General and Surprising - <AUTHOR> http://paulgraham.com/sun.html <comment><USER2> An unfortunate corollary is that slightly different general ideas are very difficult to get people to listen to because they feel like they already know it and it is not much new or the difference is negligible. This might be true of any particular case someone might think of but when the entire landscape is taken into account the multiplier pg mentions applies and can change things dramatically. But people don't seem to be well wired to think of the general.

And for any general multiplier to work, people generally need to be on board.

For example: there is a difference between economic inequality and desperate economic inequality -- the first is a mere difference in ownership and control. The second is /also/ a difference in ownership and control but that leaves one party or group bargaining against their physical well-being. There is much said about mere economic inequality but, by leaving out the desperation factor, the public conversation is tied up in knots (e.g. "Well why don't we give everyone a million dollars?!" nonsense) and the real problem, desperation and the conditions that lead to that state, persist despite having the tools to potentially tackle it. But any single example -- a single mother that has to take two minimum wage jobs to feed her kids -- can be reduced away. She could just do x, y, or z and her particular problem would be solved and she'd still be economically disadvantaged but not desperate to the point of worrying about her kids starving. And the conversation ends. We are back to the inconvenience of a weak bargaining position which is also described by the phrase 'economic inequality' and it all feels like the same, well trod and religiously guarded ground.

</comment><comment><USER3> > It's not true that there's nothing new under the sun. There are some domains > where there's almost nothing new. But there's a big difference between > nothing and almost nothing, when it's multiplied by the area under the sun.

I found that statement the most insightful of the essay. Helped me resolve some cognitive dissonance.

Whether there really are totally new things and not just existing things in new packaging depends on which level of abstraction you stop at with when analyzing. For example, at a very high level you could say that the Internet as a whole is really just a very advanced/efficient printing press. (And automation like the printing press or assembly line, just efficiently organized production.)

That level of abstraction may be less than helpful, unless there are insights to be gleaned from where the internet is going by looking at printing press technology. Their impacts on empowering the masses are similar, but they each encouraged/enabled network effects to consolidate much power (newspapers and goog/fb) and thereby effectively countering much of the effect.

<comment><USER4> I agree, this statement seems like the most interesting one in the essay.

It reminds me of expected value calculations: extremely low probability events of tremendously high impact could actually out-rate moderately probable events of moderate impact in terms of how concerned you should be with them. Assigning meaningful probabilities and impact values can be tricky though, which adds a whole layer of complexity and hand-waving to the problem.

This is where discussions of nuclear war, strong AI, nazi-oriented political resurgences, geothermal storms, epidemics, etc. can really go off the rails in my opinion: two people can separately evaluate "worst-case scenario" as very different realities, assigning very different intuited impact-values, and also assign very different probability values. Even if they think about these things from an expected-value perspective, a discussion between them becomes at least a 2-variable linear equation, and the odds of even understanding each other are stretched, let alone finding the same x and y and agreeing upon what that means for the actions we should take in response.

Graham's point here on the positive side though is a refreshing step outside of that domain. An idea recycled, if broadly applicable enough, only needs a hint of novelty. It gives me some hope for being able to come up with useful things.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> "the more general the ideas you're talking about, the less you should worry about repeating yourself"

A rule-of-thumb I've generally followed when brainstorming is "never write down the ideas". And if at all possible, try to forget them, good or bad. It inevitably forces me to re-think the ideas "from scratch". I've never been worried that an idea would escape me or that I would forget it, as I think the exercise of re-thinking ideas from scratch has helped me build a relatively solid mental model of the world. I feel that, with practice, this method of brainstorming has started bringing me to the solid / useful (general / surprising) ideas faster.

It has likely, over the years, added weeks or possibly months worth of time that I've spent brainstorming the same (general) ideas over and over.

<comment><USER6> As an aside, I can't say for sure how you use the term "brainstorming" here, but there is plenty of evidence that _classic-style_ brainstorming in groups leads to less ideas, and less creative ideas.

When I was forced by my boss to teach designers brainstorming, against my better judgement, I instead made this slideshow summarising my frustrations and what I would suggest people do instead:

[https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1EYyS4AtRhNa6i299R_RB...](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1EYyS4AtRhNa6i299R_RB0a54ePU2PEQsILQnwWgY9KU/edit?usp=sharing)

<comment><USER7> Nice presentation. Something I've seen a lot over the decades is internal politics. One huge advantage of not using a brainstorming team is 99.999999% of humanity is more creative by sole mass of brain power than the team will be (Six billion people vs a team of ten people) so almost all good ideas, for any problem, will be discovered outside the team.

If the team is in charge as a group of doing the brainstorming, 99.999999% of the good ideas will come from non-team individuals who will be automatically shot down as "not your job" "work on your own team" and similar primate dominance games. If you brainstorm individually, that 99.999999% of good ideas has a better change of getting implemented. Groups hate outsiders (and by extension, their ideas), without a boundary there is no group.

Another internal politics problem is reward. Teams exist to funnel all success upward and channel all failure downward. Everyone knows if they actually have a solution its wasted on the team unless they're the leader. There are financial and career pressures for teams to fail so individuals can keep the fruits of their labor, so to speak. This can lead to very low team performance.

<comment><USER6> Thanks, although I personally feel it's more like a decent article disguised as a bad powerpoint (text overload) - works better when sharing it afterwards though.

I've been told it's better live when I combine it with barely-contained frustration - turns out to be a very relatable experience for many.

I have been lucky enough to never have been in an organisation with a dedicated brainstorming team, but your description definitely _sounds_ like how it would play out in reality. Thanks for sharing, now I know it's a red flag.

If you combine that with brainstorming being misused for identifying problems (instead of solutions to _known_ problems) like I mention early on, things probably get even worse.

<comment><USER6> > _(instead of finding potential solutions to known problems)_

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm glad Paul is still writing essays. It seems it has dropped off in frequency, this essay kind of hints at one such reason for that. I hope he continues to write even if people disagree with his ideas or if they are repetitive.

<comment><USER9> On the same note, PG's "official" HN account hasn't been active for years:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pg](https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pg)

<comment><USER10> One year ten months, to be precise.

<comment><USER11> His account now makes comments once every year or year and a half, but it hasn't been generally active for nearly 3.5 years (the last bunch of comments in a row in a short time period was 1264 days ago, as of this writing).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> happy-go-lucky The essay itself is general and surprising, and the combination never loses its effectiveness.

Ideas keep evolving. There was nothing new about the idea of a search engine when Google came into existence in 1998.

In 1945, Dr. Vannevar Bush wrote an article titled As We May Think:

[https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as- we-m...](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may- think/303881/)

> he urges that men of science should then turn to the massive task of making > more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge.

In the 1960's, Gerard Salton created and developed Salton's Magic Automatic Retriever of Text (SMART). He also authored a book called A Theory of Indexing detailing his initial tests that search is largely based off of relevancy algorithms. Here's a very interesting blog post titled Search Down Memory Lane by Tom Evslin who worked with Salton during this project:

[http://blog.tomevslin.com/2006/01/search_down_mem.html](http://blog.tomevslin.com/2006/01/search_down_mem.html)

Fast forward to 1990, a man named Alan Emtage created the first search engine known as Archie which retrieved a database files by matching user queries using regexes. Following the growth of Archie's popularity, two similar search engines Veronica and Jughead were created and they started indexing plain text files.

In 1993, the first bot called World Wide Web Wanderer was created and then it was upgraded to capture active URLs and store them in a database. Then came ALIWEB (Archie-Like Indexing of the Web), which crawled meta information of pages.

There're others including WebCrawler (1994), Lycos(1994), AltaVista(1995), Excite(1995), Yahoo(1995), Dogpile(1996), Ask Jeeves(1996).

This is just my superficial understanding of how the idea of search engines was born and has evolved over time. They were very different from Google, but they've similarities to how data is processed and analyzed today.

<comment><USER12> \- Facebook wasn't the first social network. People were connected, shared pictures, and had friends before.

\- Amazon wasn't the first online store.

\- AirBnB wasn't the first short term rental website

\- Netflix wasn't the first online movie portal.

\- Apple didn't make the first cell phone or even the first smart phone, or the first music player or the first home computer.

\- Tesla didn't make the first electric car.

\- etc.

Still, the one criticism that startup hear again and again is that "You are late - it's already there".

<comment><USER13> Just to play devil's advocate, what was the first online store? I think Amazon was pretty damn close, having started in 1994 as a store that simply stocked a large selection of rare books. The shipping took weeks as I recall.

