Before the Electric Car Takes Over, Someone Needs to Reinvent the Battery - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-06/before-the-electric-car-takes-over-someone-needs-to-reinvent-the-battery <comment><USER2> Maybe the solution is to have better business practices around the technology that we do have. Why does the battery needs to be part of the car at all? It clearly depreciates and is technologically disrupted on a different time frame than the car itself. A Tesla Roadster is a fine car and will continue to be for decades, if you can only refresh it's battery pack every 10 years or so.

I'm thinking of a modular battery that is hot swapable at the charge stations and where you only pay it's depreciation based on what you actually use. This would significantly lower ownership costs for light users and drastically increase efficiency and flexibility for heavy users who are no longer dependent on charge times. Since it's modular, you load the number of units you need, say one battery unit for a Leaf, two for a Model S or 10 units for a light truck, all in standardized format and with their own computing that tracks things like life span, charge cycles performed by the user himself for proper billing etc.

I know Tesla experimented with and later abandoned battery swap, but that's predictable without the proper business structure in place, no one is going to leave the most expensive part of their car back at the charge station. If you were to purchase a Model 3 at $15 - $20K and have the option to pay for "battery as service" at prices comparable to gasoline, people would flock to buy electrics.

<comment><USER3> Same reason batteries in your phone or laptop are each a different shape and non-removable. They are an integral part of the design, a significant part of the weight & volume, with significant thermal concerns, etc... many electric cars today even use the battery as a "stressed member", aka the battery provides rigidity to the frame. How exactly will that be hotswappable in two minutes by John Doe?

Basically, the point is a standardized, easily removable, hotswappable widget makes a lot of sense when it's a minor item. But when it's half the weight, value, volume, and engineering challenge, you have to sacrifice all of those attributes to use the hotswap widget.

This originally made me think, if only we could pump fluid electrolyte in & out of the car, and let the battery take whatever form it likes. Then I realized that's called a flow battery, and then I realized that a hydrogen fuel cell is a type of flow battery.

<comment><USER4> Most laptop batteries are standard lithium ion cells in a specially molded case.

<comment><USER5> While the 18650 Lithium Ion cell is a standardized shape, the chemistry between Lithium Ion implementations is different from company to company.

A big reason for Tesla's design was that Panasonic's Cells (a partner of Tesla) was superior on power-density / weight.

I expect that power-density / weight will continue to be an important factor in electric cars, especially when you need thousands of these cells to power an electric vehicle. As such, I don't expect lithium ion cells (even "standard" 18650 ones) to become a commodity.

<comment><USER6> How are they not literally already a commodity?

I get that you said that they each have their own chemistry, but are the owners of all of the chemistries choosing their customers?

<comment><USER7> My understanding is that there's very little demand for Tesla's chemistry (low cobalt NCA). All other automakers prefer NCM, primary because:

* better sustained performance compared to NCA

* better peak/burst performance compared to NCA

* easy to adjust formula to show preference for capacity, performance, or longevity (most automakers skip on the 3rd)

Tesla prefers NCA battery because:

* it has more capacity / weight

* it's much cheaper due to lower cobalt requirements (main reason)

The main reason traditional automakers tend to shy away from NCA because:

* it is far less stable than NCM, which puts it a much higher risk for fire or explosions

* it costs more than NCM to make stable (I suspect Tesla chem is cutting corners in this area)

You can decide whether the trade off of safety for range is worthwhile for you; traditional automakers err on the side of safety.

<comment><USER8> I've encountered many reports of issues with safety regarding autopilot or breakdown/less repairability of the vehicles due to lack of experience in design, but what evidence is there for Tesla cutting corners regarding battery safety specifically?

<comment><USER7> Just the choice of using NCA batteries over NCM could be viewed as a safety cost cutting measure.

Here's a scientific paper about the safety of various battery chemistries (warning, PDF): [https://res.mdpi.com/wevj/wevj-06-00572/article_deploy/wevj-...](https://res.mdpi.com/wevj/wevj-06-00572/article_deploy/wevj-06-00572.pdf)

Summery is that, compared to NCM, NCA inhibits thermal runaway at much lower temperatures, offers significantly less short circuit resistance, slightly less overcharge buffer before thermal runaway, significantly faster thermal runaway after overcharge buffer is exhausted.

The result of thermal runaway is fire or explosion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> No they don't, everything is already in place. In a few years the industry will catch up to Tesla and we'll see further price decreases across the board and mass EV adoption using current tech.

The battery will have to be reinvented for large planes to become electric, but that's a different discussion. Small planes will be able to ride off the EV battery tech to start the electrification of that whole industry.

<comment><USER10> Small planes will be able to ride off the EV battery tech for about 50 miles max.

<comment><USER11> Yeah but you can use the potential energy of the plane to produce power, just like car going down hill. Probably not gone work for small planes but it does have interesting advantages and new ways of thinking about planes.

<comment><USER12> For an airplane, there's no particular reason to turn potential energy into chemical energy for storage. Use the potential energy more directly to glide down to your approach point.

Airplanes are typically "driven" (using positive power) all throughout the flight regime, including descent and approach.

<comment><USER13> > Airplanes are typically "driven" (using positive power) all throughout the > flight regime, including descent and approach.

No, not really. Descent in most aircraft is typically done at idle. In jet powered aircraft, final approach will be done with the engines at some speed above idle, but that is to minimize spool-up time during a go-around, rather than because the aircraft needs the thrust.

<comment><USER14> Even so, the aircraft still needs to make a comfortable gradual descent. It must maintain lift as it descends, otherwise it will stall (aerodynamically) and fall out of the sky. The controlled descent takes most of the energy that you might think could be recovered by e.g. windmilling the electric fan motors as generators.

<comment><USER13> I'm not sure what you're talking about with "must maintain lift as descends otherwise it will stall and fall out of the sky"...

Wings stall when they exceed their critical angle of attack. A descent is inherently a low AoA maneuver. Heck, in pretty much all aircraft of decent performance, they have devices on the wings to help "spoil" the lift of the wings to help the plane descend more quickly. They're sometimes called speed brakes, sometimes called spoilers.

<comment><USER14> Right, but you need a certain amount of forward speed relative to descent to maintain that AoA (assuming you want to maintain a fairly gradual, level descent; most passengers would find a steep nose-down descent alarming).

If you scrub off all your forward speed by turning your propeller/fan into a generator to charge the batteries, you have to push the nose down to maintain AoA.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The article begins by contradicting itself: "To deliver an electric vehicle that's cheaper, safer and capable of traveling 500 miles on a single charge ..."

That's not a "car". A "car", as driven by a billion people every day, takes trips whose distances have a power-law distribution falling off from ~2 miles down to 150 miles, by which point you are looking at < 0.1% of trips. A large fraction of cars have never been driven on a 500 mile trip.

<comment><USER16> > A large fraction of cars have never been driven on a 500 mile trip.

Consumers base buying decisions on the _longest_ trip they expect to take.

Even if 360 days a year they commute for 10 miles, and then for 4th of July / Thanksgiving / winter holidays they take an extended 300+ mile road trip, they will consider a car capable of traveling 300+ miles.

<comment><USER17> That makes it sound like a marketing / consumer optics problem then, not an engineering one.

When I was a kid my dad drove and older classic car daily, and for any trip longer than ~300 miles he would just get a rental and put the miles on that.

If people could get accustomed to that workflow, I think the need for 500 miles+ electric range is almost non-existent.

Daily drive the electric car, and spend ~$150 for a gas rental car once or twice a year for the big trip to visit the in-laws.

<comment><USER14> Yeah but rentals are extremely inconvenient. You need to arrange a ride to the rental place. Most of them close at 5:00pm unless you're close to an airport. So now you're also taking time off work. The paperwork takes at least 20-30 minutes for some ridiculous reason. They will try to upsell you on a larger vehicle, extra insurance, etc. It's a pain.

Once or twice a year it's tolerable. If you get to doing it monthly or more, it's becomes a major detractor.

<comment><USER18> > The paperwork takes at least 20-30 minutes for some ridiculous reason.

I am guessing you are not in the US. Over there, most big rental companies will let you join their program, club, or whatever they want to call it, for free(online, even). Which means you are pre-screened. You can pre-decline all this stuff you are talking about.

Then, you just make a reservation online, walk to the parking lot, pick your car, and just hand your id for them to check when leaving the parking lot. The whole process takes a couple of minutes really. When you are back, you just park at the dropoff location and walk away. At no point you have to bother with going to the counter.

The business hours can be inconvenient, I agree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> People are trying, Tesla is investing HEAVILY into battery technology and research.

CPUs 30 years ago were 8 bits and barely scratching 10s of mhz, we arrived at our modern era through incremental improvements, not by saying "we need to stop and wait for someone to invent something better!"

<comment><USER20> this. Think of the absurd amount of wasted investment that's stupidly gone into internal combustion engine research over the last century.

<comment><USER21> What? Cars today are _way_ more fuel efficient and have _way_ fewer emission than they did even 10 years ago, let alone 50 years ago.

I'd say that investment turned out to be very valuable.

<comment><USER22> That is true, but they are also immensely complex - I wouldn't say it was 'wasted' effort (as the above poster did), but modern ICE engines are ludicrously complex electro-mechanical devices. If this much effort is expended on improving battery technology (as I think it will be), then the future is very bright for EVs because they are already much better than ICE in many ways - simplicity and reliability as well as emissions.

I think it will be much like in F1 - remember when the limitation on gearbox and engine replacements in a season were introduced and many commentators said it would lead to there being no cars on the grid at the end of the season? What actually happened was the engineers created hitherto undreamt of levels of reliability. I'm sure the same will happen for EV batteries once they are the only game in town and ICE is no longer any kind of option.

