Reasons blog posts can be of higher scientific quality than journal articles - <AUTHOR> http://daniellakens.blogspot.com/2017/04/five-reasons-blog-posts-are-of-higher.html <comment><USER2> I'm surprised that so many of the comments seem to attack the claims in the post along the dimension of "well, anyone can write a blog post." I think as a community HN would staunchly advocate that the recipe for building great companies or software is an almost radical devotion to reducing any and all barriers to entry, except in this domain somehow people feel that the rigidity and exclusivity which journals provide somehow lead to the betterment of science. Makes me think about pg's "what you can't say" post.

There is short shrift given to the distortion that gets introduced in order to "get published". The "file drawer" effect is very real, and it gives us a very skewed view of what the actual scientific work being done really is; p-hacking and other statistical trickery are table stakes to anyone trying to survive in the academic world, as being published is a key metric to success yet it is surprisingly orthogonal to being right. As Brian Nosek's "reproducibility project" is uncovering, there is a non-trivial amount of "science" out there that is pure garbage, and much of it was produced in order to "get published."

In a world where "random hackers" can write twitter bots to parse scientific papers and uncover obvious mathematical flaws (which sometimes invalidate central claims of the paper), I don't understand how we aren't immediately gravitating to standards which promote more and more openness.

Lastly, the biggest issue we have to address is the fact that notoriety is now the chief indicator of success, and not genuine scientific discovery. In college I had world-famous faculty who have made a career, fortune, and placed themselves well on the spotlight on the backs of research which was later completely reversed -- and not in the way "science is supposed to work" sense, but rather in the "you purposefully fudged the math" sense. And yet there was virtually no reputational damage done to their career. Worse yet, I think it is clear that this lack of ethics actually is a direct cause of the success they enjoy today. Given that these are pressures faced by all in the academic community, true openness is the one avenue we have to counteract this sort of thing, and hopefully enterprising individuals come along and find a way to make "truth-seeking" reputation something researchers care about.

<comment><USER3> One of the reasons why I sometimes dislike my industry (design) is it's filled with a lot of Medium posts that get highly upvoted by say, emerging or other adept designers, yet it's rare that someone will substantiate their claim with data to prove that a rule or belief that they state is actually true. Sometimes I feel like designers believe x only because other designers believe x, when in reality non in-group behavior might suggest something completely different, that x is irrelevant, unnecessary, or confusing.

What I enjoy about learning about other subjects that make claim in research papers is that it is at least legitimized through a rigorous process. One can substantiate that y is better than x because tests show doing y requires less computing time than doing x. Or that doing y results in higher accuracy of the model. While getting a research paper published is an imperfect process where even high quality ideas get rejected for at times pretty trivial reasons, I can appreciate the process itself mostly results in a sharpened idea.

<comment><USER4> > Sometimes I feel like designers believe x only because other designers > believe x, when in reality non in-group behavior might suggest something > completely different, that x is irrelevant, unnecessary, or confusing.

Parallax scrolling sites come to mind. They look pretty, but quite often are terribly dysfunctional to navigate and use for a customer who just wants to learn about or buy(!) your product.

<comment><USER5> Is _your_ assertion backed by data?

Here's a study that disagrees with you, at least in terms of how many people have trouble with parallax (2 out of 43). [http://uxpajournal.org/the-effects- of-parallax-scrolling-on-...](http://uxpajournal.org/the-effects-of-parallax- scrolling-on-user-experience-in-web-design/)

Not to say that study is a comprehensive judgment on the design pattern.

<comment><USER4> TL;DR for anyone wandering by:

> We hypothesized that PS would improve UX, which is defined in this study as > the emotions that are aroused when a user interacts with a product or > technology. The PS website was perceived to be more fun than the no-PS > website. With respect to perceived usability, enjoyment, satisfaction, and > visual appeal, there were no differences between the PS website and the no- > PS website.

Great that someone formally studied it, though I'm a little put off by their subjects demographics as compared with potential customers of any given business. That is, I feel like students at a university are more adept at using interfaces than "the average user" who is going to be your potential customer.

1/5 factors they tested did signal added value, the 1 being "fun". More fun, but not more usable. I'm not yet convinced that fun correlates to sales in this context as much as usability, ESPECIALLY once the initial wow factor wears off.

I assume by "trouble" you mean motion sickness. Two of them had motion sickness, not just run-of-the-mill confusion from the usability of the site.

All that said, the main point I was making was that often designers spend a great deal of time trying to get PS working just right not because they think it will bring in more customers or make their site more usable, but because that's what other designers are showcasing and they want to emulate that trend.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> One reason blogs are of lower scientific quality -- anyone can make series of large and unresearched claims, cherry picking a few examples to claim a broad point.

Good journals do have peer review, and they wouldn't have accepted this.

Also, one big disadvantage of blogs -- depending on where you host it, they often don't last long, and point 4 (easy to edit) is a blessing and a curse, particularly if people edit things without telling you they did it.

Of course, blogs have their place, I keep one myself, it's great for breaking news, explaining things in greater depth, sharing and understanding. And journals could learn from blogs / arxiv (make it easier to make corrections, allow discussions).

<comment><USER7> Getting a research paper published sounds so meritorious, no matter how idiotic or trivial it is. Take for example, Princeton 'research' in 2014 that predicted that Facebook will lose 80% of users by 2017 [1]. The evidence? Google trends data which has near-zero correlation with DAUs of Facebook. The research not only got published, but also got a wider-audience after major media websites covered it.

Had it been a blog post, I don't think anyone would have taken more than a cursory look at the analysis. Yes, anyone _can_ fit data points and reach a conclusion with blogs, but isn't academic research fraught with similar problems already?

[1]: [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/22/facebook-...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jan/22/facebook- princeton-researchers-infectious-disease)

<comment><USER8> You picked a bad example. The actual source article is published at... arxiv. From an academic perspective it is worth exactly as much as a blog.

Academic literature has many problems but it is way above the blogosphere in that regard. And media coverage is going to suck no matter where stuff is published...

<comment><USER9> > From an academic perspective it is worth exactly as much as a blog.

From the perspective of peer review, yes. But per google scholar that paper has been 66 cited times, including in many articles that _are_ in at least somewhat reputable journals (published via Elsevier, ieee, Springer, etc) and apparently two books [0]. So I think it's pretty clear that being a "scientific paper from Princeton" was significant reputation wise regardless of whether or not it was peer reviewed.

[0] [https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Epidemiological%20model...](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Epidemiological%20modeling%20of%20online%20social%20network%20dynamics&btnG=Search&as_sdt=800000000001&as_sdtp=on)

I was also skeptical about the citations so I checked that two with freely available pdfs were actually this paper, they were

[1] [https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/4ebb/b654c59aff454ad97301e6...](https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/4ebb/b654c59aff454ad97301e6ecd9e82c69122b.pdf)

[2] [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1509.07805.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1509.07805.pdf)

<comment><USER10> Right, but it's _not_ a scientific paper. It's a problem when people trust something just because it came out of Princeton, but the problem you're identifying isn't one with scientific papers (and the citations you've identified are places where they're using the Cannarella paper as an example of people being interested in applying epidemiology to social networks, not citing the research they did as accurate or important.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> (to repeat a comment I made on the blog)

We're seeing a huge amount of non-traditional scholarly activity (if you'll pardon the dry phrase) happening in blogs. Alternative metrics aka altmetrics (as distinct from altmetric.com) have been taking in to consideration the scholarly activity that happens around traditional publishing for a while. Crossref, the organisation who brought you DOIs for scholarly publications, thought that it would be a good idea to help collect this kind of data as a counterpoint to traditional publishing and citations. We're building Crossref Event Data, which is a free (libre, gratis) service for collecting mentions of articles on blogs and social media, so that it can be used by the community in all kinds of ways. Discoverability, recommendations, and yes, maybe more metrics. How you use it is up to you.

The article raises a good point about blogs as primary methods of publishing rather than, for example, as a venue for the discussion of traditionally published articles. Establishing an open 'citation'-graph-like-dataset of blogs is a good first step toward that.

We're heading into Beta soon, and you can read more about it [https://www.crossref.org/services/event- data](https://www.crossref.org/services/event-data) . The User guide is a work in progress, but might answer any questions you have: [https://www.eventdata.crossref.org/guide](https://www.eventdata.crossref.org/guide) . You can also contact me at firstname.lastname@example.com if you have any questions.

</comment><comment><USER12> People here seem to attack only the argument about "anyone can write a blog", but I was expecting HN to give a couple of thoughts also about his first point. To me it reads something like: "publish all your data out in the open for everybody to see".

I find it _extremely_ problematic. Sure, sharing data is necessary to verify that the conclusions are supported by it and they are not due to methodological errors. But to _anyone_? Out in the open? I would expect better data ethics, especially from a psychologist.

Your data can contain political opinions, health records, sexual orientation, contact information, the places a person has visited, and when. People sign up for these studies usually with the agreement that the information that can harm them cannot be freely shared, unless to people involved in studies with similar data protection systems. Data like I mentioned has sometimes to be stored in computers not connected to the Internet, to reduce the risk of data leak. Free access to this data paves the way to persecution and shaming.

If I were to sign up as subject to a psychology study and had a person with his ideas leading it, I'd withdraw immediately. I'd question if this person should be a psychology researcher at all. Sharing data is good, but protocols are there for a reason.

<comment><USER13> Personally identifiable details can be removed from data.

<comment><USER12> There is a seminal paper showing how carelessly adopting this point of view can lead to disasters: "87% of the U.S. population is uniquely identified by date of birth, gender, postal code" [1]

In many other cases, as pointed out, it's just not possible. I'm studying mobility patterns through cellphone metadata. Even if you strip out the actual phone number with a random ID you still know where a person is going, and thus re-identify them if you have other public data.