It was not an obvious idea at the time, simply because there weren't that many people on the web. It was around the time that SSL was being developed [1] -- so if you were much earlier you probably couldn't take payments securely.

There were probably mail order catalogs that had websites, but I think that is a different thing than a "web store".

Also, Netflix wasn't the first online movie portal, but I'm pretty sure they were the first people to make a business out of mailing DVDs! It's crazy that they started like that.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Layer_Security#SSL_1...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Layer_Security#SSL_1.0.2C_2.0_and_3.0)

<comment><USER14> > _I think Amazon was pretty damn close, having started in 1994 as a store > that simply stocked a large selection of rare books. The shipping took weeks > as I recall._

Afaik, they didn't really carry any stock when they first started. They were re-selling mail order books.

A while back there was a documentary about Amazon's early years. The part that everyone always quotes is the thing about using doors as desks. (Which struck me as silly, doors are expensive compared to many large, flat surfaces.) Anyway, the part that really stuck with me was that they had one favorite mail-order place, except that shop had a ten book minimum order. So Amazon would order the one book someone wanted and then nine copies of some obscure book about snails that was never in stock.

<comment><USER13> Yup I think I saw that same video on YouTube. They didn't have stock, so they were sort of like a meta-retailer. They presented an illusion of large selection.

I think the value was the interface and ease of searching, and not inventory and retail operations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Might a parallell be draw to Kant here?

General and bland would be as akin to "analytic a priori". All bachelors are unmarried, that sorta thing.

Specific and surprising would be like "synthetic posteriori". Such and such plant is blue and grows in the Himalayas.

The real gold would be in the "synthetic a priori" findings. Blending the generalness of logic with the newness of empiricism. Like figuring out geometrical laws from observing nature. New information AND far-reaching implications.

Am I on to something here?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic%E2%80%93synthetic_dis...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic%E2%80%93synthetic_distinction)

<comment><USER15> [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/analytic- synthetic/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/analytic-synthetic/)

"While some trivial a priori claims might be analytic in this sense, for Kant the seriously interesting ones were synthetic."

</comment></comment><comment><USER16>
        [T]he more general the ideas you're talking about, the less you should worry
        about repeating yourself.

Organisms are used to train over and over to get better at things. Certain abilities are innate, like a calf knows to stand up as soon as out of the womb. But to stand firmly the calf has to keep trying.

When it comes to an idea, I believe that the broader I present the idea, the easier it is to start a conversation, because others are more likely to show interest, and eventually reach the point you find a focus point. However, I still repeat myself, because I wouldn't invent a whole new dialogue next time I bring up the same broad idea with another person.

On the other hand, I feel developing a product (startup or not), the more general the idea is, the harder for me to explain my ideas concretely, much like films have leading roles. The ideas present by the film can be broad, but you don't want camera rolling on 200 actors in 1 hour 30 minutes, would you? Your message can be interesting and novel, but I am going to be lost.

But yeah, on HN topics like "I quite FB", "security is hard", "Google is evil", etc are common here, but I still comment on those topics when I feel like to. My responses are usually similar, but I might add new thoughts, or rephrase what I had written before. I called this introspection. I believe we are not comfortable repeating ourselves, because we want to be interesting and original, but we still have the urge to try to perfect our speech the next time someone asks.

</comment><comment><USER17> When I read stuff like this and reflect on the fact that this is about the peak quality of the philosophical discussion that is going on in our little niche of the world, I get slightly depressed. I get that it's hard to find people at the intersection of astounding writing and technical chops, but still, it makes me want to distance myself and just go back to reading the classics.

<comment><USER18> What community centered around professional skills do you think has better philosophical discussion? Sure, there exists better philosophical discussion elsewhere, and communities centered around academic disciplines can be more sophisticated because that is their raison d'etre. But when I think of professional communities (e.g., accounting, medicine, law, etc.), I can't think of any better except insofar as they bleed into academia (e.g., blogs by law professors, not practicing lawyers).

<comment><USER19> The medical field is an embarrassment of riches when it comes to talented essayists, journalists, and biographers. I've also read a few wonderful biographies written by restauranteurs. Our field unfortunately lags behind, I think partially because it's rather dry compared to other fields, and partially because SV ideology is pervasive, stifling, and indifferent to many swathes of the human experience.

<comment><USER20> This is interesting. Would you say that engineers and mathematicians also suffer the same embarrassment? If so, could all of this be a side-effect of being in the world of precision vs being in the world of creative trial and error (where every attempt at writing is judged on the interpretive aspect of it)?

I am saying: I get nasty ineloquent on days I'm zoned into coding. Almost like I'd rather not say than say anything I judge to be imprecise.

Like this post.

<comment><USER21> This is something I've noticed too. I tend (when I'm coding well) to write with many clauses, and also elaborate them with elaborate punctuation, [, ( ,- , etc...

ak, I believe you may have just written something moderately insightful. Anyone else?

<comment><USER22> I'm not sure if this is exactly the sort of insight you're looking for, but personally I find that long periods of coding and being "in the zone" tend to affect my speech in the same way. Essentially, I tend to try to be as precise as possible when speaking, often going out of the way on increasingly specific tangents or finding the most elaborate examples to demonstrate what I mean. These tangents and examples always come back to the main point (so I'm not just wandering off), but when considering conversations in retrospect I find that they tend to just muddy the point I was trying to make.

Written language and code can afford the verbosity, because you can always review the earlier points to see how they tie in, but speech should be short and succinct, IMO.

I _believe_ this is similar to (but not exactly) what is meant by "circumstantial speech" [0].

That said, the wikipedia article seems to indicate that what I'm trying to describe is similar to circumstantial speech, but actually isn't:

"Some individuals with autistic tendencies may prefer highly precise speech, and this may seem circumstantial, but in fact it is a choice that posits that more details are necessary to communicate a precise meaning, and preempt more disastrous ambiguous communication."

Does anyone know of a more accurate term for this?

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Only slightly related but there is a great book for your children: "What to do you do with an idea"

[https://www.amazon.com/What-Do-You- Idea/dp/1938298071](https://www.amazon.com/What-Do-You-Idea/dp/1938298071)

<comment><USER24> What _should_ one do?

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Paul Graham is running out of ideas these days. (Partly joking).

This goes on to my same discovery: Life itself is a constant process of incremental trial and error builds-up. Over a few billions years, you get something out of it (human being playing snapchat)

If you keep counting from 0 to an infinitely large number, at some numbers you'll "discover": Windows 7, Windows 7 Korean Language, Microsoft Office, OSX, and every other game that human designed and developed. Plus a bunch of other software from alternate realities that compile on our machines. Cool.

The process the human are doing is not much different (albeit one can argue that it is much more efficient than stupidly counting) "Everything" is already there. The new Audi A4? It was already "possible".

If there is one thing that will change the future, it is our discovery of the link between "abstract" and "real" concepts. They share some important points that I'd not be surprised that "real" and "abstract" are the same thing/continuum. Like space and time.

<comment><USER26> That's an interesting thought. Just want to point out that complexity theory from Computer Science fits nicely into this, because it asks, not what is "possible" (e.g. finding all programs by counting all the integers), but what is possible within limited resources, like e.g. time.

A nice addition to the thought that, theoretically, even if you can find the Windows 10 source code by counting all integers, you can't actually do it within the lifetime of the universe without a smarter algorithm.

<comment><USER25> More like infinite resources. But there is a lifetime for the universe?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> A very academic / theoretical post. Not entirely sure the point.

It might have been easier to understand if bound to real world examples.

</comment><comment><USER28> >that territory tends to be picked clean, precisely because those insights are so valuable

People often think that a field has been 'picked clean' and conclude that either no further progress is possible or that further discoveries are going to be rare and incremental.

e.g. "the future truths of physical science are to be looked for in the sixth place of decimals" \-- Michelson, 1894

But there are always deep problems and this implies that unlimited progress is possible. The really big discoveries can happen at any time and are of an unpredictable nature, not least because they affect multiple fields. They leave behind plenty of smaller problems for everyone to pick up.

<comment><USER29> That's especially funny from the same Michelson who did the Michelson-Morley experiment that basically kicked off relativity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> The essay describes a 2x2 grid with axes of generality and surprise. Things that are suprising and general are valuable. Things that are general but unsurprising are platitudes, and things that are specific but surprising are gossip. The essay itself is a platitude.