<comment><USER23> Did they create that F1 rule to see if better engines could be developed?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I disagree with the premise of the question. How many people really need a 500 mile range? How often does the average person do a long road trip? Is it really such a hassle to stop and stretch your legs (and maybe eat) while charging in the middle of a once-annual road trip?

Hell, even if you're doing that drive weekly, you might still prefer the electric since it'd save you a lot on gas money, even though it enforces a mid-trip break.

<comment><USER25> Most new EVs have more range than the average human bladder. After four hours of driving, most people are going to need to pee. Current-generation EVs on 50kW fast-chargers can hit 80% charge in 30 minutes, which is only slightly longer than the average dwell time at a freeway service plaza. 150kW chargers are now commercially available, which (when connected to a vehicle with suitable battery cooling) cut the time to 80% charge to about 15 minutes.

I'm sure that some people do drive for over four hours without taking a break, but I don't think that it's a safe or healthy thing to do.

The technology is good enough already - we're just waiting for it to become widely distributed.

<comment><USER26> 30 minutes is close to the _average_?

Wow. I don't think I've ever spent more than 10 minutes at a gas station.

<comment><USER27> Ever time yourself? I'm not doubting your estimate, but I wonder how close your are. Out of idle curiosity (and for more purposeful reasons), I've timed myself on the motorcycle. Pay-at-the-pump, and don't get off the bike, and I'm out of there like a LeMans pit stop. But getting off, hitting the restroom, and grabbing/paying for drink took longer than I would have guessed.

And as sibling comment points out, it all goes out the window if you have passengers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm surprised there isn't a discussion of the Goodenough lithium glass battery [0]. The fact that I haven't read about replication or a failure to replicate is really weird to me given how world-changing such a technology would be if it were proven to be viable.

0: [https://cleantechnica.com/2018/06/26/the-solid-state- lithium...](https://cleantechnica.com/2018/06/26/the-solid-state-lithium-ion- battery-has-john-goodenough-finally-done-it/)

</comment><comment><USER29> This is coming from a person who would like to buy an electric car. But lets say we get to batteries that can survive incredibly high charge rates, aka the 10 minute charge time.

Some quick math: 100kWh battery needs 100 kW to charge in an hour. To charge in 10 minutes we need 100kW * 6 = 600kW.

Now that is a bit of an over simplification but it gives the magnitude of instantaneous power needed.

From a grid perspective charging a lot of cars slowly is not terribly difficult to handle because it appears mostly as base load, but if you have ton of cars starting and stopping charging at 600kW you will get massive fluctuations.

Thankfully a lot of cars will just slow charge overnight most of the time. Then for a fast charging station they could have large batteries or super capacitors to help offset the fluctuations.

<comment><USER30> There is already a way to manage that: remove the petrol from petrol stations and add huge batteries / capacitors. Charge those at normal grid load when no one is using the station then unload like crazy.

<comment><USER31> This has the added advantage of levelling the grid load beyond just the charging, like V2G without the car.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This is ridiculous. Good-enough solutions are here already. Daimler just issued purchase contracts for $20 BILLION worth of battery components!

[https://electrek.co/2018/12/11/daimler-billion-battery- cells...](https://electrek.co/2018/12/11/daimler-billion-battery-cells- electric-vehicle/)

</comment><comment><USER33> Talk about moving the goal posts. Tesla's are way less flammable than gasoline cars and some have more range (my dad's Ford has like 250 miles of range)

<comment><USER34> >Tesla's are way less flammable than gasoline cars

This is false. Talk to any tow truck driver. A breached battery is almost a guaranteed fire. A breached gas tank is nothing of the sort. A battery pack provides its own ignition source. Gasoline needs external ignition. While external ignition sources are available on cars they don't seem to ignite with nearly the same frequency.

In theory the EV can be less flammable. In practice they seem to be about the same (Volt, Leaf, etc) or worse (Model S) than your average ICE car. It all comes down to the design. Pinto < Tesla < average ICE car.

<comment><USER35> These FEMA stats suggest that only 1.6% of car fires are related to the fuel tank or lines

[https://www.usfa.fema.gov/downloads/pdf/statistics/v19i2.pdf](https://www.usfa.fema.gov/downloads/pdf/statistics/v19i2.pdf)

"Mechanical failure or malfunction was the leading contributing factor of highway vehicle fires (45 percent). These mechanical failures include a leak or break in a component of the vehicle, automatic or manual control failures, or the use of an improper type of fuel. An electrical failure or malfunction, such as a short circuit, was a contributing factor in 21 percent of highway vehicle fires. The misuse of a material or product, such as spilling flammable liquid or gas too close to the vehicle, was the third leading factor contributing to the ignition of the fires (13 percent)."

That same document goes into lots of detail about what heat source initiates those fires and what materials are actually catching fire.

"Where the necessary data were available, the leading category of items first ignited in fatal highway vehicle fires was "liquids, piping, filters" (65 percent). Flammable liquids and gases in general were, by far, the most deadly (67 percent of deaths). Specifically, fuel in or from the engine area was the second leading item first ignited in all highway vehicle fires (18 percent) but was, by far, the leading item in both fatal fires (43 percent) and deaths (45 percent). Additionally, insulation around electrical wiring or cables was responsible for 29 percent of all highway vehicle fires, but only 2 percent of fatal fires and 2 percent of deaths."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I really thought a Volt like car would be the answer. Electric for most of the year, but a gas powered motor to go for those vacations away. I don't know why that wasn't more popular.

<comment><USER29> So one of the major perks of electric cars are fewer moving parts. Once you add a gas engine to the car, you increase the weight, remove space for batteries, add cost, and finally add a lot more complexity and moving parts. Now the gas engine added convenience but personally it doesn't add enough to compensate for the downsides.

But I would not rule out plug in hybrids, from what I have read GM stopped making it since it was a sedan which are not selling great for them. But also because the newer bolt platform is a better base for an EV or PHEV, since it was designed from the ground up to run on electric motors.

<comment><USER37> Yeah, GM killing the Volt seems more a weird side effect of GM's manufacturing plant shell game than an intentional strategy. The Volt was original intended to be the "savior" of the venerable Hamtramck plant, as it was the future of what was to be built there. The original goal was to make more of the cars over time at Hamtramck resemble the Volt, which was closer to a cross-over in G1. The short-sighted decision for cost cutting in the G2 Volt was to push it more proper sedan-like to make it more like everything else that Hamtramck was producing. So the Volt shutting down was further short-sighted side effect of GM killing all sedans/Hamtramck.

Obvious rumors are that GM is already in the works on a new cross-over PHEV. It's dumb that the sedan-ification of the Volt brand between G1 and G2 probably means that it will be yet another new brand instead of just the obvious Volt G3. (It's also a dumb shame that GM didn't actually save Hamtramck in what could have been a smart move of electrifying more of it and moving it all more cross-over-esque according to the original Volt plan.)

<comment><USER14> The Volt is dead? Hm. There are still some sitting at the lot at my local Chevy dealer. Didn't know that it had been killed.

<comment><USER37> GM shut down all sedan manufacturing including the Volt (and Cruze and others), which described before the Volt was probably more of an accidental bystander than an intentional part of GM's electric strategy. The whole thing was a short term financial move that some Shareholders just about demanded after Ford did similar and eliminated all their sedans. Americans "don't buy" American sedans right now and so all American automotive manufacturing is focusing solely on SUVs, Trucks, and Cross-Overs as of 2018, _again_. Everything about this cycle is cynical and short-sighted, as Americans are still buying European and Japanese sedans at basically the same rates as always, and the SUV/Truck market (and maybe the Cross-Over market too) and its gleefully (to Shareholder earnings) high margins rises and falls directly in proportion to gasoline costs.

<comment><USER38> > Americans "don't buy" American sedans right now and so all American > automotive manufacturing is focusing solely on SUVs, Trucks, and Cross-Overs > as of 2018, again.

GM is keeping the electric Bolt, which is not an SUV, Truck, or Crossover.

The Volt, as a hybrid, doesn't fit their long term strategy, so wasn't spared the axe coming down due to the short-term situation with the sedan market.

<comment><USER37> The Bolt is closer to a cross-over than a true sedan (which mostly just goes to show the categories are dumb and another reason "no one buys sedans" is a stupid statement because the distinctions are more gray than black-and-white), but more importantly has never been manufactured in the sedan-mostly Hamtramck plant.

GM turned around and admitted that PHEV hybrids are still in their current long term strategy, to expect at least a "true" cross-over version in the near future, if not also SUV and Truck plans. Like I said before, the problem with the Volt seemed to be that G2 was nothing but a sedan made in the sedan plant that GM wanted to drop, not that it was a hybrid or electric. I still think that Volt G1's form factor would have been spared because it would have been easier to retool it next to the Bolt or in another cross-over facility.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Now that's strange. Electric cars are working pretty well, and then this guy comes along and says we have to wait for a new technology that doesn't work yet. Who is "David Stringer", anyway? A pseudonym, perhaps? ("Stringer" in journalism is a freelance journalist paid by the article.) There's a minor Arizona politician by that name, but that's about all Google has to say.

<comment><USER40> > _Electric cars are working pretty well_

They could work better, be cheaper, be safer, charge faster, have better range, and have longer cycle life for the battery, don't you think?

Better batteries are needed. Solid-state batteries have the potential to outperform conventional batteries. We'll see who commercializes them first.

ICE cars are still more practical than EVs today. ICE cars are cheaper to buy with better range and faster refuelling. If I want the most car for the least dollars then I'm buying a sensible Toyota, not a Tesla.

We're at the beginning of the end of the ICE car. EVs with fast charging, energy dense, highly durable solid-state batteries represent the genuine end of ICE cars.

> _Who is "David Stringer", anyway? A pseudonym, perhaps?_

That's an odd criticism coming from "Animats". Who is "Animats" anyway? A pseudonym, perhaps?

