Power surges in Britain caused by millions of people making tea [video] - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/britainfromabove/stories/people/teatimebritain.shtml <comment><USER2> I'm a bit surprised that they are using Hydro power to handle the extra demand, given that natural gas turbines generally are easier to locate close to urban areas. However, their marginal costs are lower. I'm more surprised that this is done manually. In the US, or at least in New York State, this is a market system and scheduling is done by a big 'ol linear program. It takes the supply curves from power plants, the amount of energy required by each region, and the constraints imposed by the physical limits of power line capacity, and solves for the lowest overall cost required to power New York State.

To be more detailed: For a given region, the algorithm schedules the lowest- cost sources first and keeps adding higher and higher cost sources until it reaches necessary generation capacity. Then, everyone is paid the same rate as the the marginal watt that just got scheduled. As a consequence, sources of power which cost money to shut down, like nuclear plans, will actually bid negative into the market to ensure they are scheduled. This is followed by low-marginal-cost plants like hydro dams. Then coal, which is relatively cheap. Then natural gas which is more expensive (or at least was before fracking) but the turbines for which can respond quickly. This actually happens twice as they run this market once the day before based on predictions and then run an adjustments market in real time. IT is actually possible to sell power in the day-ahead market and sell it in the real-time market without owning any generation capacity and do arbitrage. Another way to do arbitrage is to build two reservoirs and pump water to the higher one at night when power is cheap and then generate hydro power during the day when power is expensive [1]. You can also use flywheels or batteries. There are also markets for ancillary services like standing by ready to generate electricity or decrease generation with a few seconds' notice.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blenheim- Gilboa_Hydroelectric_P...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blenheim- Gilboa_Hydroelectric_Power_Station) Source for the rest of this: I interned at the New York ISO four years ago. Read more here: [http://www.nyiso.com/public/about_nyiso/understanding_the_ma...](http://www.nyiso.com/public/about_nyiso/understanding_the_markets/energy_market/index.jsp)

<comment><USER3> Thing with Britain is that pretty much everywhere is close to an urban area. The National Grid is truly that: national. Hydro comes online instantly, faster even than gas. It's perfect for these unique-to-Britain spikes.

The interesting parts of this video are the reasons why it's needed to be done manually: catering for spikes in demand which are easy for humans to predict, but very hard to provide for algorithmically. Commonly it's stuff where a significant chunk of the nation is watching the same program on TV. For example, half time in the FA Cup Final; the end of an important episode of a nationally-loved soap opera like Eastenders; the first commercial break in the new series of Downton Abbey, that sort of thing. On those occasions nearly everyone will go to their kitchens and switch on their electric kettles to make tea at the same time. The extra demand of 14 million one kilowatt kettles all going on at once is gigantic and instantaneous, and on a whole different timescale to the kind of day-by-day market pricing and scheduling you're talking about.

I don't think there's any equivalent in the USA at all. There's no spike in demand during the Superbowl half time, for example; the most you'd get is a little bump as everyone opened their fridge doors at once to get another beer. The only similar thing I can think of is the drop in gas pressure you get in a major city on Thanksgiving.

<comment><USER4> Not exactly the same - especially since water gets drawn out of reservoirs (typically) so there's already significant buffer, but here's a plot of water consumption in Edmonton during Canada's gold medal olympic hockey game back in 2010.

[http://chrisblattman.com/2010/03/08/graph-of-the-day- canadia...](http://chrisblattman.com/2010/03/08/graph-of-the-day-canadians- pee-between-periods/)

<comment><USER5> Water can be stored almost losslessly, with cheap fixed costs (e.g. the many cisterns in a household, e.g. the iconic watertank that appears in US movies). Transporting water long distances usually has large fixed costs, and has massive marginal costs if it has to go uphill.

Electricity is expensive to store, both marginal costs (losses) and fixed costs (plant). Pumping water into hydro-electric lakes is a reasonable solution at present but: 1. pumping has significant marginal losses, 2. usually lakes can't be placed near significant urban loads (desireble to reduce network failure risk, and optimise network loading), 3. hydro-electric lakes are often hard engineering (earthquake risks, difficult to get good potential energy storage if flat land), or politically difficult (consent, water rights), etc.

We need to invent better systems that can _profitably_ sell peak load and buy off-peak load (or buy constant load). Especially for periods of a day or even longer. That would also solve a lot of issues with eco-friendly power (solar, wind). Especially that can absorb huge amounts of load (e.g. overnight). Especially that can absorb and release load within sub-minute periods. Big engineering :-)

<comment><USER6> This is why wind and solar are good partners with hydro. They're more unreliable due to weather but if you have the wind or sun available to generate more power than you need, you can use the excess power to pump water uphill into a hydro lake and store it for later. So even though it's a lossy operation as you say you're basically getting it for free. And like the video showed, hydro is very responsive to short term load demands so if the wind falls off you can quickly start up a hydro plant, as opposed to something like coal or gas which takes much more effort to start/stop.

Theoretically you can put wind/solar much closer to urban centres but in reality the NIMBYs don't want them either near cities where they can be seen or in remote areas which are typically areas of natural beauty.

<comment><USER5> Windmills are already causing major network problems.

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-25/windmills- overload-...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-25/windmills-overload- east-europe-s-grid-risking-blackout-energy.html)

I would guess due to a design flaw in the market rules (or the rules for the interaction between different national markets).

I think most large windmill turbines are designed to be able to be feathered to limit electricity production - they need some way to not fail when winds exceed generator constraints - but maybe designs use wind stalling or other dynamics to prevent that? Alternatively they could build dumping loads close to the wind power - e.g. warm some seawater with big resistors!

Edit: I love the quote "Wind farms in West Texas earlier this year were paying utilities to use their electricity on particularly gusty days because they can still earn $22 a megawatt-hour in federal tax credits." LOL.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The demand is increasing by 3 gigawatts in less than 5 minutes, right at the end of a popular TV show. The operator who oversees the whole grid has a TV to be able to watch the show, to know exactly when it ends and be prepared. That is insane.

The demand for the whole country is ~40 GW on average. That's an 8% increase in 5 min.

<comment><USER8> actually, what strikes me as insane in that summary is that the end of a popular TV show might not occur at a fully predictable time. Barring preemption, I think of TV shows as occuring with clocklike regularity, and even _with_ preemption, it's more common for the interrupted show to make like nothing happened and just air the parts that would have been showing then anyway, than to air over an altered time period. Is british TV so different? Why does the operator need a TV to know when a show will end?

<comment><USER3> The best example is sporting events. I mentioned half time in the Cup Final in another comment: there's a referee-determined amount of injury time added to each half of the game, then that is subject to the ref (who is, as is required by the job, blind) bothering to check his watch. It's impossible to point to a given five minute window when the game will end.

And yes, British TV is pretty different, at least on the main channels. Over- running programmes will push everything else out to start later, rather than simply starting five minutes in.

TV shows - even in the USA - start all over the place, they are absolutely not 'clocklike' at all. So bad even TiVo has a hard time getting it right.

<comment><USER9> I think that's partially due to the fact that syndication, national providers selling programs to local affiliates is a larger thing here in the States. Those programs go out at a specific time and often the local stations are just relays and can't time shift things.

Contrasted against the system in the UK with the BBC where there's not really a local affiliate but a national station. In that case it seems much easier to shift for longer running programs.

<comment><USER10> Both the BBC and ITV are regional, with a core national schedule but lots of opt-outs. Most news broadcasts will be followed by a regional news programme. BBC Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland regularly opt-out of the main schedule to show locally-produced programmes.

<comment><USER9> Ok, didn't know the exact setup. I thought even the regional were run by a BBC branch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This also happens in Canada, but synchronized to hockey games (predictably). [http://www.patspapers.com/blog/item/what_if_everybody_flushe...](http://www.patspapers.com/blog/item/what_if_everybody_flushed_at_once_Edmonton_water_gold_medal_hockey_game/)

<comment><USER12> In the U.S. we have this water demand spike at half-time during the Super Bowl.

<comment><USER13> To the sounds of several million toilets flushing!

<comment><USER14> Wembley Stadium has 2,618 toilets. Think about what happens during halftime...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It begs the question why can't the operator watch a computer that does the operator's job for him. Is split second power allocation really done better by a human? Note I'm not suggesting computers are perfect operators, just less error prone.

<comment><USER16> This is exactly what i was thinking, even though the finish time of Eastenders might not be what the BBC says it is, its not like it would be hard to write a program to listen for the "Dun, dun dundundunduuun" and turn up the power.

<comment><USER17> An explicit signaling solution seems more appropriate here. Suppose the BBC were to embed a frame containing a time-remaining flag at various points in the broadcast. Then the power guys could write some software to watch the stream for these frames, decode them, and estimate the spike.

If necessary, legislate the presence of the frame.

<comment><USER18> What could possibly go wrong?

That's why we don't let politicians design technical systems. They're bound to come up with solutions that sound good but that will not work in practice.

Some problems with your approach:

      - partial loss of signal -> false positive -> power surge

      - loss of signal -> false negative -> grid overload

      - how do you signal the need for a little bit more power?

And so on.

The British solution is typical: it's simple, and it 'just works', the speed with which hydro comes online it is just not enough to be reactive but even a little bit of forewarning and they'll be fine. Heck if the TV fails he can call home to mum, or some other place.

Solution of last resort: a slight brown out due to lack of information, but as long as this system has been in place you'd think if that were a statistically frequent thing that it would have happened by now.

