Energy Saved, Sleep Lost: The Unintended Consequences of LED Lighting - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@caseorganic/energy-saved-sleep-lost-the-unintended-consequences-of-led-lighting-c0909d4872d0 <comment><USER2> I'm concerned by the fact that this response to blue LEDs, while founded on reasonable sounding theory theory, doesn't seem to have much high quality, real-world data AFAIK (e.g. insomnia in houses with blue LEDs vs not, comparisons between people using the glasses mentioned vs not, average bedtimes of people correlated with tv usage, any studies looking for causal links in day to day life, etc). Such studies might exist, but I don't think I've seen or heard them referenced, just mentions of how blue light decreases measured meletonin or what not in clinical settings. Mostly I just hear anecdotes from people who have fully bought into the line that this is a serious problem that requires time and money thrown at it about how awesome their life is now that they've gone out of their way to reduce blue light exposure, opening them right up to the placebo effect.

I'm double concerned since the answer for this seems to be "buy more stuff" and "blindly assume blue == bad without followup research or verification". This is one of those situations where it's pretty easy for companies to swoop in and offer at-best ineffective and at-worst actively harmful products to solve a problem that might or might not exist.

<comment><USER3> Given we already know it disrupts melatonin (as well as noctural wildlife), this feels like one of those cases where the burden of proof is on the proponents, before we roll out millions or billions of dollars of LED streetlights around the country.

You know who really stands to benefit the most? The companies that get to sell us blue equipment, and then next sell us replacement blue-filtered equipment when we prove night time blue light is a problem.

The cities that have already installed 5000K or 6500K (aka "daylight") lamps will be the natural experiments.

<comment><USER4> We could still roll out billions of dollars of LED light but conservatively choose LEDs with a warm spectrum. Yellow LEDs exist.

<comment><USER5> Same thoughts exactly, I have a LED lamp which allows me to adjust the color, all the way down to a dark red (insanely warm) glow, in which it's hard to red certain printed texts. Not sure when LED became blue light only?

Helps me sleep incredibly well and it's an LED.

<comment> mark-r LEDs put out a lot of blue because most of them are based on phosphorescence, and high energy light (blue or ultraviolet) is required to drive the phosphors. It's possible to make a white LED without phosphors by combining different colored LEDs, but they're not as bright and much more expensive. That's also how you make them color adjustable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Almost separately from the circadian-rhythm concerns from the article, a major design peeve of mine are random products that have unnecessarily _blinding_ blue LEDs. Worst example I know of: an otherwise competently executed automatic HDMI switch with several incredibly bright blue LEDs, always on. So bright as to be able to read and see all objects in the same room. So when you might dim the lights to watch something? The switch is still blinding blue, usually right at the viewers!

I mitigated this by disassembling the switch and installing some 3-stop ND (neutral density) lighting gel to dim these stupid LEDs to acceptable levels. This product at least afforded a good-looking solution -- many can't be disassembled to fix the problem.

See also: Dyson rechargeable vacuum cleaners.

Maybe it's time for an LED shaming tumblr...

<comment><USER7> LEDs just got more and more efficient. Even driving them with tiny currents produces bright light nowadays. I suspect once the efficiency increases stop, manufacturers will adapt and their engineers settle on limiting resistor values that are actually appropriate.

<comment><USER8> Or, you know, you can just PWM them rather than having them going at full blast.

<comment><USER9> PWM resources can be quite scarce or overkill for a constant brightness level, just pick the right current limiting resistor, it's embedded design 101. Heck, it's your first-year electrical engineering class.

<comment><USER8> It's not hard to PWM by hand; it takes next to no resources.

Current limiting resistors don't really do great at lower strength; LEDs have far from linear responses and it's very constrained at the lower end that you want.

Source: wrote embedded firmware for close to a decade.

<comment><USER9> Thanks for that! I'll keep that in mind. I'm largely self-taught in embedded. Curious what you mean by PWM by hand.

<comment><USER8> > Curious what you mean by PWM by hand.

Have a timer that is some function of your PWM frequency, and manually toggle the GPIO line in the timer interrupt.

You can do it in a super loop too if you don't care about power consumption.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> My town recently replaced the dull, orange-ish street lights in my neighborhood with very bright, white LEDs.

The street is now very well-lit, but I share the author's concerns and experience with this kind of light creating an environment that's not conducive to sleep, or to unwinding in general. When I look at the new street lights I feel like they were taken out of a hospital operating room.

Another thing I noticed when the new lights first went in was that the birds started chirping at all hours of the night. I don't know if they were always doing that and I only noticed after the new street lights were installed, but it makes sense that the light would have a similar impact on animals as it does on humans.

I wonder if anyone else noticed this when the lights in their neighborhood were upgraded to these harsh, white LEDs.

<comment><USER11> It literally costs pennies to fix by using a film to get amber light.

<comment><USER12> You can't change blue light to another color with a filter. The amber light has to be in the spectrum emitted by the lights to begin with. The filter just isolates it.

<comment><USER13> A lot of "white" LEDs have a layer that absorbs some blue light and reemits it at a longer wavelength, with the mix looking white:

[http://www.photonstartechnology.com/learn/how_leds_produce_w...](http://www.photonstartechnology.com/learn/how_leds_produce_white_light)

It's not a filter of course.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> After realizing the effect that blue light had on my sleep I went on a crusade to eliminate it from my life after sundown.

I used red LED bike lights for room illumination until I found a series of alternatives. The cheap, remote-controllable 5 meter multicolor LED strips are an amazing solution to evening lighting. It is also possible to get "warmer" LED bulbs. These are often marketed as looking like antiquated filament bulbs. But the best solution is pure red light.

I also removed every single blue-LED backlit computing device from my life. I've made sure to use OLED phones since they were first available. I finally have an OLED laptop, and thankfully, as they are no longer being made! The change in laptop screen really is the most transformative thing for me, as I often need to work in the evenings. I set all the backgrounds in the OS to black, and use browser plugins to set the background of the web to black as well. I have never slept better since blue LEDs came into my life.

People really need to take this issue seriously. There is evidence that blue light's disruption of circadian rhythms and suppression of melatonin production is related to cancer and other health risks. Blue should be reserved for the color of the sky, which is where our bodies evolved to recognize it directly as the input to our circadian rhythms.

I am pleased by the wave of "night light" filters for phones. This is a sign that people are catching on. They use the filters and feel able to get to sleep. We need to go further. OLED everywhere and deep night mode for all.

<comment><USER15> Have a look at f.lux, which alters your display's colour temperature as the time of day changes, shifting away from blues into the evening.

<comment><USER16> macOS and iOS also have Night Shift these days which is the same feature baked in.

<comment><USER17> Windows also has had this for a little while. I don't know if it's a default in Android.

<comment><USER18> Modern android has a "night mode" that you can configure to turn on after a certain time of day that cuts the blue light.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I think she has a good point about how too much blue light might not be very good for us. There has been interesting research in this are.

It's true that traditional street lights (sodium vapor lamps[1]) are warmer, but they also provide more limited light spectrum (only one frequency of yellow) for this reason they are mainly used where the price and power efficiency outweighs the limited visibilty. So it's not strange that given the option to get better color rendering at a good price, LED technology using full spectrum light has been prefferd.

However, there's nothing stopping us from using LED lights with warmer spectrum, and that argument is probably good to raise. With the higher control of the spectrum that LED gives us compared to the previous street lights we might even be able to create a good compromise using warmer but still wider spectrum lights.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium- vapor_lamp](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-vapor_lamp)

<comment><USER20> Do any LEDs match the spectrum of those sodium vapor lamp? The ones I looked at had a higher blue profile even if the output colour matched the yellow.

<comment><USER21> In fact, yes. The illumination spectrum of sodium vapor lamps is very specific -- they emit almost all of their light around 589nm (amber) [1]. You could easily replace the light from a sodium vapor lamp with an LED lamp outfitted with LEDs manufactured to emit that particular frequency of light.

The LEDs themselves are not particularly expensive either. Linked a digikey page with a potential part you could use.[2]

1:[https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Low- pressure_sodium_...](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Low- pressure_sodium_lamp_spectrum.svg) 2:[https://www.digikey.com/products/en?keywords=XPEBAM-L1-0000-...](https://www.digikey.com/products/en?keywords=XPEBAM-L1-0000-00601CT- ND)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I highly suggest installing f.lux[1] on your computer and using a similar app on your phone like Twilight[2]. They've done absolute wonders for my sleep schedule and I actually feel noticeably sleepier as the night goes on when using them. And occasionally when I do turn them off (when working late at night), I feel more awake and alert which was an unexpected plus for when I'm under crunch but an unwanted side effect when I'm trying to get a good night's rest.

[1] [https://justgetflux.com/](https://justgetflux.com/)

[2] [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.urbandroid...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.urbandroid.lux)

<comment><USER23> Or the free alternatives f.lux inspired, Redshift[1] (for desktop) and Red Moon[2] (for Android):

[1] [http://jonls.dk/redshift/](http://jonls.dk/redshift/)

[2] [https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.jmstudios.redmoon/](https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.jmstudios.redmoon/)

<comment><USER24> Unfortunately twilight gets _much_ redder than these, and hence is much more helpful to (my) sleep.

<comment><USER23> > twilight gets _much_ redder than these

Any reference to that? I've used Twilight before, and didn't notice that when moving to Red Moon.

Did you mean the default settings?

You have sliders for colour temperature, intensity and dim levels: [https://raw.githubusercontent.com/LibreShift/red- moon/master...](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/LibreShift/red- moon/master/app/src/main/play/en-US/listing/phoneScreenshots/1.png)

You can create different profiles as well, plus limit brightness. I just tested a very very red filter (lower colour temp, higher intensity level).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The US has banned[1] the (previously) standard low temperature (~2500k) incandescent light bulbs that have a black body radiation profile. Lots of low frequency. I really prefer these at night and could not find replacements. Eventually someone suggested that the key words are "rugged service". That and "incandescent light bulb" will get you many options on amazon, ebay, etc. Not sure if I need to stock up on these or if they will continue to be available into the future.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase- out_of_incandescent_ligh...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase- out_of_incandescent_light_bulbs#United_States)

<comment><USER26> There are plenty of LEDs available with a 2700K color temperature. It helps to buy ones with 90+ CRI, although few (even the good ones) actually advertise their CRI on the label. Last time I bought bulbs, Home Depot was selling 80 and 90 CRI bulbs under the same freaking model number; it's like the WRT54G all over again.

