Arq 4 Beta - <AUTHOR> http://www.haystacksoftware.com/blog/2014/02/arq-4-beta/

<comment><USER2> A new beta will be out in a day or two with a bunch of fixes so please don't get discouraged if you try the current beta! (I'm the author of Arq)

<comment><USER3> I love Arq 3 and have recommended it to several friends and family, but I ran into a problem and it wasn't fixed and I've had to stop using it.

I re-installed Mac OS X Mavericks and then used Time Machine to bring my user folder over again. I adopted the Glacier backup, and while it has worked with some folders, it appears to want to sync my entire Library/Mail folder again. This isn't ideal as it's 15GB+ and since the data has been uploaded once before, I don't want to upload it again. I don't know if you can "skip" a folder during sync, or set it to only upload files new/changed past a date.

All support said was "I'm sorry I don't have a better answer". I'm stuck now with a Glacier full of old data and software that doesn't work. Any suggestions?

<comment><USER2> Well that's not a great support response -- I'm sorry about that.

Arq 3 is good about this when backing up to S3, but not to Glacier. It uses the most recent backup record as its starting point and backs up new/changed files. (When backing up to S3, it gets an object list from S3 so it knows what's there.)

But if the most recent backup record of your Library/Mail folder has the files in it, then it shouldn't re-upload everything. Arq backs up in 2 steps. First, it estimates the amount to be uploaded by comparing the timestamps and other metadata of files on disk to the most recent backup. Then it does the backup. For each file with a different timestamp, it calculates a checksum of the file's contents. If the contents are the same, it doesn't re-upload.

Was it really re-uploading everything?

<comment><USER3> Yeah it was. I left it for a bit and it got to 250MB, so I assumed it was uploading Library/Mail again.

I should clarify and say support did get me to send various log files, etc. so it wasn't a bad experience at all - it just ended with no solution.

Maybe I'll just take a loss, kill my Arq 3 backups and just re-do everything with the new version!

Am I right in assuming that upgrading/re-imaging an Mac OS X install normally shouldn't result in sync

<comment><USER4> I ended up with the exact same problem.

Somehow the records of my Photos folder got "lost" and completely reuploaded, all the incremental are gone. And this was not even after I adopted an old backup, just happened randomly. It reuploaded 15 GB before I saw what was going on. So now my Glacier is about double the size it needed to be.

Support responded and had me send in the logfiles. I looked over the logs and there was nothing helpful there. Sure enough support could not help me and I am left with no solution.

This kind of stuff really makes me wary about the whole software. Strangely enough the other folders did not see the same thing happen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Arq is a great piece of software and is part of my backup mix. (I also use Carbon Copy Cloner, CrashPlan, rdiff-backup)

I like that Arq's restore software is open source, hopefully, Arq 4 will continue with this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Are you still happy with CrashPlan?

The Mac version at least is still Java-based and that comes with many annoyances, for example high CPU usage. I can set the CPU usage to whatever I like, it is very often around 100% (including the 'java' process). The firewall configuration if you do not use uPnP is a problem too for more than one Mac with CrashPlan behind the firewall.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I LOVE Arq. It does everything I'd like it to, but the price increase just burns me a little bit :( Hoping to wait out for another humble bundle or such.

<comment><USER7> I'd like to see some upgrade pricing for owners of previous versions, rather than paying full price every release.

<comment><USER2> We've always offered upgrade pricing. Upgrade from Arq 3 to 4 will be $19.99.

<comment><USER7> Oops, my mistake. Didn't see it mentioned on the store page for Arq 3. Good to know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I really hope the author adds the ability to generate log files for individual Arq backups runs. It's a great product overall, but it seems like a huge flaw to me that it's so hard to monitor the status of backups without manually launching the app. (I don't necessarily want an email every day, I just want an easy way to detect if the backup has failed.)

</comment><comment><USER9> To echo others' sentiments: I use Arq on 3 Macs and absolutely love it.

It's a bit of a pain that Amazon have no migration from the original Glacier API to the new S3-Glacier API but I guess that's the cost of being an early adopter.

I'll have a few terrabytes to re-upload so apologies in advance to anyone on the Shoreditch BT hub.

</comment><comment><USER10> Beta 4 has been very buggy in my experience (yesterday) with it. S3 backup crashed the helper and then continued to crash the helper service. Tried a DreamObjects backup (hooray) but that also just crashed the helper service over and over again. That's just my experience so far.

<comment><USER2> Sorry! I've got a fix, but I'm doing more testing before I ship it. (I wasn't expecting this to be on Hacker News today)

I'll ship it hopefully tomorrow.

<comment><USER10> Thank you for the reply, really looking forward to being able to backup to DreamObjects (much cheaper than S3).</comment></comment></comment>


Tools To Add Some Spice To Your UNIX Shell Scripts - <AUTHOR> http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/spice-up-your-unix-linux-shell-scripts.html

<comment><USER2> I think it's easy to get stuck thinking you _have to_ use bash and _the UNIX utilities_ for sysadmin tasks.

Automating some more complicated stuff is just a pain in the ass to write and maintain if you just use bash, sed, awk, grep and friends. Free your mind and don't be afraid to pull out Perl, Ruby or Python and apply liberally.

</comment><comment><USER3> s/UNIX/Linux, by the look of things... not quite what I was expecting.

</comment><comment><USER4> Wow. That was... underwhelming.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm an old school unix guy who's now an iPhone developer; Any word on which of these work on mac?

<comment><USER6> For user notification, get yourself Growl.

tput and reset are present.

If you really have a VT serial terminal, then setleds is going to be an echo and a tr to ship out the escape sequence. Might be a different (or easier) way...

If you're working with a standard Mac keyboard (and not a VT terminal), here you go [http://googlemac.blogspot.com/2008/04/manipulating- keyboard-...](http://googlemac.blogspot.com/2008/04/manipulating-keyboard- leds-through.html)

Applescript can do dialogs (there are hooks in Xcode) or the Applescript editor. (You can get the scripts stuff up in the menu bar for quick access.)

logger is present in Mac OS X.

pmset is a path akin to setterm.

smbclient is available. (Few Windows boxes have this path open, however.)

There are various approaches for the tcp stuff. Start with nc (netcat), which is built in.</comment></comment>


Dating for nerds (part 2): gender differences - <AUTHOR> http://p.migdal.pl/2017/09/30/dating-for-nerds-gender-differences.html <comment><USER2> It's very easy for men to fall into the mode of "us guys have it really tough because women are scared of men because of a few bad apples. But I'm a nice guy![1]" Even the article states that it's tough for guys. From a certain perspective it is true: if rape wasn't a thing, we would all live happier and sexier lives, and women in the dating pool would have more freedom to take more chances.

But that line of reasoning is false: women have it tougher, because rape and sexual assault are objectively worse than simple rejection.

Additionally, as my ex likes to say "the odds are good, but the goods are odd." If you are a man who uses Tinder or Bumble and aren't getting many matches, do a little experiment. Find a female friend and ask to do some swiping with her. You'll get a buttload of matches right away. Message them all with something simple like "hi" or "cute dog". See how long it takes before he is asking if you want him to put cannoli filling in your ass and then squirt it into his mouth (real thing, I wish I had saved the screenshots). In that barrage of bullshit, you can still find a few decent sounding people. Of those, you have to screen them for whether they are actually decent humans or sociopaths. Oh and "dating fatigue" sets in really early too. After a dozen matches all say "you DTF?" in the first 2-3 messages, why even bother going back? So guess what? The rate of finding a good match is just about the same for women as it is for men.

To be clear, I'm not disagreeing with the statistics in the article. Just the language and some of the conclusions.

[1] [https://www.reddit.com/r/niceguys/](https://www.reddit.com/r/niceguys/)

<comment><AUTHOR> So, in you opinion, which things should I have phrased differently?

I think everyone agrees that rape is worse than rejection.

For messages - well, I cover this "false positive" stuff.

<comment><USER2> I would say that "guys have it tough" is the wrong way to phrase it. I'd say that as women tend to be more careful in selecting who they engage with. Your reasoning as to why is actually quite good, but it's not that men have it tougher. It's that women are more careful. Maybe "women have to be more selective" is a good heading for that section.

As a anecdote, I have a friend who will go on a date with literally anyone. If they talk to him, he will do whatever it takes to see them, even if they are not his type, by whatever definition. Women rarely engage in this behavior. That doesn't mean men have it tough, just that the threat to him is much lower than to a woman in an equivalent situation.

Studying non-hetero dating is also a fun comparison, as it highlights a lot of the heteronormative behavior lots of people take for granted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Huh, why'd this get flagged? It's a fairly reasonable article, all-told.

<comment><USER4> Even if that's true, i don't see how articles like these belong on this site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> >A lot of behaviors considered creepy are centered around concealing sexual intentions.

And a lot of behaviors considered creepy are centered around expressing sexual intentions as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> Creepiness is a complex subject, and there are many shades of it.

In general, it seems to be anything that makes women sexually uncomfortable is perceived as creepy (from Models by Mark Manson). But the ones that can (and should) be avoided is:

\- Expressing sexual intentions in some sneaky way (like, staring at a girl but hesitating with talking to her). Though, importantly, playful flirting is not considered creepy (even though it's not about showing things explicitly).

\- Pursuing her for too long when she is not interested (some behaviors can be super romantic or creepy, totally depending on her interest in you, which you may not know).

Yet, from what I seen (and learned) being upfront (or flirting playifully) AND leaving ample space for her to turn you down (so - not being to pushy or needy) is good enough (and actionable).

