SummarAI – Summarization and Sentiment Analysis - <AUTHOR> http://summarai.com/summarai/ <comment><USER2> I hate to be critical about something new, but at least for the example of the Wikipedia article on DNA repair, the summarized text is sort of completely off: [http://summarai.com/summarai/dna_repair.html](http://summarai.com/summarai/dna_repair.html)

However the extracted tags are pretty reasonable.

<comment><USER3> It also doesn't actually do very much sentiment analysis at all unlike the title says.

<comment><USER4> It actually does, it's part of a different summarization component.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you feed it on what it expects, it does well. Now try a NY Times opinion piece and it is always way off.

The reason is that to summarize such content you have to use words that may not be used in the text at all. Also, the summary parts may not be present in the text either.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is good stuff.

Pardon the plug, but I have something similar, a side project of many years: [http://kbsportal.com](http://kbsportal.com)

I will do some side by side comparisons tomorrow.

<comment><USER7> Tried using your project for the same DNA article and your server crashed.

404 Not Found nginx/1.4.6 (Ubuntu)

as you said, its a side project which would explain why the system is not ready for primetime.

<comment><USER6> I am trying to reproduce the error you reported with the article starting "Human longevity is a complex phenotype" and I don't get the runtime error. Would you please email me the text that caused the error? (email is in profile).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The summary for the 10-Q is surprisingly good! SEC filings are not formatted like news articles or books which most summarize algorithms seem to be trained on, at least the ones I have looked at, and do not perform well.

Is the source code available somewhere? Or an API? I would love to use this.

<comment><USER4> Hi, one of the creators here. Yes, an API is available. One of the unique things that it does is to allow you to control the context of the summarization which we call context-controlled summarization. It's based on a few recent approaches in AI. It's currently being used as part of a larger algo system in the financial markets and legal technology space.

<comment><USER8> Great! Is there a link with information about the API? Or do I need to contact you through the website?</comment></comment></comment>


So Long, Whitechapel Bell Foundry - <AUTHOR> http://spitalfieldslife.com/2016/12/02/so-long-whitechapel-bell-foundry/ <comment> vic-traill The article relates the example of the sales cycle for the 'church in Langley' \- it took a hundred years from the first recommendation to replace the bells to actual installation! That's remarkable!

Is there any other industry with these sorts of time lines? I can't think of one.

What would software built to last/be useful for a hundred years even look like?

<comment><USER2> A lot of UK infrastructure is rather old; hundred-year-old rail, Tube and sewer systems need active maintenance. There are more than a few "national treasures" that are stuck in limbos awaiting maintenance or renovation for decades. I can easily imagine that 98 of those 100 years were taken up with meetings saying "we ought to replace the bells, but we haven't the money".

(Pet example: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Royal_High_School](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Royal_High_School) which has been mostly empty for almost 50 years despite being in the middle of Edinburgh.)

<comment><USER3> Interestingly enough Edinburgh's Royal High is where the term "high school" was first used in the UK (in 1505, when the school had been operating for nearly 400 years).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> BBC Radio Four has a short programme _Bells on Sunday_. [http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006sgsh/episodes/player](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006sgsh/episodes/player)

Sadly, there's no way to search the BBC site to find specific churches.

Here's Sheffield Cathedral, which is a set of Whitechapel bells. "one of the finest products of Whitechapel foundry". Yorkshire Surprise Maximus. [http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03wgy69](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03wgy69)

</comment><comment><USER5> I believe this will leave only Taylor ([http://www.taylorbells.co.uk/web/](http://www.taylorbells.co.uk/web/)) casting bells of this sort in the UK, possibly anywhere.

<comment><USER6> 'Anywhere', there also are Royal Eijsbouts ([http://www.eijsbouts.com/index.php](http://www.eijsbouts.com/index.php)) and Petit & Fritsen ([http://www.petit-fritsen.nl/en/index.php](http://www.petit- fritsen.nl/en/index.php)), which I think are in the same market (Petit & Fritsen looks to be an Eijsbouts subsidiary, judging from the 'contact' email address on their site)

<comment><USER5> Interesting, there seem to be a couple of change ringing towers with Ejisbouts bells in the US. Thanks for sharing!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> San Francisco's well known holdout: Edwin Klockars, Blacksmithing.[1]

[1] [https://goo.gl/maps/DanouArmzHn](https://goo.gl/maps/DanouArmzHn)

</comment><comment><USER8> Whatever the guy's decision I don't blame him - it's his heritage and I trust him to do what's best. Someone like that will have put a lot of thought into it.

</comment><comment><USER9> I imagine it's been a difficult few decades for bellwrights. Bellsmiths. Bellers. I don't know. Sleep well.

<comment> david-given Bellfounder.

Fun fact: big church bells are so huge, weighing a tonne up, that pre- industrial revolution they were too big to move. So they were frequently cast in temporary moulds outside the church where they were going to be installed; archaeologists have found the furnaces. Bellfounders were itinerant and travel from site to site.

Another fun fact: bellringing is dangerous; people have died from it. Before the peal is rung, the bell is rocked from side to side until it eventually balances in an unstable position, mouth up; to ring, you pull it off balance, help it go round, and then check it, mouth up again. Except... it's a tonne of metal. Once it starts moving, it's going to keep moving. Get the rope looped round your neck, and it'll quite happily hang you as it goes.

For everything you ever wanted to know about bells, bellringing, changeringing, and the Fens of England, read Dorothy Sayers' _The Nine Tailors_ ; and the non-bell-related content is damn good, too.

<comment><USER10> Not _that_ dangerous. I don't think there's been a bell-ringing death in my lifetime, although I have heard of the very occasional nasty accident.

(My partner has rung church bells all her life & is very plugged in to this world. I'll have to ask her...)

<comment><USER11> The most serious bells related accident I can find is a blast in a French foundry injuring 46 in 2009 [0].

Another hazard is that, with the exception of some ground-floor rings, most bells are rung from a ringing chamber in the tower accessed by a spiral staircase or ladder. This makes it difficult to remove a patient after a medical emergency (or an accident), and the easiest solution may be for a stretcher to be lowered through the trapdoor in the ringing chamber used to install the bells (there have been a couple of articles about drills [1, 2], and I know of one instance when this was done locally).

There have been a couple of cases where people have been knocked unconscious: Tony Merrry at Charlbury in 2008 [3], and Helen Springthorpe at Bathampton in 2012 [4]; commenting in 2012, a CCBR spokesperson said that "I know of only one fatality in the past 50 years" [5].

