Takipi – Java debugging reinvented - <AUTHOR> http://www.takipi.com/

<comment><USER2> I want to test this product, and I'm in a position where I could spend real money on a purchase or subscription to this service in the event that it does what we need.

Unfortunately, as soon as I see that data is sent off-site, I immediately discard this as a product which my organisation can use.

Reasons

1\. I am an engineer, working in a highly regulated environment. Regulated environments excel at buying things, or subscribing to things - we have whole teams of people that are delighted to spend money on our behalf. They also tend to have immense amounts of process overhead, whenever you interact with third parties on subjects relating to intellectual property or the confidentiality of client data.

Your assurances on encryption, confidentiality, etc. are irrelevant to me; you could have invented a perfect cryptosystem, but regulations would still prohibit me from exporting data outside of our organisation.

2\. I don't want to build reliance on something which is outside of my control. This might be the greatest tool ever built, but if I'm building monitoring systems for production systems, I need to have confidence that they are available, irrespective of your schedule for upgrading / supporting / maintaining your product.

Why should a tool fail, just because the people that built the tool are no longer around?

Short takeaway - my suggestion is that you consider those of us who are not fortunate enough to work in unregulated industries, and produce a self-hosted version of your application (as GitHub do) which can be run on our own infrastructure. There's revenue there which is being ignored. You might feel that centralising your service means that crackers can't steal your tool and use it for free. I would argue that the people that actually care about running this locally are the sort of people that will be paying you, handsomely, for it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Steve. These are some valid points you're making. We are currently considering an on-premises solution for precisely this situation you are describing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This looks interesting, but the lack of any pricing information makes me nervous - am I missing it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Takipi is in open beta, so it is currently free.

<comment><USER3> A not unattractive price point, I find. When are you planning to start charging for it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Nothing is final, but we should remain in beta at least until the end of the year.

<comment><USER4> I'm afraid I have to agree with brazzy; you're asking people to invest a fair amount of time, and potentially come to depend on a tool that they have no idea if they will be able to afford once you start charging money.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This seems pretty legit. I really like the personality you gave the site with its design.

Do you have any plans to support GitHub repositories as a location to pull source from in the event we don't really want to deploy a jar with our source in it?

<comment><AUTHOR> This is actually a feature which is currently under consideration.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> How well would this handle Spring code (in full autowired, horrible stack trace glory)?

<comment><AUTHOR> When you install Takipi, you are asked to enter your top packages (e.g. "com.mycompany;org.foobar.common"). Code outside of the filter will not be shown to you when viewing stack traces. In addition, if, for an example, an exception is thrown by Spring AND caught by Spring, you will not receive an event for that case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is anybody using this for Clojure? I'm very interested in how usable it is for that.

Clojure runs on the JVM using JVM bytecodes, but that doesn't mean Takipi will be able to show me anything but mangled gibberish.

<comment><AUTHOR> Takipi lets you attach your own source code to the project, so you will see your original source code when viewing exceptions and other events, instead of decompiled Java. Support for prettier stack traces is in the planning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> If I understand correctly does the takipi daemon, upload all the debug info. collected from our server to the takipi server via Internet. Then I use app.takipi.com to access the same?

<comment><AUTHOR> Takipi's agent records information which is relevant to the issues which are detected (exceptions, latency problems, custom conditions set by the developer). The data and source code are then encrypted with your secret 256-bit AES key and stored by Takipi. This data is in turn decrypted in your browser and viewed by you at app.takipi.com.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I know it works on the JVM level, but we use Glassfish a lot in production and I'm interested in finding out exactly how practical it is to use Takipi with Glassfish?

<comment><AUTHOR> Very practical :) Takipi fully supports Glassfish, as well as all other major web servers and containers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It looks like a really interesting approach for live debugging...

</comment><comment><USER11> Are you guys planning to offer this as a Heroku add-on?

<comment><AUTHOR> We are currently in the process of adding a Heroku add-on :)

<comment><USER11> Cooling, looking forward to try it on my Play 2 app running on Heroku!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Any plans to support Android in the near future?

<comment><AUTHOR> Takipi is mainly designed for production/staging debugging, and thus targets servers and development environments.

<comment><USER12> Sorry, to clarify, I meant support us developers making apps on the PC for Android (not using your tool directly on Android) :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sorry, Android development is currently not supported.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wonder what the overhead is like?

<comment><AUTHOR> Both the RAM and CPU overhead are configurable by you. The default values are max 5% CPU, and max 5% RAM.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Cool one! Good luck guys!

</comment><comment><USER15> What people sometimes fail to realize is that proper testing disciplines can mitigate practically all bugs in production. I haven't seriously used a debugger in 2 years, methinks. So giving developers "X-ray vision" to their servers in production, however innovative, is not a real solution.

<comment><USER16> As you are down voted I wonder: I have the same experience here. Very few serious problems (1/year) that come from developer bugs. Others seem to have much more, e.g. when people ask me if the devs here have pager duty (which they haven't).

I also wonder if we test too much (ca. 85% path coverage, 15k unit tests (3x rewritten), automatic selenium tests, explorative manual tests, automatic API tests, developer acceptance tests).

<comment><USER17> It certainly sounds like you're testing too much.

The most efficient use of resources is almost always proportionate allocation between code and other things. So if only a small proportion of your serious problems are code errors then you're either testing too much or not doing enough at other levels of the stack.

The real questions of course are whether your defect rate and the rate at which you introduce new features are where you want them to be.</comment></comment></comment>


The Future of College? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/08/the-future-of-college/375071/ <comment><USER2> Very interesting article. I teach at a college and have followed Minerva with interest.

> But then I remembered what I was like as a teenager headed off to college, > so ignorant of what college was and what it could be, and so reliant on the > college itself to provide what I'd need in order to get a good education.

One point not much addressed is that, while this style of education sounds great for the top five or ten percent of students, that leaves a large number that I (and I have experience with them) wonder about. There is some bias in people who went to top schools, and succeeded there, thinking about the way they would have liked to have been taught.

If a student has not done the reading, or not done the homework, or does not participate in class, do they get an _F_? Currently you work with people, trying to bring them along. Changing that would be a very sharp change in the current practice of education. (Or, will this education method lead to students doing the reading? That's a wonderful and tantalizing hope.)

That's by no means to put down the innovations, which are exciting. That's only to observe that often a person's thinking is influenced by who they are, and their experience.

<comment><USER3> OT, but I learned Linear Algebra out of your textbook (if that's who you are). The "Topics" section on voting paradoxes was my favorite bit. Thanks for giving it away!

<comment><USER2> Yes, that's me. Thank you for the kind words; you are welcome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Big fan of what they're trying to do. I've kept my eye on them for a few years.

It's remarkable that at a place like UC Berkeley (where I study CS), the pinnacle of innovation is videotaped lectures and programming assignment autograders. That, and iClickers during lectures (devices that let you answer multiple choice questions). Many universities have worse technology than many Fortune 500 companies - in areas that directly affect students. Apparently Berkeley's online course enrollment system limits the number of times you can login because it's based on a legacy telephone system originally designed for dialing in.

I've been thinking that technical/engineering education is the most ripe to be disrupted - someone with a CS education needs to rely much less on their credential/alumni network than someone with, say, a liberal arts degree. We're already seeing this with the coding schools that are all emerging.

<comment><USER3> > someone with a CS education needs to rely much less on their > credential/alumni network than someone with, say, a liberal arts degree

To the extent this is true, I think it's _only_ as a result of an employee's market in CS, something which won't always be the case (and hasn't always been). Also, wrt credentialing, CS is uncommon even among STEM fields; most engineering jobs _strictly_ require credentials.

Education and mathematics are both liberal arts by most definitions, but in my experience, graduates in those subjects get jobs by merit rather than network or credential at least as often as in CS. (edit: in fact, based on what I've seen, education is far more meritocratic in the hiring process than CS.)

Finally, "liberal arts" can refer to the field, but it can also refer to the type of institution. So there's such a thing as a "CS liberal arts degree".

<comment><USER5> "Education and mathematics ... graduates in those subjects get jobs by merit rather than network or credential at least as often as in CS"

How could that be, when virtually all education jobs require either a teachers' certificate or a doctorate (depending on the job), both of which are credentials?

<comment> barry-cotter Yeah, I can't imagine a sensible interpretation of the claim on education. You basically need to get an M.Ed. and all the research on teacher effectiveness suggests that they have an effect that is close to zero and is probably actually zero. Subject matter Master's degrees have positive effects on teacher effectiveness but that's probably a reflection of the kind of people who get Master's degrees being interested in their field, not having a Master's making one a better teacher.

<comment><USER3> The networking thing is absolutely true. Networking and "buddy hires" are _way_ more common in CS than in (secondary) Education IME. edit: in fact, in education, network-hires are basically impossible even if your buddy is all the way at the top.

> You basically need to get an M.Ed.

Definitely not true.

At the very least, in STEM most high schools would prefer a subject matter Masters.

Most teachers opt to get an Masters for the pay raise, but it's quite common to be _hired_ without an MEd, and my comment referred to the hiring process specifically.

The fact that Education MEds have no/negative effect but subject-matter masters have a positive effect probably has to do with the salary incentive and the fact MEds tend to be easier to get than subject-matter masters.

An _intrinsically motivated_ MEd student could probably get as much out of it as a subject matter masters (esp. in primary education, where increased subject matter expertise probably isn't so helpful).

Which is to say, MEds aren't intrinsically bad, but because of external incentives might attract the wrong type of person.

> I can't imagine a sensible interpretation of the claim on education.

