Forget Wearable Tech. People Really Want Better Batteries - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2015/01/10/376166180/forget-wearable-tech-people-really-want-better-batteries

<comment><USER2> I would welcome some additional thickness in my iphone for a better battery life. The end goal should not be a paperthin phone; it should be a phone that has a long charge time and fits reasonably into your pocket / hand. Phones are pretty important to people and it's silly something so important is so needy of recharging.

It's not technology so much that is the problem, it is design principles and priorities.

<comment><USER3> I agree but there are issues with having bigger batteries as well: they add a lot of weight and could result in more wrist/arm pain for those using their phones for extended time. You certainly don't want your phone to be as heavy as a brick.

<comment><USER4> >* they add a lot of weight and could result in more wrist/arm pain for those using their phones for extended time.*

Seriously? I think we somehow survived the nineties, early '00s without such issues.

>* You certainly don't want your phone to be as heavy as a brick.*

It's been at least 5-10 years that we've been very far away from that situation...

<comment><USER3> > Seriously? I think we somehow survived the nineties, early '00s without such > issues.

Smartphones were not mainstream in the early '00s. All the "normal" phones were very light and very portable.

<comment><USER5> For about 100 years or so the handset was a lot heavier than todays smartphones and nobody thought anything of it. My grandmom had one of those old black bakelite jobs, it must have weighed at least 2 pounds and could be used as a means of self defense.

<comment><USER6> But no one was tapping on the screen and looking at it to interact with it …

I would personally argue that I'm unsure about the connection between weight and comfortableness and the tolerances. Would 200g be ok? I really don't know.

However … making phone calls is not the main use case for smartphones. You just cannot design them with that in mind as something to optimise for. That's non-sensical, weird, and a total non-sequitur. Your comparison makes zero sense in that regard. It just doesn't even apply, so it's not a valid argument in any way, shape or form.

<comment><USER5> > making phone calls is not the main use case for smartphones

Try marketing a smart phone that can't make phone calls and see how it goes.

> You just cannot design them with that in mind as something to optimise for.

Every smartphone has been primarly a phone, secondary a camera and thirdly something that runs apps.

It's essentially a computer with a telephony interface but that telephony bit is absolutely essential and not an afterthought.

<comment><USER7> > _Try marketing a smart phone that can 't make phone calls and see how it > goes._

I think that's called a (mini) tablet.

<comment><USER5> How many people that have mini tablets also have a phone? How many people that have a phone also have mini tablets?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If phone manufacturers weren't in a constant race to cut the last .1 oz off of their phones while still being barely-sufficient to get through a day, this wouldn't even be an issue. I'd be happy to double my phone's weight for 3 days of life.

<comment><USER9> For most manufacturers and models battery life has actually increased marginally with each model (one notable exception being LG's G2 vs G3). See for example: [http://www.expertreviews.co.uk/mobile-phones/1402071/best- ba...](http://www.expertreviews.co.uk/mobile-phones/1402071/best-battery- life-2014-60-smartphones-tested)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Also related: _easily removable_ batteries, and preferably in standardised sizes. The fastest way to get from empty to full is not to wait for it charge, but to swap in an already-charged battery.

I think thinness is overrated too, as a device thinner than ~10mm starts getting rather difficult to pick up from a flat surface and hold comfortably (I have big hands.)

<comment><USER11> I massively disagree with the importance of swappable batteries. While I suppose there are people who are pretty happy hauling around a bunch of batteries with them, I haven't considered such a thing since camcorders were cool. A big part of keeping technology mainstream is to not require a utility belt.

(n.b. I don't mind if they're user-removable for replacement once they've totally died, but this also seems to have become rather rare for what I assume are manufacturing reasons)

<comment><USER12> I took advantage of this when my phone's original battery began to swell. With a new phone I suppose I would have to send it in and pay hundreds of dollars to get it fixed. Instead I bought 4 replacement batteries off of Amazon for $6.00 each and fixed it myself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I am often disappointed by the battery life of my phone, but I think that what we need isn't bigger batteries, but better software. Supposedly, when working on Lollipop, Google engineers left a Nexus phone running on Airplane mode, and it lasted a month on a charge. I'm not sure if it actually happened, but it's believable. Goes to show the point that if we can manage power usage well, multi-day run times are perfectly practical without mammoth batteries.

I'm not sure what's going on with it in the iOS world, but Google seems to be working on this with the power management changes in Lollipop. They still have a long way to go, since the first thing I noticed on upgrading to it was random massive battery drain for no apparent reason. It seems to have gone away since I uninstalled Foursquare, but that was a random guess, and I'm still not sure if it was the main reason. Anyways, point is that the OS-level changes to make it easier to sip power are good, but app compliance is still spotty.

I think that what we really need in Android is a good, OS-level way of monitoring which apps are actually causing idle wakelocks, GPS usage, and other non-obvious power drains. If the users can see that App X is what's killing their battery, they will presumably uninstall it and yell at the App developers instead of at Google, or maybe decide that the app does actually need to do that, and it's worth it, but at least they know it's the app's fault, and not Android's. Possibly some sort of option to notify the user if an app's idle power usage is over some threshold and ask them if they're really okay with that.

<comment><USER14> The thing I never understood -- back in the days of pagers, a pager could last for a month or more on a AA battery. A pager has to be constantly listening for a signal, then wake up and take action. So couldn't a phone be designed the same way? Have the main processor at idle, and offload event listening/processing to another low power processor chip. Then, wake up the main CPU when more advanced processing is required.

<comment><USER15> Umm... smart phones do this? It's a big reason phones can last so long with serious power requirements. A big reason for the phone/mobile specific chipsets was to enable these features.

<comment><USER14> But what I'm still confused on -- if a pager can sit an listen to a signal for 2 - 4 weeks on a AA battery, why can't a phone (smart or otherwise) do the same thing? Or in other words, what specifically is there about listening for a "You have an incoming call" radio signal, that causes more power drain than listening for a "You have a page with this message contents" signal? For simplicity sake, lets assume even a dumb phone, with no internet -- just calls -- they never did have a fraction of the standby time of a pager.

<comment><USER15> Late to see this. But the answer to your question is because even though they are superficially accomplishing the same end result, they are not nearly doing the same thing. Your smartphone is running a full blown modern operating system, with all the processors and memory and store requirements.

The pager is likely running a very lean embedded processor and doesn't have nearly the same energy requirements.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The company that wins the jackpot on this isn't going to be the one with the most advanced batteries. It's going to be the company that figures out how to cut platform bloat down to a reasonable size, reducing energy consumption by an order of magnitude.

They're also going to have to figure out ways to keep third-party apps from undoing their hard work.

<comment><USER17> Apple's pretty good at that - the last time I looked at the ifixit teardowns their batteries were 30-40% smaller than the competition, and battery life was comparable. But they use that advantage not to increase usable battery life but to decrease device size.

I doubt "order of magnitude" is going to happen barring some revolutionary display technology.

<comment><USER16> You can get to order of magnitude with a combination of getting the software right and using the best battery available. After all, it's not like the company on this path is going to use crappy batteries, they'll use the best available like everyone else.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> True. I'm one of those people who religiously plug my phone every night, yet, I often ran out of power when I really needed it (eg: browsing / tethering on a long train trip).

