other cabin integrate digital displays in such a purposeful, elegant way.

<comment><USER9> I am staunchly against the screens, but I will concede it still looks excellent. It is a very nice interior. The majority of the exterior is just a modern porsche which is exactly what I think electric cars should be as they enter the market.

The headlights though, look like some kind of light based disease has begun eating away the front of the car. My partner has trypophobia and I would be hesitant to show her that photograph!

<comment><USER8> Wow, I'd never heard of that phobia. I'd keep her away from the hideous new BMW 3 series too. The speaker grille on the dash is so vibrating and irregular, it's hard to keep your eyes on the road!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A $150,000 electric car isn't going to disrupt anything outside of Porsche's internal way of doing things, which while interesting isn't anything to be excited about. On the other hand, were the Volkswagen group to announce a 25,000 euro electric Golf or a 17,000 euro electric Polo with a 400-500 km range then the excitement would be through the roof and that would really be a world-changing event.

<comment><USER11> They kind of did. They just announced VW ID3, all electric car, with roughly 400km range for 30k EUR

<comment><USER10> Very interesting, I wonder why this announcement didn't make the front page of HN instead of a car that can only be purchased by those that win the start-up lottery or by the FANG employees.

Still a little bit pricey, 30,000 euros is already Tiguan (i.e. CUV) territory while ID3 is just a hatchback, I'm curious how the market will respond.

<comment><USER7> It didn't make the front page. It's now been flagged and has disappeared.

HN is full of Tesla fans, not EV fans, and the voting patterns generally bare this out.

As an EV fan myself, it's a little annoying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Porsche's Kindle?

</comment><comment><USER13> RIP the engine notes.

<comment><USER14> Two things:

• Noise is wasted energy, so the quieter a modern vehicle, the better as far as I'm concerned (I have Iain M Bank's descriptions of the efficiencies of some of the ships in his books to thank for this line of reasoning)

• Good! If the transition to electric makes the future streets of London quieter because micro-genitalled cretins parading up and down the streets in their over-powered cars (that are only allowed to do <30mph on the streets anyway), then I'm all for it.

<comment><USER15> >> Noise is wasted energy

Do you have a source for that? If it was true race cars would be a lot quieter

<comment><USER16> > Do you have a source for that?

You can work it out from first principles. The loud noise is a form of energy - therefore all of the sound reaching your ears is energy which was produced by the engine but did not contribute towards propelling the car.

> If it was true race cars would be a lot quieter

only if there was some way to recover the energy from sound or prevent it from being emitted in the first place

since race cars are loud we have to assume that losses from noise are an unavoidable side-effect of the workings of internal combustion engines

We can see here an article from 2017 celebrating a Formula 1 racing engine reaching >50% efficiency for the first time: [https://www.britishgas.co.uk/business/blog/mercedes- formula-...](https://www.britishgas.co.uk/business/blog/mercedes- formula-1-engine-reaches-landmark-efficiency-target/) "The F1 cars are now closing in on levels of thermal efficiency reached by diesel engines used in large container ships..."

so half the energy from combustion is lost as heat, noise etc

<comment><USER15> Most of that would be heat, didn't find any sources but noise is probably rounding errors. Think how many watts you need in a stereo to get the same noise level as a car, compared to how many kilowatts the engine has

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> That includes disruption of their mental capacity ("Taycan Turbo"): [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbocharger](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbocharger)

[https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1169695493594574848](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1169695493594574848)

<comment><USER18> My 286 had a Turbo button that made it go extra fast, pretty sure it didn't have any turbocharger inside either.

<comment><USER19> I thought the turbo button slowed things down?

<comment><USER20> Depended on the implementation. Some turbo buttons were wired to run at low clock when pressed, others to run at "real" clock when pressed.

That's why they often had some sort of LED or display (2x7 segments).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Most Mysterious Object in the History of Technology - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/06/antikythera-mechanism-whoa/487832/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> Recent discussion of the Antikythera: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11902342](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11902342)</comment>