The literal interpretation will suffice; it's entirely well-defined even if you disagree with its truth value :-)

See also my response to the parent.

edit: higher-education is a different beast, but going way back up to the comment I first responded to, we're talking about education majors, who go on to secondary and primary education -- NOT higher education.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As stated in the article, I think the hardest barrier for this project will simply be the lack of branding. College has pretty much boiled down to institutional prestige and the credential that comes with it.

Gauging "success" within this system seems hard. It's hard to attribute success to a university when it's prestige ends up determining the calibre of its student body in the first place. And a clear feedback loop exists here. On account of the prestige associated with their college, students end up leading illustrious careers. Their "success" is a combination of their inherent pre- college skill and their credential, one could say.

Now, given the Minerva project, where the feedback loop doesn't exist and the quality of students are towards the higher side, how does one begin to test the efficiency of a new system without any proper control experiment?

Because of this difficulty in assessing the success or failure of this project, even though I hope and believe it works well, the general opinion might be that it failed.

<comment><USER7> > College has pretty much boiled down to institutional prestige and the > credential that comes with it.

For top 50 maybe. But outside the first page of US News report there's very little differentiation. Quick, what's the difference between Minnesota State University, Mankato and California State University, Fullerton, and which one is more prestigious?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > _Those future students will pay about $28,000 a year, including room and > board, a $30,000 savings over the sticker price of many of the schools—the > Ivies, plus other hyperselective colleges like Pomona and Williams—with > which Minerva hopes to compete._

Sorry, but nope. To date, there isn't a single entity that carries more prestige and influence than getting an "Ivy league" type high education.

> _The Minerva boast is that it will strip the university experience down to > the aspects that are shown to contribute directly to student learning._

This is sound in principle, but education only won't have the returns that the Ivies do. Ivies are successful because they are filtering mechanisms, not because their teachers are substantially better than the rest of the competition.

If anything, the greatest threat today to established higher education is the likes of YC.

<comment><USER9> > If anything, the greatest threat today to established higher education is > the likes of YC.

You're joking, right? Y Combinator and accelerators like it are great programs for certain types of individuals, but they're hardly a threat to the higher education industrial complex.

Y Combinator has produced some great successes, but despite all the resources and access Y Combinator provides participants, Y Combinator has not discovered a recipe for startup success. The numbers make this very clear[1][2].

More importantly, there is only so much room to scale accelerator programs. Few companies emerge from these programs with cash flow sufficient to fund their operations, so they depend on the availability of angel and venture capital to support their portfolio companies. If you significantly expand the Y Combinators of the world, demand for capital would soon exceed supply, so you'd see a dramatic increase in the percentage of portfolio companies that die, and the speed with which they die.

[1] [http://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-portfolio- stats](http://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-portfolio-stats)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8043856](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8043856)

<comment><USER8> > _You 're joking, right?_

Not in the slightest.

> _Y Combinator has not discovered a recipe for startup success._

Nor has Harvard university. I think you're looking at the wrong output. YC (and other successful incubators) are about the alumni network, not the success of the startup. Just as universities are about the alumni network.

<comment><USER9> There is a good deal of research that has concluded attending an elite private university has a significant impact on career earnings[1][2].

If you are suggesting that the Y Combinator alumni network is of immense tangible value, what research do you have to back it up? To be fair to you, there obviously isn't a whole lot of longitudinal data, but as I pointed out, Y Combinator's portfolio stats look pretty much in line with what you'd expect in Silicon Valley.

The value of an alumni network is tied to what it can reasonably do for you. Ivy League alumni networks have been tapped for decades for lucrative opportunities not easily accessed by outsiders.

[1] [http://www.nyu.edu/classes/jepsen/hoxby- selective.pdf](http://www.nyu.edu/classes/jepsen/hoxby-selective.pdf)

[2] [http://www.nber.org/papers/w5613](http://www.nber.org/papers/w5613)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It is disappointing how few people realize the cost of attending college, and most families who make >$150k will never know how much other people pay to attend school. The financial aid system is actually very good at most schools. Two examples:

1) I currently attend Boston University (as a grad student), and a good _domestic_ undergrad gets a nice aid package. For families that make $40k-$80k/yr the middle 50% of aid packages ranges up to $56k per year against a $60k room and board cost.

2) The horrible Ivy Leagues are often even better. When my wife attended admission was need blind, and then after filling out your FASA the school gave the students a grant to cover the part of the cost that is supposed to be covered by student loans. Do you have two kids that are within 1-2 years of each other? The additional cost of sending a second kid can be as low as $0/year because the total contribution that the parents can afford doesn't change just because you have two kids.

One key to this article that is easy to glance over is that the target market is mostly foreign students. They do not get the same aid packages and end up paying full price at most schools.

</comment><comment> barry-cotter I wish them luck but the reporter makes it sound like they think merely providing a better education than 90% of students anywhere get will make them competitive with the super-elite. What HYPS and the tech equivalent like Cal Tech or CMU have over the merely excellent schools like Rice or Duke is not the quality of undergraduate or graduate education. It's the stamp of approval from getting in, the one that puts "Winner!" on your cv, that makes getting into McKinsey or Goldman a commonplace rather than an outstanding achievement in itself.

I'm more optimistic as it's a for profit, so it has real motivation to grow without end, unlike a "real" liberal arts school but if the main selling point of your rivals is the selection effect and yours is the treatment effect you will never, ever reach their prestige.

All that said, this is awesome. It makes me substantially more optimistic that tertiary education might actually start applying psychological research. Minerva doesn't need to beat Harvard to change Harvard.

<comment><USER11> It is mentioned in the article -

"One possibility is that Minerva will fail because a college degree, for all the high-minded talk of liberal education— of lighting fires and raising thoughtful citizens—is really just a credential, or an entry point to an old- boys network that gets you your first job and your first lunch with the machers at your alumni club."

and I also remember an article about Minerva a few years back where they said they were aware of this effect.

<comment><USER3> One of the problems with existing for-profits is that because of the lack of tenure and unwillingness to match industry salaries, they have trouble recruiting and retaining high-quality faculty. Especially in STEM, where non- research teaching faculty accept well below-average salaries in exchange for tenure.

If its deans are teaching (not typically the case, but then 4 deans for a student body in the double digits isn't typical either), then Minerva seems to have solved this problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> It sounds like the college is residential but courses are online.

Is that accurate? Is this something temporary for their first couple of cohorts, or is this the intended setup?

Interesting in any case.

It's also worth noting that this is cheaper than private liberal arts colleges, but actually much more expensive than regional state universities, and even more expensive than some flagships (assuming in-state tuition and average scholarship). Which is also interesting. edit: based on the article, the target demographic seems to be high-quality foreign students. Which, again, is really interesting because that's a very different target demographic than most liberal arts colleges.

edit: I'll also be curious to see whether these sorts of institutions can get students into top PhD programs or MD programs, which tend to require lots of experiences that are really difficult to provide without physical space and tenured faculty.

<comment> barry-cotter Residential college with online courses does seem to be the plan, with the city of residence changing year to year.

>Each year, according to Minerva's plan, they'll attend university in a different place, so that after four years they'll have the kind of international experience that other universities advertise but can rarely deliver. By 2016, Berlin and Buenos Aires campuses will have opened. Likely future cities include Mumbai, Hong Kong, New York, and London. Students will live in dorms with two-person rooms and a communal kitchen. They'll also take part in field trips organized by Minerva, such as a tour of Alcatraz with a prison psychologist. Minerva will maintain almost no facilities other than the dorm itself—no library, no dining hall, no gym—and students will use city parks and recreation centers, as well as other local cultural resources, for their extracurricular activities.

Re: price. They don't intend to compete with state flagships, but with liberal arts colleges. Which state flagships are impressive without reference to programme? I'm not American but I do spend far too much time reading American stuff and my impression would be that the only public universities in the US that are vaguely comparable to HYPS are U Michigan and UC Berkeley, maybe Georgia Tech, which is itself very far behind the top four CS schools, MIT,CMU, Berkeley and Stanford.

Being better than Amherst may be an ambitious goal for Minerva's second decade but being better than a respectable college with no real national brand seems doable.

<comment><USER3> > no library, no dining hall, no gym—and students will use city parks and > recreation centers, as well as other local cultural resources, for their > extracurricular activities.

I commented on another article that this is an interesting solution -- externalizing certain costs of higher ed. It's a very effective strategy, and even makes sense on the large scale (civilization-wide) for everything except libraries, probably.

> They don't intend to compete with state flagships, but with liberal arts > colleges.

Right. That's why I think it's interesting.

They don't compete on price with larger and/or state schools, but do compete on methodology.

They don't compete on methodology with (most) liberal arts colleges, but do compete on price.

It's a unique niche -- students who value liberal arts and can afford college but cannot afford/don't want to pay for a traditional liberal arts education. I'm not surprised they're initially targeting foreign students, seems like a pretty small market in the US at the moment. E.g. most students who are inclined to attend a liberal arts college are also inclined to prefer physical presence of instructors.

> Which state flagships are impressive without reference to programme?

State universities with a wide range of very strong programs: Illinois, Texas- Austin, Michigan, Washington, Wisconsin, N Carolina (Chapel Hill), and many others.

All of these schools out-rank Harvard in CS, for instance.

> but being better than a respectable college with no real national brand > seems doable.

All of the universities mentioned above have national and international brands in several areas (I think my list is CS-skewed). I don't think Minerva will ever _really_ compete with these schools, even if it is widely successful.

