Why it makes sense to bike without a helmet - <AUTHOR> http://www.howiechong.com/journal/2014/2/bike-helmets#.U9hcx4BdUeP <comment><USER2> Since we're passing around flawed statistics, I'd like to share some anecdotes:

1\. Just 2 months ago, my little sister was riding on a bike with no helmet. She was struck by a car. She flew off the bike, puncturing a lung, breaking a clavicle, several bones in her face, ribs, road rash, etc. She stopped breathing at the scene. After 1 week on the ventilator, she began breathing on her own. We knew there would likely be brain damage. She woke up confused and showing most of the signs of traumatic brain injury. Fortunately just a couple months later she's done with physical therapy. Due to nerve damage she will always have a little trouble walking, but most people won't notice it. Her face didn't need surgery since the fractures healed within millimeters of their original positions. The brain is the last thing to heal, and she is a different person than she used to be, most people who didn't know her before won't notice. She can't yet hold a job or go to college. If she had been wearing a helmet it's almost certain that she "only" would have to deal with the punctured lung and a few broken bones. Her not wearing a helment not only derailed her life, but it caused major problems in the lives of everyone around her. She has 250k in medical bills and the legal minumum on liability insurance here is 25k.

2\. I snowboard regularly, I've seen people without helmets die on the groomed trails. I've hit my head a few times on logs that I really wouldn't want to be running into w/o a helmet. I've never seen someone who was wearing a helmet permanently disabled by an accident.

I used to think that if you didn't want to wear a helmet it was nobody's business but your own. But when one of those cars hits you, somebody's going to pay for those hundreds of thousands in medical bills, so if you don't wear a helmet please file a DNR ahead of time.

On a "lighter" note, I tend to agree that as a society we should focus on the most dangerous things first. Right now I have a feeling that's the intersection of driving and cell phones. We can probably save the most lives by focusing on driving safety.

<comment><USER3> >Her not wearing a helment not only derailed her life, but it caused major problems in the lives of everyone around her.

Blame the victim? How about the driver, was it not his/her fault rather than your sisters?

<comment><USER4> Because blaming the driver won't change the fact that it's her life that is fucked up.

When it comes to collisions between vehicles and pedestrians or bikers, the vehicle has the right of weight.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For fucks sake, no. This is a meme that will not die.

Howie's evidence (as nice a guy as he is) is based on a single study by a professor at the University of Bath. (And there's a PLOS One paper which disputes his conclusions too which is worth reading: [http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...](http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0075424) )

There is no compelling evidence to recommend that you shouldn't wear a bike helmet and PLENTY of very solid evidence why wearing helmets have very important and life altering effects on the outcome of serious head trauma.

If you are cycling, wear a bike helmet.

<comment><USER6> He also cites an Australian study, which concludes risk of head injury per million hours travelled: Cyclist 0.41, Pedestrian 0.80, Motor vehicle occupant 0.46, Motorcyclist 7.66.

So if you want to be consistent you should update your comment to:

If you are cycling or driving wear a helmet.

<comment><USER5> Okay, how's this :P

Cars have other safety equipment that make them unlike bicycles. These include airbags, seatbelts, crumple zones and the like.

If you are a driving, you should employ those safety devices when you do so.

<comment><USER6> Ok that leaves pedestrians, who have twice as many head injury's per km. Most likely due to being hit by cars - perhaps cars should have airbags on the outside too...

<comment><USER7> Volvo does have such a pedestrian airbag: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2Aw4eZoijk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2Aw4eZoijk)

Apparently that model has scored the highest Euro NCAP crash test as of 2012 (the NCAP tests tests both damage to drive AND pedestrians).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> One of the arguments is flawed:

> According to a 2006 French study, pedestrians are 1.4 times more likely to > receive a traumatic brain injury than unhelmeted cyclists.

To fails to take into account that almost everyone walks, but very few cycle. The fact that it's only 1.4 times greater goes to show how common cycling head injuries actually are.

<comment><USER9> Came here to point this out. This is a wildly popular argument for no- helmeters, but it's just flat out inaccurate. If you control for the percentage of people who drive, walk, and cycle, the percentage of head injuries from walking would pale in comparison to head injuries from cycling.

This is like the statistic that says that 80% of all automobile accidents happen within 10 miles of home. It's not because the area around your home is more dangerous, it's _because you drive near your home more than you drive anywhere else_. It's basic statistics.

The reason car drivers don't wear helmets is because of the insane number of safety features that are built into a car, from seatbelts to airbags to varying strengths of materials, that bikes simply don't have. If another car hits your car, a number of things jump into play to save your life. If a car hits you on your bike, you're gonna have a head injury at a minimum.

<comment><USER10> THEY DO CONTROL FOR PERCENTAGE!

read the paper he quoted ( __ _emphasis mine_ __):

"The severe TBI of 1238 patients were described. The annual incidence and mortality of severe TBI were, respectively, 13.7 ___per 100,000_ __and 5.3 __ _per 100,000_ __. The fatality rate increased from 20% in childhood to 71% over 75-year-old. Compared to restrained car occupants, the odds ratio for having a severe TBI was 18.1 (95% confidence interval, CI = 12.8–25.5) for un- helmeted motorcyclists, 9.2 (95% CI = 7.5–11.3) for pedestrians, 6.4 (95% CI = 4.7–8.8) for un-helmeted cyclists, 3.9 (95% CI = 3.1–4.8) for unrestrained car occupants and 2.8 (95% CI = 2.2–3.5) for helmeted motorcyclists. "

[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001457505...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0001457505001363#)

<comment><USER9> Per 100,000 what? People who cycle? People in general? Patients with head injuries?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I choose to ignore this "advice".

I've hit my head a few times while getting into bike accidents.

The first time, I was wearing a helmet. Mostly landed on my face, but the helmet broke and I was fine. (An ambulance was driving by and took me to the hospital as a precautionary measure. Somewhat convenient.)

The second time, I was riding a CitiBike without a helmet. I hit a pothole and somehow ended up landing on my head. I don't really remember much, except laying in the middle of the road for a few minutes trying to figure out what happened. (I do remember being pretty sure that this was the end. But I decided I didn't want to get charged for the missing bike, so got up anyway.)

The third time I was wearing a helmet again, but I landed on my hands. It was winter so I was wearing gloves with leather palms, and just kind of slid for a while. It was great. I rode 40 more miles after that one. (And I'm definitely a fan of gloves!)

Wear a helmet. It's pretty easy to fall off your bike, and you don't really want to injure your head.

</comment><comment><USER12> Among others, these two points scream of grasping at anything to throw at the argument:

 _> wearing a helmet may create a false sense of security and induce risk- taking that cyclists without head protection might not make._

 _> Bike helmets discourage cycling_

We are not discussing if not wearing a helmet should be legal, A competent adult should be able to go base jumping, ride a motorcycle, or just bang their head against the pavement if they please, but that doesn't mean your not an idiot for doing it without any good reason.

But as he opens,

 _> Several of them asked me: Where is your bike helmet?_

We're clearly discussing the validity of the choice as an individual to choose to not wear a helmet, and the argument that it induces risk-taking? Well consider that fact, and use your head and don't take extra-risk.

Or about discouraging cycling? Does the _existence_ of helmets discourage cycling? Does me, or you wearing helmets discourage other people from cycling? The study at least says that mandatory helmet laws discourage cycling.

Now, if you choose to go base jumping for the adrenaline, to ride a motorcycle for the freedom, and thrill, fully aware and accepting of the risk, that's great, and better to you.

Similarly, if you want to ride without a helmet because it you think it makes you look cooler, you like the wind in your hair, prefer the convenience to the safety, or even if you are just trying to be different, a _contrarian_. Sure, do what you want. But stop fucking pretending it's because "It's safer".

<comment><USER6> Did you read this bit:

Risk of head injury per million hours travelled

Cyclist - 0.41 Pedestrian - 0.80 Motor vehicle occupant - 0.46 Motorcyclist - 7.66

"but that doesn't mean your not an idiot for doing it without any good reason."

So by this logic someone not wearing a helmet while in a car is also an idiot ;)

<comment><USER12> > So by this logic someone not wearing a helmet while in a car is also an > idiot.

That may also be true, assuming that we have similar data showing that helmets help as much in cars as they do on bikes.

Considering that car incidents are vastly different however, I suspect a helmet in a car incident doesn't have quite the same affect on head injuries.

And even if they have proven to be useful, the studies are almost certainly with helmets that much more closely resemble a motorcycle helmet. In which a case the convenience and comfort helmet have a much more significant impact, which plays directly into my comment of "without a good reason"

Additionally, I'd really like to see the paper where that statistic came from, sadly it doesn't give the numbers in the abstract. And while it's totally anecdotal I know a non-zero amount of people (directly or indirectly) who have had a head injury cycling, yet zero as a pedestrian. Despite knowing vastly more people who spend vastly more time walking. Saying that you're more likely to get a head accident walking is a pretty strong claim. Thus I'd like to see strong evidence.