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

<comment><USER14> full name + date of birth + place of birth.

That leaves about 500 non unique individuals in a country of > 50 million inhabitants.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Titus Brown also a blog post on this earlier this year "The top 10 reasons why blog posts are better than scientific papers" [http://ivory.idyll.org/blog/2017-top-ten-reasons-blog- posts....](http://ivory.idyll.org/blog/2017-top-ten-reasons-blog-posts.html) and it generated similar discussion.

There are a few elements they emphasize.

One is what the blog format enables that traditional publishing doesn't support. Those are things like having real-time feedback and comments, being able to version and making the blog post interactive, rather than a static document. Another element to the format is a lack of gatekeepers, so it can be quickly disseminated and disseminated by anyone, so there aren't barriers to participation in the scientific discourse.

Another is norms and expectations. In blogging, it is more the norm that data and code are open. Open is still possible in traditional publishing; it just isn't yet the norm. A new format however, enables new norms and it's easier to set them from the start, than try to revise existing ones.

Finally, there's the element of 'correctness'. Going through peer review and being in a traditional journal certainly doesn't ensure that the paper is correct. You can just look at retractions to see that [http://retractionwatch.com/2011/08/11/is-it-time-for-a- retra...](http://retractionwatch.com/2011/08/11/is-it-time-for-a-retraction- index/). However it would be interesting to see more evidence around whether the blog format does ultimately lead to more 'correct' conclusions, on the whole, and not just for the posts that lead to a lot of discussion.

</comment><comment><USER16> Is it so hard to publish at arxiv, share the paper on twitter, and submit a link to HN? At a minimum, arxiv is better than a blog post because there's some sense of versioning.

For anyone who is curious, some conferences share the peer review comments (even though they do not share the identities of author or commenter). Here are the comments from iclr2017 ([https://openreview.net/group?id=ICLR.cc/2017/conference](https://openreview.net/group?id=ICLR.cc/2017/conference)) and here are comments on Ian Goodfellow's GAN paper by Jürgen Schmidhuber and others ([https://media.nips.cc/nipsbooks/nipspapers/paper_files/nips2...](https://media.nips.cc/nipsbooks/nipspapers/paper_files/nips27/reviews/1384.html)).

</comment><comment><USER17> For some time I've thought that the concept of a "journal" artificially forces together several features that can exist independently. This usually includes something roughly similar to: (not a complete list, or in any particular order)

1\. people that want to publish their research, theories, response, _etc_

2\. a mechanism for having submissions peer reviewed

3\. curating which submissions will be included in the publication

4\. actually physically (or electronically) publishing and disseminating the papers to the interested community

5\. people actually reading it and responding (possibly recursively)

6\. reputation and status derived from authorship, being referenced by others, _etc_

7\. archiving the papers - _and hopefully the data_

These features are traditionally part of the same process for practical reasons like the cost/time to physically publish before modern printing technology. This worked, creating resistance to any change. Now, I suspect that over reliance on the concept of a "journal" limits your thinking. This article demonstrates some of that with it's framing of blogs as an alternative or competitor to journals.

Instead, consider that modern computing and the internet make #4 very easy and almost free. We have various ways to archive (#7), which include actual verification (e.g. "git fsck", signed commits). We already curate (#3) as a separate step with specialty blogs and aggregators like HN.

I'm not saying journals are bad or obsolete. I'm just suggesting that there might be better ways to organize the process, and that different granularities of "journal"-like process can probably coexist.

<comment><USER18> Many of these topics are constantly being championed by the somewhat obscure digital libraries space. These departments are mainly found in universities, and they focus heavily on the pipeline you described. Despite the point you made that throwing content on the internet is usually easy and "almost free", it's actually a pretty large and costly effort when you're trying to do it at scale. A lot of clerical and engineering effort goes into tagging/organizing/storing/replicating the data, guarding against bit rot and other integrity errors, and making the data easily searchable and browsable (and that's to say nothing of the political and psychological battles involved in simply getting researchers to follow through and provide the data to these processes, in the proper formats, before they finish their degree and disappear).

If the hacker side of these challenges interest you, I suggest checking out the code4lib community: [https://code4lib.org](https://code4lib.org)

<comment><USER19> Still, compared to what it used to cost to just distribute it, and compared to the cost of journal subscriptions, it's approximately free.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > Blogs have Open Peer Review

No, they don't. This is conflating having an opinion with the scientific review process. The scientific review process can prevent publication of bad research in journals and require changes before publication, the blog "review" process cannot do either of these things.

</comment><comment><USER21> I feel comment sections on well targeted sites like HN are better than peer review sometimes.

It's not uncommon for an industry expert or creator of a product to Koolaid Man into the comment section around here.

<comment><USER19> I didn't stay any long on the academic world, but the comments on targeted tend to be better than nearly all peer review I've seen there.

The thing is, the very small exception is incredibly good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> So, schema.org, has classes (C:) -- subclasses of CreativeWork and Article -- for property (P:) domains (D:) and ranges (R:) which cover this domain:

\- CreativeWork: [http://schema.org/CreativeWork](http://schema.org/CreativeWork)

\- - BlogPosting: [http://schema.org/BlogPosting](http://schema.org/BlogPosting)

\- - Article: [http://schema.org/Article](http://schema.org/Article)

\- - - NewsArticle: [http://schema.org/NewsArticle](http://schema.org/NewsArticle)

\- - - Report: [http://schema.org/Report](http://schema.org/Report)

\- - - ScholarlyArticle: [http://schema.org/ScholarlyArticle](http://schema.org/ScholarlyArticle)

\- - - SocialMediaPosting: [http://schema.org/SocialMediaPosting](http://schema.org/SocialMediaPosting)

\- - - TechArticle: [http://schema.org/TechArticle](http://schema.org/TechArticle)

Thing: (name, [url], [identifier], [#about], [description[_gh_markdown_html]])

\- C: CreativeWork:

\- - P: comment R: Comment

\- - C: Comment: [https://schema.org/Comment](https://schema.org/Comment)

</comment><comment><USER23> #1 Reason: Blogs aren't included in the publication count which is needed to gain research funding, get hired as a professor and get tenure.

A bit cynical, but a lot of the problems the writer suggests are more of a symptom of trying to get as many papers out as possible than the cause (and that one rarely reviews the supplementary material). If scientific blogs counted like publications many of the same problems would appear there.

</comment><comment><USER24> The author calls "Nature" a "low quality journal". Is that really it's reputation?

<comment><USER25> Its reputation among people like Lakens, and others complaining about the poor state of statistics and rigor in modern science, is that it features overinterpreted overhyped results from small underpowered experiments, and when errors are pointed out it's usually not too interested in correcting them. The editors are more interested in "important" results than methodologically rigorous ones.

It's similar to how Andrew Gelman always sarcastically refers to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences as the Prestigious Proceedings, because that's invariably the adjective used in news reports, yet many of the articles are of the "female-named hurricanes cause more damage" type.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Unless they're properly archived along with all their resources as well as only referencing other properly archived material, I'd be very cautious before saying they're better.

This _can_ be done, but I suspect it is rare whereas it's the norm with a journal article.

<comment><USER27> I think they serve different purposes, and the quality varies heavily across subfields. Academic research will produce a journal article as the primary output, whereas a blog post is typically a side effect of a practical project, and most will contain a link to the actual code.

Ultimately, I think they're both good, but they do have different uses.

<comment><USER26> I'm still highly concerned about the loss of these things. I very regularly follow links to code that's just gone. The code for research definitely should not only exist in a related of post link.

Archiving, for me, is a requirement if you think it should be used over more than a year or so.

<comment><USER27> Obviously, having a professional librarian working on archiving data, code, and articles is ideal. However, I've found that the public facing side of journals experience bit rot even faster than most of the older blogs. Of course, there are exceptions, and even the most public figures can decide to delete everything, code included (e.g. _why)

Gwern has tackled link rot[0] in an exhaustive way, and may give you a starting point from where to continue.

[0]: [https://www.gwern.net/Archiving%20URLs](https://www.gwern.net/Archiving%20URLs)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> It seems the future lies in something like GitHub, stack overflow or quora for articles, where people with the best code/answers naturally gain more reputation and where you still have an incentive for peer review and open data.

</comment><comment><USER29> As in, "if you follow these best practices, you too can produce high quality research"

There is no reason why this post should be focused on blogs in general, asides from generating discussion + clickbait. The key here is actually following the best practice, but do most blogs actually do this?

Alternatively: there is a high minimal requirement for research articles, but there is no minimal requirement for blogs.

</comment><comment><USER30> I think it might be better to say that contemporary psychology is frequently not being performed scientifically.

</comment><comment><USER31> Advantages that scientific journal articles have over blogs is that they are:

(i) not written in clickbait format

(ii) impact is measured in terms of other research which sees it as a relevant study to cite rather than numbers of pageviews (see also (i))

(iii) one of the things a peer review process can flag up is that bold and implausible claims like "On blogs, the norm is to provide access to the underlying data, code, and materials" probably need some form of qualification for what is meant by "blogs" and/or quantitative evidence to support that claim

Blogs can be well reasoned and evidence-based, comments can (even more infrequently) be enlightening and journal articles aren't immune to flaws, but the linked blog article is a prime example of _why_ arguments expressed in blogs are seldom afforded the respect of arguments advanced in journals.

<comment><USER32> > (i) not written in clickbait format

Really? I find them to be incredibly clickbaity whereas blog posts are much more matter-of-fact. Blogs are almost never a commercial entity/enterprise and while no writer would shun search engine traffic, they usually write for peers, not for publicity like journalists or scientists, both whose funding depends on this.

<comment><USER31> I have yet to see the stereotypical "5 reasons why [bold claim involving zero research]" format the linked blog post uses uses in _any_ academic journal.