To some point it is not possible to be creepy-proof if you want to show any sexual intentions. At the same time, it's not a big deal (and shouldn't be).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is a really good article, and I like all the hyperlinks to other material. Personally I also worked a lot to get to a point where I could have a decent social life as a nerd, and a lot of the content here is spot on.

I think the article mentions it a but it deserves to be said aloud: don't always have sex as the goal, try to enjoy the experience instead. Which doesn't mean that you shouldn't desire a sexual experience or try to have sex. But there are many many reasons why it may not happen so don't be frustrated if it doesn't. Do try to enjoy the company, rather than specific actions.

Which also means: don't hang out with someone who you strongly dislike or don't agree on certain fundamental things. Value your own time, and value others' as well.

</comment><comment><USER7> Does this article seriously claim 25% of women are raped? Troubling if correct.

<comment><USER2> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_statistics#United_States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_statistics#United_States)

It's not quite as simple as just that number, but yes it's staggeringly high, even in developed countries. Note that most go unreported to the police for a huge variety of reasons.

Edit: some choice quotes for the lazy:

> Only 16% of rapes and sexual assaults are reported to the police (Rape in > America: A Report to the Nation. 1992 and United Nations Populations Fund, > 2000a)

> The 1998 the National Violence Against Women Survey described the incidence > of rape as 1 in 6 and 1 in 33 men based upon the report of experiencing an > attempted or completed rape in her or his lifetime.

> A 2007 survey by the National Institute of Justice found that 19.0% of > college women and 6.1% of college men experienced either sexual assault or > attempted sexual assault since entering college.

<comment><USER8> Lumping attempted rape with actual rape is arguably very misleading. The actual statistics and definitions are really tricky and get bent to portray various agendas. Aka This area is 'safe' vs men are evil.

Drunken collage sex for example has various interpretations at say .08 BAC vs 0.3 BAC etc. Especially when you get into regrets after the fact etc.

IMO, you need define the measure on a scale from say unwanted but non physical to violent physical encounter, before the statistic is really meaningful to a general audience.

<comment><USER2> I think it's better to not lump them together when presenting statistics, but presenting both is important. Both are traumatic experiences and will haunt the person for the rest of their life. "Attempted rape" is not exactly an innocent thing.

<comment><USER9> > Both are traumatic experiences and will haunt the person for the rest of > their life.

The issue here is that with an expanded definition of rape, rape isn't always traumatic. Thousands of women have drunken sex every night, yet the vast majority of them aren't traumatized by it.

<comment><USER2> > The issue here is that with an expanded definition of rape, rape isn't > always traumatic.

 _facepalm_ Say that sentence out loud until what you just said kicks in.

Consensual sex, even when alcohol is involved, is still consensual sex. Rape is rape.

<comment><USER9> > Consensual sex, even when alcohol is involved, is still consensual sex. Rape > is rape.

The issue is that drunk consensual sex is no longer considered consensual. The definition of rape has changed and expanded over the years to include activities that are pretty common in our society.

<comment><USER2> I'mma need a real good source here. Show me any legal definition of rape that says that.

<comment><USER9> Absolutely! [https://web.stanford.edu/group/maan/cgi- bin/?page_id=305](https://web.stanford.edu/group/maan/cgi-bin/?page_id=305)

With Stanford's definition, consent can be considered null and void because they were drunk at the time, opening up the potential for retroactive revocation of consensual drunk sex.

<comment><USER2> No. I take issue with the definition of "any alcohol => no ability to consent" but Stanford's definition is pretty clear: there is a point past which you are too drunk to consent. Like, if I found you passed out in a bar bathroom and started fucking you, you wouldn't be able to consent, right? But if you had a beer and said "let's go to my place", you obviously can. There is no law or definition that says "any alcohol automatically means no ability to consent."

<comment><USER8> 'any alcohol' != drunk. But the line includes 'judgment is impaired' which is a very loos definition.

'Drunk' has expanded with DUI laws to be include very mild levels of intoxication as people get DUI while not noticeably impaired. Further, nobody is taking blood tests making dunk and consent tricky subjects.

Can a 120lb person give consent after 4 shots in 2 hours? How about 6, 7 etc?

<comment><USER2> And if you look at actual cases that were investigated and went to trial, you won't see the line of argument "well your honor I had four shots and then I told him 'yes I really want to have sex with you, you have my consent' but obviously I could not give consent because I was drunk. The alcohol in my system made me say those words out loud in a clear tone that I made sure he heard and understood." That's just not how it goes down. Usually you get a whole lot of victim blaming for being in a bad situation, and no clear enthusiastic verbal consent was given. There is some gray area there and that's how actual rapists often end up walking free. But in reality if you got enthusiastic clear verbal consent before and after the person took the four shots, and during they didn't lose consciousness and didn't stop you, but continued giving you signs that they were still consenting, chances are you are safe.

If you don't have clear and enthusiastic verbal or written consent, don't have sex. It is pretty simple in practice.

<comment><USER8> I think the US legal definition is generally reasonable in practice. I am more talking about what various groups use when collecting statistics or worse creating estimates.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Linguistic Mystery of Tonal Languages - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/11/tonal-languages-linguistics-mandarin/415701/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> I once thought I wanted to be a linguist, precisely to study stuff like this. Then it turned out that the fundamentals of linguistics are _incredibly_ dull, so instead I went off and did literature. These "aha" moments are rare and beautiful promentories in the midst of seas of velar fricatives.</comment>


A 1982 double murder and two men accused, convicted, and exonerated of the crime - <AUTHOR> https://read.atavist.com/whatsoever-things-are-true <comment><USER2> Holy moley, what a long article.

I slogged through it. I enjoy long format pieces when the author has some sort of clear narrative. In this case, however, I feel a bit more outlining wouldn't have hurt things. Several times I felt as if both the author and I were bumping into things without knowing why they were there in the text -- and we interpreted those things differently. Editorializing is fine, just cop to it in the first few graphs.

Structurally, it was a worthy effort. Thematically, it should have collapsed into a semi-long format opinion piece. I grow a bit tired of the New Yorker format of showing me an explosion, then cutting to a small bug crawling up a blade of grass. I know I'm in for an hour of reading before I get back to the explosion. Meanwhile the author is trying to make a point, but is too coy to just come out and say it.

For those of you without the time, here's my tl;dr

1) Chicago is a deeply corrupt city. Everything is politics.

2) Lots of convictions have happened on less than solid grounds. Over the last 20 years or so, folks have starting making names for themselves by getting innocent men freed.

3) The problem here, as we've learned over and over again with the criminal justice system, is that if you poke at a case long enough, it starts to look shaky and broken. Even if it wasn't.

4) This entire "was he guilty or not" game has become both a political football and the means by which people get rich, famous, and admired by others. That means it has little to do with what it's supposed to be about: whether the person was guilty or not.

5) There's a ton of background he-said, she-said detail on how one particular case came down. At the end the reader doesn't know any more about who killed a couple of people in 1982 than they did at the beginning. The author realizes it was never about that in the first place, which is how the article should have started.

<comment> at-fates-hands >> At the end the reader doesn't know any more about who killed a couple of people in 1982 than they did at the beginning.

This is probably the one thing that infuriates me about long form articles. At the end of reading a 15-20 minute article there's absolutely no pay-off, no conclusion and nothing worthwhile to take away from it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I can't wait until we go back to plaintext articles with a few styles instead of these stupid edgy designs. Unbearable.

<comment><USER4> Seriously, was there some AB-testing in progress. My page was just fine. Single clean column of text with no particular effects.

<comment><USER3> It's needlessly hectic. It's not a movie, it's TEXT. It starts off with some silly animation. Then another entirely pointless page with features that could easily be triggered by some sort of side menu or icon row in the top right of the screen. Now I've scrolled through two pages of crap.

Then there's a paragraph taking up another page. And NOW is the article, which fits into a fixed 800px wide container.

The "A" in the top right is an edgy animated menu instead of being A+ / A- to resize text which is what I thought it was.

\- Make it fluid

\- Cut any and all fluff

If I have to spend even the slightest effort to get to understand your layout or feel comfortable with the site, I just close it. I don't have that sort of time.

I hate all these new style article sites that are made just to justify the developers salary.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> ignoring the content for a moment..

the layout and color choices of this page make reading this unbearable.. they're distracting, annoying, and infuriating at the same time. please... for readers' sake.. stop designing pages like this.

<comment><USER4> I'm sorry, would you care to elaborate? It's black text on white background. Very good contrast. Pretty big font. What was wrong exactly? Did we read the same page?

<comment><USER5> look at it on a high resolution screen (eg 1440p).. \- 2/3+ of the screen is wasted.. why am i penalized for having a solid resolution? \- unnecessary javascript text animations.. this is a story about injustice.. not a trailer for star wars \- dropcaps the that literally take up 1/2 the width of the text container.. \- enough scrolling to properly piss you off.. and no, this isn't because of the content.. its because of shit design

this is a heavy article to begin with. i got frustrated with the horrid design before i got half way through and copied it into text editor without any styles</comment></comment></comment>


Toshiba Memory America Optimizes RocksDB for SSDs - <AUTHOR> https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190801005284/en/Toshiba-Memory-America-Optimizes-RocksDB-SSDs <comment><USER2> Seems they formed it. Why not just contribute upstream?

