Adam Savage Reddit Interview  - <AUTHOR> http://blog.reddit.com/2009/04/mythbustin-adam-savage-answers-your.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Towards the end of the third part he mentions that he reads news.YC . :)</comment>


'It's crazy': Chase forgiving all debt owed by its Canada credit card customers - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/chase-bank-amazon-visa-marriott-credit-card-debt-1.5239411 <comment><USER2> My guess: when Chase says "we felt it was a better decision for all parties" they mean "we realized we broke some kind of law without anybody noticing, and selling the debts to collections could turn up evidence of that in future litigation"

<comment><USER3> A more likely scenario is that the total outstanding debt was small enough that the positive PR + tax write-offs were bigger than getting pennies from a collections agency.

<comment><USER4> Tax write-offs are profits that were never made in the first place. It's not some sort of a tax credit. The reason you pay less taxes is because you didn't make a (or made less) profit.

<comment><USER3> You are talking about losses. Unpaid debts/invoices is its own category, and can definitely be deducted (see [https://www.irs.gov/publications/p535#idm140359415938416](https://www.irs.gov/publications/p535#idm140359415938416)).

<comment><USER5> Because they are losses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't know how Canada does it, but a lot of those smiles would change at least a little bit in the US when they get a 1099-C in February and realize the IRS counts debt forgiveness as taxable lump-sum income.

<comment><USER7> Yikes. Nope, I live in Canada and I had a few tens of thousands in debt forgiven. Definitely didn't have to pay taxes on it. That would be absolutely crazy and would have driven me to bankruptcy!

<comment><USER8> Not judging you at all, I promise. I found it ironically funny that forgiving debt could lead someone into bankruptcy. Talk about a win-win situation.

<comment><USER6> Yep. In my case we were overjoyed having finally worked out a deal with the bank, only to discover that now I was in debt to the IRS instead of the bank :'(

It sure feels like your government is shitting on you during an already tough situation.

<comment><USER9> So the idea is the bank gave you a loan then forgave it, so it's now income? That's a big leap in logic and sounds evil considering you never consider that when getting a loan, you only expect the internet to accrue.

<comment><USER10> It is income. Someone gave you money. Otherwise, why wouldn't a company "loan" you a higher salary and then just "forgive" the debt? Or, you could set up a company to loan yourself money — the company deducts the "loss" and you don't pay taxes on the gain.

<comment><USER11> The principal is presumably income, however the interest or fees should not be. The IRS will even occasionally cancel debt that's mostly fines and interest without considering it income.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If you wanted to design a system to reward addictive spending, it would look like this -- random intermittent reinforcement of problematic behaviors.

<comment><USER13> Came here to post this exact sentiment... I mean that one long haul trucker was so ecstatic his almost 7k debt was forgiven and said something to the effect of "I'm glad the number was up there." Really?

<comment><USER14> He's honest. If he had accumulated just _1k_ , then he would be annoyed that he hadn't taken on more. To him it's just free money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I didn't see it in the article, but I wonder how much debt that was forgiven was actual credit extended for purchases (which is money that Chase has "lost" as they won't recover it) and how much debt was interest+fees on the credit they extended.

</comment><comment><USER16> Wow! That's one way to get out of the Canadian market. Wonder what the number one cost was the get out of the market the normal way, legal fees?

<comment><USER17> Assuming people are only making minimum payments, they could have had to maintain operations for 20 years or so, even if they otherwise closed the accounts and only accepted credits (to them) and no debits on the accounts.

I dont know what infrastructure amd employment levels they would have had to maintain to service the accounts. I'm sure they probably ran the numbers, compared what they'd receive to cost of operations and probably realized itd either be a wash or a money losing proposition and decided to take the cheaper/expedient way out.

Personally, I'd love this deal. My CC is closed, but still paying down a very large sum. Got married, assumed my wife's debts and struggling to get our heads above water. Should be clear in another 4 years _sigh_ , maybe sooner if I can get a few good bonuses in the next few years.

<comment><USER18> You got this! My wife and I have been married just over 5 years now and still have $50k~ of debt left, most of it is her student loans.

Don't be afraid to shop around for jobs too. I'm about to transition to a new company making 50% more after putting 5 years in at my current job. Luckily, I liked the job so I had time to really search for another one that would be a good fit culturally as well and that paid more.

Now we're going to be debt free hopefully by Christmas 2020 and making $110k/yr and 26 y/o at that time. Not to mention bonuses and raises for both of us in the next 18 months. My wife has only been out of school and working for 2 years as an engineer, so she has plenty of room left to move up and I can keep working for software companies with great work/life balance and people that I like.

Win win! Rooting for you :)

<comment><USER17> I'm not worried. We have the savings to cover the debt, problem is I have a hard time touching it, since I work in Back office finance IT. I have access to the entirety of the firms positions and trades. Id like to cash out, because earning 3-4% interest, while paying out 20% interest on around 50k in debt makes far less sense than paying no interesting and paying into a matching 401k...

To be honest, this has probably been my single biggest stressor since getting married, and my wife's apparent mental block that finances are tight (when they shouldn't be) and she keeps buying non essential items.

A lot of this is self inflicted, then complicated with medical issues on shitty insurance. I mean, the year before I got married, I was debt free, even after been unemployed for 6 months (and I didnt file for benefits, stupidly).

We spent too much on our rings, but not on the wedding (we did a JOP wedding and a nice dinner afterward with just my wife, 2 step kids and myself). But, we had to move out of my 1 bed + den apartment into a 3 bed, 3.5 bath townhouse. More than doubled rent, but was necessary.

I mean, I make good money, but on my salary, we're struggling, living paycheck to paycheck, in large part of debt I assumed from marriage and medical issues. Kicker is I _have_ the savings to cover it, but cannot get to due to compliance issues.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Jubilee is pretty fun.

</comment><comment><USER20> I wonder how this gets reported to the credit bureaus.

</comment><comment><USER21> Oh man, I'm predicting a new wave of scam emails in the coming months.

Legitimate news articles like this are irresistible to the 419 scammers.

</comment><comment><USER22> Better not to own a credit card in the first place, with so many people in so much debt you really should be questioning the notion that there's a 'responsible' way to use a credit card.

<comment><USER23> Liquidity and debt help societies and people. It's just important that you pay off the card before the 18% rates kick in. But there are smart ways of avoiding these rates for a long time. For example you can roll over your debt into new cards before the interest rates kick. This could allow you to keep debt for months without paying any interest at all.

The problem with debt is when you use it purely for consumption instead of investment or increased efficiency of your consumption. But in general, debt and leverage are a very powerful thing and essential to an efficient market.

<comment><USER22> >Liquidity and debt help societies and people

Interest helps a small portion of people, while harming the majority.

>It's just important that you pay off the card before the 18% rates kick in.

If enough people did that banks wouldn't bother.

>The problem with debt is when you use it purely for consumption instead of investment or increased efficiency of your consumption

No, it merely mitigates the risks, if your business venture goes sour you will not be in a good place. There's also the question of 'what counts as an investment' although this is a minute issue compared to the aforementioned.

<comment><USER23> > Interest helps a small portion of people, while harming the majority.

Would you rather that no one could get access loans? If you truly believe that position, it would very much undermines the autonomy and choice of the people without capital: businesses, individuals, start-ups, whatever.

If you think that interest is a bad thing, what is the alternative? Sharia finance? You wanna go back to times of usury laws? Or that Christians can't loan to other Christians?

What about government? You think there should only be negative interest rate bonds? What about the federal funds rate, LIBOR, T-note yields, etc? Do you have a coherent system that could replace these financial instruments?

<comment><USER22> >Would you rather that no one could get access loans?

If they had interest then yes.

>If you truly believe that position, it would very much undermines the autonomy and choice of the people without capital: businesses, individuals, start-ups, whatever.

Without interest the amount of capital those groups would need would significantly decrease. I'm willing to sacrifice a reasonable amount of autonomy in order to stop people burning themselves and devaluing the earnings of others.

>If you think that interest is a bad thing, what is the alternative? Sharia finance?

The alternative is a number of things working together, sharia finance yes, the end of fiat currency, guaranteed minimum income to get those without capital to a point where they can contribute to society and a restoration of trust based society so that those with close bonds will be more likely to loan to each other interest free and out of good will (this is probably the most difficult of the three but I have some ideas).

<comment><USER23> Okay, how about you give me $1000 and I'll pay you back when I die. I'm good for it, I promise.

If so, I'll give you my bitcoin address.

The time value of money is so fundamental, and so obvious, that you must be being deliberately obtuse to not understand it. Money today is worth more than money tomorrow.

<comment><USER22> >Okay, how about you give me $1000 and I'll pay you back when I die. I'm good for it, I promise.

I have no reason to trust you.

