Flint, MI: So much lead in children's blood, state of emergency declared - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/12/15/toxic-water-soaring-lead-levels-in-childrens-blood-create-state-of-emergency-in-flint-mich/ <comment><USER2> I'm glad to see this on HN. Flint is often a forgot about place in the world. I grew up there and now live outside of Flint. My dad was murdered there.

But I always think Flint is prime for opportunity. The people need basic essentials, water, food, shelter. But the infrastructure to build factories is there. Power, train lines, the whole deal. It's really a shame. The sad part is, the people are still hell bent on supporting the companies that destroyed the town. Michigan in general is like this, its why they don't allow Tesla vehicle sales.

Growing up my family owned a junkyard and the Flint river ran behind it. It was disgusting. Some of the guys would wade through it on their way two and from work. It was a shortcut, but you had to be a true animal to go that route.

<comment><USER3> I wanted to see what Flint looks like, so I dropped the little yellow streetview guy randomly. I ended up on Asylum Street (!). I'm at a loss for words:

[https://goo.gl/maps/UuPPKQK5MoF2](https://goo.gl/maps/UuPPKQK5MoF2)

[https://goo.gl/maps/KunFSxxRFWA2](https://goo.gl/maps/KunFSxxRFWA2)

[https://goo.gl/maps/yg1NH6ZMkFJ2](https://goo.gl/maps/yg1NH6ZMkFJ2)

[https://goo.gl/maps/xVi2n8muHV32](https://goo.gl/maps/xVi2n8muHV32)

[https://goo.gl/maps/pAQEyZSAEw92](https://goo.gl/maps/pAQEyZSAEw92)

[https://goo.gl/maps/ssGZRAdiQak](https://goo.gl/maps/ssGZRAdiQak) (memorial garden?)

[https://goo.gl/maps/B2waNiVfeut](https://goo.gl/maps/B2waNiVfeut)

[https://goo.gl/maps/8Wx2gQ6z8up](https://goo.gl/maps/8Wx2gQ6z8up)

[https://goo.gl/maps/nAY5Kb73PkM2](https://goo.gl/maps/nAY5Kb73PkM2)

[https://goo.gl/maps/kTqzqGXQqmF2](https://goo.gl/maps/kTqzqGXQqmF2)

[https://goo.gl/maps/xWkvXRdACWR2](https://goo.gl/maps/xWkvXRdACWR2)

As a Swede, I guess I didn't really realize how bad things really got in parts of the US. The last 50 years is just one crisis after another for this place: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flint%2C_Michigan#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flint%2C_Michigan#History)

To me, there's something really heartbreaking about abandoned and decaying houses. It's all too easy to imagine the hopes and dreams that didn't play out they way they should have.

<comment><USER4> >I'm at a loss for words:

Why are you are a loss for words? This doesn't look significantly different from the town I grew up in (well near). I feel like I'm missing something.

<comment><USER5> In [https://goo.gl/maps/pAQEyZSAEw92](https://goo.gl/maps/pAQEyZSAEw92), the first one I clicked, there is decay and overgrowth everywhere.

The death of the city's economy is completely evident in that view alone...

<comment><USER6> Because a building burned down? It would be nice if they fenced it off, so it shows a lack of resources, but I'm not sure that view really indicates what you say it does.

<comment><USER5> Maybe that's normal looking in the rust belt, but it's unfamiliar looking to me as well. (Can't speak for the Swede, but I suspect they're surprised for similar reasons)

There is:

1) A burned down building (which has been in that state for some time)

2) Boarded up storefronts

3) Plants growing over the unused fences, which themselves are starting to fall over

4) The lots behind the fences look to have been empty for decades

5) Visibly aging concrete

6) Crumbling sidewalks with plants coming up between the tiles

7) at least 3 of the 5 vehicles are from no newer than ~1998

Combine that with the overcast weather, and the bleak color palette of the remaining buildings, and it looks pretty depressing. :(

Maybe it's not representative: maybe on a sunnier day, the greenery would make it look lush and liveable, but as it stands it's definitely an unfortunate looking Street View, that one...

<comment><USER6> I'm not saying it doesn't show signs of a neglected area, I just think you're reading too much into certain aspects which may be explained through the area in which the picture was taken.

I'm not sure how long the building has been in that state, but I would imagine less than a year from the vegetation, but that's hard to judge if it all dies in winter. Then again, vegetation usually grows very quickly in those areas. That said, small municipalities move slower, they have less leeway in the budget to deal with unforeseen circumstances.

A lot of what you're stated seems to indicate that you see the open areas here as a sign of neglect or failure. Often in rural areas, building are much more spread out unless they are are towards the town center. There's no reason to build next to someone if you can have a lot or two between you and them. As a city expands, these are naturally filled in as sparse building pushes farther out from the town center and some people don't want to be that far out.

As for the sidewalks and concrete, areas with wet winters that continually fluctuate between freezing and non-freezing temperatures are particularly bad on brick and concrete buildings. The continual expansion of the water when it turns into ice and back into water quickly destroys concrete in these areas. Michigan is known to be particularly bad.

In truth, looking down GlenWood Ave from that picture looks fairly pleasant to me. This could easily be a few hundred feet in either of the towns my parents are from in rural Wisconsin, and much of those towns looks fairly pleasant, if extremely spread out, to my eyes.

For comparison, here's another random spot I found by just choosing a place in google maps and zooming in[1]. Every town has some run-down areas if it's old enough, but having a run-down area doesn't necessarily mean the economy is dead (but I'm not disputing that the economy is likely bad, just that the picture is more indicative of an area than a situation).

1: [https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-83.6795166,3a,75y,1...](https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-83.6795166,3a,75y,131.39h,82.09t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s_NmqxHmgj0Cj7koki6br_Q!2e0!7i13312!8i6656)

<comment><USER5> I could absolutely be wrong about some of those! As I said, I'm not familiar with the Rust Belt. My view is almost exclusively superficial.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The one thing I don't see is the lead levels of the water supply. Doesn't the EPA have limits on that and isn't it an easy thing to test?

It is true that different water supplies will have different levels of contaminants (lead, arsenic, etc) but can all be within EPA limits. Switching to a water supply with a higher level of contamination will increase exposure. The medical study seems to look at the percentage of children below 5g/dL before and after the switch. It goes from 2% to 4%. So with the old water supply, a certain percentage of children were already being exposed to elevated levels of lead. Switching to a water source with higher lead levels will push more children who are being exposed to lead through other sources to above the 5g/dL mark. However, this would seem to indicate that the primary source of lead for these children above 5g/dL is something other than the water.

<comment><USER7> Hmm...reading further the problem doesn't seem to be one handled well by EPA standards. The new water supply is more corrosive than the old water supply, so in poorer neighborhoods with lead piping, more lead (sometimes significantly) is being leeched from the pipes than before.

<comment><USER8> Why are they using lead pipes? I understand that they may have a legacy system put in place before the dangers of lead were fully understood, but when your water distribution system is literally made of poison, I don't understand how replacing it could be back-burnered.

<comment><USER9> In theory, you are right. In practice, replacement of legacy lead pipes is more complex.

Briefly: replacing only some of the pipes can cause lead levels to increase due to (1) disturbance of nearby lead pipes during replacement; (2) ongoing galvanic effects near the replacement; (3) interfaces between the utility's new lead-free lines and a customer's old lead lines, if the customer does not choose to replace at the same time the utility does.

Point (3) is especially troublesome. Even if the utility replaces all its lead pipes, things could get much worse for customers that don't follow suit right away.

For (much) more: [http://investigativereportingworkshop.org/investigations/tox...](http://investigativereportingworkshop.org/investigations/toxic- taps/story/toxic-taps-lead-is-still-the-problem/)

All these issues are just about pipe replacement, as distinct from higher lead levels due to pH changes or use of chloramines rather than chlorine (which was a surprise, see [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1817707/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1817707/)).

<comment><USER8> Thanks, this was really informative. Makes me glad I live in California.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> So Flint has failed to govern itself - hardly the first time - and now children are poisoned. The city apparently now expects the rest of the country to pick up the tab for the cleanup of their mess.

At some point it should become necessary to recognize and acknowledge that self-government has failed and must end. I'd suggest some form of a city death penalty - declare the city dead and give the locals a one-time offer of relocation assistance to an approved list of better places. The city government, and anyone who remains, are officially on their own.

We've known Flint (and many similar cities) are doomed for decades. Why do we keep them alive as zombies rather than just help the humans and let the municipalities die?

<comment><USER11> The country _will_ pick up the tab for Flint, because that is how the country works. The expectation that Michigan and then the federal government will provide assistance isn't something Flint invented: it's part of the deal.

 _Not enough_ money flows to places like Flint. Michigan just barely ekes out a return on dollars remitted to the IRS; they're in the bottom quartile of benecifiaries. Meanwhile, for every $1 a Floridian pays in taxes, they receive $4.50.

The historical reason Michigan is such a low drag on the USG has a lot to do with the businesses Flint enabled.

This is such a straightforward point to make, and so easily Googlable, that I feel like you have to have known it already. Some of your acerbic comments are interesting because they bring a perspective to these discussions that I (for one) wouldn't think to consider. This was not one of those comments.