I recently got a One plus one, and I really couldn't tell you all the good geeky spec, I actually don't care about all it's little flaws, but I loves the amazing battery life. I will not buy another phone with lesser battery life. There is no other geeky spec that can trump that.

</comment><comment><USER19> What percentage of people don't/can't charge their phone every night? And of those who don't/can't, what percentage of them aren't satisfied with the myriad external battery cases and on-the-go-chargers available for smart phones. I challenge the assumption that the majority of people are asking for better batteries. I think it's like people asking Ford for a faster horse.

<comment><USER20> > what percentage of them aren't satisfied with the myriad external battery > cases and on-the-go-chargers available for smart phones.

Well, from the article, I'd say the answer is around 33%. Specifically, this was in the article:

> Meanwhile, consumers indicated that the new smartphone feature they were > most excited about — picked by 33 percent of respondents — was "improved > battery life."

Also...

> I challenge the assumption that the majority of people are asking for better > batteries.

I don't think anyone said it's a majority. And this article isn't about an assumption, it's about a survey.

<comment><USER19> Surveys don't provide perfect information. People may say they want better battery life because that's the only thing they can think about their phones that could get better. 10 years ago if you asked people what they wanted in cell phones they would have said "smaller, thinner flip phones please". Very few people would have asked for a smart phone that was was easy to use and with no physical keyboard. In other words, asking customers what they want is often a terrible way to figure out what to build next.

Also, the type of person willing to respond to a survey like this is likely already an outlier and more prone to running into the limits of what their battery will allow them to do.

If people truly wanted better battery life they would buy huge cases with big batteries built into them. I know very few people who own one of them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> "Forget self-driving cars. People really want anti-gravity."

I mean, of course they want better batteries, but it's not like there is a lack of investment in better energy storage.

<comment><USER22> And while people might want anti-gravity they are only actually willing to pay for the car that has the cooler look.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> So I must choose? Wearable tech or better batteries but you can't have both! Of course people want better batteries but I don't see how that leads to the conclusion of the headline.

</comment><comment><USER24> other alternative, just make slower hardware, and optimize the software running on it.

optimizing and reducing the amount of functionalities might also save a very big amount of battery.

Honestly, what I'd buy, is a

* 4 inch e-ink screen device

* that can close like a laptop, with a physical keyboard,

* with a CPU that sacrifice features and speed for less power consumption

* no camera,

* only wifi, or with 3G disabled by default, no phone function

* browser with a very limited set of feature: limited to css 2, js deactivated by default: it's amazing the amount of firefox modules that can be disabled: [http://sourceforge.net/projects/lightfirefox/](http://sourceforge.net/projects/lightfirefox/)

* no video acceleration, no graphics acceleration, and no fading/smooth window transitions, 10hz refresh rate is more than enough to read text

I wonder which of those things save the most battery, but I guess all of this would easily double battery life. Also I guess that device would cost much less and be very attractive for students, and be enough to just code if you'd have an online compiler. If you want calls, just buy a candybar phone, like the the latest nokia 100 or 200 series.

I'd buy it even if it cost $300. I wonder how expensive e-ink screen are, but I would not be surprised it's mostly a patent issue.

<comment><USER25> > browser with a very limited set of feature: limited to css 2, js deactivated > by default

I think I speak for every web developer in the world when I say that I hate you, and I'm extremely happy that almost no one else wants to buy your dream product. :)

<comment><USER24> > web developer

you can be a "web developer" without using js. the problem with js is that it can be abused. there can be very well made js, but I'm sure there's plenty of js that is just a waste of CPU cycle.

<comment><USER26> You may find it easier to redesign your dream phone than the entire web.

<comment><USER27> Or . . . you could just disconnect from the web completely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> k-mcgrady If Apple announced the next iPhone and it had a battery that lasted twice as long as the current one I think a lot of people would be happy. I've noticed I get about 1.5 days now with my iPhone 6 and not having to worry if I forget to charge it at night is great. If it could get me to the end of the next day it would be perfect. It seems that every year phone manufacturers make battery improvements but these are offset by the new sensors and screens. If they skipped everything except battery for one generation, doubled it, and then went back to features would they be able to continue adding features at the previous rate while maintaining the new battery life?

<comment><USER19> But what if you forget to charge it at the end of the second day? Maybe what you need isn't a better battery but something that reminds you to charge your phone at night?

<comment> k-mcgrady The point is more - "I can't get to a charger tonight but I don't need to worry as it'll last until tomorrow night." Charging each night isn't an inconvenience for most people and they would probably continue doing that (nobody waits until 0% to charge) but it provides extra breathing room on the occasions it's just not possible for you to charge.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> NB. People may _want_ better battery life, but they'll still _pay_ for better features or performance. Of better batteries would give both, but we've had intense R&D for decades, and it's a difficult problem. (and if we had them, do you think it will go into battery life or features/performance...?)

also, 4K looks incredible - but where do you get 4K shows?

BTW I'm sick of refreshing HN 3 times to make sure my vote was counted. I'm not voting anymore.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is one of the main reasons I still don't have a smartphone. Battery life on an old Nokia is well in excess of 5 days, it works whenever I need it when on the road even when there are no wall sockets for miles around.

<comment><USER17> If you use your smartphone for what you use your dumbphone for it will last just as long if not longer. I have a spare Android phone I use as my on-call phone where I have data turned off and it lasts 2 weeks no problem.

edit: I used to use my dumbphone as most people use their smartphones today. It was a Sony Ericsson so it had multitasking Java J2ME support[0], a high- quality camera, GPS so I was continually shooting, tweeting, on IRC, Google Maps, Facebook etc. I had to swap batteries halfway through the day same as I do now. Not much has changed.

[0] [https://farm3.staticflickr.com/2612/4022002606_b6c5935cf4_o....](https://farm3.staticflickr.com/2612/4022002606_b6c5935cf4_o.png)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Is it worth noting that if wearables caught on, this would offload some of the work from phone batteries, effectively extending battery life? A big if, to be sure.

</comment><comment><USER30> I think wearable watches has to be designed differently. Think a watch bracelet with the battery around the arm, also add solar cells to recharge that battery.

<comment><USER31> I am very happy with smartphones. Mostly because having one means I don't have to wear a watch.

<comment><USER32> I'd be very happy if my watch could take over the majority of my phone's functions--calling, texting.

Mostly because then I wouldn't have to carry a phone in my pocket.

<comment><USER31> Just attach a chain to your smartphone and call it a "smartpocketwatch."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The dream technology: Wearable/mobile electronics that pull energy from your body.

"Oh, my battery is low. I better eat some chocolate."

<comment><USER33> Wireless charger in your pocket would be close to "from your body" request. Of course this leads to heavy pocket syndrome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Is there some sort of Parkinson's Law that phones will consume as much power as is available to them?

</comment><comment><USER35> I got an LG G3 recently and the battery life is excellent. It'll happily last two days.

<comment><USER29> An LG G3 with the auto brightness feature enabled, maybe.

With brightness bumped up to a more user friendly level, my battery lasts <<1 day. I like this phone, but consider the battery life to be laughably bad.

