Starlite - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlite <comment><USER2> [http://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-557...](http://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-5575,00.html)

> Mr Ward came to my lab about a year before his death needing help to turn > what was essentially a party trick into a useable & commercialy viable > product. The problem he had was although the powder component did exactly as > it said on the tin, he had found no way of applying a lasting coating. All > he really has was some powder mixed with PVA glue, the problem being that > although you could apply it to certain objects it's longevity was no more > than 2 weeks. While testing we discovered that a sample he'd kept for almost > 10 years could be destroyed in a matter of minutes under a methylacetylene- > propadiene propane blowtorch. Unfortunately after many samples & tests we > where unable to find a effective application method & we parted company on > good terms. Sadly this is the true reason why Mr Ward was never able to sell > or bring his incomplete product to market.

<comment><USER3> > Mr Ward came to my lab about a year before his death > needing help to turn > what was essentially a party trick > into a useable & commercialy viable > product.

So, this person heard a huge, "Whooosh" when Graphene hit the scene too, eh? "It's just Scotch Tape and pencil doodles!"

I definitely Want To Believe. World-Changing technology always has its detractors. Remember the airplane? Silly, silly invention.

<comment><USER4> The quote is incomplete. Right after all that, he says:

>But rest assured, as of this time I can say that there is at least 1 complete & superior product in testing, testing that so far is going remarkably well. So one day there will be a product on the market that will save life's while also having countless other uses. The inspiration behind this project.... Mr Maurice Ward

I'm not sure when this comment was written, but perhaps he was talking about Graphene.

<comment><USER5> The meeting happened in 2010, going by the fact that it happened one year before Mr. Ward's death.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm skeptical. There are a lot of bullshit free-energy and reactionless drive "inventors" who exhibit the same pattern. Super secretive and paranoid that the traditional scientific review process will steal their invention, will only allow third parties to experiment under very controlled conditions, etc, won't produce working patents, etc. Remember Dean Drive?

I often think they either known they're peddling something bogus and are straight out charlatans, or they actually really believed in what they have, but are too afraid of it being debunked.

Science and secrecy don't go together. A material with twice the melting point of tantalum halfnium carbide sounds like an ablative heat shield to me.

<comment><USER7> I remember the Dean Drive. Does anyone else remember the Dean Drive?

<comment><USER8> I didn't: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_drive](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_drive)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What sort of scientific Scrooge chooses to take his invention to the grave like that? What has he gained in the end?

<comment><USER10> Ages ago I spent a fair amount of time considering what would happen if someone invented a new power source. I was planning to try to write a short story based on the idea. In my imagination I invented a device the size of a fridge freezer capable of powering a small town for 100 years. The workings and science were irrelevant, but the politics of it was what interested me.

I cant find the notes I made now, but essentially I ended up deciding that something so revolutionary, if proved and accepted as doing what it said on the tin, would take a life of its own. I came to the conclusion that once people know of its existence, the inventor will lose all control and become an instant target. Such inventions are the "babies" of such inventors, so loss of control is an issue. Becoming a target, more so. I'm not sure what the people who did the science that lead to nuclear stuff intended or thought, but if it were me, the idea that my science was used to make such evil devices as nuclear bombs would at the very least cause me trouble.

Interestingly there is some relevance to what is happening now with the NSA internet spying issue. People may well look at this sort of behavior and conclude that there are no limits for certain nation states. So, if a Belgian, for a random small country example, were to invent such technology, and say this person decided that only small poor countries could have access to it in order to equalize small poor countries with rich ones, how might the likes of China, UK, USA, India, etc, react to that? What would be their limit to acquire such technology? The second you deploy such a unit, spies would be all over it. Perhaps, war. So in the end, unless you do as told, your good might end up slaughtering millions.

Now, I'm not saying that starlite was or is for real, or that the inventor thought this way, but I can certainly see why such an inventor might be so paranoid as to get in to a position where the secret dies with him.

Of course I am very open to the idea that this says more about my personal psychology that any general point...

<comment><USER11> That's more or less the premise of Atlas Shrugged. John Galt (one of the protagonists) invents a device just like that.

<comment><USER12> In the sci-fi novel 'Friday', Robert Heinlein writes about a physicist named Daniel Shipstone who realised that 'the problem was not a shortage of energy but lay in the transporting of energy. Energy is everywhere—in sunlight, in wind, in mountain streams, in temperature gradients of all sorts wherever found, in coal, in fossil oil, in radioactive ores, in green growing things. Especially in ocean depths and in outer space energy is free for the taking in amounts lavish beyond all human comprehension.'

In the story, Shipstone quits his job, retreats to his basement and invents a technology that packs 'more kilowatt-hours into a smaller space and a smaller mass than any other engineer had ever dreamed of. To call it an "improved storage battery" (as some early accounts did) is like calling an H-bomb an "improved firecracker."'

Like Ward and Musk [1], Shipstone eschews patenting his new technology in order to deny others the opportunity to steal it (or tie him up in court cases) and instead begins manufacturing the devices (eponymously named "Shipstones") which end up becoming ubiquitous, powering everything from flashlights and automobiles, to households and ocean-going ships. The company he founds becomes the largest and most powerful industrial conglomerate in the galaxy and the method of manufacturing Shipstones remains a closely-held secret.

[1: [http://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk- patents-2012-11](http://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-patents-2012-11) ]

<comment><USER13> Elon Musk is by no means the first person to get that realization.

As a theme only things that can be easily reproduced by looking at the very physical nature are patented. If something is easy to reproduce by just looking at the idea or invention itself, that is the kind of thing that is commonly patented. Why else do you think the patent ecosystem if full of crappiest and most obvious patents possible.

It hardly makes any sense to patent some thing that is genuinely difficult to figure out otherwise.

<comment><USER14> You don't even need a scientific breakthrough or difficult bit of engineering to successfully use that strategy. Coca-Cola is one of the more famous cases of a company that chose to keep its "invention" secret rather than disclose it with patent filings. It was common at the time to patent the formulations of "patent medicines", and the 1890s version of Coke was indeed patented, but later formulations were deliberately not patented, in order to keep them secret.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I remember this being on Tomorrows World (which is a show that needs to come back), and practically every year that memory pops into my head and I wonder whatever happened to it. I think the segment ended with him showing it to NASA.

If I remember correctly, he created it in his garden shed using off the shelf products that you could buy on the high street, and he just started mixing them together and testing the results... and I think hairspray was mentioned as being an important ingredient.

Or maybe my mind is full of holes.

<comment><USER16> Sounds like a recipe for amateur experimentation...or a real Walter White.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This sounds an awful lot like Firepaste [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troy_Hurtubise#Firepaste](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troy_Hurtubise#Firepaste)

There seems to be a common trend among these types of inventors that border on paranoia, eccentricity and at the same time, accidental brilliance.

</comment><comment><USER18> Sounds like a situation that the patent system was supposedly designed to prevent. But, from the article linked by yapcguy:

> He refused to patent the recipe as that would mean making it public and > risking its theft

Wouldn't patenting the formula _prevent_ it from being "stolen"? Or is our patent system truly good for nothing at all?

<comment><USER19> SpaceX does not patent any of their stuff for the same reason; it can be stolen by people outside of the country and the patent is essentially directions on how to do so.

<comment><USER20> I forget the quote exactly, but there was an interview with Elon and the lady was asking him about not patenting things at SpaceX. He said something along the lines of "Patents aren't going to do you much good when your competitors are other country's governments".

<comment><USER12> "We have essentially no patents in SpaceX. Our primary long-term competition is in China—if we published patents, it would be farcical, because the Chinese would just use them as a recipe book."

Source: [http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/10/ff-elon-musk- qa/al...](http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/10/ff-elon-musk-qa/all/)

<comment><USER20> I'm sure he's said it a few times. This is the one I was referring to -

> Even more so when he tells us that none of the design innovations in the > rocket are patented. "Since our primary competitors are national > governments, the enforceability of patents is questionable,"

[http://blog.ted.com/2013/02/27/transforming- transportation-e...](http://blog.ted.com/2013/02/27/transforming- transportation-elon-musk-at-ted2013/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Starlite, meet FOGBANK: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fogbank](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fogbank)

<comment><USER21> In 1996, the US government decided that large numbers of its nuclear weapons would require replacement, refurbishing, or decommissioning. Accordingly, the Department of Energy set up a refurbishment program aimed at extending the service lives of older nuclear weapons. In 2000, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) specified a life-extension program for W76 warheads that would enable them to remain in service until at least 2040.[2]

It was soon realized that the FOGBANK material was a potential source of problems for the program, as few records of its manufacturing process had been retained when it was originally manufactured in the 1980s, and nearly all staff members who had expertise in its production had either retired or left the agency. The NNSA briefly investigated sourcing a substitute for FOGBANK, but eventually decided that since FOGBANK had been produced previously, they would be able to repeat it.[2] Additionally, "Los Alamos computer simulations at that time were not sophisticated enough to determine conclusively that an alternate material would function as effectively as Fogbank," according to a Los Alamos publication.[3]

<comment><USER22> Secrecy: not always a good idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Here is the late Maurice Ward's YouTube channel..