>The time value of money is so fundamental, and so obvious, that you must be being deliberately obtuse to not understand it

No one's saying time doesn't have monetary value, it's a variable many businesses depend on, but that shouldn't mean you simply get to do the direct conversion and sidestep creating meaningful longterm value and make it more difficult for those without money to get anywhere without being under your thumb.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Are we sure this actually occurred? If anything this is going to make it easier for american banks to exploit students and side-step legislation that would actually fix the root of the student debt bubble in America.

By this I mean people will now just point to Canada and demand a bailout without really committing effort to passing laws that will prevent exploitative interest rates and pricing schemes by private universities.

<comment><USER25> Yes, I can confirm it happened. A relative of mine was quite happy when this happened. Myself, I migrated off their cards years ago.

That said, I don't think it will lead to bailout. Debt forgiveness is a rare but standard practice in trying to rebuild credit scores, is my understanding, and a way of getting some return rather than the zilch you'd get from a personal bankruptcy. It's just that bankruptcy doesn't affect student loans in the US, so folks are absolutely stuck there...

<comment><USER26> > It's just that bankruptcy doesn't affect student loans in the US, so folks > are absolutely stuck there...

I mean, _in theory_ (wink), you could always pay off your student loan debt using other forms of debt, and _then_ go bankrupt.

<comment><USER27> Courts aren't stupid, I don't think they'd look kindly upon you if they see you've done this.

<comment><USER28> Why would courts care? Student loans are not dischargable, because the student loan creditor lobbied to make sure they get laid. The replacement creditor has not.

Of course, there is no lender who is going to give a an unsecured loan the size of your substantial student debt to someone with said loans and no other assets, for obvious reasons.

<comment><USER29> > Why would courts care?

Because it's fraud. Taking on big debts you never intend to pay right before a bankruptcy will get you in a lot of trouble.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The end of publishing. Books are dead & boring.  - <AUTHOR> http://thebln.com/2010/03/the-future-of-publishing-is-death-right-are-you-sure/

<comment><AUTHOR> I think books will become a premium product in years to come. Lots of 'stuff' will be available digitally, but people will use books to express themselves in many ways.

Pulp fiction will go digital. There will be a market for things to leave around the house for plenty of years yet.

</comment><comment><USER2> Title is a bit over the top and misleading. Traditional publishing is dead (or dying). Books, are decidedly not dead. They simply take different forms now.</comment>


J.J. Abrams set to direct 'Star Wars: Episode VII' - <AUTHOR> http://herocomplex.latimes.com/2013/01/24/j-j-abrams-set-to-direct-star-wars-episode-vii/#/0 <comment><USER2> Awesome! Loved JJ's Star Trek. It seems like everybody that grew up with the original hates it, but the original series feels so outdated. Maybe JJ's Star Trek is dumbed down to reach a wider audience, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. I am excited to see how he adjusts his Star Trek storytelling for his soon to be released movie, and am extra excited for Star Wars. On a side-note, I was really let down by SWTOR as much as everybody else. Oh well. They'll get it right next time?</comment>


Like it or not: Millennials are here to stay - <AUTHOR> http://blog.rypple.com/2010/10/millennials-are-here-to-stay/

<comment><USER2> _Millennials grew up with constant communication through MSN, IM, BBM, Skype, etc. And then things moved to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn everything and everyone is at our fingertips._

You can't take any credit for that - it was all built by the Gen X types you're so contemptuous of.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your comment gaius, I was not saying that we can or should take credit for those applications. I was simply trying to point out that we were the first generation to grow up with the internet around us and with these applications that connected everyone!</comment></comment>


Solar biggest source of electricity in Germany in June 2019 - <AUTHOR> https://reneweconomy.com.au/solar-was-biggest-source-of-electricity-in-germany-in-june-46812/ <comment> radford-neal This is a meaningless headline, which follows a regrettably common way of producing misleading statements.

If you look at the article, you'll find that solar generation accounted for only 19% of the total. It's the "biggest source" only as a result of their choice of how to group the other sources. If they had decided to have a "fossil fuel" category, that would have been the biggest. But they decided to split fossil fuels into brown coal, hard coal, oil, and gas, so it doesn't win. Similarly, if they'd split solar into subcategories according to exactly which technology was used, none of them would have been "biggest".

You should similarly ignore misleading statements about "disease X is the biggest killer of Y", and so forth. They're all meaningless when the division into categories is arbitrary.

<comment><USER2> "Fossil fuel/non-renewables" would not have been the biggest, as you can see in the chart, "renewables" is bigger. Also they didn't split it into those subcategories so that solar wins, this technology split is a absolute standard way to differentiate between technologies which is always used, and it makes no sense (on that level of detail) to not differentiate between lignite, hard coal, gas and oil which all need different power plants, have different costs, different emission factors etc.

<comment><USER3> Splitting brown coal and hard coal is not standard and would change the result.

<comment><USER2> It absolutely is standard in germany: German Environment Agency does it this way [0] Fraunhofer Society does it this way [1] German Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy does it this way[2] Agora Energywende (important think tank) does it this way [3] AG Energiebilanzen does it this way [4]

[0] [https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/bild/strommix-in- deutschland](https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/bild/strommix-in-deutschland) [1] [https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/p...](https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/publications/studies/daten- zu-erneuerbaren-energien/ISE_Stromerzeugung_2018_Halbjahr.pdf#page=9) [2] [https://www.bmwi.de/Redaktion/DE/Downloads/Energiedaten/ener...](https://www.bmwi.de/Redaktion/DE/Downloads/Energiedaten/energiedaten- gesamt-pdf-grafiken.pdf__blob=publicationFile&v=38) [3] [https://www.agora- energiewende.de/service/agorameter/chart/p...](https://www.agora- energiewende.de/service/agorameter/chart/power_generation/11.07.2019/14.07.2019/) [4] [https://ag-energiebilanzen.de/](https://ag-energiebilanzen.de/)

<comment> radford-neal Everyone using the same split doesn't make the split non-arbitrary. Aren't small-scale hydro and large-scale hydro rather different things? Is large- scale hydro really "renewable", given that reservoirs fill with sediment, and their creation leads to lots of CO2 being released? Why is nuclear power "non- renewable"? It's renewable on any reasonable time scale, and doesn't produce CO2 during operation. Surely photovoltaic and thermal solar power are rather different technologies?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> pl-94 Let's not forget that:

\- CO2 emissions of Germany is still 5 times more than a comparable (similar GDP/flatness/weather) than France for _electricity production_ [1];

\- Electricity production is roughly a third of all final energy and CO2 emissions come mainly from coal and fuel [2]. Two threats for which Germany has done very little for now.

\- Germany is spending around 2 billions of dollars [3] for renewable energies, whereas it would have cost more than 50x less with nuclear, allowing to spend the rest of this investment into building insulation and thermal renewable energies.

\- PV investments were computed from past market prices, not with the negative price obtained with non controllable source of energy [3]. Germany is only at the beginning of energy subsidies.

Investing in photovoltaics is politically efficient, not environmentally efficient. Please let's stop to focus on renewable electricity. Let's start focusing on carbon-less solutions. The hard problem is about coal and fuel.

The situation could not be more urgent, since conventional oil has reached its peak. Not removing our dependency on oil is strongly damaging for our economies. Focusing on non controllable sources of energy is just accelerating the damages. Please see [https://jancovici.com/en/](https://jancovici.com/en/) for more convincing arguments :)

[1] - [https://electricitymap.tmrow.co](https://electricitymap.tmrow.co)

[2] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption#Energ...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption#Energy_supply,_consumption_and_electricity)

[3] - [http://www.world-nuclear- news.org/NP_Eye_watering_cost_of_re...](http://www.world-nuclear- news.org/NP_Eye_watering_cost_of_renewable_revolution_2301121.html)

[4] - [https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/why-power- prices-...](https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/why-power-prices-turn- negative)

<comment><USER4> Your first two claims are mostly correct.

Your third claim is utterly wrong. And it's 2 trillion, of course, over a period of 20 years, 2011 - 2030, an estimate from 2012 that Siemens made. Let's assume for a second that the (widely debunked) 2 trillion the former Siemens CEO/nuclear lobby president literally pulled out of his ass in 2012 is reality. Replacing those 2 trillion in renewable with nuclear for USD 40 billion? Germany is spending roughly EUR 10 billion a year on nuclear currently. If we replaced all nuclear stations with with new fancy "cheaper" ones we'd still be at EUR 7 billion. Let's assume we tripled the capacity to roughly 35% of total production (from now less than 12%), that's 21 billion a year. So EUR 420 billion over 20 years. So the factor would be 4x for renewables (given the worst estimate published by a guy in 2012 who happened to be the president of the main nuclear lobby group at the time) vs nuclear (the cheapest estimate I could come up). You're an order of magnitude off at least and that is when you believe the Siemens numbers.

Regarding your 4th claim about negative price: wrong conclusion. Negative prices mean an oversupply of generated power. The eventual solution is not to subsidize producers, but to refine the system not to produce such large oversupply in the first place, while still making sure that a sudden drop in supply (because e.g. as a rather blunt example it starts raining and PV output goes down) can be managed.