Granted, it's not a true black body spectrum because the infrared part is missing, but that's why they use less energy.

<comment><USER25> It is too bad that manufactures are not required to put a spectral analysis graph on the packaging of these non-blackbody light sources. Not sure how they even calculate a temperature rating when the blue and red frequencies are the highest with yellow and green quite low.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Maybe I'm more radical, but I wonder why we need such constant, brilliant illumination anyway?

I know I'm an outlier but I often don't turn lights on, or only turn on task lighting, and at night outdoors I usually use moonlight when and where I can, or a dimmable flashlight if that's not sufficient.

<comment><USER11> If you drive, the lack of street illumination makes it harder (even with your lights on, of course). And driving high beam is not a solution because that'll blind incoming drivers

<comment><USER27> I am used to driving in rural areas that don't have street lamps, so I'm probably not the one to consult on that kind of thing, but I don't find that streetlamps do a tremendous amount.

<comment><USER28> That's not a problem if you have good eyesight. But some people can't see well in the dark because common eye conditions such as nearsightedness.

<comment><USER27> I'm severely nearsighted so I'm not sure you're hitting the mark here :D

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Shout out to the International Dark Sky Association. They've been talking about the problems of LED lighting for years.

[http://darksky.org/?s=LED+lighting](http://darksky.org/?s=LED+lighting)

<comment><USER30> But there's no problem with LEDs, there's a problem with high color temperatures. Please stop conflating the two.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> It's strange how the switch to LED lights feels rushed and often not thought through all the way.

Last winter, several intersections around my city had problems with snow accumulating and blocking the stop lights, because the new LED bulbs don't generate enough heat to melt the snow that accumulates. I guess hindsight is always 20/20, but it's surprising the people paid to make those decisions didn't think of it beforehand.

<comment><USER12> Honestly because the switch to LEDs has been at least as much about virtue signaling as any real savings. The energy savings will eventually pay for the LED conversion, but it takes a while. As in years. And as to unintended side effects, well we're just discovering those.

<comment><USER32> Payback time on domestic LED bulbs is actually surprisingly quick. We have "100W" LED bulbs that draw around 11W of power, and cost ~$5 each, compared with say $1 for a 100W incandescent light bulb. At 20c/kWh that's 20kWh of electricity, or ~225 hours of run time at 89W of saved power. Even if we only ran a bulb for 3 hours a night, it would pay for itself in two and a half months.

I imagine the case for street lighting is even stronger, especially when you start to factor labour costs for bulb replacement as well. And traffic lights would be stronger again, because they're cycling instead of being constantly on, which shortens the filament life significantly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The entire problem they're talking about is high color temperature, not LEDs. No need to spread FUD with titles & writing like this - I have lit my home with pleasing warm white LEDs for years and they've paid for themselves in energy savings.

</comment><comment><USER33> I am surprised there is not much noise over this. In my city, they recently replaced street lights with the LED ones. These were so bright and piercing, I complained to the city, and they replaced ones near my house to lower intensity one. Still the other one's not the nearest to my house are still so bright, it is very unpleasant, even though they are at a distance. No one in my neighborhood seems to be bothered by these? In my opinion these pose serious risk to health, not just ours but to birds, animals and plants. Even when driving on roads, where these lights are on, they just hit you like a sunlight.

<comment><USER34> Washington, DC is starting to switch to LEDs for streetlights. They're whiter than the old sodium bulbs, but the District uses 3000K lights for main streets and 2700K for residential streets. The LEDs are directed towards the ground at a 45° angle--the globe diffuses the light, but they produce much less light pollution and they'll save a ton of power, time, and money.

<comment><USER30> Nice to know not every municipality is too dumb to research color temp before buying into a conversion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> The youtube channel Technology Connections has a couple of interesting articles about LED (and sodium-vapor lamp) bulbs in street lighting: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIC- iGDTU40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIC-iGDTU40)

(Actually, most if his videos are pretty interesting to explore, especially the ones about early TV)

</comment><comment><USER36> Something I've realized recently is how over lit our homes can be. Like most homes, mine have always had a bunch of lights I didn't really choose with simple on/off switches. But I'm remodeling my house now and have been testing different led lights and smart lighting systems, and in the process have discovered how much better the lights are when they're dimmed!

Setting aside the blue light issue for a moment, I wonder how much a simple reduction in lumens would be helpful. Just putting our lights on a smart dimmer solution (noon home for the curious) has made a big difference. I rarely turn the dimmers above 50% and it's plenty of light with a lot less glare and using even less electricity than having leds on standard switches.

With the remodeled part of the house the lights will all be LED, but 2700k and every one of them will be on a dimmer switch.

</comment><comment><USER37> The complain is really less about Blue LEDs and more about high temperature white LEDs (5000K and upwards). Those really fuck up the circadian rythm.

A warm or natural white LED is much less harmful (3500K and under and 4000K respectively) and you can mix both. Only a few days ago I found a very interesting LED module that would mix both and use the natural white for full light intensity and mix over to the warm LED when you dim it via PWM or DC going as low as 2000K.

Myself, I built a LED RGBW controller and I use the Red and Blue channels to change the color temperature of the strip itself. The strips can be had for very cheap on chinese websites, individual LED modules with WS2812 pins cost less than a dozen cent. High powered LEDs of various temperature don't cost that much either.

It's not a hard problem and definitely solvable.

</comment><comment><USER38> "Because red, green and blue LEDs are required to make white LED light"

Just to nitpick a bit: you only need blue LEDs to make white LED lights. Most modern white LEDs use a phosphor coating (the yellow you see in the LED chip) to get white light out of the blue LED.

</comment><comment><USER39> Are there cities trying to have zero lights at night ?

Sometimes I wonder how it feels to have no light at all. There's a calming aspect to this, my mind really feels that 'no sun = no activity'. But also a little bit of fear too, unless everybody is already home.

<comment><USER40> I used to commute a lot from San Diego to Portland, and the blackness of Portland was jarring. San Diego has way more lights, but it also lacks cloud cover, so the light looks different.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I'm not sure the light profile of LED streetlights are sufficiently different enough from Mercury Vapor lighting for anyone to really notice a difference - both have significant emissions in the blue spectrum, and we used MV lighting for 40 years.

<comment><USER42> Are mercury vapor lamps actually widely used now, or for the past decades? I thought the most common lighting type before LEDs were sodium lamps which are most definitely not blue.

<comment><USER41> Mercury Vapor was widely used from the early 50's to the mid-70's/early 80's

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> "We can't easily call for our cities to go back to a less intense light. The switch has already been made, and cash-strapped cities need the savings."

Yes we can, and we should. Where does this learned helplessness come from? Cities are always cash-strapped. "It'll cost extra," should not be some trump card to shut down discussion of doing something that is provably better for the populace. There should standards devised for the idea color temperature and brightness of street lighting, and government should be required to stick to them.

</comment><comment><USER44> I would love to see a night-mode solution for televisions, either via an HDMI pass-through device or a film if necessary.

Do any products exist for that use case?

<comment><USER45> Many TVs have a light sensor and will dim the display in a dark room. It saves energy and probably makes the brightness more appropriate to the surroundings. (It doesn't adjust the color temperature as far as I know, just the brightness.)

I'd check your settings. On my Samsung, it's under System -> Eco Solution -> Eco Sensor ("Automatically optimizes TV screen brightness in response to the room lighting.")

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Does no one produce and high intensity 2700K LED light for street illumination purposes?

It seems like this would be an obvious and easy solution.

<comment><USER47> The whole point of the LED was that the white color provides better vision at lower luminosity. If you make it yellow, there's no advantage over sodium vapor lamps which are already very efficient.

<comment><USER48> They would still have a much broader spectrum. Sodium vapor lights are very unnatural [0] — I certainly wouldn't describe them as "cozy" and "more human", as the author does. Plus, the low-pressure ones are difficult to distinguish from a yellow traffic light.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium- vapor_lamp](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-vapor_lamp)

<comment><USER49> I concur - I own a couple of 2300k LED lights and the light the give off is very cozy, nothing like the streetlamp.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I always found it ironic that the controls on my CPAP machine have bright blue back-lighting - and no obvious way to adjust it. It would light up the whole bedroom if I didn't put an old hand towel over it.

OTOH, our clock-radio has a nice, warm and dim orange display.

<comment><USER28> My ResMed turns all of its lights off about 5 seconds after you turn it on. I thank its designers every day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Maybe I am barking up a completely wrong tree, but this seems to me more than anything else a shameless ad for the "healthe" filters and "Truedark" _sleephacking_ glasses.

</comment><comment> mark-r My 1985 Volkswagen Golf had a blue LED for the high-beam indicator. I've always wondered how they were able to afford those long before conventional wisdom said they were cheap enough.

</comment><comment><USER20> Has anyone tried the Health-e screen covers mentioned? I'm wondering how effective they are and how easy they are to use.

I currently use reduce white point and color filters at night.

</comment><comment><USER52> I bought some anti blue-light glasses on Amazon and they really do make a difference. 30 minutes after I put them on, I start yawning.

If I took them off the effect is jarring.

<comment><USER53> Could you share the link please? I see many options but not sure which ones are right and which ones are knock-offs.

<comment><USER52> I got this pair from Uvex: [https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B000USRG90/ref=oh_aui_detai...](https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B000USRG90/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o03_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1)

What I like about them is they cover my entire field of view. They're not really fashionable, but I only wear them inside anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> I must be missing something here.