<comment><USER31> I think "Repeating close variations on your usual theme unlocks far more value than you'd expect given minimal novelty value" is a surprising result. I utterly buy it.

The advice I give which has produced the single biggest deltas in outcomes is "Charge more." It is so simple that I could literally print it on T-shirts and wear it to any event which discusses pricing. People know it is my catchphrase and sometimes I get knowing laughter when I say it...

... and then a few minutes later they've agreed to try charging more, despite having an accurate model which suggests "Hah, I bet when we ask Patrick about our new pricing he is going to ask us what it is, think about it for less than five seconds, and then suggest charging more." They knew what I'd say before I even got in the room, but even the tiniest marginal connection to their own pricing grid / customers / data pushes them to actually try it.

<comment> le-mark > think "Repeating close variations on your usual theme unlocks far more value > than you'd expect given minimal novelty value" is a surprising result. I > utterly buy it.

I was hoping for an example, but your example of repeating your catch phrase doesn't quite fit imo. There's no variation. Is there a variation of your catch phrase or message you're not mentioning here?

<comment><USER32> I think the variation at each point is that he says "charge more because (some detail about the askers customers/costs/business model)".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> A couple of years ago I wrote a book about a new philosophy of science based on the following methodology:

\- Obtain a large dataset of observations related to a phenomenon of interest (eg English text, bioimaging data, economic reports, car-mounted camera recordings, etc)

\- Develop a theory of the phenomenon, or revise a previous theory

\- Build the theory into a lossless data compression program

\- Score the theory by invoking the compressor on the dataset, taking into account the size of the compressor itself; lower codelength is better.

\- Adopt or discard the theory as appropriate and return to step #2.

I believe that this is a valid _variant_ of the traditional scientific method, in which data compression takes the place of experimental prediction. In Graham's terms, this idea is a small delta of novelty, but since it refers to a predecessor idea of tremendous significance and generality, it could be very important. The book is available here:

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1104.5466](https://arxiv.org/abs/1104.5466)

I've spent a few years pursuing this methodology in the domain of English text. The result is a sentence parser, which works quite well, but was built completely _without_ the use of hand-labelled training data (eg the Penn Treebank). You can check out the parser here:

[http://ozoraresearch.com/crm/public/parseview/UserParseView....](http://ozoraresearch.com/crm/public/parseview/UserParseView.jsp)

I'm always happy to talk to people about these ideas, ping me at daniel dot burfoot at gmail if you're interested.

<comment><USER34> This is interesting. I don't have an intuition on how well this could work on different problems.

Do you think this approach would work for something, let's start simple, like ballistics neglecting rotation of the Earth and drag? If you fed in thousands of starting velocities and angles, and the resulting distance traveled, will this process end up with equations of motion that are as compact as can be found in first year physics?

<comment><USER22> I think the problem here is that _you_ are still the one that needs to develop the equations of motion that will be tested for compression.

What this describes is a method for _testing_ theories, not _generating_ them. You still need to study the data to try and properly analyze it so you can understand the rules yourself, or at least be able to see the edges of them.

Now if you could find a way to generate moderately accurate equations automatically by analyzing the dataset, I think that would be a real leap forward. Is there a related mechanism to the one presented by the parent which could be used to generate theories?

<comment><USER33> Yes, it is a method for testing theories; it does not give you a procedure for developing the theories. It is agnostic about whether the theories are developed by humans or algorithms.

There is not going to be any universal and practical algorithm for automatically generating the theories, at least in the short term. But you can think about algorithms that apply to particular domains. For example in my field of text analysis, you can imagine techniques for automatically inferring grammar rules from a large quantity of text. Some such methods already exist, but have not been pursued extensively.

We could also develop algorithms for inferring equations of motion from astronomical and celestial observations, as the parent mentioned. The compression principle wouldn't give you the real Newtonian equations, but it would correctly identify them as being superior to other candidates. But this would be a bit of an academic exercise, since we already have the Newtonian equations and relativity. What's more interesting to me is an attempt to build modern astronomical theories (eg about black holes, the Big Bang, cosmic inflation, dark energy, etc) into a compressor that will apply to an astronomical data set like the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. My guess is that such an attempt would reveal important shortcomings in the theories, or perhaps highlight regions of space that confound the theories.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I think pg is falling prey to the whole post-hoc founder story phenomenon here. He sees so many startups, he hears so many stories about them, and he works hard to distill it into some kind of actionable and scalable investment strategy.

The problem is that the facts which led to the success of the business are not the same thing as the best insights a founder can come up with about why it succeeded. The latter is subject to an incredible amount of confirmation bias and the simple desire to tell a good story—in fact you _have_ to do that to get investment.

In reality, novelty of ideas is meaningless, because the massively overwhelming majority of ideas in the world never get executed on. Even within contexts where people and companies have the means, most ideas—even good ones—don't get executed on because they conflict with other ideas and don't win the battle for resources.

What _matters_ for an idea is execution and context. If you bring the right resources: skills, connections, go-to-market strategy, smaller supporting ideas, and it gels with the current zeitgeist of whatever market you are in, then it can get some traction. From there you learn and gain more insights which can be leveraged to scale up. You do this over and over again, and if you are lucky you can make an 8, 9, 10-figure company.

By the time all this happens you'll have some tremendous insights, but they will be specific to the context in which they were gleaned. The "generality" we observe of these insights is just a result of our pattern-matching and story-telling brains. The "surprisingness" comes after the fact to varying degrees based on existing preconceptions and perhaps how the world has changed over time. In other words, I don't think there is such a thing as a hugely valuable insight per se, rather this: we have insights, we believe in them to varying degrees, and based on how well it maps to our actions and their results, we later declare the "value" of the insight.

</comment><comment><USER36> On the "surprising" part of this - Murray Davis had some related research and writing about being interesting: [https://proseminarcrossnationalstudies.files.wordpress.com/2...](https://proseminarcrossnationalstudies.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/thatsinteresting_1971.pdf)

"An audience finds a proposition 'interesting' not because it tells them some truth they thought they already knew, but instead because it tells them some truth they thought they already knew was wrong."

</comment><comment><USER37> Is this a stealth "I'm done with the small delta of novelness Arc already has and am stopping on it. If you can't appreciate that then you need to look harder" article? :-)

</comment><comment><USER38> At the beginning:

 _The most valuable insights..._

Toward the end:

 _So it 's doubly important not to let yourself be discouraged by people who say there's not much new about something you've discovered. "Not much new" is a real achievement when you're talking about the most general ideas. Maybe if you keep going, you'll discover more._

I really feel like Paul is conflating valuable and novel here. When you create something that solves someone's problem, who cares whether the ideas behind it are novel or not?

<comment><USER37> This is a good hackers and painters juxtaposition: in STEM, it doesn't have to be novel as long as it is better. In art it doesn't have to be better as long as it's novel :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> PG makes it all look so neat and tight, however he fails to mention the number of serendipitous instances that drive insights and new ideas.

<comment><USER40> I think the essay is intended to describe one approach, not to provide a complete account of how you can get good ideas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Well, that was certainly general.

<comment><USER41> ...and not very surprising. Thus, platitude! :)

<comment><USER32> Indeed. The number of votes this has received is an amusing insight into how many people must upvote based on origin and not content. If this were published on some anonymous medium blog, it would be lucky to be +2.

<comment><USER42> Not everything that is a platitude is necessarily bad. Reinforcing, clarifying or rediscovering knowledge certainly has value.

If Paul Graham writes an essay then that is relevant to Hacker News so it should be upvoted regardless of whether it is shit.

<comment><USER32> So...you are agreeing with me that this has been upvoted based on origin and not content, and you're just repeating what I said to reinforce the point?

<comment><USER42> Origin and context give extra meaning and weight to content. That seems trivially true to me. If Paul Graham writes this then that means the topic is on the mind of someone influential and important in our community, thus it is worthy of scrutiny and thought, thus worthy of an upvote.

Hacker News is not some game where people compete to create content with maximum merit. It is a source of new content relevant to this community.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> There's also a class of valuable insights that are general and not surprising, but rather obvious. For these, the challenge is that no one previously had the insight to observe and _state_ what is obvious. Maybe the surprise for these isn't in the truth but rather that no one had stated them before.

</comment><comment><USER44> "surprising" in patent law [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventive_step_and_non- obvious...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventive_step_and_non-obviousness)

</comment><comment><USER45> F = ma is interesting because there are universal forces like electricity, gravitation and electromagnetism that we use for our daily life. Moreover there is a marriage between maths and physics since acceleration is the second derivative of space with respect of time. If you are a new Newton you should create the new concepts and develop the new maths to create a surprising step forward. Looking for a word that goes from gossip to F=ma is like using a telescope to watch a worm. Concepts are about frameworks and using a right scale to focus concepts.