<comment><USER10> Reread what I wrote. I didn't suggest we shouldn't help the _humans_ in Flint. I suggested we should do so in a way that solves the problem _for the humans_ once and for all.

The comparison to Florida is silly. Florida gets a lot of money that a) is for the national good (naval bases) and b) follows humans around (SS/medicare). The fact that humans work in NY and retire to Florida doesn't mean that we somehow owe Flint an infinite stream of subsidies.

I do oppose the variety of unfair subsidies that Florida does get, e.g. bailouts after hurricanes predictably destroy cheaply made houses.

<comment><USER11> No, once again, Florida's figure does not come from military spending.

<comment><USER10> I don't know where you are getting the data. Google suggests to me that Florida gets $2.02 per dollar invested.

[https://wallethub.com/edu/states-most-least-dependent-on- the...](https://wallethub.com/edu/states-most-least-dependent-on-the-federal- government/2700/#methodology)

In any case, the specific source of federal largess to Florida is not relevant to my main point. Namely, help the humans rather than the municipality.

In much the same way, if it were a for-profit corporation that was failing horribly, I'd suggest giving the former human workers limited assistance designed to get them back into the workforce and letting the corporation die. That would be true even if other corporations get corporate welfare (which I also oppose).

Since you seem to favor the municipality over the humans, one might ask why?

To avoid status quo bias, lets ask why we shouldn't shift other programs to favor municipalities over humans, e.g. social security goes to the state where work was performed rather than the individual human who did the work?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Through continued demonstrations by Flint residents and mounting scientific > evidence of the water's toxins, city and state officials offered various > solutions — from asking residents to boil their water to providing them with > water filters — in an attempt to work around the need to reconnect to the > Detroit system.

Can you boil lead out of water, or does it just become more concentrated?

<comment><USER13> Distillation would essentially be doing the reverse, "boiling the water out of the lead", and that would work. But no amount of boiling in a open pot is going to remove lead from your water.

It's hard to tell from the article, but the reference to boiling water might have been in response to the other issue mentioned, trihalomethanes in the water. As dissolved gases, boiling should help drive them out.

(side note: a trihalomethane is more commonly referred to as a haloform, which is the family chloroform comes from)

<comment><USER14> Yup. Distillation should remove any heavy metal elements. It's not ideal to consume long term, as it removes most useful minerals and results in a hydrogen-heavy/acidic water, but it's certainly far better than consuming lead.

<comment><USER13> When you say that boiling results in acidic water, are you referring to the fact that pH-neutral water would be slightly more acidic than your (slightly basic) blood, or is this about dissolved CO2 or something else entirely?

<comment><USER14> It's due to absorbing C02 from the air whilst in gaseous form, which is then subsequently absorbed into the blood stream after consumption.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I just took a look at the Map of Michigan. I realized after zooming into Flint to try to understand where the water was coming from that Michigan has many, many bodies of water scattered all around the place. Plus they are right next to the world's biggest lakes.

And yet they never took care of their water supply? The one state with so much fresh water has little regulation on keeping water protected.

I keep wondering why its been prophecied that the world in the end will wage war over water, not oil. And now I am beginning to understand.

<comment><USER16> They are constructing a supply that will tap Lake Huron.

Lakes Superior, Michigan and Huron are not especially polluted. The little inland lakes vary, but they end up having a lot of trouble with residential inputs (fertilizer runoff and (historically) sewage).

<comment><USER17> They already had a supply from Huron before. They disconnected from it about a year ago. Now they are hooked back up to Huron but much of the damage has already been done.

<comment><USER16> They switched away from and back to Detroit as a water supplier. The switch to drawing water from Huron is in progress:

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> What institutional failure led to this? It seems like this has been a long time coming. Why has the leadership of the area allowed this to happen?

<comment><USER19> Flint's basically bankrupt and the state wants to delay the inevitable, so they installed an "emergency manager" with all the powers of mayor+city council (but accountable only to the governor). The emergency manager wanted to save money by using a local source of water instead of paying Detroit for water. The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality basically knew that the water was so acidic that it would eat through the biofilm on the pipes and start leeching lead (and discussed as much in emails), and gave incorrect advice on measurements to the city to try and hide the problem.

[http://www.eclectablog.com/2015/10/interview-flint-mayor- day...](http://www.eclectablog.com/2015/10/interview-flint-mayor-dayne- walling-talks-about-flints-water-crisis-emergency-managers-and-the-state- government.html)

[http://michiganradio.org/post/whos-blame-flints-water- crisis...](http://michiganradio.org/post/whos-blame-flints-water-crisis- virginia-tech-researcher-points-finger-mdeq)

[http://www.mlive.com/news/flint/index.ssf/2015/10/emails_sho...](http://www.mlive.com/news/flint/index.ssf/2015/10/emails_show_feds_told_state_of.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The fact that this kind of isse will generate publicity after just a year, and that citizens will actually care enough to fight for their rights, and that mayor will feel fallout because of that — it makes me feel so jealous of US.

Americans that cry about how the system "doesn't work" really don't have a clue about how this would turn out in other countries.

<comment><USER21> If the system truly worked, there would be no children with lead poisoning in the first place. That there are places on earth where things are worse doesn't change that.

<comment><USER20> I think that we can agree that the extent to which the system "works" is not a boolean value.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> If you are interested in a detailed breakdown of everything that's been happening over the past year or so, I would suggest reading Michigan Radio's excellent coverage: [http://michiganradio.org/term/flint- water](http://michiganradio.org/term/flint-water)

Full disclosure: my wife works as a reporter Michigan Radio, but generally doesn't cover Flint.

</comment><comment><USER23> I've been trying to understand what the heck happened, since pH management has been standard part of water treatment forever. I mean did they not bother to consult with any water supply engineers first?

It all looks like a game between Emergency Managers appointed by the governor to see who can save the most money fastest.

[http://www.freep.com/story/news/politics/2015/10/24/emergenc...](http://www.freep.com/story/news/politics/2015/10/24/emergency- manager-law-blame-flint-water-crisis/74048854/)

</comment><comment><USER24> Someday Silicon Valley may be left in the same disarray and disrepair. Jobs can be outsourced and bright people lured away to work on new things.

<comment><USER19> Tech is somewhat harder to automate than manufacturing, at least.

Silicon Valley also has a bunch of top-shelf universities nearby, which are a massive boost to local economies. The University of Michigan similarly boosts Ann Arbor's economy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This story has been building up and up for a while now, Michigan Radio has several stories/reports/etc.

[http://michiganradio.org/term/flint- water#stream/0](http://michiganradio.org/term/flint-water#stream/0)

</comment><comment><USER26> Was looking at a map of Flint and noticed that the City of Flint Water Plant is _right next to_ three metal scrap yards.

[https://www.google.com/maps/place/43%C2%B003'25.2%22N+83%C2%...](https://firstname.lastname@example.com,-83.6729557,751m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1!4m2!3m1!1s0x0:0x0)

<comment><USER19> It's more that Flint is an industrial town and Dow has been polluting the river for 120 years.

It's also not direct pollution per se, it's that the river is so polluted that it's crazy acidic and it's corroding lead out of the pipes. A compounding factor is that it's got all kinds of funky bacteria stuff going on, which can also accelerate the corrosion process.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> What led to this particular situation was apparently rate hikes in the Detroit water system, which caused Flint to switch to using the Flint river as their water source last year. Beyond that, water systems all over the country are in bad shape. Because water rates are subject to public control, they are far too low and there is a huge under-investment in water systems:[http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/a/#p/drinking- water/...](http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/a/#p/drinking- water/overview)

<comment><USER28> Subtly attempts to frame the issue as public controlled water.

A counterpoint might be that the companies with a vested interest in privitising water supplies have lobbied to choke out the public systems of funding.

Perhaps instead of cutting deplorable tax breaks for big business, it would be more prudent to augment the public funds to prevent your citizens from getting lead poisoning?

[http://www.theguardian.com/global- development/2015/jan/30/wa...](http://www.theguardian.com/global- development/2015/jan/30/water-privatisation-worldwide-failure-lagos-world- bank)

<comment><USER27> What big businesses are you talking about? Water in almost every U.S. city is provided by a municipal utility. E.g. in Flint, it's the Utilities Department: [https://www.cityofflint.com/public-works/water-service- cente...](https://www.cityofflint.com/public-works/water-service-center). Water rates are set by the city, and are just too low to cover modernization of the systems. Both the ASCE and the EPA have reported that investment in water systems is a fraction of what is required: [http://geospatial.blogs.com/geospatial/2011/12/asce- report-o...](http://geospatial.blogs.com/geospatial/2011/12/asce-report-on- the-impact-of-under-investment-in-water-infrastructure-in-the-us-.html).

<comment><USER29> Here's a big water utility company: [http://www.amwater.com/about-us/our- states.html](http://www.amwater.com/about-us/our-states.html)

It's pretty common for water supply to be treated as a utility, with municipal monopolies provided - like cable or electricity.