<comment><USER13> We can see from racing sports that helmets are good to have in high speed car crashes. Rally drivers, Formula 1 drivers etc all wear them.

<comment><USER14> What car drivers, outside motor racing, are driving at 150mph plus down the high street?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think the real danger is that smart people will find very complicated and contrived reasons (twist statistics) to justify whatever they want to justify.

The real reasons are often personal, simple and embarrassing things like: "I don't want to wear a helmet cause it is not cool", "I want to be contrarian", "I will create controversy and get a lot of discussion focused around me". And then it is just a matter of finding some statistics or anecdotes to support the position.

This happens in every sphere of life.

It seems this is a case of that. The danger is now not only to himself to also others if anyone starts listening and stops wearing helmets.

But I think in this case they went to far and the message contains its own destruction so to speak. They tried to hard to justify it and they appear too irrational to hopefully anyone take their advice to heart.

</comment><comment><USER16> For the past couple months, I've thought about John Gruber's stance against helmets. After thinking it over, I'm inclined to believe it matters what _type_ of biking you're doing. Your helmet usage should vary if you're riding in the Tour de France or taking a NiceRide bike (rent by hour deal) around town. Ditto for riding in an area that very bicycle conscious (bike lanes, many bikers) vs not (busy street, curbed, etc).

If you're just beginning cycling, please use roads that are bicycle friendly. Use a road with a wide shoulder or a bike lane and slow traffic. Don't use the busiest curbed downtown street.

I speak as a severe traumatic brain injury survivor. I don't take any unnecessary risk, explicitly to avoid the chance of re-injury. Growing up around helmets as the son of two ski patrollers, wearing a helmet is a part of life. It does not inhibit my riding and while drivers might be less careful around me, I won't take that risk.

> Children and toddlers on foot are far more likely to receive traumatic brain > injuries than cyclists

A traumatic brain injury is, at best, a severe concussion[1] and worst case can result in death or a coma that lasts for months. I would just like to make that clear.

[1]:[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traumatic_brain_injury#Severit...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traumatic_brain_injury#Severity)

<comment><USER17> > After thinking it over, I'm inclined to believe it matters what type of > biking you're doing.

You should wear a helmet regardless. It's easy to misjudge. I remember seeing a cyclist at U.C. Berkeley laying on the ground with blood pooling around his head. No helmet. From what I can tell, he was zipping downhill and hit a water fountain. You might think that the middle of a college campus is a fairly safe place to bike given the lack of cars, but in truth, it can get dangerous pretty quickly. Lots of student walking around not paying attention and, in Berkeley's case, steep hills.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I never understood why adults in the US wear a helmet when they bike (I'm from Holland, no one does that) but now that I've been cycling in LA for a while… I understand. The roads are not built for bicyclists (this "bike map" exemplifies the issue: [http://cl.ly/image/1L3E2H063l1u](http://cl.ly/image/1L3E2H063l1u)) and drivers are simply not aware. I dutifully wear the helmet here, while my Dutch friends laugh at me.

<comment><USER15> Exactly. Comparing Holland to US is like night and day (well with regional variations -- some cities try at least to build bike lanes).

> I dutifully wear the helmet here, while my Dutch friends laugh at me.

Better to be laughed at wearing a helmet than being laughed at while being a vegetable.

> The roads are not built for bicyclists

There is another more insidious element -- in some parts of the country, there is a negative aspect of motorist culture where motorists are irritated by and hate bicyclists. Really doesn't make any sense but if you go on tours through rural parts on a road bike, be prepared to be honked at and have beer cans thrown at you. I wouldn't be too shocked to hear that on a secluded country road you might end being a target and be specifically clipped or pushed off road.

That probably sounds totally ridiculous to our but that happened to two of my coworkers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The only times I've hit my head on the ground as an adult have been coming off my bike. (Not that often, but still, three times is more than the zero for all other causes combined.) In each of those three times, I've been profoundly grateful that I've been wearing a helmet.

Adults tend not to fall over, voluntarily or in-, while walking around. There are plenty of ways to fall over and hit one's head while cycling that aren't under one's own control at all.

</comment><comment><USER20> This is like saying "If I drive a car without a seatbelt, I will drive safer!" When I ride I wear a helmet and I've broken (full failure mode absorption at impact) two in accidents; one was my fault, the other a slick spot at night that surprised me. I'll keep wearing my and put them on my kids too.

<comment><USER3> Don't forget to wear one when you're driving and walking too. And sleeping. Might save your life.

Consider purchasing a bulletproof vest too, you never know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> We're all missing the most important point here:

>> Bike helmets discourage cycling.

Yes! We should require all CAR drivers to wear helmets. Imagine how less likely drivers are to engage in road rage when they're wearing dorky helmets, not to mention safety on the road.

</comment><comment><USER22> The only good argument (in that article anyway) for not wearing a helmet seems to be the Bath university study, which everyone has been citing since the day it was released. But that's the only study I have seen on the topic. The fact that other modes of transportation (walking, driving) would theoretically be safer if you wore a helmet is irrelevant. And it's possible that helmets would turn someone off from cycling, but that seems like a poor reason to not use a bike.

<comment><USER5> There's a PLOS One paper which reanalyzed Ian Walker's 2007 data and claims that the effect Walker demonstrates is illusory if you chose different classification criteria for how to group data points: [http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...](http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0075424)

I tweeted w/ Ian Walker a bit about it, and though he hasn't written up a reply he disputes their conclusions (just for full disclosure).

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> One can pour over all the meta analysis and rationalization to support a view, but until one has experienced the reality of head trauma, talk is cheap.

Here's more cheap talk: [http://summaries.cochrane.org/CD001855/INJ_wearing-a- helmet-...](http://summaries.cochrane.org/CD001855/INJ_wearing-a-helmet- dramatically-reduces-the-risk-of-head-and-facial-injuries-for-bicyclists- involved-in-a-crash-even-if-it-involves-a-motor-vehicle)

[http://summaries.cochrane.org/CD005401/INJ_bicycle-helmet- le...](http://summaries.cochrane.org/CD005401/INJ_bicycle-helmet-legislation- for-the-uptake-of-helmet-use-and-prevention-of-head-injuries)

Over 20 years ago, i rarely wore a helmet commuting, mountain biking. When you're young, life seems forever. Luckily, I had some sense to listen to my colleagues one day and wear my helmet while doing my usual run across some headlands. I was volunteering at a clinic at the time and frankly I was weary of the MD and NPs digging me for NOT wearing my helmet (they have seen it all). My styrofoam plastic encased ANSI helmet literally saved my life sustaining a rt temporal crushing cavitation that left me only with the standard clavicular fracture and embedded asphalt abrasions to my nasal bridge, upper and lower limbs that still reminds me today. Moreover, the logistics of the Nat. Park Service, the nearby public hospital emergency room, the public university insurance and my saviors at that free medical clinic further eased my burdens from this unfortunate accident.

Believe me, I applaud changes in public policy encouraging mass transportation with biking right up there in the fore, however, when it comes to health behavior/policy look at more data.

and maybe consider a seat belt and stop smoking, too.

</comment><comment><USER24> > Let's first get one thing out of the way: if you get into a serious > accident, wearing a helmet will probably save your life.

Well thanks for wrapping up the debate in the first sentence after your intro! If a helmet will save your life then why would you not wear it? It seems like your argument for wearing a helmet in the car is a lot better than your argument against wearing a bike helmet.

</comment><comment><USER25> Do you bike faster than you can run?

Would you run, as fast as you can, head-first into a concrete wall?

No, it does not make sense to bike without a helmet.

<comment><USER11> "Bad things only happen to other people. I would never crash my bike," is the idea, I think.

Statistically correct, I guess, but I'm a pessimist so wear a helmet anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> There appears to be strong - IMO, conclusive - evidence that __compulsory __bicycle helmet laws reduce the overall quality of life (with the main mechanism being reduction of physical activity, and resultant deterioration in health).

But repealing such laws seems hard, politically. Any ideas on how to support such a repeal?

<comment><USER27> In what way does the need to wear a helmet reduce your capability of cycling? Last time I checked helmets were sold in the same shops as bikes.

<comment><USER28> The fact that they require money, maintenance, and effort to use? It may be minimal but it is there.

<comment><USER14> What maintenance does a bike helmet need?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'm extremely skeptical of this viewpoint, if only due to the fact that the energies involved in car crashes are an order of magnitude larger than those involved in bike accidents.

Intuition says that a car might be traveling (on average) double the speed of a bike--which puts us at 4x the amount of stored energy in your head which can dissipate. Unfortunately, bicycle helmets are almost definitely useless at this speed.[1]

It's also unclear if the same mechanisms for brain injury apply, though I don't have any statistics on this matter. My impression is that strict blunt force trauma is no longer the prevalent mechanism for injury in cars---you're more likely to get whiplash or some sort of quick rotation that puts you in a coma due to the brain sloshing around. Helmet or no helmet, it's difficult to protect against rotational modes.