[0]: [https://www.ringingworld.co.uk/news-articles/this- week/231-r...](https://www.ringingworld.co.uk/news-articles/this- week/231-rw-5128.html)

[1]: [https://www.ringingworld.co.uk/news-articles/this- week/750-r...](https://www.ringingworld.co.uk/news-articles/this- week/750-rw-5258.html)

[2]: [https://www.ringingworld.co.uk/news-articles/this- week/520-r...](https://www.ringingworld.co.uk/news-articles/this- week/520-rw-5197.html)

[3]: [http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/bell- ringe...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/bell-ringer-comes- a-cropper-in-church-tower-accident-829313.html)

[4]: [http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/breakingnews/offbeat/bellr...](http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/breakingnews/offbeat/bellringer- rescued-after-accident-28919594.html)

[5]: [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/10/helen- springthorpe-...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/10/helen-springthorpe- bell-ringing_n_2103954.html)

<comment><USER11> There have also been a few cases where bells have fallen out of their frames, including at Kilmersdon in 2013 [1,2]. In Canada, this resulted in a fatal accident in 1999 [3].

[1]: [http://treblesgoing.org.uk/kilmersdonaccident.html](http://treblesgoing.org.uk/kilmersdonaccident.html)

[2]: [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2507951/Elderly- bell...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2507951/Elderly-bell-ringers- run-cover-bell-crashes-Somerset-church-tower.html)

[3]: [http://www.anglicanjournal.com/articles/bell-tower-death- pro...](http://www.anglicanjournal.com/articles/bell-tower-death-prompts- inspections-449)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Note that the business itself is on sale and will hopefully carry on, albeit in a different place. The saccharine post seems to tiptoe around the real issue: Alan Hughes is retiring _and is cashing out_ by selling the building separately from the business. Because of the London property market being what it is, that building is likely the largest asset the business ever had. It would be trivial for Hughes to sell the building, relocate and carry on; but he's only doing half of that, and if a buyer for the business can't be found, "well that's too bad".

Alan Hughes might be a man who "embraced the patterns that prescribe his existence", but he's clearly decided to cash in, tradition be damned. In that, he's more consistent with his generation than the umpteen that came before him.

<comment><USER13> A little harsh. Presuming his children don't want to carry on the business (if, indeed he has any) then he's left with two choices:

1). Sell the building and business together. Given the location, the sale would inevitably be to a party that has zero interest in the bell making business and they'd dispose of the business (or just shut it down) as soon as they received the deeds for the building.

2). Split the sale in to building and business. Doing it this way at least gives Alan Hughes some control over who the business goes to (and enables the sale price for said business to be within range of a potential buyer in the same line of work/industry).

<comment><USER12> I think it would be more honest to realize the sale of the building, inject most of the resulting cash in the business (which, after all, would be only just), _then_ try to sell on a healthy business with a good runway for any new owner (or the workers, or creditors, or whoever). That doesn't seem to be the case here, since he's clear the business will just close unless it gets bought - where is the real estate cash going, then?

I'm probably a bit harsh, but real estate in London has turned plenty of good men evil, so to speak; this wouldn't be the first nor the last time it happens.

<comment><USER14> Potato potato?

If he owns the building and the business, what difference does it make how he sells them?

If he injects some hypothetical large amount of real estate cash into the corporation, he will probably want to get at least the value of that cash in the sale of the corporation.

<comment><USER12> He is the heir to a 400-year-old business his family bestowed on him. Shouldn't the moral and ethical priority be to keep such business afloat and bestow it on the next generation in turn? (Not necessarily of his family.)

If that were the case, injecting any real estate windfall in the business would be the right thing to do regardless of his personal ROI. Let the business put to good use the money, which is money the business itself accumulated in hundreds of years looking after the building. Get someone else in charge, be an absentee owner, and let it run.

Of course, if you treat it as a business like any other, such imperative does not exist. That, I think, is where his insistence that he's not a particularly good or interesting person comes from: he knows he's killing a piece of history for his own short-term economic benefit. His insistence that "it's just business" is a way to deflect the moral implications of his actions.

<comment><USER14> So do it for him. Set up a non profit. Collect the funds necessary to be an absentee owner. Buy the business. Run it for posterity's sake.

<comment><USER12> If only I had a building to sell in central London...

<comment><USER14> Enthusiasm for running the business for posterity is probably more important than having a building to sell.

<comment><USER12> I don't disagree, but I'd probably have more enthusiasm for it if I were sitting on a pile of real-estate cash.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> How come this isn't being protected? Shouldn't this go to the National Trust? Big Ben as well as America's Liberty bell came from this foundry. As I believe did the Bell of Bow(to be true Cockney you had to be born within hearing distance of them)

It's kind of sad that is survived the Blitzkrieg but not hyper real estate development.

I'm glad I got to visit while is was still an operating bell foundry. I remember the folks that worked there were very friendly to me considering I had wondered in off the street and it was a working foundry and not really a museum.

</comment><comment><USER16> The Liberty Bell was made here.

<comment><USER17> Amazing! From the below link:

       "Speaker of the Pennsylvania Assembly Isaac Norris first ordered a bell for the bell tower in 1751 from the Whitechapel Foundry in London."

However that bell immediately failed! No warranty I guess? Maybe we can contact WhiteChapel quickly before they're gone... Anyway it was recast locally. Ultimately that one failed too (after 90 years) so I guess well done local boys?

[https://www.nps.gov/inde/learn/historyculture/stories- libert...](https://www.nps.gov/inde/learn/historyculture/stories- libertybell.htm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Best handbells in the world</comment>


Mozilla plans to sell ads in Firefox browser - <AUTHOR> http://news.yahoo.com/mozilla-plans-sell-ads-firefox-browser-173022997--sector.html

<comment><USER2> So, the 9 tiles on the about:newtab are going to be populated when you're a first user and "Some of these tile placements will be from the Mozilla ecosystem, some will be popular websites in a given geographic location, and some will be sponsored content from hand-picked partners to help support Mozilla's pursuit of our mission. The sponsored tiles will be clearly labeled as such, while still leading to content we think users will enjoy."[0]

If I remember correctly there's a button in about:newtab to hide the tiles, and you can easily change the behaviour to open about:blank or any other page instead.