Compare it with the auto-traffic-info system present in most car radios.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Data_System>

The alternative frequencies system works along the lines you suggest (though technically it's not a 'frame' but an entire channel with its own carrier wave). This fails so frequently that I usually disable it. Either you get switched to some totally unrelated station (without traffic info to boot) and then never switched back or you're listening to a CD or so and then you'll suddenly be in the midst of some radio broadcast and again, you're never switched back.

Easy to propose, using an unreliable medium such as a TV or radio channel apparently very hard to get 100% right.

And if you're going to change major parameters in the electricity generation capacity of a nationwide grid I assume you'd put the bar for reliability a bit higher than I do for my car radio.

<comment><USER19> This system is fairly poor in the UK. It has an ostensibly useful feature whereby local radio stations transmit a flag to say they're currently broadcasting traffic information. This then instructs car radios to interrupt what the listener can currently hear (eg. a CD, a national broadcast) and play the traffic bulletin from the local station. Sounds useful.

In practice, FM radio signals travel so haphazardly that in most areas, you're likely to be interrupted several times an hour with travel news for towns and cities 40, 50, 60 miles away. I regularly get the bulletins for places as far afield as Shropshire, Humberside, Merseyside and Lincolnshire. If, while driving, the signal becomes too weak for the 'traffic off' flag to be received, the radio will simply stay tuned to the FM frequency until the listener manually cancels it.

In addition to this, illegal 'pirate' radio stations have started to take advantage of this feature - some of these transmitters have the traffic flag set to 'on' constantly, with the obvious effect of switching listeners' radios to the illegal station regularly.

Most people have it turned off!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I don't know enough about the English power market to draw comparisons, but I'll outline a little bit about how the Australian NEM (National Energy Market) works and how it deals with situations like this. My understanding is derived primarily from an old house mate who did his electrical engineering honours around the NEM.

A while back the various disparate energy grids in Australia were more-or-less unified into one big grid (well, a few small grids with intercouples), the NEM was established, and the newly formed company NEMCO tasked to govern it.

The NEM is a bidding market, where various energy providers (and interestingly consumers, more on this later) provide bids detailing how much energy they are willing to provide and at what cost. These bids are placed, I believe, at least one day in advance though they can be revised after being placed.

If a providers bid is successful, its output gets adjusted automatically by the NEM to fulfil the quota allocated to it (note: "NEM" is used to describe both the market and the computer system that manages it, as far as I can tell). The providers will be paid whatever the current 'spot-price' is, regardless of the original bid price.

The spot-price is determined by, essentially, greedily consuming the cheapest energy possible until demand is met. Demand is met when the frequency lies within an acceptable bracket (around 50Hz). So a coal power station with high base-load capacity will place low bids for the majority of its capacity, to ensure that it gets picked first when demand is being met. It costs a lot of money to turn a station like that off, so they price their bids accordingly. Gas turbine engines have extremely low start and stop costs but their operating costs are significantly higher. These turbines will price themselves so that they get turned on only when demand is high and the spot-price has increased accordingly.

During some heatwaves in the summer the spot-price can increase to thousands of dollars per megawatt/hour and it is extremely profitable to have a diesel generator hooked up to the grid to take advantage of precisely these situations.

I mentioned before that some consumers will place bids. The realities of power generation mean that a station shutting down can be a long and expensive process. They need to ensure that _someone_ is buying their electricity so that that doesn't happen. Typically this comes in the form of a brokered agreement with a large consumer, such as an aluminium smelter. The smelter agrees to buy a large amount of energy at a certain price (the details are a bit fuzzy to me) and the station ensures that they never drop below minimum load. The thing is, there is a point where the difference between the spot- price on the market and the brokered purchase price is larger than the value of the aluminium that can be smelted with that energy. When this happens, the smelter shuts down its smelting operations and sells the energy back to the market instead.

Now its not so simple as the greedy algorithm I outlined before, for precisely the same reasons as brokered deals happen - physical and political constraints. It's an incredibly complex job to schedule power station ramp-ups and ramp-downs while still balancing the load, but for the most part it's handled by the NEM. It takes into account renewable energy quotas (what my house mates thesis was on), maintenance shut-downs, water supply (for hydro stations) and much more.

One thing in particular that I found interesting was the cost of transporting the energy. There might be tariffs on intercouples between states, but the main cost is actually the distance the energy has to travel. You can't simply turn a coal power station up when a town in the middle of the desert has a power spike, as the attenuation between those two points (well, the closest station that has excess capacity as a result of the increase) means the demand isn't met. Instead, a diesel generator near the town might need to be turned on, which can be very expensive. The grid has a number of way to mitigate issues like this, but it's still very interesting.

The point is, a well written system makes this market work efficiently, but the domain of the problem is still _huge_. The (mostly) free market takes care of many of the load balancing issues, however human intervention seems unavoidable because there are simply so many things that can go wrong.

[Edit]

NEMCO is now called the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) and their website is at [0]. It has lots of good stuff to look at for the interested. In particular [1] has lots of nice details about the history and structure of the Australian Energy Markets.

[0] <http://www.aemo.com.au/>

[1] <http://www.aemo.com.au/About-the-Industry/Energy-Markets>

<comment><USER14> This is very interesting. I can add to this that the NSW and Victorian governments passed some legislation that all retailers of electricity must offer a percentage of power used be fed into the grid through renewable sources.

Some people go for 100% renewables - this means that if they consume 3Mw power then 3Mw power will be guaranteed to be generated from renewable sources. Would love to know how they calculate this.

The kicker is that they pay for the privilege of using renewable energy, yet they still have to pay a carbon price on their power.

<comment><USER21> My understanding is that the Renewable Energy Target is actually set by the Commonwealth. Though since it's not really something directly under any S.51 heading I imagine they do it by paying the States and then the States pass the laws to make it work. [1]

I too find it weird that the RET stayed after the introduction of the carbon tax. The entire _point_ of putting a price on emissions is to allow the market to sort out the most efficient way to abate them.

Buuuut of course the RET was started by Howard _et al_ to prop up sugar cane farmers and now it's propping up Gillard's mob in the Parliament. So for now it's unkillable.

[1] On the other hand, when has the concept of limited heads of power ever stopped the High Court from giving the Commonwealth what it wants? I guess they could shove it under 51(i) (interstate commerce) or 51(xx) (the corporations power).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Stepping down from aluminum smelter load levels, consider the comparatively low power demands (orders of magnitude less) of modern lighting and electronics. There's some interesting geekiness to be found in their power demand under varying line voltage.

Voltage-regulated "inverter technology" electronics can, ironically, behave less "linearly" under adverse supply voltage conditions than resistive loads such as incandescent lighting and electric kettles.

Electronically-ballasted fluorescent lighting, CFLs, computer power supplies, VFD motor drives, "inverter technology" microwave ovens all electronically regulate their current draw _inversely_ against voltage supply changes. Voltage goes down, current draw goes up, power demand remains ~relatively~ constant.

So when a brownout (voltage sag, _not_ an outage) comes along, to some extent, these "well regulated" devices hide it from the user. You might not see a "brownout": The electronically ballasted fluorescent lights _don't_ dim so much -- or at all --, your laptop computer keeps running fine if the sag doesn't drop too much, and any DC-powered fans won't necessarily slow down so much or at all. But maybe you heard a universal motor somewhere slowed down. Or maybe the lit-up display area on your old CRT monitor (is anyone still using those anymore?) shrinks 10% then comes back. You hear your computer's desk-side UPS click in (if it has a relay, cheap ones do) then back out but don't see the lights dim. I've seen and heard this and found it rather jarring.

The term "brownout" may become an anachronism (perhaps it has already), not because brownouts don't happen anymore, but because they don't dim the room lights anymore.

To see how much variation a small "non-dimmable" CFL will tolerate, I just put one on a variable transformer and lowered the line voltage gradually from normal (120 Volts) downward. Here's what happened: o It lost very little brightness until about 60-some Volts o Below that threshold, it just turned itself off

As a device user, this is what I'd expect of a "well-regulated" device that runs on mains (grid) power.

But I don't imagine such "well regulated" loads make grid dynamics marginally easier to control under the severe conditions which lead to voltage sags. Probably not much worse though, considering all the heavier loads a grid must support.

<comment><USER5> I wonder if this is offset by industrial loads that are integrated into the network to drop their loads within milliseconds or short timeframes? Large server farms that do offline processing can instantly turn off large loads without problem e.g. Youtube background video processing.

India has perverse loads too: "Microtek, an Indian company that specializes in selling power backup inverters, claims to have 100 million satisfied customers.". I have read of the same thing happening on water networks, where individual households connect pumps to the the public water supply to suck water when pressure drops too low (supplier can then only restrict rate rather than control pressure, and customers at end of line go without!).

Many Inverter loads have a bigger problem in that they often only suck current at the peak and nadir of each voltage swing (Volts), leading to an ugly non- sinusoidal current waveform (Amps) with odd or even harmonics. Networks add large expensive HV equipment to reduce harmonics. Networks also charge large industrial users more if they have bad current waveforms (either harmonics, noise, or power factor).

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The opposite effect happens once a year in Australia, when factories across the country down tools for 10 minutes to watch a horse race, resulting in a large drop in aggregate demand over a short time period.

<comment><USER21> Thank you for avoiding the cliché.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Does that mean that Brits use electric kettles, or they use regular kettles but stoves are mostly electric (instead of using gas)?

