Ask HN: Employers, experience with hiring Coding Bootcamp grads? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> It works really well if you find a motivated candidate and have a lead developer that is both good and capable / interested in teaching others to become better developers. However, they aren't experienced in any sense of the word. Simple, small tasks, with extensive code review and time built-in to let them fix their own bugs, is necessary.

Your expectations need to match the reality and you have to be willing to invest.</comment>


'Reconstruction' begins of stone age lands lost to North Sea - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/may/08/mapping-begins-of-lands-lost-to-north-sea-during-the-stone-age <comment><USER2> This is pretty interesting!

Presumably the sea level rose slowly, so nobody lost their lives. Yes, technically "catastrophic", in the sense of comprehensively wiping everything out, but not rapid onset.

I was told by a geologist that the SF Bay Area coastline used to be a few hundred meters further west than it is now, and was also inhabited. However that region sank beneath the waves in an earthquake so likely that was a rapid catastrophe

<comment><USER3> In another model, the inundation of Doggerland began with the'catastrophic release of water from a North American glacial lake'. [https://www.nationalgeographic.org/maps/doggerland/](https://www.nationalgeographic.org/maps/doggerland/)

(In which case, the flooding might have been relatively fast.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Doggerland is one of my favorite historical subjects. It's really worth a deep dive if you're unfamiliar with it.

The TL:DR is that eight thousand years ago the UK and continental Europe were connected by land (now under the North Sea) that was probably inhabited by humans for thousands of years.

A lot of the ancient history of Europe could be under there. It's exciting to see it getting more attention.

<comment><USER5> Maybe the English custom of Dogging is a remote echo of Doggerlander traditions woven into the local culture. They must have all moved to UK to escape the flood.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's also interesting that Eastern England, Frisia (coastal Netherlands), Denmark, etc. all surround Doggerland and Eastern England was probably occupied by related Germanic speakers at that time - the Frisian language is still the closest related language to English on the continent.

The Roman description of "The Saxon Shore" may simply because it was already inhabited by Angles and Saxons - the seas being the ancient world's highways.</comment>


Inconsolata - <AUTHOR> http://levien.com/type/myfonts/inconsolata.html

<comment><USER2> I discovered Inconsolata two years ago or so, and it's been my go-to monospaced font ever since. I have it set to 11 points anti-aliased and it just looks gorgeous!

For your viewing pleasure, here is what my typical development environment looks like (anti-aliased retina 11pt Inconsolata):

[http://akhun.com/seo/skitch/Screen_Shot_2012-07-19_at_10.17....](http://akhun.com/seo/skitch/Screen_Shot_2012-07-19_at_10.17.48_AM-20120719-101815.png)

<comment><USER3> What theme do you use, and do you have your .emacs up somewhere?

<comment><USER2> I use vim :). I made my own color Terminal theme, which isn't up anywhere.

You can find my .vimrc and the rest of my configurations over here: [https://github.com/kballenegger/dotfiles/blob/dotfiles/.vimr...](https://github.com/kballenegger/dotfiles/blob/dotfiles/.vimrc)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I love Inconsolata, except for one small thing: the curly quotation marks.

If you have that same quibble, good news: Inconsolata-dz[1]. Inconsolata with straight quotes.

[1]: [http://nodnod.net/2009/feb/12/adding-straight-single-and- dou...](http://nodnod.net/2009/feb/12/adding-straight-single-and-double- quotes-inconsola/)

<comment><USER5> There is also Inconsolata-g[1] which is an enhanced version of Inconsolata-dz. I prefer the dotted zero among a few other changes.

[1]: <http://leonardo-m.livejournal.com/77079.html>

<comment><USER6> I had problems with Inconsolata in PhpStorm 4. But this version works. Tanks a lot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I included Inconsolata in my programmatic comparison of programming fonts:

[http://1overn.com/2011/01/31/iterating-on-font-pair- comparis...](http://1overn.com/2011/01/31/iterating-on-font-pair-comparisons/)

Consolas vs. Inconsolata: [http://1overn.com/2011/01/31/iterating-on-font- pair-comparis...](http://1overn.com/2011/01/31/iterating-on-font-pair- comparisons/consolasinconsolata-2/)

Droid Sans Mono vs. Inconsolata: [http://1overn.com/2011/01/31/iterating-on- font-pair-comparis...](http://1overn.com/2011/01/31/iterating-on-font-pair- comparisons/droidsansmonoinconsolata-2/)

<comment><USER8> Cool, your Consolas vs Inconsolata overlay comparison made me understand why I just love Consolas so much and have grown to hate any other fixed width font (of course, getting the right antialiasing settings for it on Linux can be a bitch sometimes)... I just like its oversized "[]", "@" and lower than standard "_" and beautiful straight quotes.

<comment><USER9> Consolas is wonderful and definitely better than Iconsolata. If you like Inconsolata, I highly recommend trying to hunt down a copy of Consolas from Windows (I did this on my Mac for awhile). These days, though, I use Meslo because it allows me to get a bit more line height in a graceful way.

<comment><USER10> Although it used to come with programs like VS, I now believe it is just out there for anyone to take [http://www.microsoft.com/en- us/download/details.aspx?id=1787...](http://www.microsoft.com/en- us/download/details.aspx?id=17879)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> How to change Chrome's default (crappy) monospace font:

1\. Go to chrome://settings/fonts

2\. Click the dropdown for "Fixed-width font"

</comment><comment><USER12> Not free but i've used Pragmata over the last years. <http://www.fsd.it/fonts/pragmatapro.htm>

</comment><comment><USER7> I love Inconsolata on the printed page and it's my go-to font for code listings in LaTeX, but it wasn't really designed for display. On the screen, I prefer something with nice bitmaps at smaller sizes, like Anonymous Pro.

<comment><USER13> Yes, Anonymous Pro is the one and only for me. Beautiful at all sizes and especially small points.

<comment><USER7> If you like Anonymous Pro and are obsessive, I have a minor tweak that fixes an issue with the bitmap version of "/":

[http://1overn.com/2011/02/02/tweaking-my-favorite- programmin...](http://1overn.com/2011/02/02/tweaking-my-favorite-programming- font-anonymous-pro/)

I named the modified version "Nameless Amateur," which was a big mistake as it makes Googling for it a NSFW activity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If anyone uses Windows here, note that this font is going to look much worse for you than it does on Mac or Linux. I use the Inconsolata-g variant[1] on Xubuntu and love it, but to my chagrin, it looked wretched on the Windows machine at work: jagged edges everywhere.

The Google Web Fonts version of the original Inconsolata — which has apparently been "properly hinted for Windows"[2] — was a major improvement, but still lacks the buttery smoothness the font has on Linux.

This discrepancy seems to be due to a Linux font setting that lets you choose "slight", "medium" or "full" hinting, with slight being the default. If I choose full, I get the more squared-off, digital-looking font appearance I associate with Windows. I don't have a Mac, but based on screenshots in this thread, the appearance is the same as Linux.

Anyway, good to see Inconsolata getting some attention. A very well-made font.

[1] <http://leonardo-m.livejournal.com/77079.html>

[2] [http://pgl.yoyo.org/bits/tech/inconsolata-cleartype-raph- lev...](http://pgl.yoyo.org/bits/tech/inconsolata-cleartype-raph-leviens- inconsolota-font-hinted-for-windows/51:2008-09-25/)

</comment><comment><USER15> No truetype font will replace a pixel perfect bitmapped font. Not until we have displays with ridiculous dpi. And until that happens you can't beat terminus as it's perfect.

Yes, I know it's meant for print, but people here mention it in the context of using it on the screen as well.

<comment><USER16> _Not until we have displays with ridiculous dpi._

3 years will see the majority of new computers on 'retina' displays.

<comment><USER17> That means we get back to what we had in 2005 with the T42's 1600x1200 15" screen?

<comment><USER18> That's not even close to the pixel density of the MBP Retina, or the new 1080p 11" IPS screens.

And given that I paid as much for my T61 a couple years ago as I could've paid for a decent MBP and the screen made my eyes bleed, I'm willing to be the 1600x1200 display was not that great.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is by far my favorite programming font. Has been since Office 2007. You should also check out Inconsolata for Powerline, especially in Vim.

<https://github.com/skwp/dotfiles/tree/master/fonts>

</comment><comment><USER20> I have been using Inconsolata since about a year ago. I was an avid user of tiny pixel fonts, but I felt an increasing amount of strain on my eyes. This worried me since I'm only 23, so I went out to look for bigger fonts. Pixel fonts look horrible in bigger sizes, and I was never a fan of anti-aliasing, so it took me a while before I found something I liked. Inconsolata made me switch, and I never looked back.

Screenshot for great justice! <http://shot.ninjaloot.se/20120719.201001.png>

<comment><USER21> What OS, window manager, term and theme are you using? Looks really nice and very close to what I would want.

<comment><USER20> Thank you! I am using Arch Linux with i3 (default config except for some keybindings) and running rxvt-unicode with tmux sessions. The top bar is a dzen2 dock with a custom script feeding it information. There is no real theme involved, but all the settings on display can be found at my GitHub account.

<https://www.archlinux.org>

<http://www.i3wm.org>

<http://software.schmorp.de/pkg/rxvt-unicode.html>

<http://tmux.sourceforge.net/>

<https://github.com/robm/dzen>

<https://github.com/daethorian/config>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I love Bitstream Vera Sans Mono. Looks great at large sizes too!

<comment><USER23> I've just checked my settings, tested with Inconsolata, Consolas and Andale Pro, and returned to Vera Sans Mono. ;-)

<comment><USER22> I always end up doing this whenever a programming font article comes up on HN.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Is it me or does t not match the style of the other letters?