</comment><comment><USER46> For me, general and surprising things are coming in the form of "X doesn't seem to work".

The reasoning goes like this: X is described like a good thing and a lot of resources poured in it. But there are documented failures of X - are they spurious or causes by X not actually doing what is advertised?

More often than not the working answer "it probably doesn't work" which is often "a thing you can not say" due to general consensus, good feelings and above mentioned amount of resources poured in X.

<comment><USER47> Can you give examples of such things that probably don't work, but you can't say it if you don't want to be ostracized?

<comment><USER46> For example, Yugoslavia had what was described as the most progressive ethnic minorities policy in the world (regarding official languages use, representation of minorities, etc, etc), and then it violently fell apart in a series of ethnic conflicts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> This post is lacking in the latter.

</comment><comment><USER49> > It's not true that there's nothing new under the sun. There are some domains > where there's almost nothing new. But there's a big difference between > nothing and almost nothing, when it's multiplied by the area under the sun.

PG, I see what you did there. The rest of the essay is just a setup for this single paragraph. This is your own small delta of novelty. Well done.

</comment><comment><USER50> I'd say this post was "general, not surprising".

</comment><comment><USER51> Too abstract to be useful.

</comment><comment><USER52> My personal image about this topic is the fact that the general relativity theory is more advanced than the special relativty theory.

It reminds me that creating something more general is harder than creating something specialized for a specific problem. For programmers this seems to be obvious, but for others this is counter intuitive.

<comment><USER53> For anybody that ever used some kind of math, it is obvious. But "counter intuitive" could be Mathematics middle name.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> > It's not true that there's nothing new under the sun.

Philosophically this statement is false.

Mental health wise, it's a lot nicer to keep in mind than the truth of reality that you reside within.

<comment><USER55> Hm. Can something be philosophically false but factually correct?

<comment><USER54> Love is an example I can think of.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> This guy pretends to be an intellectual but is the biggest wannabe I know. He tried to block the latest Steve Jobs film because it showed how much of an asshole Jobs was

<comment><USER57> The guy, ironically enough, is the living proof that capitalism doesn't reward talent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> There are also the platitudes that everybody knows but that nobody does anything about.... Oftentimes there is virtue in simply being unusually conscientious.

</comment><comment><USER59> Diff eq-like behavior is everywhere: species population, popularity, technology, market saturation, economics, spring rates, etc.

(Malthus was partially ;) mistaken.)

</comment><comment><USER60> What are some examples of past insights someone has made by discovering something slightly surprising about the general world?

</comment><comment><USER61> I think Nassim Nicholas Taleb's work epitomizes the "general yet surprising" territory.

</comment><comment><USER62> Clearly Paul Graham is defending the Bodega vending machine here ;)

</comment><comment><USER63> tl;dr if you have an idea that isn't very "new" then keep working on it until it is "more new"

There should be a twitter account that just summarizes rambling think pieces.

</comment><comment><USER64> F=ma is surprising? We took two values and combined them to define a new one. You can define all sorts of new things this way, how is that surprising?

<comment><USER65> You're making a valid point in a not-so-nice way.

What he meant was F=ma combined with other formulas that make use of F, make up a system that's surprisingly useful while remaining simple to use.

I imagine you already knew that.

If you're acting as an editor, you can phrase your point better. if you're merely nitpicking for things to 'gotcha' someone - I assure you that's not a smart longterm strategy :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> It's very resonant,ths for sharing.

</comment><comment><USER67> Paul Graham doing what he does best. Pseudo-philosophical musings with no basis or any kind of rigorous pass through. Why is this gaining visibility? If anyone else had posted this it'd never see the light of day on here.

<comment><USER65> I found it to be a nice little reminder of 'don't worry about being original, keep digging and maybe there'll be a gem there someday'.

The simple things are good to be reminded of, on a regular basis, that's why :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> This is not true as often you find surprising things that are not general which ARE NOT GOSSIP. To stay with the physics theme, the Schwarzschild solution of general relativity is a very special one and I don't think anybody thinks that black holes are gossip.

And it is certainly not surprising that amateurs in general forget that F = ma is only valid if the mass does not change. The more general expression is F = dp/dt, where p is the momentum. But this, of course, is also only valid in inertial systems. It's not really important to the article but it does kind of annoy me that he uses the most special case of an expression in an argument about it being general.

He could have actually made the point about generality by comparing this expression to the most general one for the force (in a frame of reference that accelerates). That would have also shown why generality can quickly become infeasible in practice. If he knew how many approximations people make in the real world, not because they want to, but because they HAVE TO, his worldview might be a different one.

I feel like he's trying to make a point about a very specific scenario but doesn't mention it explicitly. Instead he tries to be general and therefore fails to understand that his view doesn't actually apply in general.

<comment><USER69> Theoretical entities called "black holes" cannot exist in finite universe (no matter the perspective changes that are applied). The result (if I understand it correctly) applies to a universe in which there is a single massive body and universe is eternal.

Hence, if time dilation exists (under increasing levels of gravity) "black hole" cannot form in any finite time. Since there are many massive bodies in our universe, solution to problem is not applicable.

So, in that context, "black holes" ARE GOSSIP!!!!

Let the "GOSSIP" wars commence.

Other than that, I think you make some very salient points, especially about the approximations that we make and the validity of those approximations to the specific applications/situations being studied.

<comment><USER68> Yes, the current understanding is that general relativity breaks down inside of black holes and, to understand how it really works, we need a quantum theory of gravity.

However, I would not call it gossip since, by your reasoning, anything could be gossip then. I understand gossip as being something unimportant but the Schwarzschild solution was a major milestone in the understanding of general relativity. Moreover, all scifi movies considering wormholes and such, can be traced back to the usual visualization of the black hole distorting space time. Pretty consequential discovery I'd say.

<comment><USER69> You miss the point that the Schwarzschild solution was for a very specific universe that does not in any way match ours. Hence, saying that the solution is applicable to our universe and WILL give rise to the theoretical entity know as a "black hole" is pushing the solution well beyond it actual applicability.

Much as I like good SF (and even mediocre SF), I believe there is enough evidence to say that our understanding is very incomplete and that GR (though it give some good approximations in general) may be a complete furphy.

Our problem at this time is that any time conflicting evidence comes up. it tends to get either buried or ignore or those bringing it up get ad hominem attacked.

If the evidence is obviously incorrect then it should be a simple matter of showing exactly how it is incorrect. My observations of the actions of the proponents of GR are that they tend towards dogmatism and and not discussion, ridicule and not rebuttal.

If odd things are found, then the prevailing theory (in this case GR) should be able to fairly handle these discrepancies.

There are no "stupid" questions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> This genre of writing is also neatly categorised into one of three categories: Obvious, unactionable, or wrong.

PG sometimes meanders into actual meaning. But the likes of Tim Ferris or Seth Godin absolutely excel at this drivel.

</comment><comment><USER71> It's funny, a lot of my imposter syndrome comes from an anxiety about not having massive "deltas of novelty", as PG would call it.

I guess all I can do now is hope that whoever is listening can see the value in incremental change :)

<comment><USER72> Most probably your impostor syndrome comes from an anxiety. That's it. There's nothing more to it. It's unhealthy.

Stop being anxious, go out in the world and see what your ideas are worth.

\- Capitalism would define their value on how much you'd earn from these ideas.

\- Writers would value them based on how many readers buy your books.

\- Developers would value them based on how many contributors your open-source projects has.

\- Or die and keep your diary and maybe in 50 years you will turn out to be the genius who saw the future.

But still - none of that absolutely requires anyone to be anxious.

<comment><USER40> > Most probably your impostor syndrome comes from an anxiety. That's it. > There's nothing more to it.

This implies that anxieties themselves have no causes.

> Stop being anxious

I'd like to see your advice on other things. "Stop being sick!", "Stop being afraid of spiders!", "Stop being introverted!"

<comment><USER73> Anxiety is caused by a form of ruminating about the future in which you focus on uncertainty. Get out there and eliminate all uncertainty and you will feel your anxiety disappear! Tell your boss you feel unappreciated, talk to strangers, and generally do things that you feel anxious about.

If your anxiety is so strong that you can't do those things, then get therapy! It changed my life, and a good therapist can change yours as well.