<comment> pl-94 I am not pretending to have exact numbers but we should have some orders of magnitude in our heads.

Let's pretend that our electricity is running fully in nuclear wrt. fully in wind turbines/PV: load factor is around 0.7/0.8 (against 0.2) so costs increase by x3-4, life expectancy is 60-80 y against 20-30 years (x2-3), nuclear does not require a new electric grid, whereas renewable energies does (cost ~x1.5), nuclear works better with a low storage (10%) whereas PV/WT want 50-60% of storage (cost x2-4) and cost of building/recycling for a kwh is around 3-5k€ against 1-1.5k€ for WT (idk for PV) (cost %2-4). At the end of the day, the capex/kWh is indeed one order of magnitude higher for WT/PV than for nuclear. I am not pretending those numbers are exact but I think it reflects the order of magnitude.

For the 4th claim, the issue is that prices are much lower that what they were supposed to be, and that is why, the field will need to be heavily subsidized for a long term.

What I support, it is not to globally spending less money into energy transition. I really hope governments will spend much more than nowadays. But, I just hope we focus on reducing our economical dependency on fuels/coals to preserve a bit of our current comfort while not killing every year several millions of people with fine particles ([https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents)).

Give me USD 2 trillions, and I will 1) ban coal generated electricity, 2) ban any vehicles that consume more than 2L/100 km, 3) insulate any existing buildings (and not only new buildings as our policy makers do, since old buildings stay for roughly 100 years), 4) subsidy heavily heat pomp. But I will certainly not close any nuclear power plants.

I know it is almost impossible to ask such requests to Europeans, but this is the only plausible solutions I have heard of.

<comment><USER4> >load factor is around 0.7/0.8 (against 0.2) so costs increase by x3-4

This is a double-red herring. First load factors do not correlate with cost, and second comparing the load factor of a nuclear power plant to a PV system is comparing apples with... not even oranges... more like comparing apples with seahorses. The interesting number would be: how much money did I have to put into that thing divided by how much MWh can I get out of a thing.

>life expectancy is 60-80 y against 20-30 years (x2-3)

Next red herring. If I buy a pair of shoes that last me 10 years but costs 200 bucks, that's 20 bucks/year. If I buy a pair of shoes that costs me 10 bucks and lasts one year, well, 10 bucks/year. Recycling/trashing a pair of shoes adds another 5 EUR/pair, so the cheap pair is 15/year and the expensive one is 20.5 EUR/year. The 10x higher life expectancy by itself does not mean shit to the annual cost.

The levelized cost of energy (LCOE) for nuclear in France (who are supposed to be doing nuclear really well) was 50 EUR/MWh in 2017, but that's with the state covering the insurance costs already, which are huge, so a massive hidden-in-plain-sight subsidy. (France EDF and IEA calculations). The Hinkley Point C project in the UK is about 100 EUR/MWh, which the state had to guarantee the operators, or else the operators would have dropped the entire project, probably because their analysts told them that the chances that their plant will be competitive on price over it's lifetime are slim to none.

On top of that, a longer life expectancy means a longer commitment, which can work in your favor, or against you.

The LCOE in 2018 for large-scale PV in Germany was 37-63 EUR/MWh. Onshore Wind 40-82, Offshore 75-138 (Fraunhofer). Prices are still dropping rapidly as both the technology and construction/maintenance requirements and processes improve, actually dropping, not just "estimated" drops. Prices for nuclear are said to drop too with new fancy technology, maybe... the nuclear lobby said... but so far that's pure speculation and e.g. the fancy EPR-type nuclear plants in France/UK for now actually do not show lower costs.

The US has PV at roughly 75 USD/MWh, and nuclear at roughly 96 USD/MWh.

I'd call the PV/Wind LCOE at the very least "competitive" to the LCOE of nuclear, sometimes already cheaper, and otherwise estimated to be cheaper soon.

Now, you got a point that switching to renewables requires additional and/or refined infrastructure, like changes to the power grid, energy storage/backup power plants, etc. which requires quite a bit of additional research and investment.

<comment> pl-94 I think there is a misunderstanding in my calculation. If one pair of shoes last 3 times longer, then you investment is divided by 3. The same for load factor. If you use your shoes one every 2 days, you need to buy 2 times more shoes.

<comment><USER4> You are not comparing the load factor of shoe A against the load factor of shoe B. We are comparing the load factor of shoe A against the load factor of teaspoon B... which doesn't make much sense.

And even if you compared shoe A against shoe B, you'd still have to factor in load initial and maintenance cost (and a bunch of other things). Sure, shoe A might have have a 3x better load factor, but the manufacturer of shoe A also wants 10x the money compared to shoe B.

That's why I referred to the LCOE because it is a good estimation of what a MWh of actual (not nameplate) output will cost you. It already includes all the tricky bits like initial investment, operation and maintenance cost incl fuel where needed, load factors, disposal, life expectancy and even stuff like carbon taxes (where applicable).

So here is an amended (increasingly silly) shoe example, now with load factors:

If I buy a pair of shoes _that I can wear every day_ (factor 1.0) that last me 10 years but costs 400 bucks, that's 40 bucks/year. If I buy a pair of shoes that costs me 10 bucks, _but that I can only wear every other day_ (factor 0.5) and lasts one year, well, 20 bucks/year because I need two pairs to have something to wear every day. Recycling/trashing a pair of shoes adds another 5 EUR/pair, so the cheap pairs are 30/year and the expensive one is 40 EUR/year. The 10x higher life expectancy by itself does not mean shit to the annual cost, and the higher "load factor" I can get from the more expensive shoe model by itself doesn't mean shit either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Seems like installations doubled in 2018 compared to the last few years [0]. That surprised me a bit, since, while there still are gov incentives, they only seem to go down after the big push ended around 2012. So that bump is likely caused by falling cost. That's great to see.

[0] [https://energy- charts.de/power_inst.htm?year=all&period=annu...](https://energy- charts.de/power_inst.htm?year=all&period=annual&type=inc_dec)

</comment><comment><USER6> My friends in Germany still have the most expensive electricity in all of Europe, including Scandinavia.

They should have stayed on nuclear until renewable would be cheaper since the households are the ones feeling the pinch while big corps negociate lower fees or import cheaper electricity from France that's big on nuclear.

It's cool to be ECO and all but that's just taking the piss on the middle class and my priority is putting food on the table for my family not footing the bill for political-corporate ECO circle jerk.

<comment><USER7> Household of 3 people in one of the most expensive cities in Germany here, with multiple Raspberry Pis, a laptop and a small server running 24/7\. We are not actively doing anything to save energy. We pay between 20 and 30 EUR per month for electricity. The average net income per household in Germany is 3314 EUR per month [0], so this is less than 1% of the average household income. I would not call that expensive. Regardless of the cost, it will especially not prevent you from putting food on the table of your family, because if you have problems to do that, social security will pay the bill for you.

[0] [https://www.bpb.de/nachschlagen/datenreport-2018/private- hau...](https://www.bpb.de/nachschlagen/datenreport-2018/private-haushalte- einkommen-konsum-wohnen/278177/nettoeinkommen-privater-haushalte)

<comment><USER8> This is hard to believe. I'm paying more than that for a household of 1. For 3 ppl, the typical comparison platforms quote EUR 900 p.a. as the cheapest option (3,500kWh estimate). At EUR 360,- a year, you'd get a mere 1000kWh which hardly supplies a fridge, lighting and cooking every now and then. The average price in Germany is close to 30ct per kWh, plus some kind of fixed base fee...

<comment><USER7> Why is that hard to believe? I just checked my bill. Last year, we consumed 1,402 kWh, which came down to around 33 EUR per month (a bit higher than my number above, which was the cost in 2017). We cook at least 6 days per week. Our washing machine is a cheap model from 2015.

The third person in our household is a little child, so we are more in the 2 persons range. But even for 2 persons, Google states as the average 3,000 kWh, which _I_ find hard to believe. Even if we tried, I just cannot think of anything we could do to consume even more electricity.

<comment><USER9> > 1,402 kWh, 33 EUR per month

no way. not even close. 1400 is never ever 33 euro not even in the east side of germany.

<comment><USER7> This translates to 0.285 EUR/kWh, with 0.30 EUR/kWh being the current average in Germany, according to Google.