So even if we went with this article's suggestion of wearing helmets in cars, there's a large possibility the numbers wouldn't look any better. I wear a helmet on a bike because it maximises my protection given the amount of inconvenience it gives me. Nothing about car statistics invalidates this trade.

[1] [http://www.helmets.org/limits.htm](http://www.helmets.org/limits.htm)

</comment><comment><USER30> Seems like there are lots of huge implicit qualifiers for this advice (I disagree with it pretty much completely, but this stuck out to me): The writer is in a country with one of the best road systems around, in a college town, in a town with lots of people that bike.

This is terrible terrible advice for any place that doesn't fit that criteria, and might as well be bad advice in the town that DOES fit this criteria.

</comment><comment><USER31> As ridership in a given community increases, everyone's quality of life goes up. In such cases, increased driver awareness and reduced biker isolation increases safety for everyone -- drivers and pedestrians included.

Slowing cars down on streets where bikers and pedestrians are present will save many lives, mostly those in cars, additionally some who are not.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think the title is wrong - it should be:

"Why it makes sense to drive wearing a helmet"

Based on:

We can also approach it from the perspective of injuries per million hours from a 1996 Australian study looking at head injury risk before the beginning of any helmet laws:

Risk of head injury per million hours travelled

Cyclist - 0.41 Pedestrian - 0.80 Motor vehicle occupant - 0.46 Motorcyclist - 7.66

</comment><comment><USER32> I hope this doesn't circulate, I was out with my kid (4 yo) today who fell and tapped his head on the road, the helmet didn't save his life but probably stopped a minor concussion.

I'm sure if I dug hard enough I could find evidence that cocaine can help the human body in some type of way, that doesn't mean its right.

</comment><comment><USER33> Fascinating ideas... I was astounded to hear that drivers pass closer to bicyclers wearing a helmet. I'd be prone to do so myself, as they do induce a false sense of security for both parties. I also agree that perhaps drivers and pedestrians should wear helmets as well.

<comment><USER34> If it's true (there are others here who say it's disputed), I would bet it is more because the driver trusts the cyclist more. The more the cyclist looks like she is a competent, experienced cyclist, the less you worry she will swerve toward you suddenly, fall over, or do some other random thing. The less you worry about that, the closer you feel you can get.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Per million hours travelled is a terrible normalization method for comparing travel risks. The problem is that risk is usually not uniform throughout a trip.

A good example of this is air travel. Most of the risk in air travel is concentrated at the end points. The high risk parts of flight are getting on or off the ground, and flying through the high traffic area around the airport. When flying at cruising altitude between the endpoints, the risk is lowest.

Overall, a very long flight is more risky than a short flight, but if you went by risk per million hours travelled the long flight might actually appear to be less risky.

</comment><comment><USER36> > wearing a helmet may create a false sense of security and induce risk-taking > that cyclists without head protection might not make.

This is the argument that bugs me the most. Isn't this the same as saying "If you're going hiking, taking a medical aid kit may create a false sense of security and induce risk-taking that hikers without a medic kit might not make.". No it's a dang medical kit, just take the damn thing!

</comment><comment><USER37> I fell with my bike a couple of years ago. On a cycle path. No cars around. Nobody around. I just lost balance for whatever reason.

I will always remind vividly is how __hard __the side of my head hit the pavement. No doubt it would have been really bad without the helmet. I ended up with badly scorched fingers, a big mark on the helmet where it hit the pavement, but no head injury. Please, use a helmet.

</comment><comment><USER38> This article seems to use total injury without reference the % of population that participates in (being a pedestrian, driving in a car, riding a bike etc.. )

Very well written - but a particularly poor content and irresponsible use of statistics.

</comment><comment><USER39> An interesting case. If wearing a helmet when walking becomes half as socially acceptable as wearing one while biking, I'll seriously consider it.

</comment><comment><USER40> No, it only explains why professional racing drivers wear helmets, and other drivers should too.

</comment><comment><USER40> I would wear a helmet all day if it had an oculus rift integrated.

</comment><comment><USER41> I have sold thousands of helmets in my time, they are an easy $$$ upsell with a new bicycle. The sale is simple, people even know the FUD and have heard all of the anecdotes. However, I don't wear a helmet myself and, when I sell someone a helmet, there are a few things I do for them:

Sell them a hi-viz tabard or coat. These are cheap (tabard) or slightly more than an average helmet (coat). The thinking is prevention better than cure. If you can avoid the impact in the first place then that is a better place to be. Hi-viz works, there are studies from 3M and plenty of others to prove it (if you think 3M are biased). In real life I have been ticked off for not wearing a helmet by riders in black - you know the ones - male, black clothing, helmet, smart-arse attitude.

Make sure the helmet fits. There isn't a lot of point being strangled by a blob of polystyrene foam. The straps have to be done up tight for the helmet to do what it is supposed to do. Generally I point customers away from the American brands - Giro, Bell - and towards the European brands because the straps are much better on the proper European brand helmets. They lie flat with the face and don't have buckles that catch the skin. Again, the no-viz riders in black protected by their magic helmets rarely do the straps up and you can flip the helmet up off their heads with a single finger.

Sell trouser clips and sensible footwear. In the UK leisure cyclists need to be aware that a denim trouser caught in the chain (or a shoelace) will throw you straight over the bars head first onto the road. Trouser clips (and stiff- soled cycle-specific shoes) prevent that from happening.

Sell lights that work. The front light is probably more important than the back. Just a basic flasher will do. Drivers are used to seeing idiot cyclists on the road in front of them riding without lights, they are easy enough to pick up with headlights. However, overtaking drivers do not expect some cyclist coming the other way. So lights are vital particularly during the spring/autumn/winter months.

For me, with interactions with customers, the helmet is also part of a use scenario. Mountain biking? Doing back-flips on a BMX? Road-racing? Small child on trailer? We actually have specialist and different helmets for those scenarios. Same for people returning to cycling from having not been on a bike for a while, we have affordable and easy to adjust helmets for those folk too.

My message is that cycle safety isn't just about wearing a helmet. Wearing a helmet does not make you safe any more than an airbag makes a motorist safe. True safety is to be found elsewhere, by being properly visible to all other road users and in riding a bike that isn't going to self destruct due to some unanticipated interaction with clothing. It is also in having the skills to ride a bike in a way that is neither cowardly or cocky.

If you ride the same route every day and know every pot hole, recognise the plates on the cars that pass you every day and have never had the slightest chance of a mishap you do have to think 'why am I carrying this block of polystyrene with me every day? Am I doing this just to please my car-driving mother?'

Finally if made-in-China polystyrene was that great they would make the fronts of trucks from the stuff.

</comment><comment><USER42> 3D PIE CHART!!!!

</comment><comment><USER43> Aw, this is cute.</comment>


Chasing Owed Money vs. Making Money - <AUTHOR> http://bennesvig.com/2012/01/04/chasing-owed-money-vs-making-money/

<comment><USER2> I get his point, but think it is a little too broad. Yea, you probably shouldnt spend all your time worrying about debts and instead should focus on building what you can or just enjoying life, but at the same time you cannot gain a reputation as somebody who wont pursue debts.

Estimate your chance of collecting a debt, calculate the approx hourly of collecting it and then decide if you should pursue it. However, NEVER, publicize the fact that if collecting doesnt earn you more than X/hr that you will not attempt to collect.

As a business, debts should never just be forgotten. Maybe you never expect to actually collect the full debt, but that doesnt mean invoices shouldnt be sent, and it doesnt mean that at a certain point the account should be sent to collections.

Focus on building your business, but dont let money owed simply walk away from you.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm. I agree. I guess I'm less optimistic because what I'm owed is a drop in the ocean compared to others.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Would you choose Linux or BSD if you were building a new laptop for devs - <AUTHOR> Imagine starting a laptop company where laptops are built specifically designed for developers. Let's assume that hardware is really good. Now we need to create a new operating system for an optimal user experience. Would you develop the your OS on top of BSD or Linux (or something else)? Why? Whatever information is not provided, feel free to assume it. <comment><USER2> No, don't develop your own OS. Then you'd get your own weird-ass badly maintained OS instead of the standard Ubuntu or Red Hat or what have you. Instead just offer two or three distros preinstalled, and offer (maintained!) installation guides for when people want to do a fresh reinstall. Any weird drivers should be easily installable with a single-line yum or apt-get.

This is exactly what some cloud providers do, like DigitalOcean or Linode. They don't develop their own OS, they offer the stuff that people love and expect.

Also, I'd expect the number of BSD users to be a single percentage of the Linux users. I can't see that being a viable business, but it's worth some research.

</comment><comment><USER3> If it were 25 years ago I'd say 'Definitely BSD'.

Today, it's 'Definitely Linux'.