WRT regional colleges: I think that physical presence of full-time faculty is a pretty substantial benefit. You'd need higher-quality, _full time_ faculty _and_ really good technology to compete with even a mediocre but physically present tenured faculty member (tenure as a signal for "has experience teaching" \+ not ad junct/over-worked).

For this reason, I think that online programs which aim to compete on price without sacrificing quality face a pretty substantial HR problem. Training isn't enough -- faculty have to be available for office hours, need time to develop new curricula, etc.. This is probably not possible without hiring high-quality faculty as full-time employees.

As "coast-snobby" as academics can be (actually, this isn't really true, but accepting the article's premise...), I don't think anyone would turn down a tenured position in Nowhere, Indiana in favor of teaching online courses, especially if the work is contract-based.

That said, it's always possible to compete with larger universities if you define your scope. You'll see this in the recruiting materials of any university -- they choose a set of things they're really good at, and say "we're the best (small print: at the combination of a,b,c,x,y, and z). E.g. "student travel" is a metric used by Minerva.

<comment> barry-cotter Point on public universities. I just don't know enough about the US.

>WRT regional colleges: I think that physical presence of full-time faculty is a pretty substantial benefit. You'd need higher-quality, full time faculty and really good technology to compete with even a mediocre but physically present tenured faculty member (tenure as a signal for "has experience teaching" \+ not ad junct/over-worked). For this reason, I think that online programs which aim to compete on price without sacrificing quality face a pretty substantial HR problem. Training isn't enough -- faculty have to be available for office hours, need time to develop new curricula, etc.. This is probably not possible without hiring high-quality faculty as full-time employees.

Most Physics postdocs don't get faculty jobs. Neither do most Chemistry or Biology ones. The Arts have an equally massive over supply of wannabe academics. Math,CS, Economics,Finance,Accounting all of these have lovely alternatives to teaching but lots of people like teaching as well.

As you pointed out the coast snobbery is bullshit. Academics move anywhere for tenure or a chance at tenure. But Minerva will take you if you're close enough to the right timezone and soon they'll all be close enough. WGU has shown that all online faculty can work though they don't have an all seminar system.

I don't know, it seems close enough to the Oxford/Cambridge tutorial system that it can work given cheap enough inputs, easily. Live in Thailand, teach students in Hong Kong, live in Coast Rica, teach in San Francisco. And the star faculty can't last. But you can get really good adjuncts without being as attractive locationwise as Minerva. Re:curriculum, office hours, remember, Minerva can actually tell their staff what to do.

I don't think there's much actual disagreement here,I'm only slightly more optimistic than you, eh?

<comment><USER3> It's not that the raw labor doesn't exist, it's that this labor -- esp in STEM -- has other job opportunities and doesn't _need_ to teach. Given the choice, most would leave academia rather than live on scraps once they hit their late 20s/early 30s. And although there isn't coast snobbery, I don't think expecting teaching faculty to relocate to a cheaper country is a realistic solution -- especially if there's no tenure and the pay is below industry average!

> Re:curriculum, office hours, remember, Minerva can actually tell their staff > what to do.

Right, but (at least ostensibly) they can't compel their staff to do that for free.

If a staff member is being paid way below what they could make in industry and isn't even on a tenure track, they have absolutely no incentive to work hard. Nor should they work hard, at anything other than getting out of an exploitative relationship with their employer.

It's easier to take advantage of people in the humanities, but then, taking advantage of instructional staff doesn't exactly create a convivial learning environment.

> given cheap enough inputs, easily

I guess that's really the thing -- I think for something like Minerva to really work they need full time, well-paid faculty. And without federal aid, that means they'll probably have trouble competing with regional state universities (without sacrificing quality, which kills to whole Minerva model).

Otherwise high-quality learning environments are impossible to build and maintain.

> but lots of people like teaching as well.

One model could be finding people who have moved on to industry but still want to teach a course or two a semester. It might be possible to make this work.

BUT -- that's not a new model! Lots of colleges and universities take this approach, and it's pretty well-understood by pretty much everyone that this is a non-optimal situation. Even very bright people fail at the "teach after work" thing. It's just not possible to go as deeply as you would like without an hour or two before and after lectures to really prepare for the lecture itself well and then wind down/self-assess.

Higher Ed needs to come to terms with the fact that great -- or even half- decent -- instruction is a full-time job.

> I don't think there's much actual disagreement here,I'm only slightly more > optimistic than you, eh?

No, there's no disagreement at all :-). I'm posing possible problems and you're suggesting reasons they're not problems or suggesting solutions. It's a true dialog :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The engaged learning process is not new, or unique, but is certainly not common. My undergrad institute called this "The Thayer" method and required students to do the reading before class and show up ready to discuss. There were often even homework assignments based on the work that was not covered in class yet to force pre-reading. Class time was then a productive discussion and a chance to ask questions. During class students would be asked to "Take boards" and perform math or chemistry calculations immediately and on their own so that the teacher can assess the class's progress. This school also offered chemistry and engineering classes which will never work at Minerva because of the lab requirements. A liberal arts degree should include a basic chemistry + lab course, but I don't see this working with the program they describe.

To me Minerva appears to have a sound business model based on bringing foreign students in for an education with low overhead. This will take the most profitable students away from traditional schools, and require tuition to go up for the types of degrees that can't be offered in this environment.

</comment><comment><USER12> Eventually the 'professor' driving the highly-interactive sessions may even be an AI, trained up on all the other recorded sessions in the university's archives. Only occasional very anomalous and challenging interactions may require 'parachuting in' a real instructor of the same caliber as the original sessions.

 _Young Lady 's Illustrated Primer_, here we come!

</comment><comment><USER13> Does anyone else find the author rather aloof from financial reality in this article?

> the education I received was well worth the $16,000 a year my parents paid, > after scholarships.

> The students all now say they're confident in Minerva—although of course > they can leave whenever they like, with little lost but time.

The writer embodies the all-American liberally-educated Ivy League "coastal- elite" stereotype (writing in the Atlantic, after all), so I shouldn't be surprised at their reflexive apprehension towards an attempt to undermine the old institutions which are so tied up with that identity.

</comment><comment><USER14> I wish them success but college without the usual trappings of college exists. It's called co-working space.

I spent a few months in a co-working space partly to learn new language more efficiently and partly to get out of the fall-into-lazy-mode-when-in-home mode when I didn't have a full time job.

As I was sitting there typing away on my Macbook Pro, reading manuals, watching tutorials on youtube, and feeding off of the intense energy of fellow 'coworkers', it hit me that the ambiance was much like being in a library in college. It felt much like being in a library when I was in college and even better, there was no restriction on food/coffee/beverage. I felt like I was in college again. And I could walk away from my computer without worrying about someone stealing it during the 5 min I was gone.

And I was paying only $300 a month (although I thought it was a bit over priced...). I recall I was paying nearly $10,000 a year (many years ago though) just for tuition. And I don't know about most of you but as a student of a large public university system, I had barely any useful interaction with actual professors.

I really think for someone young with enough time, discipline and motivated to work in the internet/tech industry, having one year membership in co-working space would do wonders. And it barely costs $3600/year plus your normal living cost (which would be free if you stayed with parents).

</comment><comment><USER15> Am I alone in really enjoying my college experience? I loved going to sporting events and the ivy colored buildings. Say what you want, but my Fraternity years were amazing. I would be sad if my kids were not offered this experience. This just sounds so sterile and robotic to me. Maybe not replace, but possibly to supplement for those which want the traditional option.

</comment><comment><USER16> I am getting a 404.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm not sure what Betteridge would say about this headline but I don't think he'd like it.</comment>


Amnesty International seeks explanation for 'absolutely shocking' surveillance - <AUTHOR> http://betanews.com/2015/07/10/amnesty-international-seeks-explanation-for-absolutely-shocking-government-surveillance/

<comment><USER2> > If Amnesty International is being spied on, then is anyone safe?

Well, no.

</comment><comment><USER3> As a British citizen who supports Amnesty, I'm disgusted but not entirely surprised.</comment>


5 reasons to not "like" Facebook's IPO - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/2012/05/04/markets/thebuzz/?source=linkedin <comment><USER2> 0\. You can't get in on it anyway.</comment>


The Universe Might Be Expanding a Lot Slower Than We Thought - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-universe-might-be-expanding-a-lot-slower-than-we-thought

<comment><USER2> To see what this means for the cosmological parameters, the best place to look is Figure 15 of the journal article [1]. The effect of the distance bias pushes for a higher value of Omega_M (the fraction of the energy density of the universe in matter) and a lower value of w (a term which characterizes the equation of state of dark energy). The currently accepted values for these two parameters are roughly Omega_M = 0.3 and w = -1. If w = -1, it means that dark energy is consistent with a cosmological constant, which is more-or-less the simplest form of dark energy (not that we really know what it is). Going to w < -1 is interesting because it means that the acceleration of the expansion of the universe will itself also increase, resulting in a Big Rip. If these findings are correct, it would mean the universe is more exotic than previously thought.

Also, here is a nice discussion of the equation of state of dark energy: [http://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/March04/Carroll/Carroll4....](http://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/March04/Carroll/Carroll4.html)

1 - [http://arxiv.org/pdf/1408.1706v1.pdf](http://arxiv.org/pdf/1408.1706v1.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> This will probably reflect in a lower estimate to the amount of dark energy in the universe, if it's confirmed

<comment><USER4> I'm hoping this whole "dark energy" and "dark matter" thing will go away entirely.

I highly suspect that both theories are the result of an "error cascade" \- i.e. erroneous but at the time quite legitimate assumptions/thought/theory made early on, subsequently create errors in later assumptions/thought/theory.