Scientific writing in closed-access journals is the definition of writing for peers, and never includes AdSense, affiliate links or digital tip jars.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> One more related link on the same subject, "The top 10 reasons why blog posts are better than scientific papers": [http://ivory.idyll.org/blog/2017-top-ten- reasons-blog-posts....](http://ivory.idyll.org/blog/2017-top-ten-reasons-blog- posts.html) * there is a "maybe satire" tag added by the author to this post.

</comment><comment><USER34> "Impact factor" systems incentivise the production of poor quality journal articles. Effectively researchers end up needing to produce a certain amount of "journal-bait" in order to stay funded.

(See HN passim "Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse")

</comment><comment><USER35> There's a lot of publications. Some of them are really small step attempts at understanding. Sometimes it's just a test. A careful one, but nothing more. I guess in some fields we're still at the poking level.

</comment><comment><USER36> IMO This is one of those cases where people are committed to an existing system and have bent their thinking around that system to the point that they cannot see the big picture.

There's alot of value to the existing journal system, but perhaps it would be appropriate to have a more formal process and a more informal/collaborative process. Maybe that would address the problems with having so many journals.

</comment><comment><USER11> Can anyone recommend scholarly / academic blogs (or aggregators)?

<comment><USER34> [http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/](http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/) "In The Pipeline" is good and has been running for years.

<comment><USER11> Thanks! Looks great.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> They left out the biggest one! If you say something dumb in it, the comments will crucify you for it :)

<comment><USER38> And also if you say something controversial.

<comment><USER37> What you point out is an interesting effect. Blog posts that are controversial know that there's a chance a sh$#storm will ensue in the comments. In the case of general bloggers, such as researchers i.e. not people who are actively trying to troll or generate pageviews, but on personal blogs, how does this affect writing that is controversial?

I don't know academic publishing well enough to compare. I think that as far as controversial claims that would make it to somewhere like Hacker News, the effect is that if the controversial statements are _wrong_ , then the comments will shoot them down, and the story will be buried. Furthermore, the rest of the comments will pile on the first comment that points out that the blog post is mistaken.

Perhaps an effect of this is that you can tell from the tone that some blog posts take, that they are being extremely careful to lay a rock-solid foundation, and kind of "convert" their readers who might otherwise vehemently disagree with them. For a recent example, check out this blog post:

[https://gregfallis.com/2017/04/14/seriously-the-guy-has-a- po...](https://gregfallis.com/2017/04/14/seriously-the-guy-has-a-point/)

I actually just noticed something really interesting! The very first words in this blog post are: "I got metaphorically spanked a couple of days ago."

Would any academic article on any subject start in this way?

So the _effect_ of the backlash against controversial statements, on the writing style of blog posts, is interesting and in many cases highly visible.

It is hard for me to compare this with academic writing. (But it certainly wouldn't start with words like that.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I can't comment on the field of psychiatry. However, I will comment on my field of physics. The author seems to completely neglect the signal to noise problem. There has been an explosion of journals and scientific publication. It's rather hard to keep up to date on the literature and editors do provide a valuable function in filtering what they think is interesting (which is further filtered by the referees). Also, for the referee process--it's not perfect and will probably not catch complete fraud. But, it is good for checking the basics of whether or not the story being told in a paper is consistent. Also, again related to signal/noise, the editors hopefully choose referees with a minimum level of competence in the field (not always, but usually). Also, in terms of dilution--if there's a blog, there's no guarantee that a critical mass of people will read it to try to give it a critical review. Whereas, even for a journal that is not widely read, the papers in it will have received some peer review where someone in the field tried to take a look through it for obvious errors. I am not convinced by open peer review. Let's consider two scenarios. Suppose there is a leader in the field trying to publish something (or perhaps even a friend or collaborator). If I notice that they are wrong, am I more likely to call them on it if I am anonymous or if they know who I am? One can be idealistic, but researchers are people too. I think that the anonymous review allows people to speak frankly (though it does sometimes let people be mean--that seems to be the cost of anonymity in forums unless there is strong moderation). Let's consider another scenario. Suppose I am a junior researcher and I get a referee comment that I determine is wrong. If it comes from the leader in my field, maybe I won't push back as hard as if it came from someone else junior--again, in an ideal world, it wouldn't matter, but researchers are people too. It would seem that the editor knowing the identity of the referees would serve as a check on bias, not 100 percent, but I think that more is gained than is lost from a closed referee system.

In terms of error correction, there are errata that are published if someone finds an error in a major study and in journals like the physical review are linked back to the original article.

The open data problem is hard. In my particular field, our raw data is available on the web, but the problem is that the meta-data needed to interpret is not. And that's nontrivial. For example, I may perform several operations on my data (for example, background subtraction) before fitting it to a model. We are experimenting with dataflow languages where we embed the series of "filters" that we apply to the data, but if we want someone to be able to reproduce this 20 years from now, then there's a whole ecosystem that would have to be maintained--for example, not just my code, but all of the libraries that it depends on to run. We can describe the basic process in the paper, but for true long term reproducibility, it's a hard problem...There are groups that are working on open-data and reproducible research, so I don't think that there isn't interest, just that it's not as easy a problem as you might think. But, for reduced data, I agree, it would be nice to have that available for papers in a machine readable format...

Open access. This is also a hard problem. Increasingly, funding agencies are requiring that publications be made available in an open format after some embargo period. I think that may be the best we can hope for. Just paying for competent editors requires funding. If we want additional features like data attached to papers (for decades), it will take more funding. That money has to come from somewhere. For typical open access journals, the author pays, but that seems to create difficult incentives--not to mention that it makes it difficult for poorer funded researchers to publish. I'm not sure what the right answer is, because I agree that the public should be able to see the results that they paid for--perhaps an embargo period is the best solution...

I think a blog is a great way for communication of ideas and for education, but I do not think that it is able to replace publication in a refereed journal.

</comment><comment><USER40>
      "Why can... "

Uh, shouldn't that be "How can... "?

<comment><USER41> Why?

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Can't they?

</comment><comment><USER43> blog post on blogspot advocating that blogs are better than journals seems a bit biased, unfortunately i don't think i can get a journal article about journal articles being better, accepted in any peer reviewed journals. checkmate daniel.

</comment><comment><USER44> In my opinion blog posts have no scientific quality at all, since they are not peer reviewed. They may occasionally have quality, but that's another matter.

To be fair, some fringe journals have no scientific value either, because they do not peer review properly, but they are easy to spot and everybody in the scientific community knows them.

On a side note, originality is one of the key requirements for publication in a reputed journal and I have not ever seen a blog post that made any scientifically original claims. But maybe that's because I don't read blogs very often.

<comment><USER45> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymath_Project](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymath_Project)

Bunch of mathematicians collaborating through blogs.</comment></comment>


Revisiting Actor Programming in C++ (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1505.07368 <comment><USER2> I've looked into CAF, but haven't used it yet, is anyone using it successfully in a production environment? And what is the comparison with Erlang? My impression is that Erlang has better error handling capabilities, but CAF should be a bit faster, but was curious about a comparison from someone more knowledgeable.

<comment><USER3> JIF: there is more than just CAF in C++ land [1]

There are at least QP/C++ [2] and SObjectizer [3].

All three frameworks are used in production, especially QP/C++.

Error handling in C++ actor frameworks is a different topic than such handling in Erlang or other safe language. Because if you do something like division by 0 or deference of null pointer in your C++ actor you will have a different result: in the best case the whole your application will crush, not just one actor.

[1] [https://www.slideshare.net/YauheniAkhotnikau/actor-model- and...](https://www.slideshare.net/YauheniAkhotnikau/actor-model-and-c-what- why-and-how) [2] [https://www.state-machine.com/qpcpp/](https://www.state- machine.com/qpcpp/) [3] [https://stiffstream.com/en/products/sobjectizer.html](https://stiffstream.com/en/products/sobjectizer.html)

<comment><USER2> Thanks! Those are good resources

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A question for those who are more knowledgeable than me -- Is Actor model the same as the CSP model ? They feel the same but I am not sure.

<comment><USER5> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communicating_sequential_proce...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communicating_sequential_processes#Comparison_with_the_actor_model)

<comment><USER4> Ah! Thank you very much.

<comment><USER3> This point:

"CSP message-passing fundamentally involves a rendezvous between the processes involved in sending and receiving the message, i.e. the sender cannot transmit a message until the receiver is ready to accept it."

it not that strict in a practice. In dependency of implementation of CSP there can be CSP-channels with limited and unlimited capacity. If channels with limited capacity are used then some kind of rendezvous is necessary only on attempt to write a new message to a full channel. In that case process-writer will be blocked until process-reader read some messages from the channel.

If size-unlimited channels are used then interaction of CSP-processes will be asynchronous (just like in Actor Model).

There is another important difference (but it also depends on implementation details): CSP-processes are always proactive. They can do something even if there is no messages to read and process.

Otherwise actors are reactive (usually). They react only to incoming messages and do nothing if there is no new message in they inboxes.

This especially true for cases when actors are implemented as objects with callbacks (for example it is true for Akka, CAF, SObjectizer, QP/C++, Orleans and so on).