<comment><USER2> Forked not formed.</comment></comment>


Why I Switched from Git to Microsoft OneDrive - happy-go-lucky http://techblog.ironfroggy.com/2017/08/why-i-switched-from-git-to-microsoft.html <comment><AUTHOR> your commits don't have to be perfect, but maintaining good commit hygiene (no multiple change contexts in one commit) will work wonders... giving up on source control means having no means to roll back changes to a known good point in case you realize its a bad approach or in case of a mysterious bug you can't chase down... I don't regret having moved on from the daily 'make tar' days.</comment>


Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html <comment><AUTHOR> Although it's cliche to submit old pg essays, "a decade or so" is a nice time to revisit this list. The last big discussion seems to be 3 years ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14381699](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14381699)

Prior to that was the initial submission, 8 years ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3686840](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3686840)

The reason I'm submitting it was that #6 turns out to be solved, and it was quite surprising:

 _6\. Bring Back Moore 's Law

...

It would be great if a startup could give us something of the old Moore's Law back, by writing software that could make a large number of CPUs look to the developer like one very fast CPU. There are several ways to approach this problem. The most ambitious is to try to do it automatically: to write a compiler that will parallelize our code for us. There's a name for this compiler, the sufficiently smart compiler, and it is a byword for impossibility. But is it really impossible? Is there no configuration of the bits in memory of a present day computer that is this compiler? If you really think so, you should try to prove it, because that would be an interesting result. And if it's not impossible but simply very hard, it might be worth trying to write it. The expected value would be high even if the chance of succeeding was low._

\--

If you read [https://cloud.google.com/tpu/docs/spatial- partitioning](https://cloud.google.com/tpu/docs/spatial-partitioning) you may notice it does exactly that. It's the "sufficiently smart compiler" for ML. You can literally trade TPU cores for memory: twice the cores => you can train 2x larger models. And I was shocked that it seems to be transparent. Other than twiddling a few options to TPUEstimator, I did zero extra work, yet we were able to train a full 1024x1024 StyleGAN2 model. (Previously the maximum was 512x512 before we ran into per-TPU-core memory limits.)

That made me curious which other ideas on this list were quietly (or loudly) solved since 2012.</comment>


How to promote your mobile app to the right blogs to get publicity - <AUTHOR> http://www.appbackr.com/blog/developers/how-to-find-the-perfect-blogs-and-websites-to-tell-the-world-about-your-app

<comment><USER2> great post on marketing your app!</comment>


RMS: Why We Need Free Digital Hardware Designs - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2015/03/need-free-digital-hardware-designs/ <comment><USER2> Good article. I was surprised that Richard said that we don't really need them right now, but we needed to plan for a future when commercial computers might prevent free liner software from running.</comment>


Where the Jobs Are and How to Get One - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324492604579087044033601178.html?mod=hp_opinion

<comment><USER2> This is literally the worst, most propoganda filled article I've possibly ever read.

"It's hard to get people to take entry-level jobs when they can get unemployment benefits, health care, food stamps and the rest."

Its hard to get people to take DEAD END JOBS....

Also, does it irritate anyone that forcing companies to take care of their employees is called a penalty?</comment>


Google Instant, behind the scenes - <AUTHOR> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/google-instant-behind-scenes.html <comment><USER2> I'm amazed that users couldn't tell the qualitative difference between submitting a form and find-as-you-type. To a hacker, AJAX is a whole other experience but to Joe User, it's just a bit faster. It's something to keep in mind if your AJAX interface _isn't_ actually faster.

Yet another unconscious programmer assumption shattered.

</comment><comment><USER3> Google Instant is shockingly fast. It is hard to imagine a small startup creating it and having it work for a few beta users. Even harder to imagine Google scaling up their infrastructure 10-fold.

<comment><USER4> I agree. It's an impressive interface. If this really proves to be a very desirable improvement from an end user perspective, it may take Bing YEARS to be able to duplicate the experience unless they had something like this in the works already. ie: It takes lots of coordinated effort to make something like this possible at scale. Congrats to the Google team!

<comment><USER5> Technologically it's not very difficult, IMO, once you already have search engines that are as fast as Google and Bing.

The tough part for Bing, is with fewer searches, their predictive engine isn't quite as good. But this is where the Yahoo deal will pay off.

But all they need to do is fire off predictive searches and bring those back -- and of course, each predictive search only needs to bring back ten or fewer results.

Bing already does the predictive text suggestion. They just need to send back queries along with the actual text suggestion. At worst they'd need to get some more servers. But I fully expect they'd be able to roll this out in months if they wanted to.

Although personally I'd still focus on relevance. There's so much stuff both engines suck at, I'd love for them to fix some of those holes first.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I would have loved to be a fly on the wall at Microsoft when someone said - 'That's weird, have you tried google today?'

I assume some of the ajaxy Google logos have been leading up to this - especially the one that coloured in the letters as you typed.

</comment><comment><USER7> That's not much of a "behind the scenes". Granted, this is still rather impressive. Would love to get more technical details on it.

</comment><comment><USER8> I think the most interesting piece of that article is that they are caching per user results. So not only have they made result display dynamic, but they've made the performance unique to everyone using the system.

</comment><comment><USER9> They capture my keyboard after I search from the menu bar of Chrome, so I can't hit backspace to return to the previous page. Even if I click outside of the box, any Google search page redirects my backspace into the search box, which also changes the results.

It's rather quite annoying.

<comment><USER10> My issue is I almost always search from the address bar of chrome, or the search box of any other browser, so I never see the "instant" effect. I can't remember the last time I actually went to google.com except when linked to see a cool logo design.

</comment></comment><comment> brown9-2 Anyone else curious how long those 50 person stand-up meetings took?

<comment><USER11> Even by the scrum ideal of <1 minute per person, that's longer than most traditional "status meetings." Must've been loads of fun.

<comment><USER12> The couple I sat in for were 10ish minutes (I think the NBC Nightly News segment has a program manager saying "Alright, 12 minutes"). They were done so that each team reported to their team lead what they were working on beforehand, and then at the scrum, the team leads aggregated everything that was going on with their team.

<comment><USER11> Makes sense. Few scrum teams get that large where you need to start thinking about optimizations like that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _In user studies, people quickly found a new way to interact with Google: type until the gray text matches your intention and then move your eyes to the results. We were actually surprised at how well this worked—most people in our studies didn't even notice that anything had changed. Google was just faster._

If this is the case, then what's the point of showing the search results as the user types? It seems that just having predictions is sufficient.

<comment><USER14> They tested that:

 _For example, we tried a prototype where we waited for someone to stop typing before showing results, which did not work. We realized the experience needed to be fast to work well._

<comment><USER13> Cursor down + return is pretty fast.

<comment><USER14> It's never fast enough until people can't tell the difference. "Pretty fast" is meaningless in that context. What matters is whether it is perceptibly faster or slower.

<comment><USER13> I think the real issue is something that Google is not telling us.

Maybe most people can't figure out they can press cursor down + return.

Or maybe this is a flashy way to distinguish their product from the competition.

Or maybe this is a way to encourage users to use shorter queries (as they can see how effective they are from the search results), thus forcing advertisers to pay more for more general terms.

<comment><USER14> I vote "people can't figure out they can press cursor down + return." And that's a perfectly good reason for changing the UI.

<comment><USER15> Even those who can figure it out probably benefit from fewer necessary steps, allowing them to pay less attention to the _process_ of searching and more attention to the _content_.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Universal Mathematics: All Life on Earth Is Bound by One Spooky Algorithm - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZT59QUlrTFQ <comment><USER2> Doesn't that provide an way to probe the gaia hypothesis?

What happens if you plug the size of the earth in that scaling formula?

Or the size of our solar system, or the galaxy, or even the universe?

Maybe the principle can be applied elsewhere? He speaks about hierarchical distribution networks.

Couldn't we try to apply that to other networks? Social graph, program data flow, computer architecture, internet, power distribution (electricity), etc.

I would be interested to see what the results would be.

<comment><USER2> Ah!

A review of his book "Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies" contains this:

"West's work has been game-changing for biologists, but then he made the even bolder move of exploring his work's applicability. Cities, too, are constellations of networks and laws of scalability relate with eerie precision to them. Recently, West has applied his revolutionary work to the business world. This investigation has led to powerful insights into why some companies thrive while others fail."

So I guess I just have to look into the book.</comment></comment>


Should You Build First for Android or iOS? - <AUTHOR> http://room4debate.com/debate/should-you-build-first-for-android-or-ios

<comment><USER2> You should build first for users (and customers, if they are not the same group as your users). I suggest making a guess at what platform your users prefer and focusing on that.</comment>


There Is No Reliable Way to Detect Hacked Ballot-Marking Devices - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.08144 <comment><USER2> About fucking time. I have been preaching about this since 2000. Actually started research a bit prior.

Here is the core of the matter:

One, validating code that is actually running requires forensic level investigation. Non trivial and definitely not cost effective.

This is why;

[https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=358210](https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=358210)

More importantly, anonymous voting presents a machine trust problem that does not come up often.

Imagine the computer is a person in a secure room alone. You approach them and say your vote, or press a button. Whatever.

They say and or show you your vote through a window, and then they make a private record outside the view of anyone.

That private record determines the election.

You, the voter are forced to trust your intent was duly recorded.

With a paper ballot, the chain of trust between voter intent and the record to be used in the election is intact. You the voter know your intent is captured.

We have no solutions to this, that do not also involve personally identifiable votes.</comment>


Heroku XL - <AUTHOR> https://www.heroku.com/xl <comment><USER3> A quick check on the documentation reveals instead of routing the requests to the first available or least loaded dynos, the dyno routing algorithm now routes requests to random dynos(Reference: [https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/how-heroku- works#dyno-...](https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/how-heroku-works#dyno- manager))

Routing requests to random dyno is definitely not the smartest routing algorithm because it kind of defeats the purpose of having a routing layer. If you are not aware of the issue between Heroku and Rap Genius, I will think it is important enough for anybody who considers Heroku to be aware of. Here is the URL with relevant information: [http://news.rapgenius.com/James-somers- herokus-ugly-secret-a...](http://news.rapgenius.com/James-somers-herokus-ugly- secret-annotated)

<comment><AUTHOR> This has been talked to death, but for the general case, for applications that can handle concurrent requests (like Rails with a rack server just a tiny bit smarter than Webrick), random routing works just as well as intelligent routing with far less coupling in the routing later, making it more robust and easier to manage and scale.