"Don't reinvent" the wheel." \- "If it works, don't fix it" \- "Never teach your grandmother to suck eggs" \- etc - etc - etc: Never fall victim to the NIH (Not Invented Here) Syndrome. Bill gates had it, it ruined Microsoft. _In other words, don 't think you can build a better OS than hundreds/thousands of other brains can._

</comment><comment><USER4> > Now we need to create a new operating system for an optimal user experience.

No we do not.

TLDR: Choose Pop!_OS or ElementaryOS as they both match the 'It just works' requirement for all users.

Since you are targeting developers, it already indicates to me that you build on top of Linux which meets the drivers requirement to support the laptop's hardware. Linux already has the majority of the developer mind-share, so I see no reason to use a BSD for the desktop in this particular use-case. Don't even think about rolling your own distro unless you have a good reason to or you can afford to maintain it.

Now, the real question is: Which distro to choose for developers for optimal user experience?

To help you choose such a distro, there has to be one that must offer a level of customization that doesn't sacrifice the consistency of the OS with standard defaults to revert back to via both a CLI or GUI settings control (As found in macOS and Windows). Another requirement is having a distro that has software that feels integrated with the system software and it behaves predictably such as desktop keybinding software must work across all windows and apps or the availability of accessibility software built-in such as text- to-speech. Following this, you have eliminated 70% of all Linux distros that fail this.

Also, this distro needs an easy and consistent way of installing development libraries or even the latest libraries without it getting in the way of the developer's work. Whether if it breaks the OS or forces the developer to decipher those cryptic error messages via googlgling for each distro / library combination. Well done, you have eliminated some of the default Linux desktop OSes that do just that.

Lastly, what happens when a dev tries to install your software / firmware update? Is it as clean as a Apple software update? Is there a _easy_ way to revert a failed system update without reinstalling the entire OS or trawling through a blog to copy-paste commands for recovery options?

Unfortunately, every Linux distro requires the latter and there is no standard or easy way of rolling back a bad update without typing a few commands. If we have users that do not mind this issue, then a choice of either Pop!_OS or ElementaryOS look like clear winners to me to pre-install onto a standard or high-spec laptop to sell to devs and consumers.

</comment><comment><USER5> > Now we need to create a new operating system for an optimal user experience.

No, we don't need to do this.

The devs will decide. I don't want Intel ME (I don't even want Intel), nor secure boot, nor EUFI. I don't want the outdated, buggy, possible malware filled "OS" that comes pre-installed on hardware these days -- that is the first thing to go. I already multi-boot a laptop. I do want an easier way to boot Operating Systems.

</comment><comment><USER6> The only thing that you need to do is to make your hardware 100% compatible with Linux, BSD, Windows and MacOS (if it's possible). I even bet that if you would build machine that is unofficially, dead simple to run MacOS on it (sort of like everybody knows that Thinkpads run great under Linux) you would win a lot of developers.

</comment><comment><USER7> linux, larger ecosystem, more driver support</comment>


If Google Glass could do this, it would start a revolution - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-57609638-1/if-google-glass-could-do-this-it-would-start-a-revolution/

<comment><USER2> Google glass has a really small display on the top right of your right eye. It can overlay maybe 5% of your total field of vision. You cannot even see your hands through it unless you put your hands at a particular angle and distance. The small display is not enough for overlaying the complete field of vision. Why is it so small? Why isn't it a full blown glass with full augmented reality? The answer is power - even the current model of Google glass barely lasts 3-4 hours after heavy usage. With a larger screen, it would last less than couple of hours. So yes, these Minority style stuff is cool and Google is aware of it but they won't happen unless we solve the power issue.

Disclaimer: I work at Google and I wear Google Glass almost all the time.

</comment><comment><USER3> Google Glass can't. Oculus Rift probably will do it on its final version.

</comment><comment><USER4> Imagine playing Street Fighter with that!</comment>


Show HN: Selector.js, a jQuery replacement weighing in at 4.75 kb - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Websilk/Selector <comment><USER2> Can it replace the jQuery dependency in Twitter Bootstrap?

<comment><AUTHOR> hhmm... That would be a good test. I'll see if it works :)

<comment><USER3> Do provide an update here.</comment></comment></comment>


Is there a legit reason for a Minecraft mod to ask for your username / pass? - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/30orgd/is_there_a_legitimate_reason_for_a_mod_to_ask_for/

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm submitting this because some Minecraft mods _require the user to enter their Minecraft username and password_ in order to run. This is weirdly broken behaviour.</comment>


Osxc – Simple configuration tool for OS X - <AUTHOR> http://osxc.github.io/

<comment><USER2> Another project that uses the same tools (Ansible/Homebrew) to accomplish the same/similar goals:

[https://github.com/32degrees/battleschool](https://github.com/32degrees/battleschool)

If you're going to do this on a wider scale (multiple machines, managed in an organization), the best tools right now are AutoPKG and Munki:

[https://github.com/autopkg/autopkg](https://github.com/autopkg/autopkg) [http://code.google.com/p/munki/](http://code.google.com/p/munki/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I looked into battleschool. The way it overally works seems better (having it's own command and a simple config with just a dotfile) but I really like ansible roles and I really enjoy using brew and brew cask to install everything, it's more neat and more undoable than using a pkg command directly. For now, I don't know which design I'll choose but I still like using the ansible-playbook command. I don't want to hide the internal mechanics of my tool. Ansible is great ! I still want to use it !

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm struggling to see how this is better than a simple bootstrapping script. Every feature you list can be accomplished in very few lines of bash:

[https://github.com/taylorlapeyre/.files/blob/master/osx/boot...](https://github.com/taylorlapeyre/.files/blob/master/osx/bootstrap.sh)

<comment><USER4> The main difference between shell scripts and Ansible playbooks is that shell scripts are imperative, while playbooks are declarative and idempotent.

A shell script will be something like

        install this package
        create this file
        change this line in a configuration file

While a playbook is like

        make sure this package is installed
        make sure this file exists
        make sure this line is like this in this config file

What happens if you want change something in your configuration script? In most cases you can't just _replay_ a shell script, because it will try to do a lot of things that are already done and it is very hard to write idempotent commands.

Ansible on the other hand only performs the tasks in the playbook that need to be performed: if the condition is already satisfied, there's nothing to do.

This is especially convenient if your script fails at some point: you can fix the directive and replay the playbook, and it will restart from where it left off. With shell scripts you have to do it manually (comment out the first part?), which is error-prone and time-consuming.

<comment><USER3> I can appreciate this explanation, thanks.

I will, however, offer that a well-designed shell script should be able to be run many times in a row without causing any problems. The above script is an example of this.

If I wanted to change something in my configuration script, that's totally fine! In fact, I do change it all the time. Since all it does is ask you whether you want homebrew to install something, there is very little risk (if any) of something "going wrong."

<comment><USER5> To do the same thing using pure shell scripting, you have to write a large number of helper functions to avoid boilerplate. Things like asserting — in an idempotent way — the existence of files (with the right content, the right ownership and mode flags, etc.), services, packages and so on.

Tools like Ansible and Puppet already provide that set of functionality. If you write it yourself, you pretty much end up with something like Ansible, except it's specific only to your use case. Better to focus on commonality.

I'm a Puppet guy myself (although I appreciate the simplicity Ansible can bring to the table), and make extensive use not just of the primitives, but of the ability to bundle primitives as reusable modules. For example, rather than explicitly putting files in /etc/logrotate.d, I define a "logrotate class" and do:

        logrotate::rotation {
          postgresql:
            pattern => "/var/log/postgresql/*.log",
            keep_count => 10,
            require => Package['postgresql'];
        }

However, this is not merely a macro that is expanded in-place. Rather, it's an object which can be referenced (for example, I can have something else which requires that the object Logrotate::Rotation[postgresql] runs first) as well as "inventoried" (I can ask the system about all the log rotations that have been declared, and use that to drive a UI, for example).

The expressiveness and flexibility of tools like Ansible (which must have something similar) and Puppet is best seen in a multi-node server environment, however.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> One blind spot that all of these OS X configuration tools appear to have is the App Store. Not through any fault of their own I suspect... more that Apple hasn't opened the App Store app to being scriptable. But a command-line way of installing/reinstalling/updating App Store apps would be great.

<comment><USER7> The zdw-mentioned autopkg has the capability of looking at your installed AppStore apps and checking for updates, and further can package them(with embedded receipt/DRM) to a patch mgmt system. [https://github.com/autopkg/nmcspadden- recipes/tree/master/Ap...](https://github.com/autopkg/nmcspadden- recipes/tree/master/AppStoreApp) It works with any pkg deployment system, although autopkg itself ships with Munki support. Ansible and osxc by extension are about ConfigMgmt, of course, but conflating mgmt systems is common and understandable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I am using Github's Boxen, which works quite well [https://boxen.github.com/](https://boxen.github.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> boxen looked nice to me, but I really wanted to avoid puppet (even if I never tried, it's often compared to chef and I have lots of bad experiences with chef !)

<comment><USER9> I've used Puppet extensively for server management (and also done some Chef, and currently som Saltstack.)