<comment><USER25> They would always use electric kettles. The idea of putting (basically) a pot on a stove to boil water sounds like still going outside to an outhouse to go to the toilet.

When renting a house for a holiday in USA once, my family went out to buy an electric kettle to make tea & coffee, and they weren't as common in shops as we thought. That was a weird eye-opener.

<comment><USER26> In Italy, very few people would own an electric kettle, or even a classic one.

I've travelled a fair bit and I've never, ever seen as many kettles as in Britain.

<comment><USER27> They are common in Germany as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Back in high school, i visited the JET nuclear fusion project in Oxfordshire, they told us that they have to plan fusion experiments so they don't coincide with the end or commercial break of a soap, due to the tokamak requiring (i can't remember the exact figure) ~1 - 5% of the national grid's output.

<comment><USER29> Yes, and even then they've stored massive amounts of energy in a couple of very large concrete flywheels to supplement the NG's output.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> if you can find it the BBC documentary "the secret life of the national grid" (3 episodes) is a fascinating look into the history of the UK National Electricity Grid

EDIT: You can find it on youtube if you do a search.

</comment><comment><USER31> You can monitor the UK National Grid inputs and transfers, sales, demand etc. in almost real time here <http://www.bmreports.com/bsp/bsp.php>

You need flash, I've never got this page to work in Chrome, but it works in Firefox

<comment><USER32> I wrote a slightly frivolous one-page app which scrapes National Grid frequency data:

<http://www.caniturniton.com/>

Someone used its API (/api/json) to make a load-sensitive kettle:

<http://elsmorian.com/Projects/CarbonKettle>

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Unique British problem caused by tea. What must you Americans think of us? (is it true that Americans don't have enough power through the mains to boil a kettle?)

<comment><USER34> Is that tongue-in-cheek? Of course they can boil a kettle.

It does take ages, though.

Conventional kettles seemed to take perhaps twice as long to boil in CA than in UK. Boiling water at 230V,13A in the UK is going to be much faster than 120V,15A in the US.

<comment><USER35> Um, no.

Heating rate is a function of wattage, not voltage.

EDIT: my error. I neglected to notice the amps shown and just picked up on the voltage.

<comment><USER36> W = V * I

W1 = 230V * 13A = 2990

W2 = 120V * 15A = 1800

slight bit more power in the 220-240v at 10-13ish amp system than 120 @ 15

<comment><USER37> Don't most stoves in the US use 220?

EDIT: oops, just realized that these are likely electric kettles. I was thinking of the stovetop variety.

<comment><USER36> Yep these are separate plugin versions.

the kettle i just bought on the weekend draws 2300W

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> If the power grid in the US drops to 57HZ, we're all boned.

Fun fact: Texas is the only state in the union with it's own power grid independent of other states. It is literally the only state that could successfully secede from the union.

<comment><USER39> Sorry, you mean Alaska and Hawaii have some sort of connection to the rest of the grid, and Texas does not? Or do you mean that Alaska and Hawaii are not states in the union?

Maybe you mean 'most of Texas' and 'only state in the contiguous US'. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Interconnection>

The part of your comment relating secession merits no response.

<comment><USER38> Sorry, I didn't clarify.

Hawaii's energy needs are 90% based on imported oil. If they seceded, they'd go dark.

While Alaska certainly has the ability to make money off its oil, most of its heating, power and other needs is actually provided by diesel fuel. Add to that the fact that most of the jobs are either government or military related and other industries in the state rely heavily on government subsidies, the state would probably find itself in a real predicament if it cut off contact with its pimp.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I thought some clocks used the frequency of the power grid to keep time. How are they reliable if it keeps fluctuating so much?

<comment><USER41> What? How is that not insane when a 2 dollar watch can use quartz with near- perfect accuracy?

<comment><USER42> Plenty of electro-mechanical heating timers work in this way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> What did the power draw have to do with the frequency?

<comment><USER5> The main buffer for immediate sub-second changes in load is the rotating inertia of electricity generators (e.g. spinning turbines).

When the total power load of the network exceeds the power generation, the immediate load is taken from generators and they slow down. Alternatively if the total load drops, the turbines speed up as they have more mechanical power pushed into them than is being absorbed by the network.

You might think it would be easier to droop the Voltage (lower the load), but for a variety of reasons it works out much better to let the frequency drop (e.g. system frequency can be reliably measured over sub-second periods, frequency is the easily measured everywhere on the network independent of phase, simple control systems before there were electronics).

The whole network relies on this for control purposes. If a network goes out of synchronisation, very very bad things happen - designing for big electricity is true engineering :) e.g. hundreds of millions of people go without power for many hours e.g. design failures in substations and commercial loads can explode due to ginormous power changes!!!

<comment><USER43> Excellent response, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> The volume slider on the BBC player goes to 11. Brilliant.

</comment><comment><USER45> The thing that stands out to me is how inefficient kettles are in terms of power usage. Is it a simple case of more power equals shorter time to boil? Is there a more efficient way to turn electricity to heat?

<comment><USER46> Of all the types of energy, it's easiest to turn other types of energy (such as electricity) into heat. That's why, when converting amongst other kinds of energy (such as light, or motion), a side effect is often heat (and things getting hot which don't need to be is a sign of an inefficient process).

Essentially the kettle just converts electricity to heat (very efficient) which heats the element inside the kettle which is transferred to the water surrounding it via conduction (also very efficient). There's almost no wasted energy, and you know that because the area around the kettle does not get hot.

Kettles do use a lot of energy because water requires a lot of energy to heat up - in fact it's among the highest of all substances (the measure of this is called the heat capacity or specific heat - the amount of energy to raise an amount of a substance by one degree Celcius/1 Kelvin.

If you want to be more energy efficient at boiling water, put only the amount of water you need in the kettle, rather than boiling extra, but obviously this is not a solution when scaling electricity infrastructure.

edit: I should note that Kettles are not completely efficient - there is still some energy loss (for instance, through resistance in the wiring in the kettle, and heat conducted to the kettle itself or radiated to the surrounding air).

<comment><USER47> Could one make a heat pump kettle that would be "more than 100% efficient", by moving head from the surrounding air into the water rather than just resistive heating? I remember seeing that approach recommended for heating houses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> There are some interesting consequences of this. I heard about a "Earth Hour" or something, a campaign for people to turn off their lights (or something) for a hour (or minute) to use less power.

However unless the National Grid can plan for how many people will do it (nigh on impossible), they'll probably wind up wasting power, and more people can be used preparing for everyone to turn things back on, resulting in Earth Hour/Minute actually use more power than if they'd done nothing.

<comment><USER48> Yes. This goes around every year Earth Hour comes up. It's a 1 hour shut down. If people actually did this, then yes, the coal power would stay on. Some would be stored (pumped hydro), but most will be burned off.

National Grid do have very good prediction, as per this (old) video.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I'm not sure I understand why the spike happens. Is there some etiquette that says you must wait until the T.V. show is finished before you may start making tea (why not switch the kettle on during a commercial break)? Also, is tea in the evening really that popular? Sorry if these are dumb questions, I'm not a tea drinker and I live in the U.S.

<comment><USER50> There aren't commercial breaks on the BBC, it's funded by an annual license fee, so programmes generally run without interruption.

And yes, tea is that popular. In my office, each person will typically drink 3-4 mugs of tea during the day. Many people continue with at least two mugs when they get home.

<comment><USER49> Thanks for that. Now I need to find out if they are cutting Top Gear and Dr. Who short on BBC America to make room for the commercials...

<comment><USER51> I don't know about Top Gear, but Doctor Who is cut on reruns. It is broadcast in its entirety, albeit interrupted by commercials, on first showings (which means it runs long by about 15 minutes).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Nevermind the grid, that guy in the video has not just one but several bitchin' keyboards.

</comment><comment><USER53> Very interesting. I live just a few miles from the Dinorwig hydro plant that is mentioned and have been on a tour. It's and incredible feat of engineering - if ever you get the chance to go there (or somewhere similar), I'd recommend it.

<comment><USER54> Absolutely, I live quite near by to and highly recommend it to anyone interested, I've been a few times now, and would quite like to go again. For those who are interested: <http://www.fhc.co.uk/> There's Ffestinog further south too, but there isn't a tour around that like the one at Dinorwig.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> The fundamental issue here is that it's hard to store electricity, so that demand has to be met in realtime. This kind of problem should fade away as cheap grid-scale batteries become available in the next decade.

</comment><comment><USER56> This is hilarious, had me searching for the post date to make sure it wasn't a late-picked-up April Fool's joke.

</comment><comment><USER57> Reminds me of the apparently fake story that large numbers of people simultaneously flushing their toilets during breaks in the Superbowl damaging sewerage systems.

I wonder if some kind of evil flash mob could bring down the grid by having everyone turn on all their power hungry appliances at the exact same time.

<comment><USER58> If you want to make a flash mob big enough to do that you would need to post the information publicly. Then I think there's a good chance of word getting back to National Grid who could then plan for it. The only thing they wouldn't know then is the size of the demand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> I don't know why they say it's unique to Britain. I've visited a hydro station in South Africa a few times where they've shown me that surge, and South Africans have fewer television channels to choose from.

<comment><USER60> I think it's the sheer size of the surge in demand that's unique. It's 1.5-1.75 million kettles going on at almost exactly the same time.

With 25 million homes in the UK that's 6% of them suddenly wanting another 1000w of electricity.

<comment><USER61> Most UK households have upgraded to 3000W electric kettles by now, I'd guess.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> EC2 for power!!