<comment><USER4> Rails servers like Unicorn can still only support ~4 concurrent requests on regular dynos (roughly 1 per virtualized core), lessening the problem but not solving it if you have many requests per second.

<comment><USER5> Actually that makes a tremendous difference. It is a bit difficult to explain but even 2 concurrent requests per dyno is a lot better than 1. As you go up from 2 to 3 to 4 the difference quickly becomes minimal. I'll try to explain why, but warning: hand waving ahead!

The problem with only 1 concurrent request is that if that request takes long to process then it can block other requests that are queued up in that dyno. Lets say that 1% of the requests take long. If a dyno can process only 1 request concurrently then at each request there is a 0.01 chance that that will block other requests. If however it can process 4 concurrent requests, then the dyno will only be blocked if it gets 4 long requests at the same time. So there is only a 0.01^4 = 0.00000001 chance that a dyno will be blocked.

<comment><USER6> Not quite. If you keep routing to a blocked backend, any requests that hit that backend will have unacceptable latencies. Since the routing is essentially random, you'll still be fielding about 1/4 of your requests to that backend, so one long request winds up making 1/4 of all your requests have unacceptable latencies.

<comment><USER5> I don't think that's how it works. Within a single dyno with concurrency of 4 a single request can not block block any requests. It can only block 1 thread, but then the other requests will be processed on the other threads. Routing is only random to dynos, within dynos it is not random.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Heroku made the bold decision to design its routing technology to be optimized for things like Node and Go rather than Ruby. So if you are using Ruby on Rails (like RapGenius) Heroku's platform will simply fall short, both in terms of efficiency and flexibility.

XL Dynos let you throw money at the random routing problem which helps routing efficiency at the expense of spend efficiency (b/c they are a lot more expensive and scaling down to 1 XL dyno is still pretty expensive).

In my opinion, if you're using anything other than 1X dynos on Heroku you are compensating for some other part of your stack being broken.

We're probably months away from Heroku having some serious competition in the super easy PAAS space. Heroku's high prices have summoned competitors en masse, and by some stroke of luck Amazon has not really made a serious effort to encroach on Heroku's profits.

<comment><USER8> > Amazon has not really made a serious effort to encroach on Heroku's profits

Amazon hasn't, but there are a reasonable number of simple PaaS competitors these days:

Microsoft's Azure ([http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/details/web- sites/](http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/details/web-sites/)): ASP.NET, PHP, Node.js, Python

Red Hat's OpenShift ([https://www.openshift.com/](https://www.openshift.com/)): Java, Ruby, PHP, Node.js, Python and Perl

Nodejitsu ([https://www.nodejitsu.com/](https://www.nodejitsu.com/)): Node.js

<comment><USER9> Ninefold.com has a wider choice of server sizes and is paas similar to heroku

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> There's also a more informative blog post here:

[https://blog.heroku.com/archives/2014/2/3/heroku- xl](https://blog.heroku.com/archives/2014/2/3/heroku-xl)

<comment><USER10> Thanks - this is a much better resource than the marketing page!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Heroku's $0.05/hr base pricing hasn't changed in a very long time, while Amazon has both dropped price and increased power.

I love Heroku's service, but it's starting to get very expensive. This $576/month plan proves it. :/

<comment><USER12> And it still goes down when Amazon does (or has this changed?). Sure you get something extra, but paying more just to add another layer that can possibly fail? I don't know...

edit: Oh, and you are getting vendor-locked and they can go Google-App-Engine on you.

<comment><USER13> [https://blog.heroku.com/archives/2009/4/24/commercial_launch](https://blog.heroku.com/archives/2009/4/24/commercial_launch)

It was .055 / hour when it launched in 2009. Back then, EC2 small instances cost .10 / hour ([http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats- new/2009/10/27/announc...](http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats- new/2009/10/27/announcing-lower-amazon-ec2-instance-pricing/)).

Now? Heroku is .05 / hour, and small EC2 instances are .06 / hour. This is why I stopped using Heroku a year or so ago for anything I plan on paying for. They just let Amazon keep driving down their bottom line without passing any of those savings onto their customers.

<comment><USER14> Heroku isn't just a transparent proxy to EC2. You are getting several other services that are not easy to put together on your own - <USER2> infrastructure, simple git push deployment, world-class postgres tooling. To put this kind of stuff together on your own is costly, and you will likely make a lot of mistakes on the way (mistakes Heroku has already made and learned from).

Another thought: When you use Basecamp, are you calculating how much they are spending on hosting your data?

<comment><USER15> This plan is $576 a month, the actual hardware you get for that is mediocre at best. A postgres instance and git push deploy isn't worth that much and isn't that hard to set up yourself.

sure, you could run into some issues while doing it yourself but that risk isn't worth nearly $600 p/m IMO

<comment><USER14> How many hours do you spend a month on devops tasks? And on top of that, how diligent are you with applying patches, testing backups, and all other sorts of drudgery necessary to keep a production site running smoothly? Take that number of hours, multiply it by your consulting rate, and there's a good chance Heroku may save you money.

For most production apps, you'd need at least a part time ops person to do things right. That's the kind of cost Heroku saves you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's made a massive difference to us; we've gone from 10 x 1x dynos to 2 x XL - it's done the following to our latency graph: [http://i.imgur.com/BGKwGfp.png](http://i.imgur.com/BGKwGfp.png). Orange is perc99.

<comment><USER17> So you changed from $0.50 / hour to $1.60 / hour. Did you first try with, say, 20 x 1x dynos (that would cost $1.00 / hour)?

<comment><USER16> Yep, but it didn't help like this did. I don't have graphs for you I'm afraid.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Someone explain me, why I would need a 6GB RAM machine over a dedicated server that I could have with 10 times more machine at the same price..

<comment><USER19> Maybe you don't have a full time sysadmin in your employ. Maybe you are a one- man team that would rather spend your time working on user-facing features instead of fiddling with infrastructure.</comment></comment>


The Mission of Tesla - <AUTHOR> http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/mission-tesla <comment><USER2> Everybody is missing a huge point:

Vehicle fire now completely covered under warranty, even when caused by operator error.

 _" Third, to reinforce how strongly we feel about the low risk of fire in our cars, we will be amending our warranty policy to cover damage due to a fire, even if due to driver error. Unless a Model S owner actively tries to destroy the car, they are covered. Our goal here is to eliminate any concern about the cost of such an event and ensure that over time the Model S has the lowest insurance cost of any car at our price point. Either our belief in the safety of our car is correct and this is a minor cost or we are wrong, in which case the right thing is for Tesla to bear the cost rather than the car buyer."_

<comment><USER3> That will be interesting to see a manufacturer warranty stuck in the middle of normal insurance disputes. Like what if someone is at fault and hits a Tesla and causes a fire, would that be covered under the Tesla warranty, or the other party's insurance?

<comment><USER4> Tesla will pay for that and will have to use its channels to get its money from the one who is at fault (either his/her insurance company or him directly). I'm pretty sure that's more or less standard insurance stuff and Tesla is not inventing anything new - they just invest some of their money into that. It might be more interesting how they solve international problems regarding that but I'm sure other car manufacturers should have something similar to that.

<comment><USER5> Its called subrogation, and it happens everywhere in the insurance industry to properly account for fault/cause.

<comment><USER3> It's interesting that Tesla says they will pay regardless of fault. That must make the insurers very excited.

<comment><USER5> An insurer has to pay the manufacturer the full price of the vehicle. Tesla's margins are approaching 25%. Tesla is betting its cheaper for them to replace the car at cost than the PR hassle because people suck at math. In the event another few cars go up in fire, Tesla eats the vehicle manufacturing cost in return for goodwill and people continuing to purchase their vehicles.

You have to admit, Elon stands behind his vehicles, literally with his personal wealth. Compare that to other luxury brands. It's brilliant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The sentence -- "First, we have rolled out an over-the-air update to the air suspension that will result in greater ground clearance at highway speeds." \-- for some reason deeply amuses me. I thought that it was scary to push out OTAs to phones (I hope everything works like it did in the dev environment); I can't imagine pushing an OTA to a $85,000 car!

A few sentences later, though -- "Another software update expected in January will give the driver direct control of the air suspension ride height transitions." \-- concerns me. Tesla's car computer is becoming increasingly complex, and the fact that the infotainment system will have such complete control over the car -- and will still accept data from outside sources -- is very concerning. I hope that at some point soon Tesla will begin talking about the security methodology that they use for the firmware running on the car, and how they prevent unauthorized code from running.

<comment><USER7> So as there have been instances of an OTA update "bricking" phones, there will likely at some point be an OTA to cars which causes mass crashes and casualties. It's just a question of when...

Yet more movement of freedom and power from individuals to corporations.

<comment><USER8> How is that different from the cases where batches of faulty cars are sold and cause crashes and deaths?

With OTA updates you can at least fix it with a rollback, quickly, before more people die.

I fail to see this as a move of power from individuals to corporations.

<comment><USER7> I guess I just trust hardware far more than software in general.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Flawed argument!

Model S is only 1 year old and it's a premium vehicle. So the fire rate should be compared to those of premium vehicles about the same age.