The article mentioned is a case in point.

I'm a layman when it comes to astronomy and maths with no formal qualifications in astronomy - but I do like reading articles on the subject - and to me, Something Is Not Quite Right about the concepts of dark energy or dark matter

<comment><USER5> I'm a graduate student in astronomy and I think it's extremely unlikely that dark energy or dark matter will go away. The concern of an "error cascade" was legitimate when these ideas were first proposed and many astronomers were skeptical of both dark matter and dark energy for long while. But over time there have been a number of independent lines of evidence pointing to the existence of both dark matter and dark energy. It's possible some comedy of errors could have lead to the spurious detection of dark matter or energy through one of these measurements, but very unlikely that it would be mimicked in other, independent measurements.

<comment><USER6> Care to share some examples of dark energy evidence? If the evidence is a measurement of expansion, then it doesn't necessarily support the existence of dark energy.

<comment><USER5> One of the other major pieces of evidence for the existence of dark energy is the observation of baryon acoustic oscillations. The basic idea is that as the universe was forming, there were concentrations of dark matter. Standing sound waves of photons and baryons (ordinary matter) formed around these concentrations. After decoupling, the photons streamed away, but the baryons remained and eventually formed galaxies. This results in a characteristic pattern seen on the sky, where there are clusters of galaxies observed, and then rings of galaxies around them.

It is possible to calculate the physical size of these rings from first principles. Since you observe how big these rings appear on the sky, you can figure out how far away they are, and from this determine the expansion history of the universe.

<comment><USER7> > as the universe was forming, there were concentrations of dark matter. > Standing sound waves of photons and baryons (ordinary matter) formed around > these concentrations

You make it sound like "dark matter" is normal matter and the "ordinary matter" is the abnormal stuff, since ordinary matter formed afterwards and has more complex interactions in that it supplements gravitation with electromagnetism and what not. And of course there's far more dark matter than ordinary.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


No one wants to buy my sneakers - <AUTHOR> http://justinjackson.ca/sneakers/

<comment><USER2> Sorry to use this channel for something off-topic, but I can't find an email address on your site.

Your bold fonts would look a lot sharper if you included the bold version of the webfont. It's a one-line change, from:

      <link rel='stylesheet' id='font-bitter-css'  href='http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Bitter&ver=1' type='text/css' media='screen' />

to

      <link rel='stylesheet' id='font-bitter-css'  href='http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Bitter:400,700&ver=1' type='text/css' media='screen' />

</comment><comment><USER3> Maybe your problem is finding other people that would like that type of sneakers.

If the product was good, and priced well, perhaps it was a marketing problem. You were marketing it to high-school kids, while this type of shoe seems to be fit for the SF Mission/hipster kids.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, this is sometimes the case. I've done some thinking on this in this older post: [http://justinjackson.ca/this-tree-guy-has-good-business- advi...](http://justinjackson.ca/this-tree-guy-has-good-business-advice/)

Sometimes, moving to a new market can help. However, there's still the possibility that there is no profitable market for your product.

This is why I want to get to the customer as quickly as possible (with the idea, or a prototype) so that I can get feedback. If one market doesn't respond, I can bring the prototype to another market.

The danger is building the product solely on your own passion, without doing that research first.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> One real life example that could counter my argument here is 37signals. They've often said they build products for themselves. Do you think they're just lucky?

<comment><USER4> This is the WORST advice for startups who statistically are more likely to fail before even getting to market. It's even terrible advice for large companies as well.

Build what you want to build. Build something that you are proud of and that motivates you to get out of bed and keep working on. Build something that excites you and that you can see a roadmap for.

At least then you won't spend your life with regrets.

<comment><AUTHOR> Don't you think that building something _solely because it excites you_ is what causes startups to fail?

I'm not sure customers really care about our motivation. That's the ultimate test: do enough customers buy the product to make it profitable?

I was trying to think of a few product flops that might relate to this: Consumer example: New Coke Small app example: Backpack (by 37signals) Venture funded example: Color Big app example: Google Wave

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sometimes, asking the customer what they want is futile. Especially with an existing product, asking for futures. E.g. ask a farmer in 1901 what he wanted- he'd say "a horse that can pull harder and eats less hay". Never, ever would you have heard 'a tractor'.

Build that tractor. Or rocket ship, or twitter/blog/flash mob mashup. Then lead people to it. Then, get feedback from early adopters, hone your pitch, figure out how to draw them in.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, asking customers what they want isn't usually that helpful.

However, listening to customers is very helpful. It's not easy, but by listening to customers we can identify trends that help us answer: "What should I build?".

Then, instead of building the whole tractor (or rocket ship) we can show them a model (or prototype) and gauge their reaction.

In my case, with the sneakers, I could have purchased my own pair online ($90), and shown customers and friends to see if there was any local demand. That would have saved me a lot of money! (I ended up having to sell most of the shoes at a loss)</comment></comment>


A plain english introduction to CAP Theorem - <AUTHOR> http://ksat.me/a-plain-english-introduction-to-cap-theorem/

<comment><USER2> The paper with the actual proof (making this a theorem and not just a conjecture or vague speculation) is here:

[http://lpd.epfl.ch/sgilbert/pubs/BrewersConjecture- SigAct.pd...](http://lpd.epfl.ch/sgilbert/pubs/BrewersConjecture-SigAct.pdf)

This is surprisingly readable, and the introduction is quite good. In addition, here is a blog post that talks about the terms, their meanings, various implications, and the proof:

[http://danweinreb.org/blog/what-does-the-proof-of-the-cap- th...](http://danweinreb.org/blog/what-does-the-proof-of-the-cap-theorem-mean)

Finally, despite the shaky start, this is also a good read:

[http://www.julianbrowne.com/article/viewer/brewers-cap- theor...](http://www.julianbrowne.com/article/viewer/brewers-cap-theorem)</comment>


Study monitors programmers' stress levels to predict the quality of their code - <AUTHOR> https://boingboing.net/2016/05/23/monitoring-programmers-stres.html <comment><USER3> From the abstract, it sounds like the actual paper makes less bombastic claims than the news sites talking about the paper:

"In a field study with ten professional developers over a two-week period we investigated the use of biometrics to determine code quality concerns. Our results show that bio- metrics are indeed able to predict quality concerns of parts of the code while a developer is working on, improving upon a naive classifier by more than 26% and outperforming clas- sifiers based on more traditional metrics. In a second study with five professional developers from a different country and company, we found evidence that some of our findings from our initial study can be replicated. Overall, the results from the presented studies suggest that biometrics have the potential to predict code quality concerns online and thus lower development and evolution costs."

<comment><USER4> Unfortunately, Boing Boing has gotten increasingly clickbaity in the past few years, and Cory Doctorow in particular has a strong tendency to write about the story he would have enjoyed reading instead of the one that was actually published, up to and including lying outright if it makes a more exciting article. (E.G., the 2014 article "Small Town Sheriff Buys Tank," which opens "Rural counties across Indiana have been purchasing Afghanistan-surplus tanks with gunner turrets..." It turns out he's talking about armored trucks with no weapons.)

I'm not sure if he's doing it on purpose or if he's having genuine issues distinguishing boring facts from exciting fiction, but either way Boing Boing shouldn't be trusted at all. Shame, as they used to be quite good.

<comment><USER5> Gunner turrets do not necessarily include permanently mounted weapons. See: B-17 waist-gun turrets. All weapons in the plane were removable. Nobody wants to leave automatic weapons lying around where they would be easy to steal.

Your link includes an armored vehicle in which an automatic belt-fed weapon could be mounted (and which are commonly possessed by SWAT teams). It's a military-grade APC, there is no honestly viable quarrel with his title.

<comment><USER6> The quarrel, I think, is that APCs are not tanks. Completely different vehicles, designed for completely different missions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I just read this article & even skimmed the study, but I can't figure out what the relation of stress to code quality is. Poor quality is high stress? Or high stress means that you are meticulous and are likely to produce higher quality code?

<comment><USER8> I understood the conclusion to be that perceived difficulty (stress) while writing code is linked to poor quality.

"code elements that are perceived more difficult by developers also end up having more quality concerns found in peer code reviews"

<comment><USER9> It would be interesting to see this linked to interviews too where the entire situation, mannerisms of the interviewer, and presentation of a given exercise are all specifically tailored to make sure it is perceived as difficult.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "Our analysis also shows that code elements that are perceived more difficult by developers also end up having more quality concerns found in peer code reviews." How is this surprising in any way whatsoever?

<comment><USER8> Why does it matter if it's surprising? Science isn't meant to reveal surprising things. The purpose is substantiating or refuting hypotheses. The only relevance your expectation has to a scientific conclusion is in determining sources of bias.

<comment><USER10> If you read the rest of the text they word it like it would support their hypothesis, which doesn't follow logically.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'd suggest as a feature to measure the amount of time spent in editor, terminal and browser and especially on Google search, StackOverflow and Github. Also, the number of compilation errors could be useful. Another feature is to measure time spent on each portion of the source file, especially portions where the developer returns many times to make changes.

The developer text editor of the future should be able to collect features from a smart watch, camera, mouse, text cursor position, the terminal and the browser.

<comment><USER12> I'd suggest also taking into account the amount of measuring itself - <USER2> likely is a correlation between stress levels and the amount of "measuring" a programmer has to endure.