<comment><USER25> i think it's a feature that is supposed to add character. and perhaps it looks better in use (that image is pretty poorly anti-aliased, i think).

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I tried this and loved it, but it lacks one of the two prime weights (bold, ital), can't remember which. That hurts it because a lot of code editing for me takes place in an environment where all three weights are used, and it kills the monospaced-ness.

</comment><comment><USER27> Ricty(<http://save.sys.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~yusa/fonts/ricty.html>) user here, I love how it it is just enough "serified" for better readability

</comment><comment><USER28> Inconsolata has been my font of choice for many years now whenever I have to use antialiased fonts or when I want a large font. It beats all others for readability.

For most of my programming/terminal work, however, I use Proggy Clean, non- antialiased. The amount of context you can put on the screen this way is amazing. Also, once you use a well-designed non-antialiased font for a while, you will have a hard time going back to the fuzzy outlines of vector fonts. I think a retina-quality display will obviate the need for fonts like Proggy Clean, though.

</comment><comment><USER29> I like this font, but its hinting on Linux sometimes makes it unusable. I keep jumping between Inconsolata-g, Clean, Consolas, Anka/Coder, and Andale Mono, because each one of them has something that just bugs the hell out of me.

I'm still looking for a font that has clean hinting at 8pt on Linux, that doesn't have absolutely atrocious features, and that has a reasonable number of symbols on the mathematical and non-Latin Unicode planes. Fontconfig with Infinality patches helps, but not enough.

</comment><comment><USER30> having seen a few blogs about this in the past I tried out Inconsolata before, but always reverted back to DejaVuSansMono as I never had much luck with Inconsolata and Konsole.. specifically, the problem I have is:

<http://imgur.com/a/oy0uW>

the top one is Inconsolata, the bottom one DejaVu.. anyone else come across this behaviour before? I'm never sure of what to google to get it sorted.. and haven't managed to figure it out

<comment> mh- yes, I have seen this behavior before.. what font size were you running each at? Try changing the Inconsolata font size, I'll bet it fixes it.

if I'm right, take a look at: [http://blog.typekit.com/2010/12/14/a-closer- look-at-truetype...](http://blog.typekit.com/2010/12/14/a-closer-look-at- truetype-hinting/) and ctrl-f to 'delta' for a partial explanation of what's happening.

<comment><USER30> inconsolata vs dejavu with different font sizes.. <http://imgur.com/a/ycol8>

inconsolata seems to act silly regardless of the font size, I guess it might be just a konsole bug seeing as the font works ok with gnome-terminal etc

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I like M+, a font designed by a japanese.

In particular, I use M+ 1m regular. I like it because I'm shortsighted, so when I put it in 14pt, I can see very clearly.

</comment><comment><USER32> I tried Inconsolata few times, but i could never stick with it...

My history of programming fonts goes something like this:

\- i know they were mono

\- Dejavu sans / vera sans mono

\- proggy clean (back in the days of low resolution, i really loved it )

(switched to mac)

\- monaco

\- andale mono

Once in a while i try some other font, but i keep returning to Andale Mono. (best MS product ever? :)

</comment><comment><USER33> What I'd like to see (Monty Python Gumby) is some dates on his web page. Maybe a GitHub page. I got Incosolata a few years ago and have been using it since, but he says he's working on it. When was the last update?

</comment><comment><USER34> I love this font. Someone on here recommended it to me last year when I was in need of a fixed-width font that looked decent at larger point sizes (I was dealing with some cataract issues at the time).

</comment><comment><USER35> Inconsolata is great for writing URLs in papers because they don't have that blocky look, and they don't stick out on the page from being twice as wide as your serif fonts.

</comment><comment><USER36> Been a really happy DejaVu Sans Mono 10 user for a while now. It was tough choosing between that and Inconsolata.

</comment><comment><USER37> Inconsolata does not look crisp at small sizes for me in Ubuntu. Liberation Mono 9 is better for me.

</comment><comment><USER38> I'm guessing this is here again just because Matt Cutts tweeted it?

</comment><comment><USER39> recent awesome discovery: you can use Inconsolata in your google docs to paste in code samples and whatnot, available from the Add Fonts item in the font picker.

</comment><comment><USER40> I currently use this on my 3270 emulator ;)

</comment><comment><USER41> I prefer Anonymous because it it's legible at _low_ resolutions. Any font can take advantage of high resolution, it opens up a lot of freedom to the artist.</comment>


Taxing Uber and Lyft rides is L.A's latest plan to free up congested roads - <AUTHOR> https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-uber-tax-los-angeles-20190226-story.html <comment><USER3> > Uber and Lyft "are using public roads, and the profit is going to their > companies," Phil Washington, Metro's chief executive, said at a recent > meeting.

Public roads are supposed to be paid for through fuel taxes, which every Uber and Lyft driver pays. California has gasoline taxes of:

* 55.22c per gallon (second only to Pennsylvania)

* 18.4c per gallon (federal)

* 2.25% sales tax

Additionally, taxing only ridesharing companies may increase incidences of drunk driving. Is another, poorly conceived, tax really a solution?

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

<comment><USER4> Fuel tax revenue and other direct user fees like annual registration in California amount to less than 25% of what the state and its cities pay to maintain the roads and streets. Roads are massively subsidized from general revenues. If you are proposing a $5/gallon fuel tax then I completely agree. That would be about equivalent to what other rich countries tax motor fuel and consistent with the state's greenhouse gas emission goals.

<comment><USER5> That's misleading -- yes, in the aggregate, gas taxes cover only part of the expenses, but _that 's not because of personal cars_. Damage on the roads -- and thus maintenance costs -- scales with the 4th power of weight per axle. So the damage is virtually all from large trucks, with sedans and SUVs as a rounding error.

If you were to apportion out the maintenance cost due to personal cars, they are overpaying.

<comment><USER6> Exactly this. Of course, if they tax per axle and tonnage combination, it'll just be passed on to consumers anyhow as most of trucks are distributing goods which directly or indirectly end up in the hands of consumers. However, it would be quite fair to do, I think.

<comment><USER7> In the short term it would get passed on to consumers. In the medium term supply chains would figure out how to reduce shipping by road. In the longer term (in conjunction with other changes) we might be able to get larger-scale urban development on a more sustainable track.

If we could properly price externalities (not just road wear but also ground water contamination, CO2 emissions etc.) there are many parts of our economy which could be made dramatically more efficient and less harmful without that much overall change to human quality of life.

<comment><USER8> This would devastate the economy.

For example: Exxon mobil profits in 2017 were 19.7 billion. Fukushima cleanup costs exceed 180 billion.

There is no way to do what you are proposing without massive price increases in electricity, gasoline and virtually every other good. I wouldn't be surprised if when you priced all of this in you discovered that people couldn't really afford electricity anymore.

Also this economy would never be able to have exports because the price of producing goods would just be insane.

The truth is we can't afford the externalities without an economic implosion that would realistically end with an extreme political group taking control in the ensuing chaos and undoing everything you are proposing.

<comment><USER9> > For example: Exxon mobil profits in 2017 were 19.7 billion. Fukushima > cleanup costs exceed 180 billion.

So you could cleanup one of the worst "spills" in history with a mere 10 years of a single company's profits?

That sounds perfectly OK.

<comment><USER10> Even better, it would have been possible to _avoid_ that spill with that money and you'd probably have enough left over for a healthy profit afterwards.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This doesn't fundamentally change the supply and demand problem in LA, which is a city built entirely for cars and nowhere near the road capacity for everyone to be able to make all the car trips they would like to.

For cities that want people to be able to get around AND for the roads to be relatively uncontested, the only reasonable solution is to lower demand by raising the cost of driving - ie. significant congestion pricing (tolls) across the metro - and invest the proceeds into a vast increase in more space efficient transit options. Typically this means express bus and rail service, although the number of people who can cycle efficiently on a dedicated bike way is pretty impressive, and with the scooter revolution there are a lot of other personal mobility choices for people who are less physically able.

Traffic congestion is a problem of geometry and public will - with public will being the primary impediment to progress.

<comment><USER12>
      > public will being the primary
      > impediment to progress.

What an extremely arrogant statement. If the public will does not agree with your world view, perhaps the latter needs adjustment, and not the former, like you imply?

<comment><USER4> The American public is unbelievably misinformed. Public opposition to an idea indicates only how much cable TV the public has been watching recently and says little about the merits of the idea. Just as an example of such a thing, the median survey respondent believes that foreign aid is the largest component of federal spending, and the overwhelming majority are against increasing it. However when those same people are informed that foreign aid is among the smallest parts of federal spending and that the USA is by far last among rich countries in per-capita and per-GDP aid those same people in the same survey at the same moment largely change their minds.

<comment><USER13> "The American public is unbelievably misinformed."

This may be true without implying any defense of something that is contrary to the public will.

The public can be totally awful and that doesn't mean people who have contempt for the public are any good.

<comment><USER7> I don't see how saying that "public will is an impediment to solving traffic congestion" indicates _contempt_ for the public. It seems like a straight- forward factual statement, and not a particularly controversial one.

After we acknowledge that "public will" is an impediment, we can then probe whether the problem is really so bad after all, what "public will" really means, whether it is self-contradictory, how strongly entrenched those interests/ideas are, whether there are ways of reframing the conversation to significantly sway public perception and action, and so on.