<comment><USER9> he said he pays that monthly. unfortunatly all electricity provider have a base price. also 0.30eur/kWh is the lower bracket in west germany (not the average). and for more than 1 person 1400 kWh also seems a little bit off, too. Ok granted maybe he is roughly at 1800, but 1400 is like having a fridge+washing machine (every 3 days)+cooking (every second day)+led lamps for like 4 hour per evening.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> ....brought to you by taxes /subsidies: _" Taxes and fees now amount to 52 percent of the monthly power bill for retail consumers....The renewable energy levy alone adds 18 euros to the average monthly bill."_ [https://www.dw.com/en/german-electricity-price-is-half- taxes...](https://www.dw.com/en/german-electricity-price-is-half-taxes-and- fees/a-17849142-0)

<comment><USER4> So? We heavily subsidize every energy source here in Germany, having done that since forever. Coal subsidies, nuclear subsidies (incl massive hidden, defacto ones), now renewables. If there were no subsidies the price would be in the same ballpark anyway, except the state would have no influence over where that money gets spent.

The "renewables levy" isn't meant to be permanent high at the same level. It is meant to be seed money for research and initial construction to get the ball rolling. Startup money basically. It works by guaranteeing companies a minimum price for renewable power to reduce their investment risk.

<comment><USER11> but the green energy subsidy (EEG) fee is ridiculously distributed. Anyone in the industry who really needs a lot of electricity doesn't have to pay it at all while it makes up 20-25% of the price for citizens.

I can see that they don't want to scare off these companies but the way it works now is not good.</comment></comment></comment>


China lunar rover successfully touches down on far side of the moon - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/02/health/china-lunar-rover-far-moon-landing-intl/index.html <comment><USER2> " One technological hurdle in targeting the side of the moon that constantly faces away from Earth is that direct communication with the spacecraft is not possible. Instead messages to and from Chang'e 4 are being relayed by the Queqiao (Magpie Bridge) satellite, which is in a "halo orbit" on the other side of the moon." — from a Chinese release

</comment><comment><USER3> Wikipedia seems to say the rover mission duration is 3 months, yet the previous rover traveled for a year and transmitted a bit longer. The Chinese seemed quite coy about it failing last time (as with many things) so perhaps underpromising in this case?

The article doesn't mention it either but I thought this was all preparation for China's planned permanent radio telescope on the far side which would be a huge boon for astronomers by escaping Earth's EM interference.

Also out left field is the 3kg "self sustaining" biosphere of silkworms and plants with a camera inside. Interested to see how long it survives.

<comment><USER4> It must use a lot of energy to keep that biosphere constant-ish temperature the whole time.

I assume it needs to be fully enclosed and use artificial (electric) lighting. In that case, I wonder the use of sending it to the moon at all.</comment></comment>


Physical activity can have a positive effect on children who suffer from ADHD - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/09/exercise-seems-to-be-beneficial-to-children/380844/ <comment><USER2> Was originally going to post "Well that's a big fat 'DUH!!!!'", but then I thought better.

It's good to have studies to back up these sorts of things that typically get treated as common sense.

<comment><USER3> Relevant, Hindsight Devalues Science: [http://lesswrong.com/lw/im/hindsight_devalues_science/](http://lesswrong.com/lw/im/hindsight_devalues_science/)

>Daphna Baratz exposed college students to pairs of supposed findings, one true ("In prosperous times people spend a larger portion of their income than during a recession") and one the truth's opposite. In both sides of the pair, students rated the supposed finding as what they "would have predicted". Perfectly standard hindsight bias.

>Which leads people to think they have no need for science, because they "could have predicted" that.

<comment><USER4> And if the science contradicts what their intuition tells them is correct - they disbelieve the science and cling to their intuition. Additionally, the progress of civilization can be measured most accurately by seeing which threats and dangers are removed from peoples lives. So when these people wish to trust their intuition rather than science, they are vindicated - they are protected by the umbrella of progress that intellectuals before them erected. So they now have the luxury of sitting back and decrying the costs of maintaining the infrastructure that protects them as unnecessary. This fuels the vaccine nonsense, fears of GM crops, fears of wifi signals in England, and all sorts of other similar issues. I expect these things will continue to increase until eventually major portions of the infrastructure of modern society will be dismantled or allowed to decay because no one believes they are necessary.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Humans who evolved for constant outdoors activity and verbal co-ordination amongst tribe members don't do so well being told to sit down and shut up"

There are somethings that "civilisation" has brought us like medicine and plentiful energy and food that we want to keep - and some things like industrial work patterns and sedentary indoor lifestyles that we will want to remove.

Getting that balance right is not medication. It's whatever the opposite of medication is.

Edit: thank you for the science of common sense mention - I forget that we have too many politicians who already know what is common sense irrespective of double blind controls and it is worth celebrating the effort to prove one.

</comment><comment><USER6> Children with ADHD, previously mislabeled "young boys", respond well to physical activity, previously mislabeled "recess".

<comment><USER7> There's an argument for ADHD being over-diagnosed, but your sentiment trivializes the issues that can prevent people like me from attaining a better quality of life. I was about 23 by the time I got treated for ADHD. I often wonder how different my trajectory as an adult might have been had I been treated while I was still in high school. I got abysmal grades -- just barely graduating, in fact -- and I dropped out of college rather quickly. I beat myself up on account of my failures, over which in hindsight I had very little control.

Amphetamines are no panacea. I don't truly know what I'm doing to my heart and brain in the long term, anorexia is a constant concern, and coming down from what I would describe as a 6-hour high can be devastating to my mood, but they overall they improved my quality of life and facilitated me attaining a career as a software developer. Perhaps more exercise would be just as effective as a treatment, but knowing that I had a legitimate problem was crucial.

<comment><USER8> +1 ADHD is real. It was a lot harder to get a career as a software developer started. I feel like without finally discovering the root of my problem and taking meds at age 18 it wouldn't have been possible. All those afternoons spent over procrastinating on homework.

Excercise helps. I feel lasting positive effects on mood and concentration when I lift regularly. Sadly, It doesn't alleviate the symptoms completly and doesn't cure the syndrome.

I think we'll be able to treat ADHD much more efficently when we have cheaper EEG that can be worn always. Recently the muse headband was introduced. I own one and it's a great leap forward. Sadly there's no app for neurofeedback training that is working with it yet...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think this points out that the problem is we keep treating our children like adults. We've pushed to make them learn skills earlier to the point that kindergarden is now essentially first grade [0]. Additionally schools are cutting back on PE to be able to cram more education in [1].

The result I believe is that normal childhood development of self-regulation begins to look pathological and becomes diagnosed as ADHD. At the same time we've been demanding more at younger ages, ADHD diagnosis have greatly increased [2]. Additionally, roughly two-thirds of these kids won't have ADHD by the time they become an adult [3]. I think this points to the fact that we're simply expecting too much academically too early and we're compounding this by taking away the physical play that would help them develop.

We need to reset kindergarden back to where it was so that most kids have a chance to properly develop. We also need to restore the idea that children are suppose to play, that it's good for them and not a waste of time.

P.S: For that other 30%, ADHD is real and drugs may be entirely appropriate. I'd also suspect that more play and pushing learning later will help them as well.

P.P.S: We also need to find a way for the kids that do have the self- regulation to learn more advanced material. Right now schools do a terrible job of dealing with the kids on either end of the bell curve of learning skills.

P.P.P.S: Boys appear to lag girls by almost year in terms of their self- regulation [4]. I suspect that is why boys are far more diagnosed with ADHD. In any case, I believe this is hurting both boys and girls, it's just more apparent in boys.

[0]: [http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/article/what-happened- kin...](http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/article/what-happened-kindergarten) [1]: [http://www.reviewjournal.com/news/education/many-schools- cut...](http://www.reviewjournal.com/news/education/many-schools-cutting-back- physical-education) [2]: [http://psychcentral.com/news/2013/11/25/adhd- diagnosis-treat...](http://psychcentral.com/news/2013/11/25/adhd-diagnosis- treatment-on-the-rise-in-u-s/62500.html) [3]: [http://www.healthline.com/health-news/mental-adhd-causes- pro...](http://www.healthline.com/health-news/mental-adhd-causes-problems- into-adulthood-030413) [4]: [http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/09/why- gir...](http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/09/why-girls-get- better-grades-than-boys-do/380318/)

<comment><USER10> Probably even worse than the reduction of PE time is the reduction of playground time and the overbearing focus on child safety ruining what remains. As stereotypical dorky kid, I never liked PE, but I'd happily run around outside for hours if I was playing tag or basketball or something with friends. I'm not sure if kids these days get to have that experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> John Ratey wrote several good books on ADD/ADHD as well as this one: _Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain_ [http://www.amazon.com/Spark-Revolutionary-Science- Exercise-B...](http://www.amazon.com/Spark-Revolutionary-Science-Exercise- Brain/dp/0316113514) \- it is pretty good.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Didn't use the existing title because it's potential hyperbolic/confusing (medication suggests a pharmaceutical, at least to me). Still, a potentially very important finding. Here's the newly-released paper cited in the article: [http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2014/09/...](http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/early/2014/09/24/peds.2013-3219.abstract)

<comment><USER12> It appears that paper has nothing to do with kids who have been diagnosed with ADHD... at least there's no mention of that in summary unless I'm really missing something. The article in the Atlantic cites other work that is ADHD- specific.