<comment><USER10> Hate to break this to you, but the internals of most "premium" vehicles when it comes to things like engines are largely unchanged year to year. I test drove a lot of premium vehicles last year and found most of them were using engines/drivetrains that were still based on 15-20 year old designs with only cosmetic (and cabin electronics) changes over the years.

So in that sense, the Model S is a baby in terms of maturity of the vehicle platform.

<comment> at-fates-hands >>> I test drove a lot of premium vehicles last year and found most of them were using engines/drivetrains that were still based on 15-20 year old designs with only cosmetic (and cabin electronics) changes.

I'd love to know which cars you're referring to. I've been a huge BMW guy for years and they generally go on 5 year cycle with their engines and drivetrains.

For instance, on the M5 the E60 M5 used the same drivetrain and engine (with minor tweaks) from 2005-2010. Whereas the new F10 M5 engine and drivetrain was redesigned in 2011 and has yet to see any major changes in its current iteration.

<comment><USER10> I saw it across manufacturers the German manufacturers: BMW, Mercedes, and Audi.

On the Japanese side, Nissan/Infiniti abused the hell out of their 3.5L V6 in every car they made for more than a decade.

Regarding the BMW M5, the F10 is actually very similar to the F01 which came on the previous 7 series in 2008. Even the E60 was considered an upsized 3 series engine.[1]

Regardless, the point I'm trying to make is that Tesla is really trying to break new ground and needs about a decade for their vehicle platforms to mature before comparisons can be made with any of the current luxury brand. The other brands have a pedigree which goes back multiple decades so even their newer vehicles have a few decades of maturity baked into them.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW_F10#cite_note-12](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW_F10#cite_note-12)

<comment><USER11> Your BMW example is not even close to 15 years. Care to explain?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Mr. Musk seems to have a habit of publicizing his back-of-the-napkin calculations. "Based on the Model S track record so far, you have a zero percent chance of being hurt in an accident resulting in a battery fire."

It seems to have worked well for him. Maybe I should pick it up.

<comment><USER13> It's just like in the 60-ties the US government calculated that there is a 0% risk of accidental detonation of nuclear bombs[1],because they have not experienced it yet.

I believe that electric cars are safer than gasoline cars,but the sample size for Tesla is way to small to draw such conclusions yet.

[1] Eric Schlosser, "Command And Control"

<comment><USER14> Out of curiosity, has there been an accidental detonation of a nuclear bomb yet? I browsed through [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_nuclear_accide...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_nuclear_accidents) but could only find non-nuclear detonations.

<comment><USER15> There were a close call involving a bomber that accidentally ditched a nuke (i think?). It was the last fail safe that stopped it.

I remember reading about it here, don't have the article in hand. I'm sure you can find it.

<comment><USER13> Read that book I mentioned in the original post. It mentions plenty of nuclear-related accidents. The one you probably think about happened when an armed thermonuclear bomb fell out of a bomber, yanking the arming wire out, arming every subsystem as it fell - barometric switches activated,thermal batteries ignited , and upon hitting the ground the piezoelectric crystals in the nose cone crushed activating the high explosives surrounding the core.

It would have detonated, except that the "fire-safe" switch in the cockpit was not switch to "fire". That switch was just two very low voltage wires running close together, and it was found later that pretty much anything in that bomber could have triggered it. It was extremely lucky that that bomb has not detonated that day.

There were also a few bombs which were lost in fire on the ground, couple of those had their high explosives ignite without producing a nuclear yield but spreading plutonium around, contaminating ground.

There were bombers which fell apart in the air, which crashed, most of the time the nuclear bombs they were carrying survived intact,but a few times those crashes resulted in a widespread contamination with plutonium - a famous one in Spain and another near an American Polar station that the bomber was monitoring from Soviet attack - that one is particularly interesting,because had the bombs aboard that bomber detonated and destroyed that station, it would be extremely likely that the US government would assume that it was destroyed by a Soviet nuclear strike,and not by their own machinery - and that would probably cause them to retaliate starting a nuclear war.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This just shows how insane the media world is. Great rebuttal. I love this one: "It is literally impossible for another car to have a better safety track record, as it would have to possess mystical powers of healing."

</comment><comment><USER17> Why are people desperate to see Tesla fail? Is it a negative PR campaign from the auto or oil industry? This blog post shouldn't need to be written.

<comment><USER18> Its the opposite, especially here.

Musk and Tesla are given far more benefit of the doubt than any one else. Criticism is jumped on and scorned very quickly, and is a karma massacre. As such, I normally do not comment on Tesla threads at all. There seems to be little reason applied, its like saying some one's baby is ugly.

If it were a Microsoft car catching fire, or over stating benefits and what not, I suspect the reaction would be very, very different. Im beginning to see Tesla as the automotive Linux. Wont be long until we have people claiming Tesla cars cure cancer.

This fawning attitude, and unwillingness to allow debate and criticism seriously puts me off Tesla. I mean, even you have tried to suggest that any criticism is not reasoned debate, but oil and automotive negative PR. The criticism cant possibly be reasonable, it simply must be a conspiracy of the oil industry. You even say that the opinion should not be written at all. So much for open society.

All this, IMHO, is a big problem for Tesla. When people are being unrealistically positive and rejecting criticism like its some sort of heresy, Tesla becomes an easy target to shoot at. Especially for its enemies.

Too much "one of us" vibe here as far a Musk is concerned. He is a great bloke, and Im am very much in the positive camp, I've been advocating and keenly following electric cars for years before Musk ever got involved and I am 100% glad that a man like Musk has invested loads of his own money and time in to it, but fans need to be realistic and not so silly about criticism.

Tesla and Musk are not the problem, the fans however are.

<comment><USER19> I take the opposite viewpoint. 99.9% of startups, tech companies, and subjects on Hacker News can go hang themselves. People comparing Steve Jobs to Elon Musk are, frankly, completely missing the point.

Seriously, this is what baffles me most about Tesla hate. Did everyone forget that our world has had a massive, unsustainable energy crisis for 50 years? Forget climate change for a second, our entire foreign policy since 1973 has been based around securing cheap oil. Every person in our country should be unified in heaping as much praise as humanly possible on Musk because Tesla is _literally saving the goddamn world_.

<comment><USER20> Tesla cars do not sure solve the energy problem at all. They don't use significantly less energy than a modern diesel BMW, they just use batteries not oil. The energy crisis we have is more related to how can we produce the energy for the batteries.

<comment><USER15> Internal combustion engines are incredibly inefficient, compared even to coal plants.

<comment><USER20> They're around 20%. Increasing that to 50-60% (as you need t consider the inefficiencies of batteries, transportation of electricity, not just the efficiency of the motor itself) won't save the planet. It helps, but what we need is fusion or something like that.

<comment><USER21> Reducing automotive energy use by a half or two thirds would have an extremely large impact, especially if you consider all of the new autos that will be coming online in India+China. Sure, we still need to switch power generation to cleaner tech as well, but this simplifies the solutions greatly, as power generation will then be concentrated. If we can stop focusing our national attention on trying to secure our oil supplies, we have a better chance at solving the problem as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Whatever you think of the blog post and Musk's spin - he puts his money where his mouth is. He's put into writing that if a 3rd party investigation into the fires finds anything they can do to improve safety - everyone gets a free retrofit. And short of an owner actively trying to destroy their car, Tesla's warranty will cover fire damage.

How many CEO's have that level of confidence in their product? Can you imagine Honda, Audi, BMW or any of the others reacting that way to something like this? And they've been around for much longer.

<comment><USER23> > _Can you imagine Honda, Audi, BMW or any of the others reacting that way to > something like this?_

Yes, I can.

Do you really think he's doing this out of the goodness of his heart?

These fires are both a legal and PR nightmare. Nobody, at this point, knows how big of a problem this is. Despite the yarn that Musk is spinning, ICE cars don't combust when they hit road debris. Personally, I think the problem is exaggerated, but let's not dismiss the fact that there's a battery across the whole bottom of these cars. Go to the Tesla forums; there are owners there that are legitimately concerned for their safety.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This whole fiasco reminds me of Ryan Holiday's book "Trust me I'm lying". I can't help but wonder if some "media manipulator" was involved in the possible manufacture of some negative PR for Tesla. This assumption is not unreasonable since Ralph Nader was attacked by hired gun media (hired by the big three) when he dared challenge the status quo. I'm not that the big three are involved, but the stink caused by the car fires seems a bit "manipulated". My friend rolled his truck this weekend. He's looking for the new car and when I suggested a Tesla, he gave me a Resounding no, due to fire hazard. While this a heuristic observation, he is a pretty innovative guy and I'm confident he would a picked or even considered a tesla had it not been for the negative press. Lastly, I wonder if Elon's doing the right thing by repeating this. Maybe he should talk to Ryan Holiday type. I genuinely hope that this blows over and that Tesla & Elon can get back to building awesome cars & changing the world rather than playing PR.

<comment><USER25> There has been some absolutely ridiculous media coverage from the usual suspects like Fox[1], but it doesn't really have the smell of a organised campaign to me (yet). It's just the usual right wing talking heads taking a skewed view of things because of their preexisting biases.

I think a lot of Tesla fans are getting into the conspiracy theory zone with this and they are starting to sound fairly cult-like. HN and the Tesla users forums had quite a few people seriously suggesting that some agent of 'big auto' was out on the highway looking for teslas to throw debris under (no doubt the 'big auto' spies inside Tesla had alerted them to the vulnerability of the underside of the battery pack).

The personality cult surrounding Musk turns a lot of people off. Also the Boeing incident is coming back to bite him now, and rightly so.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhMjRzvE1Ng](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhMjRzvE1Ng)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I did not see Elon complaining when a car launch got so much attention from the press. This just seems to be the other side of the same coin. This happens to every runaway success. Remember the "death grip" nonsense for iPhone4 and how it was blown out of proportion? Media loves the story of a man who worked against all adds to build/create something amazing. Unfortunately, they love "the fall of the guy" even more.