It might turn out that everyone loves griping about traffic congestion but isn't really too bothered. Or that "public will" is just reflexive opposition to misunderstood alternatives conditioned by decades of deliberate propaganda. Or that "public will" is very weakly held and malleable if an alternative proposal does a charismatic marketing blitz. Or that the disparate powerful interest groups involved are in direct opposition and political progress working towards compromise is at a total impasse and impossible. Or ...

<comment><USER12> Op said that "public will is an impediment to progress". That is much more arrogant statement than the one you claim to defend: "public will is an impediment to solving traffic congestion"

<comment><USER7> The context made it abundantly clear that this meant "... impediment to progress [with respect to traffic congestion]".

Not just that the public is generically "anti-progress".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The congestion caused by Uber and Lyft in SF is _bad_. It's not because of the number of cars on the road, although that's certainly something, it's because of how those cars behave.

Ubers and Lyfts pull over at unpredictable spots (wherever the app says to) and then just throw on their flashers. It doesn't matter if they're blocking a lane in rush hour they just stop.

I will never for my life understand why an Uber or Lyft driver thinks it's any better to double park in an active lane of traffic than to temporarily pull out and block a driveway or a red zone. Both are illegal, but at least one of those doesn't block traffic and endanger other drivers/bikers.

Almost every day I see an Uber driver double-parked within 50' of somewhere they could have pulled over safely.

If the cops would give out a few more tickets for this, the behavior would get better and so would the traffic. And then we wouldn't have to tax the road use. Taxing the road use is crap, everyone should be able to drive their vehicle on public roads as much as they want as long as they follow traffic laws.

<comment><USER15> All the delivery services park illegally as well. For a long time I assumed they had some sort of exemption because it was so common. They just eat the tickets as cost of doing business.

<comment><USER16> I suppose tickets should have exponential increase and decay built-in - <USER2> way, collecting a bunch of tickets in a row wouldn't be edible for companies, but intermittent tickets (corresponding to base rate of traffic violations) would cost no more than before.

<comment><USER17> Linear is more predictable and easier to manage, mentally, so I don't think that will change any time soon.

<comment><USER16> Exponential is linear in log scale, so maybe let's just say that a ticket will cost you N zeros, where N is equal to number of tickets you had in the past month.

<comment><USER18> That's not a bad way of phrasing it

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> integrate-this I'm a LA resident. People in this city like to talk about congestion as though they see it as a problem, but they don't actually see it as a problem.

Only people in the valley see it as a problem because there are limited choke points into and out of LA proper which keep people from getting to work.

LA's limited transportation infrastructure prevents DTLA's homeless from getting to Beverly Hills, Long Beach's gang-related activity from getting to Brentwood, etc.

If LA wanted to fix their transportation problem then they could build trains parallel to the 405 and 110 and solve the problem, but they don't want to fix the problem because the problem allows them (us?) to keep the city segregated by income.

<comment><USER19> And to your point, they absolutely could solve the chokepoint issues with eminent domain, and adding additional arteries, but they choose not to.

For people who think a congestion tax will improve traffic, it won't. Congestion taxes work if they can shift behaviors to alternate modes of transportation. If there aren't any alternatives, it's just a levy.

<comment><USER20> > and adding additional arteries

Time and time again cities learn this does nothing. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand)

<comment><USER19> Induced demand doesn't say that nothing happened. It says that demand just fills up the new supply.

There are no alternatives to a road system in LA for most residents. If the roads were choked and there was an underutilized subway that I could use, I'd totally get the argument of taxing the road system or capping capacity, so as to push people toward more efficient methods. But, it's not feesible to build out a subway system in this city that is expansive, so we need to work with what we have- Cars.

Make LA the autonomous car capital of the world. Let's be the best and first at linking cars together in convoys and shuttling them fast down our massive freeway network.

Let's build tunnels under the mountain passes to add more connections into Hollywood so people have better access than winding canyon roads.

Let's build expansive subway networks through south central and downtown to bring cost effective transportation to lower income neighborhoods.

Let's do a ton. But let's also build a bunch of roads.

<comment><USER21> > Let's build tunnels under the mountain passes to add more connections into > Hollywood so people have better access than winding canyon roads.

This is an interesting idea. I just measured it out, and assuming you could build a straight tunnel to bypass the canyon at the 405, it would be 5.3 miles.

To bypass Laurel Canyon would be a 3.0 mile tunnel.

Coldwater bypass would be 4.1 miles.

So the question is, do we the technology to build tunnels that long and deep (all of those are about 1000 feet). And is it a good idea to build a 1000 foot deep tunnel in an area known for earthquakes?

<comment><USER19> I'm not an engineer of that sort, but I'd imagine if we can build subways in earthquake-prone zones like SF, LA, and Tokyo, we can build safe tunnels under mountains in an earthquake zone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > Metro's rough estimates suggest a 20-cent fee on each trip could bring in > $401 million over a decade, while a $2.75 fee could raise $5.5 billion.

Hmm, $401 million / 20 cents * $2.75 = $5.51 billion.

Is there some "law" that public transportation officials never account for the fact that increased fares or taxes will reduce demand?

Maybe most people don't care, but I find it hard to take seriously anyone who doesn't believe in price elasticity of demand. Perhaps they are ignorant of economics, or perhaps they are so well off that that $2.75 isn't worth counting. Either way…

<comment><USER23> In this case, reduced demand is desirable because Uber and Lyft drivers are a large part of the renewed traffic problems in LA.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I expect this to backfire. More people will buy cars if hiring out their commute becomes more expensive. Once they have bought a car, they'll use it even for perfectly walkable errands, just like everyone else.

"Metro also is considering a fee on bicycles, electric scooters, and other devices"

Ditto.

<comment><USER25> Your comment actually made me read the article. That is a direct quotation, and pushes the whole thing over the edge in my opinion from "very poorly thought-out plan" to "just barely pretending"

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> NYC is doing this as well and it makes no sense to me. What is congestion? Is it "people who own cars getting stuck in traffic"? To me it seems like all this benefits is wealthy people who want to drive comfortably to/around their neighborhood.

<comment><USER27> Not only that, if you look at plates, a good portion of the cars around Manhattan besides taxis and hire cars (T-plates) have out-of-state plates. Why should residents pay hefty city/state taxes AND pay more to use the roads (through the new Uber/Lyft tax) so that there is less congestion for people who live out of state and drive in? What behavior is the city trying to incentivize?

<comment><USER23> Congestion pricing is paid at the point of entry, so the non local cars also pay the fee. In fact, it's easier to collect from them.

<comment><USER28> But in the article LA residents pay increased Uber and Lyft fares. If this policy were in NYC, the gp is suggesting NYC residents get hit with an additional fine that people who drive from out of state would not.

<comment><USER29> Well, it doesn't matter where that uber came from.

Reducing congestion isn't just about making it easier to drive, it makes is safer as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I feel this is a completely misjudged solution. The reason so many people use Lyft & Uber is because of lack of public transport. This seems like city finding another way to tax people instead of helping its citizens.

</comment><comment><USER31> Pretty sure Los Angeles had bad traffic way before Uber and Lyft arrived.

I distinctly remember staring out of the Hilton at Universal City in 2006, on my first visit to California, with a group of Canadians marveling that there could be a traffic jam at 10PM at night.

<comment><USER32> I don't think they're trying to argue that Uber and Lyft created LA traffic but I would agree that their arrival put more cars on the roads. There's a huge market of people who are willing to pay a little extra to avoid the hassle of LA public transportation and considering that, in general, people Uber to busy places (LAX, downtown, etc.), it's bringing more cars onto the already clogged roads that wouldn't be there otherwise.

<comment><USER33> But is it really cannibalizing public transportation? Or is it cannibalizing private car driving? I assume somebody has studied this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Comparing rideshare to public transit, this tells me there's clearly a need for easier, faster transit even with higher pricing.

Solution? Try to ruin it.

Instead, maybe we should embrace it and provide incentives for ridesharing vs driving alone? E.g. give uber a lane on the highway for 2+ passengers and tax only single rider transits. Give a few lyft ride coupons with every monthly bus pass. Provide benefits to using busses (which are a terrible experience) by occasional free lyft rides ...

<comment><USER4> Can we stop with the "rideshare" junk yet? Uber and Lyft are computer- dispatched taxi services. The overwhelming majority of their trips involve the driver going to someplace they have no need of going, with either zero or one other person in the car.

<comment><USER13> I have no idea what you are really trying to say. How do you define need? All my Lyft trips have either been to/from an auto mechanic or the airport. Is that "need"? In principle, I could have gotten friends to drive me, given enough incentive. Or I could have parked at the airport, or ridden the bus, or gone to a mechanic that made it convenient to wait for work to be done.

<comment><USER24> Gp is trying to say that nobody is really "sharing a ride" that they would be driving anyway, as in hitchhiking with compensation. It's virtually all professional drivers going where the client goes exclusively because the client goes there. Hence the term "ridesharing" is misleading. A very successful piece of clever viral marketing, or maybe a fossil of an early strategy.

It's a semantic point, but a valid one. Words matter.

<comment><USER35> We don't call them taxis in California because in most California cities they're different because of:

* no access to red lanes

* only app-based payment

* unique pickup/dropoff locations at airports and other such places

If we called them computer-dispatched taxi we'd confuse that with Flywheel- style stuff which can use red lanes, take cash, and use taxi locations. We could call them Taxi Type 2 but that's super confusing.

"TNCs" is just an awful name so we use something that sounds intuitive "ridesharing", since we know that pooling is possible on these services. It's just a name. No one has proposed an alternative simple enough.