This is important because it is not uncommon to find interventions (including drugs) that benefit people who do not have a given condition that do nothing for people who have the condition.

To take a ridiculous but hopefully memorable example: steroids will not help a person with no arms lift more weight, even though they may help other people a lot. In the case of metabolic diseases, sufferers are generally missing important metabolic pathways that the rest of us have, so the example isn't completely irrelevant.

In the present case, I think it's perfectly reasonable that exercise will help (although what I think is perfectly reasonable and what is true have nothing to do with each other) and as the Atlantic articles says, other studies have shown this, but I just wanted to make a pedantic point about that particular pediatric paper.

<comment><USER13> The study says "The exclusion criteria included special educational services related to cognitive or attentional disorders ...". So kids diagnosed with ADHD had been specifically excluded. This should be tried on ADHD-diagnosed kids. If they're physically healthy, 70 minutes a day of mild exercise won't hurt them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'd rather keep my kid in and teach him to code.</comment>


How Startup Culture Is Killing Innovation - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/09/why-do-research-when-you-can-fail-fast-pivot-and-act-out-other-popular-startup-cliches/

<comment><USER2> That was... weird. The article itself was interesting, if maybe a bit rambling, and if I'd read it without having seen the headline, I probably would have thought "OK, some interesting points there to consider".

But, knowing the headline was "How Startup Culture Is Killing Innovation"

all I can do is keep asking myself what just missed, as that point doesn't support to be supported - or even argued - by the article. The stuff about the importance of doing research resonates with me and largely rings true, but all that verbiage about "fear of failure" and "startup culture" seems completely disconnected from the rest of the article.

 _shrug_

 _So why does research get such a bad rap? Because of fear. It's not a fear of failure, though._

I'm not even sure I agree with the fundamental premise here. If anything, the recent rage in startup circles is focused around Customer Development and related methodologies, which are all about doing exactly what the author here is arguing for. CD pushes a mindset of "Get out of the building, talk to actual customers, understand their day to day life in detail, and understand their problems".

But regardless of which approach you take on this, I don't see how this issue connects to "killing innovation" or the whole "fear of failure" stuff from the beginning of the article.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow the worst title in history.</comment>


What do you guys think I am doing wrong with this website? - <AUTHOR> http://limitsapp.com <comment><USER2> Nothing particularly wrong but I don't feel directed towards a particular action. What do you want visitors to do? Download an app to buy shoes? Sell the shoes I have? Read the site and email you?

</comment><comment><USER3> nice http2 by the way</comment>


Cringely predicts the second coming of Java - <AUTHOR> http://www.cringely.com/2011/10/the-second-coming-of-java/ <comment><USER2> It's gotta be a slow day on hacker news when this is at the top page. (Or, is this being upvoted because it is Cringely.)

An entire article about web development past, present, and future without a single mention of PHP....

All snark aside, I strongly disagree with several things in this article.

Java never left, so it can hardly arrive again. Anyone that has ever worked in a corporate environment problably knows what I am talking about. Java dominates the Enterprise landscape.

Disk speed limitations on database access times can be and has already been overcome by in-memory caching. This is not new. Advancing SSD tech will not suddenly lead to Java's total ascendance as a web development platform.

The characterization of dynamic languages as "easy to program for a broader, younger, and maybe less experienced crowd of developers" is a rather unfortunate blanket generalization. This is especially the case because most people that I know that use dynamic languages usually have some experience in things like Java, C, C++ that Cringlely seems to hold in high regard.

And finally:

<http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html>

The real problem that the vast majority of web developers face is not trying to cope with overwhleming amounts of daily traffic. The real problem is how do you build a product that is compelling enough to get signups, and how do you continue to develop this product to attract new signups.

Java is fast, and that is lovely. However, speed of execution does not matter when your development speed drags. When you are developing a product, you need to be able to move fast. If you get substantial traffic, then you can always rewrite backend services in Java (or whatever floats your boat) at that time.

 _Edit: When I say Java, I refer to the language - just as Cringely does in this article._

 _Of course a number of excellent languages have developed that combine the advantages of the JVM with the benefits of a more powerful language. (My personal favorite being Clojure.)_

<comment><USER3> What's odd is that here in the UK it's C# dominating the enterprise landscape. Or at least that's the impression I've always got from the jobs mentioned to me and the developers I've met. I've met PHP, C#, Python, Rails devs but never a Java developer.

The thing about .Net not being awesome compared to Java, it wasn't but that's not true any more, .Net _is_ awesome compared to Java. There's a hell of a team behind the C# language at the moment and they're about 3-4 years ahead of Java in terms of new language features.

Not that I've any delusions about .Net coming to dominate in the web space, but it's more likely than Java imo which looks old now when I read it, though admittedly I don't keep up on it that well.

<comment><USER4> C# is in demand, because C# developers are rarer. Also it's a more interesting language to work in and has features that attract smart developers.

Java developers are abundant, and mostly employed in the dark corners of big enterprise software shops you've never heard of.

<comment><USER5> I have seen some very dark corners reserved for C# programmers around Sharepoint deployments...

<comment><USER6> I worked on a major financial application that had a consumer front end written in share point... it was horrific... easily the worst thing I had seen in 15 years of developing.

The guys that put it together created a situation where there multiple front ends to one database. Each front end generated GUIDs and rammed them into the shared database. My work was to fix the sync'ing problem derived from this.

Most poeple I know refer to it as scare point now, as it scares most developers ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> First, Cringley is simply wrong on many of his points. I don't think he's kept up with this stuff very closely, but that isn't the main point I want to make.

I think everyone is missing a major point in these sort of debates. The JVM uses a shit ton of memory, and this makes it expensive to host. If someone is a poor student that is trying out different ideas for websites, then they can do it much cheaper if they don't use the JVM.

There is a reason there aren't a bunch of shared hosting providers offering jvm support, and if you look at VPN prices I'll bet money that the two things you look at are the memory allocated to your VPS and the price.

Even on the development front, I just had to order a new laptop at work because we're using the JVM and I need to run 3 JVM web services at a time every now and then, plus an IDE and I simply can't do that with 4 gigs of ram which is the max for my current laptop. The JVM process for a hello world servlet, after being hit by a number of requests, will need about 100MB of ram, for a hello world string response!

The JVM is great in certain circumstances, but it's terrible as a cheap platform for people trying to bootstrap and test the viability of ideas. I can run 3 or more ruby, python, or php sites on a $20/month VPS. I can't do that with the JVM, and I'll always bet on the bottom up technologies.

Also, he's assuming that modern times are like the past, and that you can't easily mix interpreted and compiled languages, but on the JVM this isn't so. You can use JRuby and rails, and code the hotspots in java. Hell, you can even code some of the urls in pure java and leave the less significant bits in rails. To make the situation even better, you can start off with C ruby on a cheap vps and if you're idea takes off convert it to JRuby and then start replacing the bottlenecks in java, scala, or whatever.

<comment><USER8> The last time I paid attention to the Java vs Lisp vs C++ discussion, the shibboleth about JVM memory usage was that the JVM pre-allocated lots of memory to optimize for the case where the application was going to be big and long lived, at the cost of longer start up times and bad memory usage benchmarks for toy programs. I was under the impression that huge JVM footprints were mostly because of this pre-allocation behavior, not because the JVM itself uses lots of memory to maintain itself - am I wrong?

<comment><USER9> Both. JVM also allocates a lot of memory (relatively) for even its smallest objects (round sizes up, frequent boxing and copying of primitives, everybody gets an automatic mutex), and fragments significantly because it has good garbage collectors that deal fine with that.

A _lot_ of Java is optimized for this, and it would take a fair bit of work to make a JVM (and compiler!) implementation that changed the behavior pervasively.

Java assumes memory is cheap at many levels. And usually, it's right.

<comment><USER7> "Java assumes memory is cheap at many levels. And usually, it's right."

I would say it's usually wrong. Imagine how much ram you'd need if all of your GUI apps were on the JVM. Imagine how much ram you'd need if '$ cat blah.txt | grep "something" | uniq | sort' were all JVM processes. Etc, etc, etc.

It seems to only be right for long lived server side processes that have enough load to make it a benefit.

<comment><USER9> You wouldn't architect that in that way in JVM. Instead, you'd use threads rather than processes, use heavier-weight but more capable tools and so on.

The JVM is not The Unix Way. You have to do things differently - and in Java- land, they do.

It's not really my thing either, but it's not as bad as you'd think if you just pretend we're mapping all our existing Unix stuff, unchanged, into Java.

<comment><USER7> Right, and my point is that the JVM way only fits a narrow range of use cases. Primarily long running server side processes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think Cringley is setting up a false dilemma here: that you can have fast or high-level but not both.

Lisp has been fast for decades, and modern Common Lisps are roughly the same speed as Java. Lua is a lot like Ruby or Python but about an order of magnitude faster. LuaJIT is _another_ order of magnitude faster, putting it on the same level as Lisp and Java. Haskell is a very different sort of high- level language, but it's fast too.