Every hardware store we go to here (Thailand) has LED lights (in all forms - flood lights, 'tubes', screw-in globes, even the flexible strip-lighting for hidden lighting) in at least two and usually three 'temperatures'. From most to least 'blue', they are "Daylight", "Cool White" and "Warm White". No price difference.

So, is this whole article basically just a rant because nobody this guy knows ever buys "warm white" bulbs?

<comment><USER30> Yes, most people don't even know what color temperature is, because they don't change light bulbs - someone else does it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Try living in Sweden, where people have been dealing with sleep and light for a very very long time.

LED lighting is a pussy compared to the Sun</comment>


How to Choose Cell Model and Test Indicators on Determining Clinical Basic Topic - <AUTHOR> https://www.creative-bioarray.com/oncology.htm <comment><AUTHOR> How to choose cell model - One class or multiple classes

You may regard it as a naive question in case somebody asks you to identify whether the diseased tissue is one class of cells or multiple classes of cells. However, it is closely related to research topic design:

In some conditions, the topic design must concentrate on one point. Such as the experiment being handled on cells is to verify if the A gene and drug that scientists are investigating will cause pathological changes in the cells, or play a role in alleviating pathological changes. We all know that the function and mechanism of the same gene may vary even just putting in the different cell type. That's why scientists should pay more attention to the depth of topics instead of breadth, focusing on the chosen topic more penetratingly.

Obviously, there may be some different opinions on the above view, especially for the popular CTR research in the field of cancer treatment. It can not offer accurate results if scientists are just involved in one class of cells, as CTR is to study the lethal effect of immune cells on tumor cells which will reveal the relationship between two types of cells. So scientists need to involve all the related cells type if the topic is about the relationship among cells. As a result, it will be helpful to figure out the research objects before setting the topic.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> About clinical basic research, the innovation will be how to design the gene research content. Clinical relevance, function, mechanism, all of which should be taken into consideration. Besides, how to choose cell model(animal model) and test indicator also is an important section, that is being regarded as the approach to evaluate the scientificity of topic. In this post, we will highlight the information on how to choose cell model and test indicators from cell level.

In the history of disease research, it is usually better to research deeper in accordance with the requirements of scientific research. Scientists will search the cause once the clinical manifestations of the disease determine which organ tissue lead the disease, furthermore, as cells are the smallest unit of organ tissue so that they will work on studying the difference between normal cells and diseased cell (pathological changes) and finally figure out which lead to the disease and clinical manifestations

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> How to make innovation for test indicators

Scientists need to know what indicators can be applied to demonstrate that the genes or drugs play a disease-related function in pathologic cells. For example, scientists work on epilepsy research which pathogenesis organ and tissue are brain tissue and cells are brain neurons. While evaluating if the test indicator design is reasonable, the scientific assessment is based on whether these indicators lead to clinically pathological changes in this type of cells. Abnormal excessive differs the brain neurons of epilepsy patients from the normal human, and scientists need to process electrophysiological testing from the cellular level.

It is not necessary to design a totally new experiment while submitting experiment methods, instead, scientists should understand if the planned methods are commonly used by most researchers. Even if the outdated methods are still acceptable, just coordinating with common experiment methods.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The following 3 issues should be considered from the cellular level before starting the research:

1.How to choose cell model - One class or multiple classes 2.How to make innovation for test indicators 3.The Project Feasibility</comment>


Git plus Dropbox, The Easy Way - <AUTHOR> http://nosleep.ca/2013/09/28/git-dropbox-the-easy-way/

<comment><USER2> Using git bundle looks like an interesting idea, but the solution suggested in the post is seems incomplete:

1\. it's only working for master 2\. it bundles everything making an update on a different machine more difficult

I'm pretty sure that people that use git bundle extensively know how to handle these scenarios though ( _I don 't_)

<comment><AUTHOR> 1\. I'm still relatively new to git, so haven't looked into branching, etc., yet. Worst case scenario, add other branches to the post-commit file. 2. It really is intended as a "backup", if I was looking to interact with more machines, I'd setup a central repository that everybody could commit to, and individuals could still use this to backup their local repos.</comment></comment>


How Swift could potentially be faster than Objective-C - <AUTHOR> https://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-qa-2014-07-04-secrets-of-swifts-speed.html <comment><USER2> Very potentially.

The things that can be "faster" are typically not the bottlenecks in Objective-C programs, as the fine article rightly mentions in passing.

On the other hand, a lot of the really slow parts of recent Objective-C "enhancements" are now mandatory in Swift, for example the Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) support, which is actually a big part of the 100x and more slowdowns.

Another issue is that you have copying semantics by default. The claim is that this can make things faster, but for common objects like arrays and dictionaries it first makes things a _lot_ slower (once they fix the completely borked array semantics).

In all of these cases, you have very slow defaults that you must trust the compiler to make fast again. The claim is that the semantics make it easier for the compiler to optimize. This is true, but so far practical experience appears to be that these two don't balance, that is the compilers don't get enough extra information for optimization to compensate for the loss in performance you get from the semantics being expensive by default.

Except in well-chosen benchmarks.

In fact, even in FP languages that have much tighter semantics and therefore much better opportunities for the "sufficiently smart" compiler to do its magic, you tend to see people dropping down to nasty imperative code (effectively C in all but name) to get decent performance.

Swift's semantics are less tight, so I think it's going to depend even more on the programmer writing fast, imperative code, "C in all but name". Again, there are a few things that help the _compiler_ here, but again I doubt they will generally be able to compensate.

I think the biggest issue with Swift performance is that it is focused on helping the _compiler_ , rather than the _programmer_. The performance model is, at least so far, highly non-linear and non-intuitive. This will hopefully get better, but the semantics I've touched on make it difficult, they are inherently highly non-linear and inherently difficult to predict.

<comment><USER3> When you say 100x slowdowns with ARC, are you talking about Swift or Objective-C? If the latter, do you have a concrete example of that happening? My experience has been that ARC is typically negligible, worst case a relatively small factor, and can be quite a bit faster due to things like autorelease elision if you hit the right situation.

As for "very slow defaults that you must trust the compiler to make fast again", that applies to just about every language that wants to be fast at all. C compilers generate awful code when the optimizer is turned off.

<comment><USER2> For the 100x slowdowns, I am talking about Swift, though if you want to see a 20x slowdown in Objective-C, look here: [http://blog.metaobject.com/2014/06/compiler-writers-gone- wil...](http://blog.metaobject.com/2014/06/compiler-writers-gone-wild-arc- madness.html)

Yes, the optimizer can take care of it some times, most of the time, ..., but phew!

While C compilers also generate pretty bad code when optimizations are off, it's nothing near this staggeringly awful. Unless you manage to write a longish loop that it can figure out, which is unlikely outside of benchmarks, my experience is you get around 2x or so for straight-line code that's pretty rare these days. This is 20x to 100x and more.

The 2x roughly matches Probsting's Law[1], which says that advances in compiler optimizer tech. double performance every 18 years. That's not a lot, and does not justify trusting the compiler this much. In short, making the semantics slow and trusting the sufficiently smart compiler [2] to fix it has _never_ worked in the past, and I don't see any evidence why this time should be different.

[1] [http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~techrep/CS-2001-12.pdf](http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~techrep/CS-2001-12.pdf)

[2] [http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SufficientlySmartCompiler](http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SufficientlySmartCompiler)

<comment><USER3> Are you measuring a 20x slowdown with optimizations turned off? That's the only way I can reproduce your results. That's a completely meaningless comparison if so.

<comment><USER2> Well, no, it's not meaningless in the context of TFA:

[http://blog.metaobject.com/2014/06/compiler-writers-gone- wil...](http://blog.metaobject.com/2014/06/compiler-writers-gone-wild-arc- madness.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is basically the speed advantages of C++ applied to Swift, a more powerful language. C++ also uses vtables and compilers often inline calls to methods if the method/type can be determined at compile time.

The argument as to why it can be faster than plain C is very weak, though. It says that if C programmers don't use the restrict keyword, equivalent Swift code can be faster. This is right, but ignores the fact that careful and competent C programmers _will_ put restrict in all the places where performance matters. It's very hard to be faster than plain C, because it has a long, long history, and as a result, the compilers have been steadily improving for a long time. It is also less powerful allowing you to be closer to the actual assembly code that is to be generated.

But with increasingly better hardware, the speed gains of plain C are diminishing. Yes, you can be very fast, but is it worth the trouble of expressing yourself in such a low-level language?

Also, since you can't type-pun (alias) in Swift, you can't do some things that can be done using plain C, so it is unclear how it can be faster.

<comment><USER5> > Also, since you can't type-pun (alias) in Swift, you can't do some things > that can be done using plain C, so it is unclear how it can be faster.

Type-punning is never necessary in C; it can always be replaced with one or more calls to memcpy( ), which the compiler can elide (clang, at least, is quite good at this optimization). I don't see any reason why this approach wouldn't work with Swift.

<comment><USER6> LLVM isn't as good at memcpy optimization as you might think. The MemCpyOptimizer pass isn't ordered very well in the pipeline and can't make use of the SSA infrastructure that the rest of LLVM uses.

Source: I'm fighting this right now in rustc and plan to fix it by just making the frontend emit fewer memcpys.

<comment><USER5> It's been a few years since I've seen clang/llvm fail to elide a memcpy used in place of type punning (it's an idiom that I use very frequently as a library writer, and care a lot about). If you have examples of cases where llvm fails to do this optimization, _please_ file a bug report and I will be delighted to lean on the right folks to get it fixed. You shouldn't need to work around it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A very relevant article: [http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?AsFastAsCee](http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?AsFastAsCee)

</comment><comment><USER8> Interestingly, Swift (as of now) can be orders of magnitude slower than C/Objective-C: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/24101718/swift- performanc...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/24101718/swift-performance- sorting-arrays)

I hope/expect the out-of-box performance will improve over time, but I guess it shouldn't be taken as fact that Swift will always be faster than its predecessor.