<comment><USER36> In Transport for London terminology they are called "Private Hire" companies. Separately regulated, you can't flag them down on the street, and no access to taxi lanes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> It is a tax to increase revenue. LA has almost non-existent public transit, so anyone riding Uber/Lyft is likely to drive on their own.

It is disingenuous to describe this as anything that has any remote chance to even reduce traffic minimally. LA is an extended suburb, and only infill development of higher density over time can make more public transit economically viable.

</comment><comment><USER38> Implement congestion pricing for all drivers.

<comment><USER39> This. We have this in Minneapolis / St Paul. It just _works_. We're rolling it out on most of the highways. I wish we had it on _all_ lanes on all highways already, because what is the point of having a 60mph road if most of the time you are barely going 20mph, or trip lengths are otherwise completely unpredictable?

There is a concept in economics called spontaneous order. Once the cost of congestion becomes apparent through the price mechanism, then society can reconfigure itself to adapt to it. But you have to have the price mechanism first. People will say, what about this, what about that. It doesn't matter. People will figure it out and adapt, but you need to implement congestion pricing right now, because practically every medium size or larger city in America has terrible traffic congestion problems. Importantly, you cannot set a price ceiling (like Houston did at $8), as it will not work effectively because it will not allow the price mechanism to work and will cause a shortage of road capacity and you end up with no material change.

Changes in laws and zoning and public transit will occur. Given a little bit of time, the emergence of various kinds of social order from a combination of self-interested individuals will occur.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> What a great plan! Not improving public transportation. Not taxing people who own private cars. Taxing cars who serve dozens passengers a day! Guess what, if these people weren't using Uber, each of them would be driving their own car.

</comment><comment><USER41> Charging for use of the road is the only way to balance supply and demand for road. More at peak times and a discount off-peak. Fixed price subscriptions for your commute.

But I see no reason to treat Uber cars differently, except that having a driver does not qualify to one to use the carpool lane (which I would eliminate anyway)!

I'd also allow subscribers and those who buy ahead to sell their prepaid trip when the price surges. Wait an hour and make $5 when there's an accident.

</comment><comment><USER42> Hmm I often wonder why California doesn't implement a congestion tax. In Stockholm you need to pay around 4$ if you want to drive on the highway during certain hours into and out of the city.

I can't say if it works to reduce congestion but it does even the field and it certainly made me want to not drive there.

</comment><comment><USER43> How do you guys think the trend from public transit to rideshare will look once self-driving cars begin ramping up?

I imagine that without the cost of labor from the driver, rideshares should become dirt cheap. Will anybody use public transit in 10 years? If not, the congestion problem will get many times worse.

<comment><USER44> It's the classic induced demand phenomenon - when roads are expanded, people drive a lot more, and congestion remains the same. Same thing with transit - people ride it up to the point where it's miserably crowded.

Both are signs that our infrastructure in either form is unable to service the maximal demand society places on it, so people ultimately decide not to go places because of the cost of doing so (in terms not just of cash, but also comfort and time).

I think people will use rideshares only to the point that congestion is precisely miserable enough those who choose to rideshare to tolerate it.

So what might happen is that mass transit remains equally as congested, just more people are taking trips than they were before because the capacity of the whole system has increased.

It's also the case that, unlike self-driving car infrastructure, trains are far more scalable - in places that actually invest in their mass transit infrastructure, I think mass transit can compete pretty well the more the municipality invests in train lines and stuff.

But to assume that self-driving cars will save cities that don't have transit infrastructure—that might be true for very sparsely populated, small cities, but for all the American cities that lack public transit infrastructure, I think the situation will only change marginally.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> It's really frustrating that in so many cities, car owners are perceived to have more of a right to the road than non-car owners (aka those who take only rideshare). Roads are payed for by public subsidy and there shouldn't be special handouts for car owners.

</comment><comment><USER46> Seems like there could be a lot of unintended commercial consequences — people that would be customers deciding not to bother. I don't know the situation in other places, but in Colorado the RTD smartphones apps are just awful. Twice in the last month I ended up taking an uber home because the ticketing app for the buses was down and I couldn't access tickets I bought. Not to mention it frequently feels unsafe. I'm fortunate to be a 6'4" male, but if I was say a 5'2" woman I would totally want to avoid the harassment.

Maybe the focus should be in providing better public transportation instead of encouraging people to stay home.

</comment><comment><USER47> > Ridership is now at its lowest level in more than a decade, driven by a > shift to driving instead of using Metro's sprawling bus network.

Maybe if they realised that the reason nobody takes public transit is because LA's is one of the worst of developed countries, they'd be a bit more incentivised into building a better system instead of trying to blame external things and create more taxes.

I barely use Uber/Lyft when I'm travelling in Amsterdam, Paris, London or NYC, but find myself having no choice but be in a car when I'm in SF or LA.

</comment><comment><USER48> This has to be just a money grab right? How can they possibly contend that people using ride sharing services exacerbates road congestion? Neither of their arguments makes any sense.

</comment><comment><USER49> Why not just tax single riders, if congestion is the issue?

<comment><USER20> From the article:

> [San Francisco Supervisor Aaron] Peskin is drafting a measure for the > November election that would levy a 3.25% fee on rides with one passenger, > and a 1.5% fee on shared rides.

<comment><USER35> With all the nonsense going on, I've actually just got a car in SF. And that's after 7 years car-free. Cycling is bloody impossible these days, and they got rid of the damned scooters too. Good job, Aaron. You're a bloody genius.

My friends were all car-free too and only a fourth of them are still that way. No kids or anything. It's just gotten kinda crappy here. I was hoping to hold out for just a little longer but I think I'm done.

<comment><USER50> I'm really upset about the scooters in SF. As I don't have a driver license, I can't even use them (they require a US driver license).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> .Bring back street cars!

Forget hyperloops and similar gadgetbahn bullshit. The solution isn't exotic, it's mundane. Street cars work damn well if you treat them as legitimate transit, not a tourist attraction. You can even bury them using cut-and-cover if the situation really calls for it. Forget microtunnel bullshit, that have ultra-expensive stations never mentioned by the advocates

<comment><USER52> Honest question. How are street cars better than busses?

They put one in near me recently, and all I could think is that compared to a bus it cost a ton more money, took forever to build, and can't be rerouted in case of an issue. Additionally, it doesn't even bypass traffic so it's not any faster.

Why not just buy a few busses to run the exact route they built the street car on instead ?

<comment><USER51> Better rolling resistance and electric powered without battery nonsense. However they are in close competition with trolley-buses (rubber wheeled electric vehicles powered from overhead lines, as seen in Seattle.)

(And unlike buses they don't have a "low class" reputation that prevents middle class snobs from using them!)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Using cars is embedded into the DNA of American people so deeply that I am not sure it can be changed. I remember the first time I was in LA for a longer period and somebody did not believe me that I do not own a car. She literally though I am a liar and I do not want to share with her what sort of car I drive instead of believing me that I do not have one.

</comment><comment><USER54> Amen. Uber and Lyft are adding congestion to our roads and undermining public transportation, all while profiting off public infrastructure and a class of driver "partners" who incur all of the costs for a razor thin upside.

Id like to see the start of a state owned rideshare network with specially zoned drop off, pick up, and lane privileges that Uber and Lyft don't get access to.

<comment><USER55> > Id like to see the start of a state owned rideshare network with specially > zoned drop off, pick up, and lane privileges that Uber and Lyft don't get > access to.

Uber and Lyft exist because the state didn't build one of those. In fact the state has built a completely inadequate public transit system in LA. Uber and Lyft are widely used because people in LA don't have an alternative.

<comment><USER54> Fine, but the concept is out in the world now. The cities should be able to replicate the concept, compete and leverage their strengths the same way any for profit entity could.

<comment><USER55> If the private market provides a service at a fair price, and consumers like it, why should the city try to duplicate it? It would be a waste of taxpayer money for the city government to try to clone a business that is doing just fine already.

<comment><USER54> Why draw an artificial line between cities and private markets? Innovation isn't the exclusive domain of for profit companies. Part of the reason why we end up in these situations where public utilities are in such an embarrassing state is that we don't expect or allow them to innovate, even down what is now a well proven pathway.

<comment><USER55> It's not an artificial line because of stuff like this, which you mentioned:

> specially zoned drop off, pick up, and lane privileges that Uber and Lyft > don't get access to

There are clear differences between the state and private businesses. The state can make laws to prevent private businesses from competing with it, can grant monopolies, etc.

The state is not operated for profit, and the profit motive is the only reason things like Uber and Lyft exist -- the state never would have thought to create something like that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> What about public transport?

</comment><comment><USER57> Uber and Lyft are fighting their what they created [https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/10/16/uber-lyft- responsible...](https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/10/16/uber-lyft-responsible- for-half-of-increased-traffic-in-sf-study-says/)

</comment><comment><USER58> Based on the comments here, it appears to me that many people don't understand the economy lose from the inefficiency of public transportation. 1 hour of bus transportation usually take only 20 minutes of taxi ride. It means I can save 40 minutes from the taxi ride. This 40 minutes have considerable value.

</comment><comment><USER59> It was congested way before Uber of Lyft.

</comment><comment><USER60> It'd be nice to be able to at least see the math that is used to calculate and budget road repairs then compare them with value that that particular road brings in. More broadly, some kind of (global?) effort to accurately calculate externalized costs of all kinds. Gotta catch'em all!

<comment><USER61> You know who gets 100% of their income from an externality? public officials that propose dumb laws. How are we going to get that money back?