Although they are both configuration management tools, they are different.

What kind of issues did you have with chef? And when?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is neat. I think it'd be pretty awesome if it were possible to download all the dmg's/installers/apps in a folder/drive without installing them so at a later date you could a) install everything without having to wait hours to download or require an internet connection and b) keep your packages up to date (almost as a backup) running the script every once in a while to make sure you have the most up to date packages/installers.

<comment><USER11> Puppet (and Boxen for help on OSX) can do this for you with appdmg package provider: [http://docs.puppetlabs.com/references/latest/type.html#packa...](http://docs.puppetlabs.com/references/latest/type.html#package- provider-appdmg)

<comment><USER10> Nice. I'd love to see templates so you can easily customize depending on what kind of environment you want so you can start from zero. E.g. 1\. Development 2\. Design 3\. Engineering 4\. Management 5\. General use

It's probably just me, but it seems like all of these require too much investment time before you have something usable for future use (replicating your current environment).

Which brings me to this, how about a script that analyzes what you already have installed and creates this set up for you which you can customize to easily add/remove packages/apps/installers using Boxen and similar? Anyone know of such tools? My MBP is full of crud after using SuperDuper!/Time Machine for several years to start new macbook setups and installing new versions of OS X on top of the old OS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I think the project is not largely usable for now, I just want some feedback from HN to get it usable for everyone (and not just for me).

</comment><comment><USER12> For some reason I'd never seen Homebrew Cask before, which looks very interesting! Does anyone have experiences with Cask to share?

<comment><USER13> Cask _could be_ awesome, but it's not at this stage. There are no upgrades, in many cases it doesn't work. Most apps complain that they are not in /Applications, but are in ~/Applications instead and so on. At the end of the day, it duplicates some of the Homebrew functionality - some non-GUI packages are getting into Cask, because possibly Homebrew doesn't want them - it's a bit confusing as well. I think efforts should be put into merging into Homebrew instead of keeping it separate.

<comment><USER14> Hiya - author here. Thanks for the feedback on this stuff! It's always good to hear where it's best to focus improvements.

I'm going to address a few of your points specifically.

> There are no upgrades, in many cases it doesn't work.

It's true that `brew cask upgrade` is not yet a thing. I would very much like it to be. I've been sort of avoiding work on the feature for fear of messing it up. But that's no reason to not try to make something work! :) Maybe I'll use this as an occasion to start digging in and getting my hands dirty.

> At the end of the day, it duplicates some of the Homebrew functionality - > some non-GUI packages are getting into Cask, because possibly Homebrew > doesn't want them - it's a bit confusing as well.

If the purpose of the project is not clear, that's definitely a problem. I'm not aware of many (any?) purely non-gui apps making it in to Cask. The `Homebrew/homebrew-binary` tap is the place for those. I'll go review our included Casks to make sure things are clear.

> I think efforts should be put into merging into Homebrew instead of keeping > it separate.

I can understand this opinion, but I think we may actually end up going in the other direction. The places we share code with Homebrew have been the biggest problem areas for us. We are already 90% code independent from Homebrew, and I think moving Cask to its own world may benefit both the project and the users. But of course that's a conversation to have with the (amazing!) project team.

<comment><USER15> Is there anything Homebrew can do differently to make things easier for your project?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> we use Ansible across 300 hosts, including some Mac guests. Well-tested playbooks for Mac are hard to find, so this is awesome.

</comment><comment><USER17> How is this different from Chef / Puppet?

</comment><comment><USER18> The osxc website and documentation is riddled with basic grammar and spelling errors and incorporates slang like "osxc got your back". That doesn't inspire much confidence.

Edit: Wow with the downvotes. I'm just offering feedback in a polite manner for what a lot of others are probably thinking.

<comment><AUTHOR> I know, my english is not very accurate (I'm french). Feel free to do some pull-requests to correct my grammar errors, it'll help me a lot ! Both for this website and my english. Thank you !

Note that you shouldn't be confident using it too, it's still a very early project and, at the beginning, it was only meant to be used by me ... But I intend to make it much better !</comment></comment>


The Market Will Crash Again. Are You Ready? - <AUTHOR> https://www.fool.com/investing/2020/09/07/the-market-will-crash-again-are-you-ready/ <comment><USER2> This is a generic financial news article that provides no value or insights, beyond "Don't invest emotionally".

"Rather than investing based on emotion, intuition, or pure luck, someone who dollar-cost averages invests at pre-planned times." What times? Timing the market is notoriously difficult, without inside information.

"If you had dollar-cost averaged your investment approach back in March, you might not have invested exactly at the bottom, but you would have invested throughout the correction. Even if you had bought an index that tracked the S&P 500 at the worst time to buy in March (well before the market hit bottom), you would still be sitting on returns of more than 13%!" How would you know where the bottom is? It's unclear what this comment is suggesting. The author could have picked an arbitrary time, and compared returns to another point in time, and have conveyed the same info.

"Semi-frequent drops in the market make great buying opportunities; however they are just that -- opportunities to buy more of the companies you love." This is almost implying that when the market drops more than avg in a given time, it'll go back up to its level soon... But is devoid of an actionable prediction or specifics (Rate of drop, timeframes etc), presumably because it's a generic, unfalsifiable statement.

"If you are convinced there is going to be a stock market crash.." What would be a good justification to be convinced?</comment>


DocSyncer Shuts Down, Google Docs syncing - CEO: "no business model" - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/16/docsyncer-merges-with-the-deadpool/ <comment><USER2> PG subscribes to the "build something people want" and "figure out business model" later.

The YCN community largely agrees with this mantra because it is much harder to build something people want than to find a business model.

Perhaps DocSyncer is an anomaly? Hmmm...Facebook, Friendster,...

</comment><comment><USER3> Sounds like a truth most web 2.0 businesses that add one or two features have yet to realize.

Way to stay ahead of the curve, DocSyncer!</comment>


Voxel8: The World's First 3D Electronics Printer - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbm2SSql8V8

<comment><USER2> Seeing the quadcopter take off at the end of this video really gets my imagination flowing.

I like the way this printer combines non-printed parts, such as chips and batteries, with printing the leads to hook them up.

I'm not as thrilled with the Autodesk tie-in -- I'm sure it makes for nice software, but I wonder if you'll have to purchase some sort of "premium" edition in order to do anything useful.</comment>


Here's what your stolen identity goes for on the internet's black market - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/460482/heres-what-your-stolen-identity-goes-for-on-the-internets-black-market/

<comment><USER2> Recently, my bank (Australia) was hacked and data stolen. How do I know ? Because, every day I get a spam email ( From @mybank.com ) which has my account numbers , the stocks I have traded and some other personal info that only my bank has and asks me to change my password. It also contains a link that goes to the third party website with a phishing page.

The big 4 banks here are very insecure and any one with even a mediocre knowledge of sysadmin can get into them. Alas, even after having billions in revenue they don'e have a bug bounty. Shame they take our money but do not take our privacy seriously.

<comment><USER3> And you're still banking there? That sounds kind of serious...

<comment><USER2> We only have 4 major banks here. Not much of a choice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Horrible. That said, I couldn't help but notice how nicely done the web UI looks. Clearly-presented categories, nice and apparently accurate faceted search, the listings on the right are well arranged and obviously time was sent on picking right fonts, there is a 'Save search' function etc.

Have to say, looks much better than the average "Show HN" :)</comment>


Pubsub.io - a query based message hub. End of the channel tyranny now - <AUTHOR> http://pubsub.io

<comment><USER2> How complex would it be to execute a javascript function callback against each published document on the hub instead of a query and return the document to the subscriber if the function returns true?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not hard at all. We actually had that in early versions but removed it because it's really hard to optimize against functions, and you easily break the hub by injecting long running loops.

Plus queries are the power of pubsub.io. Queries can be indexed and compiled on the fly, so hubs scale very well.

If you really need funcions, you can fork the project and I can point you to how to add them.

<comment><USER3> I'd love to see functions too, and am not sure your concerns are necessarily dealbreakers. Optimization should be easier if you use something like node- burrito for the low hanging fruit, and node.js developers are already aware that long synchronous loops should be avoided in a single-threaded environment.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think you convinced us to give functions a second look, as long as we can have a good story for auth, i can't see why we shouldn't add them, given the right optimizations are in place. They could be very powerful. <https://github.com/pubsubio/pubsub-hub/issues/3>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can someone help me understand -- is this a CEP for js?

Edit: or rather: CEP + message queue?

<comment><AUTHOR> Its not a message queue, and although its only for js now, it meant to be for everybody. But i dont know what CEP is. Something similar?

<comment><USER4> By CEP I mean something like esper: [http://esper.codehaus.org/tutorials/solution_patterns/soluti...](http://esper.codehaus.org/tutorials/solution_patterns/solution_patterns.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> That is very cool, thanks for the link. And yes the main idea is very similar to that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Saw the presentation on nodecamp.eu last month, it's really cool stuff. Great you finally made it available to the public.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!, it feels good to be out there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> after hearing about pubsub.io at nodecamp.eu I'm totally excited to see it in public now.</comment>


Things Real People Don't Say About Your App - <AUTHOR> http://trpdsaya.tumblr.com/

<comment><USER2> >I'm really glad all these ads are keeping this site in business.