<comment><USER74> I think it's great that you are sharing your personal experience. This can help others. But saying "and a good therapist can change yours as well" is a dangerous thing. It worked for you but you can't know for sure if it will work for others.

Share your experience but don't tell others that your way will work for everyone.

<comment><USER73> I used "can" to mean that there is a possibility. I did not say "will" which removes all doubt.

<comment><USER74> "Can" means that he can do it. "May" would be a better word.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> > _Thanks to Sam Altman, Patrick Collison, and Jessica Livingston for reading > drafts of this._

This (a very basic 400 word essay/post) needed "drafts" and 3 people going through them?

I like some of PG's essays, but this one just has a couple of trivial insights.

<comment><USER76> Yes it's called writing.

<comment><USER75> Wooosh. That would be a relevant answer if I had asked about the practice of writing drafts and having friends go through them in general.

My point was different: several drafts and editors were needed for this tiny and banal result?

It's like seeing someone ordering a $10,000 AGA cooker, buying all kinds of spices, herbs and fresh ingredients, amassing several Kitchenaid appliances, getting into an apron and a chef's hat, and then proceed to make ...a grilled cheese sandwich.

<comment><USER77> PG lets his inner circle read all of his posts first, whether it's strictly necessary or not. Also, I thought it was commonly accepted that a lot of work goes into distilling simple expressions of ideas.

<comment><USER75> > _Also, I thought it was commonly accepted that a lot of work goes into > distilling simple expressions of ideas._

That's only for when you actually distill complex ideas into simple expression. E.g. explaining a complex subject in a succinct and simple to understand way, like Feynman's lectures.

A mere simple expression of something banal to begin with shouldn't take lots of work, the same way writing "The sun is hot, we should better not walk on it" shouldn't.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


QUIC is HTTP 2 over UDP - <AUTHOR> https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2017/01/26/quic-is-h2-over-udp/ <comment><USER2> QUIC is certainly interesting, but I can not agree with the headline. IMHO HTTP over QUIC needs a very different implementation than HTTP/2 over TCP/SSL. The majority of frame types and frame handling mechanisms are no longer needed and even if they are, they will be used in other ways. That's similar to the situation that HTTP/2 is not simply HTTP/1.1 over a multiplexing layer that gets introduced on top of TCP but also a completely different thing, as the multiplexing layer and the HTTP related mechanisms (header transmission, compression, etc.) are tightly interacting there.

My current estimation is that webservers would need to have 3 completely different implementations of the HTTP stack (for HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2 and HTTP/QUIC), where only the most upper layer (interfaces for sending requests and respones) can be shared, the remaining stuff will be very different.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sounds interesting but is it used anywhere?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's actually enabled in Chrome right now: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC#Client_.28browser.29_supp...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QUIC#Client_.28browser.29_support). If you're using Chrome and you visit chrome://net-internals/#quic, you may notice that you're using it right now.

<comment><USER3> Wow had no idea. But isn't TCP good enough? I guess I could google for a benchmark but I am to lazy.

Because it's made for speed issues right?

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't know it was in active use either until I saw your question and decided to research, so thanks!. Why do we need cars? Isn't my horse good enough? :p It's simply a new, experimental technology that offers some benefits over an older one. Yes, speed is one of the benefits, but there are some other advantages listed here: [https://ma.ttias.be/googles-quic-protocol- moving-web-tcp-udp...](https://ma.ttias.be/googles-quic-protocol-moving-web- tcp-udp/)

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the explainer. This stood out:

> QUIC has implemented its own identifier for unique connections called the > Connection UUID. It's possible to go from WiFi to LTE and still keep your > Connection UUID, so no need to renegotiate the connection or TLS. Your > previous connection is still valid.

This sounds more viable than Multipath TCP.

<comment><USER3> Nice feature.

Also not relying on the rightfully conservative TCP standard, they can iterate over new ideas. I thought the area should be thoroughly examined by now. But they have another good idea:

Forward error correction. This is essentially RAID 5 on the network level. This introduces an overhead of 10 % so one in tenth packages might be lost. However this saves us from a costly roundtrip. My knowledge of networking is a bit rusty but this is not implemented in TCP I suppose.

Anybody got any idea of when support for this will arrive to more mainstream servers. Such as apache?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


VW announces $84B investment in electric cars and batteries - <AUTHOR> https://electrek.co/2017/09/11/vw-massive-billion-investment-in-electric-cars-and-batteries/ <comment><USER2> This and the other MB announcement come at interesting times. Both these companies are slightly on the back foot in Germany. BMW supposedly took the strategic route of redirecting investment into electric a while back. they already have the i3 and the i8 (which, depending on how you look at it, could be the most beautiful or the most ugly car in the world) and in a few months the X7 hybrid SUV. VW has Golf and Passat hybrids, whereas MB just discontinued their B series leaving them with no electrics at all. BMW had nothing to show for the last few years going up against MB's latest line-up refresh and the poor sales over the last few years reflects how dated-looking BMWs have been. I'm thinking BMW has another ICE refresh to go before they too go fully electric/hybrid, and it might happen sooner rather than later.

Tesla is probably an important competitor but at the moment I'm more likely to believe BMW, Audi and MB could pull off a production capacity of a million+ hybrids per year each by 2020 if they put themselves to it.

* I wrote a similar comment in the MB submission.

<comment><USER3> The i8 are hybrids with two engines. BMW sold an e-Mini 2009 [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini_E](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini_E) and announced to release the next version 2019 [http://www.businessinsider.de/bmw-electric-mini-concept- fran...](http://www.businessinsider.de/bmw-electric-mini-concept-frankfurt- motor-show-2017-8?op=1&r=US&IR=T)

edit: corrected what I said about the i3, there are full electric versions

<comment><USER4> i3 not only has the hybrid trim (called REx, range extender with a motorcycle engine to recharge), but also has a BEV (battery EV, 100% electric) trim. I owned one of the i3 BEV for 2 years.

And yes, the 2009 Mini-E (based on a modified Mini Cooper) was a limited production trial, as well as the 2011 BMW ActiveE (based on a modified 1-series). Both were predecessors of BMW i3.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Finally, the EV battle is getting exciting!

I'm very curious who will win the race to the middle, that is mass EV production: either (1) Tesla becoming a mainstream car manufacturer, or (2) the mainstream car manufacturers learning to do EVs.

I'm inclined to favor the Big Auto. I believe they can easily catch up with Tesla's EV technology, whereas Tesla will have a hard time ramping up production to Big Auto scale.

<comment><USER6> My money is on pure electric brands from China winning. The entrenched western groups have too much inertia, and Tesla will point the way but will get bogged down fighting those other corporations and their own government for sane policies.

Chinese corps will set up EV only marques and allow them to freely attack ICE competitors where it hurts, even if they don't initially rake in high profits, giving them a feel good halo and they'll get sensible long term support from their government.

At the moment Nissan, Hyundai and Mitsubishi are good mid-level electric options and I can see new Chinese entrants sweeping them aside as they take the whole market.

<comment><USER7> What are some of those new Chinese entrants?

<comment><USER6> BYD is a battery maker that also does electric cars and buses now. Warren Buffet has invested with them.

Geely have bought Volvo and also make the new hybrid London Taxi, and are trying to make a delivery van platform from it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So pretty much every major automaker is saying that in the next 5 - 10 years they will either be fully electric or significantly so. I don't see that ending well for Tesla or at least for their business line of making cars. Full credit to them for showing what an electric car can be (i.e., something more than a golf cart), but they also have awakened the mainstream automaker giants, who can completely dominate them in dealerships, manufacturing capacity, and worldwide presence.

<comment><USER9> I think Tesla is the only one going with a fully electric lineup. The others are complementing ICE models with a fully electric option.

Which I think is the best move. I really hated the first Hybrids and electrics from the incumbent automakers. They always looked so different. Always felt if they look the same as the current lineup people would buy more, it happened already with hybrid options.

<comment><USER10> By making the cars different, they can make them better fitted for electric cars. IE, Teslas put their batteries in the bottom frame. Will VW put them in the trunk and engine bay? how will that change the driving characteristics with the weight changes from the gas model. Will all wheel wells become larger, to handle electric motors for some of the options?

<comment><USER11> A big problem with ICEs is that you need a large and heavy component (the engine) somewhere practical and accessible. In most consumer vehicles you can't put it anywhere but the front or the rear because the passengers get in the way. Making the car aerodynamic helps here, because you end up with dead space in the hood/trunk which you can put stuff in. Of course Tesla uses this for luggage.