<comment><USER35> I don't use auto brightness. I have it set to 50% pretty much all the time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> It's really interesting how much improved batteries could improve all sorts of tech. Phones and wearables are pretty much the least interesting of them, too.

Imagine for a moment that batteries are 1000x better than now. A ton of problems are magically solved. Renewable energy is suddenly trivial. Run the world on solar and wind, done! Electric cars are now the only reasonable kind. Trucks and trains too. Even airplanes. Many satellites could be replaced with long-duration drones. Those that remain can be built lighter and cheaper. Supersonic airliners might even come back, since fuel costs would drop through the floor.

Oh, and your smartphone could run for three years on a charge. Woohoo.

Compare with something like fusion power, which only solves a tiny fraction of the above. Without storage, fusion isn't that interesting. With good storage, it's not necessary!

<comment><USER37> Yup, Generation is the 'easiest' part of the equation and has been since we had reliable nuclear power the issue is distribution via batteries.

If you look at the energy density of gasoline vs a battery for the same weight it, Petrol (Gasoline) 44MJ/Kg, Li-Ion batteries (the best ones, 0.875MJ/Kg).

Obviously there are conversion efficiencies to take into account (ICE's have a lower conversion efficiencies than Electric Drive).

1000x wouldn't be required, 10x would revolutionize many fields and 100x would be incredible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Just like people wanted a faster horse?</comment>


Some guy played Civ2 for a decade, here's what the world looked like - <AUTHOR> https://www.giantbomb.com/forums/general-discussion-30/this-decade-long-civilization-ii-game-makes-me-hat-550680/ <comment><USER2> Fantastic story. And then I realized that this was published seven years ago... I'd love to read an update to this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Me too. Maybe I'll google it when I have the time. Would be quite surprised if things got sorted out and the world became somewhat a nice place to live.</comment></comment>


An MMO startup simulator - <AUTHOR> http://www.hipsterceo.com

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm Gerard - the guy behind all this - if anyone has any questions then ask away here :)</comment>


Machine Learning - <AUTHOR> https://xkcd.com/1838/ <comment><USER2> Reminds me of this horrifying stack exchange post: [https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/185507/what- happen...](https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/185507/what-happens-if- the-explanatory-and-response-variables-are-sorted-independently)

<comment><USER3> ELI5?

<comment><USER4> The manager of the person who asked the question thinks that if you take data in form of pairs (X, Y), split them up, sort independently and combine again, you'll get better results. In fact, such operation _obviously_ destroys the relationship X had to Y, so the result is meaningless.

<comment><USER3> Ha, gotcha! Maybe if you do it enough times...in the cloud?

<comment><USER5> No no, results stored on The Blockchain.

<comment><USER6> A chatbot can read them back to us.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Tom Scott yesterday made a video for laypeople on the topic of 'black box' machine learning and how it can be difficult to get it to behave as you want, too.[0]

It's an interesting watch - I'd recommend it if you're interested in learning about it.

(Heck, I'd recommend the channel. Tom does some great videos on a number of different topics.)

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

<comment><USER8> Isn't he the guy from the hello internet podcast?

<comment><USER9> No, HI is Brady Haran and CGP Grey, though I suspect Brady may have collaborated with Tom.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "Just stir the pile until [the answers] start looking right" is actually a pretty decent description of gradient descent.

<comment><USER11> With gradient descent you are walking in the direction of negative gradient. Stirring the pile implies that you are walking randomly from point to point.

<comment><USER4> No, by stirring you're just making the pile to move, and things descend down the gradient of gravity. :).

<comment><USER12> The little things moreso. Brazil nut effect!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is _so_ on point considering a lot of my customer interactions. Until I go in and go over establishing a process framework that goes through the models in use and sets criteria for their evaluation (even something as simple as ROC), a lot of ML work in companies is mostly tinkering with things (sometimes with wrong theoretical underpinnings) until it performs adequately.

The hype is only real if you systematically work it into measurable process, not virtuoso jamming.

<comment><USER14> Stone age tools as Chomsky calls them. The problem with simple to use tools, is the simplicity masks two key facts from the user - whether aptitude for the tool exists & amount of effort and time to mastery.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> That's some nice snarkiness about how modern machine learning works. But let's not forget that this apparently "dumb" approach has beaten out much more intelligent seeming systems on many tasks. To me, this means we shouldn't be so confident that we know what an intelligent system looks like. Maybe effectiveness in AI doesn't have much to do with human interpretability, and even less to do with whether humans find the approach intellectually satisfying.

<comment><USER16> Is it survivorship bias? ML attempts that fail are cancelled and never heard from again, those that succeed are publicized.

The same approach works with pig entrails: a bunch of people make predictions, the ones that fail go away, the ones that happen to succeed a few times "must work".

Or in stock market terms, "past performance is no guarantee of future results."

<comment><USER15> In a way you're exactly correct and that's exactly why machine learning works. The models specify a huge range of possible input-output mappings and then do a dumb search to find the ones that work; the mappings that don't succeed are discarded. It turns out, surprisingly, this is the best approach we have come up with.

> Or in stock market terms, "past performance is no guarantee of future > results."

Past performance isn't a guarantee, but under mild conditions it is very strong evidence that there will be future results.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> True that. But you could replace "Machine Learning System" with "code base" and "linear algebra" with "C++" and it would be an accurate description of most corporate software development I've seen.

<comment><USER18> I think this is one of Munroe's general digs at corporate culture, and not specifically aimed at machine learning, that's just the current buzzword.

<comment><USER4> It feels like a dig at how people do machine learning these days though. My impression is that people just take TensorFlow and a random neural net, and keep throwing gigabytes of data at it until they feel the results look like they should...

<comment><USER19> Random Neural Nets should totally be a real thing.

I mean more than they already are.

<comment><USER20> At University, we did neural nets via genetic algorithms. Does that count?

<comment><USER21> Bingo. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I like a different analogy. In old times the oracles and shamans danced in masks wielding amulets of power and magical weapons. Modern day shamans dance with datasets and clusters, but the main principle is the same. If my performance produced a desired effect (correlation does not imply causation), that is, obviously, due to my undoubted magic powers. If it fail, which is usually the case, that is because the data was not big enough and there was not enough money given to perform big-enough sacrifice to please the gods.

We actually might learn a lot from Tibetan tantric practitioners. It seems that Wall street guys and economists did.

<comment><USER23> My advice : if you see a pile of sticks growing in the car park, make a swift exit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> As famous russo-ukrainian sentence goes, "is it a defeat or a victory?"

<comment><USER25> I don't know what is the Russian equivalent of this saying, but the Ukrainian version that got very popular recent years has an interesting culturological twist. The word that is used as an antonym of "victory" does not translate to English as "defeat", but instead it literally means "betrayal". This is because in Ukrainian history we almost never lost by being defeated, and almost every time our defeats were results of betrayal. And same thing applies to the ongoing war: we don't really fear a military defeat as much as a political betrayal (either internal or external).

<comment><USER26> > in Ukrainian history we almost never lost by being defeated

Nice to see Ukrainians reinventing German Stab-in-the-back mythology from interwar period.

<comment><USER25> It's much more complex than that.