> _There 's a minor Arizona politician by that name, but that's about all > Google has to say._

DuckDuckGo says David Stringer is a senior reporter at Bloomberg:

[https://twitter.com/david_stringer](https://twitter.com/david_stringer)

[https://www.bloomberg.com/authors/ARMqcSMt218/david- stringer](https://www.bloomberg.com/authors/ARMqcSMt218/david-stringer)

<comment><USER39> I hold "ANIMATS" as a US registered trademark. I own "animats.com". I'm not anonymous. When I originally signed up for HN, I tried to use my own name, but it was taken.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> For an electric car, here is my summary: For a car, a 20 gallon tank of gasoline is tough to compete with.

E.g., the US is dotted with high density with gas stations, can fill a 20 gallon tank in just a few minutes, and at 20 MPG that tank will fuel the car for 400 miles.

For a battery, apparently so far the range is about 200 mile; for the readily available charging sources the charging time is much longer, maybe hours; and from a really powerful charging source the battery will get hot and need cooling (e.g., see the Jay Leno piece on the new, all electric Mercedes which does cool the battery while charging).

The weather is a significant issue: In hot weather, the battery needs more cooling. In cold weather, the battery loses lots of its power.

So I agree with the OP: For a good electric car, need a better battery. IIRC long ago a Ford executive stated "You build me a good battery, and I'll build you a good electric car."

Actually, all electric cars are not new but old and go way back to the first days of cars, e.g., before Ford's Model T. And as Leno mentioned, for all or nearly all the time since then, battery technology hasn't made much progress. Right: Battery technology is still based on basic chemistry, and that chemistry was understood well enough in 1900.

Of course, people saw all this 100+ years ago and for one solution tried _hybrids_ where a gasoline engine charged a battery. Apparently, net, that meant that the car had two sources of power, gasoline and a battery, and could get by with just one, the gasoline, which is just what has been done since then. Still there is some hope for hybrids.

Yes, there are some uses for electric vehicles. Still:

Yup, a 20 gallon tank of gasoline is tough to compete with.

<comment><USER42> This page ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density)) has a chart on energy density shows that gasoline contains roughyl 36 MegaJoules per Liter and 46 MJ per kg of energy density while a lithium-ion battery has less than 3 by both measures.

<comment><USER41> WOW. Good way to put it.

Also, as I've done a few times, can take your 36 megaJoules per liter and ...: Let's see, a Watt is a Joule per second. So the energy in 36 megaJoules would be a million Watts for 36 seconds. A liter is ballpark a quart, and a gallon is 4 quarts, so 20 gallons is 80 quarts or ballpark 80 liters, and even with a megaWatt power source we're talking charging time 36 times 80 seconds, a bit over 40 minutes.

So, drive up to a gas station, convenience store, plug in the mega Watt power source, get some lunch, check the air in the tires, clean the floor mats, put in a DVD for a movie, ....

Before you connect that megaWatt cable, let me step back about 50 feet and look in a different direction.

Let's see: My house has 100 A at 240 V, that is 24,000 Watts. So a mega Watt is ballpark 40 times that much. If use only half that power to charge the car battery, a mega Watt is 80 times that much. So the 40 minutes becomes 3200 minutes, something over 50 hours, two days. "Sorry, Boss, I'll be charging my battery on Monday and Tuesday and will be in on Wednesday. Since my commute is 100 miles a day, I'll need to do this two day charge once for each four working days. Or, I'll be okay Wednesday through Friday, drive another 100 miles on the weekend, and will charge again Monday and Tuesday of next week, too." Right, he could charge at work. Each day at work will need about six hours of charging at the full 100 A at 240 V.

Uh, at 10 cents per KWh, the 40 minutes at one megaWatt would cost: A megaWatt hour would be 1000 times a KWh and cost 1000 times 10 cents or $100. The 40 minutes would be 2/3rds of that or $66 or the same as gas at $3.30 a gallon. Not a bargain.

And that $3.30 per gallon applies wherever have to pay 10 per KWh, at a charging station, at home, at work, at a restaurant, etc. People don't give away gasoline and won't give away electric power for charging. In particular, a full charge like 20 gallons of gas at home, at 10 cents per KWh, will still cost the $66. Right, the gasoline burns with maybe only 30% efficiency, but there are efficiency losses from heat when charging the battery and again when driving the car.

Yup, for powering a private car used as they commonly are, a 20 gallon tank of gasoline is tough to compete with. For an electric, range is too short and charging time is too long. With electric power at 10 cents per KWh and gas at $2.75 a gallon, the cost will be ballpark much the same, no big savings either way.

Ah, maybe it's just me: I want a Corvette or Dodge with 700 HP! :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> The article is written as if solid-state battery designs are going to be the future. So my honest question is, is that really so? What about others, like Graphene batteries and supercapacitors [1][2]?

[1]: [https://www.graphene-info.com/graphene-batteries](https://www.graphene- info.com/graphene-batteries)

[2]: [https://www.graphene-info.com/graphene- supercapacitors](https://www.graphene-info.com/graphene-supercapacitors)

<comment><USER44> No mention of graphene in the article and this is the only mention of it here. We can't have the battery discussion without graphene. It's the future, imo. Soon as we learn how to charge it and maintain stability while doing so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> What we really need is a standardisation to cover for the improvements in the background. Kind of like a USB interface for batteries.

Imagine, you could buy a car, that has slots for you to attach standard batteries. You could leave the batteries charging at home, office, shops that lease you charged batteries(like gas stations) etc. It would also take care of "I live in an apartment and park my car by the side of the road, so no home charging.. problem".

Also, gets rid of the range anxiety if you know you could get batteries everywhere or at-least charge yours everywhere.

Now, when technology genuinely improves by a magnitude, replace the cells, but keep the interface for a decade or so.

Bonus if that standard catches on for other uses. Imagine same batteries being used for power tools at home, emergency power supply at home, camping stuff, plug those boxes into the edges of solar panels while they are not in the car etc.

Leave it to the competing business that are "battery suppliers" to figure out how to make them more efficient, cheaper, and do further R&D.

Car companies can stay at making cars that are essentially safe, aerodynamic shells with electric motors waiting to be powered up by customer supplied batteries.

<comment><USER46> The batteries are too heavy and bulky for most people to physically carry and install. The only way regular battery replacement can work is with a large automated system, which means it would have to be in a dedicated service station rather than an apartment complex.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> This is a good article on solid state batteries. But I think it is all wrong in claiming that we will have to wait for them before BEV autos will take over.

The fact is that BEV's are already better than ICE's in many ways, and the best, Tesla's, are so good they are busy taking away market share. And lithium ion batteries are steadily improving in characteristics and also getting cheaper. Furthermore, China, the world's largest auto market, is putting a very big push behind BEV autos, and many other governments are also making efforts.

From what I have read a tipping point is coming around 2023-25 when consumers will start flooding to BEV's, and ICE sales will start dropping rapidly. And then in another half decade or so solid state batteries will be ready and the trend will accelerate.

The basic message is that the century-long dominance of ICE cars is coming to an end and in the not-so-distant future, it's just a matter of time.

</comment><comment><USER48> There is no mention of Robert Murray Smith here, so I will add him as someone who has already reinvented the battery:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1jusadHkmM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1jusadHkmM)

This is only one example of what he's done.

</comment><comment><USER49> Half of the problem is solved, we only need the engineers to solve the last little part...:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkGMY63FF3Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkGMY63FF3Q)

</comment><comment><USER50> It's fine now, but if anyone gets close to the mythical solid state battery it would change everything. Trucks, trains, and bigger vehicle have no chance without them they'd weigh to much.

</comment><comment> village-idiot My big fear is weight. Road damage scales with the per-axle weight raised to the 4th power. EVs are quite heavy to compensate for the lower energy density of lithium ion batteries.

<comment><USER12> Taking a 4000 pound car (typical mid-sized sedan) and ballooning the weight to 5000 pounds (Tesla S) is 2.5x the road damage. (Tesla 3 is ~4000 pounds vs the 3600 of a comparable A4, so a factor of ~1.5x.)

By comparison, four 16000# axles on a trailer are 8192 times the road damage per mile (and likely drive a lot more miles) of the 4000# sedan.

<comment> village-idiot I agree that semi trucks represent a massive amount of road damage, and iirc the way we structure our road costs represents a $60B transfer of wealth to the trucking industry. I wish we'd reverse that, as we could then start seriously looking at trains as a more reasonable means of moving most of our bulk goods.

Of course, it's not like EV semitrucks won't have the same weight issues as passenger cars. The same issues with energy density apply there too. EV semitrucks will either need to be heavier or more plentiful to compensate for the loss of range or towing capacity compared to diesel.

As an aside, we need to revisit the 4,000lb standard for sedans. The heaviest Honda Civic weighs 3,000lb, my Mazda 3 weighs under 3,000lb, and a Mazda 6 weighs at most 3,500lb. These days you need a luxury or performance sedan before you start touching the 4,000lb mark.

<comment><USER12> > These days you need a luxury or performance sedan before you start touching > the 4,000lb mark.

Agreed. I picked 4000# as the reference against a Model S (which clearly competes more with an A6 or E-class than a Civic) and the Model 3 I compare more to an A4.

<comment> village-idiot None of those are "standard" sedans. Not by a long shot. It's perfectly reasonable to compare an A3 to a Model 3, but it's not reasonable to say that the standard sedan is 4000#, since Civics & similar outnumber Audis & similar by an order of magnitude or so.

The point still remains that an EV is about 8-12% heavier than a sedan in its same class (see sibling comment below). This will apply to semitrucks too as those electrify, which'll be a bigger deal than sedans.

<comment><USER12> A Civic or an A3 is not a mid-sized sedan by any stretch of that category. I used 4000# as a typical mid-size sedan as-driven weight with an allowance for a person or two and fuel.