Putting the batteries underneath is a natural solution, giving you a nice low centre of gravity. Virtually all the stuff in the engine bay is unnecessary on an EV. If you have a motor for each wheel, you can distribute weight very evenly.

There are also advantages for cooling, possibly. A long, thin, cuboid gives you more surface area than a squat cuboid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Don't forget VW has to build EV infrastructure worth billions in U.S. as part of their false emissions settlement. Makes a lot of sense to capitalize on all the new chargers you build with the car offering...

</comment><comment><USER13> How much debt do they have to take to make such an investment?

<comment><USER14> I think people are confused at how much money big conglomerates like VW and Toyota spend on power train development -- i.e. VW Group revenue yearly is around 250 Billion US dollars.

In the entire group power train and vehicle development is budgeted at around 120 Billion a year, so this is just over half of that budget spread out over probably 5 years. These are not SV startups, they are enormous companies by revenue and investment (which is why they have low profits and aren't sexy to invest in )

<comment><USER15> VW spends a lot on R&D but it's not 50% of revenue. More like around $14 billion.

<comment><USER14> Many development tasks are not lumped in with "R&D", for instance an existing power train that is getting a new Fuel injection system or a transmission getting durability testing are only development. Fixed original post wording...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Why so many cars? 300!

<comment> King-Aaron Remembering, the Volkswagen group compromises of several manufacturing brands: Audi, Lamborghini, Bentley, Bugatti, Porsche, Ducati, MAN, Scania, SEAT, Skoda, VW cars.. Which makes that '300 models' seem more likely

<comment><USER17> Also a lot of those cars under different badges share a huge array of common parts. Take a look at the Seat Alhambra[0] and Vokswagen Sharan[1]. They're practically identical. Really only the radiator grills and lights clusters are varied to suit the brand identity. Some of the town cars are basically the same vehicle tweaked across 3 or 4 badges.

[0][http://www.carbuyer.co.uk/reviews/seat/alhambra/mpv/review](http://www.carbuyer.co.uk/reviews/seat/alhambra/mpv/review) [1][http://www.carbuyer.co.uk/reviews/volkswagen/sharan/mpv/revi...](http://www.carbuyer.co.uk/reviews/volkswagen/sharan/mpv/review)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I have a question. If one were to believe batteries or EV's are our future, what kind of business or startup opportunities does it present?

</comment><comment><USER19> The push towards electric cars is an ostensible step in the right direction from an environmental standpoint, but most commentators fail to consider the massive quantities of hazardous toxic waste produced as a byproduct of neodymium mining.

[http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150402-the-worst-place- on-...](http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150402-the-worst-place-on-earth)

[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/aug/07/china- ra...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/aug/07/china-rare-earth- village-pollution)

[http://e360.yale.edu/features/boom_in_mining_rare_earths_pos...](http://e360.yale.edu/features/boom_in_mining_rare_earths_poses_mounting_toxic_risks)

<comment><USER20> Rare Earth mining can be done safely, it's just China doesn't want to do so. Ultimately the world has to solve global problems, local or national problems have to be left up to individual countries to sort out.

<comment><USER21> The only rare earths mine in the US was shut down because of environmental problems. After that no owner was profitable producing REE because of environmental standards to keep up. That was until 2007 when China restricted REE exports. Now that China exports again, the current owner is broke once again (maybe it's already sold, I'm not sure).

While other industries can/could successfully be pressured to move to sustainable, fair and environmentally conscious production, the Chinese REE production, as a monopoly, just doesn't care.

<comment><USER20> Yes, it's a problem from our end. I would support some policy mechanisms to support mining in a way which was environmentally sound and reliable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> LOL. Their market cap isn't even that high.

<comment><USER14> They pull in $250 Billion a year and have almost half a trillion in assets, I think they can manage...

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

<comment><USER22> Only in the SV bubble does $5b in profit on $250b in revenue constitute "pulling in."

And if you believe their accounting, then they're trading way under their book value.

If they issued bonds to finance $84b in electric car research, they'd be rated thoroughly junk.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> VW announces "XY" $. Compare this with Tesla's style, "Starting next week."

<comment><USER24> Yes I still remember the "Starting Model 3 production next week" in 2014 ... no, wait ...

[https://twitter.com/TeslaMotors/statuses/489200343062814720](https://twitter.com/TeslaMotors/statuses/489200343062814720)

Ah no it was the Gigafactory they started ... no, wait again, this was also announced years before building started.

Hmm, you've got me confused.

<comment><USER25> That's actually the point. Tesla gets customers excited about their next product. Volkswagen makes financial announcements to please investors and regulators.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I guess this announcement from VW got fast-tracked now that China is about to announce a ban on gas-powered vehicles China, in turn probably wants to go forward with that not for environmental reasons, but because they have a near monopoly on the world's supply of rare earths (which the electric vehicle's batteries require)

<comment><USER27> This is factually wrong; rare earth elements are not required for batteries.

Rare earth elements are cerium (Ce), dysprosium (Dy), erbium (Er), europium (Eu), gadolinium (Gd), holmium (Ho), lanthanum (La), lutetium (Lu), neodymium (Nd), praseodymium (Pr), promethium (Pm), samarium (Sm), scandium (Sc), terbium (Tb), thulium (Tm), ytterbium (Yb) and yttrium (Y) ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare- earth_element](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth_element))

Lithium batteries generally require elements such as: Lithium, graphite (carbon), Nickel, Cobalt, Manganese, Aluminium, Oxygen.

None of these are rare earth minerals, and production of most of these elements is not concentrated in China. See [https://electrek.co/2016/11/01/breakdown-raw-materials- tesla...](https://electrek.co/2016/11/01/breakdown-raw-materials-tesla- batteries-possible-bottleneck/)

The powerful permanent magnets used in _some_ EVs do require rare earth elements (e.g. neodymium), but many EV motors don't require permanent magnets at all. E.g. Tesla uses an induction motor (no permanent magnet required); whereas the Nissan Leaf does use permanent magnets (assuming [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_vehicle#Electric_moto...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_vehicle#Electric_motor) is correct).

<comment><USER28> This comment is a great example of why one should triple check anything they intend to post to HN.

<comment><USER29> [https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law](https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law)

Cunningham's Law states "the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer."

<comment><USER30> This is true in general for humans, the best way to start a design discussion is, "I propose that we do X to solve Y!" rather than, what are some solutions to problem Y? People are much better at correcting than creating from a blank page.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I get nightmares thinking what that will do to electricitry prices. The graph of how they rose is already awful.

And now imagine if the tax collected on mineral oil for gas falls away cause everyone drives electric. And know that there isn't a specific car electricity to tax.

Thinking the government would just eat this loss without thinking of ways to make the people pay would just be naive.

<comment><USER32> _I get nightmares thinking what that will do to electricitry prices._

What about supply? Where does all the electricity to charge the cars come from? Is there enough surplus generating capacity in the system to support millions of EVs?

<comment><USER33> We have plenty of energy supply in the system, we need to optimize our distribution.

We only use about 39% of the electricity we generate. I know that seems strange, but it's true.

[https://c1cleantechnicacom-wpengine.netdna- ssl.com/files/201...](https://c1cleantechnicacom-wpengine.netdna- ssl.com/files/2013/08/LLNL_Flow-Chart_20121.png)

<comment><USER34> You've misinterpreted "rejected energy" there, it's due to Carnot inefficiency not distribution problems.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Spotify is writing massive amounts of junk data to storage drives - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.co.uk/information-technology/2016/11/for-five-months-spotify-has-badly-abused-users-storage-drives/ <comment><USER2> Also discussed here, [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12914188](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12914188)

</comment><comment><USER3> This has been fixed as of today: [https://9to5mac.com/2016/11/11/spotify-bug- data-fix/](https://9to5mac.com/2016/11/11/spotify-bug-data-fix/)

</comment><comment><USER4> _The behavior poses an unnecessary burden on users ' storage devices, particularly solid state drives, which come with a finite amount of write capacity._

It's somewhat ironic that since SSDs are completely silent and so much faster at these sorts of writes, it's far easier for huge amounts of unneeded accesses to go unnoticed. The lack of disk activity lights on a lot of newer computers doesn't help matters either.

With spinning-platter drives and HDD lights, constant accesses would be _very_ noticeable, both audibly and visually, and perhaps even more people would press for a fix sooner.