[0][https://blog.mozilla.org/advancingcontent/2014/02/11/publish...](https://blog.mozilla.org/advancingcontent/2014/02/11/publisher- transformation-with-users-at-the-center/)</comment>


One day, we'll all be programmers - <AUTHOR> http://zamfi.net/blog/one-day-we-will-all-be-programmers <comment><USER2> i don't buy it.

haven't people been saying that since the 70s? even SQL was designed with the intent that accountants could use it. but programming is really hard, especially if you want something that's done well.

i've also yet to see any general purpose robots that can do anything useful. i still think it's a long way out, if at all possible. there are tons of considerations that go into just about anything and if there's no magic AI there's really no way to program every useful (nevermind adaptable) constraint into everything.

<comment><USER3> People can't even give unambiguous driving directions to other rational human beings, and we expect them to be able to instruct computers on what to do.

("Take a right at where the barn used to be", "Go until you see the house with a big tree in front of it, you'll know what I mean, it's pretty big", "Take a left at the dog")

<comment><USER4> The best example I ever heard of that was a friend of mine giving instructions on how to get to his OWN house, where he'd lived for at least 5 years. He didn't know the names of the streets around his house, and just told us to turn right after the "lighthouse mailbox".

For what it's worth, whenever I'm in that area, I always notice the lighthouse mailbox now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Only in the same sense putting on a bandaid or taking some aspirin makes be doctor. Using specialty items created by others in rather uncreative ways according to well known rules.

</comment><comment><USER6> This post is rife with bad assumptions. Here are some big ones:

1\. Dexterity is NOT the "last mile" gap to having robots in minimum wage jobs. I don't care if the robot can flip a burger, can it recognize a grease fire (and put it out, and clean up afterwards?) Can it recognize a moldy bun or if the special sauce is spoiled? While low wage retail jobs don't require years of specialized training, they do take advantage of a lot of innate human skills. Most of the mechanical aspects of these jobs are already automated.

2\. Good software is not created by people sitting in cube farms programming. In projects of any size it's more about communication among developers and between developers and other business functions than writing code in isolation.

3\. Not everyone can be a programmer, and most that could be won't want to (and I predict won't have to). I'm sure you can invent trivial examples that anyone can do, but then you're not saying much. There are large classes of people that can't program a VCR or do long division, let a alone construct a slightly involved program. As someone who's been involved in research that attempts to teach average people how to "program", I feel confident that we will never see a large portion of people become programmers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your thoughts. Just to respond a bit:

1: One human is enough to put out grease fires, clean up, and find moldy buns. Most fast food joints have multiple humans, and dextrous robots would change that.

2 & 3: I don't think I made either assumption. Specifically, I didn't say we'll all be _good_ programmers or produce _good_ software. (Even today, not all programmers are good or produce good software.) I suspect what we think of as "programming" will change significantly, and with it, the number of people who program.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> One day, if the programmers do their job well, nobody will be a programmer. The system will either be so robust and self-sustaining it requires no humans, or it will program itself.

<comment><USER8> You mean like we're all writers, instead of having to rely on a few professional scribes? I shudder to think of the programming equivalent of the blogosphere.

<comment><USER3> Why? The same people who "lyKe can0t bELIEVe jim wud do dat to me" aren't going to be writing drivers for x-ray machines - they'll be giving "good- enough" instructions to machines that'll be smart enough to understand them.

People's dumb blogs get the job done for those people, and the people who choose to read them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Programming is quickly becoming the new form of literacy. I think eventually everyone will specialize but programming is going to be at the root of everything whether it's biology, chemistry, physics, or music. I think there will be many more interdisciplinary majors and professions.

</comment><comment><USER10> I think it'll become important, and may be a skill in your tools-set. How can a programmer build a medical scans interpreter without being a doctor? He can't. He needs Medical training.

Automation will drive more creativity, but not necessarily more programming jobs. The need for more automation jobs will drive needs for more programming _skills_. I think we are already there, we call it "technology". It's anything that makes use of the digital world to get improved results.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is probably the same as someone saying a hundred and fifty years ago "One day we will all be mathematicians." which eventually became true from the point of view of someone who's idea of higher math was calculus. But mathematics progressed...programming will progress too, I have no doubt.

</comment><comment><USER12> No, we won't.

Maybe one day we'll all be unemployed and bored out of our minds. But we certainly won't all be programmers.

<comment><USER13> Why equate unemployment with boredom?

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> First, you wouldn't get all programmers. You'd still have customer service. You'd probably also have executives, teachers, scientists, mechanics to work on robots, doctors, cooks, and then your smattering of people mixed in to help with robotic and computerized tasks.

Second, many people are not skilled enough in math and logic to program well. If programming became as pervasive as math education, lots of people would forget it after high school or never really learn it. If it became as pervasive as writing (as some commenters mention), then it would exist in a similar state: a collection of highly talented authors and a mass of untalented writers (with some in between). So you'd have to have newer programming environments that let unskilled people get some useful tasks done reasonably well. We have a lot of work to do before programming environments get there, but some people can make interesting things with mangled Excel spreadsheets or spaghetti code in PHP or copy-paste-modify JavaScript hacks.

Third, also as some people mention, labor is cheap in certain parts of the world, so robots aren't economical. Contrary to what some claim, I don't think that will go away. There will always be some portion of humanity that is not sufficiently educated to be programmers. This could be due to socio-economic circumstances, or it could simply be because they don't want to learn it. Some people go through high school refusing to learn, others drop out. How do you fix that? If they can't get customer service jobs, then they have to sell their manual labor cheap enough to compete with robots. You'd only replace all that if you eliminate poverty on a global level and have excellent education globally too. Then there won't be cheaper labor, so those jobs will move to robots, and then there won't be enough people wanting to hire humans for labor and so finally that market would cease to exist. I'm not counting on that happening, not even in a hundred years and possibly not ever. With a concerted effort we might have a chance at a utopian-like society world-wide in a couple hundred years, but that's plenty of time for wars, natural disasters, apathy, tyrants, terrorists, or any number of things to mess it up.

Conclusion: Sure let's make programming environments more accessible to less- nerdy people, and let's improve education about programming, since these things will improve lives. But we won't end up with all programmers.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you spend your evenings? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> 1\. exercise

2\. Am I exhausted from my day job? no -> side projects yes -> netflix

3\. Read books.

4\. Do dishes and other chores. My girlfriend cooks so it frees up a ton of time.

<comment><USER3> that sounds pretty fulfilling; how much "evening time" do you have to be able to afford these activities?

<comment><USER2> I got a new job with a 15 minute commute and free breakfast, lunch and dinner. So if I eat dinner at work then I will be home around 7ish, and go to bed at 11.

That leaves enough time to do most things but not everything everyday.