<comment> village-idiot > A Civic or an A3 is not a mid-sized sedan by any stretch of that category.

The Civic sedan is only 2" smaller length wise and 2" narrower than a Tesla 3. Size wise, this is a perfectly fair comparison, and the Civic weights 1,000lbs less. That's a pretty close comparison from a size perspective.

You are correct about the A3, it is indeed much smaller than a Tesla 3. But the A4 is 1" longer than the 3 (identical in other dimensions), and weighs about 400lbs less.

> I used 4000# as a typical mid-size sedan as-driven weight with an allowance > for a person or two and fuel.

Curb weight includes all necessary equipment, including oil and gasoline for ICE vehicles. Given that there is no reason to expect that an EV driver is a different weight than an ICE driver, it's completely fair to compare the two by curb weight only.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> We neeed batteries that can charge at a rate faster than they can be discharged.

And we also need continuing advances in conductors, magnets, and alternatives batteries such as fuel cells.

<comment><USER52> I would love to have such batteries but I'm not sure we _need_ them. Doesn't hot-swapping effectively achieve net charge rates faster than discharge?

I can see why people might be less interested in hot-swapping for personal vehicles, but why isn't hot-swap on the table for buses and cab fleets? Is it because few people are willing to invest in R&D and infrastructure when sufficient batteries seem to be just around the corner?

<comment><USER51> Tesla tried to do the hot swap, and it presented a few problems.

First, the infrastructure cost is massive. You have to keep an inventory of expensive parts (the battery) on hand. Tesla tried to fix this by having you set an appointment, but that eliminated the whole point of hot swapping: convenience.

It's also harder to put a warranty on a battery if you're swapping them all the time. What if you get a dud swapped into your vehicle?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Really? This is a problem? How is a battery any different from any other auto part? Radiator, water pump, alternator, etc. Yours goes bad? You go to the auto parts store and get a new one with a "core" fee. You return your broken radiator, water pump, etc. and get your fee back and the re-manufacturer rebuilds yours for someone else to use. We don't NEED to have the same mileage as ICE vehicles. 80% of drivers are just fine on 100 miles a day. We don't NEED just ONE battery pack for all vehicles. Just get er dun, and get me my electric pickup!

</comment><comment><USER54> Oh, someone start to understand that... Many in the industrial sectors have understood it well only in the sixties...........

</comment><comment><USER55> um, no, it sure looks like the electric car is already taking over...

</comment><comment><USER56> The information in the article is good, but the premise is just a bunch of goalpost moving.

</comment><comment><USER57> It may be an unpopular opinion, but what about radioisotope thermoelectric generator? (Nuclear)

<comment><USER58> Also: extremely limited availability of the require isotopes. Even NASA has had to redesign missions to use solar instead because their supply was running out.</comment></comment>


Why Robotic Sports Will One Day Rival the NFL - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@CodyBrown/why-robotic-sports-will-one-day-rival-the-nfl-e8f8444d1631

<comment><USER2> I've actually been thinking about this a lot recently due to an SBK (motorcycle) race I went to last weekend. A freak collision lead to a pile up, ultimately 2 riders died _after_ getting to the hospital and several others were injured. These things are rare, but they do still happen. Why should people be flying around the track at 100+ mph, risking their lives for our enjoyment?

Robotic sports could become big. But still, people identify with other people and we want to see something at stake. In e-sports you aren't physically at risk (aside from maybe your wrists), but your reputation certainly is. Colleges are fighting over football players far more than robotics competitors. Beyond financial or academic interest, I don't think competition of algorithms will ever hold peoples attention. The robots will still need human operators, because they are prone to error, which helps build the tension of watching live competition

e: formatting</comment>


Estonia wants to collect the DNA of all its citizens - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/10/is-a-biobank-system-the-future-of-personalized-medicine/409558/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> And now imagine somebody steals all this juicy, centralized, enormously-sized biometric database.

[https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/10/stealing_fing...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/10/stealing_finger.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Another double-edged knife. Amazing things _can happen_ if this data is used wisely. I don't even think what could happen if this data falls into the wrong hands though.

<comment><USER4> Agreed, so the question then becomes "how likely is the data to be used responsibly?"

... and I'll leave it at that.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> From the point of view of providing preventive medicine and lowering overall healthcare costs, this is the right way. From the point of view of this info being used by insurance companies, not so good.</comment>


Moving forward with work on the D language and foundation - <AUTHOR> http://email@example.com <comment><USER2> This is he. AMA!

<comment><USER3> Looks like the target audience for C++ mindshare is being taken away by Golang and Rust. When I think of "D" I think of nothing but "oh, yeah, they use it at Facebook". Who else uses it? How do you see Golang and Rust as competition?

<comment><USER4> We built all of our machine learning backend in D at AdRoll. Some examples:

\- learning of large-scale classifiers and regressors using custom optimizers

\- real-time pricing of billions of ads a day using these models on ad exchanges. <.5ms latency to parse complex bid requests and compute sparse and simd dense dot-products

\- a real-time event processing system that hits DynamoDB with ~4.5K json queries per sec on a single node

We literally have D systems deployed on hundreds of ec2 instances as we speak and responsible for mission critical tasks of a >100$M run rate company. D is ready for prime time and works at scale.

<comment><USER5> And we embed D in our large-scale Erlang deployments, too.

It's a fun time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Awesome, and congrats to AA! We have an all out languages war ahead with D vs. Rust vs Go. I'm sure _tons of innovations_ will come out of this that will benefit us all!

(Yeah, I get it that the languages target different niches _in theory_ , but there will be significant overlap among the people who use them, I'm sure...)

<comment><USER7> D, Rust, and Go (and C++) have been on stage together: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBbv1ej0fFo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBbv1ej0fFo)

<comment><USER6> Ouch, quite a difference between the founders... now I'm sure that C++ and Go will rule the world... _unfortunately_.

D would be awesome for game development, because it's a "C++ done right", but I don't think Andrei has the salesman qualities needed to sell his child to game devs, like getting a bunch of people together to write a good open-source game engine that could also serve as an example of codding patterns.

And Rust and his daddy... they are just _too smart_ to become popular nowadays, people just don't have the will and time to sit and learn better ways of doing things when they have alternatives that "mostly work most of the time" and have an easier learning curve...

<comment><USER8> Game devs tired of C++ are waiting for Jonathan Blow's new language :) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TH9VCN6UkyQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TH9VCN6UkyQ)

He states D isn't different enough to encourage most devs to go through the pain of switching. If they are going to switch, they would like that language to be much better targeted at solving game dev specific needs.

<comment><USER9> Game devs will 'never' switch to D or anything different from C++, it's a standard in the industry for the past 20 years, everything is built around it.

Edit: yeay the downvote bandwagon, you should go to a AAA studio and ask about C++.

<comment><USER10> Never say never. I am a game dev. I worked on AAA titles. I want to switch to D. Badly.

There are reasons why AAA studios stick to C++: they don't know any better, they're in constant crunch-mode and don't have time to look for better alternatives, they use an existing engine with years of development history and don't want to invest in a new one, they target platforms where only C/C++ compilers are available, etc.

You'd be surprised of the horrors you can find in a game's C++ code base (there are gems too, but you kind of expect those.)

<comment><USER11> _You 'd be surprised of the horrors you can find in a game's C++ code base_

While it's true that some languages make some horrors easier to bring into the world (if you take away people's access to the memory, for example, you remove an entire class of memory-related nightmares), in my experience, the key requirement for creating these horrors isn't the language; it's the programmer and the constraints they're working under (such things as inexperience, painful levels of urgency, inappropriate processes, team churn, and so on and so on). People can and will make horrors in any language, and if D becomes the new C++, in twenty years people will be saying the same things about D.

<comment><USER10> While I agree with you I think D's design avoid a lot of the pitfalls of C++.

When I think about all the different variable initialization rules in C++ I know I'll get it wrong in crunch time and most likely get it wrong when all my work conditions are perfect because there's like 7 different rules. And that's for one feature only.

D doesn't make it impossible to write horrors, it just doesn't ask for it the way C++ does.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have looked at D repeatedly over the last couple of years, and I really hope it will become more popular.

It looks pretty much like what one would want C++ to be like if one were to start over again, free of the need for backwards compatilibity with C (at the syntax level)

I haven't had the A-Ha moment with D, I have to admit, not the way I had with Go. Right now, Go feels more aligned with the way I tend to think.

But I still think that D is a brilliant language that people will come to like if they are not tied to the ground by legacy code they have to maintain. I don't think D will ever replace C++, but if Alexandrescu is behind it, that might go a long way.

<comment><USER13> Try programming with (std.)ranges and (std.)algorithm's. It's something completely refreshing, replacing a mess of loopy code with a clean pipeline of algorithms. The lazy nature of the standard algorithms and the clean syntax you get with the UFCS feature produce some really neat results. Even if you end up not using D any further, it can change your view of programming.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, it's a lot like lisp in that regard. I'm glad I learned D even though I don't use it professionally if only because it changed the way I look at some things. The algorithm chaining enabled by UFCS and the range based standard library can lead to some very beautiful code (at least as far as C-family languages go). It also made me painfully aware of how often I copy strings in C++ (string_view cannot come soon enough).

Here's a snippet of code I hacked together in D for a bot to scrape titles from pages of urls in irc messages.

        matchAll(message, re_url)
                  .map!(      match => match.captures[0] )
                  .map!(        url => getFirst4k(url).ifThrown([]) )
                  .map!(    content => matchFirst(cast(char[])content, re_title) )
                  .cache // cache to prevent multiple evaluations of preceding
                  .filter!( capture => !capture.empty )
                  .map!(    capture => capture[1].idup.entitiesToUnicode )
                  .map!(  uni_title => uni_title.replaceAll(re_ws, " ") )
                  .array
                  .ifThrown([]);

It uses D's fast compile-time regex engine to look for URLs, then it downloads the first 4k (or substitutes an empty array if there was an exception), uses regex again to look for a title, filters out any that didn't find a title, converts all the html entities to their unicode equivalents (another function I wrote), replaces excessive whitespace using regex, then returns all the titles it found (or an empty array if there was an exception). There's stuff to improve upon but compared to how I would approach it in C++ it's much nicer.