[https://www.youtube.com/user/mauricewardstarlite/videos](https://www.youtube.com/user/mauricewardstarlite/videos)

<comment><USER24> Here's a site I've built for an artist who did "Episodes of Starlite" [http://stopthebus.org/starlite](http://stopthebus.org/starlite).

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Just read abt Starlite and other Amazing man made substances at this URL thru reddit. [http://listverse.com/2013/06/20/10-awesome-man-made- substanc...](http://listverse.com/2013/06/20/10-awesome-man-made-substances/)

<comment><USER26> Why the downvotes? The other 9 substances on that link are just as interesting.

I recommend people have a look. The video of the amorphous metal is quite interesting.

(Yogrish. I saw the link elsewhere first as well but maybe we're not meant to use the R word here)

<comment><USER25> Didn't know about R word. sure will take care of it next time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A cautionary tale for any aspiring entrepreneur who won't share their world- changing idea without a signed NDA.

</comment><comment><USER27> _Ward certainly believes in his product, claiming publicly that it could have prevented the space shuttle disasters. 'Starlite has a Q-value [an energy absorption rating] of 2,470. The space shuttle tiles have a Q-value of 1.' Not only that, but because Starlite is so lightweight – 1mm thick, compared to 75mm for the space tiles – it's actually '2,470 x 75 times better'._

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/5158972/Starlite- the-n...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/5158972/Starlite-the-nuclear- blast-defying-plastic-that-could-change-the-world.html)

What is a "Q-value" in this usage?

<comment><USER28> Q is the heat transfer rate; see [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_transfer_coefficient](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_transfer_coefficient)

<comment><USER27> Thanks! But, if that's the case, a higher value means a worse insulator, so why would he brag about that?

(It's also a dimensionful quantity, but the reported value has no units -- maybe it's relative to some specific value...)

<comment><USER27> I think it's more likely to be a measure of heat _absorbed_ , rather than heat _transferred_ across a boundary. (The _Telegraph_ 's wording is "an energy absorption rating"). Starlite is apparently ablative; if this means an endothermic phase change -- the organic polymers vaporizing, without combusting -- it could absorb an extremely large amount of heat. A space shuttle tile is non-ablative (I think?), and can absorb heat only by increasing temperature.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I call bullshit.

Here's a list of the points in the article that jumped out at me as uninformative, pseudo-scientific or misleading:

> a laser beam producing a temperature of 10,000 degrees Celsius.

Scientifically, that's meaningless. It's meant to convey a powerful heat source to the reader, but as another reader pointed out, a strong focused light source on a bit of well-insulated black material might be able to raise it to several thousand degrees; the same source pointed at a well-polished mirror could leave it cold to the touch. In other words, the "10,000" degree figure tells us nothing useful.

> (from the allegedly supporting New Scientist article cited on the talk > page): The first thing Lewis and his colleagues did was fire powerful laser > pulses at the material.

What person with scientific training would set up a laser to conduct his first test on an unknown material? I admit to not being a professional NASA egghead, but if confronted with a substance alleged to be highly heat resistant, I'd start off by holding a sample of it into a Bunsen burner flame, or better yet pop it into a crucible and into a high-temperature furnace.

If a temperature of 10,000°C had really been achieved, that would have been quite impressive: according to elswhere in Wikipedia, the "best" known heat- resistant ceramics lose stability around 3,000°C.

This Tech Radar article [http://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/future- tech/10-m...](http://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/future- tech/10-mindblowing-uses-for-the-world-changing-substance-that-never- was-1156955) claims a more modest 2500°, achieved with a blowtorch and not a laser. What are we to believe?

As a (hypothetical) egghead, I would certainly object on moral grounds to using an egg for a scientific test of heat resistance. I would instead strive to measure the two characteristics actually relevant to heat resistance, namely thermal conductivity and thermally induced ablation.

As an amateur scientist completely unprepared for such a test and working out of an ordinary household, I would have urged the inventor to use his amazing compound to coat not a chicken's egg but the tip of a thermometer. And I would have attacked this assembly not with a laser but with a burning match. And I would have reported on how much of a rise in temperature was observed, and in which time.

Certainly no non-crackpot scientist would subject his or anyone's hand to a blowtorching without considerably more convincing previous tests. But maybe that claim about the human hand was just rhetoric - it's hard to tell.

Later in the supporting article, the claim is toned down to a much more modest 1000°C. Still, there's a fundamental problem here with the basic chemistry:

Plastics, or more formally polymers, are organic compounds, chemically held together by covalent bonds. Because of the physics that underlies chemistry, covalent bonds cannot be as heat-resistant as ionic bonds (as found in salts and other inorganic compounds). All-organic diamond is the hardest substance known to man (I think) but burns at relatively low temperatures. High- temperature plastics break down at around 150°C.

If the compound contained a mix of polymers, as stated, then it contained some organic compounds with known low melting/burning points. Mixing several such compounds doesn't make any of them more heat resistant; their chemical properties (including heat resistance) would not be changed unless you'd created new and different compounds that would then _not_ be polymers. Similarly, mixing in about 10% ceramics might change the compound's mechanical properties, and polymer-ceramic composites are indeed useful materials for this reason, but it doesn't change the fact that part of the mix is low- melting, burning, smoking plastic.

I'm sorely tempted to pick a fight on the Wikipedia Talk page as well, where the most ardent defender of the Starlite story lambastes skeptical commenters as "bigoted" and "ignorant."

<comment><USER30> > a strong focused light source on a bit of well-insulated black material > might be able to raise it to several thousand degrees;

Here's some well focused sunlight. It gets to 3500 C. Apparently, "nothing is known that can withstand this".

> Certainly no non-crackpot scientist would subject his or anyone's hand to a > blowtorching without considerably more convincing previous tests. But maybe > that claim about the human hand was just rhetoric - it's hard to tell.

He appeared on a BBC Radio four programme many years ago (Start the Week with Melvyn Bragg) where they used a blow torch on the material and someone touched the back of it immediately after the torch was turned off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Is this the same? Man torches hand with 7000+ degree flame and then eats the material: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SO7NVC23Stw](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SO7NVC23Stw)

</comment><comment><USER32> It kind of blows my mind that one (presumably) cannot reverse engineer things like this.

<comment><USER33> Without a sample, it's not surprising.

<comment><USER34> Noone can reverse engineer WD40 with plenty of samples.

<comment><USER35> What do you mean? There are plenty of WD40-work-a-likes on the market.

Additionally, the ingredients to WD40 are on Wikipedia[1] and Wired had a mass spectroscopy done and published even more precise details[2].

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WD-40#Formulation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WD-40#Formulation)

[2] [http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/17-05/st_w...](http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/17-05/st_whatsinside)

<comment><USER34> You are right. My mistake. Second link you provided is very informative.

Bonus: What people think they can use WD40 for: [http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/household/wd-40.asp](http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/household/wd-40.asp)

<comment><USER36> It's amazing how many people use WD40 as a lubricant. It's good for loosening stuck parts, but using it as a lubricant will wear parts quickly.

<comment><USER37> Interestingly, WD40 is a lubricant. I used to think that since it was a penetrating oil/water sealant it wasn't a lubricant, but that's not actually the case. They even have a "myth" that discusses the idea floating out there that WD40 isn't a lubricant.

[http://wd40.com/about-us/myths-legends-fun-facts/](http://wd40.com/about- us/myths-legends-fun-facts/)

<comment><USER34> I think it's just not very good lubricant. It wears off pretty quickly if you use it to lubricate your bicycle.

<comment><USER35> It's _terrible_ to use it on bike chains.

It will provide some lubrication for a while, true. But it will also dissolve any of the proper lube that is there, so when the WD40 is chopped up by the chain you'll be left with nothing.

I like the Shimano PTFE dry lube[1] but there are plenty of other brands.

[1][http://www.chainreactioncycles.com/au/en/shimano-dry- lube/rp...](http://www.chainreactioncycles.com/au/en/shimano-dry-lube/rp- prod27242)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> This would make for a great mystery novel.

</comment><comment><USER39> Sounds like vaporware

<comment><USER40> Duke Nukem: Starlite

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Sounds like aerogel.