I also fart around on the Internet a lot in the mornings but when I am more diligent then I wash dishes and read books before work too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I get home around 7-8. Half of the time I'll cook dinner with my wife, talk about our days as we cook, eat dinner together. Around 8:30 or 9:00 we'll hang out in the living room. If I have energy and am feeling ambitious, or I have to work a bit extra, we will listen to music and I will code (for work, or open source, or side projects), while she reads. This might last until midnight, and then we'll go to bed. I try to read for at least fifteen minutes before bed on a kindle as I wind down. Seems to work well.

If I'm too tired to work, we'll watch netflix together.

Two nights a week I try to exercise (martial arts classes) and instead of cooking I'll get take out or eat at the local inexpensive Japanese or Mexican restaurant.

</comment><comment><USER5> The same way as I spend my mornings, days, and nights: nothing constructive.

</comment><comment><USER6> I get home between 7 and 8pm. Usually my evening goes:

1\. Yoga at my neighborhood studio

2\. Dinner (eggs and toast with kimchi, maybe sauteed kale if I'm feeling ambitious)

3\. Reading time or, if feeling lazy, I listen to a podcast and crochet for a little bit.

4\. A small amount of writing (at the very least a journal entry)

As you can see... the last thing I want to do when I get home is touch code. But maybe this is why I'm a mediocre developer...

Does anyone have any advice as to how I can actually want to code when I get home???

</comment><comment><USER7> I reach home somewhere around 7.

Finish my dinner by 7:30

Fool around for next 30 mins.

At 8 I start coding.

I am a newbie developer, I have many things to learn before I can work on a project that really matters. So, most of my coding time is spent learning new things like C Socket programming, iOS development, etc

</comment><comment><USER8> Get home between 5 and 7 (if I go downtown). Play with my son, eat dinner, clean up some. Bath and bed for the kid, then spending some time with my wife. Then I either do more work, dink around on reddit, or read.

</comment><comment><USER9> Get home at around 6pm, stream League of Legends until midnight. Go to bed.

Due to donations I can treat it as a poor paying part-time job.

</comment><comment><USER10> Pick two to three, repeat until tired.

1\. Unnecessary social networking

2\. Make music

3\. Paint

4\. Go for a walk

5\. Go out to eat

6\. Consume recreational inebriants

7\. Watch move/tv show

</comment><comment><USER11> world of warcraft and binge watching netflix or hate watching netflix, depending on what I'm in the mood for.</comment>


How the U.S. Air Force Deployed Kubernetes and Istio on an F-16 in 45 days - <AUTHOR> https://thenewstack.io/how-the-u-s-air-force-deployed-kubernetes-and-istio-on-an-f-16-in-45-days/ <comment><USER2> Well ... I hope they uninstall it! Istio was everywhere at KubeCon 2018 and our group, enticed by the benefits of a service mesh added Istio to our clusters over the following few months. It added a lot of complexity but came with a huge cost in performance and the ability to understand and troubleshoot the system

At KubeCon 2019, Linkerd was everywhere (with their 2.0 announcement) and the Air Force presentation described in this article was the only Istio topic I found (and I was specifically looking for Istio information). It turns out that the Envoy proxy is not nearly so lightweight and unobstrusive as described.

So now we're most of the way through migrating from Istio to Linkerd and, while there are some issues we're still working through related to tracing (Jaeger, etc), if you don't specifically try to use the proxy, you have a regular Kubernetes cluster. The proxy can be install per pod or per namespace making it easy to get it out of the way.

<comment><USER3> Great to hear Linkerd is treating you well. If you run into any issues please join us in the community Slack (slack.linkerd.io). Big friendly group of people ready to help you :)</comment></comment>


Israeli surveillance tool silently collects all cloud and communications data - <AUTHOR> https://9to5mac.com/2019/07/19/israeli-icloud-hack-man-in-the-middle/ <comment><AUTHOR> >The vulnerability purportedly affects the iPhone and Apple's iCloud as well as Google Android phones, and even third-party apps installed on the phone that communicate over "encrypted and secure" connections.

The spyware is sold by NSO Group is supposedly only sold to governments to assist with crime investigations, but there are fears that the Pegasus spyware is also used by countries to help enforce authoritarian and dictatorship leadership.

The new version of the Pegasus software is supposedly able to capture and clone the authentication tokens used for services like iCloud. Then, it can essentially construct a man-in-the-middle attack to pretend to be the target user's device, and download whatever data it pleases from the origin server by making requests that seem to be coming from the origin phone.</comment>


Ask HN: When should a web application use Java? - <AUTHOR>

After seeing the Modern Java series I've grown curious: when is Java and its related framworks the best choice for a side project/small group endeavour?<p>Django/RoR or Flask/Sinatra have their niches - what are good reasons for a solo developer or small team to look outside Python, Ruby or PHP? Also, for those who are using Java, where do you host your application/service? <comment><USER2> > Also, for those who are using Java, where do you host your > application/service?

Heroku, EC2 (or Elastic Beanstalk) and Google AppEngine are all pretty good choices if you ask me. For side projects I usually just throw them up on Heroku, but I'll use EC2 for more sophisticated deployments.

> Django/RoR or Flask/Sinatra have their niches - what are good reasons for a > solo developer or small team to look outside Python, Ruby or PHP?

I'm struggling to come up with an answer to this topic. To be honest, I think you'll be fine with whatever tool you choose and I think you should just use whatever is most comfortable for you. That said, some scenarios where it might make sense to use Java (or another JVM language) over Django/RoR include:

(1) This doesn't matter for most applications (and isn't necessarily true for all applications), but if you are expecting a lot of load you will likely get more throughput out of the JVM (see how the Java platforms compare to Ruby and Python ones in this benchmark: [http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/](http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/)) and you will probably be able to handle more traffic with fewer machines (Twitter reportedly needs about ten times fewer machines to run its site after rewriting a bunch of Ruby services in Scala).

(2) You may need to use a particular JVM library (there's a lot of really good ones).

(3) Some spaces of the open-source ecosystem are largely written with JVM languages (especially in the data space: Hadoop, Mahout, Spark, etc). If your team is heavily dependent on one of those spaces you may choose the JVM for your web applications simply to focus your teams knowledge and tooling on one platform.

<comment><USER3> > (2) You may need to use a particular JVM library (there's a lot of really > good ones).

I would love to hear some examples? It always appears to me that you could use JVM on the backend and have robust services that communicate with the front end layer (flask/tornado/whatever). However, I would be open to hearing something new.