<comment><USER21> And the circle of analogies is complete.

Cloud computing: it's just like your utility!

Utilities: just like cloud computing!

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> For me it just screams for the question what if that guy will not keep up or just will go to the bathroom? Power outage on the national scale? Frankly that story just blew my mind, all that seems so ridiculous in its hilarious epicness, but very thought provoking. And of course what I did first is checked was not it an April's Fool Day joke. Also the main property of stereotypes is that they often come out to be true. Great post.

<comment><USER27> > Power outage on the national scale?

Just brownout. The hydro will come online a few seconds later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> Jeesh I'm so happy that I'm a rails engineer. How can I follow him on twitter?

</comment><comment><USER65> One gobby bloke in my flat would take the lift and run out for his bits and bobs -- that spanner would come back after a fortnight with a hold-all and straight away put the kettle on, then have an ice lolly.</comment>


Power generation from ambient humidity using protein nanowires - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2010-9 <comment><USER2> If the protein can actually supply energy continuously, it has to be maintaining a gradient. Whatever comprises the gradient has to go somewhere when the energy is consumed.

So where does the water go? If the protein eventually becomes full of water, then it's power storage, not generation.

<comment><USER3> You're asking the right questions. I'd like to understand the conservation of energy angle on this.

You usually have to expend energy to get water out of the air, no?

<comment><USER4> An old scout trick to get water out of the air is to use a plastic sheet to make a "solar still", moisture condenses on the underside of the sheet and is collected in a cup. The environment provides the energy and moisture.

<comment><USER2> That is a cool trick, but in that case the energy gradient is from inside to outside the sheet (sunlight heats the air under the sheet), right?

I'm sure the researchers have thought of this, but it wasn't in the abstract.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> How about a self powered drone that lives in a cloud? Wouldn't that be cool, if just travels the world cloud to cloud.

<comment><USER5> Maybe we could run a program on that drone and have... cloud computing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Readable link [https://sci- hub.se/https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-02...](https://sci- hub.se/https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2010-9)

<comment><USER7> re, we fabricated an electric generator from a thin film of protein nanowires that produces continuous current for at least 20 h before self- recharging, with a more than two orders of " thanks 4link. Recharging? Drying?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> [https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-generate- electricity...](https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-generate-electricity- out-of-thin-air-with-device-that-runs-on-humidity/amp)

</comment><comment><USER8> The title of the paper is misleading -- it's not generating energy from ambient humidity, but from sitting across a humidity gradient (i.e. sitting in a bucket of water on one end).

Still a really cool advancement, but not some magical de-humidification technology.

</comment><comment><USER7> The water seems to wick through the stacked nanotubes, somehow the nano structure develops a charge, bio energetic effect from a skeleton kinda?

</comment><comment><USER7> dimensions, stacking thin-film devices in the vertical direction with a 1/1 film/airgap ratio can lead to a practical volumetric power density of more than 1 kW m−3 (Supplemen- tary Fig. 24), potentially outperforming solar cells,</comment>


Shotcut – A free, open-source, cross-platform video editor - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mltframework/shotcut

<comment><AUTHOR> [http://www.shotcut.org](http://www.shotcut.org)

[https://i.imgur.com/oYNJEHk.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/oYNJEHk.jpg)

[https://i.imgur.com/ZV9X1nv.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/ZV9X1nv.jpg)

[https://i.imgur.com/XMi93BV.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/XMi93BV.jpg)

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjuv- Js1znyvErPy9vZf37A/vid...](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjuv- Js1znyvErPy9vZf37A/videos)

I'm not affiliated with the project.

<comment><USER2> Looks fairly interesting for some of my more casual use, I might give it a download.

Any big gotchas that you have come across or any tricks using it (special plugins, etc)?

<comment><AUTHOR> Like most (all?) of the Linux video editors you have the occasional crash. It happens way less than Openshot or Pitivi but it's still present. I don't know if it also happens on Windows or OSX.

You can version control your edits and do text operations since it's a MLT file so that helps.

Not really my thing but you can insert HTML5 overlays and animations. There's a demo on the youtube channel but it's quite "verbose" for most users.

GPU accelerated filters are really fast and I have no problems working with 1080p 15GB+ files. But that's nothing compared to what professionals use so I can't really comment on that.

<comment><USER3> > the occasional crash

I don't get this. Why is this true for the genre? I've been trying various video editors for 10 years, and they all crash. Every last one of them. I recently gave up on Windows Moviemaker because it crashes rendering anything over 30 minutes long. (Not only does it crash, it freezes Windows so bad you have to powercycle.)

<comment><USER4> Exact same experience here. I too would like to understand why this happens. Am guessing the excuse on Windows would at one time have been the huge variety of supported video hardware, but that no longer seems to be the issue. And that's only a guess. Not sure if it's DirectX or whatever they call it, device drivers, application-level code, or what. These experiences have made me loyal to exactly zero video editor programs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > Leap Motion for jog and shuttle control.

I love this idea. I added the ability to scrub through the history of my paint app [1]. The circle gesture provides the direction, size, and speed which can be used to create a very expressive scrubbing tool. Fast tight circle scrub really fast and large slow circles scrub really slow with high precision. Can't wait to check out their implementation.

[1] [http://youtu.be/DM1JtYyr88k](http://youtu.be/DM1JtYyr88k)

</comment><comment><USER6> Not to mention Kdenlive, which is being actively developed again and has been the most capable and stable of the free video editors I've used this past year (including Openshot, Pitivi, and Flowblade)

<comment><USER7> And Blender! I've found it more intuitive, feature-rich and stable than anything else. And it installs straight from Debian's default repos.

<comment><USER8> Blender could almost replace aftereffects for a lot of us, but it does so much it would probably confuse a new user as to how you could replace AE.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Folks may also be interested in the Openshot cross platform video editor (no affiliation other than as a user). They use (and helped develop) some of the libraries used by Shotcut. [http://openshot.org/](http://openshot.org/)

However openshot did commit the cardinal sin of second system effect. Version 1 was doing well, with a whole bunch of changes queued for version 2 including going cross platform, changing the UI toolkit, updating/changing the media toolkit, and a thousand other features. Version 2 has been imminent for well over a year now, and still doesn't seem too close to release.

<comment><USER10> The relationship extends further than that. Openshot 1.x was developed on top of the MLT (Media Lovin' Toolkit) Framework. MLT and Shotcut are developed by the same person.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Or if you want something that works now, you can use Blender, which has a very full featured video editor built in to it, and has had for a long time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Blender is a good option too. You can cut and do things very fast using full timeline with overdrop or the regular flow.

IMO for anything more complex than that the UI gets on your way. I even learned most of the keybinds but it just doesn't feel intuitive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Partially OT, but does anyone know any open source video editor or better library for merging multiple videos into a 360 degree video? (python would be awesome)

<comment><USER13> MoviePy might do what you need, particularly the CompositeVideoClip class. See [https://zulko.github.io/moviepy/ref/VideoClip/VideoClip.html...](https://zulko.github.io/moviepy/ref/VideoClip/VideoClip.html#compositevideoclip)

<comment><USER12> Thanks, I'll look into it!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is there a simple way to do a picture in picture effect (with unlimited levels of PIP?)

Trying to do this for a recent project with anything else just did my head in with complexity...

(I guess the best i can think of as a comparison is the TED intro? where lost of different clips fly across the screen)

<comment><USER8> aftereffects could probably be scripted for this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Name looks too annoyingly like a typo for "shortcut".

How about "CTTC".

"With CTTC, you can trim your video of boring dialog, and just keep the exciting chase at the end!"

"CTTC is pronounced 'see-tick', or by uttering its expansion: Cut to the Chase."

<comment><USER16> I thought the same. At first I thought typo. Then I thought they took a shotcut on spelling shortcut. Then I realized it was for video apps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> also very interesting: [https://github.com/jliljebl/flowblade](https://github.com/jliljebl/flowblade)

</comment><comment><USER18> From UI perspective as well as the architectural design behind I would rather recommend Pitivi, as it's based on GStreamer.

</comment><comment><USER19> I've been using shotcut for over a year and I highly reccomend it. It is leaps and bounds ahead of most Linux-supporting video editors.

</comment><comment><USER20> Comparisons to iMovie?

</comment><comment><USER21> Wish there was a Web app to edit video. Upload to S3 and away I would go creating (jump cut) edits which would be fed to ffmpeg to dice up.

<comment><USER22> That sounds like an incredibly wasteful way of editing. Why would you want to use a web app?

<comment><USER5> Although video editing requires a level of performance that javascript is not equipped for, a web video editor is not a terrible idea.

I would imagine all the heavy lifting would need to be done by a plugin or a local media encoding server. Portability and a rich editing interface would be the key features. Collaboration and version control would be a nice feature too. I am surprised how terrible the top commercial video editing programs are at simply sharing a project file with another person. Video projects really need the cloud backing the source files and version control.

All of this can be done in native applications, but imagine being able to work on a video project from any modern browser. Maybe you don't even need a local media encoder, the server could render your changes and stream them as needed.

Edit: I would love to be able to edit video on my Macbook Air and have a GPU cluster in the cloud doing all my rendering.

<comment><USER23> I'm having trouble finding a source at the moment, but I believe that the BBC attempted this a few years ago. They eventually abandoned the project because as the editors needed the full resolution file of everything they were using to ensure the shot was in focus etc., storing them locally was a better option. I can't really see that changing in the future either.

An NLE that checked out files from a remote server and then made edits to a text based file from which anything could be shared would be very useful though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Nice! I'm excited about this.