<comment><USER42> Yes, except that aerogel is well-understood, both as to composition and behavior. This stuff is a first-class mystery. Too bad the inventor, good at science, was so bad at business.</comment></comment>


LXD crushes KVM in density and speed - <AUTHOR> https://insights.ubuntu.com/2015/05/18/lxd-crushes-kvm-in-density-and-speed/

<comment><USER2> How about security? Quite an important topic to simply gloss over. Comparing containers with virtual machines without mentioning the difference in abstraction and attack surface gives a false sense of security for the former.</comment>


Bookmarklets are Dead (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/making-instapaper/bookmarklets-are-dead-d470d4bbb626 <comment><USER2> I've got a handful in my bookmark bar that still appear to work. I think the rumors of the death may be greatly exaggerated.</comment>


YouTube Discontinuing paid content January 1, 2018 - <AUTHOR> https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7515570 <comment><USER2> I can't imagine the number of people who paid for non-Hollywood content on YouTube was anything more than miniscule. There is a social contract on YouTube -- if I enjoy your videos I will "like" them, share them, and maybe subscribe to you. It's your job as a content creator to turn those numbers into a business if that's what you are trying to do (as opposed to a hobby), and there are ample ways of doing that. As a YouTube viewer I am already being treated as "the product" as the old saying goes in multiple ways. Paying directly for videos goes completely against the entire ethos of YouTube. There are other sites for that.

<comment><USER3> I didn't even know this was a thing. But perhaps, like YouTube Red, it never made it to the UK.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> YouTube is making changes. Http://vid.me tried the subscribe for paid content model to compete with YouTube and vid.me had to close down recently.

I know that most ad blockers that I have tried can block video ads just as well as html ads.

I discovered [http://pluto.tv](http://pluto.tv) With over 100 channels for free and they put in their own ads to make the whole service free and it looks and feels like a cable or satellite system. I was researching cord cutter resources when I found that. We have Roku and a Fire Stick and there are a lot of free or discounted Internet tvapps out there.

Amazon Prime for example is good for free shipping but also has Amazon Video included and can subscribe to premium channels if you want HBO etc.

Google YouTube and Amazon Prime videos are fighting each other now by removing their apps from the others store.

Apple tv has gotten better as well, my brother gave it to his girlfriend and she cut off cable and uses the Apple tv instead.

Bitchute is another YouTube alternative [http://bitchute.com](http://bitchute.com) and I am looking for more to compile a list for my blog to help people find them.

Since Disney bought out Fox and now own 60% of Hulu they will slowly pull their IP from Netflix. Which is why Netflix is making their own TV series and movies.

The market for videos changes fast, you have to keep on top of it.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm interested what will happen now with the YouTube Android app picture-in- picture feature. Since now it was necessary to pay for YouTube Red to have it. Does this mean the rest of us will get it?

<comment><USER6> YouTube Red isn't going away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The main problem with this paid content as far as I see it is that I'm not paying $3 per creator per video. That basically means I can watch 3 paid videos per month for the same price I can get a Netflix subscription.

In general I abhor pay-per-content models. A subscription service that gives me access to all the content means I can forget about money when I'm watching stuff instead of trying to do the mental arithmetic to see if a purchase is worth it.

</comment><comment><USER8> So if it's not YouTube Red Originals, what is it? I'm quite sure I wasn't aware this existed until now.

<comment><AUTHOR> From what I can see, youtube red is something completely different. Paid content is/was mostly used by small producers or people like you and me who want to put up paid-for content. Youtube red seems to be more like netflix, i.e. large production companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The goal must be to funnel people into YouTube Red and make YouTube more like Hulu and Netflix..

<comment><AUTHOR> It seems to be a completely different model though. I've almost finished creating a video presentation that I was considering charging for, but now I discover that I can't actually do that directly through youtube. Vimeo offers the service, but you need to sign up for a Pro account, which has a monthly fee.</comment></comment>


Entangled Particles Break Classical Law of Thermodynamics, Say Physicists - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/view/428670/entangled-particles-break-classical-law-of/

<comment><USER2> I wonder if this could be the basis for a future battery?</comment>


How to Be Someone People Love to Talk To (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://www.bakadesuyo.com/2015/02/love-to-talk/ <comment><USER2> Previous discussion [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13963858](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13963858)

</comment><comment><USER3> Ultimately all the advice in the world leads to one simple starting point: You have to act, practice, and rehearse new skills to get their benefit and those first acts, as with any new skill, will be clumsy, embarrassing, and full of other challenges that will lead the novice to feel bad.

If you try, you will fail and feel bad, worse than if you never tried, but if you stick with it, you can overcome the failures. You'll never lose access to the skills you now have it you don't want to feel or act social, but you can when you want.

The reward for overcoming those failures, in my experience at least, is so much greater than the struggle to reach that reward, that I only wish I had started learning social and emotional skills earlier.

<comment><USER4> "If you try, you will fail and feel bad, worse than if you never tried, but if you stick with it, you can overcome the failures"

This is probably good advice for a lot of people but it can also make things worse. I have made several attempts to "go out there and learn" and the result was always that I didn't improve but instead got more insecure. I think there needs too be some underlying strategy and not just banging your head into the same wall. A lot of people understand social skills intuitively but some don't.

<comment><USER5> The thing is - with most nice people - even if you 'fail' they aren't going to hold it against you or make fun of you. In fact, most people won't even notice your 'failures'. And if someone does make fun or hold it against you, it's a great time to consider cutting them out.

I remember years ago reading a comment about someone who was terrified of failure, until they learnt to skateboard - and realised that aside from the occasionally pulled off success, everyone was failing all the time, and that they reveled in the trying.

<comment><USER4> Let's say you make an effort to talk to people and after doing that a lot people still don't talk to you or you invite people but they never invite you back and so on. It's clear you are doing something wrong but how do you figure out what's wrong and how to do it right?

Skateboarding is much easier. The skateboard will be there tomorrow and you can try again. With people it's different. After a few awkward encounters they don't want to deal with you anymore.

<comment><USER5> Fair enough, I should have added that it's good to find places where failing is cheap - meet ups, public social events, mixers etc. I do understand that people can form opinions quickly that can stick.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Here is my tip on being someone people love to talk to. Be interested in the person you are talking to. Be curious about them and most important of all listen, attentively to everything. You'll learn a lot, people will share their deepest darkest things with you. Listen without judgement, without trying to reply, and it will change your life, sounds simple but really difficult to do. Something to practice over your life time.

<comment><USER7> What if the person I'm talking to just isn't that fascinating?

This is a terrible thing to say and admit and I half expect to be downvoted for it, but here goes anyways: I feel like a lot of people who I talk to aren't. I'm fully willing to admit this is some fault of my own, but how exactly can I reconfigure myself to be more interested in people?

<comment><USER8> Be selfish.

Accept that everyone you will ever meet has learned or experienced something you have not learned or experienced, and you can, therefore, learn something from them. Try to draw it out of them. Over time you'll probably start becoming genuinely interested in people who don't currently fascinate you.

<comment><USER9> But if I treat everyone like a gold mine then they'll run dry sooner or later. How do you keep the genuine interest up?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think it's incredible how people can intuitively learn these skills. People who are considered "likable" probably have developed these qualities through social experimentation, paying attention to others' reactions in the forms of tone and body language. It demonstrates a very high level of social awareness and emotional intelligence.

<comment><USER11> > It demonstrates a very high level of social awareness and emotional > intelligence.

Any reasonably average human being should have these skills as an adult. If they don't it's because something went wrong at some point, or they are on the spectrum or something like that.

<comment><USER12> That's a rather broad brush. Not everyone picks up on these things intuitively, and personality plays a big role.

<comment><USER8> As someone who did not pick up on these things intuitively, I can say two things about myself:

1\. Something catastrophic happened to me as a child that prevented the normal development of this skill. 2\. As an adult, I fixed the problem by paying attention and learning through concentrated effort.

My personality, at best, seems like a consequence of these events and decisions, not a cause.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> IMHO, asking questions to people you have just met will make they fell uncomfortable. They don't know you yet and aren't interested in giving you details about themselves.

Asking questions or making remarks about easy, common and light subjects will make you start a conversation without going too deep too fast. That's why people talk about the weather, the transit, etc. It also helps if you observe the person a bit and ask about something that they clearly appreciate.

<comment><USER14> The key piece is that you don't ask blind questions, you ask more about a topic that they brought up or expressed interest in.

"I listen to podcasts on the way to work." "Me too! What kind of podcasts do you listen to?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm not particularly good in group settings, but here's a strategy I've found that works in most cases: give the person a complement, then ask them a question about themselves. It's important that the complement isn't about their appearance or something that might make them uncomfortable. And keep the question light.