> (3) Some spaces of the open-source ecosystem are largely written with JVM > languages (especially in the data space: Hadoop, Mahout, Spark, etc). If > your team is heavily dependent on one of those spaces you may choose the JVM > for your applications simply to focus your teams knowledge on one platform.

From the data perspective, in all the places I have been, the data has been sliced up, processed, put through models and is available either as services or SQL databases. After that, there has never been a strong enough rationale not to use something else for the web server. I mean, from my understanding, you will end up having to write JS for the browser side of things. So you are no longer tooling on one platform any more, are you?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't think, it is good idea to think about language and framework first than domain.

If it is prototype or just proof of concept then it is better to use good framework that helps to build quick prototype. May be Django or RoR is best choice if you already know it. But if you have some problem with exiting system like improve system performance or scalability issue then you could think about something else.

In the end, to me need to understand problem first then framework or language but not vice versa.

</comment><comment><USER5> They're good for when you need heavy lifting and processing on the backend. It's great as an API, with a javascript front end.

The JVM ecosystem has amazing parallelism, and when tuned right has amazing speed and scales well. The distributed systems stack from hadoop et. al also has produced tooling for handling at scale operations for building services.

This is why facebook builds databases with it (presto) or twitter uses it for all of their services (mesos/scala).

The uberjar has also allowed for go like deployment schemes with everything in one package so it can play well with external services or using something like dropwizard.

Those mentioning RoR and the like as a middle man...if you're starting fresh, I'll pose the opposite question, if you aren't experienced in a particular language why have a middle man? It's great to keep your services modular, and if you already have an existing stack, yes rewrites are expensive.

Tooling wise, there's a lot of great support for hosting as well. Openshift, cloud foundry, and the usual suspects come to mind for java hosting.

That being said, use what you know.

</comment><comment><USER6> > when is Java and its related framworks the best choice for a side > project/small group endeavour?

If you want to use the project to learn a new language/framework, go ahead, but if you already know Java and you just want to get the project done, use it.

And while typing doesn't matter so much for many applications, static typing can save your ass as well as provide a guide for integrating with libraries. My experience with Django was good, but I found myself diving down into the source of both the core and of other "apps" in order to get the interactions right. With a java application, you almost never have to do this.

Generally, though, you should use the language/framework you know, as long as it isn't PHP.

<comment><USER7> Instead of spending your time bashing PHP, why not encourage people to write "PHP the right way"?

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Java is much faster than any Python/Ruby/PHP stack and this is a reason alone. Javascript is similar or better but some people consider it unfit for large scale backend because of the language peculiarities with OO.

<comment><USER9> Ironic, considering the OO 'peculiarities' of Java...

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Email me in a few weeks -- it looks as though I may be looking at different Java web frameworks for my employers. We recently did a project with Spring Boot and had a mixed experience.

</comment><comment><USER11> PHP is a joke, you can't seriously ask that question in 2014 "why not PHP?". There are 100000s websites about why it is a bad choice beside performance and security, you can easily look that up.

Why not Ruby/Python though?

I think about these languages as developing something quick, a prototype, demo sort of things and internal tools for limited number of users (<100 000). The performance is good enough for this range, and Sinatra/Django gives you great tooling around building a small web application (regardless if it is a UI or just an API). The memory management of these languages (especially the libraries) are not great, so sooner or later you gonna hit a barrier (just like several companies did, Opscode, Twitter etc.) That is the time when you need to think about something else, or the TCO will consume your revenue and it is simply not profitable to run your service.

I am kind of surprised that you see Java at the top and nothing else. My experience is that Java, Erlang (and more recently probably Go) sits at the top, when you are talking about programming languages for implementing a web application.

But why?

Java as a language does not really matter much, same goes to Erlang and Go as well. The more important part is the VM and the libraries you need to use for building a webapp. JVM has outstanding single node performance, with libraries like Jetty (last time I measured it was doing 7500 req/s with ~30ms p99 latency on my MBP out of the box) that gives you a great toolkit to implement a web application with amazing performance. Almost the same with Erlang, I think it still needs more community and better libraries, especially for more UI heavy apps, but on the other hand, the p100 latency is equal to p99 and p50 because of the per "process" (Erlang process, not operating system one) garbage collection. There is no global VM lock.

So, to answer your question, when Java? When you need good single node performance, you are expecting 1M+ users and you need to scale up your application with reasonable TCO. If you are more adventurous you can play with Erlang (build the next WhatsApp) or Go (and get the great support from the community and nice libraries from Google).

Personally I am using Compojure a lot with Jetty, and learning React (actually the Clojure port of it called Om). This gives me a sweet spot in terms of maturity, quick prototyping, lots of immutability and access to the most comprehensive library collection of the planet (LDAP, JDBC, you name it). I usually host my own stuff on AWS and company stuff is hosted in our DCs.

<comment><USER12> you are a joke

<comment><USER13> As a web newb, can you explain why the things in this comment are wrong and downvoted?

<comment><USER11> Don't worry about it, I got used to occasional trolling on HN. Basically if you are not talking about the newest hottest community approved thing or you have a slightly different opinion than the HN standard you get down voted. Making which programming language is the best for web applications sound like "node.js is the silver bullet of web apps, it also cures cancer and aids at the same time" is laughable. I enlisted several technical details why Java (besides Erlang and Go) is the best for scalable web applications while the other guy was just "java sucks node.js rocks". If I get down voted, it tells more about the people reading this site than anything else.

<comment><USER14> My advice is to treat downvotes as editorial feedback in regard to the quality of your writing.

Yes, down votes can express disagreement. More often they represent a misunderstanding - rewriting a post can fix this - or they represent a conflict with community guidelines/standards - rewriting can also fix this. Sometimes the best edits are deletions.

It's the tone, particularly the opening line that is likely to cause downvoting of your post. It's demeaning and PHP trolling and unsubstantiated, and therefore, poorly written for HN. The technical discussion which follows, though fine, can't fix it.

Good luck.

<comment><USER11> Thanks for the feedback. I still think that if you go the a cooking website and you suggest to people to eat mud you can't expect a serious discussion about the nutrition values in mud as meal. This is called common sense. You don't dry your kid in a microwave, you don't eat dirt, and in certain circles you don't use PHP. This is my opinion and I am not going to change it just because HN editorial stuff does not like it. Hope that help. :)

<comment><USER12> You use programming languages for the features they provide and the requirements they can accomplish. This is why I called you a joke. Most people can build anything in any language but requirements are what should dictate it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: FlightList – Find cheap, one-way flights within a departure date range - <AUTHOR> https://www.flightlist.io <comment><AUTHOR> Hello HN,

I built my first side-project, [https://www.flightlist.io](https://www.flightlist.io), for 2 reasons:

1\. After my travels in Europe in 2017 I wanted a simpler, minimalist flight booking app tailored to my travel style.