<comment><USER11> I used RescueTime for some time, you can forget about it after a while. But if someone else is seeing your stats, it might feel pretty stiffy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> 99% of the time when I'm stressed out about code I'm working on its because the product spec is overly complicated, not because the code is bad quality. Interesting study, but I don't think it matches up with real world scenarios that well.

<comment><USER14> If by "overly complicated" you really mean, "ambitious but nebulous and we need it now" then I 100% agree. Nothing is more stressful than basically being put into the position where you've been given nothing more than a couple slides worth of b.s. "architecture" and "design" and they want a working prototype in a month. Feels like you're being put in an impossible situation.

<comment><USER15> This is a jr programmer mistake, sr programmers know that a couple slides is usually enough to contain the essence of the problem, and yet not enough to paint them into a corner, make something that solves the crux of the problem, and rename a couple of your classes to items on the boxes drawn on the classes, and a couple of the methods have the same names as drawn on the lines between the boxes.

If anyone questions it, show Sr Mgmt that the class and method names match, say it works, and that everyone else is just a bunch of whiners. (The most important thing is that it works enough for a sales guy to convince the customer that it does everything they wanted)

Everyone wants a Lexus but if they're stranded on the side of the road a Lada will do quite nicely. Arriving with a Lada always make you the hero. You can go for beers with mgmt after and negotiate a raise while laughing about how you're surprised the wheels didn't fall off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wouldn't this be somewhat subject to polygraph syndrome? I.e. if I am being monitored my stress levels will be artificially higher as I am nervous about the monitoring.

The article is brief on details and I didn't follow any links for further study. They seem confident in their findings though so I'm sure they know better than I.

But that's the first thing that popped into my head just reading the headline...

<comment><USER17> I think that would certainly be the case at first, but if you were being monitored all day every day, you'd become accustomed to it soon enough.

The study measured developers over a two-week period. By the second week, I would say that the developers had probably become accustomed to it.

<comment><USER18> Maybe it's just me but I've never seen able to ignore nipple clamps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Wow they can monitor quality now? That's awesome.

</comment><comment><USER20> To me, stress should correlate positively with code quality. I've met too many developers in my life that work away while listening to music from their headphones, doing a low-stress job of copying and pasting code around without the least concern for structure or maintainability. I curse and sigh all day long, but at least I try to write code that looks and behaves as I think it should, not just whatever works.

<comment><USER21> What? Copy and pasting code is not correlated with wearing headphones. The music is there to keep me focused (and to help block out open plan office noise).

I curse, too - although more quietly now everyone can hear.

<comment><USER20> Most probably it's just how my brain is wired - contrary to a lot of people, I just can't listen to music and concentrate on something different at the same time. So the idea of someone coding while listening to music makes me instinctively think they're not dedicating 100% of their brain to what they're doing. But I understand that this doesn't apply to everybody.

<comment><USER22> I have this problem too. However, being in an open-plan office, I have to choose the lesser of two evils: monotonous music vs human voices. I find the latter very distracting. I can even go to sleep with music playing but never with people talking around me. Of course given the circumstances, you could probably guess that I pick instrumental music and mainly music without strong 'movements' (I don't know the right term).

Eventually, I felt that listening to music on headphones everyday for many hours is going to affect my hearing on the long term and I decided to sacrifice productivity to keep my (better than average) hearing in good condition.

I may be rambling a bit but the point I am trying to make is that people are different and also in differing circumstances. So, is possible that you will choose likewise if you were in their place (and were of similar constitution).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> So many ways to predict how this study is off in the weeds before it even got started.

Doing it for something measurable like interruptions versus a fuzzy thing like "stress" would be so much easier. And then you could take action to improve things, and measure improvement.

RescueTime and others hit this broadly. Anything do it more narrowly?

</comment><comment><USER24> While stress levels might be some degree of indicator, there are lot of other things that should make this kind of thing practically useless. Skill level/experience is going to make a really big difference.</comment>


Plagiarism spat over scientific poster prep advice escalates to legal threats - <AUTHOR> http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/2013/04/03/plagiarism-spat-over-scientific-poster-prep-advice-escalates-to-legal-threats/

<comment><USER2> Interesting. On the one hand, brief quotes are fair use. Using someone's ideas isn't even covered by copyright law. So I think it's the author that's being a bit heavy-handed, but on the other hand, I probably wouldn't retain the services of a lawyer to keep Appendix 5 of some brochure nobody reads -- it's definitely possible that the consortium copied a bit too much of the work, turning it from fair use to copyright infringement.

One thing's for sure: there will be two winners in this case. And it won't be the author or the consortium.

<comment><USER3> Plagiarism isn't necessarily a copyright violation. "Borrowing" ideas in academic publications can become plagiarism at some point. Commercial "copying" has different rules than in academia.

In the post, it looks like CPBR copied large blocks of text, then accused the original author of copying them.

<comment><USER2> Ah, I assumed CPBR replied with a DMCA counternotice. Claiming they wrote the text is probably not going to end well for them.

(I just realized: isn't this article guilty of exactly what the author thinks is wrong? _That_ should be fun to watch.)

<comment><USER4> >(I just realized: isn't this article guilty of exactly what the author thinks is wrong? That should be fun to watch.)

Well, no? You and the earlier posts missed this:

>Many other passages of equivalent similarity appear throughout the two documents. Indeed, side-by-side comparison of his 2004 document with CPBR's 2012 version shows the texts to be virtually identical.

<comment><USER2> I meant the author of the original guide, who thinks that "using my ideas" is copyright infringement.

<comment><USER4> That statement doesn't appear in the linked article. He says that copying his ideas is _plagiarism_ , which is something different. And in this particular case he is suing over copyright infringement.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ubuntu 7.10 Released - <AUTHOR> http://www.ubuntu.com/news/ubuntu710 <comment><USER2> I wouldn't recommend updating. Back up your home folder and do a clean install. The good news for anyone not keeping up with Ubuntu is that you now get Compiz and AIGLX out of the box. It works great with Nvidia, if you have an ATI card you need to install XGL and the ATI proprietary drivers.

<comment><USER2> well, someone must not have liked my response. you can update without reinstalling, Ubuntu makes that pretty easy. From experience however I've found that it works more reliably if you reinstall Ubuntu as some community supported packages can cause problems otherwise.

<comment><USER3> As a veteran Windows user this is what I will do. Old habits die hard. I want to see some evidence of clean upgrade process first. :-)

Seriously, as an engineer I doubt it will be easy: the success of this update procedure depends on reliable upgrade of _every single component_ in the system: not just the kernel/drivers/gnome/etc, but things that I installed afterwards, including those that I compiled, including those that depend on kernel version. For instance I have no reason to believe that VMware will continue working. Similarly, I expect to see issues with video drivers.

And finally, my friend who's been running Gutsy beta got an unbootable laptop after a series of online updates. Linux is solid software. However, all software has bugs, especially if it's forcefully put on a 6-months release cycle.

There is a very good reason why you don't see new Debian releases very often.

<comment><USER4> Old habits may die hard but they will also be detrimental to you. When cars were invented, there must've been people who said "I think I'll stick to horses until they work out the kinks in those car things". Those people probably didn't go on to found IBM or RCA. :-)

I generally strive to embrace new things and new ways of doing things. As long as I believe they're practical. For instance, full OS upgrade over the internet -- brilliant. Ubuntu is the first to offer this to my knowledge. On the other hand, web apps.. I don't see that as being very practical any time soon.

There will certainly be bugs and there's a certain amount of risk in doing an internet upgrade, but this is not major risk. Yet embracing the way of the future early will get you a head start, and I think it's an important mindset to have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Beware:

[http://journal.dedasys.com/articles/2007/10/14/feisty-to- gut...](http://journal.dedasys.com/articles/2007/10/14/feisty-to-gutsy- upgrade)

</comment><comment><USER3> I hope new version of proprietary ATI driver made it into this release, I getting quite envious of all those lucky who's running Fusion :)

<comment><USER2> The new version of ATI is not in the release. The version included in the release might work for you, but if it doesn't get the drivers from the ATI website (8.40), and install them yourself. If you still have problems let me know and I might be able to help you troubleshoot.

I can verify that Compiz Fusion works great with ATI and Gutsy.

<comment><USER3> I have Thinkpad T60p with Mobility FireGL v5250. ATI does not even have V5250 listed in their Linux drivers section, but for V5200 they want me to use version 8.35.5 of their driver.

<comment><USER2> That's odd, I think 8.35 or 8.37 might be the version included in the restricted drivers manager in Gutsy. Give that a shot before trying the custom driver but I've had bad luck with it on a Radeon X1300.

<comment><USER3> This is what I'm running: whatever they (ATI) are saying I should on the website. And it works great, except Beryl/Compiz won't work, people said I should install XGL server first... Which seems a bit too heavy to me.

And since I have very little time to experiment with my workhorse, I decided to wait for "native" support.

Oh... Look what I found: [http://digg.com/linux_unix/AMD_8_42_4_Display_Driver_AIGLX_I...](http://digg.com/linux_unix/AMD_8_42_4_Display_Driver_AIGLX_Is_Here)

 _.... This does not include support for the FireGL series, but the workstation compatibility will be introduced next month in fglrx 8.43..._

It appears I need to wait a little more :-)

<comment><USER2> Ah, yes, you need XGL, ATI does not yet support AIGLX (or the other way around). XGL works great in Gutsy, it installs easily (apt-get xserver-xgl). The problem is that OpenGL doesn't seem to work under Xgl so you either get 3D apps or a 3D desktop for now. Wait a little longer. I'd like to get off Xgl as well since it's not very stable yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The servers are slammed, but you can grab the release through torrents in about 30 minutes.