<comment><USER2>
       isn't about their appearance

Pro-tip for the socially savvy: intuit what about their appearance they put a lot of though/effort into, and then make a compliment based on that. Examples.

\- Your new hairstyle is amazing, who's your hairdresser, I need to go there.

\- Wow, looks like you've been working out hard recently, great definition on your upper arms, can you recommend some good workouts?

\- That top you are wearing, where did you get it? It's amazing, reminds me of Christian Dior's 1978 collection, you are the most stylish person in the room. Where, Harajuku, Tokyo? You went to Tokyo? Wow, when? I _love_ Tokio, you need to tell me everything about your trip!

\- That tan line ... looks like somebody was on holidays recently ... Where, Greece? That's so cool, I'm so jealous, tell me ...

It is also worthwhile reflecting on how the recipient will process a compliment: the recipient will compare your compliment with the previous compliments received. Let's illustrate this point with some social cliches:

\- 17 year old conventionally beautiful girl: will typically get large amounts of compliments every day. She will have heard it all before, and have a lot of experience with gracefully handling compliments.

\- 17 year old convention computer gamer boy: will typically never have been complimented on anything at all. Will have no canned graceful reply for his first compliment.

Summary: Adjust your compliments to audience expectation.

       something that might make them
       uncomfortable.

That's good advice for beginners. For the socially savvy, ambiguous compliments work really well, too. The classic "nice hair, is it your own LOL" has been discussed many times. However, it's easy to mis-calibrate and get it wrong.

Flattery is like paying with counterfeit money: easy to do and effective ... as long as you don't get caught. Meaning: when Alter realises Ego is using flattery, Alter feels manipulated.

Finally, there are different cultures of complimenting. For example, in the US compliments are given freely, often and expected. In Easter Europe, in contrast, compliments tend to be given more rarely, and not usually expected. Unless you are socially savvy or a social risk taker, I recommend to adhere to the ambient conventions about how often compliments should be made.

<comment><USER16> Next time I'm in a pub in Glasgow I'm _so_ going to compliment a guy on the definition of his upper arms and then, if I'm still alive, move the discussion onto Dior's 1978 collection. Thanks for the tips!

<comment><USER2> LOL, thanks. That's a great suggestion.

Next time I'm teaching compilers, I'll illustrate the difference between context-free and context-sensitive language with reference to Glasgow pubs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > (Please don't talk about the weather. Ugh.)

The author must not be from where I am (the midwest). Weather is actually interesting there, and important to most people. I remember spending hours talking about the weather, even with strangers, who became friends; it's one reason why I kept going back to the same family restaurant 30 minutes away, or why we stayed with our ferrier and feed provider.

Now that I live in the American west, weather is much less interesting, and people judge it to be small talk. It's too bad, but I guess I'll just talk to people about travel now.

</comment><comment><USER18> Pretty funny that an FBI behavior expert would discuss this subject given that FBI people typically don't talk to you unless they're trying to nail your ass for a crime.

Is it always about having some agenda? If so, then conversation is simply selfish nonsense, isn't it? Instead, try to be selfless, and don't give in to venal banter.

</comment><comment><USER19> I think "needing tips from FBI hostage negotiators to make people like you" should be included in psychopathy test checklists.</comment>


An Interview with Douglas R. Hofstadter, following ''I am a Strange Loop'' - <AUTHOR> http://tal.forum2.org/hofstadter_interview? <comment><AUTHOR> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=216358> is the last submission of this.

It's not spelled out in the guidelines, but if I see something is a dupe I'll usually resubmit it if it's a year or more old.

</comment><comment><USER2> I've heard a lot about Hofstadter, and I was very surprised when finally getting "I am a Strange Loop" that I didn't really like it. Actually I couldn't get past 100-150 pages - not because I hated it or anything, but it was just not interesting enough. Or maybe it digressed too much.

I'm a big fan of Marvin Minsky (I'm plowing through Society of Mind right now) and I enjoy immensely the way he demystifies the concept of consciousness - while still having buddhist quotes before half the chapters.

<comment><USER3> GEB is _much_ better. I didn't get very far in "I am a Strange Loop," but GEB is easily one of my favorite books.

<comment><USER4> Strange Loop was a big disappointment for me. Not because it wasn't another GEB, but because it didn't break much, if nay, new technical or conceptual ground.

Compared to Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language, Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies, and Metamagical Themas, Stranger Loop left me strangely unmoved.</comment></comment></comment>


Should You Sweat The 'Recession'? - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/entrepreneurs/2008/06/05/small-business-recession-ent-fin-cx_jw_0605recession.html?feed=rss_entrepreneurs <comment><USER2> If fuel prices are keeping people at home more, I'd imagine that they will spend more time online leading to growth opportunities for online services, business collaboration, social networks, games, etc. I.e. just the thing for the YC crowd.</comment>


President Signs Government-Wide Open Data Bill - <AUTHOR> https://www.datacoalition.org/press-releases/president-signs-government-wide-open-data-bill/ <comment><USER2> > The Chief Data Officer (CDO) will "(1) be responsible for lifecycle data > management"

I am very interested in what this type of lifecycle might look like considering most data I feel should be kept forever. I wonder how a lifecycle might collide with the challenges that bit rot[0] are dealing with.

[0] [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/13/what- is-b...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/13/what-is-bit-rot- and-is-vint-cerf-right-to-be-worried)

<comment><USER3> This is already getting really exciting. Some government entities (including lower levels like local, county, and state governments) have moved to digitizing their old paper and microfilm records. But if they're expected to maintain many types of records essentially forever, it places a constant burden to continue to update and migrate data in perpetuity, whereas paper or microfilm can sit in a box in a closet for decades.

For the most part, common file formats like PDFs, JPGs, and TIFs are likely to be understood for a very, very long time, but you don't just have file storage, you have systems to manage, index, and find those files, and those systems are likely to need constant maintenance.

<comment><USER4> I've seen Blu-ray disc manufacturers claim lifespans of over 100 years with capacities of 100 GB per disc. An entire warehouse of paper and microfilm documents would be able to fit in a shoebox.

<comment><USER3> Note that most record digitization projects are likely looking at live storage (online disk arrays), as it allows constant access to said records. Also note that the discs may last 100 years but having disc readers which can read them may not, and one would need to load all the discs to do a media conversion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I am reminded of the "API" decision made by Jeff Bezos at Amazon, as famously described by Steve Yegge:

 _So one day Jeff Bezos issued a mandate. He 's doing that all the time, of course, and people scramble like ants being pounded with a rubber mallet whenever it happens. But on one occasion -- back around 2002 I think, plus or minus a year -- he issued a mandate that was so out there, so huge and eye- bulgingly ponderous, that it made all of his other mandates look like unsolicited peer bonuses._

 _His Big Mandate went something along these lines:_

 _1) All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces._

 _2) Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces._

 _3) There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team 's data store, no shared- memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network._

 _4) It doesn 't matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols -- doesn't matter. Bezos doesn't care._

 _5) All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions._

 _6) Anyone who doesn 't do this will be fired._

[https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX](https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX)

<comment><USER6> This sounds "great", but how exactly does your team that works on say, a matrix library for computer graphics, expose its data over the network?

Perhaps instead of it being "all teams" it should be "all cpu processes"?

<comment><USER7> They don't, they write a library and others consume it.

It's not a "you must find some data or service to expose". If you have data and someone wants to use it, they do it via service.

<comment><USER6> The Sql services started without any data. The service started with empty tables. But yet they have an Sql service.

<comment><USER8> Nobody said you couldn't share, communicate or transfer ownership of your data to another service.

I'd say you're being a pedant but you're not even technically correct.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> >The OPEN Government Data Act requires all non-sensitive government data to be made available in open and machine-readable formats by default.

That sounds pretty awesome (and expensive)!

<comment><USER10> Not if you expand what's considered sensitive!

<comment><USER11> I'd always want to make sure no PII is accidentally leaked. Example: in 1997, researchers at MIT showed that using only gender, date of birth and ZIP code, it is possible to identify the majority of US residents! They proved their point by identifying the Massachusetts governor's medical records in a publicly-available dataset that was presumed anonymous. In 2010, Netflix published an "anonymized" dataset of movie ratings by users. After it was released to the public, researchers were able to identify many Netflix users, even though the dataset only contained user ID, movie, rating, and rating date.

<comment><USER12> Meh. Voter records are all basically public and most have full name, address, phone number and even sometimes party affiliations.

I'd argue that keeping those public is also a net good for society.

<comment><USER13> There are two issues in tension here. One is a right to privacy, but the other is a right to audit who is actually voting. If the voter rolls were secret, there's nothing to stop a massive fraud by those in power to stay in power.