<comment><USER27> > Unfortunately, they love "the fall of the guy" even more.

Tesla went out of their way to flaunt the safety features of the car, alleging a 5.4 NHTSA score when the agency explicitly said that they don't issue scores that high. Tesla said they had the safest cars on the road, and this is the eventual result (people actually expect it to be safer).

IMHO the reaction is entirely appropriate given Musk's and Tesla's behavior up to this point. If Musk and Tesla weren't flaunting their safety claims, this wouldn't be a significant issue

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> "It is also why arsonists tend to favor gasoline. Trying to set the side of a building on fire with a battery pack is far less effective."

CHALLENGE ACCEPTED.

<comment><USER29> I suggest you start here:

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

Check out the "fraggucino", which combines a lithium battery, water, a condom, and a coffee flask to make a big bang.

<comment><USER30> Look at the bang made by that "fraggucino". Look at the effects of the same coffee flask if used as a Molotov cocktail. These two things are not in the same league.

<comment><USER29> And look at the tiny quantity of lithium involved. What could we do with, say, half-a-liter of powdered lithium?

I should shut up now. I'm probably already on an NSA watchlist for the search term I used to find that site.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is probably the first article I've read linked from HN where "firewall" referred to a barrier designed to partition fire.

</comment><comment><USER32> In general, I'm not a big fan of linking directly to PR put out by self- interested parties. It's very hard for the average reader to de-spin the propaganda put out in these missives. They're being manipulated and don't know it. I'd much prefer a link to a well written analysis of events from an unbiased industry expert.

</comment><comment><USER33> _Reading the headlines, it is therefore easy to assume that the Tesla Model S and perhaps electric cars in general have a greater propensity to catch fire than gasoline cars when nothing could be further from the truth._

Actually, the Data do not support Him. He is starting to tread on shallow ground, and perhaps should re-evaluate and stratify his data analysis to fires 'on public highways'.[1,2] That is where all of the Tesla Fires are happening. Unfortunately, those data do not support him.

 _By this metric, you are more than four and a half times more likely to experience a fire in a gasoline car than a Model S! Considering the odds in the absolute, you are more likely to be struck by lightning in your lifetime than experience even a non-injurious fire in a Tesla._

And, Bayesian statistics might give you a different analysis.

From a PR perspective, I wonder if this is really doing him any favours? The note he wrote after the october crash was flawed, but perhaps excusable. This is too pre-meditated and now must just be considered somewhere on the spectrum of 'wrong' to 'misguided' to 'misleading'.

[1] In data terms, it excludes intentional fires like vandalism, and parked cars being struck, and accidents in motor repair facilities, etc.

[2] [http://legal- dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Public+highway](http://legal- dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Public+highway)

<comment><USER34> So where are the data for gasoline car fires on public highways? You're accusing someone of not being supported by their data, and offering _absolutely no data_ in counterpoint.

<comment><USER33> see, for example: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6691541](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6691541)

<comment><USER35> You have pointed to another HN comment in which you make assertions about car fires without providing any actual evidence.

I've had a look and entirely failed to find any evidence supporting your claim that 80% of car fires occur while the car is not being driven on roads.

It _does_ appear that most car fires are not the result of crashes or collisions. I don't see that that's relevant. If I were deciding between two cars on the basis of fire risk, the question I'd care about is "how likely is this car to catch fire and injure me?", not "how likely is this car to catch fire and injure me _as a result of a collision_?".

What _does_ look fishy to me about Musk's argument here is that most vehicle fires seem to be the result of mechanical or electrical faults, which become more likely with age as things wear out and break and corrode. All Tesla cars currently on the roads are rather new, so comparing them against the population of cars at large could be quite misleading.

[EDITED to add: aha, following a longer chain of links from your earlier comment I found some statistics. The terms used in the NFPA report in question are ambiguous, but what's clear is that the statistics you yourself cited _plainly refute your 80% figure_. Here are the figures: 22% "residential street, road, or residential driveway"; 18% "vehicle parking area"; 17% "highway or divided highway"; 8% "unclassified street"; 6% "street or road in commercial area"; 5% "mercantile or office"; 4% "open land, beach or campsite". So, at a bare minimum, the lowest fraction of fires that could be on roads would be 17% + 8% +% 6% = 31%, and that assumes that _none_ of the "residential street, road, or residential highway" and "mercantile or office" figures are for cars being driven on the road -- which seems monstrously improbable.]

<comment><USER33> The data comes from Figure 1 of the Report that Tesla cited in October. I provided the above merely as an example of another way to read the report, but feel free to do your own analysis. Clearly, Telsa fires were 100% on public highways (by any definition). To which the report reads:

 _Where do automobile fires occur? Roughly three-quarters (71%) of automobile fires and associated deaths (76%) occurred on highways, streets or parking areas. While only 17% of the fires occurred on highways or divided highways..._

So, taken strictly the analyis seems apples to apples. In any event there is clearly some adjustment that needs to occur rather than a blind-usage, IMHO. Whether the haircut is 33% at a minimum or a higher amount.

[PS I prvly addressed the :Edit: points in another comment below> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6760562](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6760562)]

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The Tesla counter spin to avoid a recall here is incredible. The OTA update is a de facto recall but it only partially addresses the issue.

<comment><USER36> So, what is the issue that needs to be addressed exactly? That cars get damaged when they hit things?

<comment><USER3> That the "armor plate" they are using to protect the battery pack isn't strong enough to deal with some road debris. They seem to have underestimated exactly how much energy they were dealing with. And they could have made that metal thicker but it would have negative affected the range.

<comment><USER37> It's already much stronger than the typical protection of gasoline tanks -- and it was claimed that it was a very exceptional circumstance that allowed that armor plate to be penetrated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Yes, but the Model S's on the road are less than a couple of years old. How many gasoline fires are caused by cars that are a couple of years old? I would guess this comparison would put the gasoline fires more in line with Tesla car rates. I would assume that most of the gasoline engines that catch fire are from older cars which haven't been maintained well.

</comment><comment><USER39> "First, we have rolled out an over-the-air update to the air suspension that will result in greater ground clearance at highway speeds."

Wow. Now I live in the future.

<comment><USER40> I'm actually curious on that statement as to how it affects the rated MPGe. My understanding is that the car is low to the ground for better handling and better aerodynamics. Even if this change doesn't result in lower MPGe, what would happen if a OTA update to a future car resulted in lower-than-rated MPG? I wonder what the EPA would have to say about that.

<comment><USER41> Good observation... and by how much does this reduce the operating range of the car?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I find their statistics to be somewhat misleading. Can we see fire statistics on cars produced from the same time as Model S? Because I am not surprised a lot of the older cars are catching on fire.

I still believe Tesla will be safer then gasoline cars, but gap definitely would not be orders of magnitude.

</comment><comment><USER43> What I want to know is what Elon Musk is working on next. He's not 100% on Tesla 24x7, because now he has people to optimize the factories and work out the next models. What else is he doodling about on his notepad.

This is the Elon Musk I want to see, not the harried auto executive making PR stunts.

</comment><comment><USER44> I don't know what's going on but I sometimes wish someone would tell Elon to cool it and really think things through before making public statements. I realize there's a lot of emotion involved. His competitors are loving every minute of him flying off the handle and making dumb statements.

> Based on the Model S track record so far, you have a zero percent chance of > being hurt in an accident resulting in a battery fire

This is right up there with Bush's "Mission Accomplished", his Dad's "Read my lips. No new taxes.", Obama's red line and "You can keep your plan. Period".

It's not true. Or put in better terms, the data is not statistically significant. And he knows it.

These are the kinds of statements you really regret making when reality catches up with you.

> There are now substantially more than the 19,000 Model S vehicles on the > road that were reported in our Q3 shareholder letter for an average of one > fire per at least 6,333 cars, compared to the rate for gasoline vehicles of > one fire per 1,350 cars. By this metric, you are more than four and a half > times more likely to experience a fire in a gasoline car than a Model S!

Again, he knows this math is wrong. To make this comparison stick you'd have to aggregate data going back to the very introduction of gasoline powered vehicles. You'd also have to include every kind of vehicle --trucks, vans, busses, not just cars. And then you'd have to remove the percentage of fires that were caused intentionally which, from what I was able to garner, could represent a massive 20% to 30% of fires. Fires due to collisions represent a smaller fraction of all automobile fires.

Further to that, you'd have to also consider vehicle age, maintenance and environment. Is it fair to compare a fire on a a 15 year old truck in a rural setting on substandard roads against a brand new Tesla in the city on great roads? How are Tesla's going to perform (in terms of safety) when they are five, ten, fifteen or twenty years old?

Perhaps the comparison should be restricted to fires caused by collisions (not intentional or other non-collision causes) on new cars operating in the same urban centers where Tesla's are found.

In other words, he is grabbing numbers without any though given to applicability.

Again, these are statements that obviously come from anger and frustration and you could end-up regretting them.

> you are more likely to be struck by lightning in your lifetime than > experience even a non-injurious fire in a Tesla.

From [1]:

"The odds of becoming a lightning victim in the U.S. in any one year is 1 in 700,000. The odds of being struck in your lifetime is 1 in 3,000."

So we are comparing the odds of something happening over someone's lifetime (50 to 90 years?) with a fire in a car that's been in the market for ONE YEAR? Really? How about we compare it to the 1 in 700,000 yearly case? It's still a bullshit comparison. But, hey, since we are slinging bullshit.