<comment><USER27> Only 15% of water utilities are private companies: [http://www.waterencyclopedia.com/Po-Re/Privatization-of- Wate...](http://www.waterencyclopedia.com/Po-Re/Privatization-of-Water- Management.html). And even, it's usually an arrangement where the city contracts with a private company to operate its water system. The companies don't own the system and prices are set by the municipalities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The article failed to explain how the river got so toxic in the first place.

<comment><USER31> Problem is the pipes, not the river per se. When they switched water, they didn't add an anti corrosive agent:

[http://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2015/11/13/af...](http://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2015/11/13/after- flint-water-crisis-families-file-lawsuit/75744376/)

<comment><USER32> >> Problem is the pipes, not the river per se. When they switched water, they didn't add an anti corrosive agent

Which means there is now corrosion in a lot of old lead pipes, which means the lead will continue to get into the water for a while. IIRC at least a few months after they switched back and possibly longer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> So... Flint is the new libertarian dreamland where no regulation exists?

</comment><comment><USER34> Hmm, so in addition to their existing problems with acute lead poisoning, they now have to deal with chronic lead poisoning.

</comment><comment><USER35> Does anyone know the extent that the surrounding townships would be impacted by this? My parents live just outside of Flint, but the article only mentions that Flint is impacted.

<comment><USER16> They could be. They should know if they buy water from Flint or not. If they don't buy water from Flint, without having looked into it, I would not expect the same pollution in ground water and the river.

It also seems to be the case that the lead is coming from residential pipes:

[http://www.michigan.gov/documents/deq/deq-spotlight- Flint_wa...](http://www.michigan.gov/documents/deq/deq-spotlight- Flint_water_FAQs_500946_7.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> If what they say about lead levels decreasing IQ is true not there is not much left for Flint to do.

</comment><comment><USER37> So in ten years time someone is going to kill someone and blame it on the lead he was poisoned with when he was a kid. What would the just result be in such a case?

<comment><USER38> No sweat off the backs of the officials responsible for this disaster.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I particularly like the comments to that article stating that only "liberals" believe the water supply is heaving with lead. The ridiculous political bun- fight infects everything, it seems. It's a mental disease.

<comment><USER40> The toxicity of lead is actually a longstanding political argument in the US. Lobbying against lead regulation was one of the original motivations for the development of modern american libertarianism. Even fairly recently libertarian organisations like the Cato Institute have been fighting against regulation of lead and against compensation for those poisoned.

When the topic of lead comes up on HN you often get comments arguing that it isn't really as toxic as claimed.

<comment><USER41> But... to argue lead is nontoxic is counterfactual!

<comment><USER42> Oh, definitely.

But being able to argue it isn't toxic enough to necessitate a change in behavior is what makes a politician's career. Everything is toxic in the right quantity. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Why should the Michigan state government care about this? Flint is a bunch of liberals, and the State government is Republican.

The Snyder administration will certainly pay a heavy price for "giving free handouts" to the Democrats in Flint, all to remedy a problem that many Republicans don't believe exists.

EDIT: wording

<comment><USER44> What is more toxic: Flint's water or this comment?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Can I have this HN feature for Christmas? - <AUTHOR>

I love Hacker News. It quickly became my #1 favorite site in 2010. But, I really hate that stories don't open in a new tab. I click on a link to read a story, then close the tab when I'm done--forgetting Hacker News is click back. This leaves me having to open a new tab to come back to HN. This happens a few times a day. It's just not good.
Hacker News, can you make offsite links open in a new tabs? Please? <comment><USER2> I generally hate having sites "decide" this for me. This is almost certainly a personal preference.

When I use Atomic on the iPad I set it to open off-site links in new tabs. Yet on my desktop, I never do. This is a setting in various browsers.

</comment><comment><USER3> Ctrl-click or Command-click is the answer.

<comment><AUTHOR> It is _an_ answer. It interrupts my experience when I forget to Command-click and close the tab on accident.

<comment><USER4> In this case, I think it's _the_ answer. Your request goes against the grain of what most people would tend to prefer: links act as they were designed to, user modifies behavior by choice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> When you click a link, it opens in the current tab.

When you middle-click a link, it opens in a new tab (in the background).

I HATE sites that go against this, and decide for me where to open the link. Especially since Chrome has an outstanding bug where middle-clicking links with target attributes opens then in a new _foreground_ tab. So annoying.

</comment><comment><USER6> I agree with others that this doesn't make sense to become a default. However, it doesn't mean that's your only option. <http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/57563> looks like it might do the trick (although I haven't tried it). If not, it shouldn't be too difficult to create your own GreaseMonkey script and solve your problem.

</comment><comment><USER7> here I thought you were going to ask for higher contrast text in the Ask HN: posts. :)</comment>


Laws of physics applied to software development… - <AUTHOR> http://www.sep.com/mcterry/2011/11/20/overcoming-momentum-laws-of-physics-applied-to-software-development/

<comment><AUTHOR> Great comment by someone named Morgan about inertia... [http://www.sep.com/mcterry/2011/11/20/overcoming-momentum- la...](http://www.sep.com/mcterry/2011/11/20/overcoming-momentum-laws-of- physics-applied-to-software-development/comment-page-1/#comment-65)</comment>


What security measures do hackers use - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/Hacking-computer-security/What-security-measures-do-hackers-use-to-keep-their-online-interactions-and-computers-secure

<comment><USER2> BSD & linux.</comment>


5 Tips If You Want to Learn to Code - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@NateAndorsky/do-you-want-to-learn-to-code-here-are-my-5-tips-ba5bd53ab431#.mlhbppeyp <comment><USER2> Folks who know how to code: is this legit? I have no idea how to do anything, but I've always wanted to learn in order to maybe get into Android development.

Also, are some of the resources provided transferable to Java?</comment>


Ask HN: Using comment box or reply on Twitter for personal blog comment - <AUTHOR>

What will you choose using comment box (disqus, livefyre, etc) or reply on twitter like @necolas's tweet https://twitter.com/necolas/status/418520525216808960 for your personal blog? Please give your reason too.
Roon.io also use it http://drew.roon.io<p>Thanks :) <comment><USER2> I am not sure if I'd want to crowd my twitter timeline with article replies, but I like the idea.</comment>


Muon – A Light(er)weight GPU Based Electron Alternative Using Ultralight and Go - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ImVexed/muon <comment><USER2> 42MB is still a lot.

We went from an Electron app on macOS to a Swift app with WKWebView and it weights 4.2MB. Not a hello world, the complete production app on the Mac App Store.

Although I imagine the performance would be better with Ultralight since it's an optimized version of WebKit.

<comment><USER2> So I asked in the Ultralight Slack and they told me the JS performance is the same with WKWebView. The rendering perf is about the same but they expect it to be better in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Shame about the licensing of ultralight, it makes it a tough sell (unknown pricing) for commercial use.</comment>


HEVC and the No Good Month of January - <AUTHOR> https://streaminglearningcenter.com/other/hevc-terrible-horrible-no-good-bad-month-january.html <comment><USER2> Companies that caused HEVC patent mess had it coming.

So I understand AV1 is great for streaming content when you have a lot of encoder computing resources.

What about other video codec application areas?

Like real-time peer-to-peer low latency streaming (<50 ms codec latency)? Like for remote desktops, remote gaming, video conferencing, etc. What rules the roost in that department?

More specifically, which codec would have the best image quality for low- latency 400-4000 kbit/s (== ~50-500 kB/s) 720p/1080p streaming for different computing resources (like say for these cases: ARM A53, high-end ARM (like phone flagship models), mobile GPU, modern x86 chip and discrete GPU)? h.265 with B-frames disabled? Or something else?

What can achieve the lowest latency while maintaining low bandwidth requirements? (So not including obvious bandwidth-hogging techniques like streaming jpegs or [codec x] I-frames.)

<comment><USER3> Streaming of computer screens is quite different compared to real life footage. UIs contain very shallow gradients (thus you want 10bit+), lots of flat areas which are easy to entropy-encode without any frequency domain quantization at all (so a modern codec that has passthrough blocks) and font rendering engines use subpixel anti-aliasing so you want 4:4:4 chroma. And that annoying effect where image quality refines gradually after large-scale changes on a screen (not enough bits allocated to an I-frame?).

Screencasting is basically quite a different beast compared to live-action or even animation footage. At a minimum you need higher profiles of a modern codec and tweak the encoder settings for low latency AND different bit allocation compared to the usual.

<comment><USER2> > Streaming of computer screens is quite different compared to real life > footage. UIs contain very shallow gradients (thus you want 10bit+), lots of > flat areas which are easy to entropy-encode without any frequency domain > quantization at all...

Well, you can get pretty good results with h.264 without B-frames. Modern composited desktops have caused traditional changed block (RLE, LZ) lossless codecs to perform badly.

> font rendering engines use subpixel anti-aliasing so you want 4:4:4 chroma

I think you can just gradually stream more (chroma) bits to stationary areas containing high detail (frequency) information, like text. In other words, tunable bit allocation between motion and stationary detail.

No matter what, there's no way to know what's the subpixel layout on the receiving end. Luckily Retina/HiDPI displays are increasingly lessening importance of subpixel rendering.