2\. To learn Javascript

When I travel I always buy one-way flights and I'm not looking to depart on a specific day, but within a date range. And of course, I look for the best price.

Even though sites like Skyscanner and Google Flights are quite popular and easy to use, I have to enter a specific departure date and then use the Calendar to find other dates which may have cheaper prices.

I just want to enter an origin, destination, date range and get a list of flights, without the frills or ads.

So I built Flightlist and in the process I learned Javascript. Something I had been meaning to do for several years.

I'm looking for your feedback, do you find it useful? Would you use it? What features or data-points would you like to see?

</comment><comment><USER2> Where do people get access to this flight data? I have interesting travel requirements, to the point that I would probably want to filter the raw data itself, but I thought it was highly locked down?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm using an API which returns a raw string of data and then I can present it however I wish.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Cool, just added to Pushbullet to check this out later.

Curious, there are other services that also have search functionality within a date range. When someone creates these flight checker apps, what is unique to each one? Aren't there only a limited amount of flight data at any given time?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes there is. What differentiates most sites is how they present the data. I wanted something minimal and simple for my style of travel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I may have spotted a bug. I am choosing Warsaw Chopin Airport (WAW) as a departure, but it shows results from WMI too :/

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes i have to fix a few issues with Polish airports and cities. Thanks for catching that. I will fix.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Thank you for letting the From: field be unspecified! I haven't seen a site that lets you do that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes basically that is to ANYWHERE. I will be improving the departure and destination fields to include more options (radius, multi-city, multi-country, regions, etc)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Stuck on spinner when I visit the site

<comment><AUTHOR> Try re-refreshing the site, which country are you in? And are you on mobile or desktop?</comment></comment>


New nucleotide could revolutionize epigenetics - <AUTHOR> http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/new-nucleotide-could-revolutionize-epigenetics-20334.html <comment><USER2> _YAWN!_

Meh, more nucleotides. Why all the hyperbole? A, T, G, and C haven't been the only game in town for a while now. What of Pseudouridine?

A novel derivative base is interesting, but it's not ground breaking on its own. The effects it might have would be interesting, but I'm really tired of this sort of overhyped science reporting.

<comment><USER3> Any time I see a science related headline with words like "revolutionize", "cure for cancer", "breakthrough", and similar absolutes my eyes get all-a- rolling. I've never understood why so many PIs sign on to University PR overhyping their science (which in many cases is really good science). I wonder if PCR ever got this kind of hype? Good, useful, science will end up being well known when it becomes general consensus without the need for fancy headlines</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Ways to deal with low data caps? - <AUTHOR> For a couple of months I will have internet mostly though tethering. That means that I should not download more than ~3-5 Gb data per month in my daily usage.<p>I am looking for the best ways to limit the data usage while browsing, and monitor data usage in general. Recommendations about tools as HTTrack or youtube-dl would be appreciated too. <comment><USER2> Disable your OS automatically downloading updates and instead manually take a look at what's on offer every so often.

<comment><USER3> Yes, also good. Notify but don't download is what I generally use, tethered or not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> My reflex initial actions are to block unwanted stuff on Web pages (which is good for speed and security also) with NoScript and your browser's anti- tracking support at least, and have your mail client ask you before downloading large items (~100kB, which are often malicious also).

And turn off any applications that may be chattering in the background without telling you.</comment>


IOS 5 To Have Powerful Face Detection - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/27/ios-5-to-have-powerful-face-detection/ <comment><USER2> This is such shitty reporting by TechCrunch. 1\. The face detection APIs were new in 5.0 – although under NDA, they are hardly newsworthy, especially considering now that 5.0 has been in beta for weeks if not months. 2\. Face detection is NOT the same as face recognition. There's an important distinction: The latter recognizes a _particular face_ where as the former can only recognize facial features and detect that it is _a face_. 3\. 9to5 published this story on Monday. It took TC 3 days to notice and rip it off? Lame.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hopefully this will improve on the algorithms they have in Lion (which seemed to work ever-so slightly better than OpenCV's face detection and work poorly on profile views).

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm wondering if this will trickle into unlock screens and profile logins, I can only see that being highly frustrating. I have little faith in biometrics and can just imagine that not being able to log in due to having your angry face on can only become a viscous circle of lockout.

Then again, if you can teach it your intoxicated face then you could have a phone version of gmail's mail goggles.

On a more serious note, can anyone give me a practical non entertainment use for facial recognition in an desktop app? With the quality of camera it's likely to be working with in the near future there doesn't seem to be much scope for more than just 'yep, that's a face, here's roughly where the features are'.

</comment><comment><USER5> I keep wondering when the "Welcome back, Mr. Yamamoto" scene from _Minority_Report_ will become reality.

iOS including strong face recognition will be a big step toward that.

<comment><USER6> Not face recognition, face _detection_. The new APIs [1] make it possible to _detect_ if an image _contains_ faces and returns position data of various face features (eyes and mouth). There is no way to recognize which person a face belongs to.

As an aside, why do rumor sites always have to make it seem as if these things were somehow hidden? It's a well-known and documented part of a public API (it just happens to be under NDA at the moment, but it's not any kind of secret, really).

[1] [https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/#document...](https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/ios/#documentation/CoreImage/Reference/CIDetector_Ref/Reference/Reference.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40010974)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Must be depressing to work at Apple and be the dev on the Photo Booth app.

</comment><comment><USER8> Yes, I'm going to be that guy, but Google showed off face "detection" (not recognition) at Google IO, and in my opinion, in a fairly cool way.

Sorry that I actually read the source material (or is it merely that I implied that it's not some god send from Apple). The only conclusion that is supported by the literature, source tweets, or "revealed" API functions... indicate "facial detection". Not recognition as commenters here or the TC article imply. Maybe someone else has info they're not sharing with me.

Downvote away, feel free to actually indicate where this is new from information that was known or anything that supports the "facial [recognition]" that we're all speculating about. What a joke.

<comment><USER9> It's an article about a new feature in iOS. It's factually wrong and awful but it doesn't claim anywhere that the face detection is revolutionary.

What was your goal by bringing Android into this? That can only result in unproductive discussions and it's also kinda irrelevant.