<comment><USER14> Party affiliation should not be public record. I would like to understand why it is.

<comment><USER15> Kind of defeats the purpose of a public ballot.

<comment><USER7> No, you can have the lists of voters without having any information about who they voted for (or in this case, party affiliation which gives who they probably voted for).

<comment><USER15> Wow! Did I write "public" \- I meant "secret" \- it's been a long day.

Of all the comments I've made that should have been down voted, the one I made above was it. HN gods are having mercy on me it seems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The deep irony here is that [https://www.data.gov/](https://www.data.gov/) is still down due to the government shutdown.

<comment><USER6> Just curious, do government services really not have any reserve funding? It seems like avoiding shutdowns could be solved pretty easily by having reserve funds (at least for 1-3 months or so).

But perhaps that's the point. Shutdowns are supposed to be inconvenient.

<comment><USER17> Indeed. "Many agencies, particularly the military, would intentionally run out of money, obligating Congress to provide additional funds to avoid breaching contracts." [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antideficiency_Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antideficiency_Act)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I am deeply afraid of the impact of this law. The amount of meta-work required to consolidate and annotate data we collect, in order to prepare it for public consumption, seems likely to hurt government efficiency.

In addition to the administrative burden, it appears to ignore the fact that non-sensitive information, in sufficient quantity and correlation, becomes sensitive information.

Perhaps my skepticism is misplaced, but my initial reaction is that this sounds better in the abstract than it will turn out to be in practice.

<comment><USER19> Part of my wife's job is to research Medicaid billing codes for every state (yes, this is a state thing, but I'm just making an example). Once in a while she can get their codes in a form as "advanced" as an excel spreadsheet. But more likely she'll get a PDF doc that she's got to run through an OCR programming to convert it to a spreadsheet, and has to check for errors. Or for some states, nothing is published at all - she's got to piece it together from partner hospital billing records.

There's no doubt that getting this data into a sane format will take the states some extra resources.

But when you consider how much more efficient this will make my wife's company, and every other provider of Medicaid services, it's bound to be a huge win on net. And improving efficiency of delivering healthcare should be important.

The government is big, but the private sector is still much larger. So there's great leverage to make our overall systems more efficient because an investment in efficiency on the government side will be multiplied many times over as seen by the many private entities that the government is overseeing.

<comment><USER20> There's money to be made selling these information to hospitals. It's just really hard to sell things to hospitals.

<comment><USER21> Hospitals routinely spend huge sums of money on new equipment that significantly improves their competitive edge on diagnoses and outcomes. They are also willing to spend money on drop-in solutions that lessen the need for paperwork that eats up admin, nurse, or doctor time.

However, you're right that they are notoriously stingy on buying new things if the economics aren't immediately apparent, and will never buy into something that demands radical workflow/org changes.

<comment><USER20> By hard to sell to, I mean, it's hard to get in front of the right person. The people who control the purse strings are not necessarily the most knowledgeable about the problems at-hand either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This sounds like an amazing thing! Anyone serious does their work reproducibly. This shouldn't add more than a little bit about storage on devices and paper, in terms of costs.

</comment><comment><USER23> Haven't dug in... does this include data as part of government funded grant studies? It is a nice start to more open data from the govt.

<comment><USER24> I searched/skimmed through the full text of the bill, and it doesn't seem that it applies to data used/generated by grant-based research (or other projects). The language of the bill is heavily focused on executive agencies.

That would be ideal, although a large portion of grant funding goes to medical research (e.g. via NIH), where it would be difficult to anonymize the data. They could require that it be sanitized (differential privacy, etc.), but I don't know how that could be verified effectively/efficiently. The grants process is quite time-consuming for the grantees (and the grantors) without this requirement.

*not a lawyer

<comment><USER25> Data generated by a researcher on a government grant generally includes a provision in the grant that says the govt owns the data, doesn't it? And if the govt owns it, this seems to indicate it should be open...

<comment><USER24> I'm not really knowledgeable enough on policy to know how this might interact with the new law. But based on my reading, it seems that institutions conducting federally-funded research are required to retain any data generated by the research, but not necessarily that the government "owns" it, per se. There was a change in policy in 1999 that required the ability for the public to use FOIA to access grant-funded research data, with some limitations.

"To balance the need for public access while protecting the research process, OMB's revision limits the kinds of data that will be made accessible (it excludes personal and business-related confidential data) and limits applicability to federally funded data relating to published research findings produced under a federal award and used in developing an agency action that has the force and effect of law."

[https://fas.org/sgp/crs/secrecy/R42983.pdf](https://fas.org/sgp/crs/secrecy/R42983.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I am surprised that in the current political climate any reasonable laws can pass. My only explanation is that there were no lobbyists fighting it.

<comment><USER27> Lobbyists are probably fighting laws you don't like as well.

<comment><USER28> Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

<comment><USER29> Time isn't real

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> At least two things to like in this:

1) Open is better

2) Bipartisan legislation, indicates some progress is possible

</comment><comment><USER31> Is this the first act with a recursive name acronym?

</comment><comment><USER32> Does he get paid to work today?

Edit: It was an honest question I wanted to know the answer to, but I've got my answer.

<comment><USER33> Depends, is the secret service still able to pay trump hotel for their stay?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: News Site Application - <AUTHOR>

Hello there, A group of my friends want to create a news site and asked me for help. I've looked up for some web apps in google but none of them seems to fit the bill. Do HN users know a web app which provide newssite features out of the box?<p>Thanks <comment><USER2> What specific news site features are you looking for? Additionally, what toolset skills does the startup team possess?

I have used Liferay in the past and can see how it can be used to create a news site. However it needs Java skills. I am pretty sure products such as Joomla etc. can be used too (though I have not used any of them).

<comment><AUTHOR> From what I have gathered they want a news slider with images, a place to list articles written by authors, picture gallery and rss feed parsing for automatically getting images and news items from various sources. As for the startup team skills they are not a startup and do not have technical expertise for building a site - I am helping them and because I am working in an IT department I don't have the time to build a site (I mean not in the timescale they would accept).

As for your recommendations I have checked wordpress, joomla and drupal and from what I have seen I felt like they need an immense amount of setup time to create a workable news site. There are themes which tout they provide this kind of functionality but I can't say "shucks, guys I don't know whether this will work but you have to pay this amount of dollars for an experiment".

Thanks for your comment by the way.

<comment><USER2> You are right in that it requires familiarity with the underlying toolset to create the site and involves some amount of effort.

Check out the wordpress templates.

[http://wp.smashingmagazine.com/2012/05/23/best-wordpress- the...](http://wp.smashingmagazine.com/2012/05/23/best-wordpress-themes- newspapers/)

Good luck.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think newscloud is a good place to start. <http://communitystarter.org/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you checking it.

edit: I have checked it and it seems that they do not give prices in their site, nor a demo version to check whether my team can use it.

Thanks anyway.

<comment><USER3> Have you seen refinerycms? <http://refinerycms.com/>

From what I gather in your other comments this team wants to post their own news stories, refinery has engines built specifically for this. If you know just a little rails you can set them up nicely and fast with refinery.</comment></comment></comment>


Awkward Aussie fail from The Gap - <AUTHOR> http://internationalbs.wordpress.com/2010/11/04/a-gap-in-local-knowledge/

<comment><USER2> funny fail, but... I reckon that Sydney store was planned to either open first, or take precedence on the page ( be om the left) . but once the Melbourne store opened, they thought it looked odd to have the copy on the right.

but I wonder who made the call to have it like it is...</comment>


Immutable Infrastructure: 6 questions to 6 experts - <AUTHOR> http://highops.com/insights/immutable-infrastructure-6-questions-6-experts/

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm biased since I wrote the highlights but my favourite two are:

\- 'It's a way to simplify change management: servers never rot and you can think of an application as a single deployable artefact, you can reason about it at a higher level.'

\- 'A pattern or strategy for managing services in which infrastructure is divided into "data" and "everything else"'</comment>


Prototyping Algorithms and Testing CUDA Kernels in Matlab - <AUTHOR> http://www.mathworks.com/company/newsletters/articles/prototyping-algorithms-and-testing-cuda-kernels-in-matlab.html

<comment><USER2> Very neat stuff, but seriously, who uses (tiny) screenshots of code in 2014?

Also, too bad it's CUDA only - i.e. no support on most mainstream computers. There's not even any software fallback -- execution fails on my macbook, for example.</comment>


India to order taxi aggregators like Uber, Ola to go electric - <AUTHOR> https://in.reuters.com/article/us-india-electric-autos-exclusives/exclusive-india-to-order-taxi-aggregators-like-uber-ola-to-go-electric-idINKCN1T71DU <comment><USER2> * Uber/Ola do not own cars, and the owners take out loans to get one. Electric cars can be expensive to be financed for that income group. Uber's endgame is to own self-driving cars and not a normal car, atleast that was the dream :).