<comment><USER3> The thing is that 4:2:0 chroma is the default in most codecs because the main profiles only support that. You couldn't stream full chroma video on twitch even if you wanted to.

And subsampled chroma looks terrible on colored text, edges between flat colored areas and similar things.[0] So 4:4:4 is a must, only once you have that you can think about adaptive quantization for chroma.

[0] [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1c/420-prog...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1c/420-progressive- still.png)

<comment><USER2> I agree with that, but 4:4:4 also means there's twice as much data.

I think you should be able to get away with using chroma subsampling for moving portions while allocating bits in data stream for stationary areas, without subsampling (by using some heuristics, perhaps.)

Chroma from luma techniques might be interesting in this context. [https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/daala/demo4.shtml](https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/daala/demo4.shtml)

<comment><AUTHOR> Chroma from luma happens to work particularly well for video game content. It's one of the reasons Twitch is interested in using AV1 as soon as possible. Here's a talk by Thomas Daede where he discusses chroma from luma:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKEDf5-2sT4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKEDf5-2sT4)

Slides: [https://people.xiph.org/~tdaede/demuxed_av1_2017.pdf](https://people.xiph.org/~tdaede/demuxed_av1_2017.pdf)

Twitch is also interested in AV1 for its s-frames feature which allows for better compression in low latency live streaming:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5sJX6VA34o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5sJX6VA34o)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeSNW2T7QwE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeSNW2T7QwE)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The referenced blog post by the founder/chairman of MPEG is worth reading.[1] In it, Chiariglione expresses regret not for the money and control his organization is losing, but for the loss of competition which he claims will slow innovation. It will be interesting to see if this comes to pass, but my hope is that the collaboration of these companies will outpace the historically siloed research consisting of a dozen companies duplicating work.

[1] [http://blog.chiariglione.org/a-crisis-the-causes-and-a- solut...](http://blog.chiariglione.org/a-crisis-the-causes-and-a-solution/)

<comment><USER5> The last thing I want to hear is one of computing history's most harmful patent holders complaining about a lack of competition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> HEVC has been such a pain for me. You need to run High Sierra to use it, it's not just a plug in for the mac but a whole operating system change. Then GoPro switched to it and as a moderator for the GoPro subreddit, it has caused so many support questions as to why they can't edit the video they took. Yes there are benefits, but man it's been such a pain.

<comment><USER7> It's funny how it's so seamless on Linux when even on windows you now have to install it separately.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The article mentions that AV1 is slow. I seem to remember that H.264 was painfully slow in the beginning. Is this simply a matter of waiting for hardware to add support for AV1? Or does someone need to sit down at the spinning wheel and write some assembly?

<comment><USER3> Yes, the h.264 and hevc reference implementations are also terribly slow and alternative implementations with performance optimizations, tradeoffs and additional encoding features were developed over long time spans.

The bitstream formats provide enough flexibility for the encoders to go beyond what the reference implementation does.

Software encoders provide the best quality, hardware encoders are kind of meh but do their job in a low power envelope.

<comment><USER9> Well, yes, the reference implementation are, reference implementation. But h.264 and HEVC Ref Encoder and let say X26x encoder were only a difference of 10 - 50 times.

Av1, we are taking about 1000x.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> HEVC is starting to get some usage in pirate distributions. Most TV and Movies are released with H.264 video. But some releases are also coming out in HEVC / x265. The files are typically 1/3 to 1/4 the size for the same visual quality.

</comment><comment><USER11> The pirating community appears to have embraced HEVC however, and they can have a lot of influence in determining which codecs/containers are supported on playback devices like game consoles, phones and tvs.

<comment><USER12> And don't forget the different groups "race" to get their release out first, and get the kudos.

So if one decided to use AV1 with its much longer encode times, they would always lose.

Saving bandwidth isn't usually a concern.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I recently noticed Chrome Canary added a flag to enable AV1, any samples out there?

<comment><USER14> [https://demo.bitmovin.com/public/firefox/av1/](https://demo.bitmovin.com/public/firefox/av1/) has a sample that works in Firefox Nightly.</comment></comment>


Interview buddy to do mock interviews - <AUTHOR> Hi,<p>Looking for people passionate about computer science, to do mock coding interviews.
Long term goal is to work for FAANG and it would be great to practice coding interviews with someone. PM me <comment><USER2> Haven't used them myself, but [https://interviewing.io/](https://interviewing.io/) seems right up your alley.</comment>


20 Years Since John Perry Barlow Declared Cyberspace Independence - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2016/02/its-been-20-years-since-this-man-declared-cyberspace-independence/ <comment><USER2> Every frontier eventually gets integrated into civilization. It's only a matter of time. Civilization brings its laws and its infrastructure and its masses of people. As civilization is bigger than the frontier, the frontiersmen either have to civilize themselves, or move on to another frontier.

The nice thing about the Internet is that it is particularly hard to civilize. It's incredibly hard to wrap laws, which have to be enforced, around information technology. There is always more information than there is people to look at it. So the Internet offers an "endless frontier" of sorts. The Chinese government is famously grappling with this.

Such a thing is not unprecedented, there are plenty of arenas where there is always going to be room for intrepid settlers to voyage to and scrape out an individualistic experience in. Academia is such a place. Doesn't matter how civilized the university gets, there is always room for more people pushing the boundaries of institutionalized knowledge.

We should welcome society into the Internet. Powerful ideas are bigger than even society, so the Internet will forever remain a place where good ideas thrive. It is society that will be changed by the Internet, not the Internet by society. Society will make its settlements, and people fearful of the rough frontier lifestyle will cling to these settlements, but it won't keep them safe from the powerful ideas generated further out.

<comment><USER3> I was always happy to welcome individual people into Internet society, but after offline society swamped us, there really isn't an Internet society anymore, and I miss it.

I'd have struck out for the next frontier years ago if I had any idea where it was.

<comment><USER2> The world has frontiers for days. Everywhere society isn't, is a frontier. Every idea has a fringe of people that are out on the edges of that idea. Bitcoin, weight-lifting, Indian-Mexican fusion cuisine, van-dwelling. All these things have groups of people that operate outside of the norm, who have made sacrifices to exist more strongly in that space.

The Internet has made finding a frontier to settle in easier than ever.

<comment><USER3> Maybe so, but those are little subcultures with small horizons; the future doesn't live there, the way it used to live on the Internet. I'm not just looking for people to hang out with, I'm looking for the next big thing, the next opportunity to help undermine the old power structures and build something better.

<comment><USER2> You can look to history for ideas.

Once the West was won, America needed raw materials to actually build all the infrastructure. Civilization moves slowly, so there was always opportunity to get out ahead of it and strike it rich. Gold mining, oil prospecting, surveying, offered up a continuous range of gradations of closeness to civilization. You could have worked for the railroad or gone out and, say, ranched or prospected on your own.

You can see these elements in today's Internet frontier. The equivalent of prospecting would be making a Bitcoin startup, those who would have preferred a more civilized life working for the railroad might join an established startup.

The American frontier moved from being geographical to being industrial. It's a different kind of culture and different goals. But the stakes of this frontier were even larger, the benefits that came after the West was won had a much greater impact than the Wild West itself ever did.

And so you see the same with the Internet frontier. If you know what to look for, the civilizing process has only begun, there's still lots and lots of money to make and influence to have. But the pioneers time is over. We need those who can actually build something real.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The message is probably one we can all get behind in principle.

However, the internet has a real, physical infrastructure that is definitely owned and operated by behemoth organizations like governments and private corporations. In fact, the Internet was created by a government. What makes you think they'd give it up willingly?

If you want to create your own internet, you certainly can. But even if you find the monetary resources to do so, you'll need to house and operate the telecommunications equipment somewhere on Earth (or in LEO). And if you want to protect that equipment from hostile takeover, then you'll need some form of recognized sovereignty including a real military capable of defending your castle.

Cyberspace cannot (yet) escape the real bounds of physical reality. It seems as though some people think of it as a superset of the world, while it very much is still a subset dependent on its corporeal parent.

<comment><USER5> Think very long distance wireless. It has yet to be invented but I believe one day it will be possible to communicate point-to-point across the globe with low power devices at high bandwidths. Such a technology would make these arguments moot. Certainly we have to be practical about our present situation but the broader idea of cyberspace is not limited to current technology. In 1996 moderates would have laugh if you suggested today's technology would become common place.

<comment><USER6> > low power

> high bandwidth

> high distance

The laws of physics compel you to choose 2.

<comment><USER7> No, that's wrong. It's correct if you add the requirement that you're omnidirectional but if you want to let go of that requirement then low power, high bandwidth and long distance can be there at the same time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Well, that didn't work out.

Back in the 1930s, there was a similar enthusiasm about air travel. Watch H. G. Wells "Things to Come".[1] "Wings over the World", indeed.