But there can be implementations of Actor Model where an actor has to call some kind `receive` primitive to get an incoming message. For example it is Erlang programming language and Just::Thread Pro Actor Edition library for C++.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: HN Gathering in Silicon Valley? - <AUTHOR>

I recently moved to Silicon Valley and I am looking to meet some new people in the area. Having followed Hacker News for some time, I thought this might be a good place to find some like-minded individuals (e.g., entrepreneurs, developers, etc). If you are interested in an informal gathering, to network and share ideas with fellow HNers, somewhere on the Peninsula (e.g., Palo Alto) or in the south Bay (e.g., San Jose), please let me know. If there is sufficient interest, I will coordinate a day/time and location (so if you express interest, please make sure to check the comment thread). Thanks everyone! <comment><USER2> We do four Bootstrappers Breakfasts a month ( see <http://www.bootstrapperbreakfast.com> ) in Palo Alto, Mountain View, Sunnyvale and Milpitas you are welcome to check out for the price of your breakfast. This Friday's in Palo Alto is full (Eric Ries is a guest speaker) but the others all have seats left. We've been doing them for several years and have had a number of HN folks show up even though most start at 7:30am (Mountain View starts at 9am).

Jonathan Nelson ( <http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=iamelgringo> ) also puts on a <http://www.hackersandfounders.com> event every few weeks that's good and get HN folks.

</comment><comment><USER3> Considering how anti-social most hacker-types are, maybe its better if you make it a session with a "purpose" instead, such as perhaps a gathering where each person gets to show everyone something you are working on.. (etc). Otherwise, gathering just for the sake of gathering doesn't sound appealing enough.

But if the event does go down, I'd be willing to show up.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your thoughts kth. If there's not much of a response, I will try posting again, and indicate a more focused purpose for the meeting.

<comment><USER4> I would suggest that you search on MeetUp.com and look for topics that interest you like Ruby, PhP, Opensocial, Iphone, etc ....

In fact there is a New Tech Meetup every first Tuesday of the month near DLA Piper, Palo Alto. They have about 3-4 demos by hackers/founders followed by networking. I have easily seen 150+- people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You should checkout superhappydevhouse. They have hacker parties that alternate between the bay & city. Also, some of us are trying to create a hacker space in the bay:

<http://hackerdojo.pbwiki.com/>

I should note that I met my 2 cofounders at SHDH. Hackers aren't the only attendees.</comment>


Avicii died aged 28 - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-43841194 <comment><USER2> [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-5639703/Avicii-...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-5639703/Avicii- dead-28-Swedish-DJ-Tim-Berglings-body-Oman-leaving-family-devastated.html)

"He suffered from acute pancreatitis - which is a potentially life-threatening inflammation of the pancreas - due in part to excessive drinking"

</comment><comment><USER3> It is not natural death. Sociaety continues to kill its geniuses and can't see any problem with it. "You are traveling around, you live in a suitcase, you get to this place, there's free alcohol everywhere—it's sort of weird if you don't drink," he said in 2013. There should be above-natational electronic government that will fight for ppl interests but not alcohol taxes.</comment>


2013 Tesla Model S Long-Term Road Test - <AUTHOR> http://www.edmunds.com/tesla/model-s/2013/long-term-road-test/2013-tesla-model-s-drive-unit-iv-the-milling.html <comment><USER2> That's great that the drive unit was covered under warranty.. that was Edmunds 4th drive unit in 30,000 miles. Of course, once it hits 50k miles, the warranty period is over, and it's $15000 to replace it.

MotorTrend reported the same problem.. they've already had it replaced twice.

[http://seekingalpha.com/article/2312325-tesla-may-have-a- hug...](http://seekingalpha.com/article/2312325-tesla-may-have-a-huge- unfunded-warranty-problem-due-to-defective-drivetrains?app=1&uprof=45&dr=1)

<comment><USER3> Wow. I've never had a vehicle worth more than $15,000. That's one expensive part.

<comment><USER4> Your vehicles were very likely worth more than $15,000 when new. You've just never had a new vehicle.

Also, engine replacements on new gasoline vehicles run around $10k.

<comment><USER5> True, but when was the last time you heard about a car that needed a whole new engine every 7k miles?

It's an interesting question actually, are Tesla motors only really serviceable as a unit? That could be bad news. A new gasoline engine might be $10k, but 99% of the time you just replace a belt or a pulley or a seal, or take off the top and do some machining for a few thousand.

<comment><USER6> The electric drive motor is about the size of a watermelon and weighs ~70lbs. Its easier to pull it and swap in a new one than to tear it down on-site.

<comment><USER7> A house with mold is easier to burn down and rebuild rather than completely gut it out. That doesn't mean that's the correct decision.

<comment><USER8> Are we talking about a specific type of mold? What makes it so difficult to get rid of?

<comment><USER5> Black mold. It gets everywhere, and it is pretty dangerous to humans so you have to be sure you get it all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I do believe these results are an outlier.

I've had my Model S since December 2012 (one of the first production models in the state of Georgia) and have had no major issues with it. I've only ever had proactive maintenance (12v battery system replacement, coolant pump upgrade, and improved sealant on the sunroof), all of which I haven't paid a dime for. They even provided loaner vehicles while they worked on it. I've driven it up and down the East Coast and a 260 mile straight shot from Atlanta to Savannah.

I've heard similar stories from most other owners. It is a tremendously easy car to own, as you barely have to do any work on it. Yes, cases like this will happen. But no different from any other car out there.

<comment><USER4> Out of curiosity, why does it have a 12v battery (& system) ? I always assumed it didn't have one, and that accessories would be powered off the "big" battery.

<comment><USER10> This is what annoys me about my Prius.

It has a large, high voltage battery that could easily be stepped down (and in fact is, since it charges the 12V battery), and yet a separate 12V battery is required to power the electronics to start the car.

Since the 12V battery is only used to power the electronics (the high volatage battery powers the starter motor), it is very small and consequently, drains quickly (a few weeks) if the car is not in use. I don't drive much and regularly find it dead when I try to drive somewhere.

The upside of it only being required to power the electronics is that I can (and regularly do) jump start it with a NiMH remote control car battery.

I understand that if the high voltage battery goes flat in a Prius, you're somewhat screwed, which is perhaps why they don't allow it to power the electronics for starting, but it's still a pain.

Disclaimer: this is an older Prius, newer models may be different

<comment><USER11> Nobody got the answer even remotely correct WRT the EE issues.

Battery bulk current handling capacity is provided by bulk lead in the plates and copper wires. Its extremely cheap to build a lead acid battery that can momentarily squirt out a thousand (or so) amps to start an engine on a cold winter night. Maybe $100 or so.

Unfortunately power converters / supplies of all sorts scale at a higher than polynomial rate. So although a 20 amp smart battery charger might only be $50, a similar power converter capable of 1000 amps peak starting currents might be way over $2000. Thats about 10KW and thats about the right price for non- industrial non-automotive inverter hardware so its probably higher cost.

The total system cost to provide momentary 1000 amp starting currents is minimized by a $50 charger and a $100 battery rather than a $2000+ inverter.

My wife has one and I'm slightly jealous, I know ham radio guys who've spliced in inverters to run their entire house off the prius, using it as a stationary generator basically. There have been articles in QST magazine. Anyway one issue they and everyone else runs into is the primary battery is physically disconnected from the world until the boot up self tests pass. Leakage current to chassis, stuff like that. Until the tests pass, power is not connected by the giant relay. So its chicken and the egg time, where how do you get enough power to run the self tests of the electrical system if the primary battery isn't connected until after all the tests pass? So you need a secondary battery thats never physically disconnected, the 12V lead acid traditional batt.

Now an excellent firmware question is why not have the firmware self test and partial boot the car every 6 hours to top off the 12 volt battery for 5 minutes? Probably some mechanic who thinks the car is off will manage to set it on fire by not being careful while replacing the battery or something like that. "Oh of course the main power cables are powered down, the whole car is powered down... err... whoomph" and then you need a new car and mechanic.

A design change to connect the 12V to the primary battery would then mean routing even more junk thru the primary battery compartment. There really is no perfect solution.

(Have to reply to mikeash as an edit. Yes I researched this after your comment and you are correct and MG1 is powered from the HV not the 12V to start, I did not know that. I knew it charged the HV and helped out at full throttle, along with MG2 that does "most of the work".

Anyway the TLDR summary still stands, from a scaling perspective there is an economic crossover point at a surprisingly low current, at least around the 90s's to 00's when this was designed, where its much cheaper to use a battery/charger than a really beefy inverter above a certain (medium-ish) current level. Someday that'll probably change as semiconductors advance and that crossover point becomes 50 kiloamps or something.)

<comment><USER10> You might be interested in the following post, which I found while researching which battery to buy to jump start mine:

[http://irobin.org/prius/startup/startup.html](http://irobin.org/prius/startup/startup.html)

The required 12V startup current for a Prius turns out to be surprisingly low. The author measures it for a 2005 model directly at around 30 amp (with one test showing a brief spike to 60 amp).

Based on this, I bought a pack of 10 5Ah sub C NiMH batteries for jump starting (unfortunately there is no outlet in my car park for a trickle charger).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The most interesting thing about this to me is how similar it is to other long-term road test articles -- IOW, how well Tesla has built a car that conforms to people's conceptions about how cars should operate. That's extraordinarily impressive; to me, it's more impressive than the (admittedly impressive) technology in the cars themselves.

I'm not a fan of the Musk/Tony Stark schtick, or of SpaceX, or the hagiographic treatment he receives from the technical press, but I am a fan of Tesla as a carmaker.

<comment><USER13> Most long term tests of 1 year/30,000 miles have multiple drivetrain failures?

<comment><USER5> I think your parent is saying "It is a victory that Edmunds is conducting a road test just like with any other car".

<comment><USER12> Exactly.

<comment><USER14> That seems a little easy-going. Yes, it's good that an electic car is being tested alongside other cars, but it seems as though we have moved beyond that point. In particular Tesla is rightly showing no humility about their cars.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> First, it sounds like Tesla service is pretty great. All that work at $0 cost, done in 1.5 days, is pretty incredible. Good maintenance should bring a positive ROI.

Yes, there's a downside, which is out-of-warranty cost, and ultimately resale value. It's both a science experience we are funding here, and a public company. I would love to have seen some hard numbers from the stated financials about warranty costs, and expected future warranty costs.