Why GPLv3? Why not make the license permissive as possible?

<comment><USER25> Although permissive licenses are great for libraries, they aren't that good for applications. Why would you let someone make a closed source version of your open source video editor? No, you never ever want that happens, that's when copyleft comes into play, it's ideal for applications like this.

<comment><USER24> > Why would you let someone make a closed source version of your open source > video editor?

How is that a bad thing? I think that's a zero sum game way of looking at it.

No damage is done if someone makes a closed source version. They can add value and stimulate competition. More often, they fail.

Occasionally, core developers may enrich and provide additional functionality upon a permissive core. Why not look at Postgres as an example?

And what harm is done? Lost code contributions? Some have no interest in collaborating on software they can't incorporate / copy from later without restriction. It takes time to wrap ones brain around a codebase.

Why would someone take time to understand the internals of a GPLv3 app, when they could never incorporate pieces of it in their code later on?

> it's ideal for applications like this.

Ideal is subjective. Judging by the above, it seems as if enforcing envy trumps programmers doing as they wish with the code.

<comment><USER26> _> Why would someone take time to understand the internals of a GPLv3 app, when they could never incorporate pieces of it in their code later on?_

...to make it better for their uses, rather than their products? "Enforcing envy," though--please, _be_ more of a jerk.

I'm curious as to what large-scale applications have you developed and released under a permissive license that make you such an authority on what others should do with tens of thousands of their man-hours.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Hacker Typer - <AUTHOR> http://hackertyper.com/

<comment><USER2> If you're using this at a coffee shop (or anywhere else public): Press CapsLock 3 times to get an "access denied" message. Press Alt 3 times to get an "access granted" message.

</comment><comment><USER3> Ha! I was helping a friend choose a laptop at some electronic retail shop. I pulled that site fullscreen on a microsoft surface to goof off a bit. I then left the green screen on.

3 minutes later the microsoft onsite seller stumbled on it, alarmed himself at rapid space, took a picture, made a phone call and hard-rebooted it. We had a good laugh xD.

</comment><comment><USER4> Flagged. This is affiliate spam wrapped around an otherwise cute gimmick.

</comment><comment><USER5> \- Looks nice. \- Putting keyboard shortcuts to referral links. \- Post on Hacker News (great jolt of traffic). \- Enjoy coins.

It's sort of a hack..</comment>


College Closings Signal Start of a Crisis in Higher Education - <AUTHOR> https://www.usnews.com/news/education-news/articles/2019-03-22/college-closings-signal-start-of-a-crisis-in-higher-education <comment><AUTHOR> Overdue, arguably. [https://jakeseliger.com/2018/03/12/the-case-against- educatio...](https://jakeseliger.com/2018/03/12/the-case-against-education- bryan-caplan/).

<comment><USER2> This is at least the fourth time I've seen this linked in a college-related thread. It feels a bit spammy when there is no substantive comment, just a link to an article. I'm never going to read it, but if there is a part of it that is particularly relevant to this US News article, please feel free to explain and give some quotes.</comment></comment>


I'm a female developer, and this is what I want in a company - <AUTHOR> https://code.likeagirl.io/i-am-a-woman-in-tech-and-this-is-what-i-want-in-a-company-f6177569a287 <comment><USER2> I'm an old white male developer, and her list is exactly what I'd like from a company too. I have little patience for a company that isn't actively working at achieving diversity.

<comment><USER3> Same here. What she describes in her wish list sounds like a great environment to work in. I tend to value those sorts of things much more than than free food and ping pong tables.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> love this! it is such a raw and accurate look into tech - and what things we can do to help change the culture for the better! the future is female.

<comment><USER5> The future ought to include everyone.

<comment><USER6> +1 As a father of both a son and daughter, I'm getting fed up with this "future is female" nonsense.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Cardbox – The address book reimagined as a social network - <AUTHOR> https://cardbox.app <comment><USER2> A simple idea that makes sense. Good luck! I see a use case and would install if there was an android version. How does adding others work? Scan QR code? Search their pre-added contact info?

For pricing, and I understand you may be bootstrapped and seeking to be cash- positive, 100 contacts limit seems really low, especially given a selling point on your website that this can be for quickly adding new contacts/business cards/high number of low familiarity/frequency contacts. Perhaps make fees for power user features, like groups, or very high contact lists, or corporate use cases?

For vanity url usernames, I'm not sure if this works or just fragments namespaces more. I have my own firstlast name .com, Twitter and handful of other social media vanity url accounts. But names are not unique being first mover is. My vote on the jury for this feature is out.

<comment><AUTHOR> _> A simple idea that makes sense. Good luck! I see a use case and would install if there was an android version. How does adding others work? Scan QR code? Search their pre-added contact info?_

Thanks! Android is planned. You add someone by searching their name, clicking their link, or using Nearby which shows people who have the app open near you using Bluetooth.

 _> 100 contacts limit seems really low_

I think after connecting to people 100 times you'll feel like paying one cup of coffee a month is worth the value you get out of the app.

 _> For vanity url usernames, I'm not sure if this works or just fragments namespaces more._

Not quite sure what you mean, but usernames are primarily intended so you can put a pretty, memorable link in the bio of your social accounts or on your business card.

If Cardbox becomes the initial point of digital connection, then here's where a good username will matter most; your other accounts are easily found anyway as they're linked on your card.

Making usernames work like domain registrations also solves the problem of usernames being squatted, or taken and abandoned. It's also an incentive to keep paying. I believe it's a good solution :)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN,

I'm the (solo) founder at Cardbox. Happy to answer any questions and respond to feedback!

After growing frustrated from outdated, incomplete, and duplicate contact information that had accumulated over the years, I realized that the concept of contact management has become really dated.

While we've seen a lot of innovation in email and calendar apps, the same can't be said about contacts apps—even though we all use contacts, and the process of contact management hasn't changed since the first smartphones.

At the same time, the detrimental effects of social media on mental health, relationships, privacy, and politics have become quite clear, and many people want to cut down on their social media usage. The problem is that when you leave social media platforms, you also lose your social networks (note the distinction).

Then it hit me. By combining contacts and social networking, I realized most issues with both could be fixed, and in hindsight combining them just makes so much sense. Why should you manage someone else's contact information in this age of connectivity?

In short, Cardbox is a next-generation contacts app where everyone controls their own card at all times. When you make changes to your info, those changes get instantly pushed to the device address books of your connections.

It's the one central place to stay connected to the people in your life. Whether it's family or friends, classmates or colleagues, teammates or clients; you can simply connect on Cardbox and exchange the contact information necessary to stay in touch both online and offline (this includes the messaging apps and social media you use).

My goal with Cardbox is to create a paradigm shift in the way we connect digitally, to become the first place to connect when you meet someone. Instead of creating a contact on the spot, or spelling out your usernames on services X and Y, you easily connect on Cardbox and instantly see where else you can find and contact each other—now and in the future.

Let me know what you think!

<comment><USER3> I think it looks great. Hope it catches on! How long until the android version is ready?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much!

It's hard for me to say as I have no experience with Android development so far. The app is built using React Native, so most of the code will work on Android.

It's just a matter of getting it to work, then making it feel at home and handling the unique challenges on Android. This is why I say this summer; this gives me a couple of months to figure it out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've had this exact idea floating around in my head for a while now. Really excited that you've gone and built it :)

As with any social network, the hard part is getting lots of people to use it. There's no benefit to me if I have a card but none of my friends do. How are you going to tackle this problem?

I'd really like to use this kind of product at the company I work for. We have a fair amount of people churn, with contractors coming and going. It would be great if my address book could auto-update with their details. Do you have any plans for some kind of company tier, where you could add/connect cards to a company on behalf of the user?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! I truly believe in the idea: I've had it since 2014, and after a few stranded attempts with various co-founders (as a side project, no funding nor enough time) I decided to roll up my sleeves and learn to build everything myself.

 _> As with any social network, the hard part is getting lots of people to use it. There's no benefit to me if I have a card but none of my friends do. How are you going to tackle this problem?_

The way I see it, a social media platform only offers value if you have people actively posting content. Cardbox is different in that it already offers benefit if you have just one connection; that's one contact you never have to manage again. And this is true for every connection you make.

Right now, it's not yet a full replacement of your old address book, but rather a utility to modernize it, bit by bit. As the user base grows and the app becomes available on all platforms, it can become that replacement.

If everyone manages to just convince their closest circles (and/or people that change phone numbers or addresses a lot e.g. due to travel) to use the app, at some point enough people will have it so that it can unlock its full potential in situations of meeting new people.

To promote this, there's the referral program that rewards free Pro. Hoping early adopters want to set up the app for family members etc.

 _> Do you have any plans for some kind of company tier, where you could add/connect cards to a company on behalf of the user?_

Absolutely, lots of potential there; company cards and business cards are on the roadmap: [https://cardbox.app/roadmap](https://cardbox.app/roadmap)

 _> Also, where is the data kept? Is this GDPR safe? I'm in the UK and I'd like to keep this company/user data somewhere safe :)_

It's stored on AWS in the Ireland region. Of course, Cardbox is GDPR compliant; privacy is a core focus :) See [https://cardbox.app/privacy](https://cardbox.app/privacy)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't really get it. I use contacts on my phone + iMessage, this seems to be just a slightly more featured contacts manager? But, comes with a huge drawback that everyone else needs to be using it as well?