I think he's right that we'll see more people caring about the speed of the implementation language's runtime, but I suspect we'll see more startups picking fast high-level languages or fast runtimes for already-popular high- level languages than going for Java.

<comment><USER8> > Lua is a lot like Ruby or Python but about an order of magnitude faster

I'm surprised to hear either of those statements, both that Lua is a lot like Python and that it's an order of magnitude faster. Now, the last time I seriously looked at Lua was for my master's thesis work about four years ago, so I'm willing to believe that my impression of Lua is out of date. However, my experience on using it for a medium-sized project was that it is nothing like Python. My procedure for programming is

      1) think of semantic construct,

      2) think of how to express this construct in this language

      3) type it in

My experience with Python is that step (2) is almost automatic - for whatever reason, every construct I'm used to using has a clear, terse expression in Python. And I've never spent an extended period writing Python, so I don't think it's because Python has really shaped the way I think. (The closest analogue to Python programming is using the STL in C++, in my experience.)

With Lua I had exactly the opposite experience. Every time it came to step (2), it felt like what I wanted to say was _almost_ expressible in idiomatic Lua, but not quite. It just felt like I was running a race with a 50 pound backpack the whole time. Every time I tried to write a Lua script, I'd eventually throw up my hands and write my program in Python instead.

Now, it's certainly possible that I just never really understood Lua's paradigm that well, and that if I'd kept going I would eventually have reached enlightenment. I don't think so, though - tables just aren't that hard, oonceptually. However, the point is that, out of the box, Python gives me by far the least cognitive friction and Lua by far the most of any programming language I've ever used. I therefore have to strongly disagree that Python and Lua have much in common other than a small overlap in the niche they each fill.

And as for the order of magnitude speed difference, I find that hard to believe. Again, my information may be out of date, but when I looked at it Lua converted all numbers to double precision floating point numbers internally, which dragged its integer benchmarks down quite a bit. (In fairness, I think that was the same time frame where Python could only use primitive integers for the numbers 0-99, and had to box everything else.)

<comment><USER11> Lua is much faster than Ruby/Python/Perl/&c. It still doesn't get close even to the higher-level compiled languages like Common Lisp and Haskell, but e.g. the programming language shootout [1] makes it pretty clear that Lua is still a league above the other dynamic languages. For just a quick result, I tried timing just the Hello World program in Python, Ruby, and Lua, and while startup time isn't going to be the bottleneck of the world of modern web development, it's still a telling result:

        $ time python2.7 -c "print 'Hello, world'"

        real        0m0.107s
        user        0m0.080s
        sys         0m0.023s
        $ time ruby -e "puts 'Hello, world'"
        Hello, world

        real        0m0.338s
        user        0m0.030s
        sys	        0m0.013s
        $ time lua -e "print('Hello, world')"
        Hello, world

        real        0m0.008s
        user        0m0.000s
        sys         0m0.003s

That said, I kneejerk-ly agree with you about Lua being an awkward medium for expressing programs. I personally haven't ever gotten to the status where Lua was as natural as Python, but I have also used Python a great deal more, so I don't know if my attitude is attributable to Lua's design, or Python's plenitude of libraries, or merely the experience differential between the two.

[1]: <http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/>

EDIT: Converted some tabs to spaces. (Nitpicky, I know.)

<comment><USER12> My timings where different on my 6 yr old Pentium D dual core, Ubuntu 64 bit:

      time python2.7 -c "print 'Hello, world'" && time ruby -e
      "puts 'Hello, world'" && time lua -e "print('Hello,
      world')"

      Hello, world

       real	0m0.056s
       user	0m0.040s
       sys	0m0.000s

      Hello, world

       real	0m0.008s
       user	0m0.000s
       sys	0m0.000s

      Hello, world

       real	0m0.061s
       user	0m0.000s
       sys	0m0.010s

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _You pretty much only see people coding Ruby while using the Rails framework which governs the whole thing. You can replace Ruby here with Python, Django or Groovy and it is still correct._

This is certainly not the case with Python. Python has a huge community outside of Django and is used in the scientific, academic, and financial communities (see NumPy, NLTK, Bazaar).

In other words, if you eliminated the Django community there would still be a large Python community.

<comment><USER14> Perhaps he's never heard of Google or Red Hat or science. Maybe he should google Google on...google.

<comment><USER15> Hmm... aside from the SketchUp scripts, I don't remember a whole lot of Google projects written in Ruby. Do you have a source for that?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I get the feeling he is making the common mistake of comparing Java with JVM. Java, as a language, is fine but many other languages (Ruby, Python) run on top of the JVM and have very good execution times (plus multi-core support).

 _...languages like Ruby. These are slow as molasses (though now our CPUs are much faster) but easy to program for a broader, younger, and maybe less experienced crowd of developers._

Something about this rubs me the wrong way, and smacks of elitism. I've seen some amazing code from the Ruby community yet I feel he is confusing a language's learning curve with the experience of its development community.

 _Under Ruby, we put C++. On top of Ruby we put the Rails web framework. It's not very common to actually code anything in Ruby._

Wow. I completely disagree with this. I stopped reading after that.

<comment><USER17> I have to correct a few other things in his post.

a) There are shittons of frameworks for Ruby. Rails is definitely not the only one, its just most popular. Most good libraries are framework indepenedent and have plugins into that framework. One example is Guard or CarrierWave. The elegance of it all is what separates it from java.

b) Much easier and faster to develop for. allows for rapid prototyping and mutations. Writing front-end servers in ruby > writing front-end servers in java as ruby can do things in 1 line that take 50 in java.

c) As we see with facebook, sometimes a "slow" front-end written in a prototyping language is better, but the back-end is written in a performant language.

d) The power of ruby/rails is the community. That is it's number one source of power and without it, rails is crap. There is a lot of Java developers, yet the awesome java frameworks are things like hadoop, meant for data processing.

I don't think there will be a "second coming" of java. I think Java will die, but the JVM (will probably) live on. Either that or the JVM will die to be replaced by something the community makes, if oracle has any say in the matter, knowing how oracle is doing everything possible to alienate java.

However there will be no second coming of java because it never left. Java is still going strong within the rails community as most are fully aware that you write your application in ruby, and anything important that has to be performant will be written in java. There's just no alternative.

<comment><USER18> Who says the performant code has to be written in Java? It could be another JVM language (Twitter is using Scala for this), or it could be some other non- JVM language if that language better fits the situation's needs.

Cringely's post is pure link bait (or even flame bait). I feel sorry for those who read the post as if the author is knowledgable about this subject matter. Picture the IT manager or CIO who reads that and thinks their continued investment in Java as the "one language to rule them all" was a good decision. That person would be better served reading Steve Yegge's platform rant from earlier today.

No one language is equally great at solving every foreseeable problem. The only good answer is not to be afraid of using multiple languages/technology stacks and be prepared to replace existing pieces with ones that are better when the time comes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The whole argument is flawed. First of all, Java never left. It is still used widely in "Enterprise" environments where it powers complex architectures with a lot of XML.

Secondly, Ruby on Rails and other dynamic frameworks are not popular because their performance issues can easily be discarded compared to Java. They are popular because they make a tradeoff between development speed and execution speed. Better hardware may change that tradeoff slightly, but human labor will likely still be more expensive than the servers running the applications, so this changes nothing.

I don't think Java will disappear from the web any time soon. It is way too pervasive for that. I see it more like the new COBOL: in 100 years, people will still be interfacing with ancient Java apps, only to move on as soon as possible to more modern environments (that may or may not still use the JVM for their execution.)

<comment><USER20> >Secondly, Ruby on Rails and other dynamic frameworks are not popular because their performance issues can easily be discarded compared to Java. They are popular because they make a tradeoff between development speed and execution speed.

But that's the crux of his argument. If storage speed improves by leaps and bounds it becomes comparatively more expensive (from a performance standpoint) to use these other languages. The terms of the tradeoff change.

<comment><USER19> Yes, but hardware will actually become cheaper and faster, not more expensive and slower and therefore hardware resources also become less relevant. The terms of the tradeoff actually change in favour of "easy" development frameworks. It is true that Java will benefit from this more than Ruby and friends will, but that doesn't really change the reasons people choose these anyway (because it is not about performance, it is about labour).

<comment><USER21> This is the same argument made when claiming that JS will catch up with native app development.

It's a flawed argument: any solution that relies on 'hardware will get faster' will only ever be able to catch up to yesterday's state of the art.

Meanwhile, the state of the art will move forward as it takes advantage of increased resources or lower operational costs.

<comment><USER19> Yes, but what is the state of the art of most server-side web apps, really. Even the most successful web apps don't do all that exciting stuff. Most are just pushing data around and perform well enough with whatever tools you throw at it. In many cases performance is simply not that much of an issue compared to other factors such as development speed.