You know what would suck? Paying for Gmail and Facebook.

<comment><USER3> You know what would be totally awesome? Paying for Gmail and Facebook so I don't have to deal with any fricking ads, and so I can expect a commensurate amount of commitment from the companies that run them.

<comment><USER4> <http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/index.html>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Why yes, I'll give you offline access to all my Facebook info"

Isn't that said by millions of (real, non-geek) people every day?

</comment><comment><USER6> Kind of funny, but as I predicted, not quite as good as tpdsaa.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2106021>

</comment><comment><USER3> Look, I know it's gauche to admit that you laughed at something on the internet, but the "modal dialogue" one got me fair and square. I LOL'd, Hacker News.

I LOL'd.

</comment><comment><USER7> This couldn't be much less funny.

</comment><comment><USER8> "I love verifying my email address." Sigh... I know, man. I know.

<comment><USER9> Hmm, I wonder what the solution to this could be.

<comment><USER10> Not having an email account?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Meh, I call BS on some of this. I've def lazyed out on deleting my account because I couldn't find the button on the site.

<comment><USER12> But did that make you a returning customer, or did you still just abandon the site?

<comment><USER11> It was thinkvitamin, I'm still a member paying 25 a month.

Also the same situation on 1and1...

Actually I should do something about that.

<comment><USER13> If you'll pay me 20 a month (and give me the account info), I'll delete it for you.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How I made $2,000 in 20 seconds - <AUTHOR> http://okdork.com/2013/04/30/2000_dollars_by_asking/

<comment><USER2> Great example of the old adage: you'll never know if you don't try. Interesting title as it's slightly misleading at first, but ultimately truthful.</comment>


Show HN: Papermine—create HTML publications - <AUTHOR> http://papermine.com/examples/

<comment><USER2> At last, an antidote to all those horrendous Flash magazines!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup.

:-)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> We've built this app to create HTML pubs for your website.

Here is a sample publication: [http://papermine.com/site/public/eatalian- simple-and-authent...](http://papermine.com/site/public/eatalian-simple-and- authentic-italian-recipes-for-your-boating-menus/)

To create one and play with the editor, you can sign up here: [http://papermine.com/sys/register/](http://papermine.com/sys/register/) (we would actually love it if you did that).

We think the tool would be good for designer to build brochures for clients, travel guides, recipe books, albums for photographers, etc. etc.

What do you think? Do you think it has potential?

Any feedback appreciated.

Thanks!</comment>


Teaching Linear Algebra - <AUTHOR> http://bentilly.blogspot.com/2009/09/teaching-linear-algebra.html <comment><USER2> One of my favorites. Discussions from 2009: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=850485](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=850485) and from 2012: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4660842](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4660842)

</comment><comment><USER3> I always like the Trefethan and Bau focus on the SVD.</comment>


The last moments of Lac-Mégantic - <AUTHOR> http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/lac-megantic-musi-cafe/article15656116/ <comment><USER2> The use of railways for transporting petroleum products is booming thanks to the backlash against pipelines such as keystone and gateway. Oil companies who are fearful of incurring public outrage due to pipeline spills are only too happy to hand tanker cars over to the care of railway workers. When statistically inevitable accidents happen the oil producers can escape the blame!

The Lac-Mégantic disaster shows why we should be building more pipelines. Pipelines spill less per unit of volume shipped and usually avoid populated centers to a much greater degree than railways. They're better for the environment and safer for humans. Fossil fuels can be nasty stuff, but we currently still need them and we require the ability to move them around safely. The next time you see environmentalists protesting pipeline construction, ask them why they're not chaining themselves to their local railway tracks instead. We should do our best to avoid rolling bomb's through beautiful towns like Lac-Mégantic on a daily basis.

<comment><USER3> That might be penny-wise and pound foolish. Pipelines cost billions to build and they manifest our reliance on oil, which in turn costs much more lifes simply through pollution than any number of railway accidents.

<comment><USER4> Our reliance on oil is already there, whether you're building pipelines or additional oil carrying railroad cars and running extra trains.

<comment><USER3> The point here is not absolute, it's a relative one. Of course we already rely on oil. But if a 7 billion pipeline makes us rely on oil for an extra year (simple economics since its cheaper to transport through a pipeline than on rail), the negative externalities caused by that extra year of fossil fuel would dwarf the fatalities of railway accidents any time.

<comment><USER5> The cost inflicted by oil is measured in centuries. A year or two saved may not make a difference in terms of total lives lost:

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/globalwarming/1...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/globalwarming/10471304/Carbon- in-atmosphere-could-warm-planet-for-centuries.html)

Moving oil through the pipeline is bad, but it is less bad than moving by rail in light of the probabilities of human loss (though the spillage is likely to be bigger when there is an accident). At least there is an potential up of rail being freed up to move something else safer - like people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For those who haven't seen it, this is what the fire looked like, taken from an amateur cam [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRb3JHsiqfA](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRb3JHsiqfA). Horrifying...

</comment><comment><USER7> It's a really beautiful little town in a gorgeous setting and this was a really shocking tragedy that shows how easily disasters can happen in an increasing scale industrial world.

</comment><comment><USER8> That is one great navigational layout.

</comment><comment><USER9> I live not too far from there and my thoughts are with you guys!

Stay strong!

</comment><comment><USER10> Same here! Stay strong guys! What a horrible tragedy!

</comment><comment><USER11> I remember receiving that news alert on my phone at about 1:30 am. It was surreal.</comment>


I tried Android, but couldn't switch. Did you know you can't undo text edits? - <AUTHOR> http://benguild.com/2013/11/20/android-cant-undo-text-edits-wont-switch/

<comment><USER4> I've had an iPhone for two years, and never even _heard_ about undo before. I almost couldn't believe it when I tried shaking, and it actually worked. Talk about hidden features...

But typing is so much slower with an on-screen keyboard anyways, and I so rarely select text for anything but copy/paste, it has never once happened that I wished there was an undo.

<comment><USER5> Hah, maybe Samdung didn't copy the feature because they didn't notice it either. And thus, they don't have undo at all. Hilarious.

<comment><USER6> This feature's presence or absence is more about Android and Google than a vendor such as 'Samdung'.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> In other words : An Apple fanboy is being a total compainypants about Android because he doesn't want to accept that it's actually a pretty good phone.

<comment><USER8> I disagree. Any time someone switches platforms, they will undoubtedly be more prone to identify quirks and missing features in the new platform than everyday users.

If companies (be it Apple or Google) want users to switch to their platform from their competitors, it's critical for them to maintain feature-parity and push the boundaries on their strengths. Case in point: Apple adding notifications and copy&paste to the iPhone. Both were gripes from non-iPhone users. But at some point, Apple had to bite the bullet to follow suit. Whether their implementation was a success isn't the point, but rather keeping up with the competition in feature parity.

<comment><USER9> > I disagree. Any time someone switches platforms, they will undoubtedly be > more prone to identify quirks and missing features in the new platform than > everyday users.

Exactly, and this goes both ways. I switched to iPhone a little over a year ago (because apps) and the new car smell lasted about a day before I was annoyed by quirks like lack of a swipe-keyboard, inability to get a piece of information from one app into another app, and bad app switching. I returned it after about a week of frustration.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "While nearly all of our consumer audio devices share the 3.5mm headphone jack (and have since before I was born), my Apple "earpods" don't function properly with Android phones!"

Welcome to Apple world, where everything interesting is patented so it works only with your iPhone.

"Even my Mac computer can accept remote commands from and utilize the microphone of these (for audio/video calls)."

Guess who makes Macs? Apple.

</comment><comment><USER11> I have to admit, my jaw dropped when I found out I couldn't undo a text edit on my Nexus 7. This was last year; I assumed it had to be something that would make it into 4.3 (no) or 4.4 (still no).

iOS's shake-to-undo still feels a bit gimmicky to me (I prefer the keyboard undo button on iPads), but it's something that should have come immediately after clipboard support on Android.

</comment><comment><USER12> The complaint about backups is inaccurate. Preferences like sound or vibration on type and (infamously) wifi are backed up automatically and restored on boot. Many apps choose to save user preferences on their own servers in lieu of using the Shared Preference manager, but many others do not - <USER2> preferences will also be restored.

<comment><USER13> Inaccurate? He turned on backup, and most of the settings didn't come back. Apps don't opt-in to the backup feature in iOS - they opt out. This is a design decision that results in a UX failure, and not an inaccurate complaint at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> These are not deal killers for me, so much as they are selling points for Apple.

Android has plenty of deal killers; slow scrolling response, too many crap apps in store, bloatware, cheap hardware designs, music players that lack complex playlist algorithms, lacking mac integration, limited upgradability, dumb OS features (samsung, ei: eye tracking?!), OS updates delayed up to one year after release, short battery life, etc.