I think it's a good question to ask -- is the longer term service cost of the car understood? Maybe we're just starting to get to that point, but I'm not sure the data is really out there. I do expect of any company that Tesla would be the best at predicting their long-term performance and costs.

It's one thing if the car isn't perfect, it's another if it becomes a maintenance nightmare. That could happen only outside of warranty, and not even directly impact their expenses, but it ultimately does impact sales. I would expect if there's an issue that Musk has discussed it at length already. This clearly isn't new.

I don't like the scaremongering about the cost of this repair. Did they even ask Tesla how much the repair would cost, and they refused to answer? It certainly doesn't say that they even asked the cost. I doubt it would matter, but I'm sure there's a law that they have to disclose the retail cost of the repair.

I know car reviews rarely quote the CEO, but for this specific issue of drive train, I think it's worth getting a quote from the company in the article.

<comment><USER16> Since the car was under warranty, why is $0 cost so great? Isn't that completely standard for warranty work?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm guessing these quality issues are caused by the massive amount of fatigue and overtime at both the Tesla Design Studio and the Fremont factory. Tesla employees work 6 days a week, and we're not talking 7-hour days here. So they are able to polish the product really well, but the fatigue shows up in the tiny details that are rushed, leading to long-term quality control issues.

Or it could be just growing pains, I suppose. But I've always been critical of Tesla's (and others') reckless attitude towards excessively long hours.

</comment><comment><USER18> So it seems to me like there isn't enough raw data about the auto industry available to consumers. What are the odds of having a lemon Model S like Edmunds' vs the odds of having a GM that drives itself into a tree, for example? I'd obviously rather have to replace parts than have my accelerator go nuts, but is there any real source of data outside of anecdotal evidence via Consumer Reports or relative outliers from subpoenas in the case of Toyota and GM?

</comment><comment><USER19> >>We decided to pass on the annual service

It's interesting - I bought a brand new Nissan Qashqai recently, and I HAVE to do an annual inspection to keep the warranty, regardless of the condition of the car. Basically after a year they will look at it, say "yep, it still works" and charge me $300 to stamp my warranty booklet.

</comment><comment><USER20> "We decided to pass on the annual service. The alignment had already been performed when we installed the new tires. System monitoring? We were just there in May when Tesla took care of a laundry list of items. Plus, they were already installing the firmware upgrade as part of the "Courtesy Inspection." Hardware upgrade? Any critical part should be (and was) covered under warranty. More on that later. So the only thing we were missing out on was the AC filters and the wiper blades, not worth $600."

I love how they (and most) rationalize skipping this service (aka maintenance is for suckers). The more time a trained mechanic spends under, in, on and thinking about your car the better. Especially when it's a techno-feast such as the Model S.

</comment><comment><USER21> Oof, I thought resale value on Jaguars was bad ($70k to $15k in 5 years) but these are basically write-offs after the warranty expires.

It's a grand experiment but I don't think the market for $70k assets that lose 90% of their value in 5 years is going to be too hot.

<comment><USER22> Actually, Singapore has proven it can be: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_of_Entitlement](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_of_Entitlement)

The right to own a car for only 10 years has been bid up to about that. You can find cars with COE with less than 5 years remaining, that are still worth multiples of their non-Singaporean value. People will get into debt to drive a car.

<comment><USER10> I'm not sure what comparison you're trying to draw.

Singapore has shown that restricting the supply of vehicles will drive the price higher. Yes, owning a vehicle is extremely expensive in Singapore and many in that economy are willing to pay the price (by definition since it's an auction based system).

I believe your parent was pointing out that the depreciation of the Tesla appears to compare very poorly with alternative vehicles, and potential buyers are unlikely to choose such an expensive option when there are far cheaper alternatives available. Singaporeans have no alternative.

<comment><USER22> Well, it was a bit tongue in cheek, but I was specifically answering: "I don't think the market for $70k assets that lose 90% of their value in 5 years is going to be too hot". The COE loses 100% of its value in 10 years, but you still find plenty of buyers.

Singaporeans have the alternative of not owning a car - both public transport and taxis are highly available, cheap and very pleasant to use. If you see a car as merely a means of transport in exchange for economic value, it makes no sense to own one at current market prices (it's cheaper to take a cab every day, for example - even if you live near the airport and work in CBD, a 15km commute, that's $40/day or $80,000/10 years). Why do some Singaporeans take out 30 year mortgages for the right to drive an average sedan for 10 years?

What the COE taught me is the value of intangibles like status boost and the pleasure of driving for its own sake. This is more relevant to Tesla's target demographic than the considerations of the average second hand Toyota Corolla buyer (closer to where I would fit in, and why I'll never own a car in Singapore, no matter my net worth).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The lemon law is not quite as cut and dried as the author of this article states. If you're not happy with your car you should not make this judgment for yourself. Consult an attorney.

You can be outside the 18k miles but if the problems began inside the first 18k miles, you qualify. I have personally had a car bought back a couple of months ago. After rejecting the manufacturers' initial offer of monetary compensation and sending a letter to the company on attorney letterhead, the mfr immediately folded and offered to buy it back for the full amount required by the CA lemon law.

</comment><comment><USER24> FWIW - I've done 18,000 miles in 1.5 years - 0 reliability issues, so far.

</comment><comment><USER25> One car isn't enough to form a true conclusion, but what about 76? [1] This poll is biased in the sense that "0" isn't an option; still, it's an alarming amount of failed drive units. If this is a real problem, it won't scale---they can't keep replacing these things under warranty.

[1] [http://www.teslamotorsclub.com/showthread.php/29834-Drive- Un...](http://www.teslamotorsclub.com/showthread.php/29834-Drive-Unit- Replacement-Poll)

<comment><USER26> There is also a sampling bias, people who have experienced problems with the car are more likely to hang around in online forums trying to share their experience.

<comment><USER27> So the rate the problem is being reported at should be comparable to other premium cars? How does it compare with BMW, an enthusiast brand with high online engagement, many unofficial forums and so on? Audi?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm going to go ahead and guess here that Tesla is going to have to give up on launching the 4,785 pound Model S to 60 mph in 4.2 seconds. There might not be a possible gearbox that can do that for the life of the car and fit the cost/size constraints of a sedan.

Another case of "just because its possible doesn't mean you should". It will be fixed with 3 lines of code (to create a gear friendly torque curve) and a whole lot of PR to explain it.

<comment><USER29> Gearbox?

<comment><USER28> Teslas have a single speed gearbox that reduces the electric motor down 9.7-something to 1. This is likely the source of the "milling" noise. These gears degrade rapidly at the insane torque levels of an electric motor starting full blast from stop. Something they would never face from their ICE brethren.

<comment><USER30> Seems like something that could be fixed by a software update.

Static friction is the same in equivalent spec'd ICEs, so if the Tesla is _over_ torquing, wouldn't they be able to back off on wattage for a few ms when starting out, and retain virtually the same accelerations?

<comment><USER31> There are not a lot of equivalent spec'd ICE vehicles.

<comment><USER30> The BMW 550i[1] has very similar size, peak power, and peak torque ratings compared to the Tesla[2][3], so let's use that as a comparison.

Obviously, torque availability at 0 rpm with a flat curve is the notable difference, but remember that launch control in the BMW will also occur at peak power RPMs with a clutch or torque converter taking up the difference in road "RPMs", so it's not that dissimilar a comparison at least in regard to the strength of gearboxes, half-shafts, differentials, axles, CV joints, et cetera. (Consider too that the BMW has changeable gears, not a fixed ratio; the complexity _should_ give Tesla a nod for transmission strength)

      BMW 550i (base) vs Tesla Model S P85
      Cost:  $63,900 vs $87,070
      Curb Weight: 4277 vs 4647 lbs
      Peak Power: 445 vs 416
      Peak Torque: 480 vs 443 lb-ft
      0-60 mph: 4.5 vs 4.2 seconds
      Top Speed: 130 mph for both

So I think my point stands; I suspect a software update in the Tesla could likely alleviate strain to the gearbox, without much tangible sacrifice in specs.

I'm curious what "to the wheel" power looks like after the final differential ratio, but have to leave :)

1 [http://www.bmwusa.com/Standard/Content/Vehicles/2014/5/550iS...](http://www.bmwusa.com/Standard/Content/Vehicles/2014/5/550iSedan/Features_and_Specs/550iSedanSpecifications.aspx)

2 [http://www.teslamotors.com/models/specs](http://www.teslamotors.com/models/specs)

3 [http://www.teslamotors.com/models/features#/battery](http://www.teslamotors.com/models/features#/battery)

<comment><USER31> Thanks for the info. I think we can conclude that BMW is better at mass producing transmissions than Tesla. The BMW is only slightly lighter and slower to accelerate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Overall the Tesla seems like a Range Rover (owned one, wife worked at dealership). Amazing technical features, but with all that bleeding edge technology comes high maintenance needs. Don't get me wrong, Range Rovers are amazing vehicles to own, but you have to accept that you'll be using that loner-Rover a handful of times each year.

</comment><comment><USER32> When you skip annual maintenance of your car, you don't have much to complain about when it breaks.

That is why it should be _inspected_ , to catch problems before they become serious.

<comment><USER33> This kind of stuff is actually what is less likely to make me purchase a Tesla. If it becomes common for these kinds of failures, it isn't a risk that I want to have.

What is magic about annual maintenance? In my gasoline car, I change the oil around every 7500 miles (when the car tells me) and rotate the tires at the same time. Total cost about $50 a year. Brakes when they need it for around $200, and when I need it four tires for a little under $1000. Throw in a yearly emissions and safety inspection for $37.