<comment><USER26> After making such a statement it would be proper to elaborate on what you meant there. Don't get me wrong, I am not yearning for a debate on Ukrainian historiography here, I just believe that borderline chauvinistic statements like that should be checked.

<comment><USER25> I get your point. It would be chauvinistic if I said that we are so strong that we can't be taken by force (which is impossible), while actually I'm just saying that we are too corrupt (so that every time a pivotal point comes, someone gets bribed and betrays). And also, I'm speaking of the last 300 years, and not really the _entire_ history.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm waiting for the followon - I stirred it up, I got good results, and now I can't seem to reproduce them again :-(

</comment><comment><USER28> There is this famous paper "I Just Ran Two Million Regressions". Any half decent statistician will tell you what's wrong with that type of approach.

<comment><USER29> Could one describe machine learning as _" combine_ enough _bad statistical tests that the cries of 'it seems to work' from managers drown out all the 'it's wrong' cries from the statisticians"_

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> So I am curious, like to a software engineer who has never learnt much of stats how difficult has it been for them using these things in the field to solve problems with, if they are any doing so? Like do they have a problem because they don't have a grounding in stats or do these things pretty much "work" assuming the models are coped to fit the problems.

</comment><comment><USER31> Not hot dog.

</comment><comment><USER32> Seems to be releated to this recent one:

[https://xkcd.com/1831/](https://xkcd.com/1831/)

Something tells me Rundall Munroe had a run-in with some over-eager data scientists recently.

</comment><comment><USER33> So far Deep Learning has made this Xkcd obsolete: [https://xkcd.com/1425/](https://xkcd.com/1425/)

Check whether a photo is of a bird.

<comment><USER34> Interesting, it shows how things can move quicker than expected, even when judged by enlightened people.

Is there a way to know the date (1425) was released ?

<comment><USER35> 24th September 2014

<comment><USER36> Programmers often have Scotty syndrome and pad their time estimates to look like geniuses when they solve ahead of schedule.

<comment><USER37> > to look like geniuses when they solve ahead of schedule

No, it is because estimating software tasks is difficult, the penalty for underestimating is that people think you are dishonest/flakey, and there isn't anywhere to get an education in how to do it well. The default advice given to junior engineers is therefore: "take your intuition and triple it." I hate that this is the state of the industry. My interactions around estimation over the past 5 years since uni have literally made me feel nauseated and near fainting on multiple occasions. I would love for Joel or Klamezius or Uncle Bob or someone else to fix it and produce a good course on how to create estimates.

<comment> UK-AL There isn't a way. It's an issue that blights everyone in the industry.

Probably the best your going get is the book "Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art "

Even applying those techniques you get it wrong.

Most experienced software companies have adopted agile, and accept reductions in scope to meet deadlines as something that happens.

<comment><USER38> Agreed, agile seems the only way, but does indeed require experienced managers. A lecturer once pointed out that business/normal people would always expect some kind of point estimate, they are never satisfied with some kind of distribution or interval. Personally, I would say that this is even more sad than that: the point estimates are always taken at the extreme values, which ever suits the person wanting the estimate more, never the average value.

Of course, all this leads to bad blood between techies and business side: how long will it take? -> probably about 3 weeks, but this requires using a library we haven't used before, so in the worst case even 2 months -> what? so long? get it done in 4 days, this is required the next week -> no, that's not really possible -> make it happen -> it happens and it either sucks when it's delivered at all, so the deadline gets extended anyway to iron out all the bugs or it causes lots of problems in the future.

<comment><USER34> For very long projects, I have seen much delay because of feature creep.

"OK you have implemented it as requested, but finally the customer does not like it, it needs to be slightly different. Can you do it quickly?"

Sometimes it is easy to adapt, sometimes next to impossible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> It's funny that this also seems to work for humans.

When the outcome is bad/not what humanity wants, we get/give a negative response and hope the outcome next time will be better.

</comment><comment><USER40> The second part quite accurately describes most of the generalization techniques. Especially when it comes to deep learning.

</comment><comment><USER41> For webcomics and ML, see this footnote: [http://p.migdal.pl/2017/04/30/teaching-deep- learning.html#fn...](http://p.migdal.pl/2017/04/30/teaching-deep- learning.html#fn:webcomics)

"It made a few episodes of webcomics obsolete: xkcd: Tasks (totally, by Park or Bird?), xkcd: Game AI) (partially, by AlphaGo), PHD Comics: If TV Science was more like REAL Science (not exactly, but still it's cool, by LapSRN)"

</comment><comment><USER42> This thread is hilarious.

ML is powering most or even all self driving car efforts underway, powers online translation services, numerous vision projects and speech recognition besides winning competitions meeting or exceeding human performance on the same data.

I'm just as allergic to those that hype some technology as I am to those that will snarkily discard something with arguments that have already been laid to rest, in some cases multiple years ago.

Xkcd is fun, but isn't necessarily prescient nor does it have to be accurate, when this cartoon was published the writing was already on the wall and that's 3 years ago. It's fine to be skeptical about new technology but before you start criticizing it make sure that you have at least a rough idea of where things stand lest you end up looking foolish.

Sure, ML is abused and if we're not careful we will see another AI winter because of silly hype and ascribing near magical properties to ML. But at the same time snark, condescension and a-priori dismissal of what is most likely the biggest landslide in computing since the smartphone is - especially on a site that deals with both hacking _and_ novelty - something that I would not expect.

Compared to the HN love for the next JS framework or language fad this attitude is surprising to say the least.

</comment><comment><USER43> Do you think it's connected in any way to [https://www.wired.com/2013/02/big- data-means-big-errors-peop...](https://www.wired.com/2013/02/big-data-means- big-errors-people/) ???

If not, what is your interpretation of the XKCD cartoon?

</comment><comment><USER44> Couldn't a DNN be trained to inspect other DNNs and generate human-readable explanations of how they work ? In the fewest words, with maximum poetry

<comment><USER32> Brilliant idea! Why not try it out yourself and see how it goes?

<comment><USER44> don't know anything about DNNs!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Can we load all XKCDs into a neural net (LSTM, or something), and train it to "dream" new ones?

Like the neural nets which generated non-sense, but realistic looking C++ code.</comment>


Ask HN: I can't read code indented with 2 spaces: do I need glasses? - <AUTHOR>

I'm doing a lot of work in Javascript at the moment, and it seems like most of the world indents using only 2 spaces - which I find really hard to read, particularly (say) long grunt config files, where indentation makes a big difference to meaning. Do I just have much worse eyesight than your average coder, am I using the wrong toolset, or do other people have this problem? <comment><USER2> Just an idea I haven't seen implemented yet:

Tabs have the advantage of beeing of variable width while spaces don't. But two or more consecutive spaces are rarely used for more than just aligning code. In theory the editor could render double the spaces (or rather a space with twice the width) for every amount of spaces higher than one, effectively doubling the indent.

No conversion (retabbing) would have to take place and therefore no hardcoding the value, which often breaks languages which don't like mixed tabs and spaces as the retabber might encounter three consecutive spaces and only convert two of them to a tab if told to do so.

</comment><comment><USER3> Can't you adjust your given IDE / text editor to accomodate? Look for hints in whitespace sensitive languages like python or coffeescript. For instance, you could use retab in vim.