</comment><comment><USER9> Nice reinforcement of "performance tricks" almost always equaling "get the computer to avoid doing extra unneeded work that it used to be programmed to do".

</comment><comment><USER10> To be honest, right now _Haskell 's_ looking like a higher performance language than Swift.

<comment><USER11> Because of actual semantic analysis or some microbenchmark you saw somewhere running on a beta, unstable compiler?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> _and even claimed to be faster than C for certain cases_

-a promise made for pretty much every language ever. Just need a couple of compiler tune ups. Not trying to be critical, that just gave me a chuckle.

 _On most architectures (including x86-64, ARM, and ARM64), the first few parameters to a function are passed in registers_

To add to this, the Microsoft 64 calling convention is that the first four integer parameters (which includes pointers), and the first four floating point values, are passed in registers. The System V AMD64 ABI (used by Linux and others) passes the first 6 integer and the first 6 floating point parameters in registers.

ARMv8 convention is that the first 8 integer/pointer values, and the first 8 floating point values (so up to 16 values) are passed via registers.

This isn't all win, of course -- if your code was using those registers, to hold local variables for instance, it needs to save and restore them, or simply avoid them. In most cases it would be the latter given the abundance of registers.

The whole aliasing bit was just weird and detracts from the piece. Anyone who is doing pointer-based-operations in base C is using restrict as appropriate.

<comment><USER13> >and even claimed to be faster than C for certain cases -a promise made for pretty much every language ever. Just need a couple of compiler tune ups. Not trying to be critical, that just gave me a chuckle.

I remember the days when C was just yet another systems programming language deemed too slow for any serious work.

EDIT: Always nice to be downvoted by hipsters that lack coding experience from the days C was UNIX only.

<comment><USER14> > I remember the days when C was just yet another systems programming language > deemed too slow for any serious work.

I've heard that remark several times. Which languages were faster than C back then, except assembly? Fortran? Algol? BCPL?

<comment><USER13> Assembly of course. All higher level languages were still 2nd place to Assembly and had similar execution times across the board.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> These aren't exactly secrets, are they? Vtables and similar optimizations have been used in Java and .Net compilers for a long time. For a good explanation in C# you can read [http://netmatze.wordpress.com/2013/04/06/dynamic-dispatch- in...](http://netmatze.wordpress.com/2013/04/06/dynamic-dispatch-in-c/)

<comment><USER3> Well no, they're certainly not actual secrets. I used the word for two reasons: first, to convey that which mechanisms are actually used in Swift aren't well known yet, and secondly and much more importantly, to make the title alliterative.

<comment><USER15> Alliteration is always a good reason :) I shouldn't have been so short with you. I've just seen one to many articles where Swift is made to be seen as Apple's godly gift to software development, without any references to similar languages. Not that yours is that ofcourse, it just triggered that frustration a bit :)

<comment><USER3> I understand and share your frustration. This article is my attempt to counter the "Swift is super fast because rainbows and unicorns" attitude floating around.

<comment><USER15> A knight for the good cause, then :)

<comment><USER3> And for the record, I didn't see your comment as "short". You explained some good context, and I just thought I'd explain my word choice in turn, especially since I could joke about it.

<comment><USER15> Record noted. Now I find it unfortunate that the title here was changed, we went through all this text for nothing :)

<comment><USER3> Hey, the original title is still on my blog, still counts!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> So it's not really the secrets of Swift's speed, it's more like not doing what made Objective-C slow.

<comment><USER17> Objective-C isn't slow. It's a strict superset of C, so anything that C can do fast, Objective-C can do just as fast. If you say Objective-C is slow, you are also saying C is slow.

Objective-C provides a message passing mechanism that trades speed for convenience. It turns out that programmers often choose convenience over speed because of time pressure.

<comment><USER18> Going further, writing just C code to replicate what the Objective-C runtime actually does (dynamic dispatch) is also slower than Objective-C and it's hand-tuned, written-in-assembler runtime at those same tasks.

So, Objective-C (at least on Apple's operating systems) is as fast as C AND faster than C at a few highly specific things.</comment></comment></comment>


MSNBC: iPhone3GS over Pre; Ignores AT&T ball-n-chain - <AUTHOR> http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31169842/ns/technology_and_science-wireless

<comment><AUTHOR> But CNET warns: Don't sign new 2-year contract with AT&T (which "wants to kill everything good about iPhone3"). Wait for Verizon. [ Yeah. I _have_. For years. ]

[http://cnettv.cnet.com/iphone-3g-wait- verizon/9742-1_53-5007...](http://cnettv.cnet.com/iphone-3g-wait- verizon/9742-1_53-50072978.html?tag=smallCarouselArea.2) [cnet video]

</comment><comment><USER2> Meh, AT&T sucks just as much as every other cell-phone carrier.</comment>


The US Army's earth-shaking, off-road land trains - <AUTHOR> https://www.thedrive.com/news/33645/the-incredible-story-of-the-us-armys-earth-shaking-off-road-land-trains <comment><USER2> Another unusual type of vehicle designed for arctic transport applications is the Rolligon: [https://jalopnik.com/weird-tech-friday-the-rolligon-for- when...](https://jalopnik.com/weird-tech-friday-the-rolligon-for-when-you- want-to-r-1724171889)

Rolligon-type vehicles (mostly not under the Rolligon name today) are still used in mine and oilfield applications in the Canadian and Alaskan arctic. This is often motivated less by their snow/ice capability (which is similar to tracked vehicles), than by environmental regulations which specify a maximum ground pressure exerted by vehicles to prevent excessive damage to plant life. There's a whole world of "low ground pressure" vehicles for this reason, although in non-arctic situations they usually achieve this by use of exceptionally wide rubber tracks.

<comment><USER3> Speaking of "low ground pressure' vehicles: if you have not seen it before, take a look at the Sherp!

[https://sherpatv.com/](https://sherpatv.com/)

<comment><USER4> This is the only vehicle, besides a cruising yacht, that I truly desire to own.

My dream of journeying the worlds' swamps and river systems with a Sherpa is a tough one to shake. If only they'd made a fusion-powered version, hehe ..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm so glad this was made and worked, does anyone else find themselves haunted by the dumb failed utopian projects of the past? That somehow stupid engineering of the past sits in your imagination beside the dumb software development in shitty languages of your personal history? - What's that employer? you want a contract management system entirely in microsoft word macros - and it has to produce a scrollable map of government infrastructure, and it's 1995, and this is all in word, is there a database?, no?, no database, all in the word template - sure why the hell not, I guess you're paying and no doubt I will experience immense person satisfaction wasting my youth in your strange beige office attempting and repeatedly failing to realise this hideous monstrosity and cherish the downward spiral of shame and self recrimination. excellent!

Thank you snow train - finally I can relinquish the weird melancholy I've always got thinking about the Antarctic snow cruiser: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_Snow_Cruiser](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_Snow_Cruiser)

<comment><USER6> This was only a tiny part of US air defenses in the 1950s and 1960s. This was for building the Distant Early Warning line of radar stations, geodesic domes in arctic climate. They were built, they worked, and many, though abandoned, are still standing.

And that was just the outer warning line. The Mid-Canada Line and the Pine Tree Line were further in. Texas Towers were built out in the ocean with even more radars. There were interceptor bases all over the US and Canada. Anti- aircraft missiles and guns were staffed 24/7\. The SAGE computer systems and Missile Master were built to coordinate this. Cheyenne Mountain was built as headquarters.

<comment><USER7> And nuclear hardened coaxial cables and the TD microwave system and communications satellites and fiber optic and...

I feel like millennial and future generations need a compact guide to what the GI and Silent generations actually accomplished.

<comment><USER8> Look at the state of our communications infrastructure today. These "modern" coax networks have no redundancy and so so reliability (eg: Comcast's Node+0 nodes occasionally have their IP stack fall over, requiring a reboot).

The remaining baby bells are baby bankrupt after years of pillaging their territory to pay for acquisitions and investor dividends (see recent Frontier bankruptcy and fire sale of Pacific NW territory to Ziply Fiber) and the infrastructure they do have is almost entirely running atop legacy hardware designed in the 1980s.

<comment><USER2> The coax networks that GP refers to have nothing to do with cable television (except that television syndication links were carried over them). GP is referring to the AT&T L-series carriers which carried telephone calls (and later digital voice link equivalents) over multiple bundled coaxial pairs.

The L-carrier infrastructure was built to remarkable standards of durability and reliability, in part because much of the system (particularly L-3I and L-4) were built as part of federal C3I contracts and were hardened against limited nuclear strikes, but also because of AT&T/WECo's general culture of obsession with reliability. Station equipment would be entirely duplicated for redundancy, nearly all equipment stations were manned to allow for quick repair (and 'maintenance patrols' inspected remote en-route repeaters as often as daily), and the system was designed for network-level redundancy through rerouting and the preparation of 'alternate control points' to allow continued operation even in the case of complete isolation of parts of the network.

The L-carrier system fell out of use when it was replaced by fiber-optic technology (which AT&T initially referred to as "lightguide", perhaps due to it coming hot on the tails of their work on waveguide carriers such as WT4 which were essentially microwave radio through a metal duct).

Of course, this raises the question of why this infrastructure is so much more reliable than cable television seems to be. I would suggest three explanations. First, AT&T, Bell Labs, WECo, and the rest of the Ma Bell crowd held reliability as an extremely high value, at both a cultural and requirements level. This is exemplified by now legendary Bell system feats such as moving exchange office buildings with operators still working inside (and dragging long tether cables) in order to avoid a service interruption. Second, AT&T long held major defense contracts with significant reliability requirements (against both natural conditions and enemy attack), and as a matter of cost savings these contracts were met using infrastructure shared with civilian services. In general, the non-Bell system modern internet carriers have not held this type of business on such a large scale, in part because they postdate the cold war and in part because AT&T, CenturyLink, and other Bell alums are more interested in federal contracts.