* Indian car companies do not have electric cars (a real car can go for atleast 200kms a charge/refill).

* A car factory(even non-electric) would take atleast 5 years to start churning cars.

* Even in that case, it will have to import 40% of the cost ie batteries as India cannot make them. If it starts today, it can in 10 years.

* Import duties of fully assembled, SKD and CKD electric cars is very high makes them uncompetitive to petrol/diesel cars.

* Direct importing is not viable as it requires certification.

* 60% of India's electric supply is coal based.

And to top it;

* Upto 50% of pollution a car will cause is done during production of the car ie before even a kilometre has been driven. Replacing lots of good working cars from the street is not environment friendly.

<comment><USER3> Nice analysis.

The point that many people make: "* Upto 50% of pollution a car will cause is done during production of the car ie before even a kilometre has been driven. Replacing lots of good working cars from the street is not environment friendly."

It is not just overall pollution, but where and how it is done that it is important. There is a huge difference between controlled pollution, from a factory away from large cities, and thousands of cars spewing emissions right into the core of urban centers. The second would cause more direct health issues and potentially deaths and overall unpleasantness.

<comment><USER4> > The point that many people make: "* Upto 50% of pollution a car will cause > is done during production of the car ie before even a kilometre has been > driven. Replacing lots of good working cars from the street is not > environment friendly."

You're completely wrong. This may be the case for a weekend vehicle that is sent to the junkyard before you put 30,000 km on it, but is 100% wrong for a taxi, that drives >300,000 miles over its life.

It takes 6-12 tonnes of CO2e to produce a car. [1]

Taking 35 mpg, every 10,000 miles driven is 285 gallons of gasoline. 1 gallon of gasoline produces ~8.9 kg of CO2e. That's 2.5 tonnes per 10,000 miles driven.

After 50,000 miles driven, the typical car breaks even with its manufacturing emissions.

The average taxi (in NYC) puts on 70,000 miles. Per YEAR. [2] In a single year, it's fuel emissions exceed manufacturing emissions.

If you want good return-on-investment, taxis are the first vehicles we should be regulating. They drive a lot more than the average car.

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

[2] [https://www.quora.com/How-many-miles-does-a-NYC-taxi-do- in-i...](https://www.quora.com/How-many-miles-does-a-NYC-taxi-do-in-its-life- as-a-taxi)

<comment><USER2> Electric cars produce more CO2 during manufacturing.

Indian taxis/cars on Indian roads do worse.

India's electric market is 60% coal.

"If you want good return-on-investment, taxis are the first vehicles we should be regulating. They drive a lot more than the average car." \- Who is the you here? The car driver who is trying to make ends meet?

<comment><USER4> > Electric cars produce more CO2 during manufacturing.

How much more? Sources, please. The internet tells me that adding an 85 KWH battery in a Tesla adds ~1 tonne of CO2e. [1]

Tesla, as a whole (Which includes non-manufacturing, but does not include the carbon cost, of say, smelting the steel that went into their cars, or Panasonic manufacturing their batteries), produced ~300,000 tonnes of CO2e in 2018. They shipped ~250,000 vehicles in 2018.[2]

Bloomberg claims something completely different, but doesn't provide any concrete numbers. [3] The study it seems to cite is [4], which claims that a Tesla's battery is ~15 tonnes of CO2e, if manufactured in a factory powered by 50% coal power. There seem to be no other studies on the subject.

Panasonic, which manufactures Tesla batteries, is doing some work to make their batteries carbon neutral [5][6]. It's unclear how much volume this factory produces, and what the emissions of their other factories are.

> Indian taxis/cars on Indian roads do worse.

This also means that the existing ICE taxis don't have a long prospective life, and at least 40% of them are due to be replaced by 2026. It's why this legislature is coming into play in 2026, and not in 2020.

> India's electric market is 60% coal.

Thanks to Carnot efficiency, even if your electric car is powered by a coal plant, it is still more carbon efficient than powering it with gasoline. Your V6 engine doesn't reach the temperature differential that utility coal plants do. Electric vehicles also have near-zero-cost regenerative breaking, which increases waste energy, that would otherwise go into heating brakes in a non- hybrid ICE.

> Who is the you here?

Someone who is comparing the environmental benefit to the monetary cost of switching from ICE to electric. You get a lot more reductions, for the same dollar spent, from electrifying taxis, then from electrifying heavily-used personal vehicles. You get more reductions from electrifying heavily-used personal vehicles, then lightly-used weekend vehicles.

Pick the lowest-hanging fruit first.

[1] [https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Ska839...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Ska839NYN2kJ:https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2016/04/22/the- carbon-footprint-of-tesla-manufacturing/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

[2] [https://www.environmentalleader.com/2019/04/tesla- emissions-...](https://www.environmentalleader.com/2019/04/tesla-emissions- report/)

[3] [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-16/the- dirt-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-16/the-dirt-on- clean-electric-cars)

[4] [https://www.thegwpf.com/new-study-large-co2-emissions- from-b...](https://www.thegwpf.com/new-study-large-co2-emissions-from- batteries-of-electric-cars/)

[5] [https://www.panasonic.com/global/consumer/battery/primary_ba...](https://www.panasonic.com/global/consumer/battery/primary_batteries/sustainability.html)

[6] [https://www.panasonic-batteries.com/en/news/panasonic- enviro...](https://www.panasonic-batteries.com/en/news/panasonic-environment- vision-2050-our-commitments-become-carbon-neutral)

<comment><USER2> Indian cars/manufacturing/importing has different economics and pollution impacts. You are free do your own research and make up your mind.

I am not against electric cars, I want them. I am against the idea to replace cars which have already contributed to significant pollution being removed from road.

The lowest hanging fruit for me is to get US and other top polluters to reduce pollution. India and China are doing good already as they are increasing more green cover. The reality is the India car drivers cannot afford the cheaper electric cars, forget about Tesla.

<comment><USER4> > Indian cars/manufacturing/importing has different economics and pollution > impacts. You are free do your own research and make up your mind.

No, you don't get to go ahead and do that. The burden is on you to provide evidence for your claim, not on the person you are talking to.

> I am against the idea to replace cars which have already contributed to > significant pollution being removed from road.

Didn't you say that taxis in India don't last as long as they do in the West? If so, won't it be possible to electrify 40% of them by 2026, through natural attrition? The whole point of this law is to give a heads-up on a multi-year process.

> The lowest hanging fruit for me is to get US and other top polluters to > reduce pollution.

Agreed. The West has had modest per-capita pollution reductions, but needs to go much further then that. As does China. (It's overall per-capita pollution has matched that of the European Union. If you look at its urban areas, alone, they pollute just as much, per-capita, as the US.)

China is no longer a developing country. It's a 350-million person developed country, with all the same carbon footprint as any western economy, sitting on top of a 1-billion person developing country.

> India and China are doing good already as they are increasing more green > cover

Increasing green cover isn't anywhere close to enough. If we tore down every city, uprooted every field, and covered the entire planet with trees, we'd offset only a few years of global emissions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is what you call a PR thing by Government. Why? * 2019 - 2026 - That's after (5+2) years which means it makes it easy for this current Government to pitch it before next election.

* Everyone knows Uber and Ola don't own their fleet so who'll be accountable?

* In Bangalore, Ola was banned for a month or so for a policy violation, only to be revoked just in 24 hours citing Public / Traffic / Driver's livelihood.

* Uber and Ola drivers in cities like Bangalore are currently not even getting time for their food (lunch) and for them to sit aside and recharge the car seems another big 'would they ?'

* Any news on Public Policy reg. Internet companies hit front page.

Why not the government make better Public transport system? Why don't they increase the frequency of Government Bus ? Why don't they electrify Public transport?

None of these would hail the Government as Elon Musk ish visionary other than this one.

<comment><USER6> >* Everyone knows Uber and Ola don't own their fleet so who'll be accountable?

Who says so? Have you read about tie-up with Tata for EV ? [https://www.indiatimes.com/auto/current/tata-nano- electric-m...](https://www.indiatimes.com/auto/current/tata-nano-electric-may- debut-with-ola-cabs-1000-examples-to-join-fleet-368361.html)

Try to understand ground reality before making false claims.

Btw, elections over just ~15 days back, if this just PR stunt, it makes more sense announce it during 7 week long election not after that.