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9104706/how-can-i- convert...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9104706/how-can-i-convert- spaces-to-tabs-in-vim-or-linux)

</comment><comment><USER4> True geeks should use their own editor. When I ran across 2 space indentation, I also couldn't keep track. So, I implemented a vertical marking bar in the editor, that I could use to "comb" the code. Works beauty, I suspect that implementations of this idea are available for editors like vim as well.

</comment><comment><USER5> Ask your $PROFESSIONAL.

</comment><comment><USER6> Try another color scheme?

But see an optician.

</comment><comment><USER7> Further proof tabs make more sense.

</comment><comment><USER8> Try changing your font, line/letter spacing, or turning on indentation guidelines. This is mine: <http://imgur.com/0BSq6lE></comment>


Ask HN: Does Hacker News really understand Fred Wilson? - <AUTHOR>

Despite 33.8% of HN following @fredwilson http://searchyc.com/fred+wilson shows up only 302 results, in contrast with searching for "invest" - 24919 and "venture capital" - 1164, "angel" - 3856 or "37 Signals" - 2763.
Does hackers really get their most followed VC? If not, why?
Links http://jmillerinc.com/2010/07/28/twitter-users-most-followed-by-readers-of-hacker-news/
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1555866 <comment><USER2> I don't see how 'followers' on twitter translate in to any level of understanding. It's more like a fanclub than a measure of insight.

Also, that's the 33% or so of HN that uses twitter, and/or was put on this list, not of HN as a whole.

<comment><AUTHOR> The point is many of HN readers are following a top VC without discussing frequently his ideas.

Something very interesting for a community to follow but to not discuss ... weird.

My guess is that the distance between a hacker and a vc/angel is far bigger than imagined before despite the efforts YC is putting in with HN to educate us.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> As the most appreciated VC not just by me incidentally but by the HN I still don't get his points investing in companies.

And my question would be in fact: Does anyone knows what drives VC investments in companies / products like Facebook, Tumblr or Foursquare?

Yes, the profit, BUT who will generate that profit? We, free users of these services? How?</comment>


YouTube Censored My Interview with Posie Parker - <AUTHOR> https://quillette.com/2019/11/22/youtube-censored-my-interview-with-posie-parker/ <comment><USER2> TL;DR A couple of right-wing "comedians" interview a transphobe, put the video on YouTube, and get an email from YouTube saying that that kind of "content" isn't appropriate for YouTube and has been removed. That's what they get for not self-hosting.</comment>


Ask HN: Should Richard Dawkins Open Source his software? - <AUTHOR>

He seems to be thinking about it: https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/355251334049562627 <comment><USER2> This is interesting too [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQp1QaW_onk](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQp1QaW_onk)

</comment><comment><USER3> of course :). This seems to be the book to which the code belongs [http://www.amazon.com/Climbing-Mount-Improbable-Richard- Dawk...](http://www.amazon.com/Climbing-Mount-Improbable-Richard- Dawkins/dp/0393316823)</comment>


Creating a Slack Writing Etiquette Guide for Your Workplace - <AUTHOR> https://slab.com/blog/slack-etiquette-guide/ <comment><USER2> "It's not built for synchronous communication the way emails and documentation tools are."

That seems exactly backwards - email works well asynchronously, Slack demands immediate attention. I can check email a few times per day. On Slack, the best you can do is shut off notifications for a while to make some space to not be interrupted.

In my (recent) experience, people expect an answer to an email within 24 hours, they expect a response to a Slack message immediately.

</comment><comment><USER3> My Slack pet peeve: "Hi" and then a further 2 minutes of "John Doe is writing a message...".

Gather your thoughts, then write everything - the context, what you need from me, everything - in a single message.

<comment><USER4> Is slack etiquette different from that of Skype? I prefer to greet and then send in my message(in one or many chunks depending on complexity/feedback) after that.

<comment><USER5> Sharing _my_ perspective here.

The greeting is irrelevant because truly neither party of the message cares. That's okay too. You have a question, I probably have an answer so just ask your question.

The absolute most respectful thing you can do to the person you are messaging is to send as much info as possible in the original message and then let them respond. If you do need to engage first with something like "do you have a moment for a question?" then still write your question first so you can copy/paste it immediately.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The example on using emojis is very strange:

> It'd be nice to get that report by this afternoon.

This phrasing is inherently passive aggressive since it's not a direct ask, regardless of how many emojis are included.

Why not:

> Hi <name>, will you be able to have the report on X ready by <time>?

<comment><USER7> I notice this pattern all the time in guides to "polite" workplace communication. Their examples are hypothetical, so they look at how positive something sounds without considering the underlying content, or go even further and _change_ content to improve tone. The advice looks good on paper, but using it when there's an actual task at hand might just sound sarcastic or disingenuous. The worst example I've ever seen was something like:

> _Instead of "I need that report by the end of the day", try saying "I really > appreciate you working to get that report out soon, it's a big priority > right now!"_

That's absolutely insane, because those are two completely different statements. The second one sounds less demanding because it's not the same request. So the tip isn't positive communication advice, it's either a schedule rework or failing to convey a deadline.

As for this specific example:

> _By adding an emoji below, it 's clear that the sender is embarrassed to > make this last-second request, and isn't trying to come across as sarcastic, > rude, or overbearing_

That wasn't clear to me at all. If you type in "embarrassed", Slack will only suggest _:flushed:_ , although I'd also have understood _:sweat_smile:_. I guess the monkey was meant as "I'm hiding my face with shame", but Slack calls that emoji ":see_no_evil:", and at first glance it seemed like "I'm trying to not to look over your shoulder, but is this done yet?". If the problem is "making a last second request", there's no particular reason that emoji are the best way to address it - one example simply has more content than the other. So I like your direct phrasing, and I might add:

> _Hi <name>, will you be able to have the report on X ready by <time>? I'm > sorry it's such short notice, thank you!_

<comment><USER8> I'd really just prefer to keep emojis out of any professional requests. If after work you want to go out for :beers: :D then sure, but if you're asking me to work late on a project, no amount of emojis will improve my mood.

<comment><USER9> I'm with you there, and it gets even worse when a company has their own emojis with a completely obscure meaning that is somehow expected to be understood. Like for some reason people in my company reply to messages sent out of the context of the channel with an emoji of the pokemon Charmander breathing fire (:charangry:). My own subtle form of protest is to use random emojis that _really_ don't have any meaning. A personal favorite is :shallow_pan_of_food:.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > _Use Slack for ephemeral communications only_

> _Ask yourself, does this conversation need to be preserved for future > reflection or action? If not, continue using Slack. If so, transfer the > important elements into Slab._

This whole article seems to boil down to, "rely less on Slack, and more on our product."

I strongly disagree with things getting lost in Slack, and it being made for ephemeral things. Slack is one of the places I typically go to search for problems and past data - their search is quite good, _much_ better than (e.g.) Atlassian's, and no worse than StackOverflow's. If I have a technical issue that I'm sure someone will run into again, I'll almost always toss it into Slack so I can ctrl-f for it later.

(This is different for their free offering; there, yes, things vanish into the void. But this isn't aimed at pals chatting away in the evening.)