<comment><USER15> Like maxk42 said, most of these are device specific. I will address some of these more specifically, though.

      slow scrolling response

While Android as a whole may not be as smooth as iOS is (due to the Dalvik VM if I'm not mistaken), this is pretty much a non-issue on most newer phones from what I've seen. Also, the addition of the Android Runtime, I've noticed zero lag on my Nexus 5.

      Too many crap apps in store

This is an issue on both platforms. Most of the most popular apps on the App Store are on the Play Store as well.

      Cheap hardware designs

Not really an Android issue. Blame this on the OEMs. Though, there are some very well built, comfortable phones. HTC One, Moto X, both Nexus 4 and Nexus 5. This is more of a personal preference. I could say the same about iPhones as I personally don't like the design of the phone.

      Music players that lack complex playlist algorithms

Perhaps not as complex as iTunes, Google Play Music is quite a service. Check it out if you haven't.

      Lacking mac integration

Any specific examples here? I have used a Mac for the past year and have had no issues with integration.

      Limited upgradability

Not sure what you mean if not OS upgradability (see below).

      Dumb OS features

Again device specific. Also, something you might see as dumb may not be to someone else. Personally, I think the fingerprint scanner is dumb. Thought it was when Motorola did it years ago, think it still is today.

      OS updates delayed

Again, device specific. Nexus phones do not have this problem. Moto X is another phone that is getting quick updates.

      Short battery life

No response here. This is my biggest gripe with Android.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Backup is big one and as a long-term Android user I find it unforgivable that this isn't implemented in a system-wide way.

Text undo - now you mention it, that would be nice to have. I can't say I've ever cursed it's absence though.

He's just wrong on the camera focus. Just tried it.

I don't use disk encryption although what he says seems to make sense. I wouldn't call it a deal-breaker though.

Finally - regarding hardware compatibility? - sounds like a gap in the market for an enterprising chap!

<comment><AUTHOR> Video camera focus, not the photo camera. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Man... I swear you can undo in nearly any text box on Android (unless it's a custom class used by the third party dev)... You long press on the text box and click undo on the popup.

Am I remember wrong? It's been 12 months since I last used my Xperia, so I probably am.

<comment><USER18> I just tried on my Razr M, and no, no undo option based on a long press. Just cut, copy, and select-all. Same on my Nexus 7.

I'd never heard of a shake-undo feature on iOS, but it does sound awesome.

<comment><USER17> It's actually annoying sometimes! But useful when you need it.

<comment><USER19> Yeah, I don't have the steadiest hands. I can imagine the undo popup coming 'round every friggin' time I try to type something...

Then again, I'd take Swiftkeys over undo any day.

<comment><USER20> I've had an iPhone for over 4 years and didn't know this feature existed. Unsteady hands will not set it off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Huh? You can manually refocus the camera, just tap on the image somewhere. I'd do a video, but.. (Nexus 4 w/ 4.4)

<comment><USER22> Is this feature universally available over all the devices if they have recent OS?

<comment><USER23> I'm unaware of a phone camera that doesn't have some kind of focus capability, and the tap-to-focus feature is part of the AOSP camera in, at least, anything north of 4.0, so...

<comment><USER24> His complaint is that you can't tap to focus _while shooting video_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As an everyday carrier of both an iOS and Android device, it's rather refreshing when people point out flaws and points of improvements on both platforms. I certainly hope Google fixes these problems ASAP.

<comment><USER25> The competition between Android and iOS will probably go down as one of the great technical "great leaps forward" in history. While I often wish they could all just get along, the fact that two incredibly capable companies (and heck, Microsoft as well now) are fighting it out hammer and tongs in a pretty flat playing field is ridiculously awesome. Imagine if the same level of competition had existed between Apple and Microsoft between 1985 and 2000.

Consider that we're getting smaller, faster, lower powered, and often cheaper devices with more features every year. We got this level of progress in PC hardware for a while (1990-2003 or so) but software progressed far more slowly. Right now, literally everything is up for grabs, and everyone is benefiting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I've been an iPhone user for the past 4 years. I know about the undo feature but have honestly never ever used it.

</comment><comment><USER27> You can undo in Android, just not with the stock keyboard. Try out A.I.type Keyboard. It may not be the best solution as it should be built in, but it does work.

[http://img833.imageshack.us/img833/7762/zm0t.png](http://img833.imageshack.us/img833/7762/zm0t.png)

</comment><comment><USER28> Android and iOS are very different OSes. iOS I feel is more out of the box everything you need but you must use our stuff (itunes, imessage...etc). Stock Android is more here is a barebone kit and we got all these third party stuff. Pick and choose what you like.

The Nexus 5 is for people who don't want all this complications. Its a very barebone phone designed for devs. But if you get an Android with a third part skin like the HTC One, most of these issues are solved (off the top of my head I know it has #2 and #3).

</comment><comment><USER20> Interesting, I just tried Android for the last week as well. None of his complaints bothered me though. I actually almost switched, but ended up going back to iPhone as well. I will miss some things (widgets) but in the end the iPhone is better at being a phone IMO.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6777363](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6777363)

</comment><comment><USER29> I've been on the fence about switching away from iPhone. I hardly use Apple software and only the non-straightforward backup really bothers me.

<comment><USER30> TitaniumBackup with back up to a cloud service or your own server solves that problem. Alas, you do have to "root" your phone.

I agree such functionality should be included with any Smartphone at this point, but it appears that only a small percentage of Smartphone consumers seem to care.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> After a year of using Samsung Galaxy S 2, I realized that the most common reason that my phone shuts down (i.e. crashes) and restarts is copying to clipboard. After 20 clipboard uses, it just crashes, and Samsung, the biggest and richest Android vendor has refused to fix this issue for almost 2 years!

</comment><comment><USER15> Wow, I did not know about that undo feature. That would be a great addition to Android.

One way they could do this pretty easily in my opinion (if they wouldn't do the shake feature) is to have it included in the contextual action bar when you highlight text.

</comment><comment><USER32> Concerning the SIM card, that sounds more like an issue with using a Verizon phone overseas than any issue with Android. I believe any non-LTE Verizon phone (including pre-LTE iPhones) would have the same issue.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I feel like #1-4 are really small fixes. Can't wait to try Android again!

<comment><USER33> #1-4 seem like reasonable issues, and I hope they get fixed. None are things that are a problem for me, but I can see how they would be for some.

#5 - I might be misunderstanding this, but it reads like: Apple-specific hardware does not work on Android, and this is the fault of Android. I would say the fault lies with Apple, who force proprietary interfaces and not open standards. Then again, for headphone interfaces (which I myself don't use - <USER3> have a decent pair of Sony headphones which just have a standard audio jack for audio only), I suspect that other manufacturers are dropping the ball too.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree with your thoughts on #5. The main reason I mentioned it was not at the fault of Android, but more just at the fault of manufacturers.

I'm glad we've agreed on USB, but I don't understand the need for proprietary 3.5mm remote protocols at this point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Has anyone tried pairing a Bluetooth keyboard and pressing Ctrl-Z? I seem to recall this working in the emulator.

<comment><AUTHOR> I believe this does work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> People easily forget what's precious while they're having it. And then, realize after they lost it.

<comment><USER16> Deep. Unfortunately I have no idea what you're talking about. Care to elaborate?

<comment><USER22> I meant, they are happy with iOS because there's something important, but they easily forget because it's hard to be described in words. Not impossible, anyway a lot harder than simple numbers and graphs. Or it looks too natural to be lacked.

And people realize that other products are lacking that after they drop iOS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Article points out missing features or presumed flaws in Android, but not The inverse (IOS flaws and missing features). How does this add value for anyone thinking of switching? or wanting to debate which phone is better for whom and why.

As such, it's nothing but another uninformed rant.

It's likely that most people who own an iPhone don't even know about this feature.

He owned an android phone for a week and did not even see half the features that Android has and IOS lacks. How can you adjust to a totally different UI (and begin to appreciate many of the features and differences) in such a short period of time.

This post was not worth reading.</comment>


Ask HN: Best custom open source license that you have come across - <AUTHOR>

Which is the best custom Open source (i.e buy me beer, do whatever you want, etc) license that you have come across? <comment><USER2> Do What The Fuck You Want To Public License - [http://www.wtfpl.net/](http://www.wtfpl.net/)

Which is basically Unlicense - [http://unlicense.org/](http://unlicense.org/)</comment>


The Futhark Debugger - <AUTHOR> https://futhark-lang.org/blog/2018-09-16-the-futhark-debugger.html <comment><USER2> Anyone here have experience using Futhark, either for fun or in a professional environment?

What was the project? What were the alternative technologies in this space?

<comment><USER3> I am currently using it for a university course. It is a simple language to learn. The most troublesome part is to install the right drivers on Linux. It can provide significant speedups and is simple to use with other languages.