Third, cable television has historically been both more competitive and less critical in popular opinion than telephone service, and so reliability has simply not been a high business priority for these operators. For the Bell system any service interruption could be a major scandal, and this is still to some extent true today of telephone service (see any 911 interruption incident). On the other hand the cable companies descended from offering a service which was viewed as a non-critical luxury. Consumer and regulator behavior seems to have just not caught up to the internet era in this regard.

And yes, it is quite true that many of the Bell system alums are struggling today. On the other hand, CenturyLink is quite viable as a business and shows few signs of slowing. They are even arguably relatively innovation-forward as an ISP as evidenced by their having one of the larger gigabit GPON footprints in the US, as well as emphasizing no-contract "price for life" service in many markets where they compete with cable carriers. But yes, ultimately most of the Bell system has been dismantled in the interest of cost savings, and has been replaced by a sort of shambling wisp of its former self. Many feel that the writing was on the wall as soon as the breakup occurred, a move which was in good part aimed at reducing consumer prices, and did so, but partially at the cost of radically reduced investment in infrastructure. There is tradeoff between affordability and reliability, and the telecom industry seems to always cling to one of two extremes.

<comment><USER9> Part of their monopoly was regulation. Those reliability requirements were mandated by state utility boards and the FCC. The engineering culture was the tail that wagged the dog.

<comment><USER2> Yes, and I think it's an important example of "reason number three" that while cable television operators are subject to public utility regulation in most states they are _not_ subject to nearly as stringent quality-of-service requirements as the telephone operators. You can complain to your PRC or equivalent body about nearly any interruption of telephone service, but when it comes to your cable you're largely on your own.

<comment><USER9> Very true.

In my experience in New York, Verizon basically uses the public service commission as a level-1 helpdesk -- they take referrals incredibly seriously. I had an issue with Verizon equipment infested with bees -- and they literally rolled trucks within 30 minutes of getting a referral from the regulator, a pole and a bunch of equipment was replaced within 24 hours.

With TWC/Spectrum, unless they do something grossly incompetent or unsafe, the regulator is more like another party nagging them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wonder did this somehow inspire The Amtrak Wars[0]?

(Probably not, but I'm loving the `strange(truth) > strange(fiction)`)

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

<comment><USER11> First thing I thought of! Especially the picture in the header.

<comment><USER12> Seconded. Perhaps the series is less obscure than I'd imagined.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Heard a legend that when USSR planned the manned Moon program, one of ideas for how to bring a humongous rocket to Baikonur was manufacture it in Moscow, then move by rivers to Caspian Sea and then move over land east, to the launch pads. For that purpose USSR started to construct a pretty big off-road vehicle - rather similar to what's pictured here, but dropped the project, as N-1 was decided to be built on Baikonur itself. Remnants of the vehicle surfaced somewhere on the Web...

Wonder if somebody could confirm or disprove this :) .

<comment> orbital-decay Yes, the diesel-electric ZiL-135Sh. [1][2] 120t payload, zero-turn radius. The prototype looks deceptively small, those are motorized Il-18 landing gears, and the payload was supposed to go on top of them. The full-scale vehicle was being tested but there are no photos left, apparently.

[1] [http://www.gruzovikpress.ru/article/6377-zil-135sh- transport...](http://www.gruzovikpress.ru/article/6377-zil-135sh-transporter- tyajelovoz-dlya-transportirovki-krupnogabaritnyh-blokov-raketonositeley- zemnaya-sostavlyayushchaya-lunnoy-programmy/) (in Russian)

[2] [https://truck-auto.info/zil/304-135sh.html](https://truck- auto.info/zil/304-135sh.html) (less info, some more photos of the prototype with the wheels turned 90)

<comment><USER3> So, in my industry, moving 10,000 tonne loads is routine(-ish).

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Wp41alE8Mg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Wp41alE8Mg)

<comment> orbital-decay Yeah, it was supposed to look similar but obviously non-modular and with less wheels. It was USSR in 1967, nothing like that was available, so they had to improvise. More like a wheeled version of NASA crawler-transporter designed to cover fairly long distances across Kazakh Steppes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Cool. But I wonder about this stat: 63 manned stations, "would need about 500 tons of materials to create all of these stations"

500 tons seems WAY low.

<comment><USER15> I think they dropped a 1,000 from it, so it should have said "need about 500,000 tons."

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This reminds me of the Speed Racer movie where one of the competitors in the race drove a land train made of pure gold.

Not sure what the plot was but they were the villan trying to hide the gold. Speed Racer had to use his steering-wheel-radial-menu to summon equipment embedded in his aerodymanic car (up against this extraordinarily heavy freighter with lots a drag).

<comment><USER17> I just posted about that and then saw your comment. See: [https://youtu.be/EgSk7yEheLo](https://youtu.be/EgSk7yEheLo)

What kind of professional auto race allows a car the length and size of a train? Love that they green-lighted (greenlit?) that script.

<comment><USER16> Haha thank you for this. I was cracking up at so many things - 1500 HP per wheel as told to the inspector LOL. 500 mph on any kind of road. Over the top in so many ways, love it.

The signature sound it made when it was imposing in a scene resonates with me in such a deep, nostalgic way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> R.G. LeTourneau also built LeTourneau College to train his workforce. It's evolved into LeTourneau University, my alma mater. www.letu.edu

<comment><USER19> Whoa a fellow Letu grad in the wild! My wife and I graduated back when it was top flight school in the nation 2009. Beat out Embry Riddle and the Air Force Academy that year. She wasn't on the Sting team though, just a regular student. I worked for IT for a year before we moved off into the wild world.

When did you graduate? Are you into programming?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Article is worth it just to watch the video of the land-train on the interstate in the 50s / early 60s, with all the classic cars maneuvering around it.

</comment><comment><USER21> Oh, so I guess a real machine inspired this?

[https://i.imgur.com/Apnf1qN.png](https://i.imgur.com/Apnf1qN.png)

</comment><comment><USER4> From the linked article, a juicy tidbit:

\----

"Jungle Destroyer

The Morrow Project purchased two of these as driver training vehicles, and for heavy load carrying -- though also because the manufacturer had them "lying around" \-- SAC had tested them in the late 1950s for clearing crashed bombers from runways in a hurry. The same width as the Overland Train (5.25 meters), these are 17.5 meters long and 5 meters tall (over the blade-lifting arm) -- 3.4 meters from the ground to the cargo deck. Weighing 50 tons unloaded, they can carry 95 tons of cargo. Similarly to the Control Car of the Overland Train, the four rear wheels are not steered; all shock-absorbing is from the low pressure tires.

When purchased by the Project, these were powered by a 600 HP Cummins diesel, driving an electrical generator; the Project removed the diesel engine and generator, and installed a fusion reactor. "

\----

.. ummm .. what? A fusion reactor? Like, nuclear powered jungle destroyer? That is bonkers.

Glad these things didn't make it out of the Armys' toy box. Imagine what the world would be like if we had fusion-powered jungle destroyers on the market ..

EDIT: This picture is a sad end to this story:

[http://golddaughters.com/wp- content/uploads/2017/05/museum_4...](http://golddaughters.com/wp- content/uploads/2017/05/museum_4836.jpg)

Somehow it doesn't look so huge!

<comment><USER22> That seems to be from a different article: [http://asmrb.pbworks.com/w/page/53070717/Morrow%20Project%20...](http://asmrb.pbworks.com/w/page/53070717/Morrow%20Project%20Overland%20Train)

And, as the casual mentions of fusion reactors suggest, it is fiction: [http://asmrb.pbworks.com/w/page/9958836/FrontPage](http://asmrb.pbworks.com/w/page/9958836/FrontPage)

<comment><USER4> Well, it was linked in the original article directly, which used that page as a source reference for a lot of things, so .. if there is fiction, its sprinkled throughout the original source material.

<comment><USER22> Hm, maybe the thedrive.com article has been changed since then. I can only find one link to that page, in the final paragraph.

<comment><USER4> Its the link in the sentence "In the end, the TC-497 was also abandoned." \- that I followed... interesting that they'd use an ARG as a reference on it ..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> In Australia there are apparently civilian equivalents of this.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iFkKRh5kcM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iFkKRh5kcM)

<comment><USER24> There are a couple Australian TV shows about these trucks and truckers: Outback Truckers (on Netflix in the US) and MegaTruckers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> It's interesting that it featured regenerative electric braking. Whilst regenerative braking is an old idea, I couldn't find an earlier example of this applied to electric regeneration. It seems the first mention of this in a car is 1967's AMC Amitron concept but this industrial use predates that by over a decade.

<comment><USER26> Some diesel electric trains had regenerative braking in the 1930s.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Pet Peeve: they break the back button on the browser

<comment><USER28> Not just a little broken; I'm literally unable to use the back button to leave the site. I had to use the long press feature to leave the site.

Firefox mobile

<comment><USER29> Works for me on Firefox for Android, but uBO is blocking 27 items.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Before reading the article I was planning to complain that a tractor pulling a few wagons in a, well, train does not an off-road train make.

But after reading the article, you know what, I'm willing to concede it's an off-road train.

</comment><comment><USER31> I remember seeing a documentary about this vehicle as a kid. Everything about it just seemed so oversized. I had not realized it was the heavy lift helicopters that eventually outmoded it. Kind of sad, since it can be handy to have the logistic capability to move thousands of tons when you can't fly.

It also got me wondering about what a Tesla version of this would look like :-)

<comment><USER32> The closest I can think of for "a Tesla version":

[https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a...](https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a28748306/worlds- largest-electric-vehicle-dump-truck/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I am reminded of the Burning Man 747 in terms of "things that could be done with this".

</comment><comment><USER5> snowrunner mod please ([https://www.epicgames.com/store/en- US/product/snowrunner/hom...](https://www.epicgames.com/store/en- US/product/snowrunner/home))

<comment><USER34> Haha, I was thinking the same thing

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I wonder if we might see something like this operate on Mars one day, to haul cargo from landing areas to inhabited areas (or mining operations). These were apparently doomed by heavy-lift helicopters, which likely won't be an option in the thinner atmosphere _there_.