<comment><USER12> This looks pretty cool! I think I know what I am going to do over my next vacation! :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> great times ahead for D!

for those now interested in the D language one must recommend Ali Çehreli's free book that now is also available as print:

[http://ddili.org/ders/d.en/index.html](http://ddili.org/ders/d.en/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER16> What a __bold __move. There are other in the OS communities, languages guru 's that are working 100% on the language?

Matz is working only on ruby at heroku? Guido, is working full time at dropbox?

I think this is huge lose for Facebook and a big win for D lang comunity

<comment><USER8> The question on my mind (and probably everybody else's) is Facebook backing away from D? Seems like if they were stepping up D, they would want to keep him on board to help improve it. And backing away from D might have encouraged him to leave.

<comment><USER17> Anything is possible (crystal balls are notoriously unreliable), but in the linked forum, Mr. Alexandrescu says Facebook is not backing away from D:

"Facebook is and continues to be a D user, the last project I was working on (and is ongoing) uses D, and there's more use in smaller internal projects. But there is no stronger involvement for the time being."

[http://email@example.com...](http://firstname.lastname@example.com)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Don't miss to click around a little (but probably not too much) on the D forum. It's super fast, but also somewhat annoying (at least in chrome) since it flashes when reloading. Is there a write up somewhere of the stack (etc.) behind it?

<comment><USER15> its open source: [https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed](https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed)

<comment><USER19> thanks, this is super impressive

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Somehow I find this more inspiring than most commercial success stories. Deciding to work on ideas instead of working for a large or small company. I sincerely wish the best to the D Foundation.

(I'm an occasional lurker on D mailing list and proud owner of the D book. That mailing list, BTW, taught me a great deal of things about a whole bunch of programming languages.)

</comment><comment> slipstream- Well, this looks like interesting times ahead for the D language. Hopefully this is a good thing, I've loved D since I first came across it. :)

</comment><comment><USER21> That is an incredible loss for Facebook. Congratulations to the D foundation and community though!

</comment><comment><USER22> I remember reading this book when I was using C++ a lot and being blown away:

[http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Design-Generic-Programming- Patt...](http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Design-Generic-Programming- Patterns/dp/0201704315/ref=pd_bxgy_14_img_y)

Unfortunately - I changed jobs to work on some start ups and said bye to C++ for Python, JS, etc and never had a chance to really use the concepts

</comment><comment><USER23> I want to learn D, Rust, Go, Android, Rails 4.x, Objective C/Ios, D3.js, C++11, Lisp, Smalltalk.... Good luck with that, me.

<comment><USER24> I can't even get enough time to do Nim, Ember 2, and Rails 5.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> What activities are running to get some more infrastructure support for D. I keep tryimg to bring up a workflow on it, but get hit by a lack of support for things like editors/ide's and package managers.

Will the foundatiom be sponsoring development of plugins for popular ide's like atom, netbeans, intelij, eclipse etc.

</comment><comment><USER26> This is indeed a very courageous decision on AA's part to leave a secure job at Facebook to join D Foundation. But I am pretty sure, if at some point in future AA decides, FB will be very happy to have him back.

<comment><USER27> AA is a rockstar programmer, I'd imagine he isn't too short on cash and wouldn't have any problem finding a job in a big company if he decides to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I started learning D in 2012, coming from a Java/C++ background. One thing that I've learned over the past 3 years is that D is one of those languages that completely changes your perspective on some aspect of language design (for D, that's metaprogramming and range-based algorithms). D can proudly take its place among the Lisps, the Haskells, the Smalltalks, as one of those fundamental paradigm shifts that makes you think differently about everyday problems.

</comment><comment><USER29> I know a little JavaScript - what's the best way for me to tinker around with D and see what it offers? I'm curious!

Even if I just built something simple in both languages it would be a fun exercise.

<comment><USER30> It's a bit old, but this gives some nice context and allows you to follow along with your own D compiler:

[http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1381876](http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1381876)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Good luck! I have been wishing D well for many years now and I hope your steering of the foundation will take D into the forefront of programming.

</comment><comment><USER32> nit:

"Next step with the D Language Foundation is a formal talk with the foundation's prospective attorney tomorrow."

Isn't that something you'd like to do before leaving your day job?

</comment><comment><USER33> Off topic and old but does anyone on here know what happened to the c++ ranges implementation he promised?

<comment><USER34> Do you mean Eric Niebler's ranges[1] library?

[1][https://github.com/ericniebler/range-v3](https://github.com/ericniebler/range-v3)

<comment><USER33> I meant this

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=716111](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=716111)

I think he said he had an implementation almost ready to release but I never saw it. I would be very interested to see it. Thought it would be a good thread to ask.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Of course if you don't know who Alexandrescu is, here is a C++ fantasy map that was circulated a few years back (it is funnier if know C++) and well, Alexandrescu has his own castle there:

[http://goldns.ru/cppmap-2012.png](http://goldns.ru/cppmap-2012.png)

<comment><USER36> I heard that there's also a diamond mine somewhere in the multiple inheritance forest, but all pointers to its exact location seem to be off a bit :)

<comment><USER35> Indeed, look West, there is a diamond mine. By the Virtual Inheritance Mountains, which are North of the Inheritance Forest. The location makes sense, because virtual inheritance helps solve the "diamond" problem. (I am not a good C++ programmer, so if this is wrong, please correct me).

<comment><USER37> That's for explaining the joke so laboriously and with so little wit

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Shitty move by Facebook not at least partially sponsoring this. Instead, they keep putting lipstick on their PHP pig.

<comment><USER6> the pig flies pretty well for them...

<comment><USER39> while HHVM has a little bit of popularity I don't think Hack is really popular. But good for them if it works.

<comment><USER40> Well it doesn't play with basically any library. That goes for HHVM as well. I tried it out after someone here recommended it. I had about the simplest app possible and I still couldn't get it to build.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tennis for Two was an electronic game developed in 1958 on an analog computer - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennis_for_Two <comment><USER2> If you live in NY, you can play this at a currently ongoing exhibit about the history of computing in New York at the NY Historical Society.

(Review: I would say the exhibit was decent, though not great - might not be much new for people already familiar with computing history, and it's very clearly sponsored by IBM, though you could argue that this is not unfair for a history of NY-area computing. There's also a fun little exhibit on comic book heroes at the museum, plus I'd never been there before, maybe all added together it's worth a ticket.)

</comment><comment><USER3> I played Tennis for Two yesterday at the New York Historical Society museum, nyhistory.org, where it's part of the Silicon City exhibition, [http://nyhistory.org/exhibition/silicon-city-computer- histor...](http://nyhistory.org/exhibition/silicon-city-computer-history-made- new-york)

</comment><comment><USER4> I've always been confused by this game. How do players know when to strike the ball when they can't see their paddle on the screen?

<comment><USER5> It's not like Pong where you have to line the paddle up with the ball. You can hit the ball as soon as it crosses onto your side of the court, using a button. You use the knob to change the angle you hit the ball at. Hitting downward increases the speed of the ball, but increases your chances of hitting the net.

<comment><USER4> Couldn't someone just win by pressing the button the second it crosses the net and never letting the ball reach the edge of the screen?

<comment><USER5> Ideally you could. But because the speed of the ball changes with the angle you hit it, you can throw off your opponents timing and cause them to mess up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If this takes your fancy you may want to interest yourself in modular audio synthesis, whether analog or the DSP emulation (an easier and cheaper way to get into it). There's a whole bunch of oscilloscope-friendly patches for Clavia's Nord Modular software that implement primitive videogames, including a working version of _Asteroids_.

</comment><comment><USER7> Here is the original schematic:

[http://scienceblogs.com/brookhaven/2011/01/24/so-you- wanna-r...](http://scienceblogs.com/brookhaven/2011/01/24/so-you-wanna- rebuild-one-of-th/)

There is a clone using a microcontroller, but I won't link to that abomination.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This video looks like it might be of the original game, rather than a re- creation: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PG2mdU_i8k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PG2mdU_i8k).

</comment><comment><USER8> Is there a video somewhere? The only one I found required the RealPlayer plugin :). (Shudder.)</comment>


Extreme statistical anomalies in Research 2000 polls - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/6/29/880179/-Research-2000:-Problems-in-plain-sight

<comment><USER2> fivethirtyeight.com just got a ceas and desist letter from Research 2000's lawyers:

[http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/06/research-2000-issues-...](http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/06/research-2000-issues- cease-desist.html)</comment>


Amazon Pairs Print and Digital Books With New Program - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/03/amazon-couples-print-digital-books-with-new-program/?smid=tw-nytimesbits&seid=auto&_r=1

<comment><USER2> It looks like this only applies to books that were purchased new through amazon. Used books purchased through amazon marketplace are not included: [http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/?docId=1001373341](http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/?docId=1001373341)

<comment><USER3> That would be way too easy to game. I.e. set up an Amazon Marketplace account, "sell" yourself and/or accomplices lots of books for "reasonable" prices, with the money minus some vig including Amazon's charges going back to the "buyers", then they buy el-cheapo Kindle copies.

<comment><USER2> For sure. Not saying it's a poor choice. As a frequent buyer of used books on amazon, I was interested in the details and thought I would share in case anyone else had the same question.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I take it that this will apply only for physical books purchased through Amazon. I love using my Kindle; my only problem is that I lived a good portion of my life reading books on paper.