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm repeating myself, but I've found Zulip many times better than Slack. It's more or less the same, but everything there is a thread, which makes following things much easier. It also supports much better message views (you can "zoom in/out" on them), and it's very fast and extremely keyboard-friendly.

<comment><USER12> > everything there is a thread

Microsoft Teams is the same, but in certain tech circles MS Teams seems to be hated.

As someone who's staunchly in the Linux camp, I don't have any strong feelings -- I use MS Teams and it's ok. In the corporate world people are ok with it too.

Which brings up an interesting cultural disconnect: people in tech use different tools from folks in the non-tech enterprise/corporate world. As someone who straddles both worlds, it's an interesting divide to observe.

(Side note: this is also why many tech folks vastly underestimate the influence of Azure in most enterprises, which always seemed to me to be an interesting blind spot. This seems very similar to the blind spots that occur in politics.)

<comment><USER13> I would like the Teams UI to be compressed more and some other things but otherwise it is alright. There is a problem with people creating teams channels, upload documents there and then people come and go and some of those documents that should have been in some public repository is instead in that channel (SharePoint) only.

It does not have to be that way but it is very easy to end up that way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is a problem with Slack, not the users. The entire platform encourages noise.

Here's an experiment. The next time someone in a channel asks a question, immediately post _another_ question that is unrelated and see how much people see/respond to the first one. It's as good as dead. What a mess.

<comment><USER15> I have a similar problem with batching questions in email, though.

Like even in one-to-one correspondence, you send an email with two questions, you invariably get a response to the easy one and no acknowledgement whatsoever of the difficult, time-sensitive one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> My personal experience is that the vast majority of slack complaints are solved by:

\- Allowing all users to freely create channels as needed

\- Raising user awareness of how to use the very flexible channel notification settings (and muting channels that aren't relevant but still things you want to keep an eye on)

\- Threading conversations whenever it makes sense

\- Encouraging limited usage of @channel and @here (only use when very important)

Humans are remarkably capable at self-organization when given the opportunity.

At the end of the day, Slack is about enabling natural conversations between people. It is not email. It's chat. If you try to enforce rules on how people naturally converse with each other, you are going to encounter a lot of resistance and friction.

<comment><USER17> I would agree if I worked at company where a majority of the users saw all of the above as a problem. In my experience (three tech companies with a 4 to 10 times larger non-tech crowd) people who care about asynchronous written communication just leave or ignore the noisy groups and their concern are ignored.

Once CEO stormed our open space and yelled at the entire tech team for having muted the main channel. We've had to make a presentation to the whole company about why. That was kind of an eye-opening moment.

> Encouraging limited usage of @channel and @here (only use when very > important)

I've through about it slightly differently:

* use those only if everyone or a majority of people in the channel will need to change their day-to-day habits because of what you are saying (say, the channel is about an internal tool and that tool is undergoing maintenance);

* do not use those if you are asking for help and want the attention of one person in the group (specific or not); people who have the time will answer. If you use those too often, people who can help you will ignore the channel.

We've had to implement a bot in a key internal chanel that, unless you were an admin/support team, would remind people of those rules. We also displayed a ratio of who among the support group had chosen to ignore those signals to convey the point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Thanks for sharing your guidelines.

> Review and edit messages before sending

Part of the joy of Slack is that sending messages to your team is super low- friction so more people are likely to contribute. The example use case is "I have this thought-through proposal I'd like to do. Is it okay with you." In this case it makes sense to review more thoroughly before sending in order to communicate the proposal more clearly.

In other cases, you may want to engage in more back and forth as you debug something together or make a plan together. In these debugging/planning sessions, I think it's valuable to have the full thought process of the team recorded in Slack. This unfiltered discussion might provide useful context to someone else later.

I like to augment this frictionless back and forth with a summary at the end of the discussion. This makes it easier for someone other than those involved in the conversation to benefit from it. And then they can refer to the full conversation for more details.

I'm one of the creators of a tool that's designed to make these summaries accessible ([https://bytebase.io](https://bytebase.io)).

</comment><comment><USER19> The comments here do a great job highlighting the broad and deep flaws in the OP. I'm happy to see the article only has a few upvotes; I don't understand why it got bumped to the frontpage.

</comment><comment><USER20> some good tips here but ultimately the tool encourages the undesirable behavior and guidelines likely won't overcome that (even if humans actually read them).

if you feel similarly, would love to get your feedback on a tool that's built to combat slack's issues [https://usepingpong.com](https://usepingpong.com)

</comment><comment><USER21> If etiquette is needed for an app then that's the wrong tool or the tool is that bad. In this case I think it's the wrong tool. If people are that concerned about the visual noise in slack, maybe use something else that is more limited. If emojis are there, that implies they can be used. If there is abuse the option is either to remove them or add an additional feature that tries to solve the problem.

<comment><USER22> So if someone is chewing loudly unmuted on Google Hangouts, it's not bad etiquitte, it's that the tool is bad?

<comment><USER23> Most group audio clients allow you to mute individual users to solve this exact problem. A group audio client that doesn't let you mute individual users is therefore inherently bad relative to other competitors in the space.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> slack abuse is definitely my favorite working in SV in the 2010s trend...</comment>


Wikipedia Raises $16 Million to Remain Ad-Free - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/wikipedia_raises_16_million_to_remain_ad-free.php?sms_ss=hackernews&at_xt=4d1fa1b01149c6b1%2C0 <comment><USER3> Why are people so consistently negative about Wikipedia?

Just looking at the top comments here, and other places around the internet - I think it's far too common.

Let's be more positive. Wikipedia is amazing - congrats to them for successfully achieving their fund-raising goals.

<comment><USER4> I don't trust Wales to run the organization effectively. I think that things are just going to get worse for Wikimedia as they get more money. My opinion on Wales is not high generally and Wikipedia has implemented some policies that I find rather undesirable in the recent years. Wikipedia has also done little to really actively improve the encyclopedia; they make all the wrong organizational changes, which in general tend to further stupid political bickering and turf wars, and these are the biggest problems to successful Wikipedia editing. Good governance would move to minimize these so that editing remains (or now, becomes) reasonable for people who don't have time to sit around for six hours a day and justify every change they make over and over again until the other guys get sick of it.

What it comes down to is that Wikipedia is really one great big edit war, though they'll never admit it.

<comment><USER5> Not trying to provoke you or anything, but as I am somebody who has not given this topic much thought I would be curious to hear of your concrete examples and arguments about bad policies?

I am somebody who can't see himself as contributing to wikipedia, but some changes might make me reconsider. What would you like to see changed?

<comment><USER4> I don't remember them all anymore -- I keep only loose tabs on Wikipedia these days. I was a very active editor and a founding member of a WikiProject in the 2004-2005 timeframe. I thought the blanket removal of most fair use images and the policy banning them was inappropriate and one of the least pragmatic things from an editorial quality perspective that could have been done.

That's the only big policy change since I quit that I can remember right now, though I know there have been several other that I felt were misguided or inappropriate. When I browse talk pages these days, I see very many new policy links, and that's part of the problem. Wikipedia has a pretty steep learning curve just to format an edit in a way that won't be reverted under a cavalcade of acronyms from the WP pagespace.