<comment><USER60> If you start measure externalities, then you can start predicting their expected value. Proposers of dumb laws will have to spend more effort in showing that their law is effective at whatever thing that they are trying to affect. The feedback loop will become more apparent and hopefully tighter. You won't be able to recoup that money back, but you would be able to demonstrate negligence / malice / incompetence more effectively and deal with them then as appropriate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Another dumbass Aaron Peskin proposal. :eyeroll: At least we can vote this one down in November.

You'd think someone who spends so much time positioning himself as a "progressive" would understand why taxing people who don't own cars is both stupid and unfair.

</comment><comment><USER63> The alternatives are not taxis, it's people having their own cars which are probably on average larger than the typical Prius my Uber driver has. Moreover, I often take pool so it could further increase number of cars on the road.

</comment><comment><USER64> The headline is a lie. This is all about raising money to pad their pensions.

</comment><comment><USER65> If anything they should be giving tax rebates to Uber and Lyft drivers since this is called f'ing car pooling, and it's saving additional cars from getting on LA roads.

</comment><comment><USER66> If it were parking space that they wanted to free up, that could make sense.

But congested roads? Don't Uber and Lyft occupy road space like everybody else?

</comment><comment><USER67> LA's plan for everything is a tax.

</comment><comment><USER68> Yet again the "achilles heal" of mass transit it exposed. Uber and Lyft work because they go where I want to go and when I want to go at a reasonable price.

Busses are not full of people who want to ride the bus, they are full of people who must ride the bus.

No amount of taxation will ever change that.

</comment><comment><USER69> Yet again the "achilles heal" of mass transit it exposed. Uber and Lyft work because they go where I want to go and when I want to go at a reasonable price.

Busses are not full of people who want to ride the bus, they are full of people who must ride the bus.

No amount of taxation will ever change that.

</comment><comment><USER70> LA Times' latest plan to free up congested attention spans is to omit grammar and words.

First picture's caption: "Kristine Valenzuela exits a Uber at Union Station in Los Angeles."

Second picture's caption: "Elena Markusic lifts her heavy luggage into the trunk of an at Union Station in Los Angeles. Transportation officials are considering a tax on Uber and Lyft rides in Los Angeles County."</comment>


2011 OECD Project "Future Global Shocks: Pandemics" [pdf] - sahin-boydas https://www.oecd.org/gov/risk/46889985.pdf <comment> sahin-boydas It seems we didn't learn and apply important lessons from the past pandemics</comment>


Super advisors for your startup: How to form an Invisible Council - <AUTHOR> http://blog.bread.ly/?p=117

<comment><USER2> You would be better served to form an advisory board with people you actually meet, whether it's a set of peer entrepreneurs or other folks whose opinion you respect.This "mental model" approach doesn't force you to actually write down and walk through the issues that you are wrestling with.</comment>


Twitter Isn't Over-Hyped; It's Just Misunderstood Tech - <AUTHOR> http://www.markevanstech.com/2009/08/30/twitter-isnt-over-hyped-its-just-misunderstood/ <comment><USER2> 1\. The 140-character (or less) limit seems like a restriction to many people. In fact, it's a way of forcing companies and businesses to get to the point. You have to deliver the message quickly and succinctly without frills or hyperbole.

I might buy that if every Twitter post didn't fall into one of two categories, inanity like "going to the gym" or bitly links to things of actual value.

</comment><comment><USER3> I still think Twitter is overhyped...

<comment><USER4> I'd go further and say twitter is pretty much the definition of over-hyped. I can't remember any technology or company before it receiving that kind of hype. Not even google, ebay or the forgotten monstrosities during the dotcom bust.

I think this is less about twitter itself but more about a way overbloated tech news / blogsphere scene craving for content. Don't know what to write? Write about twitter.</comment></comment>


QML support for Golang - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/107994348420168435683/posts/54Q8NwbRwng <comment><USER2> Very cool, QML is a very promising GUI development language. I'm a huge fan of declarative UIs, and QML is great for this. For those that have experience in WPF, QML is actually very similar.

My main complaint about QML is that it really needs to ship with some desktop widgets. Without common desktop widgets, developers are forced to basically reinvent the wheel, and redefining common controls using primitives like rectangles, text, etc. Once this problem is solved though I really hope QML will take off in a big way.

<comment><USER3> Have you used QtQuick (particularly the QtQuick.Controls package) in Qt 5.1+? Because based on what you wrote I believe it covers a lot of what you're asking for here.

<comment><USER2> Thanks, I haven't seen that yet. It does look promising. I was vaguely aware that work was happening on these features, but I wasn't aware of their current state.

Unfortunately it doesn't look like these are available yet in Python, as Python doesn't seem to have bindings for QtQuick 2.1, at least based on my googling. Hopefully that will come soon though!

<comment><USER4> From Phil's annoucement on the mail list, it seems PyQt5 does have full Qt 5.1 support (except for QtSerialPort and QtSensors)

(and the latest installer tagged Qt5.1.0 contains a QtQuick.pyd)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> LGPLv3 is going to make some people unhappy (Qt5 itself is LGPLv2.1+).

<comment><USER3> It does include a special exception not requiring source code release of combined worked, but still I agree that having it be LGPLv3 even with the exception will hurt its adoption with the wider Go community. The vast majority of widely used 3rd party Go libraries just use the standard Go license here:

[http://golang.org/LICENSE](http://golang.org/LICENSE)

Using that license just leaves things totally clear and unambiguous, if you're using the language you must already be okay with the license. I've worked with a number of companies that just don't want to touch anything *GPL with a 10 foot pole in Go where static linking is non-optional other than over a CGO bridge (which makes Qt's own LGPL usage palatable). This may be a sticking point for them even with the exception (just because of the extra work required in getting legal clearance, not because the license as written actually harms them).

License aside, this is a pretty great library and this is what I think is the most practical solution to providing a cross-platform GUI solution for Go in that it puts all the heavy lifting of platform independence on Qt without having to expose the entire large Qt API to Go via wrappers.

I was actually working on something like this a few months ago (mentioned in HN comment: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6055043](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6055043)) but got side-tracked due to serving jury duty on a 6 week trial (ugh). This solution is a lot further along and benefits greatly from Go 1.2 support of compiling cpp files in CGO (mine was being written against Go 1.1 and required an extra intermediate static library build step). I may possibly continue working on mine anyway just to side-step the licensing issue altogether (which, again, I think is more of a perception problem than an actual practical problem, but still a problem).

<comment><USER6> Although I respect whatever decision you make, please note that there's absolutely nothing I could use as an argument for a license change there, other than "George will work on something else if we don't change it.", which is pretty hard to sell. If you do have valid arguments, please mail me with them so we can have a more focused conversation on actual issues.

And by the way, Qt is also LGPL, so not wanting to link with LGPL software when working on linking with LGPL software is also a curious choice.

<comment><USER7> Qt is dual licensed so a company that isn't willing to GPL their software can pay for a license that allows distribution without releasing source.

<comment><USER6> You don't have to GPL your software to use LGPL.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> That's awesome. QML is a really incredible piece of technology. I had a lot of fun building a cross-platform desktop app all in QML back in 2010 (www.betterinbox.com)

I wish some ideas from QML made their way to the web. The anchor system, for example, is really powerful for layout.

<comment><USER9> There are attempts in the kde scene to (since they are transitioning to using blink in qt, and rekonq already uses v8 as its js engine) enable the running of qml apps via url in the browser. In effect, it is a side by side engine right next to blink to run qml apps and both share v8 on the backend.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Will this mean I can create GUI applications with native look and feel (i.e. native looking widgets) across all platforms?

<comment><USER9> Assuming this is just golang bindings for qml, yes. If they reimplemented qmlscene or any of the moc, possibly not. Also consider qt does not have finalized ios support yet, and the qml components aren't done yet. For pretty much every other qt platform they are, though.

It also requires a Go compiler that works with your preffered platform. I'm not sure on the availability of Go compilers for ios or Android.

<comment><USER11> From talking to a friend at Google, I know that there is a way to get Go running on an iPhone. I don't know the specifics though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm hoping this will make one thing easy enough to be worth the effort: a proper UI for GDB debugging Go code.

</comment><comment><USER13> What about Go support for Qt native?

<comment><USER3> There is go-ui here:

[https://github.com/visualfc/go-ui](https://github.com/visualfc/go-ui)

It is unmaintained and has some very serious issues with 64-bit cleanliness (it assumes C int being the same size as Go int, but C int is virtually always 32-bit whereas Go int is either 32-bit or 64-bit depending upon GOARCH).

The same author has another project here which was meant to be a second pass at this (from what I can tell):

[https://github.com/visualfc/goqt](https://github.com/visualfc/goqt)

But as far as I know nothing was ever released on that project.

The approach used here of exposing QML is the most practical one, IMO. The Qt API is huge (not to mention C++ as opposed to C based) and creating a monster wrapper around it in Go is no easy task (especially if you wanted it to feel like Go) and would be a bear to maintain. Sticking with QML gives you a much smaller surface area to worry about while still giving you most of the benefit of using Qt as a GUI toolkit (at least with Qt 5.1+).

<comment><USER6> The main reason why the Go support was done in this fashion is that developing applications in such a declarative manner seems to be a better experience despite any difficulties in creating the tooling.</comment></comment></comment>


Man and man's best friend have both been experiencing declines in sperm quality - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/august-3-2019-science-of-awe-blue-whales-and-sonar-chromosomes-and-sleep-and-more-1.5047142/man-and-man-s-best-friend-have-both-been-experiencing-declines-in-sperm-quality-1.5047150 <comment> word-reader I am kind of upset there is no commercial way to test your blood or urine for endocrine disruptors. You can test your hormones for $100-300 depending on how comprehensive you want, and you can test sperm quality directly for another $100-200. Still, this is a pretty penny for most people. Why is this so expensive?