Most gasoline cars will have a 5/60, or 10/100 powertrain warranty. But even outside of warranty, I know I am not going to have to pay $15,000 to fix it. I'm also not stuck going to the manufacturer, price shopping is possible and I'm sure would save money over a dealership.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> That car has been driven 30,000 miles in ONE year.

How would a gas car do with that kind of non-stop driving?

<comment><USER35> Fine. My dad used to put 150k miles on a mid 90s Ford Escort annually. The car was taken out by a deer at 480k and totaled.

<comment><USER36> That almost sounds impossible. Do you mind me asking what he did, driving for so many hours a day? At 150k a year, that amounts to over 410 miles a day, which is 6-10 hours of driving at normal speeds, quite a feat!

<comment><USER37> Courier of some sort? Seven days a week, 80 km/h still makes for 8+ hours/day which is pretty insane.

Or a 4-hour each way commute for a Mon-Fri work week. Or 3 hours each way for seven days a week at 110km. That'd be soul destroying.

<comment><USER38> I have a co-worker who has a 4 day a week - 112 mile commute into work (Sacramento into Redwood City) - by avoiding rush hour he does it in a little over 2 hours each way, he puts almost 50,000 miles/year onto his vehicle. I thought _that_ was the most insane soul crushing thing I had ever heard of.

<comment><USER36> Why does your co-worker do that? Redwood City, or even areas in the south bay are reasonably affordable, especially if you adjust for the cost of fuel and attrition from that commute.

<comment><USER38> He owns a house there, has family ties there, etc...

One thing I've noticed about many of my colleagues in California - when they get a new job, they don't move. Indeed, I've actually had colleagues who've _changed_ the company they work at to reduce their commute, rather than just moving.

<comment><USER39> That seems odd to you? In the US, most people don't move around that much. This is certainly the case for people with families. I've been in the same house for 8 years and am in the process of moving across town - it's a multi- year process that's extremely personally taxing for my entire family, and we're only moving 2 miles away. I've had 5 jobs in the time I've lived in my current house, and my commute has ranged from 15 minutes (by car) to my current 1.25 hours (by train/bike), depending on the job. A major factor of choosing where I'm going to work is what it will do to my daily commute. I wouldn't consider moving for literally any job, but I wouldn't hesitate to change jobs so I could move.

<comment><USER38> As a family, perhaps. As a single person - I want a commute of 5 minutes or less, and when I get a new job - I always move. In the last 8 years I've lived in seven places - one of which was a Condo that I owned / sold.

I think the Prop13 issue explains why most home owners can no longer sell their homes.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Exception notifier on steroids - <AUTHOR> http://getexceptional.com/beta

<comment><USER2> Sounds useful, but I'm not sure I'd pay for this service. The ExceptionNotifier plugin does a good enough job, and exceptions shouldn't really keep happening for days on end. In my app(s), when there's an unexpected Exception, it gets fixed within a few days at most, so I'm not quite sure how useful a historic view would be.

</comment><comment><USER3> Very nice looking. This could be a easier way to find which bugs bubble up to the top most frequently. Swombat does make a good point though. We use ExceptionNotifier and the policy is to fix anything that triggers it, so we normally have zero exceptions occurring.

If you could maybe have it tap into your logger so you could log weird states or other issues that don't cause exceptions, but you don't want occurring often perhaps it would help a little more (recoverable problems).

</comment><comment><USER4> There's this one too - <http://hoptoadapp.com/welcome>.

Haven't tried either one yet.

</comment><comment><USER5> These guys were interviewed on Geoffrey Grosenbach's Ruby on Rails podcast recently. They sound very young, early 20s.</comment>


Ticketing App AXS Scrapes Everything It Can Get from Your Phone (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://theoutline.com/post/5628/how-a-concert-ticket-steals-your-personal-data <comment><USER2> AXS has an incorrigible treatment of VPNs built into every step of their checkout process. Some highlights:

\- expect 5-6 pages of captchas during the process. Each will require multiple steps of attempts

\- page loads are articially delayed 30+ seconds per page

\- the payment form CATEGORICALLY REJECTS payments from known VPN ips claiming the payment was rejected from your bank

I've learned these lessons the hard way using AXS as they have a vicegrip on the Denver concert scene. While they used to be a refreshing alternative to Ticketmaster their newfound approach to privacy is absurd. Instead you spend minutes identifying sidewalks and street lights only to discover it was all a ruse and your were literally incapable of purchasing tickets in the first place. This is using a denver vpn to purchase tickets to small local shows.

Convenience indeed.

<comment><USER3> Well stopping bots from buying tickets and vpns so they can resell them at insane prices is exactly why events need AXS type stuff, and then they abuse that for their own anti-consumer actions

<comment><USER4> I've never understood why tickets can't have your name on them, with ID checked at the venue. That'd stop scalping.

<comment><AUTHOR> There are a lot of corner cases. What if I want to give some of the tickets to a friend who has to arrive late and meet me inside the venue? What if I want to do legitimate reselling on a website like Stubhub (many events encourage this even, like reselling sports tickets if you can't make it, so that the seat doesn't go empty and the stadium can make money on concessions... this happens all the time if you're a season ticket holder for a particular team; you just frequently can't make it and need to resell).

Personally I wish tickets were just bearer bonds. If you have the paper ticket in your hand, you get in, all else be damned.

Then to solve scalping or bots, try to invent solutions that offer tickets to verified long-time fans / supporters first, then use a pre-registered (not day-of) lottery system to allow general purchases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Relevant context: the AXS app is required for this year's BlizzCon: [https://blizzcon.com/en-us/news/22938865](https://blizzcon.com/en- us/news/22938865)

Which is how the permissions issues resurfaced: [https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/bkd5ew/you_need_to_hav...](https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/bkd5ew/you_need_to_have_a_phone_to_attend_blizzcon_this/emg38xv/)

</comment><comment><USER6> What happened to that Android mod which returned fake data to apps that wanted too many permissions? Fake contacts list, fake location, fake stored data, etc.

<comment><USER7> Still available, runs on top of this: [https://www.xda-developers.com/xposed- framework-hub/](https://www.xda-developers.com/xposed-framework-hub/)

Edit: here is the Xposed module: [https://github.com/M66B/XPrivacy](https://github.com/M66B/XPrivacy)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> If I'm required an app for a "ticket", they can go fuck themselves.

Maybe that sounds simplistic. But I don't care.

<comment><USER9> This is a failing of Apple (and Google? not sure what their motivations are here). Smartphone apps need to be ephemeral, up and running in <5 seconds and deleted as quickly. The heavyweight install/delete process means they're going to be fighting against the web's tide.

<comment><USER10> > Smartphone apps need to be ephemeral, up and running in <5 seconds and > deleted as quickly.

Since the latter two points have been true for years, I'm assuming this comes down to what you have in mind by "ephemeral"? Something about whether it leaves an App Store purchase record behind or can persist data using e.g. iCloud?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I thought I was going to read that this app asked for extra permissions to scrape contacts/etc, but instead it mostly sounds like stuff that you'd give to any app that you would purchase physical goods with (Amazon, etc). The difference compared to buying on the Ticketmaster website is... the advertising ID, I guess?

The real problem here is the privacy policy. I think we've been conditioned to click through agreements and enter personal information for purchases because normally we're dealing with reputable businesses. I think the only solution here is legislation that prevents businesses from storing or disseminating personal information unless it is necessary to provide the service requested.

</comment><comment><USER12> _" You either agree to the terms of service, or you don't use the product — which, in this day and age, often isn't a viable option."_

Gonna stop you there...

What day and age are we in where you _have to_ go to concerts?

I mean yes I agree it's an invasion of privacy. The thing is, you have to vote with your feet!

<comment><USER13> So because one doesn't _need_ something, one can't complain about it?

<comment><USER12> Complain all you want. Sometimes nowadays it even works, just through the sheer power of a Twitter shitstorm. But complaining -- essentially asking someone else to fix things -- that's one of the very first things a human baby learns. And it only works if there's someone more powerful than you, on your side, who protects and looks out for your interests. Good luck with that - maybe you noticed who's in the White House (and whom he put in charge of the FCC and the FTC and so on). And certainly the AXS/AEG people aren't on your side: they're your adversaries! Complaining to them is like asking your no- good abusive husband to please stop beating you, while you continue paying his rent and getting beaten. You need to get out of there!

Besides, NOBODY is more powerful than you in this case! You're the one (you and your fellow buyers) with all the money that AEG depends on! So when it comes time to actually stop complaining and _do something_ about this kind of crap, there are many things you can do, starting with the obvious: Absolutely Stop Supporting Them Monetarily. Even better: organize a widespead boycott. And then all the time and money you save by not going to concerts (or only going to small cheap local ones where you can actually talk & hang out with the artists), you can get yourself a guitar or a copy of Ableton Live or whatnot, and start teaching yourself!

This article points out (or complains about, to use your phrase) a problem that does exist, and needs to be pointed out/complained about. But then instead of taking the next logical step ("everybody stop supporting these assholes please"), it instead spreads hopelessness and despair by saying _" They know they can get away with [this crap], so they do. And so they will, until anyone with enough power to enact systematic change cares enough... to actually do something about it."_ That's a clear appeal to the "someone more powerful" that I mention above, and if they don't do anything, we're all just totally helpless, right? Weak sauce.</comment></comment></comment>


America's food giants swallowed the family farm - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/mar/09/american-food-giants-swallow-the-family-farms-iowa <comment><USER2> This is what is normally called progress.

Capitalism and markets trend toward efficiency. And while I understand, if I had a little family farm, why I might be upset, that doesn't mean it's not a net good for the consumer and the economy.

> "They'll hire somebody to sit in a little office somewhere and run that > stuff off the computer and farm the land that way. Now what you've done is > you have lost the innate knowledge of how to grow food and raise animals.