Edits on controversial topics are nearly impossible, primarily because articles will often be locked in the first place, or if they're not, each member on each side exhausts his/her three reverts, someone complains to an admin, and the page is locked so that it can all pick back up in a few days. It becomes especially difficult on pages that are hand-sanitized by a politician's staffers or other editors paid to keep WP articles favorable, because they literally have all day and they make their money by being combative, intimidating opposing editors, and otherwise staving off legitimate unfavorable edits.

And that's part of what makes this all so frustrating. Wikipedia has no real conflict resolution mechanisms. Open-source software is supposedly an inspiration for WP, but OSS has very clear, authoritarian project leaders that don't tolerate silliness. WP is an absolute free-for-all; there are policies, but in general they just mean you have to avoid specific phraseology and can still do whatever you want. As such, editing WP is very inconsistent but almost universally frustrating and it's often clear even to readers which group has established turf over a given article or set of articles.

On top of all of this, Jimmy Wales has an extreme aura of arrogance and ethical pliability. See the incidents around "co-founder" and "founder" of Wikipedia for just one example; there have been some other good ones over the years. Wales misappropriated Wikipedia, really the brain child of Larry Sanger, for his own and hasn't known what to do with it since. Sanger, meanwhile, started another wiki-based site that evolved on the Wikipedia model with approved revisions and a few other small tweaks (Citizendium, I don't know if it's still alive or not).

It also seems to me that Wales has been trying to carefully straddle the community line regarding policies, etc., (except a few cases where lawyers specifically said "this part is not optional, sorry") because he doesn't really know what's good for WP. It's all some kind of anomaly to him and he's just trying to keep a light touch so he doesn't scare it away. As such, WP yet languishes in its morass of "whoever-is-the-most-obsessed" methodology for resolving editorial conflict and lacks any serious drive or leadership.

WP is already like a big corporation because it already has a CEO that got there through business school instead of innovation. That's always the sign that you shouldn't expect many interesting advances from a given group anymore -- they are interested in maintaining their model and milking it for money until someone comes around and obsoletes them. Hiring a chief executive trained in milking money out of existing infrastructure instead of a chief executive trained in contributing something new is a huge red flag from every non-financial perspective (though the finances usually languish along with the invention and research).

Basically, it boils down to frustration over the lack of conceptual or procedural improvement in Wikipedia and the general belief that Wales is blatantly unqualified in almost all relevant respects and sort of wandered into his position accidentally. I don't necessarily blame him for that (though I do blame him for the morally dubious stuff, like Bomis, Sanger, and that girl), it just doesn't bode well for the organization.

And, as I'm sure we all know, it's generally a pretty bad thing when confused people get a whole bunch of money, as Wales just procured for himself. Wikimedia already emanates these astonishingly corporate vibes, I think we should only expect those to increase.

<comment><USER6> You've written a lot of gut-check stuff here about why you distrust Wales, and I respect that. But you really only made two substantive criticisms of the project's actual work:

* That Wikipedia didn't go to bat for fair-use images, and instead adopted a harsh policy of copyright attribution that can be used by activist admins to require forms-in-triplicate process to get an image posted.

* That Wikipedia's conflict resolution processes add up to make it impossible to contribute to controversial articles.

Both of these may be true, but my response is, "so what?". The outcome you've spelled out here isn't the end of the world. The encyclopedia is still epic in scope and useful even to a cynical bastard like me. It dominates the top spot on most Google SERPs and by doing so drastically improves the quality of virtually every Internet search in the English-speaking world.

Particularly regarding controversial articles: seriously, just go edit somewhere else. You were a busy editor in your time, and you know exactly why those draconian rules exist: because controversial articles are massive neodymium magnets for crappy edits. Between daily attempts to rewrite the entire flow of articles to specific POV's (often in nitpicky work-to-rules fashion deliberately designed to incite days worth of arguments over how to revert) and mindless vandalism, how is anyone supposed to get anything done anywhere on the project if everyone has to patrol the articles cleaning up all the nonsense?

You bring up lots of valid points, but you don't seem willing to consider the other side. I might actually entirely agree with you about the project, but for the fact that your comment is overtly misleading.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm aware it is temporary, but I'm surely not the only one thinking that banner is more annoying than the occasional ad would have been.

<comment><USER8> They could definitely make a killing with just a single AdSense block at the bottom of every article. Maybe even just the top 1000 articles.

Instead, we get places like Answers.com mass-duplicating Wikipedia content and slapping big image ads on it.

<comment><USER9> One of the things people are worried about with that it would allow something close to paid additions/rebuttals to Wikipedia articles, at least if ad buyers were good enough at the AdSense targeting. The goal is to have a neutral article that covers all viewpoints fairly, but then you'd have this little box where whoever pays the most money would get the opportunity to insert a link to _their_ take on the subject.

<comment><USER10> Exactly. Or to put a finer point on it: there becomes a much greater pressure to insert ads _as content_.

Why pay for an ad sense spot if you can just insert your own ad into the relevant wiki article?

<comment><USER11> So all the merchants that can't buy an ad aren't trying to subtly insert ads as content currently? Advertisers only have one choice now--try to get a mention, try to get a link, perhaps as a source--do whatever it takes to get into the content of the article.

If Wikipedia sold ads, they would have the alternative to buy an ad instead; I don't see how the problem of advertisement-as-content would be worsened when given a choice to buy an ad. If anything, I think it's the other way around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Great, now how much more money do they need to buy the disk space necessary to stop deletionism?

<comment><USER13> All the editing history is archived, right?

<comment><USER14> No, normal users cannot see deleted articles or their edit histories (which I think is crazy). Only Wikipedia administrators can see this information.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_policy#Acces...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_policy#Access_to_deleted_pages) says:

Because many deleted articles are found to contain defamatory or other legally suspect material, deleted pages are not permitted to be generally viewed. However, they remain in the database (at least temporarily) and are accessible to administrators, along with their edit history unless they are oversighted. Any user with a genuine reason to view a copy of a deleted page may request a temporary review (or simply ask an administrator to supply a copy of the page). Note that these requests are likely to be denied if the content has been deleted on legal grounds (such as defamation or copyright violation), or if no good reason is given for the request.

<comment><USER15> > Because many deleted articles are found to contain defamatory or other > legally suspect material, deleted pages are not permitted to be generally > viewed.

But if defamatory material is added to a popular article and reverted away, doesn't it remain in the edit history forever?

<comment><USER16> I believe there are ways to hide portions of the edit history as well - <USER2> usually don't bother to do this if it's only part of a larger article, but if necessary, it can be done.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wasn't aware that not meeting that goal would result in slapping ads on articles.

Also, Wikipedia itself was fully funded a while ago through next year, the foundation was trying to raise money for other projects and programs that aren't the encyclopedia itself.

<comment><USER18> Or raising for the future instead of waiting for the imminent to happen, running out of money, and act in desperation.

<comment><USER17> That would be a good idea, but they seem to do the same thing every year.

<comment><USER19> Why change what works?

<comment><USER10> That's a pathology called "non event feedback", just because you've avoided catastrophe with risky behavior in the past doesn't mean that the risk doesn't exist, it just means you've gotten lucky.