Again. Please. Think before saying such things. All you need is one fire where someone gets hurt or killed and this statement could be thrown back as an utter joke. With only 20,000 cars on the road every incident has the potential to change numbers in a radical way. If that happens you now have a 1 in 20,000 chance of being killed in a Tesla in any one year. See how stupid it is to make such statements?

> The far more deadly nature of a gasoline car fire deserves to be re- > emphasized.

Who do you think you are talking to? Who's your audience? Children? There are a BILLION cars in the world[0]. A BILLION. That number might not include motorcycles, trucks and other variants. I would suggest gasoline powered vehicles are pretty damn safe, particularly when you consider markets where they might not have pristine roads, regular maintenance and where cars are used for ten, twenty and thirty years rather than flipping them every few years as is often the case in affluent communities in the US and elsewhere.

Anyhow, the point is that sometimes you have to lead by not reacting to things with emotion and by not saying things you know you will have to regret. The strongest statement he could make right now is to crash several Model-S's (as painful as that might be) into concrete walls, into each other and into gasoline cars and show --in a very public way-- just how safe they might be. If they are not. Fix it and then show the public. Release the videos and let people sort it out.

[0] [http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2011/08/23/car- population_n_934...](http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2011/08/23/car- population_n_934291.html)

[1] [http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/06/0623_040623_...](http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/06/0623_040623_lightningfacts.html)

</comment><comment><USER45> Why are comments here focussing on Tesla so much. Isn't it time to acknowledge that the media are actively damaging society with misinformation and fear mongering, often in support of entrenched corporate interests?

</comment><comment><USER29> This is a marketing problem.

For marketing purposes, Teslas must be perceived to as safe, if not safer in every respect than gasoline cars. So if they're more likely to catch fire when they hit road debris, that's a problem.

</comment><comment><USER46> Hope it's not superfluous to point out, but it's kind of funny: "By By Elon Musk" is seen under the title. That sounds hostile :) (the duplicate By isn't seen in other posts on the blog)

</comment><comment><USER47> FD: TSLA Shareholder

We should discuss whether the situation changes over time. As gasoline cars age, their likelihood of catching fire increases. As electric cars age, does their chance also increase?

The flammable elements of a gas-powered car also have wear and tear issues, and poor service risks. A do-it-yourself mechanic replacing a fuel filter is a worry, for example.

Or, an old engine with a compromised head gasket, coated in leaked oil and then overheating.

No time to do the analysis myself, but I am guessing that the failure modes of a gas car that cause fire are many and the failure modes of a Tesla are few. Moreover, the likelihood of a particular failure mode in a Tesla may not increase at the same rate as gas as the cars age.

</comment><comment><USER48> I can't say enough how much I respect Tesla and the integrity they approach their market with. Other automotive companies are miles behind!

</comment><comment><USER49> The amount of hate in this thread is sickening.

</comment><comment><USER50> To make money, of fucking course.

</comment><comment><USER44> I've said this before and now I'll generalize my statement to say that the most important issue in the electric vehicle segment is and will be that of high power and high voltage system safety, of which the battery is one component. If the public becomes spooked by problems and accidents in this area it could set the electric vehicle market back a decade or more.

The real test for electrics will come when one or two million electric vehicles of all types are sharing the road. That's when this issue of battery and power system safety will be hugely important. I can imagine semi's with a million Wh battery systems rolling down the highway. What I cannot imagine are chain reaction collisions involving a variety of electric and liquid fuel vehicles.

Tesla is at the forefront of this movement, which means all eyes are on them, the arrows are on their backs and they have the burden of proof.

One of the most expensive types of businesses to get into are those where you have to educate your customer base before a sales pitch can even begin. Having to educating the market before you can sell to them can seriously derail one's focus and cost bundles of money that could be put to better use elsewhere. I've been in markets like that. It's a horrible slog.

Up until now, for the most part, electrics have avoided this territory. I fear that period is ending. Up until now the conversations about electrics were about range and relative cost when compared to gasoline vehicles. It feels like we are now entering the domain of having to potentially prove to the market that the technology is safe as well as to remove (or stop the potential of the development of) fears of fire and electrocution.

Tesla, due to their position in the market, has the honor of having all microscopes aimed at everything they do. Every mishap is amplified. Now that the NTSB has officially opened an investigation every afternoon news show is jumping on the issues. It will soon be everywhere. And Tesla now has to defend, educate and prove to the market that what they are doing is safe.

Competitors are now going to pull back and let Tesla take the hits. In markets where a huge investment is required in order to educate the customer base it is often a good idea to not be a pioneer. They will let Tesla burn reputation, bleed cash and resources to deal with the challenge of getting people to be comfortable with the technology. In these markets letting someone else slot through this phase is often the most intelligent strategy.

Once things settle, competitors will come in and enjoy a market segment that has been paved flat by the pioneer/s. It is far less costly --at all levels-- to enter at that point. The mentality of a typical potential customer --after massive investments in educating them-- is now very different. Now customers look at the available products and think about which one to buy rather than whether or not to take a risk with this new technology. That's a massively different mind-set. That's a mind set primed for well executed product, marketing and sales strategies with wide distribution, solid sales channels and a solid post-sales support infrastructure --all of which the established players either know how to do or already have in place.

Manufacturers entering the market after the education phase can focus on pricing, marketing and, in general, execution rather than educating or evangelizing the audience. There's a huge difference in cost of sales in "nicely paved markets".

When that happens, when the market is "flat" and competitors enter in force, they could run right over Tesla, push them right off the edge of the market or they could be swallowed-up by a larger organization. Let's not forget Tesla sold somewhere in the order of twenty thousand cars --total. There are companies that probably sell that many cars per day. The difference in scale is huge.

It is possible that Tesla is at the start of an existential threat. It is hard to predict which way this will go. It's all on them now and they are all-in. They can't afford many more fires. And they certainly can't afford to have the market turn on them. They need to be way ahead of this and spend lots of money to show people this technology is safe. And, if it isn't, they need to move quickly to make it safe and then show the market. Quickly.

Volvo used to run commercials featuring cars being rolled and crashed in order to show how well they protected occupants. Tesla might have to crash a few cars into concrete walls or into each other to demonstrate how survivable their high voltage and high current systems might be. If they don't get ahead of this and more accidents are reported the cost to regain market trust will grow exponentially. And that could be very difficult to survive.

</comment><comment><USER51> Now that, ladies and gentlemen, is persuasive writing.</comment>


Israel offended Japan's prime minister by serving him dessert in a shoe - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/israel-served-japan-prime-minister-shinzo-abe-dessert-out-of-a-shoe-2018-5 <comment><USER2> Sometimes chef's think too much out of the box. There is a chef in Buenos Aires that serves you the food rght on your palms (no plates), he is very exclusive and hard to book.</comment>


How one woman built her own artificial pancreas and started a DIY movement - <AUTHOR> https://www.geekwire.com/2017/health-tech-podcast-one-woman-built-artificial-pancreas-started-diy-movement/ <comment><USER2> It's worth noting that the pancreas produces more than insulin, though that's the most common failure. Cystic Fibrosis patients have scarring/blocking of the pancreas that results in malnutrition due to inadequate delivery of digestive enzymes. (CF is known as a lung disease, but earliest diagnoses, when patients died early enough to not develop lung issues yet, were due to malnutrition and autopsies reveal cysts and fibrotic tissue on the pancreas - "cystic fibrosis of the pancreas" in earliest writings)

Just a long-winded way of being pendantic and saying this couldn't be an artifical pancreas, but just perform one of its roles :-)

</comment><comment><USER3> As a type one diabetic of 18 years, I've been looking for something like this! I'm so happy to see it finally exists! I'll have to look into this more.</comment>


Mozilla: Text to Speech (TTS) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mozilla/TTS <comment><AUTHOR> I was researching for really good open source text to speech programs yesterday and I ran into this project by Mozilla. By the way here is the best voice output I've heard from it [1].

[1]: [https://m.soundcloud.com/user-565970875/ljspeech-logistic- wa...](https://m.soundcloud.com/user-565970875/ljspeech-logistic-wavernn)

<comment><AUTHOR> If you want to run the prebuilt models you can use the colab Jupiter notebooks that user tugstugi put up on this page [1]. The voice from the comment above comes from WaveRNN and Tacotron2.

[1]: [https://github.com/mozilla/TTS/issues/272](https://github.com/mozilla/TTS/issues/272)

<comment><AUTHOR> Here's another longer sample audio file from the TTS program [1].

[1]: [https://m.soundcloud.com/user-565970875/pocket-article- waver...](https://m.soundcloud.com/user-565970875/pocket-article-wavernn-and- tacotron2)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask PG: Would Less Anonymity Help HN? - <AUTHOR>

I'm growing weary of reading long posts which dispense advice or tell stories and then when I go to the users profile, it's blank.
It would be nice if users were encouraged to say who they are, perhaps with a special colored handle for verified identity.
Thoughts? <comment><USER2> Mercy no. What ever happened to letting each comment stand on its own merit?

Hacker News is already afflicted with "celebrities" and their unbearable sycophants. The last we need are additional mechanisms to support the phenomenon. Hell, if anything, we should move more towards meritocracy by hiding authorship for the first 60 minutes of a comment's life...

<comment><USER3> Although that works for some very trivial discussions†, it's unrealistic to think that every comment has easily quantified value without respect to the author's expertise. Not all opinions are equal. That's the kind of malarky that you hear from school districts that want to teach creationism and evolution as two equal theories. It's simply ludicrous to suggest that a comment from somebody who just read 40% of the Wikipedia article deserves the same standing as a comment from somebody who has devoted two decades of his life to the subject.