</comment><comment><USER36> I imagine this would make more sense now with electric motors and a diesel generator. You would get a massive cargo transport and also a diesel generator at the same time.

Still an helicopter might be more better, it just seems a nice thing to imagine, a beast like this moving around in these days.

<comment><USER37> The LeTourneau land trains _were_ diesel-electric. What are you imagining being different?

<comment><USER36> I must have confused a few parts. I read in one somewhere in the article being gas powered.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> My dad worked on one of the radar stations on the dew line in Canada. He's got some cool photos. Like photos of a Polar Bear looking in the windows of his cabin.

</comment><comment><USER39> Off road, maybe, but it's still required to scout the terrain and find a proper itinerary, and possible bulldoze dirt or cut some trees.

</comment><comment><USER40> Strikes me as wasteful and pointless, like a lot of military projects.

</comment><comment><USER41> I wish we had a world with zepplins ferrying people around, land trains with several gas turbine engines, and nuclear powered aircraft. I'm bored of the same Material design web sites, phones that look the same, every apartment is the same, etc. I want imagination and crazy ideas to rule the world.

<comment><USER42> There used to be steam-powered and battery-powered cars in the early 20th Century. There was an Edison-Westinghouse war in electricity distribution.

Typically, a consensus is reached based on technical and economic limitations.

For example, nuclear-powered aircraft? You need shielding to protect the human crew. You also need a reactor that can survive a crash. That's why they use nuclear fuel for unmanned probes. There are no humans to protect, and it's a one-way trip.

<comment><USER43> It's my understanding that if not for the development of ICBMs, the US might have created cruise missiles powered by unshielded nuclear reactors. They got as far as running a prototype engine for five minutes, but the whole project became pointless when it became clear ICBMs would work.

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

Russia has seemingly been developing this same sort of technology in recent years. Presumably this is in response to anti-ballistic missile technology calling into question the future effectiveness of ICBMs.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9M730_Burevestnik](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9M730_Burevestnik)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> WARNING: back button hijack. now on my blacklist.

non-user-hostile link: [https://outline.com/PUh9a5](https://outline.com/PUh9a5)

<comment><USER45> Really? A "warning?" A warning is appropriate for malware, but a faulty UX? That's a bit extreme.

Back button works fine on Safari for iOS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> > visible from space on Google Maps.

Note that google maps imagery is generally taken from airplanes not satellites.

<comment><USER47> Except the imagery they link to is actual satellite imagery from Maxar, a space company that sells orbital Earth observation imagery.</comment></comment>


HN cyclists: How about a new cycling forum? - <AUTHOR>

I've been cycling for a number of years now (~150 miles/week these days) and have been getting a little annoyed with some of the existing cycling forums out there.
I pulled a little something together over the past few days (yay, for open source stuff!) and, if you're interested, would love to have a few HN'ers help me build a better cycling community.
Any takers? http://www.paceline.cc
At the very least, would love some feedback on the idea, the features (or lack thereof) or anything else you think is relevant.
Thanks! <comment><AUTHOR> <http://www.paceline.cc></comment>


Ask HN: Should I stay or should I go? - <AUTHOR> I started a company with a friend. The friend is good at sales but not technical and bad at cost control.
Long story short the company lost a ton of money and now is pivoting to some software that I wrote. My issue is that the investors owe me 130k in back pay (almost 1.5 years worth) and are blaming me for my partner's cash burn. Despite this it looks like by end of month we will have raised 2 million additional investment based on my software and partnerships I signed.
I don't really believe the company can pivot because there are only a couple of technical people: myself, a dev I hired and a couple of part time outsourced devs I manage (all in low cost jurisdictions). I am working only part time until they settle the back pay stuff. I am not the highest paid person and others did get paid. I am just associated with my friend who burned the cash (he also got paid more than me). Also the investors given me any warrants that were promised.
I am working part time on a second startup. 2 investors I ran into offered me 500k to launch it. Should I jump? Or do both?
I need someone to work with... and almost every company needs sales guys. Maybe hire my friend? <comment><USER2> If you have 500k to launch a new startup then best to cut ties with the old one because no matter how much time and effort you put into the old one it will never be operated in a manner that you are comfortable with. Better to cut your losses and live life happy, in control of your own fate and have the 500k to do it with. Just sign away all but a small portion of the old startup.

<comment><AUTHOR> good advice thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> If it's your company why are you not getting paid? And why are you not in control? Maybe I'm reading this wrong but it sounds like there's either a lot more to this that you've not mentioned or you've some underlying problem, if you don't address that problem you're just going to be taking it with you and the same thing will happen to you at the new startup.

<comment><AUTHOR> We raised so much I am at 2% + warrants in ownership. Again a bunch of the issues stem from my partner who went pedal to metal and blew through millions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You should probably get a lawyer.

<comment><AUTHOR> I spoke to one... He basically said I am screwed as a company director I can't do anything against company interests or get sued :(</comment></comment>


First Impressions Using Android Honeycomb, Google's iPad Rival - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/02/android-honeycomb-ipad/

<comment><USER2> I wonder why Google broke from Android UI branding with Honeycomb. It doesn't even seem to be consistently applied throughout. Definitely not an improvement.

</comment><comment><USER3> Utter stupidity

"...If you long-press the desktop, you'll bring up the widget/wallpaper selector, which some people will undoubtedly activate accidentally (and promptly panic). The third button in the bottom left corner lets you jump between recently used applications — a feature that I'll love, but could confuse people who aren't sure what's going on."

This idiot thinks that long-click wallpaper widgets will cause panic and that he's smarter than all the common folk who will be too confused by the recently used apps list.

And those are his detriments to the platform? TC's staff rarely provide anything of value to the conversation.</comment>


Tarn Adams – Villains in Dwarf Fortress - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-7TtPX5uhg <comment><USER2> It is always a pleasure to listen to Toady One speak about DF. He seems to be perpetually at that stage, regarding DF, where you like something a lot, the initial hype is gone but given way to a more 'profound' sense of pleasure from understading it

In this talk particularly this is evident when he talks about traditional game structures, he talks about using them to 'cutting corners' but not in a bad way

Sidenote: Tarn's voice registers in my head like H. Jon Benjamins in some bits</comment>


Evernote Raises Another $70 Million - <AUTHOR> http://blog.evernote.com/2012/05/03/evernote-raises-70-million-financing/

<comment><AUTHOR> I still fail to see how Evernote is worth this much. But then, I prefer plain text notes with Simplenote/Dropbox/nvALT, so perhaps I'm just not the target audience. Still...

<comment><USER2> Yeah, I can agree with that - it's a great tool but really, it's just a way to store notes for later. Then again, a simple photo-sharing application company just sold for $1bn. Crazy times :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Maybe they can use this to give us better text formatting inside the evernote app.</comment>


Hello World in AIM – crezy syntax development - <AUTHOR> https://areknawo.com/the-aim-project-syntax <comment><USER2> I thought this was going to be an article on the AOL Instant Messenger protocol.</comment>


SQL and noSQL are two sides of the same coin (Erik Meijer, Gavin Bierman) - <AUTHOR> http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1961297

<comment><USER2> FTA:

"By applying a little more category theory we can show how a single abstraction, monads and monad comprehensions, can be used as a unified query language for both SQL and coSQL."

So just added to my reading list: Grust, T. 2003. Monad comprehensions: a versatile representation for queries. In The Functional Approach to Data Management, eds. P. Gray, L. Kerschberg, P. King, and A. Poulovassilis, 288-311. Springer Verlag.</comment>


So You Don't Want to Be a Programmer After All (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://blog.codinghorror.com/so-you-dont-want-to-be-a-programmer-after-all/ <comment><USER2> I guess "the grass is always greener on the other side" fits perfect for any career change pattern.</comment>


Data Analysis Revolution in Football - <AUTHOR> http://www.iafrikan.com/2015/03/14/data-analysis-football-soccer/

<comment><USER2> I think games are ripe for Big Data and IoT as they are less critical usecases compared to health etc. Following is two similar efforts with football, first done by us and second by SAP.

1) Glimpse of the future: Overlaying realtime analytics on Football Broadcasts, [http://srinathsview.blogspot.com/2014/06/glimpse-of- future-o...](http://srinathsview.blogspot.com/2014/06/glimpse-of-future- overlaying-realtime.html)

2) [http://www.sapbigdata.com/stories/tsg-hoffenheim-uses- spatia...](http://www.sapbigdata.com/stories/tsg-hoffenheim-uses-spatial- analysis-with-sap-hana-to-optimize-soccer- training/#sthash.bNzbhh2p.TKe0E9Of.dpbs)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, will check out and probably update the blog post with those two examples</comment></comment>


Feedback for http://couponize.me - <AUTHOR>

Hi all, I've found that the opinions of those who regular this site have been valuable to me in the past, especially given the range of expertise present here.
It is with this in mind that I was hoping to get some feedback on my latest side-project, http://couponize.me. The site is a very simple to use printable coupon creator.
I'm particularly looking for feedback as to: whether everything works, confusing UI elements, and what features you'd like to see the site have.
Thanks for anyone who takes the time to look or respond. <comment><USER2> A few points:

"Title" should probably be called 'offer'.

Make the printable 'coupon' be multiple on a page. It's rather wasteful to just do one to a sheet - 2 or 4 would be better imo.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, thats pretty useful feedback. I'm going to introduce different templates so that people can specify things like size.

Will def change the title tag though. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> Clickable link: <http://couponize.me></comment>


Show HN: Patent Database Search Tool - <AUTHOR> http://rosencrantz.berkeley.edu/

<comment><AUTHOR> A big issue in innovation research is to attribute patents to particular people. Patent disambiguation is an attempt at creating some sort of person ID, when the underlying data has no such information. One application is to find the same person inventing under the same name but at a different company (signalling that he has changed jobs) and so on. In doing analyses like these that disambiguation becomes essential. There is no "definition", everyone tries to come up with their own algorithm to unify S. Smith, Microsoft Corp from Steven Smith, Microsoft Corp, there there are always false positives.