<comment><USER8> Because the reaction to this on HN is like most other things Apple announces after others already have, and as often is the case (and not helped by the article) it misattributes magical features that aren't even in the feature being discussed. I guess I should've just kept my groaning to myself.

<comment><USER9> You might be a victim of confirmation bias. Not everything should be seen from the Google vs. Apple angle.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Brunch is secular church - <AUTHOR> http://ediblesanfrancisco.com/brunch-is-secular-church <comment><AUTHOR> Brunch is secular church. Sunday service for the socially starved. Something for the nothings. Specifically, something soulful and restorative.</comment>


How America Lost Faith in Expertise (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2017-02-13/how-america-lost-faith-expertise <comment><USER2> A trend that seems implicated in what Nichols reports but that he doesn't touch on much is the secularization of identity. Expertise is much more threatening to people's egos as people come to identify with things that didn't develop to function (as religion did) as a wellspring of identity.

</comment><comment><USER3> America's foreign policy "experts" have long been the worst of the worst. Look how few of them stood up against the Second Gulf War. I read a book in the 1980s that said exactly how that war was going to play out and you know, it did.

<comment><USER4> Plenty of foreign policy experts, perhaps _most_ , were against the war.

IMO, one of the primary reasons why America has lost faith in experts is because most "experts" on television and lobbying Congress are anything but experts. They didn't study foreign affairs in college, have professional experience in the foreign service, nor have any other sort of substantial foreign affairs expertise (e.g. running major NGO). If they have any bone fides at all, it's typically via a series of political appointments. (Unfortunately, the ones who come out the other side of a political appointment chastened aren't the ones that get tapped for advice or commentary, especially on politically charged topics.)

What these lobbyists and pundits tend to do is echo the most radical ideologues in the scholarly community, particularly those whose theories nominally justify partisan political policies. The archetypical example is the cult behind Arthur Laffer. To most professional economists the namesake Laffer Curve is an obvious and largely uninteresting illustration of the relationship between taxation and market deadweight loss. All it does is beg the question of _where_ the optimal point is. Laffer's substantive policies are radical and the vast majority of economists don't take them seriously. But to Republican politicians and the GOP platform Laffer lends their policies scholarly credibility, at least in the eyes of non-experts. But because Laffer's and Laffer-justified policies are manifestly broken in a way that is readily apparent, that has had the effect of making many people skeptical of experts.

The same thing happens on the left, particularly wrt to various theories about race, gender, and cultural identity more generally, not to mention poverty and crime. I don't mean to equivocate because I think the problem is much worse on the conservative side of the spectrum. There's a reason those Democrats, like Hillary Clinton, who bought into the Iraq War are considered "hawkish"\--i.e. conservative--in foreign affairs. OTOH, it was leftist academics who seemed to have begun the scholarly trend of rejecting empiricism and skepticism in favor of radical ideologies. Among other things, radicalism is helpful for careers in academia, in ways similar if not identical to the dynamics of publication and citation in science. Beginning in the latter part of the 20th century conservative scholarship adopted these tactics and brought them into the mainstream of political culture in a way that hadn't happened before.

The fact of the matter is that American culture, particularly political culture, has historically been relatively conservative, so it's not a condemnation of conservatism per se to say that it was conservative politicians that brought radicalism into the mainstream. It couldn't have been any other way. In other countries with more liberal-leaning political cultures its of course the leftist parties that usher in radicalism.

<comment><USER2> Goldwater, in particular, brought a greater skepticism of expertise to American conservatism, which has come to define it.

<comment><USER4> Goldwater, Buckley... yeah, you can trace a lot of the our modern dynamics quite far. These people brought intellectual gravitas to mainstream conservative politics, giving it a voice and modus operandi.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


At Least on Wall Street, Wages of Sin Beat Those of Virtue - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/14/business/14vice.html?ex=1347422400&en=084ed93c655e9530&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

<comment><USER2> But of course:

"The record of the Vice Fund has not been without blemishes. Its founder, Richard A. Sapio, and two other executives at the fund's advisory firm, Mutuals.com, were accused in 2003 of securities-related fraud and in 2004 of conspiracy to commit securities fraud, wire fraud and mail fraud."

Maybe the kind of thing you should think about before investing in something proudly calling itself "The Vice Fund".

</comment><comment><USER3> No, no. These guys aren't amoral blood suckers -- they're just "keeping the market efficient!", haven't you heard? (My time in the financial industry was the most repugnant professional experience I've ever had. I'm a little bitter.)

<comment><USER4> They may be amoral -- but whose blood are they sucking?

Also: the only reason this is profitable is that moralists avoid these stocks. If you want Sin Investing to be less successful, you just need to discourage socially responsible stock pickers.

<comment><USER5> Sometimes, I wonder if the best thing anti-smoking advocates could do would be to buy up all the Phillip Morris stock and then use their dividend checks to run lots of gritty anti-smoking ads. Heck, if they bought enough, they could gain control of the company, publish all the incriminating smoking memos, forever tarnish the brand image of all cigarette manufacturers, and liquidate the company.

<comment><USER4> This is sort of what Warren Buffett suggests is happening with taxes: he argues (in one of the letters to shareholders in the 80's) that there's a "Class G" stock entitled to 35% of a company's annual profits, and that sometimes that money is used to reduce those profits.

It would be great to make that explicit: put together a foundation that buys cigarette stocks, reinvests most of the dividends, and uses the rest for ads. It's a built-in hedge, because the stocks only go down if the ads are working, and if the ads fail (or, per "Thank You For Smoking," make smoking cooler) the ad budget goes up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This makes a lot of sense. When you invest in a stock, your returns aren't just financial: buying shares of a solar power company pays a dividend in pretension (sort of like buying Amazon in 1999; it wasn't the money -- it was the .com). Since these stocks have a negative 'dividend' in the sense that nobody wants to admit to owning them, they offer higher returns to compensate.

Peter Lynch recommended this with garbage haulers and coffin manufacturers. It's still viable.

</comment><comment><USER6> It's generally been said that sin pays of in the short term, while being very bad in the long term.

<comment><USER4> In fact: I can't think of any 'sins' that aren't exactly what a cynical person would do to maximize long-term gain.

<comment><USER6> Really? Pride, sloth, envy, wrath, lust, etc. all seem to cause more trouble for the person who can't control them. How do they maximize long term gain, or are you thinking of something else?

<comment><USER7> yters, you're thinking from the customer's point of view, which is great. Looking from a cynical business point of view, they are weaknesses to exploit. For example, one could create a discussion site and attract a lot of eyeballs by posting contentious comments, raising peoples' wrath (also known as "trolling"). Envy is what high-end consumer products exploit.