There was a repeat of this in the Space Age, ("We came in peace for all mankind") but that didn't last long.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kn76zoYjr4k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kn76zoYjr4k)

<comment><USER9> There is always a lot of enthusiasm about technology that is ultimately tempered by cold hard reality. When I grew up in the 1990's, computers in the classroom were going to change education. But that idea is a farce today. Same thing with space travel, supersonic flight, nuclear power, etc. The landscape is littered with the bones of techno-optimist dreams from the 1980's and 1990's.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's always interesting to see how various companies attempt to go against these ideas and fail. Geoblocking for instance goes against the borderless idea mentioned there. The core of their failure is always the attempt to use physical logic in the digital space. Some just never learn.

</comment><comment><USER11> John Perry Barlow is recovering from a stroke.

Here is at San Francisco's Ocean Beach: [https://twitter.com/JPBarlow/status/692198084265254914](https://twitter.com/JPBarlow/status/692198084265254914)

<comment><USER12> I think he had a heart attack, not a stroke.

<comment><USER11> Sorry, you're right. My mistake.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Wonder who's gonna write this for the Blockchain.

<comment><USER14> Blockchains don't need independence from governments. Blockchains _are_ independence from governments. Blockchains allow individuals to enforce rules on their governments without needing to navigate bureaucracies and legislatures that are already captured by the wealthy and powerful.

Inalienable rights are a powerful concept. It suggests that there can be rights that people aren't using—not because they don't have them, but because they don't _know_ they have them. This was the story of the Enlightenment, and I believe it's the story of blockchains as well.

Blockchains give the people information about their economy that they can use to see the flow of economic power, and they can use this information to decide whose power to submit to. No one can take this right away. Rejecting power used to require a violent revolution. Soon it'll only require an app.

[http://meritcapitalism.com/](http://meritcapitalism.com/)

<comment><USER15> My understanding is that blockchains are designed to ensure that it would be economically irrational to attempt to expend resources competing with the blockchain, creating create a stable equilibrium in which rational participants cooperate.

It might not be worth a scammer's money to buy enough computing power to double-spend, but that doesn't mean a government mightn't find it worthwhile to spend money to tamper with or destroy something it perceives as a threat.

<comment><USER14> Blockchains can be tampered with, but they're tamper-evident. Sure, a government can 51% attack Bitcoin and lower its value. The value of Bitcoin doesn't matter. What matters is the ability to reach consensus on a sequence of events. Such attacks only make that harder temporarily.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I agree with the message in principle and in spirit, but in order to have an open and free internet we've seen that government involvement is fairly necessary. Net neutrality laws and their enforcement are paramount in order to prevent monopolization of content and information, and government cooperation is necessary in order to build the infrastructure necessary to deliver the internet to people's homes.

"You are not welcome among us" sends the wrong message, I think. I would rather they embraced a free and open internet, and were convinced of the value of keeping it so.

<comment><USER17> Well, I think we all recognize now that the original message was a bit, ah, naive. But that's okay! Missions change with the time and as we learn.

<comment><USER5> When you declare what "we all recognize" you are bound to be wrong. I still fully agree with the original naive statement as it was written.</comment></comment></comment>


Where Facebook and Google+ fail - <AUTHOR> http://checkthis.com/itimdi

<comment><USER2> I'm sure you'll face a tremendous amount of naysayers who say it's insanity to attempt to build a new fb, however I've heard some very compelling arguments as to why it might be an inevitability.

Your post is incredibly difficult to read, however, so I barely skimmed it. I would suggest putting it on a shaded transparent background or pretty much anything besides what you have now.

Best of luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I'll change the colors. Much appreciated!</comment></comment>


Ultralight lithium-sulfur batteries for electric airplanes - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/aviation/with-ultralight-lithiumsulfur-batteries-electric-airplanes-could-finally-take-off <comment><USER2> Here's a fun bit: in the article they say that lithium-sulfur is hard to measure charge level for due to the voltage properties of charging and discharging.

"The upshot is that voltage is not a good proxy for the state of charge and, to make things even more complicated, the voltage curve is asymmetrical for charge and for discharge."

Since it would be bad if your battery suddenly died and you dropped out of the sky, they had to develop complex statistical and neural network algorithms to accurately determine state of charge to within a few percent. One black box for staying in the sky and another in case you end up on the ground!

<comment><USER3> Or you could do what they did on Apollo (forget if it was the CM or LM). They had the problem of measuring how much was in a tank, but the tank was in 0G, so a float is no good. The proposed solution was some sophisticated radiation based thing where they measured the attenuation of some radioactive source through the tank. This wound up being highly complex, and the solution was simply to have a reserve tank. When the main tank ran out, you knew you had exactly the amount in the reserve tank.

<comment><USER4> This is the solution used on motorcycles (which don't usually have fuel gauges). There's only one tank, but in the normal position you get fuel only to a certain depth.

As you're riding along, if you notice the engine running out of fuel, you reach down and flip the fuel switch and you have access to a little more fuel (and you know to head to a gas station soonish).

<comment><USER5> Just for correctness: A vast majority of new motorcycles for quite a while have had fuel gauges. There are only a few brands who are obtuse about it (e.g. Aprilia).

<comment><USER6> More like sports bikes don't have fuel gauges (saves weight, amirite?) and make do with low fuel warnings instead, which serves the same purpose as a reserve tank without the need for a switch.

Neither my MV Agusta nor my BMW S1000R have fuel gauges. The BMW does the odometer trick itself though to estimate remaining mileage. It's often way out of course, depending on throttle usage.

(It's possible the BMW has a meter but it doesn't present a level, only miles remaining. I still think it's a style thing - something you don't put on sport bikes.)

<comment><USER7> Pretty sure all the S1000R years have fuel, but yeah it's as miles remaining. S1000RR didn't have anything until 2019.

It never really made any sense, but now that race bikes have tire pressure sensors and full color LCD instruments it is really spectacularly dumb to not have gauges.

Any of the popular crotch rockets have had fuel gauges forever. I think it's mostly just crazy race/rep bikes like BMW and Aprilla (so i guess the guys that only make sport bikes in 300 or 1000+) that don't have gauges

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Oxis recently developed a prototype lithium-sulfur pouch cell that proved > capable of 470 Wh/kg, and we expect to reach 500 Wh/kg within a year.

Meanwhile, gasoline / petrol / benzin (wherever you are in the world) has an energy density of 12200 Wh/kg.

In other words, even in a world where all petroleum is perfectly depleted, we would still be producing synthetic gasoline for high-demand applications and capturing 100% of the emissions for recycling — essentially using gasoline as a battery. It's just too good an energy storage to ignore.

I've been looking at cars and geeking out on internal combustion engines for the past few weeks since I had to buy a car, and for the usual Silicon Valley guy such as yours truly whose standpoint on cars hadn't been much more than 'I want a Tesla', it was an outright revelation.

ICEs are real technology — and for a software guy it is easy to understand because the complexity is bounded by physical dimensions of parts (i.e they don't work past a certain small size) so you literally see human-size machinery with human size movements. It's been a refreshing change from potentially unbounded complexity of software.

<comment><USER9> Electric motors are simpler, more reliable, smaller, lighter, almost perfectly efficient, and have better torque characteristics than ICE.

You can't compare the energy storage density in isolation. Engines are heavy...Model S's motor generates 362 horsepower (according to the official specs), and only weighs 70 pounds...the equivalent ICE would be 500+ :-)

(Yes, the inverter weighs something, but the transmission is much simpler as well for electric...overall you save a few hundred pounds easily...A Model 3 battery pack is between 600 and 1000 pounds--so pretty close to the crossover point.)

<comment><USER10> We're still not at the point where weight savings from motor offsets battery. Tesla cars are all extremely heavy for their size

<comment><USER11> The mass is a problem of you don't t recuperate braking energy. Tesla's do recuperate braking energy. A heavy ICE driven vehicle in contrast just loses braking energy as heat.

Edit: typo

<comment><USER10> Energy recovery from regen is minimal unless you're stuck in stop and go traffic. Usually less than 5%.

<comment><USER12> The argument made wasn't so much about getting more range from regen as about regen lessening the impact of added mass: with perfect regenerative braking, a ten ton vehicle wouldn't use much more energy than a one ton vehicle if they shared the same outer hull.

Real life doesn't have perfect regen, but on the other side of the equation real life ICE cars actually lose more efficiency to added weight than just what is converted to heat while breaking because they tend to compensate worth a bigger engine to get comparable (or better even) acceleration than a lighter counterpart and that means that during cruise where the mass is irrelevant the engine is running at all an even worse load point in terms of efficiency. ICE are terribly inefficient at partial load and when your engine is sized to get decent acceleration despite high total mass you simply can't gear long enough to get the engine to a reasonable load point in a moderate speed cruise. Electric motors don't have this problem (or a much, much smaller version of it), so they wouldn't suffer quite as hard from added mass as ICE even worth no regen at all.

<comment><USER10> > ICE are terribly inefficient at partial load

Yes, but this doesn't happen much anymore. Torque converter, electronic throttle control, variable valves, and 6+ speed gearboxes means the engine is usually near full throttle even if your foot is barely on the gas.

Turbochargers also help, along with cylinder deactivation for some V8s.