When I got an iPod, I was able to transfer all my existing CDs onto it; this program is the closest thing to an equivalent process for books. I just wish there were a way that I could prove that I own a book and qualify for the discounted price, even if I did not buy the book through Amazon.

</comment><comment><USER5> I wish this worked the other way around as well. I'd love to get a discounted price on the hardcover versions of my Kindle books.

</comment><comment><USER6> I have been waiting for something like this for a long time. The only problem is that it is only for Kindle books. I would like a PDF/ePUB for any paper copy book I buy even if its a 5 dollar surcharge that is much better than buying the same book 2 separate times on different media (paper and ebook).

Honestly I would like this to be the default option for all paper books I buy, even if the costs get factored in to the buying price. If I can take my CDs I purchased and encode them into MP3 and use them on my e-device of choice then why cant a similar model be used for paper media.

</comment><comment><USER7> I have been waiting so long for this.

On the one hand I'm excited.

On the other hand there are some series like LoTR and Harry Potter that I went ahead and re-bought. So that's frustrating, although on the third hand I got some value so and don't see as a total waste of money.

Of course, Harry Potter is the kind of thing that will probably never qualify for this. How broadly publishers do embrace this will be interesting to see.

</comment><comment><USER8> This can't come soon enough. I'm preparing for a potential cross country move early next yet. I was looking at the potential of getting rid of a multitude of books that I haven't read yet since the storage cost would probably exceed the repurchase cost whenever I did get around to wanting to read those books. This makes that choice even more palatable.

</comment><comment><USER9> Presumably, one could download the eBook to every book they've purchased on Amazon, even if they no longer own the print version (e.g., resold or lost). I'm hoping O'Reilly, Manning, and Apress get on board with this, but I can see why they'd hesitate.

<comment><USER10> O'Reilly has been doing this for a while. They offer discounted ebooks (I think $5) for print books you've already purchased after you "register" them (via ISBN) at [http://oreilly.com/register/](http://oreilly.com/register/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I hope this applies to technical books as well. I would love to have things like my old DSP textbook and others available with me wherever I go, but still have the hardcopy I'm used to at home.

<comment><USER12> Exactly. They mention nostalgia as a reason to buy physical books, but for anything you use as a reference they're still a lot more convenient.

But it'd also be nice to have a stack of them in my pocket all the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Anything stopping me from buying a book with matchbook, and then sell the physical copy but keep the digital one ?

<comment><USER14> Your time, the difference in the price of a used book and a new book. This is also useful for people with large print libraries that was purchased from amazon before the kindle was on their radar.</comment></comment>


What Is Space? It's not what you think - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/49/the-absurd/what-is-space <comment><USER2> Don't skip this article. Read it now or bookmark it and read it sometime later.

Just don't skip it. Trust me. This will change the way you view the universe forever.

</comment><comment><USER3> Great article!

<comment><USER4> Seconded - very well written, funny and easy to follow along.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How can I get more stable career as a software developer - <AUTHOR> I have been working as a software developer for 3+ years now and due to a string of bad decisions and trusting easily I have ended up switching 4 jobs in past 3 years. Hence my hireability has gone down and hence I am struggling to find a stable, long term working condition. Also my skill sets have increased in terms of backend engineering in interviews I am unable to give any concrete answer to domain specific knowledge input. This becomes a hinderence for many companies. Any input in terms of how I should approach next steps and choose a stream to work and also where should I start will be great help. <comment><USER2> Was laid off by $BIG_CORP after 4 years and have now spent the last two bouncing around at least 4 other companies.

This road is really hard, I agree. All I can say is don't be too hard on yourself-- it's them, not you.

Send out hundreds of applications, network constantly and give concrete answers in interviews that aren't too wishy-washy.

I don't have any magic bullets besides persistence and budgeting really hard. Good luck!</comment>


Why do people think Twitter is so great? I feel like I'm missing something - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> You're not the only one. After the explosion at SXSW there was a lot of "I don't get it" noise in the blogosphere (<http://drumsnwhistles.com/2007/03/11/twitter-this/)> with some claiming that that Twitter has already (<http://www.flickr.com/photos/baratunde/416990545/)> or will soon (<http://ross.typepad.com/blog/2007/03/twitter_tips_th.html)> 'jump the shark' (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumping_the_shark).>

P.S. is would be great if comments allowed some kind of wiki link syntax like [<http://blah> friendly name] :)

</comment><comment><USER3> Sociologically, twitter is very different from other communication forms. AIM and Skype are designed for communicating thoughts and ideas. Twitter, however, is designed for telecocooning. Telecocooning is traditionally defined as sending little "presence pokes" to people. For example, just saying hi or sending someone a picture of a heart or a smiley face. The point of these messages isn't the ideas they contain, but rather the message itself. That is, just getting any message from someone shows that the other person is thinking about them and cares about them.

Traditionally people telecocoon with their two or three closest friends. However, Twitter lowers the telecocooning barrier so you can telecocoon with many more friends for the same effort. People tend to just send messages like "ahh homework sucks" or "heh stuck at the library." You aren't really communicating anything intelligent, but you are building a feeling of group solidarity by letting people around you know what's up. It also helps people to find where their friends are if they want to meet up.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not buying the telecocooning thing. Sounds like more of a catch phrase more than anything else. I can put up an away message that says whatever I'm doing much like a "presence poke". Or I can just blast a text to my friends letting them know what meaningless task I'm involved in at the moment.

I can see how it can show how you care or are thinking of them but if telecocooning lowers the barrier doesn't that trivialize a message? It's like giving a myspace bulletin to your whole friends list but telling them something less important than what is usually sent around.

I do like that you can use it to meet up with friends. That's a cool feature.

<comment><USER3> I believe telecocooning comes from Mizuko Ito's research, but Howard Rheingold cites it in Smart Mobs as well.

I think lowering the barriers does trivialize the message in some ways. For example, it would build less of a bond between any two individuals. However, I think it builds a tighter bond between the individual and their group of friends as a whole.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> There is so much buzz around this company and I just don't get it. You can keep everyone up to date on what you do. Don't people already do this with AIM, Myspace, friendster, blogs, etc.? I just don't see a need to know if someone is listening to a Bono track right now. I'd like to get some feedback on some people who love the site.

</comment><comment><USER4> there will be always place for new implementations because existing ones create gaps or cause a new wave of needs, that takes force by users that are bored of something they already used.

if you accept that what we have available yesterday is enough for everyone today then you accept that there is no space for new ideas.

but the reason there are ideas is because we are never satisfied.

though, i had also the same reaction when i first heared about netvibes broad use and I wondered why contrary to its simplicity. But its one of these times that simplicity of creating something not conceived by lots of people, can grasp significant usage due to the audience ready to adopt that peculiar experience, that later only becomes familiar and how i could live without it or just a trend that will pass...

</comment><comment><USER5> I heard about Twitter about 5 months ago, but this thing seemed to explode after SXSW.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I'm thinking it's mostly just buzz and the aftermath of SXSW. A friend did point out that it's good for if you're in the city and want to know if friends are somewhere close. This however does not apply to my 90s Zack Morris phone.

I compare it to those overly hyped bands that you only hear about either at SXSW or around awards shows. They never get a good record deal and fade away very quickly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Really good marketing at SXSW. They had big screens in public places that scrolled random twitters. If you've ever stared at the scrolling Google search thing on Google's campus, you can understand the appeal.</comment>


Wikipedia's JavaScript Initialisation on a Budget - <AUTHOR> https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/phame/live/7/post/175/wikipedia_s_javascript_initialisation_on_a_budget/ <comment><USER2> I am surprised to discover that wikipedia appears to not use a standard minifier on their JS, but rather they have a custom one (written in PHP) that appears to just do whitespace-style removal, which they appear to run in part of the critical path of serving (?!) rather than as an offline build step.

[https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/ResourceLoader/Architecture#R...](https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/ResourceLoader/Architecture#Resource:_Scripts)

You can 'view source' on a page to confirm that their JS doesn't even do "safe" transformations like local variable renaming.

<comment><USER3> Does it really surprise you that people write their own? Or perhaps more importantly here, that people write their own and then never revisit that decision as the industry builds up around them?

Sadly all too common in my experience. Disappointing? Absolutely. But few things of this sort surprise me anymore.

<comment><USER4> They have something that works for them. Why change?

<comment><USER3> Because it's a form of vendor lock-in, but for an internal vendor.

Also, is it really working for them? We're responding to someone who thinks it isn't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Wikipedia's startup payload now neatly fits into the target budget of 28 KB > – chosen as the lowest multiple of 14KB we can fit within subsequent bursts > of Internet packets to a web browser.

But (according to their linked article) 14KB is only the max size of the _first_ burst of packets, after which TCP will usually double the size in each subsequent burst. So two bursts equal 14 + 28 = 42 KB, not 28.

Are they doing this to assume a connection limited to only its initial burst size? I imagine this might be relevant in low-data areas (developing countries, etc.), but they don't go in to it.

</comment><comment><USER6> The "Startup manifest size" graph is misleading. The Y-axis doesn't start at zero, which makes the Sep 2019 size look like it is multiple times smaller than the Sep 2018 size. In reality, it's only ~22% smaller.

<comment><USER7> who cares. look at the numbers. continue with your life... it's not like the text claims something that isn't true

<comment><USER8> I care a bit. It's misleading by the standards of anyone who's used to reading graphs. Wikipedia is an organization I care about and trust and it sucks to skim a graph and realize that the axis was changed to mean something that the shape didn't convey. The entire value of graphs is using shapes to convey meaning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is the kind of Javascript work I love. All too often we see terrible, overly-engineered Javascript monstrosities that actively make the web worse for everyone, and that can make some of us anti-JS zealots. But JS can improve users' experiences as well, and the folks at Wikipedia are good at it.