<comment><USER6> Ah right. However, this has a bad long term effect for the market as a whole. Just look at what such thinking has done to our culture as it is.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why aren't desktop OS sold in chips? - <AUTHOR> I can't think of good reasons for desktop OS manufacturers (i.e. Microsoft, Ubuntu etc.) not distributing their OS in hardware (i.e. SSD or custom RAM sticks containing flash memory along with NVM).
The pros of OS in flash memory are-
1. The flash memories are cheaper than ever. A single NVM chip in a RAM stick
2. Number of laptops/desktops without CD/DVD ROM are increasing significantly.
3. OS in NVM loads much faster than OS in traditional HDD.
4. Users won't have to go through time consuming install/setup cycle, plug-n-play hardware should make the OS ready.
5. piracy of OS in NVM (only) will be significantly harder, if not impossible.
Any idea? <comment><USER2> What does (2) have to do with anything, you can get OSs on usb this decade.

</comment><comment><USER3> Updates.</comment>


Someone is lying about electric cars on the Internet - <AUTHOR> https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/5/6/1524012/-Someone-is-lying-about-electric-cars-on-the-internet <comment><USER2> Kudos to the author for trying to set the record straight. As an EV enthusiasts who has tried to read up a lot about this stuff, it is depressing to see the sheer amount of propaganda and misinformation being spread about electric cars.

According to the fossil fuel fan club, the electricity going into your EV is somehow always from coal. Of course all the other electricity not used for electric cars is of course pure as newly fallen snow.

Of course they fail to mention that a lot of power is simply wasted at night anyway. E.g. in Ontario you could charge your EV at night without requiring any increase in electricity production.

Nor do they mention the fact that oil refining requires a huge amount of electricity. In fact it requires so much electricity, that you could have use that same electricity to drive an EV the same distance as gasoline car would drive with the gasoline refined using that electricity.

But really I think what it comes down to is that people like to lie to themselves. They like to invent little lies that will justify the actions they already made. They want to drive that gas-guzzler and so they look for fact that will support that decision.

<comment><USER3> Here's a comparison by emissions: [http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/electric- cars-green](http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/electric-cars-green)

2015 US electricity generation by source: ( [https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=427&t=3](https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=427&t=3) ) Coal = 33% Natural gas = 33% Nuclear = 20% Hydropower = 6% Other renewables = 7% Biomass = 1.6% Geothermal = 0.4% Solar = 0.6% Wind = 4.7% Petroleum = 1% Other gases = <1%

I've written before about the higher weight of EVs (a Tesla S weighs ~4600-~4900# vs some 80s cars weighing under 2000 or much lighter modern cars), drag coefficients (tesla is better but there have been other vehicles close even a decade or two ago), recycling of batteries, etc. The article I linked puts the EV equivalent mileage in the low 40s, which is the same as we can get with efficient ICE vehicles already. I'm not saying that their math is perfect and their picture complete (e.g. You also need electricity to make coal mining equipment and diesel to power oil tankers) but it looks like they did quite a bit of research and found that it's roughly the same right now.

I'm personally annoyed at all of the people thinking they're totally saving the environment by driving their Prius / Tesla / Leaf / whatever. I think it's ignorance at best and greenwashing a lot of the time.

The gist is that driving is bad for the environment regardless of what your car runs on. Bicycles or walking or living closer to the things you do every day is a better idea, and I wish more people would promote that vs ~don't change your habits, just buy a new car and Earth will be saved.

<comment><USER4> Small quibble: Coal is down to 28% percent of US electrical generation, and will continue to be crowded out by solar, wind, and natural gas. Every one of the largest coal mining companies in the US are in bankruptcy. 98% of generation this year coming online is solar and wind.

Coal will be completely removed from generation in 5-10 years; natural gas in 15.

You _are_ helping save the world by buying a Tesla; those 20-30% margins on the Model S and X are paying for the Supercharger network (which is required for mass adoption of EVs) and the Gigafactory (required to build out ~50GW/year of energy storage for homes, utilities, and of course, vehicles).

Cars are not going away any time soon. Therefore, its best to make every effort to make them as clean as possible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I just bought a Nissan Leaf. The decision had nothing to do with the environment, I did it for the convenience of not having to go to the gas station or get oil changes any more. After about a month, I am in love with the car. It's comfortable, amazingly quiet, and surprisingly powerful. The acceleration is better than any other car that I've driven, it's super responsive. It was also very inexpensive. I think most consumers are like me and will make the EV decision based on economics rather than environmental concerns.

<comment><USER6> A friend of mine just refused to pick me up from Airport, because his Nissan leaf wouldn't be able to survive 80 miles both ways and there is no charging station in between.

<comment><USER4> Which airport?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interesting, I felt like this was a recursive joke. Show the mine for nearly all the worlds production of lithium and then show a oil sands derrick which can't provide enough gas and oil for the cars in the state of Maine. Not that mining for Lithium could be done "better" but that the article was a poorly articulated argument for how electric cars are either 'as bad' or 'worse' than petrol cars.

<comment><USER8> One picture has trees in it ergo oil is good for the environment?

The whole thing rings bullshit alarms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Another study which compares particulate emissions on EVs: [http://jalopnik.com/electric-and-hybrid-cars-might- produce-a...](http://jalopnik.com/electric-and-hybrid-cars-might-produce-as- many-toxins-a-1775747577)

TL;DR EVs are worse there since they weigh, on average, 24% more.

</comment><comment><USER9> Electric cars still use a lot of copper... [http://jalopnik.com/ever-wondered- how-much-copper-goes-into-...](http://jalopnik.com/ever-wondered-how-much- copper-goes-into-electric-cars-1692424366)

<comment><USER10> Normal cars also have over 55 lb of copper, which is a lot of copper. Worldwide copper production is 18,500,000 tonnes or ~6 pounds per person per year. Which is why recycling is so important.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Honestly these lies do not matter. Let people buy what they want without government using our money to subsidize anything.

In the long term facts win because they are self evident. I find it disgusting that rich people get $8K per Tesla.

</comment><comment><USER12> I would have loved to see some pictures of actual lithium mining in the Salar de Uyuni. That's because although this area is called dead by the author, it is one of the most beautiful places in the world.

<comment><USER13> The lithium drying pools are rather pretty too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Bottom line is we're always going to be digging something out of the ground. The less hellish we can make those places the better, regardless of which element it is. Or, you know, asteroids.</comment>