Why change wikimedia's method of fund raising and budgeting? Because wikipedia is a valuable resource and it would be far greater if we could ensure it remains available for reading and continued revision not just for the next year or the next decade but indefinitely. They've already raised enough money to have ensured that _had they invested the money correctly_. Instead, the money has been squandered on salaries for positions within the foundation which provide questionable value.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is their budget public? I'd really like to see how you spend $16 million.

Is there actually paid staff/benefits? Because $16M is more hardware/bandwidth than I can fathom.

<comment><USER21> <http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Budget>

PDF for 2011: [http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/d/dd/2010-1...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/d/dd/2010-11_Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan_FINAL_FOR_WEBSITE.pdf) (Page 24 for pie chart comparison)

Summary: They want to expand, a lot, almost every sector has more than doubled in allocated budget from 09-10s budget

<comment><USER20> Thanks! So they spent nearly $9M in salaries vs $2M for bandwidth, $1M in travel expenses, $2M in office rent/furniture/meetings [https://docs.google.com/gview?url=http%3A%2F%2Fupload.wikime...](https://docs.google.com/gview?url=http%3A%2F%2Fupload.wikimedia.org%2Fwikipedia%2Ffoundation%2Fd%2Fdd%2F2010-11_Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan_FINAL_FOR_WEBSITE.pdf&docid=a9195ac7cb3a86770a771ec7db3ac037&a=bi&pagenumber=44&w=972)

 _2010 Wikipedia Spending, in USD, in thousands_

      8,972 Salaries and wages
      1,837	Internet hosting
      3,270	Capital expenditures
      483 	Donation processing fees, charitable registrations
      2,274	External contractors
      864 	Travel for staff, Board, Advisory Board and volunteers
      134	Wikimania Travel
      155	Legal
      1,273	Office rent, furniture and equipment,   supplies and maintenance
      813 	Staff and volunteer meetings, conferences,   training, workshops
      325 	New allocation for awards and grants supporting volunteer initiatives
      </comment></comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>--
      $20,400K	TOTAL  (*$20M*)

Direct link to pie chart as image (thanks to google)

[https://docs.google.com/gview?url=http%3A%2F%2Fupload.wikime...](https://docs.google.com/gview?url=http%3A%2F%2Fupload.wikimedia.org%2Fwikipedia%2Ffoundation%2Fd%2Fdd%2F2010-11_Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan_FINAL_FOR_WEBSITE.pdf&docid=a9195ac7cb3a86770a771ec7db3ac037&a=bi&pagenumber=24&w=972)

and the whole document in html/images

[https://docs.google.com/gview?embedded=true&url=http://u...](https://docs.google.com/gview?embedded=true&url=http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/d/dd/2010-11_Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan_FINAL_FOR_WEBSITE.pdf&pli=1)

<comment><USER10> This data is concerning to me, here's why:

First, most of the value of wikipedia comes from random users. Second, we've seen a pattern of Wales and wikipedia administration not understanding where the value of wikipedia comes from. Third, we've seen a pattern of policies and practices that are actively hostile to the users and usages that are wikipedia's bedrock (deletionism, edit wars, unnecessarily tight permissions for article creation etc.)

And then we have wikipedia's budget priorities, which indicate that Wales et al seem to value creating cushy jobs for people who don't add much to wikipedia much more than just keeping the site running for as long as possible, by a ratio of around 10:1 (roughly).

In short, the people who _run_ wikipedia don't seem to care or value the source of content on the site nor the continued operation of the site very much. Instead they seem to care about extracting money by effectively holding huge amounts of content that they did not create hostage.

I love wikipedia, it's a great site and potentially very positively disruptive to traditional norms in human society, culture, and education. Yet increasingly I am driven toward the conclusion that the people who run it are not in any sense good people and are holding it back as much as they are keeping it running.

<comment><USER16> > And then we have wikipedia's budget priorities, which indicate that Wales et > al seem to value creating cushy jobs for people who don't add much to > wikipedia much more than just keeping the site running for as long as > possible, by a ratio of around 10:1 (roughly).

I won't comment on your other points, but - Wikipedia is a non-profit. They can't just hang on to cash, they have to spend it somehow, and in a way in line with their charter. If they've already spent enough on servers, bandwidth, hosting, etc, where else will that go but to salaries? If you look at their financial reports ([http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/d/dd/2010-1...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/d/dd/2010-11_Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan_FINAL_FOR_WEBSITE.pdf)) you'll see their donations exceeded their planned amounts significantly, so they're hiring more people to balance that out.

<comment><USER10> They could do what every other similar organization has done in the past, create a trust fund to keep the organization running into the foreseeable future without having to routinely solicit donations. Whether or not their charter is set up correctly to allow that today is immaterial, they can found on a new charter if necessary.

If you asked people what the benefit of donating to the wikimedia foundation was I'm sure at least 9 out of 10 would respond "to keep wikipedia running". Indeed, that is the context of all of the appeals for donations.

What value does hiring more staff provide? Specifically, what value _higher than the long-term continued operation of wikipedia_ does it provide?

<comment><USER22> That reminds me two different attitudes towards life. If all you need to support a good meaningful life is $100k, and somehow you can get $1M a year by running a business, soliciting dontations or whatever, you could choose to get $1M for year one, and continue with your lifestyle for another 9 years without getting more money; or you could change how you spend your money, aim big things and spend $1M all in year one. My zen master taught me to aim big. How big an impact your life can make depends on how wise you spend your money and also, equally important, how much you can spend.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> If someone was asked, _"Would your rather use a website that has ads or one that has no ads?"_ , they would most likely choose the latter. However, Wikipedia has shown the world something that no one would have expected; it seems as if most people would rather have the ads given the circumstances.

<comment><USER24> Most people being commenters on HN? Or the 500,000 people who have donated to Wikipedia?

<comment><USER25> > Or the 500,000 people who have donated to Wikipedia?

How many of those that donated thought that the advertisements would disappear after they gave money?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I've always thought Google should just buy them. If you're going to index the worlds information, this is a good start. Google has the resources and power to make sure it remains alive and well.

<comment><USER27> I don't think you deserved the many downvotes you received. It's not like you were trolling. People here just downvote things they disagree with. Personally, I think Google should donate a decent amount to WP because Freebase relies on it. Without WP, Freebase would have been useless. (Disclaimer: I have no idea if Google actually donated.)

<comment><USER28> Google donated $2 million in early 2010:

[http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Wikimedia...](http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Wikimedia_Foundation_announces_$2_million_grant_from_Google)

<comment><USER27> Thanks for the link and the info. It would seem Google is on top of this situation. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I don't understand why they are so adamant about ads... A small adsense block (with 2 text ads) will cover all their expenses and more. It will not be intrusive and useful to visitors in most situations (as their content is well suited for a contextual ad system like adsense)...Also there is precedence in non-profits doing this like firefox with their google search deal (which makes them $100 million or so a year)

</comment><comment><USER30> I'm now seeing 'If everyone reading this donated £5, our fundraiser would be over today. Please donate to keep Wikipedia free.' banners.

If they've already hit the target, presumably they must have already set a new target in order to make that statement?

</comment><comment><USER31> Wiki is really worth $16 million.

<comment><USER32> It's called Wikipedia, FYI.</comment></comment>