Well evidently that knowledge wasn't very valuable in the first place. If these farmers were providing value, they wouldn't be going out of business.</comment>


San Francisco Office Rents Seen Topping Manhattan in 2015 - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-08-14/san-francisco-office-rents-seen-topping-manhattan-in-2015.html <comment><USER2> Serious question for other startup founders: why would you put your company in the bay area or even the state of CA?

It has never been easier to build a tech company, especially a SaaS-type business with no physical inventory. You could home your company in a cheaper, more business friendly city like Austin (disclaimer: I live in Austin). The tax savings alone would cover the costs of going to SF once a week. Quality of life is just as high (or higher, depending on your interests) in many other cities.

Edit: Seems people are missing the fact that you could literally fly to SF once a week for networking / meetings / events and it would still be cheaper to live somewhere else. You don't have to miss out on being a part of the network.

<comment><USER3> Disclaimer: I live in Chicago, but started my company in San Francisco. I've been in gravitational orbit around the SF Bay Area my entire working life. (For a majority of the past 6 years, I've spent 1 to 2 weeks a month in SF.)

The standard arguments for starting a company in California is: 1) You'll be closer to venture capital. 2) You'll be closer to talent. 3) You'll be closer to customers.

1) If you want or need venture capital, then it helps to play by their rules. One rule is: "Locate your company's headquarters within an hour's drive of my office." In my opinion, this is stupid and short-sighted, but from their perspective, it kinda makes sense. Giving you capital means (most likely) also sitting on your board of directors. And if those board meetings only require a short drive (instead of flying), then their life is easier. Also, if they're giving you a ton of money (many millions, perhaps), they'll sleep better at night knowing you're close by and can meet in person at any time.

2) Access to talent is closely related to access to capital. VCs will want to give you money only if you want to get big and make billions of dollars. (AKA: Are you the next Google, Facebook, or Apple?) The implication is that if you're going to scale big, you're going to need a ton of employees. If you're based in the middle of nowhere, your growth potential is limited to the size of your local talent pool. Again, I think this argument is silly and short- sited. But I've heard VCs make this argument directly to me in the past.

3) It generally makes sense to be close to your customers, especially early on when you don't have any. If you're a software company selling to other software companies, it might make sense to be based in San Francisco, regardless of how expensive it is to operate there. (You're going to make billions, anyway, right?) If your early customer is the U.S. Government, it might make sense to be primarily based near D.C. If your customer is the media, it might make sense to be based in New York or Los Angeles. If you can argue that there isn't a central cluster city of potential customers for your business (or you can argue that it doesn't matter), then it's less likely you'll need to move to be closer to them.

This is how I plan to do my next startup given the above three arguments: 1) Don't plan on needing VC. Bootstrap and get to profitability as quickly as possible. Then I won't have to play by VC rules and move closer to them. 2) Don't plan on needing to grow big. Plan on hiring people wherever they are, and create a remote-friendly working environment. 3) Live near an airport. As long as I'm close to an airport with lots of direct flights, I can visit potential customers whenever/wherever I want. (This is why I'd rather be in Chicago near O'Hare Airport, than live in the middle of Kansas, for example.)

However, I still might move back to the Bay Area someday. But I'd only do so for personal reasons - e.g. being closer to family and access to awesome hiking trails.

[edit: spelling and grammar]

<comment><USER4> Sounds great, and I hope you succeed with your new venture. I'm with you on not wanting VC money. Nothing says "I don't have control" like a company in debt or beholden to those who control the purse strings.

<comment><USER3> Until you never have to work again in your life, you'll always be beholden to someone. But I'd rather be beholden to my family, my employees, and my customers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Last week patio11 had an interesting comment on residential rents in San Francisco compared to rents in Tokyo.[1]

"Can I throw one into the list? The median cost of a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco gets you approximately two bedrooms in Tokyo... in a semi-luxury apartment, in the most desirable neighborhoods. . . .

"Still though, given that I have had lifelong impressions of Tokyo as being the most expensive place to live anywhere, I was pretty gobsmacked when I started doing the math."

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8142684#up_8142803](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8142684#up_8142803)

</comment><comment><USER6> Many people here in SF have been saying this is the direction we've been heading for quite a bit(if it hasn't happened already): SF becomes Manhattan, the surround Bay Area become the boroughs.

<comment><USER7> San Francisco has no right to compare itself to New York. None at all.

New York has a legitimate demand problem, seeing as it's the capital of the world.

California has an _artificial_ demand problem due to NIMBYs who corrupt zoning boards, oppose reasonable development at every turn, and live in the past while paying lip service to "building the future".

(It also has a problem with corrupt/dirty foreign money swelling into the housing market, but that's an issue in New York as well.)

New York has solid public transportation. You don't need a car if you live there. People bitch about the MTA, but it's remarkably cheap compared to having a car anywhere in the US, and remarkably convenient considering how much access it provides.

San Francisco is a city where you need a car, but can't afford it. Parking costs are so bad that many garages post their _15 minute_ rates (often around $3.00).

New York is hard-core urban and owns the positives and negatives that comes from it, and New York runs itself. San Francisco companies are run from the suburbs-- specifically, from an office park called "Sand Hill Road" in a stretch of land that really ought to be reclaimed by the cows and orange trees, because the people living there are contributing nothing but additional work for the sewer system.

Manhattan is what it is, take it or leave it. (And there's nothing wrong with leaving it.) California is fundamentally dishonest and hypocritical, because it's full of people who pretend to be liberal but are, in many ways, worse than the Manhattan old board when it comes to elitism.

New York isn't perfect. There's a lot that's badly designed or unpleasant about it, but if you compare it to the cataclysmic mismanagement of California at all levels, it's a breath of fresh air.

<comment><USER4> Well said. I couldn't agree more.

I have always loathed California. It all seems so fake and far reaching, while NYC, as you say, is brutally honest in what it presents: lead, follow, or get out of the way.

<comment><USER7> New York is a place that forces you to accept that human life is mindlessly, ludicrously, and inexcusably unfair. It's not there in the abstract ("lifestyle" shows about rich losers, poverty on other continents) but quite visible, every day. It's in front of you, and it's not easy to accept, but after a while you learn from it and tune out the idiocy, while keeping the insights that make you a better person.

In the suburbs (and the mentality that is now dominant in San Francisco _is_ suburban, because the locals have been priced out by fratty douchebags and basic bitches) people have enough distance from what's going on that they don't have to acknowledge the facts of social injustice. They can persist in the delusional belief that "the rich" are more successful versions of themselves, and _not_ preselected winners who've had social connections and resources delivered to them since before birth.

I don't loathe "California", insofar as many people I like live there and it's a big state with some beautiful national parks. I'm just disgusted by what it has become, and especially by the utter defeat of the technology/engineer culture in Silicon Valley at the hands of MBA C-students and people flushed out of McKinsey.

<comment><USER4> Again, well said. I agree with you. I, too, have some good friends who live out there (cannot fathom why).

I like the raw energy of NYC, something no place in CA has, not even LA, and I lived out there for almost 4 years. NYC trumps any large US city for pure energy and things to do. I can be in Europe in a few hours, Canada in no time, the food is second to none, the weather is decent, as you tend to get four seasons instead of warm and cooler.

I've lived in Europe, Asia, and 7 US states. NYC is by far my favourite place in the US to visit, and perhaps one day, live. NYC is walkable, something few US cities can boast. Not even Chicago comes close to NYC in amenities -- and Chicago cannot seem to get a grip on their gun violence problem, something NYC has all but stamped out.

Let's not even mention the plethora of museums, restaurants, theatre choices, educational institutions, and more that NYC has going for it. No other US city can compare.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > "At the heart of high-tech's growth is strong demand for products and > services from consumers," Los Angeles-based CBRE said in its report. "As > long as high-tech companies align themselves with this demand, the > unrealistic growth and valuation expectations that defined the dot-com > bubble should be avoided."

"Demand" must be the new "eyeballs."

There's no question that there is strong demand from consumers for high-tech products and services. The question is how many startups are capable of offering those products and services _profitably_.

Right now, much of the rent money in the Bay Area is coming from investors, not cash flow.

<comment><USER9> > Right now, much of the rent money in the Bay Area is coming from investors, > not cash flow.

Do you know what the ratio is? Was in 2000? Is in NYC or elsewhere?

How to calculate? Investment divided by revenue of startups, or divided by city or metro gross product? Investment in current period, or cumulative with some decay factor?

Is there an index that gets at this that I don't know about?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's hard not to be excited for the development going on in the Transbay area of San Francisco[0]. Including the tower built by Norman Foster[1].

0: [http://sf.curbed.com/archives/2014/04/04/mapping_big_changes...](http://sf.curbed.com/archives/2014/04/04/mapping_big_changes_for_rincon_hill_and_the_transbay_area.php#reader_comments)

1: [http://sf.curbed.com/archives/2014/07/23/norman_foster_vies_...](http://sf.curbed.com/archives/2014/07/23/norman_foster_vies_for_second_tallest_with_sparkly_soma_tower.php)

</comment><comment><USER11> It would be nice if the city allowed more skyscrapers to be built.

</comment><comment><USER12> I think I've written about this a lot. Prop M from 1986 capped the amount of office space that could be added per year. The city has only run into the hard cap a couple of times in its history.

[http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/22/the-pressures-driving- adapt...](http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/22/the-pressures-driving-adaptive-re- use-and-silicon-valleys-strange-reverse-commute/)

</comment><comment><USER13> It's not really surprising given the growth of tech and the lack of growth in finance. That plus the sheer volume of office space available in NYC compared to SF (NYC has about 4x the total office space of SF).

Of course, NYC's overall infrastructure for tech companies is horrible compared to SF.