<comment><USER2> Not only expensive, but I recently wanted to get a sperm quality test done and the labs I called flat out refused to do it without a referral. Even though I was willing to pay cash and forgo all of the insurance nonsense. It is apparently impossible to just get a test done because you want to unless you pay a doctor to refer you.

<comment> word-reader yospermtest.com sells an at home test that is basically a magnifying lens and collection tray that attaches to your phone, and an app to analyze the sample.

edit: Yes, the referral thing is absurd. People answering the phones at medical offices when I've called trying to _give them money_ will act confused or even offended if you ask how much things cost. Thankfully there are some new businesses like this chipping away at the edges.

<comment><USER3> Sperm count is only one aspect of it I don't think that their app can measure sperm vitality and other factors that are just as important.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Don't forget obesity as a major contributing factor. Pollutants are no doubt to blame in large part, but it's very well established that obesity results in lower testosterone, and I would not at all be surprised if it also resulted in lower sperm quality. Fat cells literally produce estrogen.

<comment><USER5> You're right that obesity causes low testosterone, but low testosterone also causes obesity (plus factors that lead to obesity, like lethargy). Chicken/egg problem?

<comment><USER6> For a vast majority of people, obesity is a problem of eating too many kcal. There is no chicken/egg problem for them. The remainder might have some sort of metabolic problem which they should go to the doctor for. There is still no chicken/egg problem there.

Am I missing a group of people who eat exactly the kcal they require, get the nutrients they need and don't have a metabolic problem, but still materialise fat for some reason?

<comment><USER7> The chicken/egg problem is satiety, not weight. Being fat messes up many small feedback loops, some of which are related to satiety, energy expended, exercise, inflammation or mood.

Breaking those circles is not easy at all. It's closer to rehabilitation and a long process.

Of course reducing intake is a main goal, but then keeping it low is as important.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In 2008, CBC put out a 45-minute documentary, The Disappearing Male, about this topic. If you do a simple Google search, you can find it easily online.

Previous HN discussion (with a comment from pg): [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=375127](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=375127)

</comment><comment><USER9> Our generation is exposed to a lot of things that no other generations have experienced over extended periods of times like food preservatives, continuous wifi exposure, sunscreen chemicals that daily gets into the bloodstream, high blue light exposure, plastic water bottles, pollution... Our generation will probably be known as The Great Guineapig.

</comment><comment><USER10> Given the point made by other commenters w.r.t. sperm quality not really being a very serious concern for either dogs or humans as species, are there other health concerns linked with DEHP?

The article mentions PCB 153 _" causing a variety of health problems"_, and being banned as a result. What's the status of DEHP in this context?

<comment><USER11> It too is associated with a variety of health problems and has been recently phased out in the European Union:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bis(2-ethylhexyl)_phthalate#Ef...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bis\(2-ethylhexyl\)_phthalate#Effects_on_living_organisms)

[https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/substances/toxsubstance.asp?toxid=...](https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/substances/toxsubstance.asp?toxid=65)

It is only moderately regulated in the United States.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Also affecting fertility rates at the moment: low counts

> The analysis found an overall 52.4 percent decline in sperm concentration > and a 59.3 percent decline in the total sperm count over the 39-year period.

[https://www.npr.org/2017/07/31/539517210/sperm-counts- plumme...](https://www.npr.org/2017/07/31/539517210/sperm-counts-plummet-in- western-men-study-finds)

<comment><USER13> The current thinking is that it is oestrogen in the water that is killing the sperm count. It is tempting to think this comes from 'the pill' but water treatment plants do remove it and the amount of women on the pill plus the amount of oestrogen pollution does not add up to cause a problem.

What is apparently going on is intensive farming, so manure:

[https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/pressroom/presspacs/2011/...](https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/pressroom/presspacs/2011/acs- presspac-february-23-2011/new-report-dont-blame-the-pill-for-estrogen-in- drinking-water.html)

So the new research that suggests that the swimmers don't swim as they should means there is a double whammy for the humble sperm.

I imagine that if you are breeding dogs, cows, horses or any animal of value this is a serious threat to revenue. We won't necessarily do whatever is needed to fix our own fertility but if there are profits being affected in the world of pedigree pets then something might be done.

<comment><USER14> BPA mimics estrogen, and it's everywhere: packaged food and drink, receipts, toiletries - really virtually anywhere you can find plastic, especially heated plastic

<comment><USER15> And yet the effects of BPA have actually been studied, and it should not pose such a wide health hazard. But, due to the public outcry over potential dangers, the industry has been moving on to other bisphenol compounds that are less well understood. I think there could be a whole host of synthetics that contribute to the problem.

<comment><USER16> The solution probably wasn't to just sidestep to other bisphenol compounds. I'd say it was to stop selling products that depend on them, and let the world adapt.

I'd also be curious to know, have the effects of BPA been _sufficiently_ studied? Have results been replicated? Do the studies at least sometimes have a funding source not interested in a certain outcome?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Is low quality sperm permanent, or does the quality increase after the behaviors are stopped?

<comment><USER18> little bit of both.

hormone disruption during the formative years has lifelong consequence

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Wouldn't be surprised if it's more widespread and attributed to pesticides

</comment><comment><USER20> How do we even detect these bloody endocrine disruptors? I have no idea which things in my environment are leaking this stuff. Perhaps pie in the sky, but it would be awesome to have something like a geiger counter for endocrine disruptors.

</comment><comment><USER21> TLDR: DEHP disrupts testosterone leading to lower sperm quality.

DEHP can be found in carpets, plastic toys for children, and dog toys. Humans are also exposed by eating microwaved food stored in plastic containers.

Stay away from microwaved food. Keep dogs away from plastic toys.

<comment><USER22> I'm particularly puzzled by why so many electric kettles are made of plastic.

Unfortunately, the non-plastic one I bought two years ago has already died, so maybe there's something to the casing.

<comment><USER23> I always wondered what crap chemicals is leeching into my coffee using my plastic electric kettle for my plastic aeropress or plastic Keurig machine using plastic disposable pods.

Anyone have a safer method of brewing coffee? Like boil water in a glass Pyrex beaker and some sort of glass French press/glass aeropress?

<comment><USER6> One of these? [http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-hoi46KPfaMk/Uu6k-6CP5lI/AAAAAAAAC8...](http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-hoi46KPfaMk/Uu6k-6CP5lI/AAAAAAAAC8A/jXUxvzINc0w/s1600/Italian- espresso-maker.jpg)

The coffee tastes good, they are cheap (assuming you get a cheap one, which works just as well as an expensive one), they last for a long time and you can find them everywhere

<comment><USER23> I've used one of these until the metal started flaking off the bottom, which is concerning to say the least...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Is this true in dogs that have always lived in the wild too?

Is it possible to run a controlled experiment on dogs, i.e a controlled wild food only diet vs. normal pet dog diet?

<comment><USER25> I googled for a few minutes, and found this likely unrelated blurb, but I thought it was interesting...

"domesticated animals are more likely to: be smaller or larger than their wild counterparts; undergo multiple periods of fertility within the span of one year (a trait referred to as being polyestrous), unlike wild animals, which often mate seasonally" [1]

If you're only mating annually, I'd guess natural for higher sperm count would be more of a factor. If you're a perpetual, opportustic mater, I'd think it be more about selecting for the number of times you could mate.

[1] [http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2018/asked-pets- different-...](http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2018/asked-pets-different- wild-animals/)

<comment><USER26> Wild dogs are also domesticated; the "wild counterpart" in that quote refers to wolves.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I just fell in love with cooking meat in a sous vide machine that was gifted to me. Boiling meat in plastic bags concerned me to no end so after much research, I opted to use reusable silicone bags for cooking the meat in.

Does anyone with more insight on the matter know if there are any nasty compounds I'm exposing myself to using a silicone bag in a sous vide water bath or even microwaving in a silicone bag as opposed up plastic?

Thanks!

<comment><USER27> I dunno about silicone, but with plastic you want to avoid plastic softeners. That's the real nasty stuff. Pure nylon oven bags are suitable. Keep in mind supermarket oven bags likely won't be pure nylon. I use the nylon bag material made for Volcano vaporizers by storz & bickel, because I know it has no plastic softeners.

<comment><USER23> Will check it out thanks for the recommendation!

</comment></comment></comment><comment> 867-5309 spurious?

</comment><comment> Iwan-Zotow Beer doesn't have sperm count

</comment><comment><USER28> I wonder if they've ever found plastic microbeads in anyone's sperm

</comment><comment><USER29> Testosterone disruption also leads to more mellow behavior. May be violent crime going down is because of the phtalates, PCB and the likes around us.

<comment><USER30> It's because we fixed lead pollution. Adding more pollution isn't going to help.

[https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead- exposur...](https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposure- gasoline-crime-increase-children-health/)

That said, I can't think of an easier problem for evolution to solve than this. I'm sure we'll get kids immune to plastic in a few more generations.

<comment><USER31> >It's because we fixed lead pollution.

No, that's just a theory about why violent crime has gone down. No one really knows for sure. Someone noticed that crime rates have gone down, and that this correlates with reduced usage of leaded gasoline in North America.

Remember also that global warming has been going up over the past few centuries, and this has an inverse correlation with the number of pirates on the high seas. Back in the days of Blackbeard, we didn't have problems with global warming. Does this mean that greatly reducing piracy has caused global warming? Of course not. Correlation does not prove causation.

The banning of leaded gasoline might in fact have caused a reduction in violent crime, but it's not proven at this point.