I would like an app where I can manage my friends / family lists, and then be able to text multiple people at once, invite them to events, etc. Those are the useful features I see from social networks, but are not well replicated right now outside of Facebook.

I typically manage all my contacts thru Google, and that has some features for merging duplicates, portability across devices/gmail, and also some list features.

<comment><AUTHOR> The core idea is that we move to self-managed, modern, always up-to-date, dynamic contacts which are also way faster and easier to exchange.

I imagine it's also the first alternative to Facebook for people who simply want to stay in touch digitally, despite changing online and offline environments.

If Cardbox becomes ubiquitous, manual contact management for everyone you know will be a thing of the past. You will always have access to the latest contact info of your connections, always a recent photo, always access to their preferred messaging and social apps.

Anyway, this is early days and those group features are always possible in the future. :)</comment></comment>


C, Python, Go, and the Generalized Greenspun Law - <AUTHOR> http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=7804 <comment><USER2> Quotes from the three comments from when this came up yesterday at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15957773](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15957773) : "Citation needed", "esr is a loon", and "Generalized ESR presumption based on no data and outdated methods".</comment>


Users Get Routed: Traffic Correlation on Tor by Realistic Adversaries [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.ohmygodel.com/publications/usersrouted-ccs13.pdf <comment><USER2> Fun related paper: Locating Hidden Servers [[http://www.onion- router.net/Publications/locating-hidden-ser...](http://www.onion- router.net/Publications/locating-hidden-servers.pdf)] Summary:

 _" Using random selection of backup and layering entry guard nodes will be an improvement, but as in all Tor circuits, someone connecting through ran- dom nodes will always be compromised if an at- tacker owns just two nodes [25]. Using the backup and layering techniques in combination with a non- random selection, e.g. based on some kind of trust, or experience, with the nodes, may slow the attack even more or may even prevent it entirely"_

TIL: The Office of Naval Research has been working on onion routing for 18 years. [http://www.onion-router.net/History.html](http://www.onion- router.net/History.html)

<comment><USER3> Yup, it is kind of prevented now (otherwise the Silk Road would've been shut down long ago). From the paper's conclusion:

 _" Our results show that Tor's location-hidden servers are not really hidden—or rather they were not really hidden prior to the recent introduction of guard nodes as countermeasures to our attacks."_

More info: [https://www.torproject.org/docs/hidden- services.html.en](https://www.torproject.org/docs/hidden-services.html.en) (where they reference the same paper)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> We always knew that correlation attacks by an adversary that controlled a sufficiently large portion of the Internet were trivial to carry out. Now that we've learned that the NSA is capturing 75% of Internet traffic then we should assume that they are able to carry out correlation attacks fairly trivially, right?

<comment><USER5> Yes, but I have observed multiple times that many engineers, including crypto and even infosec folks, don't really understand or even think about traffic analysis as a threat vector. I want to chalk this up to a lack of thinking about systems (in the classic sense, not in the jargon for "computer" sense), but I'm not entirely sure.

<comment><USER6> Yes, from a T/A perspective, basically everything everyone uses leaks like a sieve.

A great paper about T/A: [http://cryptome.org/2013/07/nsa-traffic- analysis.pdf](http://cryptome.org/2013/07/nsa-traffic-analysis.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Call me paranoid but I've always assumed Tor was a honeypot.

<comment><USER8> This strikes me as a meaningless statement. But if you don't want to use it, hey, different strokes.

<comment><USER7> Since the meaning apparently eluded you let me spell it out;

Tor seems like the perfect honeypot for government agencies looking to lure people who are involved in illegal activities online (child porn, drug trafficking, stolen credit cards, black hat hacking, etc.) Its origin is also well known to be based in government research. The source/identities/ownership of the various Tor nodes is by design unclear as being "safe".

In other words, if I were working for the NSA or FBI or whatever and designing a honeypot to lure in as much illegal activity online under a guise of safety and security but enable me to fully track it, I would design something like Tor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> IIRC, Tor was built by the US Naval Research Labs, so... yeah one should assume its compromised.

<comment><USER10> The Internet was originally funded by DARPA. Must be a trap!

Tor is not controlled by the US government. Moreover, Tor was originally created to protect US government spies in foreign countries; a deliberate compromise would have done far more harm to government interests than good.

<comment><USER11> Moglen at Re:Publica: Freedom of thought requires free media

On the other side was the then deputy attorney general of the United States and a lawyer in private practice named Stewart Baker who had been chief council to the National Security Agency our listeners and who was then in private life helping businesses to deal with the listeners. He then became later on the deputy for policy planning in the Department of Homeland Security in the United States and has much to do with what happened in our network after 2001

and anyway the four of us spent two pleasant hours debating the right to encrypt and at the end their was a little diner party at the Harvard faculty club and at the end after all the food had been taken away and the pork and the walnut were left on the table Stuart said,

"All right, among us now we that we are all in private just us girls all let our hair down" he didn't had much hair even then but he let it down "We are not going to prosecute your client Mr Zimmermann he said public key encryption will become available we fought a long loosing battle against it but it was just a delaying tactic" and then he looked around the room and he said "But nobody cares about anonymity do they?"

And a cold chilled went up my spine and I thought alright Stuart and now I know you're going to spent the next twenty years trying to eliminate anonymity in human society and I am going to try to stop you and let's see how it goes.

And it's going badly.

We didn't built the net with anonymity built in. That was a mistake now we are paying for it.

Our network assumes that you can be tracked everywhere.

And we have taken the Web, and we made facebook out of it.

We put one man in the middle of everything.

[http://benjamin.sonntag.fr/Moglen-at-Re-Publica-Freedom- of-t...](http://benjamin.sonntag.fr/Moglen-at-Re-Publica-Freedom-of-thought- requires-free-media)

<comment><USER9> thank you for that very interesting link!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Social Ideology of the Motorcar - <AUTHOR> http://www.copenhagenize.com/2009/11/social-ideology-of-motorcar.html <comment><USER2> Too marxist for HN I'm afraid. Something of a shame, as it makes an interesting point.</comment>


Ask HN: The most conflict situation you faced at work? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> A conflict I'm experiencing is planned obsolescence before I even get started. I'm supposed to develop a novel system to accomplish X with the knowledge that X will be replaced by vendor Y.

While I'm excited to work on the project and I'll learn a lot, it's not so fun knowing it's just a placeholder.</comment>


The old grey bar | Kenneth's Universe - <AUTHOR> http://kenneth.kufluk.com/blog/2011/08/the-old-grey-bar/ <comment><USER2> Microsoft designers have put so much thought into the design that it has become too much as you point out. In this case, as is true with many of the best designed websites, less is more.

"Simplicity is the keynote of true elegance."</comment>


Rightload: an adaptive feed filter -- feedback sought - <AUTHOR> http://rightload.info/info/about <comment><AUTHOR> Main points: * works with most feeds and feed readers * filter the feeds you want, not some other stuff on top of what you have to read already * uses 1 second yes/no feedback for fine tuning * uses state of the art algos for text analysis * first public announcement, simple prototype, please be kind ;)</comment>


Bitcoin: Chainalysis Raises $16M, Plans to Track 10 More Cryptocurrencies - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/2018/04/05/chainalysis-raises-16m-series-a-plans-to-track-10-more-cryptocurrencies/ <comment><AUTHOR> What do you think?</comment>


AOL Attempting to Buy Yahoo  - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2010/10/13/aol-yahoo-acquisition/ <comment><USER2> In this case I really think the sum might end up being greater than the parts. I don't how them merging would be worse than both of them on their own. Yahoo has good engineering talent, AOL has some decent content. They feel complimentary to me.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yahoo is actually trying to avoid the takeover. [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-14/yahoo-said-to- work-...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-14/yahoo-said-to-work-with- goldman-sachs-to-defend-against-possible-takeovers.html)

</comment><comment><USER4> Hmm, if AOL and Yahoo somehow did merge, that would mean Techcrunch would belong to Yahoo.

Would TC still trash Yahoo in their articles?

<comment><USER5> Not in the same tone. Certainly not after Arrington's incentivized stay period is up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> There's just no way AOL can buy Yahoo. It's impossible.

YHOO: 20.56 billion

AOL: 2.70 billion

Plus AOL is not doing well. They are losing 20-30% of revenues every year for the last 4 years.

<comment><USER7> Subtract Yahoo's stake in Alibaba from the cap and it becomes $10B. Strip a few more assets and it suddenly becomes viable.

AOL have $2.7B in revenue, that combined with an injection of money from a hedge fund or two make an LBO (leveraged buyout) very viable. AOL and the hedge funds would only need to put up $500M-$1B

They would reverse-merge Yahoo into AOL, and I have a feeling that the market cap of the new entity would be greater than the sum of its parts.

AOL + Yahoo would become the largest content provider on the web, with a global audience. Throw in an ad company or two and you have a good business (and a business with a purpose, unlike Y! atm).

<comment><USER8> > AOL and the hedge funds would only need to put up $500M-$1B

That's an interesting use of the word 'only' :)

I agree it is a possibility though, but such mergers usually don't work out well in the long run because of conflicting priorities.

It's amazing how much staying power these 'old giants' have, it would not surprise me at all if it did happen but I'm more skeptical about the aftermath of such a merger.

One thing is for sure, lots of people will lose their jobs. That seems to be the one constant when big companies merge.

<comment><USER7> 'only' being relative :)

And you bet there would be layoffs if this happens.