For an alternative you could look into Accelerate for Haskell: [http://hackage.haskell.org/package/accelerate](http://hackage.haskell.org/package/accelerate)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> trace() and break() seem like a good approach for getting acceptable debugging with a minimal impact on the design of the language. Indeed, I've often written something equivalent to trace() to help me debug functional programs.</comment>


A new GPU backend for the TVM stack - <AUTHOR> http://www.tvmlang.org/2017/10/30/Bringing-AMDGPUs-to-TVM-Stack-and-NNVM-Compiler-with-ROCm.html <comment><USER2> Some quick calculations about TFLOPS per dollar on GEMM.

Since NVIDIA's volta consumer card is not out yet, I used Titan Xp as the reference card. I grabbed prices from wikipedia, and assume TVM reaches 64% peak perf on Vega and 90% peak perf on Titan Xp:

Radeon RX Vega 64: 12.6TFLOPS * 65% / $499 = 0.01638 TFLOPS/$ Pascal Titan Xp: 12TFLOPS * 90% / $1200 = 0.009 TFLOPS/$

So Vega outperforms a lot here.

<comment><USER3> I'd assume that Video RAM is important though. The Titan XP has 12GB of RAM, while the $500 Vega 64 only has 8GB of RAM.

A better comparison is probably Vega Frontier with 16GB of RAM for $1000. If you're doing heavy compute, you're probably gonna need a ton of RAM to go with it.

<comment><USER4> Vega has half-precision floats as well though, which (with a seemingly negligible loss in precision) in combination with their HBCC (transparent main memory DMA) should more than make up for the lack of memory on the Vega 64, and in the case of Frontier Edition, all the more so.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> New usage for RX480/580 miner?

</comment><comment><USER6> How's the perf per dollar? It's not enough to "bring" it to AMD, it must be competitive as well.

<comment><USER3> Hmm, with the "Tensor Cores" of NVidia's next-generation Volta coming in, I'd bet that NVidia cards will be faster in machine learning tasks.

But then again: AMD Vega 56 / 64 have HBM2 and are under $1000. IIRC, the Vega Frontier Edition is $999 and 16GB of HBM2 at 480GB/s theoretical bandwidth.

NVidia also has an offering with high-speed HBM2 RAM: The Tesla P100, but its way more expensive: $7000 each.

I dunno if there are major benefits of HBM2 over GDDR5x however. Just listing off numbers here. The Titan Xp apparently has more bandwidth from the GDDR5x RAM for example, although the Titan XP is still more expensive than the Vega 64.

\</comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>

If there is some problem that is global memory-bandwidth constrained, then it might be better to run it on AMD Vega 64. After all, you can pretty much afford 7x AMD Vega Frontier editions than the NVidia P100.

Obviously, this very much depends on your workload.

<comment><USER7> Yep, Nvidia is quoting 125 TFLOPs mixed precision on V100, boosted by Tensor Cores.

Vega 64 can in theory do 25 TFLOPs half precision.

But as you say there's a large price difference too.

For a market segment that needs 1-8 GPU rigs for ML on a low budget AMD could kill it if they invested in software support and kernel optimisation.

For servers and large scale training, unless AMD has some ML specialised cores in the pipeline, Nvidia Volta and Google TPUs have a serious lead.

<comment><USER8> Aren't the Tensor Cores mostly for inference, not training?

<comment><USER3> The Volta Tensor Cores aren't released yet, and I haven't played with Google's TPUs at all.

But NVidia markets Tensor cores as:

> New Tensor Cores designed specifically for deep learning deliver up to 12x > higher peak TFLOP/ss for training, and 6x higher peak TFLOP/s for inference

[https://devblogs.nvidia.com/parallelforall/cuda-9-features-r...](https://devblogs.nvidia.com/parallelforall/cuda-9-features- revealed/)

I wouldn't be surprised if they were inflating the numbers slightly, as is common in a lot of marketing material.

<comment><USER7> You can use Tensor Cores on AWS p3 instances (v100) now. Just doesn't seem to be a whole lot of ML framework support for mixed precision training with CUDA 9 yet

[https://devblogs.nvidia.com/parallelforall/programming- tenso...](https://devblogs.nvidia.com/parallelforall/programming-tensor-cores- cuda-9/)

Google's TPUs also do low precision training (with some special version of TF). [https://cloud.google.com/tpu/](https://cloud.google.com/tpu/)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: AI-based search to help find any item in local stores? - <AUTHOR>

Hey HN! We're just two guys in a garage and we just launched a new local product search called Goodzer.
http://goodzer.com
Our smart crawler scrapes the internets and extracts inventory data from stores' websites and then finds where those stores are located. Right now we're testing our service in New York City - we found more than 15M products in about 15,000 stores there. So, before scaling to whole US we want to know your opinion on this. <comment><USER2> I like it...this is an idea I had in 1999, but the technology just wasn't ready yet. I think the big challenge will be getting data from smaller stores who often have a good price but don't serve up their inventory online. For example, while looking for an iPod charger recently, my fiancee pointed out that TJ Maxx (discount women's clothing store) had them for $5. I would have missed this if I just searched online. It may be that you'll have to broker deals with these merchants to get data feeds, or rely on crowd sourcing to get the data, but this is where the real value could be. One other idea I had back in 1999 was the ability to supply a list of products (e.g. Christmas list) and get back a list of places that have all the items with options for lowest total price, shortest total distance, or fewest number of stops.

</comment><comment><USER2> Clickable: <http://goodzer.com></comment>


How OpenGL works: software rendering in 500 lines of code - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ssloy/tinyrenderer/wiki <comment><USER2> Previous discussion [1]

        How OpenGL works: software renderer in 500 lines of code (github.com)
        363 points by gregorymichael 200 days ago

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11264469](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11264469)

</comment><comment><USER3> I can't wait to work through this. I agree so much with this philosophy: "I do not want to show how to write applications for OpenGL. I want to show how OpenGL works. I am deeply convinced that it is impossible to write efficient applications using 3D libraries without understanding this."

</comment><comment><USER4> This is very impressive, I love it when code has minimal (or no) dependencies, you really see what's going on under the hood. Could have used some more comments in the code itself though (there are basically none but the code is clean). I first thought the code would render into a window using OpenGL. But this is a _plain software_ renderer with no hardware acceleration/OpenGL at all and it simply stores the rendered image into a picture file. There is no window or stuff like that.

EDIT: The lessons in the wiki explain things so well that comments in the code really aren't necessary at all.

</comment><comment><USER5> Heh, I did something similar, but in JS, rather than C++, if you want a second opinion of "how it works":

[http://magcius.github.io/sw3dv/sw_rast.html](http://magcius.github.io/sw3dv/sw_rast.html)

[https://github.com/magcius/sw3dv/blob/gh- pages/sw_rast.js](https://github.com/magcius/sw3dv/blob/gh-pages/sw_rast.js)

The math and geometry behind 3D projection and 3D rendering is fairly basic once it clicks.

</comment><comment><USER6> There's one piece of information about the OpenGL pipeline I never quite understood:

Years ago when I was playing writing my own operating system, I wanted to add accelerated video drivers, and obviously OpenGL. I now know it's out of the reach of hobby OSes, but I could never figure out what's the relationship with OpenGL and the actual hardware.

Is OpenGL just an API, with the actual API -> hardware command translation done by the video driver? Or does the hardware understand some part of the OpenGL spec? Rephrased, does the OpenGL spec mandate some ABI to talk with the video card?

I seem to think the former's the right answer, as I never managed to find any of the actual OpenGL -> HW command translation source code anywhere. At the time Intel wasn't a player in the video card space, so nVidia and ATI were the only option, but alas, closed source.

<comment><USER7> The former is the right answer. Now, there are open source options, e.g. Nouveau for Nvidia originally for Linux, but has been ported to FreeBSD.

Gallium should make it easier to do what you wanted as well - providing the glue between a video driver and APIs such as OpenGL / DirectX ( - there is a gallium implementation of DirectX 9 for Wine).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I love the approach for teaching! I also just recently wrote a reference GL-SW renderer. It's not much code.. 400 loc? But it really drives home the (simple) math. There are some things that are hard to do in SW - derivatives. Also writing SW today is very different than back in the day! Just Lerp everything, no DDA, no "divide only every 8th pixel".

</comment><comment><USER9> Cute. Most of the work is done in function "triangle" in [1]. 33 lines of code which do, somewhat slowly, what GPUs do rapidly.

[1] [https://github.com/ssloy/tinyrenderer/blob/master/our_gl.cpp](https://github.com/ssloy/tinyrenderer/blob/master/our_gl.cpp)

</comment><comment><USER10> I did that in class with ssloy. It's really not that difficult, even if you're no maths buff :)

</comment><comment><USER11> The link should be changed to [https://github.com/ssloy/tinyrenderer/wiki](https://github.com/ssloy/tinyrenderer/wiki) since that seems to be the primary entry point for the repo/tutorial.</comment>