<comment><USER30> > Someone noticed that crime rates have gone down, and that this correlates > with reduced usage of leaded gasoline in North America.

…and the rest of the world… and it always happens after lead regulation… and there's a reasonable mechanism… did you read the article?

> Correlation does not prove causation.

This is a "middle-brow dismissal".

Anyway, here's an RCT on lead reduction in children: [https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/app.20160056](https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/app.20160056)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Remember how, when a guy announced that his wife was pregnant, his buddies would say "Oh you dog you!" ?

</comment><comment><USER32> Look no further than standard self-care products and receipts. Possibly Teflon:

[https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2011/03/...](https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2011/03/08/7-surprising- sperm-killers-that-could-leave-men-shooting-blanks.aspx)

<comment><USER33> Dr. Mercola is a quack. While there may be something to the teflon thing, citing Mercola doesn't give it a whole lot of credibility. He's an anti- vaxxer, he claims microwaves alter food's chemistry, says AIDS is caused by stress, not HIV, and says sunscreen causes cancer. Meanwhile, he sells, directly from his website, products that conveniently solve all the quackery fear mongering he spews.

Please do not cite this clown.

<comment><USER31> >he claims microwaves alter food's chemistry

To be fair, doesn't all cooking alter food's chemistry? In fact, isn't that the whole point of cooking? Look at potatoes for example: humans can't digest raw potato, so we learned to cook it eons ago because that changes it into a form we can digest.

So unless I'm missing something related to terminology, he's right about microwaves altering food chemistry, but it's just scare-mongering because you frequently _want_ to alter food chemistry.

The rest of those things you cite are, of course, total BS.</comment></comment></comment>


How can existentialist philosophy help with the anxiety and dread of fatherhood? - <AUTHOR> https://aeon.co/essays/what-the-childless-fathers-of-existentialism-teach-real-dads <comment><USER2> The best I can do, after raising two children, is that fatherhood needs to be less about keeping your children alive (by avoiding risk in any form) and more about teaching them to 1) survive on their own in the world, and once they're in a good place, 2) incrementally building the life they desire. In the most general sense, that means: How to size up a situation, analyze it for both opportunities and risk, asses the resources available and then resolve it. You can't really teach your kids to size up situations without, at some point, exposing them to said situations. Moreover, there is much more of an edge to that process when a child knows they are on their own in solving the problem.

So it's a real balancing act as a father to present age & maturity-appropriate situations that challenge your child without presenting more danger than they can reasonably handle. Anxiety, yes, that's the fuel to keep fathers focused on maintaining that balance. Dread? Yes, but you'll get over it once your kids start surprising you with insights and behaviors you didn't know you'd taught them.

<comment><USER3> I'm currently struggling to learn this by myself (not fatherhood but surviving on my own) in my mid twenties. It is incredibly difficult only because I am in such a state of comfort that forcing myself to face difficult situations to learn and grow from, is hard.

<comment><USER4> the solution is easy. just get rid of your state of comfort.

most people can't, because the real problem is something else.

<comment><USER5> >the real problem is something else

Would you like to elaborate or give examples of that something else?

<comment><USER4> fear.

<comment><USER6> Can you take the gnomicism down a notch?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Schopenhauer is also famous for having an anti-natalist stance.

"If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist? Would not a man rather have so much sympathy with the coming generation as to spare it the burden of existence, or at any rate not take it upon himself to impose that burden upon it in cold blood?"

It's brushed off in first few paragraphs, but for those who are not yet a parent: you don't have to be. You can have a fulfilling, arguably happier [1], life without children. In fact, a lot of people argue against having children these days [2,3,4]. I'm fairly lucky to have a supporting and progressive family who, mostly, supported my decision for not having children. But a quick gloss over /r/childfree indicates that there is a lot of stigmatism still going on. I think it's time to do away with that.

[1] [http://www.pnas.org/content/111/4/1328.full.pdf](http://www.pnas.org/content/111/4/1328.full.pdf)

[2] [https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and- radio/2013/sep/10/david-a...](https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and- radio/2013/sep/10/david-attenborough-human-evolution-stopped)

[3] [http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/people-who-dont-have- chi...](http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/people-who-dont-have-children- benefit-our-environment-more-than-any-campaign-its-time-to- celebrate-a7178951.html)

[4] [https://www.wired.com/2015/04/biggest-threat-earth-many- kids...](https://www.wired.com/2015/04/biggest-threat-earth-many-kids/)

<comment><USER8> I think not having children is incredibly selfish.

Life is an incredible gift. It is, after all, the substrate upon which all of our hopes and dreams are built.

And we were given this gift. Many people made many sacrifices so that we could be here, alive, enjoying life. To decide, then, to not share this gift with your own children, well... I can't conceive of anything more selfish.

<comment><USER9> So how many children do you have? Why not more? You're not sharing gifts with as many children as you can conceive. You are selfish in that regard according to your own basis.

<comment><USER8> Believe me, after I convince everybody to have children, I'm gonna work on convincing them to have lots of children :P

That's certainly my own plan. Just welcomed number three into the world last week. Definitely have plans for more, but, you know, babies generally come one at a time.

<comment><USER10> Luckily the process scales horizontally quite well. Also see e.g. Genghis Khan.

<comment><USER8> Well, it does for half the species. In theory. The other half kind of acts as a damper on things, especially if you value things like women's rights, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I struggle to relate to the premise of this article: while anxiety is something I have always struggled with, fatherhood is not one of the things that makes me anxious. My son is three, turning four in a few months, and while his behaviour and moods can at times be difficult to deal with, I'd describe the resulting emotions as more exasperation or weariness than anxiety. Now, maybe as he gets older – maybe when he is a teenager he will cause me anxiety – but certainly not yet.

</comment><comment><USER12> It's difficult for me to relate to this. For me, fatherhood has been a source of great joy.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is really only an issue for neurotic over-educated upper-middle class Westerners. Everyone else just gets on with their lives and ignores this nonsense about anxiety and dread.

<comment><USER14> It's still an issue to be overcome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Because in the long term everything you see will be destroyed and humanity itself wont even be a thought, so don't worry.

</comment><comment><USER16> I can't wait, generally, to have kids.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'll drop the name only because I am tired: Viktor Frankl. Everything from own is great.

</comment><comment><USER18> I might point out that men are not _totally_ fine. Men are imprisoned at a much higher rate than women, enter and complete college at a lower rate than women, and have a higher rate of successful suicide. Men also bear the vast majority of the tax burden and have few rights in family court. Men also live shorter lives than women.

<comment><USER19> The rates of entering and completing college and of successful suicide are real problems. Definitely give you those.

The others, I'm not sure I can. Some of this is biological. The rate of sociopathy is much higher in men than women, and young men have hormonal drives to physical violence that are much stronger than women. I would be astonished at a society where incarceration rates are equal. Similarly, men living shorter lives appears to be biological, as it is ubiquitous across cultures.

As for tax burden, if you factor in systemic lower rates of pay for women than men, lower employment opportunities for the three quarters of single parent households that have only a mother rather than only a father, and split the burden across couples where one does not work, is it still so?

<comment><USER20> > Some of this is biological

It wasn't a long time ago that most gender inequality for women was labeled "biological". Estrogen was blamed for everything between unsuitability for voting, then it was specific professions, and then higher hospital rates. All which research in the last 100 years has found to be either completely false or highly overrated as a factor. Culture it seems, plays a order of magnitude bigger factor in everything we used to blame sex hormones.

> young men have hormonal drives to physical violence

So lets say we had a study that looked at hormonal levels in young men, and tried to correlate that to tendencies to commit physical violence. We should expect that those individuals with higher tendency of violence should have a statistical higher levels.

And researchers did such studies and found that there was no correlation between hormonal levels and risk of committing violence. There was a correlation between abnormal levels of several times higher than can naturally occur, and violence. Within the natural range however, testosterone has no regulative effect on violence.

> men living shorter lives appears to be biological, as it is ubiquitous > across cultures

Higher income for men is also ubiquitous across cultures, so is that biological? At best it is a half truth, since success statistics from dating site do give a strong correlation for women that focus on personal health. Men in turn has success being correlated to wealth and ability to support a family, and less so to personal health. This translate to a strong cultural difference in incentives, possible caused by biology, but surely thats not one that gender equality can't over come.</comment></comment></comment>


A must see TED talk by Sheena Iyengar on cultural differences in choosing - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDq9-QxvsNU <comment><AUTHOR> (via <https://www.facebook.com/ashish007/posts/223031457746543>)

</comment><comment><USER2> Just amazing !!!

Thank you !</comment>


Your Next Chevy May Watch You Watching the Road - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2014/09/general-motors-seeing-machines/

<comment><AUTHOR> What if I am looking away from the road to read the traffic signs, so I can know what the law is on a particular stretch or in a particular town? What if I am reading the signs of establishments so I can figure out what kinds of services are offered along the route I am traveling? Will I only have x number of seconds to look away before my car obnoxiously suggests "You are tired, pull over soon"? Driving involves a lot more than simply looking at the road. In fact you have to look away from the road constantly to evaluate your surroundings, discover where things are, read traffic signs, check your rear and side view mirrors, watch for vehicles from incoming roads to drive defensively, etc. How is an algorithm supposed to detect the difference between looking away from the road for one of the above mentioned reasons and looking away from the road because I am tired or distracted? It seems to me this technology could be extremely annoying due to false positives. Last thing I want while enjoying scenery on a road trip is some stupid algorithm suggesting to me that I'm tired when I'm wide awake.</comment>


RapydBooks – Free Online Accounting Software - <AUTHOR>

Manage your clients, contacts, vendors, invoices, estimates, bills, expenses from anywhere, anytime and any device. Signup Today http://www.rapydbooks.com <comment><AUTHOR> It's completely free in our forever plan. Signup Today, [http://app.rapydbooks.com/signup](http://app.rapydbooks.com/signup)</comment>


Wind turbines are neither clean nor green and they provide zero global energy - <AUTHOR> https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/05/wind-turbines-are-neither-clean-nor-green-and-they-provide-zero-global-energy/# <comment><USER3> TLDR: Editorialist in UK conservative political magazine[0] tilting at windmills as sources of clean energy. His hobby, apparently, or his job[1].