If you're updating, be sure to grab the alternate CD for your platform.

<http://releases.ubuntu.com/7.10/></comment>


It's Time for a New Discussion of Marijuana's Risks - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/07/upshot/its-time-for-a-new-discussion-of-marijuanas-risks.html <comment><USER2> It's fair to say that if we think smoke in general is deleterious to respiratory health and many chemical compounds found in different kinds of smoke are known carcinogens that marijuana is not exempt from those troublesome characteristics.

Given its potential harm as well as benefits in health, it's worthwhile that people in general as well as proponents for liberalization, myself included, know more about all its effects. We as a population would be better served if there were a middle ground between it's and evil gateway drug and it's a cure to many ailments and should not be regulated.

<comment><USER3> I disagree. If you read the literature you will find cannabis smoke, physically, is stunningly non-harmful and not associated with much more than perhaps a slightly higher chance of respiratory infection.

Whereas tobacco is ridiculously deleterious and causes oxidative damage directly iirc.

I used to think it was all about smoke inhalation but it's not that simple.

That being said, obviously I agree that we need to study the effects of cannabis as much as possible.

<comment><USER4> Lighting shit on fire produces carcinogenic material.

That's about all the science on MJ smoke (vs vapor etc) that I really need to know.

<comment><USER5> Heat is well known to cause cancer, including in the form of hot beverages; but the contents of smoke aside from CO2 and H2O depends entirely on the source of combustion.

<comment><USER6> I'd not heard this about heat. It doesn't seem like an entirely straightforward link to me - aren't saunas supposed to _fight_ cancer?

<comment><USER5> Since cancer is caused by certain mutations and heat can induce mutation, ingesting hot things can be mutagenic and thus carcinogenic.[0]

Saunas at the right temp for the right time can induce the expression of protective heat shock protiens.[1]

[0][https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2773211/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2773211/)

[1][https://www.selfhacked.com/blog/reasons-sweating-far- often/](https://www.selfhacked.com/blog/reasons-sweating-far-often/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Whatever the risks of marijuana are, they pale in comparison of the harm done by the "War on Drugs" aka the "War on Poor People and Minorities". Anything that takes power away from the criminal "justice" system to lock up people for non violent offenses, I'm all for it.

<comment><USER8> True but respectfully not the point here. Post the drug war on marijuana (a day rapidly arriving) it is reasonable to look at things objectively, consider the possible risks, and make an informed decision on whether to partake. Just because the old anti-pot propaganda was so false and awful doesn't mean every possible risk is a lie.

<comment><USER7> There are lots of risks to marijuana and I never had any desire to have it in my system. I dread the thought of it becoming normalized. But we have seen the alternative. Hopefully, it will become legal like cigarettes but with people knowing the risks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> HNers interested in this topic are liable to be interested in SlateStarCodex's treatment of it: [http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/01/05/marijuana-much-more- tha...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/01/05/marijuana-much-more-than-you- wanted-to-know/) .

tl;dr; according to the author's "Irresponsible Utilitarian Analysis," the statistically dominant factor in whether widely-legalized marijuana would be a net benefit or harm to society is its impact on driving. Since cars are, for most of us, the most dangerous thing in our lives, this probably makes a decent amount of sense.

<comment><USER10> I find it funny that he doesn't consider the benefit of people who want to use cannabis being able to use cannabis. That seems like it should be the main advantage!</comment></comment>


Amazon orders 100K electric delivery trucks from Rivian - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/09/19/amazon-orders-100k-electric-delivery-trucks-from-rivian-as-part-of-going-carbon-neutral-by-2040/ <comment><USER2> Honestly this is a good move, I just have a quick question:

Does anyone anywhere have video footage of a Rivian actually being driven? Like, not in a commercial, someone genuinely driving it. I just want to know if they are anywhere close to having a production vehicle. If they have a single production vehicle that does what they say, then OK they "just" have to figure out scaling up the manufacturing.

If they don't have a single vehicle, they are years and years away, to the point that Tesla truck may beat them to mass market.

They have great marketing though.

<comment><USER3> The Tesla truck will almost certainly beat them to mass market. Look how long it took Tesla to scale up production -- the Model S shipped in 2013. It wasn't until 2018 that Tesla built their 200,000th vehicle. Rivian hasn't yet shipped a single truck to customers; they're in for a long and difficult road ahead building out their production lines.

All that said I do hope Rivian is successful. I would absolutely buy an electric pickup truck.

<comment><USER4> Tesla took so long for production because Charlatan-In-Chief didn't want to use any of the lessons learned about Auto Manufacturing the past 100 years and decided to do it his way.

Charlatan-In-Chief also assumed he knows more about A.I and Robotics than many who warned him about his 'Alien Dreadnought' vision.

Rest assured people who are focused on building mass cars won't have the same hubris

<comment><USER5> Charlatan-in-Chief is putting spacecraft into orbit and yet here you are in an internet forum posting a barely-reasoned critique of his work?

<comment><USER6> Let alone that it lands...

If there's one thing I love about people calling Musk a 'charlatan' who build his company on 'government subsidies' and 'fairytales' it is that you can just reply with a video of a double 80m orbital booster landing vertically after putting a massive payload into orbit.

<comment><USER4> SpaceX is successful because Charlatan-In-Chief is completely hands-off and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwynne_Shotwell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwynne_Shotwell) is making sure he stays like that.

At Tesla, he is perfectly playing the role of a Used Car Salesman. Rising price up, prices down, making false promises

<comment><USER6> [https://youtu.be/u0-pfzKbh2k?t=25](https://youtu.be/u0-pfzKbh2k?t=25)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Amazon led a USD 700 000 000 investment round in Rivian last February. [https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/02/electric-truck- startup-...](https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/02/electric-truck-startup- announces-700-million-funding-round-led-by-amazon/)

(Edit: change amount from thousands to millions)

<comment><USER8> So 700 000 000/100 000 would be 7 000 - So an initial investment of 7 000 per vehicle they want to buy.

Now if they buy 100 000 vehicles at a rate of $100 000 each (pretty reasonable for industrial vehicles), that is 10 000 000 000 (10 Billion dollars). If it's $50k each, that will be $5B. $5-10 Billion in sales ain't too shabby.

<comment><USER9> > Earlier this week, Reuters reported that Amazon and General Motors were both > expected to invest in Rivian, "in a deal that would value the US electric > pickup truck manufacturer at between $1 billion and $2 billion."

Assuming that valuation is vaguely accurate they must own a pretty decent chunk of the company too.

<comment><USER8> GM wound up not investing, but Ford did invest.

Disclaimer: I work for GM, I have no knowledge of this deal, any opinions are my own.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wow, 100k is no small change. Hoping this accelerates the "tipping point" for electric vehicles - in my mind that's when the infrastructure for EVs (e.g. charging stations, or something in the future like battery swaps) actually makes it easier to own than a gas vehicle.

<comment><USER11> tipping point, indeed... and not in a good way:

let's take 100,000 vehicles with (I'm conservatively guessing) a 100 kWh battery each, that's a 100,000,000 kWh load each night! 100,000 Mega watt- hours is roughly the output of about 10 nuclear power plants in a 24H period.

Unless a lot of new capacity comes online, it could easily overwhelm the existing electrical grid's capacity.

Let's hope this is a gradual transition.

<comment><USER12> Note that 100kWh/day * 100,000 vehicles is 10,000MWh/day. If a typical nuclear power plant output is about 500MW, that's 12,000MWh/day.

<comment><USER13> Good. That's a lot of oil that would need to be burned that this is replacing!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> For once, mighty Amazon comes late to the show.

Germany's parcel service DHL builds up a fleet of small electric delivery vans since 2014:

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

Living in Bavaria, I see these drive around everywhere now.

<comment><USER15> These seem like they'd never work in the US. They aren't fast enough to go on the highway and their range is limited to 62 miles.

<comment><USER16> These trucks are solving the "last mile" delivery. Do you see many USPS delivery vans on the highway? That's the market.

<comment><USER17> In a dense urban environment, 62 miles is still less than most delivery trucks drive. In the US, the actual average overall is more like 2-3x that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Warning: petty partisanship ahead.

Our last Republican governor in Illinois spent some quality time trashing this company, which sure looks shortsighted in retrospect: [https://www.adaptbn.com/home/2018/5/16/breaking-rauner- criti...](https://www.adaptbn.com/home/2018/5/16/breaking-rauner-criticizes- rivian-for-not-employing-well-over-1000-people-despite-the-company-being- ahead-of-estimates)

He also made a point to trash all of Central Illinois as a place to do business, which is a heck of a strategy for business development. [https://www.news-gazette.com/news/rauner-apologizes-for- rema...](https://www.news-gazette.com/news/rauner-apologizes-for-remarks-that- undervalued-c-u/article_12524dab-d72d-56db-b8f9-a33e778d15b2.html)

Anyway, yay, the auto plant that funded my upbringing is back in action.

<comment><USER19> Fellow Normalite here, you still in the area? Would love to talk shop with a local Hacker Newser. Email in my profile if you're interested.

<comment><USER20> Wow, I would not have expected to find so many Normalites here.

<comment><USER21> Spent 7 years in Urbana-Champaign. 45 minutes from Normal. There is huuuge potential in that area.

<comment><USER20> I've spent a lot of time there - agreed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> So how does this work? Right now, Amazon outsources delivery. Will they be building huge garages for their fleet? Or trying to get their drivers to pay for the vans, like Uber? And like they did in 2018, when they "bought" 20,000 Mercedes vans?[1] That deal: "Amazon will not own the vans but they will be handled by fleet management companies, who will then lease them to the delivery service owners."