</comment><comment><USER2> This is quite cool. What is the difference between raw and disambiguated? I have an educated guess, but I would appreciate a definition.</comment>


What are your favorite sci-fi and fantasy books? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Blindsight by Peter Watts. It's a masterpiece of hard SciFi, but not for the faint of heart. It will mess with your mind, on top of the generally scary subject matter.

<comment><USER3> It's also Creative Commons licensed on his website, despite some commercial success: [http://rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm](http://rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Childhoods end - Humanity takes the next step in evolution

Anhilliation - Fish out of water like story of exploring a mysterious, horrific, environment (2 sequels drag on for too much after this one though)

Many Ray Bradbury stories (Martian chronicles, and the Everyman collection contain the best ones)

Infinite Jest (Alternate American future of a culture of addiction and depravity, partly mediated by technology)

The Circle (haven't read, but like the author, life inside the biggest tech company of the future)

</comment><comment><USER5> [http://www.amazon.com/Omega-Rising-Force-Book- ebook/dp/B00B7...](http://www.amazon.com/Omega-Rising-Force-Book- ebook/dp/B00B795UUS/ref=sr_1_7?s=digital- text&ie=UTF8&qid=1422222164&sr=1-7&keywords=Joshua+Dalzelle) Omega force book series is my favorites, and the new series the same author is making [http://www.amazon.com/Warship-Black-Fleet-Trilogy-Book- ebook...](http://www.amazon.com/Warship-Black-Fleet-Trilogy-Book- ebook/dp/B00RS8FT2G/ref=sr_1_3?s=digital- text&ie=UTF8&qid=1422222164&sr=1-3&keywords=Joshua+Dalzelle) both book series are great, second series only have 1 book, and both are sci-fi. :)

</comment><comment><USER6> Stand on Zanzibar, Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, Childhood's End, A Cantilce for St Leibowitz, The Stars My Destination, Midnight At The Well of Souls, Nine Princes in Amber, Halting State, Strnger In A Strange Land, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress.

</comment><comment><USER7> For Fantasy I loved the Thieves' World shared universe. The first 4 books were my favourites.

[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thieves'_World](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thieves'_World)

While some of his work hasn't aged well, I am still quite fond of several of Michael Moorcock's Elric novels and the first Corum trilogy.

[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elric_of_Melniboné](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elric_of_Melniboné)

[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corum_Jhaelen_Irsei](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corum_Jhaelen_Irsei)

</comment><comment><USER8> Anything by Greg Egan; some of the things by Adam Roberts; i like William Gibson (the modern books too); I also really like Bruce Sterling.

HN has a lot of these style threads and you're going to get some good recommendations if you search for them.

<comment><USER9> I recently read William Gibson's "The Peripheral" and I really liked it. I think it's one of his best.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Discworld: Going Postal, Making Money, and Raising Steam (3 books total)

The Lies of Locke Lamora (and sequels, 3 books total so far)

The Name of the Wind (and sequels, 3 books total so far)

Ancillary Justice (and sequel, 2 books total so far)

All of Iain M. Banks Culture series

Old Man's War (and sequels)

<comment><USER11> Second all of these choices, and I will add Hyperion and its sequels to the list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Just read 'The Martian'. I wouldn't even call it science fiction, its just science. A fictional but technical and realistic how-to guide on surviving Mars.

</comment><comment><USER13> \- Brave New World (dystopia/utopia, short read)

\- Pandora's Star (futuristic (2380), humans are immortal through rejuvenation and are colonizing new worlds using worm hole tech(I think they have 50 or so worlds), long read - lots of sequels if you enjoy the universe)

\- Ender's game (futuristic, the movie cuts off 1/2 the book that revolves around Ender's 2 siblings, both also are geniuses, short read - lots of sequels if you enjoy the universe)

</comment><comment><USER14> Diamond age: a young ladies illustrated primer. Anathem. Halting state. Accelerando. Rant: an oral biography of buster casey. Enders game. The laundry files.

</comment><comment><USER15> I just read these and am waiting for the third. [http://www.wolfhoundcentury.com/](http://www.wolfhoundcentury.com/) Peter isn't on Twitter, but he responds to email through his site. I hope there is a major motion picture in the works as he has created a very cool world.

</comment><comment><USER16> It's easier to list some of my favorite authors than list their individual novels. Fantasy: Brandon Sanderson, Anthony Ryan, Kevin J. Anderson SciFi: Alastair Reynolds, Peter F. Hamilton, early Richard Morgan Military SciFi: B. V. Larson, Dave Duncan, Evan Currie, Jerry Pournelle, John Ringo, Eric Nylund

</comment><comment><USER17> Theatre of the Gods by Matt Suddain is an epic read. Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card is one of the few books I'll reread every few years. Both are sci- fi.

And, while not technically a book but a manga, Appleseed by Masamune Shirow is another collection I reread every few years (precursor to Ghost in the Shell).

</comment><comment><USER18> Iain M. Banks "The Culture" series. I only just found out about these books this summer and have not been able to put them down. Currently on book 9 of 10 and could not recommend them enough. I just can't get enough of the universe that Mr. Banks has created.

</comment><comment><USER7> Ted Chiang is my favourite short fiction author, he doesn't write a lot but what he publishes is first notch.

Podcast of his short story Exhalation:

[https://archive.org/details/ExhalationByTedChiang](https://archive.org/details/ExhalationByTedChiang)

</comment><comment><USER19> I really enjoyed the Honor Harrington series by David Webber. I've also read most of the Safehold series, also by Webber, which has been excellent so far.

Currently half way through the Lost Fleet Series, which is pretty good too.

Quite different from the 3 series above, the Rho Agenda was very good.

</comment><comment><USER20> Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, Dune, Foundation series, Martian Chronicles & Illustrated Man, Ender's Game, Accelerando, Hyperion, The Forever War, Player of Games, Snow Crash

</comment><comment><USER21> Not much fantasy here yet, so Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun tetralogy, republished as two books: Shadow & Claw and Sword & Citadel.

</comment><comment><USER22> Favorite fantasy book far and away is "The Way of Kings" (a random Sanderson), favorite sci-fi book is Snowcrash (Neal Stephenson)

</comment><comment><USER23> All-time favorite: _Cryptonomicon_ by Neal Stephenson Recent favorite: _The Name of the Wind_ by Patrick Rothfuss

</comment><comment><USER24> Invasion of the Body Snatchers by Jack Finney

2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Mission of Gravity by Hal Clement

The Song and the Pendant by Magnus Von Black

</comment><comment><USER25> Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

Any of Ursula K Le Guin's books, but particularly The Left Hand of Tomorrow.

Ancillary Justice.

Anything by Peter Watts or Iain M Banks.

</comment><comment><USER26> If you like short stories I recommend Nine Tomorrows by Issac Asimov & The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury

</comment><comment><USER27> Old Man's War series by John Scalzi

</comment><comment><USER28> The Hyperion series by Dan Simmons, nice mixture of sci-fi topics.

</comment><comment><USER29> Deamon by Daniel Suarez

<comment><USER30> Daemon, and the follow up Freedom(tm) are a few fantastic books. Don't be fooled by the start - it seems like a bit of a clichéd cop procedural, but rapidly evolves to an interesting glance at near-future sci-fi and augmented reality.

...plus it's pretty darned cool.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Dune - IM not-so HO its the best sci fi novel ever.

</comment><comment><USER32> Kevin Hearne - Iron Druid Chronicles</comment>


Identify browser in SVG - <AUTHOR> http://a3nm.net/share/svglitch.svg

<comment><USER2> In Chrome 35.0.?? it says "webkit", that is correct.

In IE 11.0 it says "gecko", but it should say "trident".

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh, right, forgot about IE. This is only distinguishing Webkit and non- Webkit...</comment></comment>


Applause For Finland: First Country To Make Broadband Access A Legal Right  - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/14/applause-for-finland-first-country-to-make-broadband-access-a-legal-right/ <comment><USER2> So called "positive rights" like that are bad.

If you want broadband and don't want to pay for it, you are basically saying that your neighbors should work as slaves to provide it. In that if they don't, they are violating your right.

Rights should only be negative, i.e. things you have the right for other people not to do to you. Basically protection of your property rights including your own body. No theft, murder, stealing, rape, fraud etc.

Not only do I personally believe positive rights are wrong, they cannot logically be upheld without breaking the negative rights.

<comment><USER3> Coming from an extremely poor family, I feel fortunate to have been raised in a society that provided the "positive right" to a public education; otherwise I would probably be unemployed or making minimum wage in a gas station right now.

<comment><USER4> There's a difference between rights and things that any sufficiently advanced society should ensure are available for all of its citizens.

<comment><USER5> If it's government mandated/enforced/funded, it's probably safe to refer to it as a "positive right".

Otherwise, I agree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What good is broadband access without some kind of computer? Do Finns have a "right" to computers too?

If some Finn chooses to live in a remote area of the country, must he be provided with broadband? By whom? How? Or else what (the provider is forced out of business and won't be providing access to anyone)?

(I haven't read the law in question. Perhaps it answers these questions.)

Why stop with broadband? Providing it will make Internet-geeks "applaud." What other so-called "rights" can we invent which are incumbent upon the action of others? A right to instruments [culture is good]? Musicians might applaud. A right to sports equipment [fitness is good]? Athletes. Etc. Tell me, what's the difference?

<comment><USER7> I think is important it's made a legal right so companies or other agents can't take your connection away easily, like the 'Three Strikes Law' is trying to do in France.

Second, it means that service providers are forced to provide somekind of access to all areas. Usually in urban areas this means a broadband and in extreme rural areas somekind of mobile or wireless access.

Third, there is some confusion in TC comments, but this doesn't mean that the connection will be free, just that it has to be available to almost every residence.

Anyway this doesn't change things much in Finland. I think we already have broadband almost everywhere, this just ensures that the situation won't change in the future.