Javascript is a front-end technology and therefore it is really different and not really suitable for comparison in this case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Wow, this guys knowledge is wrong.

Dynamic languages can be faster than C now, and are only improving. Implementations like pypy, and luajit2 really are rocking. JavaScript implementations are also getting real fast.

C++ doesn't need to use manual memory management, and hasn't for ages. You can use it, but it is optional. Perl was often mixed with C/C++ libraries, including mod_perl with apache - the real webserver written in C.

With WebGL there is coming a massive amount of GPU power available to apps from JavaScript. Which also has available WebWorkers, which allow multi core use. As well, as vector instructions. The speed available for processing is truly amazing.

There's just too much wrong in this article, so I'll just stop writing about it now. Usually I enjoy his articles, but this one is way off. On the other hand, maybe it is just a really good troll?

<comment><USER23> > Dynamic languages can be faster than C now, and are only improving.

You're a bit too enthusiastic here, imo. JIT compiled code can in theory outperform AOT compiled code because of dynamic recompilation of hot code paths. However, you can get some of the benefits of runtime code generation via profile-guided and link-time optimizations without any runtime overhead.

In practice, no dynamic language is faster than C (AOT compilation), and they rarely approach Java (AOT compilation to bytecode + JIT compilation to native code) where raw performance is concerned.

<comment><USER24> That was my view yesterday. Then I benchmarked some JavaScript (CoffeeScript) code, and the same algo in C code and my world changed. I know that I could have optimized my C code better (I don't think I even turned optimization on), but I could have optimized my JavaScript better too.

<comment><USER25> That seems like a very small and somewhat flawed data point to be drawing any conclusions from.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This article is indeed cringe-worthy. Not because he's defending Java, but because of all the strong opinions clearly based on a weak understanding of what he's talking about.

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm a Rubyist and I actually buy his basic argument, but the technical _details_ are out of date/wrong and it reduces his credibility. I don't know if Cringely is a developer but it doesn't read as if he is and his point would have been better made from a higher level rather than playing the trendy dynamic language-bashing card.

<comment><USER28> He is a tech journalist, who has worked for infoworld and PBS. So far as I know he hasn't written a line of code in his life.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This article is nonsense. It deserves nothing but ridicule.

The popularity of dynamic scripting languages had nothing to do with databases, and everything to do with prevailing fashion, compiler technology, and industry priorities. We've had fast databases for decades now, and good freely available databases for about half as long.

Even if you take this point as a charity, the timelines don't match up. There just isn't a link between Java and all this. Technology has advanced a lot since the early 90's and we're dealing with a lot of new languages, VMs, and language design.

There simply aren't causal links anywhere in this chain of argument.

"Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them..." -- It doesn't matter who said it, it is correct.

</comment><comment><USER30> His argument is that slow languages are acceptable now because databases are slow due to slow hard drives. But this seems not right to me. Most databases eat as much RAM as they can get their hands on, and in any reasonable sized setup, the frontend and database will be on different servers so you still have to factor in internet work transit time. What this boils down to is that harddrive speed increases won't make as much of a difference as he is counting on because

a) They aren't necessarily the biggest bottleneck now

b) Even if they were a bottleneck, we still often have network transit time to account for, making DB access still relatively dog slow.

This doesn't even take into account the entirely different set of arguments that other languages like php and python are an order of magnitude faster than ruby 1.8 (and ruby 1.9 is faster too) and that Java is considered by many a horrible language, and no speed increase in the world would make them willingly use it.

<comment><USER31> Yah, his arguments are silly.

Sure, Java is faster, but people left for/use Ruby (mostly Rails) because making a web app in Java became horribly inefficient. I know, I did this for years and left for that exact reason. Spring, Hibernate, jars that all used different logging that leaked memory in different ways, _deploying_ , verbose syntax - it all became too much for me.

I'm sure Scala will address some of these things, but if anything, I think what will materialize is the _opposite_ of his argument. If anything, faster 'disks' and databases will just allow people to use Ruby or Python even more. I'm not sure Ruby will ever be as fast as Java, but again, that's never the reason why I left the Java world for Ruby/Rails. Productivity was.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Does Cringely ever actually write code? And if not, why would we consider that he has any degree of credibility on this topic?

<comment><USER33> I remember when Cringely was interesting; sadly, he's gone the John C. Dvorak route of pulling stupid, provocative assertions out of his ass.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> (as a full-time Java and occasional wannabe Rail programmer)

I think there will always be a huge % of website where raw performance doesn't matter. I don't recall PHP being a high performing language either. But, for those websites that are constrained by disk access perhaps they will prefer a fast performing language. I'm not convinced it will be Java though, just because speed of development is still going to be important. Perhaps it will be a JVM language or perhaps it will be something new like Go, Node.js or Scala.

</comment><comment><USER35> A rising tide raises all boats. Increased hardware and database speed will not make Rails less attractive it will make it more so. Far from exposing Ruby's sluggishness (which itself will be less and less of an issue), it will expose how easy it always was to solve most (I said _most_ ) scaling issues horizontally.

The majority of the old "Rails doesn't Scale" canard was based on perception and CPU benchmarking that had little if anything to do with actual scaling issues in the real world.

If -- if! -- SSD and other hardware advances remove the classic bottleneck for performance -- the Database -- then 1) the question of performance will become less of a political issue for departments, and there will be far less incentive to look for a scapegoat ("let's get rid of Rails then, it's slow, right??") and 2) in the majority of situations where latency is a problem for a Rails (or Django, etc.) deployment, then horizontal scaling becomes the simple solution, which in fact it always was.

But the biggest reason to use a framework like Django/Rails, etc. will not go away with better hardware: time to market. Use of these frameworks has enabled a number of high-profile sites to get to market quickly recently and handle some heavy-duty traffic by any standards. Can you imagine a Groupon rolling out on top of a J2EE stack?

<comment><USER36> This is why large web applications written in Ruby/Rails could easily port to JRuby. In fact, we are looking at doing this for our server platform as the initial performance numbers CRUSHED passenger/Rails. Our infrastructure guys even suggested we may be able to decommission some of our servers based on initial performance numbers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I was surprised he didn't mention more agile Java web frameworks like Play! (fairly much awesome) and GWT and/or SmartGWT (I use them a lot for customer work, but prefer Play! for my own projects).

I am also surprised he didn't talk about alternative JVM languages like Clojure and JRuby, which are great languages for the JVM for some types of applications.

</comment><comment><USER38> Good grief, please move this off the front page. The guy obviously doesn't know what he's talking about.

<comment><USER39> Yes, but he's a popular journalist, who frequently makes some interesting observations about the IT/tech industry _business_.

The entertainment and discussion value today, though, is that he is indeed full of crap this time. Not saying you're wrong about his subject knowledge, just why people are reading it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> My best guess is that, as the bottleneck goes back into the application (and out of external dependencies like databases, disk, network), there will be an increasing pressure towards better multi-processor support (we are not going back to single cores anytime soon) and, of course, faster executable code. Unlike Cringely, my bet goes toward using more and more JIT'ed code (as in PyPy and v8) and better use of asynchronous APIs instead of lower-level languages. Of course, better integration with native code (as in "compiled from a reasonable language") will also be highly prized and a tool worth looking into.

</comment><comment><USER40> This is an unbelievable post. We're going to move back to _Java_ , because..... _file access will suddenly be an order of magnitude faster_ , therefore dynamic languages will suddenly be _too slow_?

what form of crack is this ?

<comment><USER9> Yeah. He's also assuming that fast file access equals fast databases, which is partly true and partly utterly wrong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> The JVM is going to be around for a long time. I'm thoroughly enjoying myself writing rails apps on jruby, bundling them as a WAR file, and then sticking them in tomcat. Too easy.

</comment><comment><USER42> This article appears to make the following argument:

1\. Ruby/Rails developers use Ruby/Rails even though it is slow because storage access is slower (and thus the bottleneck).

2\. Storage access is about to get much faster as people switch from spinning disks to SSDs.

3\. Therefore, people will start using faster performing languages because app server language will become the bottleneck.

However, there are two questions I have about this argument:

1\. How much faster are SSDs in common database scenarios? Presumably, they are much faster for point queries? But is it 2x, 10x, or 100x? How much faster are they per dollar (e.g., how do SSDs compare to tons of spinning disks in RAID)? Will they impact common caching scenarios (e.g., memcache)?

2\. Are app servers ever the bottleneck? Modern web development seems designed for stateless, horizontal scaling ("scale out") at the app server layer. Further, this stateless, horizontal scale out requires no effort for even the smallest shops, through things like Heroku, App Engine, EC2, and similar services. Will it ever make sense to trade off expensive programmer time (by coding in a lower level language) for less app servers at all but the most extremely popular websites? Is there some compelling reason the app server layer should not be stateless?