Modern engines are nearly always at a relatively efficient load point. This wasn't true until about a decade ago though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Higher energy density makes electric planes a little bit more reasonable, but they'd still be quite range-limited compared to gas. For some use cases, that might be okay.

I'm more interested in how this affects cars. Getting four or five hundred miles out of a battery pack that's lighter than what's in a typical Tesla would be a great thing, especially if it's cheap.

I'm currently working on an electric conversion of a Mazda RX-8. I just bought about 450 pounds of lithium iron phosphate batteries. They're the most expensive component, and provide about 27kwh; maybe enough for 100 miles if I'm lucky. I sort of assumed that in about ten years or so I'll probably replace the whole pack with whatever great new technology can provide more range with less weight, and probably cost less too. It would be wonderful if we had awesome batteries now.

(I considered used tesla modules; they have much better energy density, but they're more dangerous and they wouldn't have fit well in the odd-shaped places I wanted to put them.)

<comment><USER14> Sweet project! How much did the batteries cost? I see this works out to ~130 Wh/kg--did you avoid batteries with higher energy density for cost reasons, or are they just difficult to get?

<comment><USER13> The batteries cost me about six thousand dollars. Lithium iron phosphate is generally recommended for conversions because they're about as safe as you can reasonably expect a battery to be and tolerant of abuse.

Used tesla packs have much higher energy density and are actually reasonably inexpensive, but I couldn't really figure out how to make them work in my setup. They're awkwardly long and don't really fit where I wanted to put them, and need liquid cooling. They're also quite a bit more dangerous if they're damaged or catch on fire, which is unlikely in a vehicle carefully designed to protect them but considerably more likely in conversion. So I went with the simpler, safer option.

LG Chem has some pretty good batteries as well, but I would have needed multiple series groups connected in parallel, which would have required a pretty complicated battery management system to keep everything balanced.

<comment><USER15> I have a largish 20AH 48V LiFePO4 I bought from PingBattery.com ten years ago for powering a dual motor e-bike project. I ended up also using it to power a mobile robot (rover) project, and sometimes used it for emergency power during blackouts.

I went with lithium iron phosphate because it was perceived safer and more durable. Over the past ten years when it wasn't bouncing around inside a rover or e-bike it spent months or years on a shelf when I forgot about it. Most recently I've dusted it back off and use it to power a large shop fan. Because of it's long storage and infrequent charging/balancing the subset of cells that actually power the microcontroller in the BMS were alarmingly low compared to the others, but after a few cycles it seems to have recovered and all but one of the low cells has balanced to the others. The battery still seems to perform well overall.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Everyone is talking energy density but nobody is talking about Urban Air Mobility.

Electric is the name of the game for a VTOL plane that will take you from SFO to downtown or Santa Cruz. They don't have to have all the performance in the world, they just need to have enough performance to do their job.

Also, pilots will appreciate the operating costs and simplicity of these aircraft. Student pilots will love a plane that costs $10/hr instead of $100/hr in the Bay Area. 90 minutes of flight time (1 hour lesson + 30 minute VFR 'fuel' reserve) is all it needs.

Neighbors will appreciate higher torque motors that turn modern props at 1500 RPM instead of 2200 for the noise reduction.

<comment><USER17> How much of a prop plane's noise is from its propeller vs its engine?

<comment><USER18> Depends on the size of the propeller. The main issue is the tip of the propeller breaking the sound barrier. This limits the RPM. Bigger propellers mean more noise at lower RPM. Smaller propellers enable higher RPM.

So the noise profile of a plane with smaller, faster propellers and engines is going to be very different from a big noisy helicopter where you can clearly hear the engine over the already substantial noise of the very loud propeller. Faster also means the noise is of a higher frequency and carries less far.

Comparatively the engine noise for electrical engines is not going to be a factor. Think of the noise level of your vacuum cleaner; most of which is in fact the spinning blade inside hitting a few thousand rpm; 3-5K is pretty common for vacuum cleaners. Dysons apparently go way beyond that. A typical Cessna would max out at around 2700 RPM and be cruising at around 2200.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> With every lithium-sulfur battery I've come across you need to have a lot of steel clamping plates together because they expand so much when charging, and will otherwise delaminate. So ultimately they become the same mass.

This includes the oxis energy battery mentioned here.

<comment><USER20> This might sound crazy but is it possible to do that in some way such that the clamping plates etc. are only there during the charging process? Prevent the delamination during charging and then remove the prevention mechanism?

Or just charge really really slowly? Airports etc. could just have terminals full of trickle-charged batteries to swap in and out.

<comment><USER21> That was my first thought as well. But I don't have a clue if it's practical.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Can I just say this was an extremely well-written article? Each time a question came to mind, it was answered within the next two sentences.

</comment><comment><USER23> For speculative (near future) fiction, that uses a lightweight electrically- powered aircraft as a linking device, "News From Gardenia" by Robert Llewellyn, is a good read.

</comment><comment><USER24> Just yesterday I threw out a print of a DoE paper from 1997 that talked about lithium-sulfur as imminent new storage tech.

Impressed with the persistence here.

</comment><comment><USER25> Surely hydrogen makes more sense for electric airplanes?

</comment><comment><USER26> Wow. So much geekery comparing ICE to electric, without a single mention of global warming.

Big oil has done an amazing job making the subject unmentionable.

</comment><comment><USER27> Still orders of magnitude less energy-dense than jet fuel.

<comment><USER28> Yes but presumably electricity is order(s) of magnitude cheaper than jet fuel. And also order(s) of magnitude more available than jet fuel. And also order(s) of magnitude cleaner than jet fuel (depending on the source).

<comment><USER29> I'd debate the 'more available' statement. It is more widely available overall but not in the places you'd want it. Of course that can be fixed but someone will have to build out that infrastructure to make electric planes viable.

It's a bit like Tesla. Prior to them building out their charging network, electric cars had a bit of a chicken and the egg problem. You might buy a car but have no where to charge it, but nobody wanted to build places to charge them because nobody has an electric car.

<comment><USER30> That's not the case at all. Everyone has electricity at their home. You can charge basically any electric car from a domestic wal socket and higher power chargers are easily available. Commercial charge points only really need to be used for long distance travel. Most EV owners can do the majority of charging at home.

<comment><USER31> One confounding factor is parking arrangements. If you have a garage then a wall socket is reasonable, but for many years the only place i could park a car was somewhere on the street, hopefully within 100m of my address. In that situation commercial charge points (hopefully near my employer, if lucky) would be the only reasonable charge point.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Online Finance Draws on Geographical Data, Raising Questions - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/online-finance-draws-on-geographical-data-raising-questions-1457482366 <comment><USER2> Hmm, the old search-and-click-article-through-Google-News trick isn't working.

How about a summary, OP?</comment>


Ask HN: Should I Take Prozac? - <AUTHOR> I am a mid-level software engineer, raised religious, who in the past few years has gone through the "jaded atheist" phase that I suspect affects many engineers - a tendency towards only believing things that can be proven using western scientific method, which religion cannot be.
This phase has become ultra-logical at an existential level; why are humans obsessed with living? I believe that humans create their own purpose, and I used to derive purpose from work but recently work has been going poorly. I have had bouts of depression - low motivation, low energy, feel as though there is little reason for living.
I saw a psychiatrist who prescribed me Prozac to help with the low energy and motivation. I have heard SSRIs are hard to come off of. I'm wondering if this is just a depressive phase and if I should try to move past it without this drug, or if this drug could kick start an improvement in motivation and feeling like there are reasons for living.
Has anyone taken Prozac for similar reasons, and can you share your experience with it -- positives and negatives? <comment><USER2> Any advice here other than "talk to multiple doctors and decide for yourself" is bad and dangerous.

SSRIs can be life-saving, or they can ruin your life. People have different degrees of illness and different reactions. No one can help you figure this out except a doctor.

You can and should get multiple opinions if you don't feel confident in your current psychiatrist's recommendation.

</comment><comment><USER3> > I have heard SSRIs are hard to come off of

SSRIs can have unpleasant discontinuation effects. These don't affect everyone, and they don't affect people in the same way. I know people on low dose venlafaxine who struggled. I was on high dose venlafaxine for years and stopped almost overnight with no problems. Currently we think only very small numbers of people ahve severe serious enduring problems coming off SSRIs. It is, of course, totally fine for you to examine the risks vs the rewards of taking medication. Personally, and this is only my opinion, meds saved my life and I am glad they were available to me.

You may want to look at an evidence-based talking therapy as well. Cognitive behaviour therapy has good evidence (especially if you do it face to face, one to one, with an experienced therapist). It's a short form therapy so the maximum length of treatment is 21 weeks, but most people need less than that.

</comment><comment><USER4> Prozac and its metabolites have a long half-life in the body (weeks); relative to other SSRIs Prozac is a rough ride but the natural tapering makes discontinuation easy. Other SSRI drugs (e.g. Sertraline, Lexapro, ...) are also off-patent and are pretty good.

Successful treatment with antidepressants will involve waiting a week or two, probably increasing the dose and trying other medications if the one you are using doesn't work or has side effects.

Effexor is also available in generic and it is an SNRI that hits receptors and overall is more effective, but it is harder to quit.