<comment><USER8> There is a cost to providing Internet access in rural areas. Should this cost be borne by the people who choose to live in those places, or by everybody else?

Has there ever been a time when making _everybody_ pay for an individual's mistakes -- whether the mistake is getting pregnant at 15 or buying AAA-rated mortgage-backed securities -- has been the right thing to do?

<comment><USER9> Can a nation thrive with all citizens living in urban areas? The internet is becoming the main way to disseminate information. I'd rather folks in rural areas have access to broadband.

Libraries and broadband access are important to providing education opportunities and to spread culture and ideas throughout a nation, and I'm willing to subsidize that for people living in rural areas.

<comment><USER10> Serious question, not being facetious:

> ... I'm willing to subsidize that for people living in rural areas.

I'm not willing to do that. What are you willing to do to me for refusing? Arrest me? Shoot me?

<comment><USER11> Tax you.

<comment><USER10> > Tax you.

The philosophical question is, "Are you willing to imprison or harm someone who refuses to do things for other people they don't believe in?"

"Tax you" does not answer that question. If you request or demand someone contribute (in this case, broadband internet in rural areas), and they refuse to do so, are you willing to arrest or harm them?

<comment><USER12> "Tax you" is exactly the answer to that question. Taxes are not optional and there are penalties for refusing to pay them. That's how governments work.

<comment><USER10> > "Tax you" is exactly the answer to that question. Taxes are not optional and > there are penalties for refusing to pay them. That's how governments work.

You've simply stated that there is a currently enforced law. The same argument could be any law throughout history: Mandatory religious worship. Conscription. Even slavery. Take ancient Sparta or Rome - "Slavery is not optional and there are penalties for refusing to work. That's how governments work" - that would have been a true statement, but doesn't get at whether that's right or wrong. It just states that there is a law that is enforced.

But this question is important - "Are you willing to imprison or harm someone who refuses to do things for other people they don't believe in?"

The easy way is to refuse to directly answer this question. In this dialog, it comes down to, "Are you willing to imprison or harm someone who refuses to subsidize a rural area's broadband internet?" I'm not speaking universally about all law here, I'm wondering if you or anyone is willing to imprison or harm another human being for refusing to subsidize a rural area's broadband internet. Yes? No?

<comment><USER13> You're conflating refusal to pay taxes with not supporting how those taxes are spent. Those are two very different ways of interacting with the law.

<comment><USER10> > _The easy way is to refuse to directly answer this question._ In this > dialog, it comes down to, "Are you willing to imprison or harm someone who > refuses to subsidize a rural area's broadband internet?"

> You're conflating refusal to pay taxes with not supporting how those taxes > are spent. Those are two very different ways of interacting with the law.

It's not conflating - if you pass a law to further an agenda (say, broadband internet in rural areas) you need a penalty or it's just a request.

The reason I'm not talking about all taxes is because I can answer this question: "Are you willing to imprison or harm someone who refuses to subsidize a rural area's broadband internet?"

My answer to that is no. No, I am not willing to imprison or harm someone who refuses to do that. Therefore, I believe the law has a problem with it.

However, if my country was invaded by malicious hostile forces and I was asked, "Are you willing to imprison or harm someone who refuses to defend the country against the malicious hostile invading force?" - Then I would say yes, in that particular emergency, I would imprison or shoot someone who refused to defend against the invaders. I would not enjoy doing it, but I would do it if I could not find another way to keep our people from getting killed and pillaged.

When you pass a tax on something, you need to back it credibly. Now, it's easy to wash your hands of it by saying, "It's the law, and if you break the law, there are penalties." Yes, but this a generic non-statement. So far, no one is willing to say whether they are willing to imprison or harm someone for refusing to subsidize a rural area's broadband internet. Are you?

"The easy way is to refuse to directly answer this question. Are you willing to imprison or harm someone who refuses to subsidize a rural area's broadband internet?"

<comment><USER13> You certainly are conflating. Opposing the existence of a law and breaking a law are two different things, and your supposedly simple question is combining then in order to make the misleading argument that a person who breaks a law is actually punished for opposing the existence of a law. It's conflating thoughts with deeds, and it's dishonest. I will not answer it.

A person in a democratic society has a right to determine the laws they are legally subject to, but their mechanism for doing that is not their choice of whether to comply with it or not. If you are tried for a crime, you are not asked whether you agree with the law or not. You can't simply say "Oh, well, I don't agree with that law, so it's ok if I break it." and expect that to constitute a valid defense.

Relying on civil disobedience to communicate your opposition instead of (say) voting and lobbying the legislature is naïve and not likely to be effective in most cases. Your opposition is much more likely to be recognized by the arm of government responsible for the formulation of the law than that which enforces it. This is what I mean by two ways of interacting with the law.

<comment><USER10> > You certainly are conflating. Opposing the existence of a law and breaking a > law are two different things, and your supposedly simple question is > combining then in order to make the misleading argument that a person who > breaks a law is actually punished for opposing the existence of a law.

No. The point is that the ends do not justify the means. I support the vast majority of the current law's agenda - but I believe the means of how it is carried out is wrong. Most people have never thought about this - I'm asking you to think about it.

> A person in a democratic society has a right to determine the laws they are > legally subject to, but their mechanism for doing that is not their choice > of whether to comply with it or not.

I'm not speaking about legality or illegality here. Above I wrote: When you pass a tax on something, you need to back it credibly. Now, it's easy to wash your hands of it by saying, "It's the law, and if you break the law, there are penalties."

But ends do not, in my opinion, justify means. Others can disagree - that's why we're discussing. But most people can't even admit that the means that are being used are pretty horrific. If someone says, "Yes, I think it is horrible that someone who refuses to subsidize broadband internet in a rural area is imprisoned, but it's necessary anyways so I support it", then I respect that person. I disagree, but I respect it. But the man that refuses that is refusing to see the way things currently are.

This truth is a bit ugly, I think. I don't particularly like it.

> If you are tried for a crime, you are not asked whether you agree with the > law or not.

Again, I'm not speaking about legality or illegality here. Yes, breaking the law is always illegal, by definition. This is not the discussion.

But this really isn't academic. The broadband internet in rural areas is very illustrative, but let's take another example, this time from the United States. Social Security Tax - it's to help support older and disabled people. This is a good end goal - supporting older and disabled people.

But if someone doesn't give their income up to pay this tax to support this cause, they go to jail. Yes, not paying this tax is against the law, therefore it is illegal, therefore you can be punished under the law for breaking this law. That's obvious.

But is it right? I'm going to say, categorically - no. You could disagree. You could say, "The ends justify the means. We need to lock people in jail who refuse to help the elderly and disabled." But you can't say, "That's dishonest, that's not what's happening." Because that's precisely what's happening.

I'm aware it's the law. That does not change whether the law is right or wrong. I'm in favor of supporting the elderly and disabled. I personally have done so in my life. I'm not in favor of jailing or otherwise hurting someone who refuses to. Does it make sense that way? We're not talking about legality, we're talking about ends and means. You need to ask yourself what you're willing to incarcerate or hurt other human beings for not complying with, and that needs to be factored into the law.

There are situations that would warrant arresting, incarcerating, hurting, or killing another human being. The question, "Are you willing to incarcerate, harm, or kill someone for refusing to subsidize broadband internet in a rural area?" is a fair question, because a law mandating that you subsidize broadband internet or suffer a penalty of incarceration or harm does precisely that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A Finnish friend of mine told me: Article forgot to mention that every household will be taxed for around 175€/year; known as TV/Internet Tax. Independently if TV or Internet is used in that household…

<comment><USER7> It's actually known as Media Tax, which is revamped version of the old TV/Radio Tax, where TV owners had to pay about 225€/year.

The tax is used for funding the Finnish Broadcasting Company(YLE) and the tv- infrastructure. Most people opposed the tax, since not everyone watch TV anymore and they're not happy how it's used, for example buying HBO shows and producing soap operas instead of some quality programs like BBC does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is completely absurd. People should not be given rights that require someone provide something for them. Surely, the problem with believing someone has a 'right' to broadband internet access they should also have a right to a computer, or a television, or cable.

<comment><USER16> _People should not be given rights that require someone provide something for them._

I read: "People should not be given rights to trial by jury or elections". The former requires that random citizens be selected to give up their time for my sake. The latter requires that random government-types go out of their way to organize the whole bloody thing, which is both extraordinarily expensive and inconvenient. Both "require someone provide something for them". Edit: For that matter, what about universal education, as well?

I know the above is clearly not what you intended. Nonetheless, it follows logically from your statements. Perhaps you could clarify your stance?</comment></comment>


Google Removes Search Box From Results Page? When Using Chrome's Omnibox - <AUTHOR>

No Google search box for searches done with Chrome's Omnibox.
http://cl.ly/image/3U3l2A3l2D1j
Bold move. Anyone else seeing this? <comment><USER2> It's happening on my Chrome for iOS for a week or so. I like it.

I also have new cleaner homepage that has almost no header

<http://i.imgur.com/bw4KpgC.png>

</comment><comment><USER3> This really creeped me out when I saw it on the dev channel - enough that after using Chrome exclusively since 2009 I've moved to Firefox.

I love searching through the omnibox (and will go to the omnibox to refine a google search result page I'm on) but there's something deeply unsettling about integrating Google Search and Chrome in this way - I can't quite put my finger on it but I think it's because the URL isn't shown

</comment><comment><USER4> Also the case on iOS Chrome: <http://d.pr/i/9pwK>

I think I first noticed it a week or two ago on desktop and iOS, so not sure if it's a version thing or an a/b test.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting. I checked with a few people that have my version, and they don't see it. Seems like a test.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This was on for a while when I was on Chrome's dev release channel. It annoyed me, so I switched to beta.

</comment><comment><USER6> I saw this for couple of days, but now I can't. It was really annoying :(

<comment><AUTHOR> I actually like it. It takes some getting used to, but it helps me fumble less when I start a search. Now I just go direct to Omnibox everytime.</comment></comment>