<comment><USER14> > Of course, NYC's overall infrastructure for tech companies is horrible > compared to SF.

What makes it horrible out of curiosity?

<comment><USER15> Well, as an NYC based startup I can speak to a at least one thing; TWC Business/Commercial internet is garbage. Plain and simple. We're lucky enough to have FIOS in our building and that has been pretty decent, it still goes out quite a bit.

<comment><USER16> As soon as you move past the low end of cable / FIOS Internet speeds NY has awesome commercial network bandwidth. Think OC 192 and beyond. You can often make a deal with another company in your building to add bandwidth or redundancy.

Also, [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multihoming](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multihoming) FIOS and cable Internet or even just DSL is a good option if you need a little more stability or bandwidth.

<comment><USER13> FiOS isn't available in many areas of the city (I can't get it at home where I do most of my work). TWC is incredibly unreliable (daily outtages of a few minutes, monthly/bimonthly outtages of a full day or so). I have no other alternative other than slow/unreliable DSL or exceedingly overpriced (per GB) mobile hotspots.

<comment><USER17> FiOS is actually "available" in _most_ parts of the city - i.e., there's a Verizon FiOS line running right in the street in front of your apartment.

The main problem are buildings and landlords. Many landlords and supers receive kickbacks from TWC to prevent Verizon from accessing the building and delivering the last-100-feet service.

The best way to improve the state of internet in NYC is for the city to start busting landlord heads.

<comment><USER13> It's not available where I am. Not on my block. Or the next one. Or the next one. Verizon has no ETA on when it will be and hasn't been installing any new fiber in my neighborhood in a long time. It has nothing to do with my building owner. The owner-occupied single and two family properties on my block (or the next one, or the next one, etc) can't get it either.

<comment><USER16> Absolutely no offence indented, but this is the type of thing you work out before signing a long term lease. Not that that in any way helps you, but FIOS is available in much of NYC so if your looking to move to that area it's an option.

In your case, bonding with wireless or DSL in case of outages is probably worth it. The difference between slow internet and no internet is huge. Other options include wireless internet cards for PC's / laptops, it can get vary expensive but for a small staff that occasionally does off site demo's it's also vary useful for that.

<comment><USER13> Unfortunately, wireless is hugely expensive... as in $10 per GB expensive. As posted in another comment, I have a Verizon hotspot that I use as a backup for the unreliable Time Warner Cable connection.

DSL isn't an option as, like most (possibly all) of NYC, I only have a Verizon or someone that resells it. I tried it once years ago and was out of service for 7 days of my 1 month trial because a Verizon tech randomly unplugged something at the local box.

My only real choice is to move to another neighborhood. But I've begun looking into moving to San Francisco anyway, since it's a much better environment for tech companies (unless you're in finance technology, which I used to do).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Slightly off topic, it would be interesting to see how the rents compare to Hong Kong, Tokyo, London etc...

</comment><comment><USER19> I think it's funny how the same NIMBY policies that all the techno- libertarians hate so much, are the same policies that made San Francisco a more desirable place to live for said techno-libertarians than San Jose and the East Bay.

Personally, I hate NIMBYs but I also hate SF.

</comment><comment><USER20> >This time is probably different, the company said.

Chuckle.

</comment><comment><USER21> This only makes sense. The amount of multi-million dollar seed rounds has increased and people want the best office space to attract employees. The more competition in the market for the best office space, the more people can charge and then boom you get what you have now : hyper inflation in costs. I actually wonder how long until people start looking at the north bay like San Rafael for office space just to save on cash. I know people are already targeting Oakland.

<comment><USER22> North Bay is one of the least assessable places in the Bay Area (to SF, PA, SJ). Oakland has a lot of "room" to grow.</comment></comment>


Access Your Amazon Aurora Serverless Database with the New Data API (Beta) - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2018/11/aurora-serverless-data-api-beta/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is a big deal for serverless fans.. if the connection latency is good, then no more hassles with VPC, DynamoDB, etc..</comment>


Material Design is design science - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@danhollick/material-design-is-design-science-6c99c1d76498

<comment><USER2> From the article:

"Time is a heavily neglected aspect of user experience. Humans don't just experience states of a device, they experience the transition between states too. States with hard cuts between them are jarring for the the user. If an actor in a play were to exit stage right and re-enter moments later from stage left, the audience would notice the lack of continuity. It would be jarring. It would release the immersion."

This is everything I dislike about the 'mobile experience' and exactly why I like using a CLI. I tend to believe I'm not alone.

Oh the glory days of the HP OmniGo 700LX! [1] 1996 'smartphone' (well, it had a _built in Nokia 2110_ ), UI with quicker response to user input and screen transitions than most non-flagship smartphones 20 years younger (maybe I'm exaggerating and should upgrade my 4yo smartphone).

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1UtCJ84Ris](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1UtCJ84Ris)

</comment><comment><USER3> Ask HN: Who's best at creating animated websites these days? Except Google. Functional animations with properly choreographed UX elements has been the next frontier in web design for some time now.</comment>


Code Guide by @mdo - <AUTHOR> http://codeguide.co/

<comment><USER2> > Don't include a trailing slash in self-closing elements—the HTML5 spec says > they're optional.

This kills the XML parser. Yes, I know, you should use a real HTML parser like BeautifulSoup if you can. But sometimes you don't have one available, or you're working with legacy tools.

More importantly, if you're looking through the code and you don't know what tags are self-closing, you can't instantly tell whether something's a syntax error or not. Off hand, do you know which of the SVG tags are self-closing, vs. those that permit optional but rarely-used contents? [0] What about the embed tag? If you make a mistake in rattling off that list, then you cannot claim that you can read through an arbitrary @mdo-compliant document and know with certainty whether there is or is not a syntax error. And I'd bet that many talented frontend developers would make a mistake.

It's an extra character that makes your HTML parse-able by a person or program that isn't a geek (or the programmatic equivalent thereof) who's read the HTML spec. And that's well worth the pinky-press.

[0] [http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/syntax.html#foreign- elements](http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/syntax.html#foreign-elements)

<comment><USER3> > More importantly, if you're looking through the code and you don't know what > tags are self-closing, you can't instantly tell whether something's a syntax > error or not.

I came to say this, so I'll second you instead. Syntax is less cognitive load than remembering what element does what - and in reading code, if I don't see a closing marker I'll go looking for the closing tag before thinking about the tag.</comment></comment>


Star Trek characters in pixel form - <AUTHOR> http://flowingdata.com/2011/04/08/star-trek-characters-in-pixel-form/

<comment><USER2> Very well done! However, I'm wondering what the Paramount lawyers are going to say of this. I've heard they're very protective of the Star Trek brand.</comment>


Concept: Simple Collaborative Web Pages - <AUTHOR> http://concept.so/

<comment><USER2> nice demo. should make some people think.

content-editable can be nice when it works, but it doesn't always work. for example, i couldn't edit stickies-text in safari. (chrome worked.)

further, the cross-browser inconsistencies have \-- regrettably -- been present for a long time, with seemingly little progress toward resolution.

doesn't negate anything that you have accomplished, but it might put a cap on how far you can travel...

just so you know...

-bowerbird</comment>


Twice as fast as Concorde: Supersonic jet will fly from London to NY in 2 hours - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2008607/SonicStar-The-supersonic-plane-fly-London-New-York-TWO-HOURS.html

<comment><USER2> From the same news company that brought you "Are aliens getting less camera shy? UFOs filmed above BBC building in London" [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2008437/UFOs-...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2008437/UFOs- filmed-BBC-building-London.html)

<comment><USER3> Clearly it was a mistake they were just testing out the supersonic jets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Our plan is to build and fly the world's first very high speed supersonic hybrid aircraft by June 2021."

June 2021. At first, I thought "2021" sounds like the incomprehensibly distant future. Then I realized that was only 7 years, the same distance from the present as 2006 is. Then I felt old.

Wow, it's 2014.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is pretty cool, but they have their competition cut out for them. Also check out the Aerion SBJ, which is a very similar concept: [http://www.forbes.com/sites/grantmartin/2013/10/31/the- world...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/grantmartin/2013/10/31/the-worlds-first- supersonic-business-jet-will-fly-in-2021/) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerion_SBJ](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerion_SBJ)

</comment><comment><USER6> no, it won't.

<comment><USER7> As someone who has actually flown on the Concorde, I certainly hope it will. Your negative attitude is what's wrong with the world today.

<comment><USER6> s/flown/ridden/. FTFY.

I'm going to guess you weren't at the controls.

Also, fair point. I have personally been holding back private supersonic travel for decades. I killed the 2707 a few years before my birth and worse than that, I personally lifted 2 billion Indians and Chinese out of poverty solely to cause demand for fuel (and thus prices) to skyrocket so that in case anyone managed to build an SST, it would be uneconomical.

I'm the inspiration for [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZI_aEalijE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZI_aEalijE)

P.S. I'm a pilot who flies (not just rides) planes and I'd love to fly or ride this thing, doesn't mean it will ever happen.

<comment><USER7> LOL, I understand the difference and I'm sorry for mixing that up. I did in fact fly in the cockpit for some of the journey, but no I was not at the controls. I was also only 9 years old.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Title is missing the (2011) tag.

<comment><USER9> Yeh for some reason this was linked by a mate on facebook too, I don't know what's promoted it to go around again but it's odd that it is, given it's 2.5 years old.

Anyway, I laughed at this great line: "It will be able to cruise at Mach 3.1, a speed made possible by S-MAGJET hybrid gas turbine engine technology; nobody has ever travelled that fast before."

Right, because man has never gone to space and the SR-71 is just a fairytale.

<comment><USER2> It was on reddit, it being here is a repost of that

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> We will see Buckbeak {Hippogriff} flying in the sky before this.</comment>