The big negative for some people is that SSRIs suppress the sexual response. This could be anything from "My girlfriend thinks it's great because now I can ____for two hours " to "I took one tab of Lexapro and I didn't have sex, think about sex, look at porn, anything for a week"

Some people won't care, some people will get into trouble with their partner, some people might get along better with their partner. The effect is dose dependent.

You are living in the 21st century and can partake of it's advances. But also try these other things:

* exercise (if you could two hours of cardio most days that would be ideal) * psychotherapy

also things that work for some people:

* pets (raising chickens is a common southeast asian treatment for depression) * going to church (if you get something out of it and it may or may not be Christian) * volunteer activities: (Most of the Christian churches in my area run a soup kitchen; the lady who used to run it is scheduled for sentencing by a federal court because of what she did at an anti-war protest; it is a mellow scene where nobody will trouble you about religion but will recognize that "good works" can be meaningful to people) * audit use of alcohol and other drugs: many people have problems

<comment><USER3> Everyone needs to do exercise because it has a range of important side effects.

The evidence for exercise as a treatment for mental ill health is not good. It's really hard to disentangle the effect of any form of "activation" (this doesn't have to be exercise, it could be joining a book reading club) from the benefits gained through exercise.

We know it can be difficult for people to start and then maintain an exercise regime, and this failure to stick to it can cause some people to feel bad about the failure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Please don't take medical advice from random people on the Internet.

</comment><comment><USER6> Avoid the drugs. They alter your brain, deadening it and stop you being as good at your job. I'd recommend a book called Mind Over Mood. [https://www.mindovermood.com](https://www.mindovermood.com)

I was told: When you find yourself thinking dark thoughts just stop doing it. It's that easy to fix depression, and also that ridiculously hard. Crack it though and you're sorted for life.

Throw away the symptomatic crutch and address the root causes. It's the engineering way.

<comment><USER4> Most evidence is that antidepressants and other forms of therapy (particularly CBT) go together like peanut butter and jelly.

Depressant drugs such as Xanax or Klonopin on the other hand open up ion channels in your neurons that let the electrical charge drain out. You get fast and often complete relief from anxiety but learning and memory is impaired.

People who use benzodiazepines for a long time seem to grow older but not grow up, you see them and they still have the same conversation that they had with you ten years ago, they just don't seem to move on the way that most people do.

That's not true about antidepressants.

<comment><USER7> What "most evidence". Please provide something tangible instead of analogies.

<comment><USER4> See [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15507582](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15507582)

<comment><USER7> So from your linked study:

>"The remission rate for combined treatment did not differ from that for CBT alone (P = .42) "

With the conclusion:

>Children and adolescents with OCD should begin treatment with the combination of CBT plus a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor or CBT alone.

Basically they didn't find any difference between patients on SSRIs and therapy, to those doing only therapy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm not a doctor, but I really would not recommend SSRIs. At all. This is from personal experience, but there are a lot of anecdotes and research around that agrees.

I didn't really read this book, since this wasn't really new stuff to me, but skimming through it seemed like a pretty good overview:

[https://www.amazon.com/Lost-Connections-Uncovering- Depressio...](https://www.amazon.com/Lost-Connections-Uncovering-Depression- Unexpected/dp/163286830X)</comment>


Vmap in Haskell - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ezyang.com/2020/01/vmap-in-haskell/ <comment><USER2> > We're going to need a few language extensions, so let's get this out of the > way first: {-# LANGUAGE RankNTypes, GADTs, MultiParamTypeClasses, > KindSignatures, TypeApplications, FunctionalDependencies, FlexibleContexts, > FlexibleInstances, UndecidableInstances, IncoherentInstances #-}

Dang, how do you know to use that?

<comment><USER3> This feels absurd indeed. Like half of the GHC extensions introduce only some trivial syntactical convenience whereas the other half each introduce practically a whole new language.

This list aligns more with the latter description.

<comment><USER4> All of those extensions match the description of "things one thought that Haskell should have been able to do anyway" (some more tenuously than others, granted).

<comment><USER5> IncoherentInstances?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> vmap is by far my favorite feature in JAX. Very cool to see that you can get the same thing straight out of haskell.</comment>


Ask YC: basic text parser? - <AUTHOR>

I'm working on designing a form for submitting large blocks of text, and out of curiosity: is there a basic text parser for breaking up lines and processing HTML? Or is that something that you feel just ought to be made from scratch? <comment><USER2> What programming language? if Python is an option Beautiful Soup could be one alternative for HTML parsing.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am not much of a programmer. I love designing things, I love layouts, I love figuring out the mechanics behind a system. That said, I'm ignorant with various languages and what does what. Is it possible to use Python to parse a web page? I'm woefully ignorant where stuff like that is concerned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> regexp?

<comment><USER4> I second that, pcre.

It's a horrible horrible API but you can free-ride features like UTF-8 and Unicode support.</comment></comment>


My coding practices in 1991 - <AUTHOR> http://cowboyprogramming.com/2008/11/15/my-coding-practices-in-1991/

<comment><USER2> The 68K programming talk reminds me of being a kid running an Atari ST, and saving up 20 Australian dollars (16 US) for a two month old copy of 'ST Format' with cover articles like:

'WHO WILL INHERIT THE FUTURE OF COMPUTING?

ATARI?

OR AMIGA?'</comment>


Apprentice failures giving business tips - <AUTHOR> http://launchlab.co.uk/article/Entrepreneurial-Columnists/Apprentice-cronies-on-the-rise---Quelle-horreur!-/696

<comment><AUTHOR> Why do people who get kicked out of The Apprentice think they can go on to advise start-up businesses? Coming fifth on a reality game show surely doesn't qualify you??

<comment><USER2> Most of the contestants on that show have pretty prestigious backgrounds. They either went to great business schools or started businesses of their own, or both.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I don't think that's true of the UK version - if you look at the career histories of the people on the most recent series, for example, they're pretty average.

And then there's their performance on the actual show...</comment>


Audi E-Tron Gets Lower Than Expected 204-Mile EPA Range Rating - <AUTHOR> https://insideevs.com/audi-e-tron-electric-range-epa/ <comment><AUTHOR> That's with a 95kwh battery. Turns out building EVs is not so easy.

<comment><USER2> But only 83 kwh available for use. As mentioned in the article, the battery is over-provisioned to increase its longevity and to enable faster charging. The Audi e-tron SUV can maintain a 150 kilowatt charge rate up to 80% state of charge, which no other current EV can do:

[https://support.fastned.nl/hc/en- gb/articles/115015420127-17...](https://support.fastned.nl/hc/en- gb/articles/115015420127-175-kW-fast-chargers)

Not even the Tesla Model 3 on the new Tesla V3 chargers:

[https://electrek.co/2019/03/07/tesla-v3-supercharger- action-...](https://electrek.co/2019/03/07/tesla-v3-supercharger-action-first- look/)

The e-tron's main problem is that it's too heavy for the battery it has. Every version of the Tesla Model X, for example, weighs less than the e-tron.

<comment><AUTHOR> Also that 12 kWh of unused battery will be quite heavy

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Pretty disappointing. It will be a niche car like BMW I3/I8</comment>


Ask HN: What are stock options? What should I do with them? - <AUTHOR>

I'm a recent graduate, and I've just received a job offer for a small, but well established startup. Stock options are part of the renumeration package. What should I understand about them, and how should I go about effectively making best use of them? Also, can anyone recommend any advice on decent books to read to get acquainted with personal finance and budgetting, I've been in school so long, I need to understand how the real world works.<p>Many thanks, Sydesigner <comment><USER2> Good question that most people face and are afraid to ask :)

Here are some resources to check out that have covered this well:

* Rand wrote a great post ([http://moz.com/rand/understanding-stock-options-at-startups-...](http://moz.com/rand/understanding-stock-options-at-startups-and-at-moz/))

* Solid overview: [http://www.danshapiro.com/blog/2010/11/how-much-are-startup-...](http://www.danshapiro.com/blog/2010/11/how-much-are-startup-options-worth/)

* This is a good book that doesn't get enough love ([http://www.amazon.com/Engineers-Silicon-Valley-Startups-eboo...](http://www.amazon.com/Engineers-Silicon-Valley-Startups-ebook/dp/B004Q9U19G))

* Good high-level notes about equity in startups (part of an incredible series, read it all if you can - [http://blakemasters.com/post/21742864570/peter-thiels-cs183-...](http://blakemasters.com/post/21742864570/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-6-notes-essay))

* Venture Hacks on the "Option Pool Shuffle": [http://venturehacks.com/articles/option-pool-shuffle](http://venturehacks.com/articles/option-pool-shuffle)

</comment><comment><USER3> Stock options state that you may exercise, essentially invoke, your right to buy a stock at a given price, also known as a strike price. If you have 100 options at a strike price of $20, you have the right to buy 100 shares at $20 per share regardless of current market value of the stock. Your options also may be subject to a vesting period. This means that after a given time you are given a certain amount or percentage of options you may use. For instance if your 100 options vest over 4 years, you would have 25 options per year that you are allowed to exercise. Vesting periods can be different so ask your employer.