I think the chances of it happening are slim though. They rejected $40B from MSFT, they would look really stupid to accept half of that now (personally I think they should have accepted the MSFT deal, I owned stock at the time)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> An accurate title should be :

"AOL Inc. and several private-equity firms are exploring making an offer to buy Yahoo Inc."

</comment><comment><USER10> Better get that field full of rakes ready.

</comment><comment><USER11> weak x weak = won't last a week

<comment><USER8> They've been lasting for a very long time already, what makes you say that?

<comment><USER11> most acquisitions fail and AOL has pretty disastrous recent experience with Bebo.

[http://www.marketwatch.com/story/aol-loses-11-billion-on- res...](http://www.marketwatch.com/story/aol-loses-11-billion-on- restructuring-costs-2010-08-04?reflink=MW_news_stmp)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Both companies have had a rocky ride the past two decades. At least this merger makes more sense than the AOL Time Warner fiasco.

<comment><USER13> Past 2 decades? Yahoo is only 15 years old and was (arguably) the king of the web until '03 or so. The financial slide didn't start until 2 or 3 years ago after a respectable dot-bomb recovery.</comment></comment>


Apache Flink 1.6.0 released - <AUTHOR> https://flink.apache.org/news/2018/08/09/release-1.6.0.html <comment><USER2> Nice to see this following so soon after the 1.5 release. I'm especially pleased to see the new features around state and timers.

</comment><comment><USER3> The SQL API is exciting stuff! Great work, Flink team!

</comment><comment><USER4> Great Job!</comment>


A Mind Is Born by LFT *256Bytes* (C64) - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdaMbGPEXV8 <comment><USER2> This is a duplicate. The other discussion links to a detailed walk-through of the code by the author.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14160975](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14160975)</comment>


On finding a cofounder: what is the likelihood that people will like your idea AND your proposed implementation technologies? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> I don't know of what use it is to guess the "likelihood" of something such as this.

The way it works with us is I usually make the technical decisions with my tech partner in my mind. Yes there are times we run into disagreements but they are discussed and resolved UNLESS you make disagreements a personal thing in which case you might as well part ways with your team.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think theres plenty of people out there who want to be part of a startup, but hav no idea whatsoever, or have just vague/pipe dream ideas about starting a company.

Right now I just need a really good flash developer, and maybe another super tech if they could contribute alot. I haven't been able to find one yet, but still have a few leads..

</comment><comment><USER4> I think it is dangerous to expect a cofounder to be a yes-man. You are probably better off without a cofounder at all. I'd imagine a good partner would complement your ability, and provide interpretation from a different angle.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> There are many different ways to build a web app and this can present a significant hurdle to finding cofounders. After all, some may like your idea but hate your choice of implementation technologies.

<comment><USER5> I think what's important is that you agree on WHAT you will build.</comment></comment>


'Chipotle Ordering' Back in App Store - <AUTHOR> http://www.macrumors.com/iphone/2009/08/25/chipotle-ordering-back-in-app-store/

<comment><USER2> By far the best chain to eat at (save for in-n-out, but I'm on the east coast) by far. It's actually fresh food, not terribly expensive and generally really tasty. There is also a "secret menu", where they will make whatever you want, as long as the materials are on hand(ex. quesadillas)

<comment><USER3> And maaaaan do they move a lot of burritos. Popular locations can have lines 20 or 30 people deep around dinner time. I'm never afraid to hop in line because they move very quickly. The production line is very finely tuned. I'm looking forward to waiting even less by ordering my burrito as I'm leaving the office.

They also treat their employees very well. My cousin is the head manager of one location. He was promoted to that position within 9 months because of how rapidly they were growing and they only hire managers via promotion.

<comment><USER4> I had about an hour and a half to kill before district 9 started this weekend...after screwing around in Best Buy for a while, I went next door to Chipotle. I figured I would be the only person in there, would be eating some veggies and stuff that had probably been sitting out for more than a few minutes, etc. etc...(it was 3:30 in the afternoon...from working in a restaurant during college...this is the WORST time of the day)...

There was a line of about 20 people...and the place was nearly packed.

I think I need to abandon this whole "internet" thing and open a chipotle.

<comment><USER3> Chipotle locations are corporate owned; it is not a franchise.

"Of the nearly 700 stores, only eight are franchises, and the outlook is not good for more franchises being sold."

Source: <http://www.businessfranchiseworld.com/chipotle-franchise/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The Burrito Bowl with Black and Pinto Beans, Veggies, Chicken, Pico de Gallo and Corn Salsa. Skip the rice, cheese and sour cream and it's possibly the healthiest lunch you can get in a fast food or fast casual restaurant.

</comment><comment><USER6> Ha, according to the linked article it sends orders to the dev server by default (look in Settings). Looks like they forgot to remove the development switches. Maybe it _was_ made by the same folks as the last one...that one was awful.

</comment><comment><USER7> I believe that should be 'Brookline Ave' in those pictures</comment>


Uber's iOS App Had Secret Permissions That Allowed It to Copy Your Phone Screen - <AUTHOR> https://gizmodo.com/researchers-uber-s-ios-app-had-secret-permissions-that-1819177235 <comment> et-al While it's easy to point the finger at Uber given its history, we also need to be asking Apple why this isn't something that's apparent to the user.

</comment><comment><USER2> How is this not a more popular story on HN? This seems like huge news to me.

<comment><USER3> You may have just discovered how prolific Apple fanboyism is on HN. If Google did this it'd be a much bigger deal on HN and people would be pointing out how this is why they use Apple products.

All smartphones are a privacy/security shit show, Apple is no exception.

<comment><USER4> Eh, compared to the "shit show" I just witnessed in the supposed "dark UI" around the new control center toggles, I'm inclined to believe that both sides get their side of crap.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wondering what the legitimate use for this was?

<comment><USER6> The article states they were rendering maps screens on the phone and shipping the screenshot to the watch to handle performance issues with the watch.

<comment><USER7> I don't buy this explanation. You need to full control over the screen's framebuffer to render an image?

Even _if_ your architecture is so hosed that you are screencap'ing the actual screen to get an image to ship over a network connection … multiple people thought that tradeoff with security was _worth_ it?

<comment><USER8> > _You need to full control over the screen 's framebuffer to render an > image?_

No, but you do need the ability to render in the background, and apps aren't allowed to do any GPU-based rendering in the background (you can't touch an OpenGL context, and while I haven't actually confirmed this I assume you can't touch a Metal one either). This entitlement probably let them skip that restriction to do fast rendering in the background.

<comment><USER9> I do wonder why they execlusively got it, and others (who must have had similar rendering issues) did not.

<comment><USER8> Presumably because they were a headlining launch app for the Apple Watch and were in the keynote.

<comment><USER10> Wasn't Lyft also showcased at that event?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Curious, how much access like this could cost. Still, FaceID is safe by design.</comment>


Let Shit Happen - <AUTHOR> http://akhil.me/2012/let-shit-happen

<comment><USER2> The site timesout for me. Is this part of the lesson?

<comment><USER3> [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://akhil.me/2012/let- shit-happen&hl=en&prmd=imvns&strip=1)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot for the link :) The site is up now

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm getting the error: "Content Encoding Error. The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because it uses an invalid or unsupported form of compression." I haven't seen that one before.

</comment><comment><USER5> My browser is reporting that your website is infected with a trojan horse:

BlacoleRef

Might want to look into that.

</comment><comment><USER6> <http://what-if.xkcd.com/11/> Shit unlikely to happen</comment>


Offer Computer Science in our public schools - <AUTHOR> https://www.change.org/p/offer-computer-science-in-our-public-schools <comment><AUTHOR> We (the Raspberry Pi Foundation) are providing free training to teachers in the US at the moment, and the enthusiasm, dedication and creativity of the teachers we've trained is second to none.

CS should be taught as standard in public schools in the US, imho.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you structure a seed round? - <AUTHOR> When you are raising a seed/angel round - what are the do-s don't-s for a seed round? <comment><USER2> This is a big topic. You probably need to narrow down some questions or find a mentor that can help you.

There are also lots quite a few blog posts and templates floating around. I can think of two accelerators that have published some of this.

If you narrow the scope some you might get more direct answers.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think YC has a template somewhere</comment>


What is Developer Anarchy and how is it different from Agile development? - andrew-lucker https://medium.com/@andrew_subarctic/what-is-developer-anarchy-and-how-is-it-different-from-agile-software-development-6e212d6b8dfb <comment><AUTHOR> I've seen this tried but what tends to happen is you have the "tech lead" become a project dictator, in my experience its horrible. Agile actually works, unless you have equal input on a project and are treated as a peer generally so called developer anarchy devolves quickly into a lead developer autocracy. However some elements like developer manged merges and devops blending of roles is useful.</comment>


Tell HN: Our Upcoming Expense Tracking Service - <AUTHOR>

Hi all,
We are working on CostJar - a simple expense tracking service, that will help you organize your paper receipts and gather insight with some fundamental personal finance analytics. Your receipts will be digitized automatically and you'll be able to export transactional data or generate expense reports.
We'll be launching an invite-only beta version soon. I would like to request all interested HN readers to checkout our introductory video at http://www.costjar.com and join the invite list.
Please share your ideas, comments or suggestions.
Thanks. <comment><USER2> Some feedback:

The video is a bit slow-paced, and the music is really annoying. Overall, it feels like a 1992 commercial.