[1] [https://multichannelmerchant.com/operations/amazon-adding- fl...](https://multichannelmerchant.com/operations/amazon-adding- fleet-20000-trucks-delivery-services/)

<comment><USER23> Considering Amazon history I would not be surprised that this leads to "Amazon Delivery" which does exactly what you think. "Amazon Delivery" would slowly be responsible for an increasing portion of "Amazon Retail" parcels then generate money by opening to a wider audience.

<comment><USER24> Amazon rents the delivery vans to the contracting companies even now. I read somewhere that these vans are specific models that skirt the regulation and qualify as personal vehicles.

<comment><USER25> My brother runs a repair company for these vans. From my understanding that is not true only because he has set guidelines with them which he must make sure the align with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I work for a company that could most definitely deliver this vision before Rivian could (this is entirely my personal opinion and not reflective of my company) due to our extensive, non-vapourware, build history. The trucks are very real and being field tested, delivering real packages to real people every day. Most don't even realise they are electric.

The price is not a niche price you may imagine; it's very highly competitive for fleet managers that entirely makes sense on their books and not just for the environment or marketing. You don't have to wait for the product to be R&D or whatever, because they're rolling off the line right now, and typically no charging infrastructure is needed due to on-board charging.

Australian designed.

[http://sea-electric.com](http://sea-electric.com)

<comment><USER27> Why do you think Amazon went with Rivian instead of your company?

<comment><USER26> Personal opinion only;

If you are delivering vehicles today, then the technology that you have validated is (although not vapourware) older than today. And to meet people's expectation of a cheap vehicle without operating at a loss (no VC money), there are realities imposed by cost.

Someone like Rivian with lots of VC money isn't concerned with surviving between sales, so they can afford to take the risk of selling things that don't exist yet, at a loss if they desire, and so their marketing department is constantly walking on water.

<comment><USER28> Plus, you guys drive on the wrong side of the road.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> "The company will be ordering 100,000 electric delivery trucks"

Headline is false. Amazon have NOT ordered 100k electric delivery trucks. Amazon have made a announcement to get a lot of free press. For themselves (vitue signalling, oooh isn't amazon green) and for the company in which they have invested.

Seriously. I'm announcing here that I will order bezos' underpants. You should take it as seriously. Corporate PR is and this is another weak edition of it from Amazon.

<comment><USER30> This article as well as others are a bit thin on that particular detail, with some saying "will be ordering" and others speaking of Rivian "receiving an order" or "a deal being announced".

But, in any case: do you actually have doubts that this is real? I can see scepticism regarding the timetable and targeted number of vehicles. But for Amazon to just nope away now would be catastrophic for their $750 million investment in Rivian, and their general image. It would destroy far more than whatever this announcement may get in terms of good PR.

And isn't investing $750 million into such a company enough "skin in the game" to make accusations of "virtue signalling" nonsensical, even by that cheap insult's own definition?

<comment><USER29> This is a "news" story. It's supposed to be new. Writing an analysis story about how amazon are wonderful and green and citing evidence is just fine. Use good evidence. Write it and argue it well. That is not what this is. This is a naked play for positive PR and the facts are _thin_. Call it for what it is. Make this kind of positive PR at least as expensive as it needs to be to get. Make it so you have to do something to get it. Smoke and mirrors should not garner positive PR. This announcement _is_ smoke and mirrors - there is NO order!! And if you think amazon are not smoke and mirrors then why are they doing it? It's a bad scene that makes them look dishonest and they should not be doing it.

"Virtue signalling" is not a cheap insult it's a useful discription of a behaviour. It also isn't in any way BAD. No really. Signalling that you are doing good things and should be thought of as doing those good things thus enhancing your brand reputation is actually what everybody wants, right? Positive PR for doing things that are good. Signalling to the market your virtue based on actual substance. Not paper thin announcements that we will be announcing something of substance later to stoke the news cycle. That's gamed up crap.

Again I don't see substance in this announcment. I see a false headline. I'm calling it because that is what it is and virtue needs to be real, not simply corporate PR "announcements" of no commitment. Or nobody gets good PR from doing good things of real substance.

Separate to that, looking at amazon stories lately is it possible to cynical enough about their PR? That's reflected here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> And remember when Uber "ordered" 100,000 Mercedes S-Classes?

[https://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/news/a28508/uber- or...](https://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/news/a28508/uber- orders-100000-mercedes-benz-s-class-sedans-report/)

Bezos is probably trying to pressure UPS (or has some other business motive) versus target Amazon's carbon footprint. Amazon will undoubtably grow its own delivery fleet over time, but this splashy press release is probably not entirely about climate change.

<comment><USER32> Climate change? I thought it was about Bezos taking a snipe at Tesla because SpaceX is way ahead of Blue Origin.

<comment><USER33> Human will be saved my the egos of 2 billionaires

<comment><USER32> I'd rather they had a pissing contest by building space exploration companies than that they just kept building bigger and bigger boats.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> This discussion [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21016645](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21016645) has more comments and only recently fell off of the front page.

</comment><comment><USER35> Am I the only one who finds the spare tire location an absolute deal breaker? You have to unload the payload, and lift up the payload bed floor in order to access the spare. Now, I suppose this doesn't matter much to Amazon. But I have had the experience of being out the back-country where cell phones don't work, miles from a highway, changing a truck tire by myself. If I had to spend 1 or 2 hours unloading the truck before I could get at the spare, that would be a huge issue. At one point I was seriously considering writing a deposit check for a Rivian. The spare tire location told me instantly that this truck is not for me -- the designers have no idea how trucks are actually used. The utter cluelessness of that design decision boggles me.

<comment><USER36> Can't be too hard to just mount a wheel carrier in the bed, or swinging on the rear, and just use that spot as extra storage though. I don't know a single off-roader who doesn't mod their vehicle in similar ways to make up for perceived shortcomings.

<comment><USER37> Sure, but one begins to wonder how much knowledge this company has of actual usage if they get something this straightforward wrong.

<comment><USER38> If they are targeting sales to a small number of large fleets, this doesn't matter. In fleet operations, the driver will never ever be allowed to change a tire. This is simply not acceptable, insurance-wise. You will dispatch a second truck to handle the delivery and also a tire repair service truck.

An electric delivery truck is probably not even in the cards for small players, where gas or diesel is a better option all around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I love it when your investors are also your biggest customers, they know if they get your revenue numbers they can flip the shares at a massive multiple of those revenue numbers. Its like guaranteeing a 10x

And the founders get paid twice or thrice!

</comment><comment><USER40> I've never heard of Rivian before and had to look it up: it's an American automaker founded in 2009.

</comment><comment><USER41> The larger story here is that the ev revolution, after decades of hopes and slow progress, is finally taking off.

</comment><comment><USER42> Never heard from Rivian before. I'd have expected Tesla to get that contract, but I guess if Amazon invested in Rivian it makes sense to order 100k vehicules and make sure that company is successful to get a huge return.

<comment><USER43> It is highly likely the investment was because Rivian is the company Amazon decided long ago to order from, not that Amazon is ordering from them because they invested.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Did Amazon announce they'd also help Rivian in AI / self-driving ? This is an area of expertise where Tesla is years ahead of Rivian by I'm thinking if Rivian gets Amazing engineering help, they will catch up sooner

</comment><comment><USER45> Are they including the carbon footprints of their employees and all products including of their vendors? And if not, how meaningful is it?

> The commerce giant will seek to meet its goal of becoming carbon-neutral by > 2040

<comment><USER46> Their employees would still exist if they didn't; they're not cloning them somewhere. And people would still buy stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> What is the article referring to when it cites an "increase in climate change" and says that it's been more aggressive than predicted?

</comment><comment><USER48> Did they order those through Amazon.com?

</comment><comment><USER49> The US government could do something similar if we wanted to force a global change

</comment><comment><USER50> This seems like it is a great idea for Amazon, regardless of whether this deal works out for them. If Rivian manages to build and ship these cars on schedule at the expected cost, that would of course be a great outcome for Amazon. But it's not actually necessary for the overall strategy to work for Amazon.

Suppose that does not happen? Their goal with this is simply to shift the fleet of vans they rely on today to electric to reduce cost. Currently most of that is third party operated and diesel powered. The cost of that diesel is a big component of the delivery cost for Amazon. Besides, lots of cities relevant to Amazon are currently considering diesel bans/restrictions. So they have a solid motive for wanting to address that.

The mission of these delivery vans is very simple. They do nothing else than drive to and from Amazon's massive distribution centers to pick up loads of packages and distribute them in the area. I don't have numbers here but I imagine the vast majority of these trips are well below 150 miles.

So, the mission for an electric delivery van would be to drive these routes and charge quickly in between from a preferably cheap power source. It so happens that these distribution centers are huge and vans have to stop there to take new packages on board; which represents a great opportunity to plug in.

Huge distribution center here means lots of room for a couple of mega watts worth of solar panels on the roof to power a couple of tens of charging points. The resulting power can be delivered to super chargers at the loading docks and the vans can probably suck up enough power while they are loading to cover the next round. And of course, using solar power probably gets Amazon access to some nice subsidies and grants as well as lots of great PR about how green they are.