Here is an example:

You are given a strike price of $20 per share and decided to exercise your option. The stock is currently at $30 per share. You are now buying the stock at $20 per share. You now decide to immediately sell those shares and now make $10 per share gross profit.

All stock purchases and sale must be done through a broker.

Hope this helps.

<comment><USER4> >If you have 100 options at a strike price of $20, you have the right to buy 100 shares at $20 per share regardless of current market value of the stock

Not exactly. Maybe this isn't the same thing as an employer stock option. But a single call option, what I think you're referring to, gives you the right to buy 100 shares at x strike price. So 100 call options would be 10,000 shares at x price.

<comment><USER3> That is true for call and put options but employee stock options are not the same thing. A call or put option as you stated is for 100 shares per option contract. An employee stock option is the right to buy N number of shares at a strike price, not in blocks of 100 per contract.

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the clarification!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Opa (the programming language) Enters 2012 With Strong Customer Adoption - <AUTHOR> http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/opa-enters-2012-with-strong-customer-adoption-1604487.htm

<comment><USER2> Apart from it not being ready production-ready, I find the syntax confusing and overly engineered. Perhaps I'm just dense. However, as a programmer with 5+ years of experience, it feels rather off that I can't look at some of the Opa code and understand what is happening.

Haskell providers a lower barrier of entry.

That being said, it's different. I wish them the best as the more options available to a programmer, the better.

</comment><comment><USER3> Posting a press release to hacker news?!? Really? Your own press release?

<comment><USER4> They're trying to convince people opa isn't a load of trash. Write some code, tag it with "built for the cloud", say "it's the future / next gen / teh shit / extremely awesome / nice / etc" and hope people believe that crap.

After all, they should bet their startup / business on something which is very new, seems to lack large real world use and testing. Yeah, that's right, weird looking code mixed with HTML is just the thing I was looking for. Trust an untested new database system with my data? Sure, I'll do that....reaaallyyyy soon...NOT.

They've failed to convince me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I never imagined myself as a "customer" of a programming language

<comment><USER6> It's an AGPL runtime with an option for a paid license to make the AGPL go away.

<comment><USER4> It's AGPL licensed? That just upped this company's retarded level to maximum.

I saw they raised 1.7 million USD in funding. Who was so stupid to give them money for this?

<comment><USER7> Normally I'd like to try to understand what you have against AGPL (Opa is dual licence btw.) but given that half of your wording is around words like "retarded" and "stupid", I'm not sure whether you're really interested in real discussion?

<comment><USER4> From previous experience with AGPL licensed libraries and tools, I decided that it's best to avoid them without exception.

Basically, GPL and LGPL are the only acceptable licenses from the *GPL family of licenses when building websites. (GPL/LGPL/MIT/BSD for the server side software, LGPL/MIT/BSD for the JS libraries reaching the browsers)

I don't like the idea of being forced to license the app under the same license and release it to the public under AGPL if it's web based or running on the network.

I've come across such a company which demanded about 300 USD for a javascript library. Of course, we were told of this generous pricing via email. We rolled our own. That's when I started to hate AGPL with a passion and to dislike companies which use it.

Therefore, you can say that I don't want AGPL anywhere near any of the websites I'll work on or I'm currently working on and that I doubt that the companies which use this license have a good business model.

Opa has got weird looking syntax which can only lead to even nastier code. It also has HTML mixed with that weird looking syntax. The database is also something proprietary and weird. Normally, I can easily read code in a language I'm not used to. However, this was particularly bad.

All of those apps they show on the website are toy examples. Nothing big or popular was built with it. This makes me believe it's extremely difficult to get something done in this language and with the tools of opa.

Do you need to fix an issue? Perhaps add a new feature? I am ok with giving back changes. Since it's all written in (o)caml, it's more difficult to do that.

As for the part regarding the money they received, the people who gave them that amount of money are having a problem noticing how bad this opa language is. To me, it looks like they wanted to "gamble at this table" as well, just in case it turned out to be something more than a flop.

The things I'd give another chance somewhere else are: keeping the database & everything else in a single binary and some of its distributed architecture.

P.S.: I prefer to donate money to open source projects, rather than buy software to be used in the code of the sites / apps I work on.

<comment><USER8> So what's your favorite approach for web app development?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Trillion-Dollar Vision of Dee Hock, the Radical Who Organized Visa (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://m.fastcompany.com/27333/trillion-dollar-vision-dee-hock <comment><USER2> It's a fascinating story, told better in Hock's book, "Birth of the Chaordic Age". Visa is unusual in that it is a organization of _competitors_ who need to cooperate on some standards for the system to work. The Visa model would be a useful model for Internet governance. Visa is a network operator of a big network which predates the Internet. They run data centers and switches all over the world.

There are other organizations with similar organizational problems. Most are financial clearing houses, such as Depository Trust Company. In the past, the Association of American Railroads acted as a clearing house for railroad cars. (When a railroad car is not on its "home road", the borrowing railroad pays a daily rental to the owning railroad. One of the AAR's functions was being the clearinghouse for that and other inter-line billing issues.) The AAR is still the standards organization for railroad equipment. It's owned by the big railroads. That's typical of industry organizations; they're dominated by the big companies.

Visa was a chaord because the US used to have a lot of small banks, and the small banks wanted a system that wasn't controlled by the big banks. As the financial industry consolidated, this became less of an issue. Visa International is no longer a chaord; it went public a few years ago.

<comment><USER3> > The Visa model would be a useful model for Internet governance

I disagree on that. The Visa model works because at every single turn there is a clear, shared understanding of what the single purpose of the whole thing is: Process payments.

The same is emphatically not true for the internet, just look at net neutrality. That's a pretty simple but very fundamental concept, and there's nowhere near consensus on the matter. Or even without considering NN, the fact that Netflix and Skype are eating the lunches of the very companies that own and operate most of the consumer internet (telcos and cable cos). It's hard to imagine a similar conflict at Visa, yet the internet's history is riddled with them, and the fallout from their incomplete resolutions.

Incidentally, this clarity is also why Visa would probably be fundamentally ill-suited to deal with an existential threat, e.g. of the sort some people imagine bitcoin to be.

<comment><USER4> Yeah it seems like it would mostly be effective for cartels, rather than corporations. It would probably be useful for something like W3C, perhaps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Today, Hock is on the advisory board of Xapo, claiming that _" Bitcoin is one of the best examples of how a decentralized, peer-to-peer organization can solve problems that these dated organizations cannot."_ How about that pivot!

[https://blog.xapo.com/announcing-xapos-advisory- board/](https://blog.xapo.com/announcing-xapos-advisory-board/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Interesting article, Dee Hock could be onto something very useful for society at large.

On initial reading, I wondered if an analogy could be made with the organic growth of computer technology through developing protocols and standards, looking at the growth in USB devices as an example.

There are probably finer details that I'm missing out on, would be interested to learn more about the chaordic approach to building social structures.

</comment><comment><USER7> Hock's book "Birth of the Chaordic Age" is one deep read!

Modelling organic growth of a company according to biological growth, is quite mind-bending.

</comment><comment><USER8> 1996, not 2012!

<comment><USER9> Yeah, I was really confused as to how a 67 year old could be the founder of Visa.</comment></comment>


The epicenter of Covid19 coronavirus is scrubbed from Wikipedia - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/Grummz/status/1237457786407026689 <comment><USER2> 1984ing doesn't work here and soon it will not work there either. Wuhan Virus.</comment>


Ask HN:  If you could master one technology this year, what would it be? - <AUTHOR>

If someone had a gun to your head and asked you to choose one thing to learn that you thought would bear the most fruit which framework, language, software would you choose.  Only one. <comment><USER2> WebGL. I can see it being used for a lot of interesting graphics applications in the browser.

</comment><comment><USER3> SciPy: <http://www.scipy.org/> If you know that and the background math it requires, then you are fit to work in almost any data analysis setting you can imagine.

</comment><comment><USER4> Native mobile app development - Java [Android] and Django / or any other framework.

</comment><comment><USER5> I would choose native mobile app development (with a focus in iOS).

</comment><comment><USER6> Native Mobile App Development

<comment><USER7> What advantage does native have over HTML5?

<comment><USER8> Efficiency as well as integration with the native OS's style & interface.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> SilkJS, CouchDB, JavaScript

</comment><comment><USER10> I want to master C++ this year! Fully! Reach the levels of this guy: <http://stackoverflow.com/users/922184/mysticial>

</comment><comment><USER11> Clojure.

</comment><comment><USER12> Go</comment>


UK MP takes parliaments ceremonial mace - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/BBCSussex/status/1072243438593196034 <comment><USER2> That was just odd. I wasn't expecting him to do anything in particular with it but what he actually did was somehow ridiculous.

<comment><AUTHOR> It was enough to get him thrown out for the day! Apparently taking it over the line is really serious...

<comment><USER2> I know it was an offence but what about being a little nore dramatic by hold it in up in the air with both hands instead of just awkwardly hesitating what to do with it?

<comment><AUTHOR> Some kind of primal scream would have worked for me!</comment></comment></comment></comment>