</comment><comment><USER43> When someone says things like this, I have to ask if they _really_ understand the difference between a language and a framework:

 _Under Ruby, we put C++. On top of Ruby we put the Rails web framework. It's not very common to actually code anything in Ruby. You pretty much only see people coding Ruby while using the Rails framework which governs the whole thing._

 _You can replace Ruby here with Python, Django or Groovy and it is still correct._

</comment><comment><USER44> His argument is basically that slower dynamic languages like Ruby are popular because databases are slow, and databases are slow because disks are slow. But databases are not slow because of disk speeds. Disk access is pretty fast compared to network speeds. Databases are slow because of the join algorithms they use, because of the way data are structured, etc.

<comment><USER45> In a modern datacenter, network is significantly faster than disk. See Jeff Dean's numbers everyone should know. [http://www.google.com/imgres?q=google+numbers+everyone+shoul...](http://www.google.com/imgres?q=google+numbers+everyone+should+know&um=1&hl=en&sa=N&biw=1862&bih=1083&tbm=isch&tbnid=Z-o- Fiwd8NGEMM:&imgrefurl=http://doubleclix.wordpress.com/2010/11/11/google-a- study-in-scalability-and-a-little-systems-horse- sense/&docid=h6N4kIPchU34oM&imgurl=http://doubleclix.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/numberseveryoneshouldknow.png&w=595&h=444&ei=jeGVTrtJrdSIAsmhuMQN&zoom=1&iact=rc&dur=313&sig=107667830273554061378&page=1&tbnh=135&tbnw=181&start=0&ndsp=56&ved=1t:429,r:0,s:0&tx=143&ty=81)

Databases are slow for many reasons. The most common is that your dataset doesn't fit into memory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> The writer's argument pretty much boils down to the claim that java will be faster than ruby on rails even more than now. For technical reasons why he claims this, read the article. I don't know enough to know if his technical claim is true or not, but here is why I won't be switching from rails to java anytime soon.

I previously worked with c# and asp.net which may be comparable to java in many regards. I currently work with rails. In my experience, the ability to build rapid prototypes with rails simply trumps marginal gain you might get out of performance improvement with .net or java frameworks. I think the writer also agrees with this statement. Pretty much anything you build with java, you can build faster with ruby on rails. So I'll probably stick with rails for a while.

Things might certainly be different for larger firms that have exhaustive developer resources to close the gap of developing time between java and ruby.

<comment><USER39> It's been 2005 since I worked on ASPX.NET & C#, but this was a different kind of Evil than stuff like Struts. JSP/servlet setup isn't _too_ bad, but even more clumsy slow stuff typically gets piled on top.

Rails is cool, though. But it's not what feeds the kids out here in Sacramento. At least not yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> This doesn't make any sense. It's relatively easy to horizontally scale web servers. Perhaps at huge scale this would an issue, but I would imagine it's relatively easy for most developers to line up servers/instances behind a load balancer and have at it. The database is always going to be harder to scale because it holds state.

</comment><comment><USER48> He makes an interesting point about disk latency; but network latency remains, and seems to be getting far worse due to assembling services to render a page.

Although his implicit point that users care about latency is correct, it may be that they care even more about other things - such as the information richness from combining those services; and indirectly, the entirely new webapps made possible by the flexibility of this modular approach. After all, they've put up with slowness for a long time. e..g historically, each time desktop became faster, users happily allowed it to be absorbed in to GUIs, layers and layers of modules, including C# and... Java.

Even if he's right, we might go back to Java the same way we went back to Perl...

</comment><comment><USER49> I think he's correct in pointing out the trend of faster disk seeks and database accesses. But I don't think he's right in his assessment about Java (the language) coming back. Java's not the only game in town on the JVM anymore. Clojure and Scala are options.

Developers would do away with databases if they could, and just use data structures since objects don't map well to relational (ORM problem). So I think as disk access gets faster, either languages will move away from objects, or storage will move away from relational. And the techniques of ORM will only be reserved for really big data.

</comment><comment><USER50> Oracle's control over Java has seriously dampened my enthusiasm for it.

<comment><USER51> Right. If someone builds something interesting enough to get on Oracle's radar, then they become an obvious target for litigation. Doesn't make sense to build anything with Java, when there are so many other free alternatives available.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> I will agree with what he says about Ruby. When you think of Ruby you think of Rails, an amazing framework with amazing things that I wish was in Django. As Javascript becomes more powerful I feel like we won't need server-side frameworks anymore. Everything will shift to the clientside, only requesting the server once with other requests for the database.

This becomes especially true with the existence of frameworks like backbone and new languages like Coffeescript that make Javascript exponentially easier.

</comment><comment><USER53> > These are slow as molasses

Not really, with stuff like Python, your bottleneck is most likely going to be I/O and data reading/writing.

> You can replace Ruby here with Python, Django or Groovy and it is still > correct.

Nope, with Python, unless you're using Django, most of your stuff is done with Python - there are frameworks like Flask but they provide a minimal set of tools to work with web concepts like routing and sessions.

CPU won't be the bottleneck until storage is as fast as CPUs. SSDs close the gap a tiny bit, but nowhere near enough.

</comment><comment><USER54> _It's not very common to actually code anything in Ruby. You pretty much only see people coding Ruby while using the Rails framework which governs the whole thing._

This seems like an unfair generalization. I have come across many large non- Rails Ruby projects, e.g. Homebrew, CloudFoundry, Fog. A lot of reasons why Ruby and the like are good for web development also extend to other types of development.

</comment><comment><USER55> SSDs really are going to change the game. As a Ruby developer, I'm hoping to see a new language created that is inspired by Ruby but is optimized for speed. Java will remain insufficiently aesthetic, but a new language could be both fast and pleasant to use. I know there are options out there, but none have appealed to me enough yet to consider leaving Ruby.

<comment><USER5> > As a Ruby developer, I'm hoping to see a new language created that is > inspired by Ruby but is optimized for speed.

You don't need a new language - all you need is a better runtime. See what PyPy does for Python. A good JIT also goes a long way - people forget how terrible Java performance was in the late 90's.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> The second coming of Java isn't Java, it's the JVM. Look at the rise of Clojure, Scala, and other JVM-based languages.

</comment><comment><USER57> It is time like this that me more certain why frameworks like RingoJS or Helma.org is way way ahead of it's time. It use a dynamic scripting language (javascript), but sitting on top of JVM. The code are compile to byecode.

It has the best of both worlds. (Dynamic language and speed of java).

</comment><comment><USER58> Ruby may seem easier to pick up than java, but it gets pretty complicated when you actually try to understand its power.

Try explaining eigenclasses to some java-only developers sometime.

<comment><USER59> I have a hard time believing that Java developers would fail to understand the concept of a singleton, the most pervasive anti-pattern in Java code.

<comment><USER58> It isn't the same thing, despite the same name occasionally being used. It also gets a lot more complex than expanded upon in the other comment.

Eg. what is the eigenclass of an eigenclass?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> The JVM is already seeing a resurgence with Scala/Clojure/etc.

What about the JIT projects? LuaJIT, Rubinius, PyPy and V8? All of these are close enough to Java to not matter.

</comment><comment><USER61> Tough prediction to make considering it never went anywhere and Android is everywhere now

</comment><comment><USER62> The second coming of Java is already here. It's called Scala.

<comment><USER12> If this is better then I guess I'll stick with Java:

      object HelloWorld {
        def main(args: Array[String]) {
          println("Hello, world!")
        }
      }

Different is != better, not in my view.

<comment><USER63> What's wrong in your example?

Do you prefer "public static void main" ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> Maybe Java not so much, but languages and frameworks that run in the JVM and are regarded as equals in the mind of the average CTO will definitely benefit over those languages that do not.

Keep in mind that Cringely provided no stats to compare and his ideas of what goes on in Rubyland are similar to those of a Luddite newspaper columnist refusing to upgrade his iPhone because of the kids on the Facebooks.

Mr. Cringely, the cool kids have grown up.

<comment><USER5> > regarded as equals in the mind of the average CTO

Your local average is better than my local average

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> I'm really tired of language debates when 90% of effort goes into libraries, APIs, and IDE/editor integration, not the language itself. I'd take modern C++ over, say, PHP, as long as I get to use some really awesome, common, standardized web server library.

If Java becomes the new hotness again, it will be only marginally due to performance, and primarily due to the endless cycles of "new hotness" and obsessiveness in the industry.

</comment><comment><USER66> I don't understand. Now Ruby and database are slow, so it's OK to use Rails. When a database is fast in future, I will stop using Rails, LOL.

</comment><comment><USER67> I never pay much attention to anything that John Dvorak says. He doesn't seem to have much knowledge or insight into the industry, especially at a technical level. But he sure gets a lot of press when he says anything because he knows how to craft articles that have the sheen of seeming technical cluefulness and sophistication and contain just enough of a troublesome morsel of conflict to raise eyebrows and draw attention. But ultimately it tends to be little more than questionably founded pablum.</comment>