<comment><USER7> That's an article from 2 weeks back. (24 May) of an announcement of the deal. The ground reality today is the drivers own the fleet, with both Ola and Uber financing it to some degree.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> How would this work? As far as I know neither of them owns the vehicles in their "fleet".

Do they just provide incentives for drivers to buy electric vehicles? Or is the government actually expecting them to put company-owned electric vehicles on the streets?

<comment><USER9> How they change their fleets is their business. They could give higher compensation to people with EV's. They could treat ICE as if they weren't around when the maximum number of ICE cars is on the road.

<comment><USER10> >How they change their fleets is their business

Why is this obvious? If the composition of their fleets is not their business why is it clear that the way they manage their fleets is? I would actually assume that there are probably loads of regulations that already govern the ways Uber can manage its fleet?

<comment><USER11> If they are regulated, it should come as no surprise when additional regulation is imposed. And they are regulated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> So let's jump start the beginning of "S Curve of Electric Adoption" going for cars. 2 or 3 years back, Minister of Transport Mr. Nitin Gadkari had dropped a bombshell right in the middle of some mega Car Event. "I am NOT going to allow you to sell ICE post 2030". Audience was like ....... Awwwww

Battery Mini-Riksaw are already dominating many of the small towns in India right now. Registration for Diesel Tri-wheelers is already stopped in some capital cities. Petrol may be on the way out too within 5 years.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is a good thing. But I really hope India invests a lot in public transportation and related infrastructure, especially in tier 2 and tier 3 cities.

<comment><USER14> We are. We are building metros in n>10 cities now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> 7 years from now is quite late. Would prefer a 2-3 year deadline, along with plans on how cities will provide chargers before that deadline.

<comment><USER16> Where do you anticipate all these cars being made? What about the cars that are currently owned, where the sunk cost of mfg was already paid and it's more economical to continue using vs. replace?

For example, if the U.S. required half of all cars sold be EV, then there would be no cars available to buy for 2-3 years just to ramp up production alone. Millions of jobs lost during that time too.

<comment><USER15> We're talking only about ride hailing cars, right? Not all.

<comment><USER16> It's only a matter of scale, in example to emphasis that the impact is not necessarily trivial as suggested.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Some more info:

>EV sales in India grew three-fold to 3,600 in the year ended March but still account for about 0.1% of the 3.3 million diesel and gasoline cars sold in the country over the period, industry data showed. China's electric car sales, meanwhile, rose 62% in 2018 to 1.3 million vehicles.

>Motorcycles and scooters sold for commercial purposes, like food delivery or for use by e-commerce companies, will also need to be electric from April 2023, the person added.

>Its Ola Electric Mobility unit in March raised ₹400 crore ($58 million) from investors including venture capital fund Tiger Global and Matrix Partners.

>It also raised $300 million from Hyundai Motor and Kia Motors and formed a strategic partnership with the South Korean duo to help build India-specific EVs.

[https://www.livemint.com/politics/policy/india-set-to- order-...](https://www.livemint.com/politics/policy/india-set-to-order-uber- ola-other-taxi-aggregators-to-go-electric-1559820588642.html)

</comment><comment><USER18> Having just been in India, I can safely say that Uber in India is one of the worst uber experiences I have seen, independently of this change.

India's car policies will make this very difficult.

Right now the "made in India" car restrictions means that India doesn't share car infrastructure with the rest of the world. From what a local was telling me, car manufacturers typically transfer their tooling from old product lines in other parts of the world when assembly lines are re-tooled to build cheaper India only vehicles.

Thankfully, the big cities are so congested that the older model cars with older model safety systems, but this approach won't work with EVs, which are not yet mainstream in the rest of the world.

My guess is that a modern version of a tuk-tuk would be ideal, but battery production is going to be a very big problem for this. India has the 3rd largest automobile market and a low level of vehicle adoption, but until they fix infrastructure, I don't see it happening.

</comment><comment><USER19> India has aggressive climate change commitments. It is setting long term expectations and providing guidelines to the biggest influencers [Uber/Ola]. It gives an indicator to the manufacturers, infra providers, service providers and the end consumers on what to expect. It is in line with their 2025 goals.

</comment><comment><USER20> While I don't know about this specific policy, I'm happy that the push to electric vehicles (and hopefully carbon-free energy) is happening worldwide. This is one of the big areas we need to do absolutely immediately.

Otherlab founder Saul Griffith has a great analysis about why electrifying cars and more of our technology is so necessary in the US here: [https://medium.com/otherlab-news/decarbonization-and- gnd-b8d...](https://medium.com/otherlab-news/decarbonization-and- gnd-b8ddd569de16)

> "Without changing the size of our homes, or our cars, or fundamentally > changing the fabric of our lives, a fully electrified energy economy using > non-carbon fuel sources would require less than half of the total amount of > energy we use today."

Your next car should be electric.

</comment><comment><USER21> To everyone recommending adding more restrictions to the cars that can be driven for rideshare companies, please, I don't know where you live but India is not at all as rich as your country. There's no infrastructure to support electric cars not to mention no drivers who can actually buy it. Here's an example, today I rode Uber for one journey for one hour and paid 500 Rs (7 USD). In US I pay more than 10USD for a few miles (may be 15 minutes) only. Do you really think this guy is going to buy an electric car?

Yes it's a PR campaign, elections may be over but reelected government has to show that its better than past and what better way to make empty promises, which cost nothing.

Every point made by ShirsenduK is to the mark about conditions in India.

</comment><comment><USER22> Ola recently raised $56 million to spin out a dedicated business that focus only on electric vehicles. In March, Power Minister R. K. Singh said the government was aiming to ensure that at least 30% of the country's vehicles run on electricity by 2030, a significant dilution of the earlier-stated goal of an all-EV fleet by that year.

[https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/28/ola-ev-business-ola- electr...](https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/28/ola-ev-business-ola-electric- mobility/)

</comment><comment><USER23> This might be irrelevant to the topic at hand, but the cover image of the news article that the reader first sees is very misleading. It depicts nothing that might hint towards the article talking about Uber, Ola or electrification of their fleets. Yes, there appears to be a traffic jam (which in an indirect way can be linked to Uber and Ola being public modes of transport), but that is because there is a road-show going on related to an election.

</comment><comment><USER24> Are there domestic EV brands that are doing well there? Or is the expectation that Ola will fund it itself? Or buy foreign brands?

</comment><comment><USER25> Anyone know roughly how many hours various electric cars can go in a city taxi-driving setting before needing to be recharged?

<comment><USER26> Aside from the fact that this is not an impressive goal, hopefully by that time we have electric cars with solar panels anyway.

<comment><USER27> I don't think that solar panels will be capable of generating enough power to make much of an impact on an electric car's mileage. Happy to be corrected.

<comment><USER28> _The standard solar panel has an input rate of around 1000 Watts per square meter, however on the solar panels available at present you will only gain roughly 15-20% efficiency at best. Therefore if your solar panel was 1 square meter in size, then it would likely only produce around 150-200W in good sunlight._ [1]

 _For example: 2 square meter panel x 1000 = 2000 x 0.20 (20% efficiency panel) = 400. 400 x 5 hours of sun hours = 2000 Watt hours per day._ [ibid]

 _In 2012, the EPA range for the 60 kWh battery pack model was 208 mi (335 km) and the 85 kWh battery was 265 miles (426 km)._ [2]

A Tesla gets about 3.5 miles per kWh, so you would be able to get about 7 miles of driving distance per day (5 hours of sunlight) of charging.

Ref:

[1] [https://www.theecoexperts.co.uk/solar-panels/how-much- electr...](https://www.theecoexperts.co.uk/solar-panels/how-much-electricity)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Model_S#Battery](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Model_S#Battery)

<comment><USER29> The Sono Sion gets 34 kilometres (21 miles) per day from solar charging.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Is it just me that thinks whenever a western media writes an article about India, they show an image of India in the worst possible way.

For ex: Why does this article have to show a picture of a political rally ?

<comment><USER31> Because the rally is collocated with a traffic jam?

<comment><USER32> Ah, I think your parent comment should have asked for a non-stupid reason. An electric car is going to be in a traffic jam as well.

<comment><USER31> Yes, but it won't be spewing out any noxious gases while stranded in traffic (neither would a hybrid or a shut off idle car, but none of those are in that picture).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Seems crazy to me. Most taxi and uber/gypsy cab drivers run hybrid Priuses because they are the most cost effective and economical vehicles for this purpose in stop and go traffic. Insisting on EV's when charging tech is so inefficient and scarce seems hugely problematic for the foreseeable future. Seems a lousy investment for anyone wanting to make money providing a driving service through one of the mobile platform middlemen.