It's too easy to shoot holes in his "facts". I won't even try. He's deliberately being intelectually dishonest, coating his opinion in statistics carefully taken out of context.

Now for an interesting look at wind power technology, have a look at a list of the ten most powerful wind turbines[2].

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spectator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spectator) [1] [https://www.spectator.co.uk/author/matt- ridley/](https://www.spectator.co.uk/author/matt-ridley/) [2] [http://www.windpowermonthly.com/10-biggest- turbines](http://www.windpowermonthly.com/10-biggest-turbines)

</comment><comment><USER4> Here's his logic, so you don't have to subject yourself to that "article" -> solar and wind contribute very little to global energy at the moment. Energy demand is growing at 2% per year. Therefore, wind and solar won't contribute a significant chunk of energy ever. Therefore, let's invest in gas.

Dumpster tier reporting. On a side note, does HN blacklist any sites for being chronically bad?

<comment><USER5> There was an estimate of the cost of keeping up with demand using wind - <USER2> the back-of-the-envelope numbers were discouraging. 2TW per year, and wind power takes a huge investment in the towers to produce relatively tiny amounts of watts.

<comment><USER6> They might also kill lots of birds, see: [http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart- news/how-many-birds-do-w...](http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how- many-birds-do-wind-turbines-really-kill-180948154/)

And they look ugly as well. Personally I hope we can get rid of wind turbines as soon as possible.

<comment><USER7> FYI they kill a lot of bats too. Many of them are turned off at certain times so as to kill fewer (source - wife is a bat-ologist)

<comment><USER8> That is true, they do, but in the UK at least all new ones/sites do need full ecological impact assessments (there are various levels of assessment needed depending on habitat suitability) and hopefully there will be a lessening on the problem long-term - off-shore is the way to go, of course!

(I do/help with these assessments)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> We already generate ~6% of all our power in the US by wind power, which is incredible considering that modern wind turbines installation really only hit its stride in 2010 or so. Of course much of the world is behind the US–we lead the world in a lot of things. This is a silly and unthoughtful hit piece. Advocating for natural gas as a cleaner source than wind power is borderline idiotic. Dumpster bin article.

<comment><USER5> Isn't that 'power capacity'? And since wind turbines don't often run at capacity, its a greatly inflated view of the situation.

<comment><USER9> No, according to Wikipedia that was actual generated power / all power used.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_United_Sta...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_United_States)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> His claim that wind turbines are useless because they take the effort of 150 tons of coal to produce the steel is interesting. He didn't follow it up with the obvious calculation of how long a wind turbine take a to get that energy back. I did a quick calculation, and it looks like you can recover that input coal energy in only a few months of operation.

<comment><USER11> I wonder how much coal it takes to produce a steel steam turbine...

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I read the article and read the comments. The article had numbers, the comments have mostly invectives.

If he is wrong, could someone who is knowledgeable take his numbers and state why they are wrong?

This is a honest question. I would like to have energy, ideally clean energy, uber ideally lots of clean energy. He is telling that wind and photovoltaic are not enough, by large, to replace our energy use of today. Why is he wrong? If we wanted to completely switch to green energy, would this be technically possible? (let's put the political agendas aside, I want to take this opportunity to actually make up my mind)

<comment><USER13> I don't know, but the article's numbers are pretty convincing and not a single comment here addresses them. I'd say there is likely some truth somewhere in the article that the commenters here don't want to acknowledge. I completely agree with his conclusion about nuclear energy being the obvious way forward in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Before you waste your precious time one should consider that the author has quite the history of writing contrarian articles related to climate change and renewable energy that are poorly researched and/or flat out wrong. The author also has no real experience in the field.

</comment><comment><USER15> The author (Matt Ridley) has an interesting story actually. He because chairman of Northern Rock, following in daddy's footsteps and oversaw it as it went _spectacularly_ bust - the first run on a UK bank in 150 years.

Now he appears to be cheerleading for another industry (fracking/oil) that is piled high with debt:

[http://www.econmatters.com/2014/07/oil-companys-fracking- deb...](http://www.econmatters.com/2014/07/oil-companys-fracking-debt- treadmill.html)

You could probably run a profitable hedge fund that simply bet against his predictions.

</comment><comment><USER16> "As for resource consumption and environmental impacts, the direct effects of wind turbines — killing birds and bats, sinking concrete foundations deep into wild lands — is bad enough. But out of sight and out of mind is the dirty pollution generated in Inner Mongolia by the mining of rare-earth metals for the magnets in the turbines. This generates toxic and radioactive waste on an epic scale, which is why the phrase 'clean energy' is such a sick joke and ministers should be ashamed every time it passes their lips."

</comment><comment><USER17> Wow, this got buried fast.

But it is worth considering. Hrm, Seems like Holland is known for its windmills.

Vast lands in the midwest that are unsuitable for farming are being turned into wind-farms. This is controversial because it is subsidized so it's difficult to do a cost-benefit analysis.

Finally, if climate-change is an issue, we should also consider that wind take energy out of the atmosphere whereas the proposed alternatives put waste energy into the atmosphere.

<comment><USER18> It might be worth considering if it wasn't written by someone who regularly writes inaccurate misleading articles about green energy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> "Wind energy takes a lot of coal to setup, so we shouldn't even try" is this author's entire statement. He suggests we focus back on fossil fuels, i.e. natural gas and coal, which he admits he has a commercial interest in.

While I cannot discount his assertion of how much power it takes to build wind turbines, I can point out that using CURRENT fossil fuel power generation to bootstrap our renewables, even wind energy, is a good thing. We're not attempting to go from 0 - 60 by building an entirely separate power grid from scratch. We, as a species, are attempting to move from a harmful and eventually scarce set of fuels to clean energy. Not suddenly. Not quickly. And eventually, slow moving as it is, we will find ways to maximize renewable output. Look at how long it took to squeeze so much power from coal and oil. It didn't take 5 years, it took decades.

To decry renewables like wind because we RIGHT NOW need current coal and oil power to produce it, is worth mentioning but NOT a reason to discount such!

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm getting a vibe that many commenters skipped the first sentence of the final paragraph because they were too preoccupied being angry that someone dare insult the economic efficiency of green energy sources.

the author states:

>And let's put some of that burgeoning wealth in nuclear, fission and fusion, so that it can take over from gas in the second half of this century.

He's advocating for nuclear power. From a pure numbers perspective it makes a lot of sense.

<comment><USER15> The UK has just building a nuclear plant that has a guaranteed strike price that is higher than what wind/solar gets. It also gets it for many years - it's a bad deal now and as the price of solar and wind comes down it will become _even worse_. The total subsidies for this plant are expected to be about 37 billion in total.

In return for paying _more_ for Hinckley point the UK cedes sovereignty over its power generation to the Chinese and, of course, in case of disaster taxpayers are on the hook for almost all of the clean up costs.

What's not to like?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Pathetic.

<comment><USER20> It's not like he crunched the numbers wrong.

Nuclear has massive bang for your buck (both figuratively and literally) but we ignore it in the first world because we cater to peoples' mostly irrational fear of it and there is no money to do it right in the third world.

<comment><USER11> No, he just crunched them utterly disingenuosly.

Infrastructure evolves very slowly, and he's using a true figure (wind is a small part of the grid) as an argument for keeping it a small part of the grid.</comment></comment></comment>


Multiplayer 0x10c testing [Streaming] - <AUTHOR> http://www.twitch.tv/notch

<comment><USER2> The streaming session is over. Here is the link to the archive in case anyone is too lazy to find it on the page: <http://www.twitch.tv/notch/b/336813987>

The game seems much shoot-ier than what I was imagining from the description. But maybe this is only a small portion of the actual gameplay.

<comment><USER3> It's anyone's guess really but I interpreted it as a test of the networking code more than anything else. I don't think he is making a fast paced shooter :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This video reports over 4 million views. The early interest around this game is mind boggling.

<comment><USER5> That is total views on his channel. The 0x10c testing video[1] only has about 5500.

[1]: <http://www.twitch.tv/notch/b/336813987>

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Recording: <http://www.twitch.tv/notch/b/336813987>

</comment><comment><USER6> I foresee how the FPS aspect could come into play when dealing with pirates or aliens boarding the ship, for example. I hope he keeps that aspect of the game.

</comment><comment><USER7> I am kind of thinking this will be FTL but you will be able to board and fight off boarders yourself in first person as well as program various ship systems.

</comment><comment><USER8> ... looks like I just missed out :/ Did anyone catch this?

<comment><USER9> If you click the videos tab at the bottom you can watch the archived recording. It looks like it's only 30 mins long

<comment><USER8> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> looks like his initial plans were too ambitious, he wasn't skilled enough to pull them off or just got bored and decided to pivot it into a more FPS style game.

<comment><USER11> This was the first test of the network code.

The DCPU computer and 3D vector display were already completed long ago.</comment></comment>