Why partner with Rivian for this? Well, Amazon is faced with a market where the existing manufactuers are dragging their heels a bit. There are some electrical vans on the market but not quite at the scale needed and most of the big manufacturers are not shipping them in meaningful volume yet. Nothing like a Tesla like small startup to shake that up a little. Best case Rivian actually delivers. Worst case Amazon just buys electric vans from somebody else (whomever steps up). Also, they just put all the third party delivery companies on notice that Amazon wants to go electric. They too would need to charge these vans and I bet they can do that on favorable terms at Amazon's chargers in Amazon's distribution centers. Yep, they'd be buying electricity from Amazon to deliver for Amazon. Either way, the vans become electric and Amazon has a need for charging infrastructure.

Best case of course this works out for Rivian as intended and Amazon gets a nice return on investment. From their point of view, they already have a great drive train for a ridiculously overpowered pickup truck and they are already building production capacity for that. Delivery vans don't need four wheel drive and probably also don't really need 400 miles of range. Meaning, a smaller variant of the drive train but with the fast charging capability would be perfect for one of these vans. Bonus points for making them capable of autonomous driving; which is something Rivian is investing in.

Finally, why 100K? Very simple. Amazon has hundreds of distribution centers serviced by hundreds of vans. If you want to electrify all/most of them you'd need about 100K vans. Ten years is reasonable timeline to electrify the delivery fleet one way or another.

</comment><comment><USER51> whats the carbon footprint of producing a single van?

<comment><USER52> The more correct question is:

Liftime EV-Van Footprint = Production-Footprint(EV-Van) + Operational- Footprint(EV-Van, lifetime-miles-driven)

vs

Lifetime ICE-Van Footprint = Production-Footprint(ICE-Van) + Operational- Footprint(ICE-Van, lifetime-miles-driven)

This calculation overwhelmingly favors the EV van, increasingly so as the carbon footprint of the operational electricity source itself reduces in footprint (i.e. increasing use of solar, window, nuclear, etc). Delivery vans in particular have a charging profile (late evening through morning) that matches the peak production of wind.

Note that the carbon footprint of petroleum use is strictly higher than even the highest carbon sources of electricity, and it has a high extraction cost also.

<comment><USER53> I think it's clear the lifecycle calculation favors the EV, but I don't think it's night and day[1]. Likely the emissions associated with the manufacture of the ICE and EV vans are similar (the batteries in the EV may even make it a little worse). But there's no doubt that the EV is a huge improvement in use, and switching a large portion of the trucks in our cities to EV would be giant win for air quality. As you say, electricity generation can continue to get greener as well, unlike gas production...

1: [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/green-living- blog/20...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/green-living- blog/2010/sep/23/carbon-footprint-new-car)

<comment><USER54> As I write this I'm on the 521 bus in central London. This bus is battery electric powered. I didn't even realise it was possible until I got on one.

The difference in noise alone is unbelievable. The elimitation of tailpipe emissions is a huge bonus in a dence city centre. Even if the lifecycle emissions are the same it would still be worth it.

The only thing I don't like about them is the torque and instant reaction of the motor make it easy for inconsiderate bus drivers to make the ride quite unpleasant.

It's one of these if you are interested:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Dennis_Enviro200_M...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Dennis_Enviro200_MMC)

<comment><USER55> >The only thing I don't like about them is the torque and instant reaction of the motor make it easy for inconsiderate bus drivers to make the ride quite unpleasant.

Seems easy enough to solve this with a fly-by-wire "throttle" and some software to limit max acceleration from a stop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Am I the only one who noticed multiple spelling errors in the article. "whine" instead of "when", "revelled" instead of "revealed" :(

</comment><comment><USER57> As far as I'm concerned, this move is pure greenwashing until Amazon stops collaborating with oil and gas companies to extract fossil fuels faster.

[https://aws.amazon.com/oil-and-gas/](https://aws.amazon.com/oil-and-gas/)

<comment><USER58> The sooner Amazon helps get all of the oil and gas out of the ground, the sooner we'll be forced to adopt electric cars.

<comment><USER59> Unfortunately, we cannot afford to pull all of the fossil fuels out of the ground.

There are trillions of barrels of unconventional oil shale (confusingly, not the same as shale oil) in the Green River formation in Wyoming/Colorado alone. If it was all extracted and burned and put into the atmosphere (assuming none makes it as ocean acidification, etc), it'd raise the CO2 level from the current 400ppm (about 3 trillion tons of CO2 in the atmosphere right now) to 500ppm. Just a single formation.

And there's 5 trillion tons of coal in Alaska, equivalent to about 15 trillion tons of CO2. Even if just half of that made it into the atmosphere (the other half going to ocean acidification, weathering, and biomass), we'd have something like 1400ppm in the atmosphere, which is a very stuffy room. And that's just one state. Assume Siberia and Canada has just as much or more.

I think if we extracted every last bit of fossil fuels in the ground, we'd have a CO2 level on the order of 10,000ppm and will have measurably reduced oxygen levels as well.

<comment><USER60> > And there's 5 trillion tons of coal in Alaska

Say what? There is only 909 billion tonnes of proven coal reserves in the entire world: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_by_country](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_by_country)

<comment><USER59> Right. Only about 1 trillion in _proven_ _reserves_ , a number which often increases over time due to technology and economics and exploration.

I was discussing how much actual coal is there. Coal _resources_ , which is a (relatively) fixed number.

The fellow I was responding to was talking about extracting all the oil and gas from the ground (not just that which is today known with high certainty and both technically and economically viable).

For instance, look at this graph of US proved oil reserves. It has climbed for most of the last 100 years and peaked in 1970 at about 39 billion barrels, declined and has started rising again: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_reserves_in_the_United_Sta...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_reserves_in_the_United_States#/media/File:US_Proved_Crude_Oil_Reserves.svg) ...but that data only goes until 2012. The reserves have kept climbing, and as of 2017 have now equalled their peak of 39 billion barrels: [https://www.eia.gov/naturalgas/crudeoilreserves/pdf/table_1....](https://www.eia.gov/naturalgas/crudeoilreserves/pdf/table_1.pdf)

In other words, technology and economics has improved access to fossil fuels faster than we can burn it.

But it's not like there was a bunch of oil added into the ground. It was there the whole time. Hence why I'm using _resources_ : It's the ultimate limit.

We cannot rely on Peak Oil (or Peak Coal for that matter) to stop our reliance on fossil fuels and the ensuing climate change. We just keep getting better and better at extracting them. Trends in automation of mining do not bode well for the climate, either.

<comment><USER60> > Right. Only about 1 trillion in proven reserves, a number which often > increases over time due to technology and economics and exploration.

I get that, but you are claiming that the unproven reserves of one portion of the US are more than five times the current proven reserves of the entire world. Where is your evidence for that?

> We cannot rely on Peak Oil (or Peak Coal for that matter) to stop our > reliance on fossil fuels and the ensuing climate change.

No, we need to stop burning them. That is unrelated to _extracting_ them except for extraction being the first step in the process.

<comment><USER59> Sorry for not providing the citation right away. Here's the evidence (with discussion and links to source studies) for trillions of tons of coal in Alaska: [http://www.groundtruthtrekking.org/Issues/AlaskaCoal/HowMuch...](http://www.groundtruthtrekking.org/Issues/AlaskaCoal/HowMuchCoal.html)

In particular, it links to this 2005 USGS study: [https://pubs.usgs.gov/dds/dds-077/](https://pubs.usgs.gov/dds/dds-077/)

> "The combined measured, indicated, inferred, and hypothetical coal resources > in the three areas are estimated to be 5,526 billion short tons ( _5,012 > billion metric tons_ ), which constitutes about 87 percent of Alaska's coal"

The amount of fossil fuel energy in the ground (if we're very clever about extracting it) is absolutely vast. Enough to provide current needs for hundreds or even thousands of years, but to cook the climate and chemically change the atmosphere to that of a stuffy room long before that.

<comment><USER61> We're just changing climate back to what is was way before us. Current state was created by the organisms who went into the ground. Our turn now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> There is so much pollution that goes into making those vehicles, and all the waste from the batteries that need to be recycled every 8~10 years. This makes no sense from an environment perspective. You're better off buying older vans, that aren't so old they aren't inefficient, and just keep running those.

Plus you're talking about more growth and selling more products, which is just more waste.

We can't buy ourselves out of environmental disaster. We can't keep consuming. This feels like lipservices because for us to not destroy our planet, we actually need to buy fewer goods, that are more durable/fixable, even if they cost more. It's the opposite of what ever retailer big and small wants.

<comment><USER63> Batteries don't have to be recycled every 8-10 years, nowhere near. If you keep them within temperature and leave a safety margin they'll outlast the car. There's already plenty of data for Tesla batteries lasting hundreds of thousands of miles without significant degradation. Look after Lithium Ion batteries and they're good for 1500 cycles, that's 300k miles for a 200 mile car, 450k miles for a 300 mile car.

<comment><USER64> >they're good for 1500 cycles, that's 300k miles for a 200 mile car, 450k miles for a 300 mile car

These aren't average cars, they're delivery vehicles meant to be driving rather a lot. Just ball parking here, but 100 miles per day, 6 days a week, 50 weeks a year is 300k miles in 10 years. 8-10 years doesn't seem that off the mark given your numbers.

<comment><USER63> In the special case of delivery vehicles that applies. But the high mileage also means a phenomenal reduction in carbon emissions and pollution over those 300k miles.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Steven Sinofsky – Apple's Software "Problem" and "Fixing" It (via Twitter) - <AUTHOR> https://medium.learningbyshipping.com/apples-software-problem-and-fixing-it-via-twitter-c941a905ba20 <comment><USER2> Please, please don't try to make a reasoned argument using Twitter. There lies insanity. Instead, write a blog post or record a podcast.</comment>