† _The kind of discussion where each comment can stand on its own merits seems unlikely to be a good fit for Hacker News. That trait implies that the topic is shallow and there aren't any great insights to be had — if there were, the people who had poured years of their life into the topic would deserve more deference._

<comment><USER4> "Comments stand on their own merit" ≠ "all opinions are equal".

<comment><USER3> If comments can stand purely on their own merits, then one person's opinions _must_ be equal to another person's — otherwise something outside of the comment matters. If the only thing that matters is _what_ you say and not the actual expertise that causes you to say it, then your doctor telling you "You need to go see a surgeon right away" is equal to a drunk bum telling you "You need to go see a surgeon right away." That is obviously not true. Thus comments cannot stand solely on their own merits. QED

<comment><USER4> What you're saying now is reasonable (though I still don't agree that HN needs identities).

Your previous comment read as implying that from "all opinions are equal" followed "creationism is as valid as evolution", which is a total straw man since we're here using "equal" to mean "equal irrespective of the person advocating" not "equal irrespective of intrinsic merit". It is not because creationism is advocated by creationists that creationism is a poor theory.

<comment><USER3> There is no intrinsic merit to the statements "God created the world" and "Animals evolved from simpler lifeforms and ultimately from non-living compounds" — their merit is entirely extrinsic, deriving from research done by scientists. It's ignoring these extrinsic factors and "letting the statements stand on their own merits" that leads to creationism being taught in school — that literally is the way the school board members usually put it. That's what I'm getting at: The more context you get for a claim, the better. In technical matters, the identity of the person telling you something is very important, because the value of an expert's opinion is extrinsic to the actual words that comprise the opinion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I hate to be so disparaging, but this has to be one of the worst ideas I've seen thrown around here.

Anonymity is part of the reason you have such intelligent and verbose conversations. At the end of the day it's up to the reader to assert the meaning and usefulness of what they are digesting.

If some sort of a helper guide is needed for you to determine the validly of someone's words, then I suggest you go about trying to think a little more critically.

I don't want some pre-disposed criteria affecting the conversation that's made HN a staple of my daily reading for well over the last year. In fact, it goes against everything HN and the start-up scene stands for.

Hacker News is where the future known commodities of this world come to cut their teeth and get their 'education'. Just because someone hasn't made it, or hasn't promoted themselves to the point of becoming a 'household' name doesn't mean they don't have wise or intelligent words to type.

Lastly, some of the suggestions calling for people to be labeled based on one thing or another.. couple that with some of the legislation that's been getting introduced in the UK/US/FR and extrapolate that out of a little further.. What kind of society do you want to live in?

<comment><AUTHOR> _Just because someone hasn't made it, or hasn't promoted themselves to the point of becoming a 'household' name doesn't mean they don't have wise or intelligent words to type_

I agree with you, but I do find the intersection of people and ideas sometimes more interesting that just ideas.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is an intermediate question.

What is the _actual_ symptom that euroclydon is concerned about?

Verifiability of stories users relate?

Trollish behavior?

Something else?

Anonymity/Pseudonymity is an important part of open discussions in highly interconnected communities where one may get blowback for saying something unpopular.

</comment><comment><USER7> Being quite new to HN, I don't think less anonymity would improve it, mittigating the "fatt finger" syndrome in mobile would help more :-)

As for the advice, it alredy occured more than once to me to read some comment here and my first impression was "ahh, that's stupid". Butter after following the discussion a little bit more and / or on second thought it turned to "hey, good stand point after all".

I think that's where the voting buttons come in.

</comment><comment><USER8> If they left the profile empty, it was their choice. You can interpret that as if they simply don't want to be contacted. Doing what you suggested won't make HN any "better", it will only drive away the commenters that don't want to be reached out, or those who want to remain anonymous.

For other commenters here thinking that less anonymity will improve comment quality, a comment should stand on its own, and comment quality is completely unrelated to the anonymosity from the commenter, as well as his age, sex, job or domain-specific knowledge. I repeat, a comment should stand on its own, any kind of filtering based on someone's profile is flawed.

<comment><AUTHOR> I used to think a comment should stand on its own too, but I now think that the benefit of knowing the background of the person speaking to you outweighs the downside of introducing your own personal prejudices. I mean, should HN be optimized toward mitigating user prejudice or an enhanced experience for the enlightened?

<comment><USER9> What benefit is there to knowing the background?

<comment><AUTHOR> How is having less information helpful, in this case?

<comment><USER10> You've already acknowledged that the intent is to reduce prejudice and priming and to allow comments to be judged on their merits.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What's next, then, "real names" a la Google? No, thank you.

</comment><comment><USER12> I guess independently verifying claims and facts is too hard, regardless of their origin.

Anonymity is used to encourage discussion for good reason.

</comment><comment> mike-cardwell How about a function for sending a direct message to a user through the website? It could be enabled by default, but users could disable it if they don't want to be contacted.

That way, users _by default_ can be contacted, without giving away any personal information.

</comment><comment><USER13> What does "verified identity" actually mean? That a user has filled in their profile?

</comment><comment><USER14> This has to be one of the worst suggestions I have ever seen. Also, I cannot believe you would even consider asking a technical audience to just give up anonymity so lightly ("growing weary"?!) when they most understand its true value.

There are some high profile commenters or from high profile firms on here who may never have commented or will never comment if they felt their identity would be forced out of them.

I know for one that I would never have signed up to HN if there was such a requirement (and more importantly its enforcement).

HN is not Google Plus or Facebook - thankfully.

</comment><comment><USER15> Dare I say it but providing more identity hints has really improved reddit. Thanks to some css :after trickery (and now built in support for managing that), it became possible to put more identity information next to usernames called "flair". This ranges from the football team a user supports in /r/soccer, to being a Mojang employee in /r/minecraft/, to getting an AK47 flair for being a verified successful sender of candy in /r/snackexchange. And of course reddit employees, past and present get global flair avoiding awkward "do you know who I am" incidents ;)

<comment><USER9> But HN is not reddit!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Something simple like asking if the user wants to make an email address and/or web page _public_ on their profile would be nice.

<comment><USER17> There's already an "about" field for that, you can put whatever you want in it, and people do use it for this exact purpose.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, I do, for instance, but giving just a bit more encouragement to do so would be nice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> +1 I believe knowing what interests a user has, or what experience, may help a lot to filter people who speak without knowing the facts (when talking about programming or startups, for example) or whose interests conflict with the subject, so the comment may be strongly biased.

Of course, throwaway accounts are still needed (for example, guy looking for job and his employer reads HN). But still, it would be a good way to filter "conflicted" answers. Even more, being able to flag them ("warning, this may be too subjective and not useful") would be great.

</comment><comment><USER19> Would be an easy hack to write a Greasemonkey script that displays user info next to their name. If you care, why don't you go for it?

<comment><USER20> Where do you propose to get the info from?

"...when I go to the users profile, it's blank."

<comment><USER19> I thought you don't want to see posts from people with blank profiles. Apparently I misunderstood.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is very tricky because while I understand not wanting to read things of low quality, the entire purpose of the voting system is to establish some kind of quality indicator (although it never works that way -- longer story)

As a starting point, I just spent a couple of minutes updating my profile. Might be a good idea for others to do the same.

As ryandvm points out, there is another extreme: voting things up or down based on the author and not the quality of the idea. If you ask me, this probably happens about 50x more than it should on HN. (And I speak as one of those folks who probably benefits from it.)

This is a case where either solution, more anonymity or less anonymity, has problems. I'd personally love to see both real names _and_ posts/comments being anonymous for the first 15 minutes or so. That would allow a bit more meritocracy, but still hold people accountable for ugly and time-wasteful activities.

I agree that we are not in the optimum configuration. It'll be interesting to watch the brainstorming on this thread.

Sidebar: while we're talking HN fixes, another weakness is that because early votes on a story count more than later votes, stories that take longer to read are penalized over quick-reads. I seriously doubt people voting up those 12-page The Atlantic articles in the first 30 minutes or so have actually read them. Not unless they read a lot faster than I do.

<comment><USER7> So I've been right about that whith the early votes, already doubted that.

My impression is HN being a fast moving community with some posts sticking around longer. Spontaniously, I don't see an easy solution to retain the fast moving character AND not having long articles discriminated, kind of.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm curious why you aren't posting under your real name?

</comment><comment><USER23> i feel it's pretty easy to find out who people are

</comment><comment><USER24> What about optional links to github/linkedin/etc accounts in the profile and badges next to the comments to show what the person reveals in their profile?

I am not sure I think this is a good idea, but I was just thinking about a way to make identity relevant and optional.

</comment><comment><USER9> Does a blank profile somehow de-legitimize good advice or stories?

To be honest, I don't really pay attention to usernames and profiles. I just pay attention to individual comments. Less anonymity might even change comment quality, since people might not post comments they consider controversial.

</comment><comment><USER25> Maybe an acceptable compromise would be simply to indicate someone's age.

It's hard for me to take a kid's advice on managing a company, vs a grizzled veteran. Then again, like with any advice online, it's caveat emptor.

<comment><USER26> Age? I think one of the good things about the relative anonymity in HN is that things like age aren't usually seen as a factor in rating someone's contribution to a discussion.

[And I say that as someone who definitely belongs to the "grizzled" end of the spectrum].</comment></comment>


US Air Force grounds F-35 fighter jets - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnn.com/2016/09/16/politics/us-air-force-grounds-f-35/ <comment><USER2> Beware of the auto-pay video ad on that site. Hate those.

But this:

> While nearing completion, the F-35 is still in development and challenges > are to be expected...

Why, then, did they declare the aircraft combat ready?</comment>