How to improve it? More dynamic voice, get quicker to the point, change music (or no music at all)

The most important piece of information here is "scan your receipts with your iphone" (we'll imagine the rest), and this information only comes at the 31st second. It should be in the first 5 seconds.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your feedback. I'll make relevant changes soon.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable: <http://www.costjar.com></comment>


Thomas Jefferson's hidden chemistry lab at the University of Virginia discovered - <AUTHOR> http://news.yahoo.com/what-we-can-learn-about-the-discovery-of-thomas-jefferson-s-chemistry-lab-at-university-of-virginia-194302159.html <comment><USER2> We've known about the chemistry lab for years, possibly forever? I knew about it when I was there. Making this into a story has been really weird to watch.

<comment><USER3> I think it's a different, larger lab.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/UVA/comments/3olh2f/a_secret_room_f...](https://www.reddit.com/r/UVA/comments/3olh2f/a_secret_room_found_in_the_rotunda_at_uva_teaches/cvyfnc0?context=1)</comment></comment>


Dell XPS 15 (2017) Review: Your Portable Workstation Has Arrived - <AUTHOR> https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-10/123541/dell-xps-15-2017-review-portable-workstation-arrived <comment><USER2> I own an XPS 15 9550 (almost identical to the reviewed unit). This review is spot-on and I would only reinforce that you will not want to use the web-cam because of the unflattering angle. With many devs working remotely this might be a big deal.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been loving it for the past couple of months. I boot into Win10 and use the ubuntu sub-system to build everything. Upgraded to 32gig is the biggest boost, I love the extra headroom. One this to notice is that I have not been able to charge from the thunderbolt port when almost everything I hear about it seems like it should be charging fine. I have the TB16 w/ 240W supply and still wont. This isn't a huge deal but it destroys the dream of a single cord desk setup.

</comment><comment><USER4> I believe they ship an Intel network card as standard these days, which makes Linux compatibility a lot better.</comment>


Are dark themes bad for your eyes? Alan Kay seems to think so - <AUTHOR> https://www.quora.com/Is-a-dark-mode-light-text-on-dark-background-really-better-for-the-eyes?share=1 <comment><USER2> The title does not represent the content of his answer. This is the line

'A dark close up display will induce dark adaptation while looking at it and light adaptation when looking elsewhere.'

Meaning keep the light from the monitor consistent with your surroundings, to avoid having to readjust.

Going a bit further into his point, the tests were done on a CRT not an LCD, where black is no light, not just a grey. LCD black is not really black so I don't think it 'induce(s) dark adaptation'. Even when we have OLEDS and low brightness text that would be dark enough trigger adaption monitors have an ambient lighting setting that would crank brightness to be clearly visible on a sunny day, adding light to the dark elements.

Finally I use dark mode, when working in the dark, exactly the 'troglodytish existence' he advices against.

</comment><comment><USER3> Having spent many years in US Navy Radar Rooms, NOC's and the like. I can tell you that white interfaces are the digital equivalent of being snow blind. it's MUCH easier on your eyes and your vision if you utilize dark backgrounds (or darkmodes) than it is to use bright interfaces... that's not just my opinion but something born from experience...

<comment><USER4> Agreed. When I worked in CIC/CDC, it was always darkened, and a white interface would have been super annoying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Dark themes work are only comfortable for me when the ambient lighting in the room is dim/dark because otherwise, as Alan says, if the room is bright, then the transition between the screen and the room hurts a little bit.

I think the other question is in terms of readability: I've always found light background/dark text to be more readable.

Maybe it's because the "brighter" nature of a light background means my eyes squint more and focus better on the words? At least with a dark background, my eyes feel more relaxed but they kind of just wander around and I can't focus on the text as naturally.

Then again, I've found dark backgrounds to work really well when there's a lot of visual elements in the design of the page (i.e. not words to read but graphics to look at).

(Not a professional designer, I just occasionally design things for people and wonder these things -- would love input from someone more knowledgeable).

</comment><comment><USER6> I don't know if it's bad for the eyes, but as someone with astigmatism I've never been able to use dark themes, and always revert back to light theme if necessary (i.e., VS Code).

</comment><comment><USER7> Bah, simply give to the user the freedom to switch from light to dark themes to be comfortable in every situation. Have you ever tried light themes on the bridge of a ship at night?

</comment><comment><USER8> I find dark mode comfortable. I find light mode comfortable.

Using both in different programs is very uncomfortable.

</comment><comment><USER9> _| but this would imply a kind of troglodytish existence that is likely not healthy for human beings_

:(</comment>


Idiorm & Paris - a minimalist database toolkit for PHP5 - <AUTHOR> http://j4mie.github.com/idiormandparis/

<comment><USER2> Great idea and great code. Nice to see re-usable, light-weight PHP libraries not coupled to larger frameworks.</comment>


Stickam shutting down today, Jan 31st - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/31/scene-kids-cry-as-streaming-site-stickam-shuts-down/

<comment><AUTHOR> Why would they shut it down instead of selling it? I'll take it off their hands for $500K today.</comment>


Google Denies Requests To Remove Videos of Police Brutality - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_denies_takedown_requests_this_time.php#.TqnuLZnzTGk.hackernews

<comment><USER2> _But Google's record is spotty. Just this month, it handed over a WikiLeaks volunteer's Gmail data to the U.S. government, which used an old and controversial law to request it without a warrant from a judge. Google is pushing for updated laws ..._

This seems like an absurdly high standard if obeying the law and pushing for updated laws isn't enough.

<comment><USER3> Have we collectively forgotten the time when journalists went to jail rather than reveal their sources, and publishers didn't waiver in their support?

However understandable Google's position may be, fighting the law is not an "absurdly high standard". Sometimes it's simply the right thing to do.

This "obey the law, obey the government" attitude is a post-9/11 thing we really need to get over.

<comment><USER4> Google is a publicly traded company, their first duty is to their share holders. If a reporter chooses goes to jail that's up to him, it's his decision to make. It's not Google's money to throw away.

<comment><USER5> >their first duty is to their share holders.

Even if this is entirely true, it is quite possible that fighting the law more aggressively may be in their share holders best long-term interest. An excessive focus on the extremely short term has caused many businesses quite a lot of trouble over the last century. For a really interesting analysis of the decline of a machine-tool manufacturing company (the most thorough discussion of the issues I know of) see Max Holland's _When the Machine Stopped_ , about the decline and collapse of Burgmaster, a mid-century "start-up" by an inventor.

<comment><USER4> I meant not throwing away money in respect to suggestions that they out right refuse a legal order. Not that they hire more lawyers to attempt to change that legal order.

I was talking about the prospect of them breaking the law.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The addition of "(This Time)" in the article's title is just short of outrageous, if I'm not misunderstanding. It seems to me there's nothing indicating Google has ever taken down videos of police brutality at the govt's requests.. but rather, has complied with many other types of legal requests from the US?

<comment><USER7> FWIW I trust Google's "don't be evil" policy over the US government.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Thank you Google! BTW justin.tv saves broadcasts in real time, so I recommend it if you're worried that the police will confiscate the phone, etc.

<comment><USER9> I believe Livestream, Ustream and Qik also do this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Good on them!

I was disappointed when Google quickly complied with last year's request by the Japanese government to take down the sengoku38 videos (leaked video evidence of a Chinese fishing vessel trespassing into Japanese waters and ramming a Japanese Coast Guard vessel twice).

After that DVDs of the original video were anonymously left in a box for anyone to pick up and watch at home.

I suppose even if Google is eventually forced to comply, the original poster has some options to get the truth out.

<comment><USER11> >leaked video evidence of a Chinese fishing vessel trespassing into Japanese waters and ramming a Japanese Coast Guard vessel twice

The Senkaku Islands are a disputed territory and from the video, you could easily say the Japanese coast guard boat cut in front of the Chinese boat, thus causing the collision.

Let's lets not forget the 2008 incident where a Japanese coast guard rammed a Taiwanese fishing ship and Japan had to pay compensation as a result.

I don't see why you must take sides when the matter is murkier than it is, probably due to your own political bias but I digress.

In summary: a title of 2010 "Senkaku boat collision incident" should be appropriate. There is no need to simplify it if you can't keep a neutral point of view because it detracts from your main point.

<comment><USER10> Sorry, I have no intention of taking sides.

I only highlight the sengoku38 event as one where Google didn't stand its ground, and how impressed I am that at least this time they are refusing to take down the police brutality video.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I would like to know what videos were requested be removed.

<comment><USER13> If they release the links to the public those videos would gain more popularity and it may look like an attack to the US police.

<comment><USER14> It would be fantastic if the police learned that abusing their power gets them recorded on video, and trying to suppress the video gets the video even more publicity. But it'd be nice if other companies weren't making Google look so unusual for its basic decency.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think it's more than a little sad that it's suddenly news the fact that a corporation did the right thing.

</comment><comment><USER16> Google having a spotty record, does not take away from the fact that its good for the public to know what is going on, and Google is helping do that. It is hard for me to beleave a company can be completly good or bad.

<comment><USER17> So which videos were removed again?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Let's compare Google's stats with the rest of the industry .. Oh, wait! we can't! because no one else publishes a transparency report.

You can't knock Google for complying with the law and not devoting resources to fruitlessly fight every court order and removal request when the goal of their transparency effort is to highlight the problems with that law and try and change it. They're doing something unique and are trying to fix the larger problem yet some people still give them shit for it.

<comment><USER19> Really, everyone should be following Google's example and yet they get so much flak for trying to do the right thing in the comments of this post alone.

<comment><USER20> Right, because they're beyond criticism for being better than the rest of the companies. Let's not go to extremes, how about that?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This makes me want to work for Google!!</comment>