</comment><comment><USER5> A few months ago I discovered that spotify was causing my laptop battery to drain whenever it was open and I was not using it. I didn't bother to dig into it further but I guess that's what was causing the problem. I don't use Spotify ever so I wound up deleting it.

</comment><comment><USER6> Is any way of knowing what is inside all of those writes? I mean, what is the purpose of writing when idle?

<comment><USER7> Based on what I read in the suggested manual fixes in the thread, their SQLite db is constantly being VACUUM'd.</comment></comment>


Real-time notifications from systemd to Slack - <AUTHOR> https://www.scaledrone.com/blog/posts/real-time-notifications-from-systemd-to-slack <comment><USER2> Why is everyone okay with relying on Slack for sensitive communication or even business critical stuff like monitoring?

It lacks everything a good alerting system has (acknowledgements, fine-grained notifications...).

Even those addresses in the stacktraces could be sensitive in other situations since they contain ASLR offsets.

<comment><USER3> What would you suggest? We're in need of an alerting platform and making use of Slack, not because it's flawless or anything, but because we're already paying for it and it's convenient for the mass junk. Ie, not strictly mission critical alerts.

What medium might be better than Slack?

 _(to be clear, i 'm asking, not saying Slack is good for this)_

<comment><USER4> Zabbix. It's open-source and pretty flexible. I maintain my company's Zabbix installation, and I've come to appreciate it (and 3.x finally has a non-ugly UI!).

<comment><USER2> We use Nagios + CheckMK, but I believe neither this nor Zabbix solve the alerting part.

Our solution is a custom notification broker that decides whom to alert and then waits for an acknowledgement. It uses different backends including our company chat.

Not complicated at all, just 100 lines of Python code that contain the business logic.

Anything that relies on a single medium is unsuitable for anything but unimportant alerts. What if Slack goes down for 2 hour? Unlikely, but definitely possible.

This ensures that every alert is explicitly acknowledged by someone, and that unimportant alerts are quickly forgotten without wondering whether someone handled them or not.

We have different applications sending alerts, not just Nagios (because Nagios sucks at processing events as opposed to states), and it would quickly become unmanageable without some sort of middleware.

<comment><USER5> Is it something where the business logic part could be easily abstracted / separated? It sounds like an interesting and useful yet simple tool. The open source community can always use more of those.

Edit: or maybe something like a blog post to describe the structural details.

<comment><USER2> Would need some clean-up but sure, why not. Ask again in a month or so :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For a previous setup we built a small script that attaches to dbus and just listens to the notifications and pushes interesting events to our logging service. Once you understand how dbus works, that's actually pretty neat and catches crashes as well as intentional status changes.

</comment><comment><USER7> Can anyone who's used systemd share what it's like to have it for process management? We use monit, and it's all right, but I occasionally wonder.

Does anyone run it also as a separate user to manage certain applications? So that you could have certain people log on and operate some things and others operate other things?

<comment><USER8> systemd is far superior to anything else out there. It matured at roughly the same time as docker.

However it doesn't support being the CMD in a Dockerfile. Which is why it's not very common in software deployment scenarios in the post-container world.

For older deployments, it may not be worth switching to systemd because the base OS may not be compatible.

So it's kind of a catch-22.

If you are on baremetal, systemd is much preferable to run it/supervisord

<comment><USER9> > However it doesn't support being the CMD in a Dockerfile. Which is why it's > not very common in software deployment scenarios in the post-container > world.

Er, that's only half-true. systemd isn't great for running as PID 1 inside a Dockerfile, but that's because Docker already monitors PID 1[0], and systemd can be used to monitor your container itself.

In other words, think of containers as individual applications that you want to monitor, and systemd can be used either to monitor them or even to run the containers directly. (Yes, systemd can even run Docker containers directly, without Docker![1])

[0] you _are_ using exec mode, right?

[1] [https://chimeracoder.github.io/docker-without- docker/#1](https://chimeracoder.github.io/docker-without-docker/#1)

<comment><USER8> Actually I'm not sure we are referring to the same thing here.

I'm referring to pid1 inside the docker container. systemd does not run inside the container as pid1 very easily.

Take a look at this - [https://github.com/docker/docker/pull/13525](https://github.com/docker/docker/pull/13525)

I think your presentation was about replicating docker functionality using systemd-nspawn...Which pretty cool...But it's not the same as what I'm talking about.

I'm referring more generally to production decisions with docker. Also read this [https://blog.phusion.nl/2015/01/20/docker-and-the- pid-1-zomb...](https://blog.phusion.nl/2015/01/20/docker-and-the-pid-1-zombie- reaping-problem/)

<comment><USER9> > Actually I'm not sure we are referring to the same thing here. I'm referring > to pid1 inside the docker container. systemd does not run inside the > container as pid1 very easily.

We are - I'm saying that you don't actually want to run systemd as PID 1 inside a Docker container; the Docker model is built around the container being an application unit, not a system unit.

But if you want to have isolated system(d) units, you can use systemd to get that behavior inside containers. In that case, you'll want to use systemd to run your containers instead of Docker, because systemd's tooling is container- aware (ie, you can have integration between units that run on your host and units that run inside a machine - 'machine' being the systemd term for 'container', in this case).

<comment><USER8> That is a simplification - even Facebook runs sshd inside its containers.

I know what you are saying - that an atomic unit of work is the program itself..But we run stuff under supervisord even if it is a single program. It helps us to make quick debugging changes to scripts,etc and "restart" them without restarting the container.

In theory it seems the same - in practice it is not. This is the reason for the existence of tons of different init tools for docker.

BTW, I had trouble understanding what you meant because you are constantly moving from docker-as-an-application-unit concept (which is reasonably true) to systemd-nspawn-is-better-than-docker (which is something I am not generally opinionated about).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What if slack is down/unreachable? Won't it keep the service from starting?

<comment><USER2> If it makes slacktee fail with an error code, yes, it would prevent startup. The fix is a - sign:

        ExecStartPre=-/usr/bin/foo

Would still mark the service as "failed" but wouldn't prevent it from starting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> What about using sentry and getting better stack traces with local variables as well as slack notifications?

Stack traces are fine and all, but without locals it's often hard to track down the issue.

</comment><comment><USER12> This will also notify if you intentionally shut down the service.

If you want to only see failures, you can use an OnFailure directive.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm currently building something similar for matrix instead of slack. My idea was to clone the mail(1) interface, but tee(1) is also a nice idea!

In the process, I also discovered sendxmpp, which provides mail(1) for XMPP. It does not support encryption and is written in Perl, so I am building my own.

</comment><comment><USER14> I don't understand. How is it better than using HTTP POST to post to the slack channel yourself?

<comment> jon-wood It doesn't require changing the underlying systems that are being managed, giving it a lot more flexibility. So long as the service can log to STDOUT it can be integrated with Slack.

<comment><USER14> Oh I get it. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is Systemd a nohup equivalent? If it is, then what's the benefit of using one over the other?

<comment><USER16> nohup just runs a process that will ignore SIGHUP.

systemd can also run processes that ignore SIGHUP. But systemd does a lot of things that nohup doesn't do. Please don't attempt to use nohup as a daemon management system for anything but the noddiest of tasks.

If you're going to use anything, you're probably best choosing from this list:

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

<comment><USER17> ... which misses out quite a lot, from s6 through perp to initng.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Interesting service scaledrone. How are you different than pusher, pubnub, or hydna.com?

<comment><USER19> At a very first view I can say it's cheaper. And this is important for startups and small/medium businesses.

They also provide examples for a lot of languages, I guess I'm going to try their service.

Good job, Scaledrone!

<comment><USER20> Shameless plug: if you want something almost as cheap but without having to drop the ability to subscribe from all client libs (not just js), queryable history, presence, connection state recovery, webhooks, stats, firehose to queues, etc, then have a look at [https://ably.io](https://ably.io). (disclaimer: I work there)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Not to be overly nitpicky here but it's spelled "systemd", not "SystemD". From its website: _Yes, it is written systemd, not system D or System D, or even SystemD. And it isn 't system d either. Why? Because it's a system daemon, and under Unix/Linux those are in lower case, and get suffixed with a lower case d. And since systemd manages the system, it's called systemd. It's that simple._ [https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/](https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/)

<comment><USER22> if you're not being overly nitpicky, what are you being? if you'd clicked on the article you would have seen that the mistake was only in the HN submission title, and not in the title.