</comment><comment><USER10> Tangential, but wikipedia without javascript enabled is a great experience.

<comment><USER11> I have to admit, I couldn't name one javascript "feature" on the site other than one that incessantly pops up when you mouse-over links. Which I find _highly_ irritating, but ultimately useful. I have a definite hate/love relationship with that thing. Maybe it just needs to wait a second before trying to stop me from reading the existing article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> What is "the size of two 14 KB bursts of Internet packets"? MTU is 1500 bytes before overheard. How did they get 14 KB? What significance does that have? And what is "burst"?

<comment><USER12> Looks like they referenced it later in the article: [https://tylercipriani.com/blog/2016/09/25/the-14kb-in-the- tc...](https://tylercipriani.com/blog/2016/09/25/the-14kb-in-the-tcp-initial- window/)

> So why try to squeeze a website into ~14KB? Seems like you should be trying > to squeeze it into 1432 bytes.

> I found my answer in IETF RFC 6928 – a proposal to increase the TCP Initial > Window to 10 segments. The Initial Congestion Window (cwnd) is the maximum > number of bytes that a server can send without receiving any acknowledgement > that the bytes were received via a client ACK packet. This maximum number of > bytes to send is calculated by multiplying some number by MSS. As of RFC > 6928 some number is equal to 10 (initially).

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is a great article. Wikipedia is the only site I have used in a long time that works better with Javascript turned off.

<comment><USER14> Really? Most sites I go to other than ones like hackernews work way better without javascript.

If you create an account on wikipedia you can tell them to serve you formulas using images or mathml but without doing that formulas stop working. Those hover previews hang midori though, I wouldn't mind losing those.

<comment><USER15> > Those hover previews hang midori though, I wouldn't mind losing those.

On any preview, hit the gear icon in the bottom-right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Dat Y-axis.

</comment><comment><USER17> Kudos to the Wikipedia/Wikimedia teams for all this hard work!

</comment><comment><USER18> Not to abuse this post's comment section but I recently noticed that on IE11 mobile, image captions overlap with the article's text. I don't think this is relevant enough to formally file a bug report (browser seems to be grade c) but in case someone working on the site's CSS reads this and feels overly bored, well..... ;-)

<comment><USER19> It may never be prioritized, but it's much better to have a bug report/ticket than to casually mention this in a comment no one will ever see.</comment></comment>


Adolescents' rich and nuanced relationship with risky behaviour - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-02170-3 <comment><USER2> When I was a pre-teen, my mother once told me "I never want to hear about you...". I expected to hear a sweeping restriction and my brain was already primed to file the next tidbit with other adult "advice" \- material that had no supporting context in my experience (largely because my experiences were so few, though I didn't know that then).

Instead she finished with "...committing any crime you can't retire on". It was a game-changer for me. This advice...had context. It wasn't a absolute "no", nor did it rely solely on experiences I didn't have. It extended on experiences I _did_ have into a broader area.

Throughout most of my teenage years I avoided all the worst situations that peer pressure was steering me towards, not because I suddenly properly calculated the risks - I could no more visualize the impact on my life that any kind of conviction would have than I could before - but because I was better weighing the _gains_. Instead of "doing this will prevent me from losing ranking in my social hierarchy" it was "doing this will not gain me material improvement". Instead of "if I fail I will get in trouble" it was "I will be disappointing because I tried, regardless of success".

Eventually, of course, I built my own ethics structure about why crime/rudeness/unnecessary risk-taking were undesirable, but this one statement gave me time to do so that I might not have had.

I highly recommend it to all parents.

<comment><USER3> >I never want to hear about you committing any crime you can't retire on

This is pretty interesting "advice", but curious how on that would have impacted my younger self

<comment><USER2> I think it had a big (and net positive) impact on me, but anecdote is not data - If you think the advice would have been bad for you, I'd love to hear how - not because I think it's impossible or that you'd be wrong, but because I have no idea what is probable without more people weighing in.

<comment><USER4> I mean, if instead of smoking pot with friends you decided to rob a bank, that sounds like a bad outcome in line with the advice...

<comment><USER5> Robbing a bank has a poor average payoff, so not likely to be able to retire on it.

Becoming a CEO and indulging in embezzlement on the other hand...

<comment><USER2> I never thought of the CEO angle (not sure what that says about my intelligence, but hopefully it says something good about my morals). I know that my thinking as a 10 year old was that if I got caught robbing a bank, my mom wouldn't have been bothered that I tried to rob a bank, she'd have been bothered that I _failed_.

As an adult I realize that she'd not have been happy in either case. (I think. Probably.) But it was exactly that shift of thinking from "should I do this" (prone to peer pressure) to "is the payoff worth the risk" (which leads to "what is the risk?") that kept me from doing anything particularly stupid and why I brought the story up in relation to the article.

As adults we normally relate "should I do this" to "what is the payoff" and "what is the risk". As a preteen/teen the life experiences to encourage those connections aren't there, so the decisions will be different from the average adults'. This crazy advice (my mother doesn't remember making it, so it was probably an off-the-cuff attempt at humor that altered my life) created a temporary bridge between those concepts until I had the experiences to build my own bridges.

In retrospect it's actually similar to how certain religious doctrines provide reasons for moral decisions when you wouldn't necessarily have those morals on your own. mindblown.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Being able to engage and succeed in high risk endeavors was much more useful in the past than today. Getting pregnant and giving birth was a high risk/reward proposition, much less so today. For men there were other avenues to engage high risk for high reward activities.

Being in the hunting party for your tribe and being the one to go in close with a spear to make the killing thrust on a large animal. A bit closer to today: a poor young man with no prospects goes off on a two-three year whaling voyage. If he makes it back he would have enough experience to sign up from another two-three year voyage and get a decent share. If he returned from that one he would have enough capital to set himself up with a home and family.

These days taking risk in the physical realm is highly discouraged and there is almost no highly rewarding outcomes for taking physical risk in wealthier countries. A crew hand on a crabbing boat can make good money, with low skills for high risk, but that is so strange we televise them on TV for entertainment. And even that type of work is going away as people decided it is too high risk and introduce individual fishing quotas instead of short open fishing seasons. Many more people do high risk activities unrelated to any productive endeavor (mountaineering, BASE jumping, wingsuit flying, etc). Maybe human space travel with open up high risk/high reward opportunities for people again.

<comment><USER7> Oil rigs are a similar situation today - high pay, relatively high risk, and you'll be away from family living on the ocean for weeks or months at a time.

<comment><USER8> The difference is a lot of jobs in oil are manual labor that do not require a college degree and can be high paying if one is willing to go to where the jobs are, even on land.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As a parent of a budding 5yr old.. I am starting to think about this upcoming phase in terms of where to raise him.

Currently the two options we are contemplating between is staying in a large major urban city (population ~10M) or moving to Bariloche, Patagonia (population ~150k)

I only have my own childhood experiences to work from growing up in NYC..and remembering vividly how I yearned to always play in nature. Going to summer camp was my only joy to escape the intensities of the city.

I noticed how pre-teens and teens are here in the big cities, and the kinds of activities they do ( which are quite varied naturally ) vs the kinds that Bariloche will have to offer.

On one side the kids from big cities never get bored.. but seem to always grow up very fast..and get into all sorts of night-life very early on.

On the other side, if you are teen bored in a small town then getting into trouble there with less stuff around that will kill you is very appealing to a parent.

What are your stories??

<comment><USER10> I was a military wife. We moved a lot. Where you go is less important than your parenting policies.

My oldest has had sleep issues from birth and was a boatload of trouble in the form of _curiosity killed the cat_ and _you can 't tell me no._ He's a handful.

From age 2, he was taught to keep himself entertained and out if trouble so I could sleep a little while he was up nights. He was taught to tell me when he spilled stuff in the middle of the night so I could clean it up. He did not get in trouble. He only got asked what he spilled so I could clean it up properly.

I gave my kids a lot of latitude and worked with them to make sure their needs were adequately met. I did a whole lot of dealing with the woman in the mirror and trying to not hang my crap on them. I facilitated their interests and made sure they were reasonably safe.

I did things like rent Jurassic Park and watched it first, then watched it with them so I could pause it and warn them about icky surprise scenes. They very much wanted to see it they weren't that old. I made it as comfortable and not traumatic as I could and let them have their way.

I started with laying that foundation from birth. By the time they were teens, we had a good relationship. They never went through rebel teen crap. They didn't need to. There was nothing to rebel against.

<comment><USER11> Wow you were an awesome mom. I'm going through the same motions with my daughter. She's 4. Non-verbal autistic. Trying everything under the sun to get her to talk AND sleep. Feeling kind of hopeless right now but I am trying to be positive. She genuinely loves me though and wants me to hold her all the time.

<comment><USER10> I spent the first 12 years of my first child's life trying to make it possible for him to sleep decently. Off the top identity head:

ASD kids are picky. Try to keep foods on hand that are healthy and that the kid likes. Let them eat what they want from what is on hand.

Hey them a good multivitamin. Disney Princess Gummy vitamins worked well for my kids.

Make sure they get outside every single day for some physical activity. You may have to work at making sure this happens at the right time of day as well.

Kids need to be both physically tired and mentally tired to sleep. ASD kids have trouble getting the mental stimulation they need. Video tapes and video games sometimes serve them well.

Don't substitute physical exhaustion alone for physical tiredness plus mental tiredness. This can cause night terrors, where they wake up screaming after an hour.

Be accommodating of their weird preferences as much as possible. My oldest slept all kinds of weird places when he was little.

I have had a parenting blog in the past. I have fantasies I will eventually get back to that.