<comment><USER34> Your point is well-taken but there is an incredibly limited number of hybrid vehicles in India (only 2 actually) - [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_vehicle_industry_in...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_vehicle_industry_in_India)

But given the age of India's electricity infrastructure and the huge challenges, this initiative would definitely present large challenges. The good news is that there is political will and a general absence of politically powerful retrograde lobbies to stop this from happening if tried sincerely.

<comment><USER35> Good luck getting a charge with the blackouts.

Also.. most of the ubers (aka taxis) that I was in were suzuki Wagon Rs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Url changed from [https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/06/india-electric- vehicles-20...](https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/06/india-electric- vehicles-2026-uber-ola/), which points to this.

</comment><comment><USER37> Based on Uber's history, they'll probably cook up some scheme to fraudulently register combustion vehicles as electric or find some other shady way around the regulation.

<comment><USER38> Ridiculous government regulation needs Uber style treatment.

India is faaar from any electic car infrastructure. Like another comment said above, it's purely a PR move by the govt.

<comment><USER39> Yeah, let's not attempt do anything, because it's not perfect. /s

<comment><USER38> Grandstanding about doing something is very different from actually doing it. Grandstanding is free. That is what this 'reported order' is. To some extent it's the government's job to do this kind of PR, but we don't have to buy it hook line and sinker.

When the government does something concrete to boost the infrastructure, I will be the first to applaud.

<comment><USER40> > When the government does something concrete to boost the infrastructure, I > will be the first to applaud.

Yeah building roads and highways at record pace are not concrete enough to boost infrastructure right?

[https://www.businesstoday.in/sectors/infra/modi- government-c...](https://www.businesstoday.in/sectors/infra/modi-government- constructed-73-percent-more-highways-compared-upa- last-4-years/story/279060.html)

"So far, the incumbent government has constructed a total of 28,531 km national highways since FY 2014-15, contrasting with 16,505 km by the previous government up to FY 2013-14, a clear gain of an astounding 12,026 kms, the Financial Express reported."

<comment><USER38> What has building roads and highways got to do with switching from gasoline to electric cars?

<comment><USER40> I thought you talked about physical infrastructure (roads and highways) needed for cars to ply on. After re-reading your comment I realised you are talking about infrastructure needed specifically for electric cars (like charging stations). My bad! Apologise for that!

Either ways, I don't see how the Government can help in this! Isn't this the prerogative of the companies manufacturing their EV to setup? The only place where Government can help is providing land and electric power for these charging stations. That should not be a big deal.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Learning Concepts with Energy Functions - <AUTHOR> https://blog.openai.com/learning-concepts-with-energy-functions/ <comment><USER2> From the abstract of the article they linked:

 _Energy-Based Models (EBMs) capture dependencies between variables by associating a scalar energy to each configuration of the variables. Inference consists in clamping the value of observed variables and finding configurations of the remaining variables that minimize the energy. Learning consists in finding an energy function in which observed configurations of the variables are given lower energies than unobserved ones. The EBM approach provides a common theoretical framework for many learning models, including traditional discriminative and generative approaches, as well as graph- transformer networks, conditional random fields, maximum margin Markov networks, and several manifold learning methods._

 _Probabilistic models must be properly normalized, which sometimes requires evaluating intractable integrals over the space of all possible variable configurations. Since EBMs have no requirement for proper normalization, this problem is naturally circumvented. EBMs can be viewed as a form of non- probabilistic factor graphs, and they provide considerably more flexibility in the design of architectures and training criteria than probabilistic approaches._

Seems like a really interesting unification of the wide variety of techniques out there in statistics and machine learning, analogous to the "everything is a computation graph, as long as it's differentiable" revolution. I like it when this kind of thing has its day. Would be interesting to see how well it works non-robotics problems.

<comment><USER3> See Yann's tutorial on EBM: [http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/publis/pdf/lecun-06.pdf](http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/publis/pdf/lecun-06.pdf)

We actually ran into them when doing research in our startup. It is a really powerful perspective.

<comment><USER4> Thank you for this!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Setting up some energy function and then finding the lowest energy state sounds a lot like adibatic quantum computing. Assuming this research lives up to the hype, quantum computers might be able to run this algorithm faster. Quantum machine learning is already a thing, but its nice to see it fit so congruently with a classical counterpart.

<comment><USER6> Quantum Simulated Annealing?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have no idea what's going on in this article. Is there a good resource or video for understanding this stuff?

</comment><comment><USER8> Every new technique is able to "quickly learn X." Something most not be so quick, otherwise why aren't these techniques turning into AGI?

I think the problem is the goal is not well defined. So, increased velocity has no bearing on increased velocity towards the target.

A side question, why is there no research into whether human intelligence is computable? The assumption in AI is that human intelligence is computable, but I've never seen any good argument or evidence that this is true. Seems very unscientific to exert so much energy into this research direction without validating the fundamental assumption.

For example, the one instance I know of that defines AGI in a quantitative manner is Solomonoff induction (SI), but it is not computable. If SI is representative of human intelligence, then AGI is impossible.

<comment><USER9> Solomonoff induction is not representative of human intelligence.

At least, speaking for myself, I do not exhaustively search literally every hypothesis and match it against my data. Your mileage may vary. Dunno. It's a diverse world out there, right?

<comment><USER8> Solomonoff induction is a way to quantify the human ability to induce general principles from limited observations. All the computable methods are unable to achieve this ability.

<comment><USER9> With respect, no, that is not what it is. My summary is glib and phrased in non-mathematical terms, but closer.

A true Solomonoff Inductor would be wildly, wildly smarter than a human being, if it could get over the problem that such a machine would also consume super- exponentially more resources than the universe has.

<comment><USER8> It's not a matter of resources. Solomonoff induction is not computable, since it needs to calculate the Kolmogorov complexity of the data.

If that is what is required for induction, it is surprising that humans are able to do so well at identifying concise descriptions of the data we observe. This seems inexplicable with a computational view of human cognition.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bt 1.9 released and Collaborators wanted - <AUTHOR> https://atomashpolskiy.github.io/bt//2019/12/14/release_1.9/ <comment><AUTHOR> Looking for experienced Java devs, who are interested in P2P and BitTorrent, and have time to spare on OSS. Contact me!</comment>


Ask HN: Last Mile as a Service - <AUTHOR> I'm trying to determine if there are start ups that are doing last mile delivery as a service. Similar to EC2 but you provision drivers and cars who can fulfill deliveries. For about every other company building last mile technology feels like unnecessary heavy lifting. <comment><USER2> [https://onfleet.com/](https://onfleet.com/) Onfleet is the trusted last mile delivery solution for thousands of companies across dozens of industries including food and beverage, retail, pharmacy, cannabis, e-commerce and more.

[https://onerail.io/](https://onerail.io/) OneRail connects shippers to an extensive courier ecosystem to automate, optimize and control the entire fulfillment supply chain, from the demand signal to the proof of delivery. Ready to use in under 72 hours!

</comment><comment><USER3> [http://jungleworks.com/](http://jungleworks.com/) \- Check this company out (specifically their "Logistics Cloud"), many of their offerings I think fit the mold to a certain extent, in that they provide the technology for onDemand/last-mile'ish services and tooling.

No affiliation, just stumbled upon them when I was kicking around a startup idea of my own.</comment>


ASK HN: Why every language has its own build system? - <AUTHOR> Hello HN!
Why every language has its own build/(dependency management) system? Java - ant, maven, gradle Scala - <USER2> Python - <USER3> Ruby - <USER4> JavaScript - <USER5> ... <comment><USER6> I think it was a lot by accident. Also different languages have different needs, for instance you will really compile Java, probably not process Python source code, but you might do a ton on minimization for a Javascript product.

Many of these frameworks (especially Maven) have a "convention over configuration" attitude and that is probably easier to do the smaller the scope is.

Another factor is that many build/dep systems share metadata and package formats. For all the strong feelings JVM developers may have about gradle, sbt, maven, leinegin and the languages and other baggage that comes with them, they are compatible at the repository level and that makes life sweet.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm going to guess a combination of ignorance of other build systems (either real or deliberate), dissatisfaction with how "make" or "ant" or whatever in that there's a bit of mismatch between how a build system works and the language in question envisions dependencies, and hubris. The hubris comes in when something like XML gets some faith as The Silver Bullet (because we all know there is no Golden Bullet). Intoxication with, and belief in XML leads to "ant", for example.

</comment><comment><USER8> Because the runtime is present? I mean, why should I install Java to build my JavaScript when Node is present? And wouldn't it be weird if pip served Ruby gems or Homebrew providing chocolatey packages?

</comment><comment><USER9> One large driver: NIH syndrome.

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

</comment><comment><USER10> You might want to preface your post with "ASK HN: "</comment>