<comment><USER23> Both of them are fixed now.</comment></comment></comment>


Transaction fees/speed don't matter on Bitcoin - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@yoshimiller/bitcoins-price-is-the-only-thing-that-matters-7008d4e755db <comment><AUTHOR> Heart of the argument:

The reason that an item must be popularly collected before it can become money can be illustrated by imagining that you are at a baseball card convention. Inside the convention there is very little doubt that you could sell your highly sought after baseball card to just about anyone. If you see someone that has something you want it's just a matter of figuring out the ratio (price) — since it's very likely they will accept your card in a trade. Now imagine you leave the convention and walk a few blocks away to buy a bag of chips. It's obvious that the store owner is unlikely to accept your baseball card.

Money works the same way except that the whole world collects what you have. Since everyone in the US collects US dollars you are sure to be able to use it to trade with just about everyone.</comment>


High prestige, low satisfaction jobs - <AUTHOR> http://lemire.me/blog/archives/2010/11/22/why-you-may-not-like-your-job-even-though-everyone-envies-you/?refer=hn <comment><USER2> I can't help but find this entire article flawed because he's basing his analysis on a man who went from Harvard to Google...they're both incredibly prestigious, so really the article is about going from a low satisfaction to a high satisfaction job, which is kind of a no-brainer.

<comment><USER3> If he went to a software engineer position at Google, I would not say that's as prestigious as a Harvard professor.

<comment><USER4> Sorry to say, Harvard's reputation in CS circles is pretty abysmal.

I'm sure there are some fine folks there, but compared to the status of the school....meh.

In hiring circles folks with CS degrees from Harvard are generally frowned upon, "couldn't they have just gone to a better school for CS/Engineering at a cheaper cost? Musta gone for the brand name recognition...we'll pass"

<comment><USER3> From <http://www.seas.harvard.edu/faculty-research/people>:

"Harvard ranked # 1 in Mechanical Engineering; # 1 in Biotechnology & Applied Microbiology; # 5 in Mathematics; # 3 in AI, Robotics, and Auto Control (Science Watch, most recent data)

Harvard ranked # 7 in Theoretical Computer Science

In terms of citation impact, Harvard ranked second nationally in the category of Engineering and Computer Science in a 2002 analysis by ISI (for 1998-2002 data; most recent)"

<comment><USER4> I can probably find rankings that put Harvard at wildly different rankings in all of those categories too. The fact of the matter is, outside of Law and Business (okay okay, Math too), Harvard does not exactly float to the top of anybody's personal list as a source of any kind of great engineering. That's okay, that's not what the school focuses on.

We actually had this exact discussion recently at a client site and brainstormed top schools we could look to recruit from for C.S. and Mechanical Engineering types and Harvard was not on _anybody's_ list for either of those. Not top-10 and not in the discussion at all.

Most people are wildly surprised to find out that folks like Bill Gates and Zuckerberg studied at Harvard, almost verbatim the response is "Harvard _has_ a C.S. department?" Most people assume Stanford or MIT.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task, it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn't need its brain anymore so it eats it!

It's rather like getting tenure."

<http://www.langston.com/Fun_People/1992/1992AAC.html>

</comment><comment><USER6> While we wait for his server to recover, there's this analysis:

<http://tjic.com/?p=18531>

</comment><comment><USER7> Site is down, my little project got it though:

[http://viewtext.org/article?url=http://lemire.me/blog/archiv...](http://viewtext.org/article?url=http://lemire.me/blog/archives/2010/11/22/why- you-may-not-like-your-job-even-though-everyone-envies-you/%3Frefer%3Dhn)

</comment><comment><USER8> "The abstract thinkers may not be so reliable after all! The millions of college graduates who are underemployed in wealthy countries all around the globe have unanswered questions. Weren't these high-level abstract college degrees supposed to pay for themselves?"

Actually, I would view Google's existence as proof that abstract, high-level thinkers actually can do something. Did it not start out as a research project by abstract, high-level thinkers?

I think the author has a point, but the populist, anti-intellectual bent really distracts from that. The point as I see it is that prestige is a benefit for certain jobs, just like money or vacation or insurance. These things are good, but can they make up for a job that you don't see as rewarding?

<comment><USER9> Sure, abstract high level thinkers _can_ actually do something. But Google is a one in a billion. The majority of abstract, high level thinkers are, and always will be, underemployed: there's only room for a handful of Googles, but there's plenty of room for those that don't make it.

<comment><USER8> True, but it's a big one in a billion.

There are few Googles, but there are also few abstract thinkers. I don't pretend to believe that the world would be better with more of them. But everyone has their place. It's no better for you to say that abstract thinkers are useless than it is for them to say you're a short-sighted idiot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "In effect, a job doing research in Computer Science is more prestigious than an industry job building real system"

That's actually no longer true. Hence why a Prof leaves to take a job at Google

<comment><USER11> It is still true. Google is an exception, it's certainly not the rule.

<comment><USER12> And I think it's partly because they _do_ do a lot of research, so they get some of the research prestige. With the number of full-time researchers and publication output they have, the research side of Google would rank as one of the larger institutes if it were standalone. See e.g.: <http://research.google.com/pubs/papers.html>

I think the same is true prestige-wise of other research-heavy companies. Bell Labs was prestigious; being at Microsoft Research is prestigious; etc.

<comment><USER13> I don't see why doing privately funded research would be any less prestigious. Microsoft Research is arguably the most important operating system research group in existence, like Bell Labs before them. Honestly I would expect these kinds of misconceptions from the general public, but do most people in our field not understand the state of computer science research today?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It seems that some or all of this post is based on a seriously flawed notion of what lends prestige to a job. For example,

         > The electrician who comes and wires your house has a less
         > prestigious job than the electrical engineer who manages vague
         > projects within a large organization.

So, in other words, the electrical engineer's job is more prestigious because... it's less useful? Ignoring completely the assumption that "vague projects within a large organization" are less useful than an electrician's work, it couldn't have anything to do with the fact that the barrier to entry is far higher for an electrical engineer than for an electrician, or that the former nominally pushes the forefront of new technology while the latter, while certainly performing a useful task, does little more than repetitively apply procedures dictated by various building codes?

I guess a doctor is only more prestigious than an EMT because the former is probably a better golfer than the latter on account of his/her massive excess of free time?

I'll admit that I haven't read The Theory of the Leisure Class; perhaps someone who has can confirm/disconfirm the OP's interpretation of same?

It seems to me that, for example, a possibly better interpretation has to do with the public's level of understanding of one's job: the EE's "mysterious projects" are more prestigious because they somehow seem magical. Of course, this isn't really consistent with the example of the scientist who works in a lab (seems pretty mysterious to me!) versus the one who writes grant proposals all day (ugh), so I think I still don't get it.

</comment><comment><USER15> >These core values were explored by Veblen in his unconventional book The Theory of the Leisure Class.

Funny he should mention this; Veblen wrote another book after this, The Theory of Business Enterprise. In it Veblen gives a strong critique of the advertising industry (at least the part of it that is zero sum).

A large part of Google is advertising. A lot of that advertising is _not_ zero sum--I believe it provides a lot of value--but over time they have moved more and more heavily into the zero-sum space (e.g. the purchase of DoubleClick, the general character of youtube ads). By that I mean things like brand- building ads that just associate an emotion or status/prestige with a product or company.

</comment><comment><USER16> Plumbers make more than software developers?

I know some blue collars, plumbers included that are doing _really_ well in the grand scheme of things, but I don't know any that make more than I do, and I'm 20 years younger than them.

<comment><USER17> Plumbers' riches is an urban myth. When I started out in web development, my billing rate was $325/hour, which a journalist could easily calculate into a $600,000+ year job. In reality, I made around $70k. I suspect the plumbers meme is based on similarly ill-informed calculations. The reality is more humble: $20/hour for hired hands, lots of expenses and unbilled downtime for independents, etc. The average for highest-earning states (NY/CA) is around $60k.

<comment><USER18> > _When I started out in web development, my billing rate was $325/hour,_

???

When was that? What technology? That's easily the highest rate I've ever heard of.

<comment><USER17> I was working for Arthur Andersen and later KPMG in New York. The technology stack was varied (Vignette/TCL is one odd example) and largely irrelevant to my rate, as was my value as a programmer (I wasn't very good back then). $325 was one of my more sedate rates actually, they've billed me out as high as $400.

People tend to think the crazy numbers were a byproduct of the internet bubble but the biggest factor was due diligence: certain big clients had to choose a Big 5 firm for their projects based on requirements such as, minimum number of employees, minimum years in business, minimum assets, etc. The whole racket was absurd, if you ask me.</comment></comment></comment></comment>