Best.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> When I was 5, I knew it all. But I was wrong, and I realized how stupid I was at 5 when I was 10. Then, I thought I had it all figured out and I knew I was way smarter than the adults. Except, I realized at 15 how much of a stupid kid I was at 10, but I knew I had everything figured out by then...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorrows_of_Young_Werther#C...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorrows_of_Young_Werther#Cultural_impact)

<comment><USER13> Interestingly I still consider myself to have been quite capable/rational from age 4 onwards.

<comment><USER10> I was at my best at age 4. It has been all downhill from there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Reinforcement Learning: Exploration vs Exploitation with epsilon-decreasing strategy.

I am wondering if we are indeed some kind of optimization algorithm ran for somebody else to validate some model they need in their "real" universe.

</comment><comment><USER15> I like how they compare a teenager's risk of contracting AIDS with a 10 year old, but not with a 30 year old. Nice cherry-picking. All I see is an article trying to explain risk-taking of the youth as a pathology. You might agree with that, but I think it's just retarded.

</comment><comment><USER16> There was nothing nuanced about my risky adolescent behavior. I give thanks about once a month for the good fortune of not ending up in a dumpster.

</comment><comment><USER17> wizzard0, why didn't you use the original title, as per HN guidelines? Your title doesn't match what I read from the article at all. Environment is only mentioned once and culture isn't mentioned at all.

<comment><USER18> We've just updated the title from 'A lot of teen risk-taking is environment/culture influence, not just "age"' to part of the subtitle, which hopefully represents well the article without the "Sex and drugs..." bait.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, I decided to submit under a more neutral tone because the "Sex and drugs" part felt too sensational, but the result got too opinionated. Will try better next time.

UPD: Also... isnt "when Steinberg told the adolescents that their friends were watching from an adjacent room, they took significantly more risks" an environment/culture influence? I don't mean environment like "nature", but the social one, and that includes peer pressure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Original title is _"Sex and drugs and self-control: how the teen brain navigates risk"_ , and seems better than the editorialized HN title.</comment>


Mass FTP Crawling - <AUTHOR> http://findex.cedsys.nl/research/mass-ftp-crawling/

<comment><USER2> Your sidebar overpays the text on a narrow screen, making it impossible to read. People can scroll, your navigation does not need to be visible all the time.

<comment><USER3> What device are you viewing on? I'd say "impossible to read" is a pretty wild exaggeration. Looks fine to me.

<comment><USER2> It seems to have been fixed.

<comment><AUTHOR> I fixed it. thanks for the headsup.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> So right, it is not his responsibility to inform and educate, however his article is a great tool for the ones that do want to educate and help companies in NL.

<comment><AUTHOR> It is not my responsibility to email every single person running a sensitive public FTP server. It is my responsibility to educate those that have the power to positively influence the situation more than I ever could - ISPs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Previous title said: "I scanned a country on port 21 and analyzed the data". The country is The Netherlands.

Is there a way to contact the server owners to tell them about this? I feel bad that so many servers are open possibly without the knowledge of the owners.

<comment><USER6> There are 1+ million anonymous FTP servers on the Internet ([https://www.shodan.io/report/OY7YoHou](https://www.shodan.io/report/OY7YoHou)) and it's usually difficult to determine who the owner is. I haven't yet found a good way of notifying users, the best bet is to send the data to the respective ISP or CERT and hope for the best. On a related note: there needs to be way more attention on NAS devices. Many of them are connected to the Internet, poorly secured and in the process exposing huge amounts of personal data (not just through FTP).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> FTP file indexing used to be how I found everything on the Internet before HTTP existed. Does anyone else remember Archie? (My coworkers thought I was a wizard.)

</comment><comment><USER8> It is impossible to educate everyone about the risks of the cloud. Even if it goes mainstream :( I tried with my family many times, but they never fully understand it.

<comment><USER9> For most people nowadays, "the cloud" probably doesn't have anything to do with accessing an FTP server... specifically not a public FTP server unless the cloud hosts are absolutely careless...

I remember using sites like [http://ftpsearch.ntnu.no](http://ftpsearch.ntnu.no) probably 15 years ago to find very interesting files on public FTP servers (but I don't think that this one exists anymore)

<comment><USER10> These still work, and have been around for a long time as well:

[http://www.filesearching.com/](http://www.filesearching.com/)

[http://www.mmnt.ru/int/](http://www.mmnt.ru/int/)

(I don't know whether it's coincidence that they're both of Russian origin.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The "Sensitive Files" add up to 7005, while the total number of files is 18088392. In other words, <0.04% of them.

<comment><AUTHOR> The amount is much higher as I have only tried a limited amount of keywords. There are many servers that have complete backups of the Windows folder 'My Documents' for example. Combined, I'd say at least half of it is not meant to be public, thus sensitive.</comment></comment>


Heroku architecture - <AUTHOR> http://www.quora.com/Heroku/How-does-Heroku-work <comment><USER2> I posted that answer. If you have any additional questions or insights let me know.

<comment><USER3> I thought it was terrific that you did this - I emailed the answer to myself so I can read it on the bus...

It looked like you did a lot of research into it based on the sources you posted.

How long did it take you to create that post?

What is your primary area of interest -- If I post a question about some other infrastructure, would you give such a detailed response, or was this a one- off?

<comment><USER2> It took maybe 4 hours, but it was fun and I learned a _lot_ (not just about Heroku).

I've been using Heroku since near the beginning (we were in YC W08 together) so I was already vaguely familiar with the architecture. It was mostly filling in the details.

Infrastructure is a side interest that I'm trying to learn more about, so I can't guarantee I'll be able to answer your questions, but it's worth posting them anyway. Hopefully other people can answer as well (of course that's what I thought when I posted the Heroku question... I ended up answering it myself)

Rather than directing the question at me, just post a normal question on Quora, and post the link here or message me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> If this stuff sounds interesting to you, we're always looking for excellent engineers (and much more): <http://jobs.heroku.com/>

</comment><comment><USER5> Take a look at the CloudFoundry project -- <http://github.com/cloudfoundry/vcap>

It's open source and maintained by an uber-capable group at VMware.

</comment><comment><USER6> Surprisingly good link. While we're discussing Heroku, does anyone have any deep[er] insights into the differences between Zookeeper and Doozer?

</comment><comment><USER7> Does this mean that 3 proxy servers serve all the traffic for ALL apps hosted on Heroku?

<comment><USER8> Yup. Amazon has 3 too!

         $ dig amazon.com

        ; <<>> DiG 9.7.0-P1 <<>> amazon.com
        ;; global options: +cmd
        ;; Got answer:
        ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 41998
        ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 3, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

        ;; QUESTION SECTION:
        ;amazon.com.      IN  A

        ;; ANSWER SECTION:
        amazon.com.   36  IN  A 18.104.22.168
        amazon.com.   36  IN  A 18.104.22.168
        amazon.com.   36  IN  A 126.96.36.199

<comment><USER9> Not exactly. The 3 IPs that are returned for proxy.heroku.com are not fixed. They are a just subset of the available front-end proxy servers.

<comment><USER10> Exactly - its a common practice to use DNS servers to spread load across backend instances. Example djbdns/tinydns by default "only" returns up to 8 IP addresses so if you setup more then that those IPs will be randomly returned.

<http://cr.yp.to/djbdns/balance.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is really cool. Providing this as a service requires a very different approach than running open source code.</comment>


2012 CES Keynote Live - <AUTHOR> http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/events/ces/liveevent.aspx

<comment><USER2> wow, was it just me, or was that really awkward?

</comment><comment><USER3> "What happens when you touch the monkey?"</comment>


The world's mounting debt crisis must solved before it blows up in our face - <AUTHOR> https://www.scmp.com/business/banking-finance/article/2184746/worlds-mounting-debt-crisis-must-solved-it-blows-our-face <comment><USER2> I did a book report in middle school on a book called bankruptcy 1995. The author made a pretty convincing case that the USA was headed for debt disaster. Yet here we are. So will there be articles like this in 20 years?</comment>


Google Nexus 7 tablet hands-on: Is it special enough? - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/computing/131792-google-nexus-7-tablet-hands-on-is-it-special-enough <comment><USER2> Article with minimal new detail and obvious linkbait title. The only conceivable way this is getting upvotes is that there are people who like the linkbait title but didn't read the article.

</comment><comment><USER3> The real question is will it sell? Google doesn't have a strong track record of selling devices directly to consumers. If this thing is not available in places like Best Buy, Amazon, Verizon Wireless stores, etc, it won't go anywhere. Apple has the luxury of the Apple Store. Google does not.</comment>


Ask HN: Are there any full featured chat/messaging as a service solutions? - <AUTHOR> I am making a mobile app and want to have a chat/messaging feature where users can directly chat with me (in order for them to ask questions about a product) in real time. I would also like to have file exchange support (to send imgs, PDFs, etc) within the chat.. I know it maybe a stretch but are there are third party solutions that offer this feature?? So far the closest thing that is https://pusher.com/chatkit and they seem to offer a Rich Media Messaging feature to send files back and forth, my only problem is that they have a free plan and their next cheapest plan starts out at 500 bucks a month! <comment><USER2> Disclaimer: I work for Pusher.

Hi Alan, when we built Pusher Chatkit we took into consideration developers like you who are looking to introduce their first chat functionality into an app. As you noted we include a very generous free tier (1,000 Monthly Unique Identified Users, and all core features of our business plan) to cover implementing and scaling up a chat experience. It's good to note that users are only considered active if they have authenticated and established a session.

Use cases can be varied, so if you have something particular in mind where you need to scale more incrementally I would suggest reaching out to our sales team so we can find the right solution for you.

[https://pusher.com/enterprise#sales-form- partial](https://pusher.com/enterprise#sales-form-partial)

You can also find tutorials on implementing Pusher Chatkit here: [https://pusher.com/tutorials?q=chatkit](https://pusher.com/tutorials?q=chatkit)</comment>